“Goddammit, Felice.” His chest tightens with a kind of radiant anger — he has a brief, wild impulse to tear open the envelope and shower the cash over the skateboarders’ heads. “Jesus Christ, why not?”
She looks at him, then takes the envelope and removes about five hundred dollars. “This will be our escape plan,” she says. “For when it’s time to come back.”
He stares at her: his chest sinks on a partial sigh. It would almost have been easier if she’d stayed missing. No rough, ragged edges. He takes the remaining money. “I want to ask you to do something. It’s about our mother.”
She turns her head toward the skateboarders. “There isn’t time. To see them? Really. We’ve got to hit it.”
“But what if I ask you to do it.” He draws a low, even breath. “For me.”
She squints toward the wind-shaken treeline. He knows her, he thinks, and he doesn’t know her. He feels the unexpected touch of admiration: she created herself, nearly from scratch. “Don’t you think it’s important,” she asks suddenly, “you know — to sort of hang on to your plan for things?”
“Feef, I’m not saying move back, just—”
“No, no, I know. I just mean. You make a decision. Even a principle for a way to live your life? Don’t you think that needs to be, like, the main thing?”
He studies her for a moment. “I think,” he says slowly, “that principles are important. Yeah, I think they can get you going. Sort of help you see what you want to accomplish…”
“And what you don’t want.”
“Right. Yes, absolutely. But I think even principles can change, you know? People keep changing all their lives. It never stops. But I think it’s not like the old principles were bad or anything — just sometimes you’ve got to add some new ones.”
“Huh.”
Stanley walks out to the edge of the platform and sits and then Felice comes and sits beside him. The sun softens under high clouds, far away, a sound of thunder — some hope of rain. They stay out there, waiting and not speaking, watching the roll and zip of the skateboarders.
Avis
AT MIDDAY, AVIS WALKS AROUND THE HOUSE, switching on lights. She moves from the rectangular windows in the living room to the windows in her study, to the small panes of the French doors, each time turning away from the dark glass, the reflected oval of her own face, her eyes fretful and shadowy. She hasn’t heard from Brian since his abrupt departure for work that morning. After watching for hours, she had to turn off the Weather Channel as their predictions and graphs — something resembling a fireball hurtling toward the peninsula — grew unbearably ominous. By late afternoon, the storm’s outer bands have started to lash the house with dark, heavy rain. She shivers, drawing her arms in close to her body, drifting to the front door to watch the rain sweep up the street. Lamb slinks under the couch and yowls softly. Outside of the kitchen and her normal work rhythms, Avis feels the strangeness of the house without Brian, its emptiness intensified. In the past, he’d always hired someone to cover the windows before a big storm. He made up checklists, tested the flashlights, and monitored the bottled water: they spent the hurricanes together, watching forecasts as long as the electricity held, then listening to the wilderness of wind. How did this happen? She used to live with husband and children. How does life dwindle to such a place in which one is boxed up alone? Had she truly dreamed of a private cottage? Now she listens in misery to the drumming rain and tries not to let herself imagine Brian stranded, stuck in a highway wreck, or worse.
The longer he doesn’t answer the phone, the more she feels a pressure in her chest, as if a hand were softly closing around her heart. As she watches from a front window, the sky goes from a bruised green to a deep eggplant, enormous columnar clouds wall off the sun, and the rain rises, slits sideways, slicing at the roof. Where is he? She goes into the kitchen, hoping that a bit of work will calm her, but her hands tremble as she tries to roll out baguette dough, and for once her mind will not be subdued by her hands. She worries over Stanley, aware that a storm this intense could destroy his entire market; the thought tears at her that their last real interaction consisted of her denying him money. And there is also, of course, the transparency underlining all her fears: her anxiety for Felice. Where on earth could her daughter be in this weather?
As the day goes on and the storm grows, her concerns melt into one steady pulse of fear for her husband. Twice she picks up the phone, about to call the highway patrol, but such a call seems like an admission that things have gone too horribly wrong. She feels the sheen of dread, a petrification, as if her insides might turn to stone: the sense that Avis could not survive — not as a whole person — without him. The fear of losing Brian subsumes and encapsulates all the rest, spelling out her world, her understanding of loss. She sits on the edge of the living room couch staring at the black street, and the feeling of it spills through her, thoughts disjointed and dark as syllables.
This hurricane seems worse than any she can remember — even Andrew, which they’d lived through as a family. The thunder sounds as if it caroms inside a metal barrel — the house shakes from its force. The hurricane wind, which usually drives against the south end of the house, seems wily and demonic, coming from one, then another direction. Power lines sway and snap free and rain skirts the street forming a minor river. The wind masks all other sounds as Avis calls Brian’s cell again: its unanswered ring like a stone’s echo in a well. The wind starts to drive needles of rain through the window seams and under the front door. Avis grabs bath towels and a bucket but she can’t stay ahead of it. She blames herself for the mess of rain-water: she’d repeatedly complained to Brian that she hated the idea of encasing their house in shutters, “closeting” themselves in darkness: now the floor and carpets along the south side of the house are soaked. This happened in much the same way, she senses, that she’s brought this isolation on herself — her chronic retreat, training him, in essence, to leave her.
Late in the afternoon, Avis sees a watery flash of headlights out front: standing quickly, she is almost faint with relief. Brian straggles in the door, rain streaming from his face and collar. He’d had to park in the driveway — the garage opener shorted out. “I tried to call — the cells are useless. Oh my God — you wouldn’t believe—”
She wraps her arms around the compass of his back, filled with joy. He presses his cold face into her neck, then looks at her, his hair dripping. “I thought I’d left the office with plenty of time but the storm came up so fast it was like a bomb. Traffic was dead in the street. I’ve been stuck on the Dixie seems like days.” Avis smells dampness on him all the way to the silk lining of his jacket. She peels off his jacket and shirt and drapes these over the shower door. She sits him on the couch and rumples a towel on his dripping hair: his face has that long, earnest sweetness she remembers from their lovestruck college days. Her thoughts flicker to the long-ago tutoring sessions in her apartment on North Aurora Street — how she tried to get Brian to kiss her, how he was so concerned that she master the principles of economic theory. An emotional history like a fire they’d carried between them, seeming to dwindle, then rekindling and leaping, all the gas rings on the stove turned up high.
Brian reaches up to her hands as she dries his hair: she bends and kisses the top of his head. They remain together on the couch as the lights flicker off, then on, then finally go out for the night. The terrible hollow booming and shaking goes on; at one point the door and windows rattle insanely, as if some gigantic force were trying to invade. Avis sits with her head tilted low against Brian’s chest and listens to the storm within the walls of his body.