And what if he didn’t return? She and Lily would continue on without him. What else could they do? Break down entirely? Let their lives come to a standstill? No — Lily would go to the Academy as planned. Rose would continue on with the election. Her day-to-day life would look much the same. But, she thought, holding the tin box in her hands, she would have no more letters to add to it. She ran her fingertips over his handwriting on the page. For so long, he’d been her dearest friend, her closest confidant, her greatest love next to Lily.
Meena brought Lily her books and assignments from school, and in the evenings sat with her in front of the television, though Lily hardly spoke, and her schoolwork remained untouched.
Sarala prepared a large stack of casseroles and filled the Winchesters’ freezer. Before she left, she put one in the oven and reminded Rose to take it out in forty minutes, but neither Rose nor Lily remembered or even thought of it until they began to smell it burning.
In the kitchen, Rose kept the radio on and tried to work, listening for each time they cycled back to the story.
“Mrs. Winchester is so calm,” Meena had said to her mother. But Sarala suspected that, while on the surface the waters appeared still, below it was a rolling boil.
Lily tried to prepare herself for the worst. “He’s dead,” she told herself over and over again, imagining that, somehow, anticipating this possibility, preparing herself for it in advance, might offer her some sort of protection once the news arrived, might somehow make it less painful.
Then, finally, on the third day, a scratchy phone call, and, like a miracle, his voice on the other end. He would be home within a few days, courtesy of an empty seat on an NGO’s return aid flight.
At the airport, Lily rushed for Randolph the moment she caught sight of him.
Rose stood where she was and watched him approach, afraid, almost to believe it, to believe in their good fortune. It was a trick of the world, she thought, to visit upon you such bad fortune that you were reminded every now and then of how lucky you were — a builtin guarantee that no one should ever become complacent or begin to feel entitled to one’s happiness.
Back at home, Rose put a plate of food in front of him, but Randolph showed little interest in it. Lily sat with her chair pulled close to his, every now and then her hand snatching at him as though to reassure herself that he was there in the flesh. They looked exhausted, Rose thought. She bundled them both off to bed, to little protest from either, and then the house was quiet and dark.
Rose made her way downstairs to Randolph’s study. Filling the bookshelves were his travel journals in which he’d recorded the details of so many places, so many ways of understanding the world, so many other ways of living. She thought of the rituals of these cultures. What was the ritual, she wondered, for overwhelming relief, for giving thanks, for burying fear? For being reminded, by almost losing something, of how important it was to you?
The moonlight shone on the framed maps that hung along the walls. She put her fingertips against the cool, smooth glass of one and a wave of grief rolled over her. There had been no preamble — just a sudden sob, as though it had broken free and escaped. She sank down onto the floor in front of the bookcases, pulled her knees to her chest as tears came. Why now? It made no sense. He was home and safe. She held her hand over her mouth to keep from waking them.
This time he returned with nothing. Randolph imagined his trunk, his travel journals, swallowed by the ocean and sinking, finally, to its bottom. He’d been so tired of the clothes he’d arrived in — having lived in them for nearly a week — that instead of handing them over to Rose to be laundered, he had thrown them into the garbage, happy to be rid of them and their smell of mud and sweat and dark, stagnant water.
He had survived, he explained, by climbing into a tree from which he watched possessions, entire cars, splintered pieces of wood, hunks of metal, and people being carried away by the torrent below him.
And in telling it, he is again rolling with the water, rushing toward a tree he counts himself fortunate to have caught hold of. Catching his breath, he begins to climb, pulling himself through the fragile branches he wouldn’t have gambled would hold him. But it is his only hope, the water below him rising, black as charcoal and filled with the detritus of what it has already encountered, splintered boards, concrete blocks, a bicycle, a woman.
“What happened to those people?” Lily asks.
“I don’t know,” Randolph says — though he can still hear them calling out for help, some rushing past atop an island of debris. He’d had nothing — not even a rope to throw down to them.
Cars against cars, an ocean of steel and tin and wood filling what had once been the streets. And what to do? He had found himself praying.
“Then what?”
After a long while, the waters shifted, began to recede, returning to the sea. All around were still, shallow pools of dark water containing who knew what. He had climbed down then, out of the safety of the tree’s embrace.
At the first muddy spot, he had fallen forward, palms against the wet, soft soil, touching his forehead to this solid earth, inhaling its smell.
He’d headed inland on the back of a motorcycle, hitching a ride with the local postman. Together they rode north to the airport along empty stretches of road. At one spot, the hulls of two enormous freighter ships lay across the road, the traffic — all motorbikes — passing carefully between the two beached craft.
On his second night home, Randolph had come to sit beside Lily in the living room, where she sat surrounded by her schoolbooks. “Your mother told me about your speech during the hearing,” he said.
For Lily, the hearing had receded from her mind, which had, instead, for so long it seemed, been full of images of rushing water.
“I’m very proud of you,” Randolph continued. “It’s not always easy to stand up for what you believe in, especially in the face of friends, neighbors, and family who disagree, and on matters about which passions run high. I understand from your mother that you did so articulately and with grace.”
It seemed now like such a silly, inconsequential thing, Lily thought.
Randolph had been absent for so long that the daily rhythms of the Winchester home were entirely foreign to him, and he observed them as curiously as though watching a native people in their habitat. He learned the small, simple routines of the household — on what day the trash was collected, when he might expect the arrival of the newspaper.
Randolph and Rose’s was a marriage that had, for years, been conducted in absence, via letter, scratchy phone connections that ran under the sea, long cables stretching from continent to continent. Now, as they each adjusted to the other’s daily presence, Lily noticed the way her parents moved around each other in the kitchen in the mornings, bumping into one another as they both reached for the milk. It was as though they had to learn all over again how to live with one another.
Rose took pleasure in the routines that had sprung up among all three of them. The waking, each morning, to a warm presence in the bed beside her. The rising to prepare breakfast. The bustle of the morning routine as they all — three of them now — busied themselves preparing for the day ahead. She and Randolph, once Lily was off to school, retiring to their corners of the house to work — he to his study, she to her small desk in the kitchen, and how, now and then, they might meet in the hallway or over the teakettle. The house quiet, then coming back to life with Lily’s return from school. Gathering in the kitchen to prepare their evening meal, now Lily’s and Randolph’s heads bent together over the last difficult bits of the crossword, here and there calling out clues for Rose. Dinners over which Lily regaled them with stories from school — then the quiet evenings in which they each withdrew to their work, Lily to her room, Rose to her small desk in the kitchen, and Randolph to his study. And then, at night, again, Randolph there beside her, and the whole lovely routine ready to spin out ahead of them once more each day.