As he crosses the parking lot, the rain slices through his shirt. He throws up an arm to shield his face. It feels like the storm is ripping his clothes off—the fabric tearing apart and flying away into the wind, and then the flesh beneath it, too. Peeled back in bloody curls. If the old man is right and his boys are safe, this hurricane can do anything it wants to him. Kirby gets to his truck and beats his hands against the driver’s-side window until he feels foolish. The sounds he makes as he does this are feral, but no one hears them over the yowl of the wind. Inside the cab he gets a hold of himself and tries to think, to strategize, as if such a thing were possible when his insides are exposed, his bones bare, his nerves snapping against the air like live wires. Still, he tries: Where else could they be?
Chapter 16
Frida props herself against the doorway of the tool shed for a long, long time. The rain pounds into her aching back, and the wall of trapped heat presses against her belly. She is caught here, struggling to understand the emptiness of this place where she allowed herself to believe she would find the boys. She is unwilling to go back to the house, to sit alone, useless, waiting, while Flip and Lucas are lost, and she is unable to be in the open outdoors, to subject her body and the child within to the whiplash fury of the wind. So she occupies this in-between space and waits. She waits to be forced to choose—one or the other—but the moment doesn’t come. She surveys the tool shed and its contents, a domain unfamiliar to her. This is Kirby’s kingdom, not hers. All of this is Kirby’s kingdom, she realizes. The house, the yard, the shed, the town. Florida. She’s used to not belonging anywhere; she just thought that Rudder might be different.
She can feel the hurricane now, not so much against her body as inside it—the frantic swirl of elements crashing into and apart, into and apart. The path to and beyond this moment stretches and shrinks and stacks and for a brief second, or perhaps a very long while, she can see her life’s entire shape as a blueprint, not unlike the renderings she used to study at Rice. There is the ground floor of everything she came from, watery and expansive: watching the sail catch the wind; cooking with Joy back-to-back in the tiny galley; carefully considering every option in their box of flags, gathered from all over, even though all Frida ever wanted to fly was the Jolly Roger. And then there is everything she built by herself, with sharp corners and high ceilings: the transition to life on solid ground, entering the world instead of skimming its edges like Joy, every scholarship she earned, every A, every opportunity she held on to with both hands. But she’s looking down on all this from the third floor now—a cramped, unfamiliar warren of rooms in a style she didn’t choose. A man she doesn’t always recognize. Little boys who hate her. A daughter she hasn’t met. Everything seems jumbled and ill-planned. Nothing fits together. What if it all collapses? What if a part of her wants it to?
She commands herself to pull the shed door shut and turns back toward the yard. The kitchen looks very far away now. The rain drills into her face, her legs, slamming down into the tops of her boots and rising to her ankles. A piece of debris—a neighbor’s kiddie pool, maybe—flies across the yard and smashes into the jungle at the edge of the property. She can see the house moving ever so slightly, can see the plywood on the windows shaking against the screws.
For a moment, she thinks Poppy has whirled through time to come and collect her. Maybe it has. Frida has met this chaos before. In San Juan, she and Joy anchored the boat and sought refuge in a motel, like always. They weren’t foolish enough to be caught out on the water, they just didn’t know that land wasn’t safe, either. She remembers the shriek of timber straining against its nails. Water rushing down from the sky and up from the rivers and in from the bay. Windows shattering. The roof yawning back to reveal the sky. One minute Poppy was outside; the next, she was right next to them.
Another wave rolls through Frida’s body—inarguable, indefensible vise-grip pain. How could her body allow such a thing? Her conscious mind ceases to remember, to think anything at all. There is only the rawness of the wind on her bare skin and the slice of the rain. The lights inside the house go out. The only thing she’s aware of is a pain so intense her fear is not just part of her—it is all of her.
Another wave, and another, and another, until she is barely standing, her back sliding down the shed’s doorjamb. Even now, she struggles to understand the thing she’s both known and not-known all day. She isn’t ready, but her daughter is.
Chapter 17
Flip has been unsettled by the way this afternoon progressed, but the theft is too much for him. He turns away from Lucas, from the lump of someone else’s money in his brother’s pocket, and walks out of the bedroom, down the hall, past the twin La-Z-Boys. When he opens the front door, the wind snaps it out of his hand. He sees that something has happened while they trespassed here. The whole world has changed—the texture of the sky, the quality of the air. Even the ground, which was damp when they arrived and is now choked with water. The clip-clop of the rain has turned into a stampede. He was listening to it thundering against the roof, was loosely aware that the weather was worsening, but it isn’t until he is face-to-face with that wind, that wild, clawing grip, that he is aware of just how much trouble they are in.
Lucas comes up behind him and together they face the storm. It is a strange and brutal kind of justice for these sins they have just committed. They recognize that this is their punishment. “We gotta go,” Flip says, but really he shouts, because the wind is so loud he must raise his voice if he wants to be heard. And he does want to be heard. Very much. He wants to go home.
Lucas shouts something back but it’s lost, the wind darting inside his open mouth and blowing up his cheeks, his eyes already watering as they stumble down the steps. They hurry forward, along the sandy path between the trailers. When a tire rolls in front of them and slams into the side of a tree, they begin to run. Flip is a few paces behind Lucas, every muscle tensed in anticipation of a rusty appliance hurtling out of the sky. His body feels as frail as a featherless baby bird’s, as if the slightest thing could kill him. As if he is too small for this world, too new.
He isn’t wrong. Flip thinks of the nest he found at the tail end of summer, built in an eave of the sunporch. Inside it were chicks so bare it was as if their organs might pop through that delicate, translucent skin. He felt an overwhelming tenderness for those birds. Lucas lost interest almost immediately, but Flip checked on them every day. Frida helped: one of their first moments of amity. When he showed her, she stepped down from the chair he’d put beneath the nest, and her face was rapturous. Alight. “They’re beautiful,” she said. It is those birds that Flip thinks of now as he runs. He remembers watching them stretch their wings and open their mouths and squawk their little hearts out every time he climbed up to see them. In the end, a possum came and did what a possum does. They never even flew.
Chapter 18
When Kirby leaves the shelter, he heads for the beach. His boys would do almost anything for a beach day, and he’s been promising them one since summer. They wouldn’t be so bold—would they? He doesn’t have any other ideas. The breakers are huge, crashing against the sand like the fists of gods, and he can feel the wind trying to separate his tires from the road. This is no time to be driving. He takes the shore road for a few miles, going slow, squinting through the deluge in both directions for any sign of them. There is none. The beachfront properties are dark and shuttered, the boardwalk utterly abandoned. The sky is stained a vivid purple and he can actually see the eyewall of the hurricane as it arrives, gray as stone. It’s so close he could swim out to touch it.