There, on her front step, is a drenched little boy, his mouth open, his cries snatched away by the wind and tossed up into the sky. Quick as a flash, she reaches out, grabs a fistful of his shirt, pulls him inside, and slams the door.
Chapter 23
Kirby tunes and retunes the CB to channel 9. He checks the single reception bar on his cell phone, which flickers in and out. No news is hardly good news. He’s driving at a crawl, barely able to discern road from ditch. At this rate, the eyewall is going to catch up to him and slam his entire vehicle into someone’s house. He catches sight of an apartment building’s sign on his right—THE PELICAN PERCH. It’s a newer building, the kind with beach views and a doorman and probably a rooftop swimming pool. Kirby knows the type. A roost for wealthy snowbirds who will spend only a few weekends per year taking in the salt air before they tire of Florida and fly away to one of their other nests. There is an underground parking garage beneath, he recalls, and without pausing to consider he swings the steering wheel, jumps the curb, and manages to find the in ramp. There’s a thin iron gate—there’s always a gate with these people and their fucking beachfront properties. He drives straight through it.
Below, the garage is beginning to flood. Kirby idles there, surveying the half-empty lot—SUVs; a few sports cars in storage, wrapped up in tarps like enormous presents; an old painter’s van, undoubtedly the maintenance vehicle, too dented to belong to anyone who might live here. The water does not trouble him in a truck this high and this heavy, not yet. He turns around to face the entrance of the garage and leans up against the steering wheel, straining to see what’s happening on the street outside. Visibility is sparse. The radio crackles.
Eye has made landfall in the township of Rudder heavy
rain potential flooding a few blocks south of
Marriott, approximately half a mile wide
speed measured 155 mph repeat eye landfall
The eye. Of course. Could he…？ He will. He can’t just sit here and wait; he has to try. Kirby accelerates toward the ramp. Any minute now. He watches as a small fishing boat crashes into the storefront across the street from the mouth of the garage. So this is the eyewall, where the storm does its worst. He thinks about what these winds could do to a human body. Pictures it.
And then the quiet arrives. That eerie, inexplicable pause in the destruction. The rain ceases. The fishing boat falls to the earth, along with an accompanying shower of splintered siding and glass. Kirby guns it.
Chapter 24
Frida tries to hold on to the singleness of her purpose: making it back to the house. But there is so much happening, inside her and all around her. Her mind feels slippery, weak. She crawls across the flooding grass, dragging her limbs through the water that is continuing to rise. All she can do now is move in increments, and so she does. The wind rages above her head, but she stays close to the ground, on her hands and knees, making slow progress through the muck. There is a pause between contractions and she uses it to drag herself the rest of the way to the kitchen door, hauling herself to her feet with the sandbags as support. She loses a boot to the mud, sucked off her foot, and she goes on without it, hauling herself over the sandbags and falling through the door in one fluid motion.
Then the pain returns and she is overcome once more, on her back, on the floor, gripped with it. She watches the storm rage through the doorway, still open, and knows that she should seize the next moment of relief to separate herself from this violence. But she can’t just now. The door slams against the side of the house, flailing in the wind. She is back to existing, to simply abiding what is happening within.
Frida has never seen a birth before, but she’s read the books. She knows what the speed and intensity of her contractions means. It means she will have this baby soon and there will be no one here to help. Trying to remember any shred of information or advice that might get her through this and failing to think of a single thing, she sees the scattered oranges that were swept from the table and onto the floor when she first opened the door, the shards of the bowl they occupied surrounding them. The nearest piece of fruit is beside her head, a luminous globe not unlike a small sun, rocking back and forth in a dip in the tile as the wind comes inside. She tries to focus on this orange, inhales its ripeness, imagines that its skin, that rich flame of color, is emitting the energy she needs. She begins to push, almost involuntarily, and it is as though her pelvis cracks open. An agony not of this world floods through her. The door, she keeps thinking—The door, I have to close it. As if that matters now. It’s still open. It stays open. She pushes again. Doesn’t want to, isn’t ready, but she can barely stop herself. Is this right? Is she doing it right? Nothing about this is right. From the floor she can see the dark sky spinning, can hear the storm screaming, or maybe it’s her, or maybe it’s both of them.
Chapter 25
Inside the eye, the storm is quieter. The rain ceases to fall. The wind is almost gentle. Kirby drives as fast as he can without breaching its border. The roar of the eyewall, of its edges, seems to come from a great distance, though it isn’t far away at all.
Where there was a cacophony a moment ago there is calm. The palms on either side of the road sway back into their upright shape. The sun shines through above him. Ahead, the wall of the hurricane is enormous—a churning mass of cloud that is somehow dark and luminous at the same time. The storm moves quickly, its eye roaming over the road he needs to get home. He is grateful for this miracle. But every mile that he drives has already seen the wrath of the eyewall, and the devastation makes him physically ill. He skirts the debris in the road when he can and drives over it when he can’t. This is only the halfway mark—the other edge of the eyewall will come to bear soon enough and the destruction he’s passing through now will double. Later, the surge will destroy what’s left. There are moments when he can see the other side of the wall in his rearview mirror. He can only imagine what the destruction behind him must look like. Suddenly, improbably, the phone on the bench seat rings. He snatches it up, answers it without looking at the screen, his eyes fastened to the treacherous road in front of him.
“Yes,” he barks.
“This is Phyllis Donner, from down the street? The blue house…” The connection is bad, of course; he strains to fill in the gaps of what she’s saying to him.
Kirby is confused. “Okay…” he says, and almost drops the phone as he swerves around a tree limb in the road. “Can I…Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I have your son here. I—he’s not saying much, but he put in your number. I just want you to know he’s okay. I’ll keep him here until it’s over.”
Kirby is at a loss for words. Relief floods his nervous system. He scrambles, reaching; something is wrong with this, this tidal wave of relief has come too soon, and then he finds it.
“Where’s the other one?”
“The other…” she says slowly, not understanding.
“The other boy. Which kid do you have?”
Chapter 26
Phyllis hangs up and looks at the boy sitting on her sofa, dripping, a pink towel wrapped around his narrow shoulders. He’s still shaking, so wet she can’t tell if these are tears streaming down his face or rain. She sits down next to him.