He sees his daughter cry, her tiny limbs pedaling through this strange new element. He sees the blood, impossibly bright, mixing with the amniotic fluid on the tiles, shimmering. Beside him, Lucas is silent and small. Kirby gets down on his knees and bows his head close to Frida’s. Her eyes are open, but she is looking at him from very far away. “Didn’t I do good?” she asks him. “Kirb. Look at her.”
“You did real good,” he says. “You and her both.” He takes his utility knife from his belt and cuts the cord. Time is moving strangely now. The tug of his blade against this otherworldly matter, curled like the cord of a telephone receiver, a silent conversation between mother and daughter. The thrust of the baby’s feet as she kicks. The quiet smile Frida gives him when he fits his huge hand around his daughter’s head and brings her to his chest.
“Her name…” Frida says. “I like Wanda.”
“Fri, no.”
She shakes her head, ever so slightly. “Wanda. Sounds right. I’m sure.” Whether she realizes what she’s asking of him or not, he can’t know for certain. There’s no time to discuss it. She drifts, and all he can do is watch her go. He hears the storm surge arriving outside, rushing against the sandbags he stacked so carefully, trickling into the house wherever it can.
“Hold your sister,” Kirby says, and places his daughter in Lucas’s arms. Kirby takes off his shirt, trying to stanch the bleeding between Frida’s legs, knowing he can’t help her anymore but needing to try anyway, feeling the blood soak through the knees of his pants and listening to the siren of his own wailing infant. This is how Wanda arrives. This is the world she belongs to.
Water
If the ocean is a body, then the waves are its tongue, long and blue-gray, licking at the beach until there’s nothing left. This body is wide and full and deep. It rises, wrapping itself around the world, squeezing the land tight between its thighs. Ten years mean nothing to a body like this. It’s been here since the beginning.
Chapter 30
Every time he speaks her name he remembers. “Wanda.” Her head snaps up, a guilty look on her face, though she’s done nothing wrong. That he knows of. Kirby tries not to see Frida in the way she flicks her gold-brown eyes toward him, but that’s impossible. All these years later, Frida is still everywhere he looks. “What did you get up to today?” She pushes her macaroni around on the plate with her fork, spearing it one cheesy tube at a time.
“Nothing,” she says, in a way that means she got up to a great many things she doesn’t want him to know about. Lucas gives a short, one-note laugh and serves himself more of the pulled pork. His son, his only son, twenty-two now, has grown into a quiet, careful man. After the hurricane, Chloe took Lucas away from him, raging that he had allowed such a thing to happen. She was right to punish him. Right to take his boy. The search for Flip’s body lasted days, and by the time they found him—well. It is, has always been, unspeakable. Kirby knew the blame was his. He didn’t fight Chloe on any of it, didn’t object to threats of a lawsuit or the midnight phone calls when all she did was scream at him. He took it as barely a fraction of his due. If he could have died, too, he would have. But he couldn’t. He was needed.
That first year alone with an infant was harder than anything he could have imagined. Every time Wanda cried, he woke up and remembered anew what he’d lost. It felt like drowning again and again and again, gasping for air alone in his bed as everything came rushing back to him. But there was Wanda, reaching for him. For her, he found his breath. He got up, made the formula, changed the diaper, and anchored himself to what he had left. To who he had left.
“Nothing, huh,” Lucas says.
“Nothing fun, anyway,” Wanda replies.
They eat off of paper plates in the twilit kitchen, the flame of a citronella candle quivering among the plastic deli containers that crowd the table. A half-empty bottle of cola sits, open, losing its fizz. It’s been more than a week since they had power. Almost two. Kirby’s crew, which now includes Lucas, work the lines as fast as they can, but it’s becoming harder to get the lights back on after the hurricanes pound the coast, year after year, storm after storm. There is so much equipment they don’t have, only so much daylight, and never enough line workers. This time, Miami took the brunt of the damage from Hurricane Valerie, and although the fringes that Rudder got were still enough to bring down the grid, it could have been so much worse. Even so, they’ve been working round the clock ever since the wind died down. The crew is smaller now. The work is bigger. Kirby watches Lucas from across the table and feels proud that his son has chosen to follow him into this battle against the elements.
When Wanda was three, Lucas returned to Rudder. Chloe moved to Minneapolis with her new husband, and Lucas chose to stay with Kirby. Insisted on it. He still has no idea what the kid went through to convince her, but he got his way in the end. Two became three. At fifteen, he was a different boy than Kirby had known in the Before years. The mean streak Kirby used to worry about, that cocky bravado, was replaced with something else. Vigilance. A tremor in his hands. A wary furrow on his forehead. Wanda, just beginning to become aware, to remember, fastened her soft brown eyes on Lucas and claimed him, just as she had claimed Kirby the day she was born. The rule of this household is that Wanda occupies its center. She is their sun, and in return for their venerations she gifts them with a levity they would have otherwise forgotten is possible.
The mosquitoes whine around the open door. Nights like these, it’s either fling open the house and bear the mosquitoes, or swelter. The breeze ruffles their paper plates. “You’re behaving yourself while we’re gone?” Kirby presses.
In response, she looks at him and chews with her mouth wide open, smacking her lips.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “school’s starting up again soon. Won’t be long now.”
“I never want to go back to school,” she says, suddenly serious, mouth closed.
“Oh?” Kirby takes another scoop of potato salad.
“Or daycare neither. I’m too old for daycare.”
“We’ll see about that,” Kirby says.
“I’m ten,” she insists.
“Almost ten.” How did that happen? he wonders.
After Wanda is in bed and the leftovers have been tucked away in the cooler on a bed of melting ice, Kirby and Lucas sit on the porch in the dark and listen to the buzz of mosquitoes, the singing frogs, the fluttering bats.
“You hear about Miami-Dade?” Lucas asks.
“What about?”
“Governor’s pulling the plug on the whole county.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Guy I know from high school lives down there now. Works at the power plant. He says they’re winding down city services. Offering relocation packages to folks.”
“That so.” Kirby doesn’t want to believe that this is true. And yet—watching the brisk disintegration of the developed world this past decade has instilled in him a mounting expectation that things will get worse. Always worse and never better. This is a collective experience, surely, a despair sewn into the fabric of his generation, but for Kirby it’s more than that. He knows doom’s true face. It’s more mundane than he thought it would be: the strange glimmer in a swirl of blood mixed with amniotic fluid on tile. An empty bed. An unused bicycle. Frida felt it all coming. But now he’s the one who has to live with it.