Christmas approaches. The Lowes aren’t very good at celebrating things, Kirby and Lucas in particular, but for Wanda’s sake they make an effort. There is a tree—a raggedy artificial thing Kirby keeps in the attic. And lights. The Lowe men do know how to put up nice lights. They let Wanda plug them in when they’ve all been strung, as they do every year, and their shabby living room comes alive. When she was little, Wanda would clap and say Ooh as if magic had occurred. This year, when they come on she admires them quietly, a faraway look on her face. As if she’s staring at something no one else can see. She’s been different lately, he notes, not for the first time. He chalked it up to her obsession with Phyllis before, but now he realizes that’s not quite it. Maybe it’s just that she’s getting older.
New Year’s is nothing much. Someone sets off a few firecrackers nearby at midnight, but that’s all. Lucas is already in bed when he hears them pop. The next day is a Wednesday; Lucas and Kirby go to work the same as always. Hurricane season lasted longer than usual, so there’s still plenty to repair. It lasts longer every year. No direct hits this season, so that’s something. There are murmurs coming out of central Florida: concerns that the Hoover Dike won’t last another year with no plans to reinforce it. Fears that Lake Okeechobee will burst free. But it’s only one of so many murmurs about so many things.
One day in February, Lucas drives to buy groceries and then keeps going. He doesn’t plan it, but somehow he ends up on Beachside, and then he’s in front of Gillian’s parents’ house. There is a line of artless graffiti scrawled on the siding: Miami Vice will live forever. He sits for a while before he gets out, trying to understand what he’s doing here. The door is ajar. Inside, stepping over the leftovers of a squatter, long gone by the looks of it, he remembers the first time he came to this house. He was sixteen. Gillian wanted to introduce him to her parents, and it wasn’t until he was on the porch, ringing the bell, that he understood how different they were from his family. The house is modern and luxurious—or it was. Now it reeks of mildew and urine. Some of the windows have been blown out, probably by gale winds, maybe by humans. A white shag carpet in the living room that he used to worry about spilling something on is now a grayish yellow. They left most of their furniture behind: ornately carved cabinets, beds with four posters and tall headboards, a pale pink sectional so soft you could disappear into it. So much has been abandoned that he wonders what Gillian actually packed up.
He roams the floor plan, thinking of Gillian in her graduate program, sitting in classrooms, in libraries, in boys’ dorm rooms. He doesn’t realize that she probably doesn’t live in a dorm anymore. Why would he? Her life is a cipher to him. There have been no letters about his applications—nothing either way. He sits down on the sectional and a puff of sourness rises from the upholstery. Here, in this place where he first learned about money, about all the things he didn’t have and all the paths he couldn’t take, he allows himself to imagine that the letters he’s waiting for aren’t rejections after all. He imagines that they are invitations. And then, just a few seconds into the warm rush of a daydream, he plummets back to this sinking spit of land with the certainty that he can’t possibly leave. He can’t leave his crew, his father, his sister. He can’t leave this town—not the way Gillian did. Not the way her parents and all the other Beachsiders did. In the end, it won’t matter what the envelopes hold. He’ll stay. His daydreams melt into a hot shame in having applied at all. This is where he belongs. It’s what he deserves.
In March, the afternoon thunderstorms begin. It’s too early for it. The rainy season is meant to start in May, but the sky doesn’t follow anyone’s rules but its own anymore. At work, they do what they can in the rain, but when the thunder rolls through and the bright zippers of lightning appear on the horizon, Kirby tells them to cab up and they either wait it out in their trucks or head back to the yard to call it a day.
On a particularly stormy afternoon, they abandon the work site. Brenda goes home and Kirby stays behind at the yard to make calls from his office. He sends Lucas to pick up Wanda by himself, forgetting what he’s asking of his son. Lucas says, “No problem,” and leaves before Kirby has time to remember. His father has enough to worry about. The rain on the windshield is heavy as Lucas drives, pounding against the glass and transforming his view of the road into watery smudges. He has the radio turned up loud to drown out the thrumming against the body of the truck. When he was younger, this kind of weather got the best of him. Every time it stormed, he could feel his nerves sizzle, like live wires slapping against the road: useless, frantic energy.
It took years for Lucas to stop holding his breath when he passed the blue house. What happened there—he doesn’t remember it completely. Just fragments. But some pieces are impossible to forget. He slows and turns into the driveway. There: the gravel he tripped on as he ran, his short twelve-year-old legs tangling beneath him. And over there: the tree that caught his little brother’s body after the wind picked him up and threw him. He saw it happen. Saw the jolt of impact. Heard it. He used to torture himself by trying to determine when it was that Flip died—the exact moment when his brother became meat. Was he somehow still alive while Lucas was pounding on Phyllis’s door? If Lucas had been braver, could he have saved him? By the time they found his body, it was so traumatized no one could tell which blow was fatal. He knows this from eavesdropping; neither of his parents ever discussed it with him.
The jungle is thick around Phyllis’s house, even thicker now than it was back then, like all this time it’s been trying to swallow her home whole. One day, he thinks, it will succeed, and this house will disappear completely. He honks and waits in the truck, hoping he won’t have to go to the door to collect Wanda. He doesn’t want to climb those steps, or to use his fist on the thick door, or to stand on the long wraparound porch. Just imagining it is already too much.
Sweat soaks through his shirt. The flow of air in his throat shortens, tightens. No, no, no, he thinks, not now. Not again. He thought he was past all this, but his body tells him otherwise. His lungs seem to shrink. He forces them to open and close, to fill and deflate, like working a stiff, unwieldy bellows. He sees Phyllis opening the door—it isn’t today, but it’s so suddenly vivid it might as well be. He’s on the porch and it’s ten years ago. He’s feeling her drape a bath towel, pink and worn, around his shoulders, hearing her tell him to breathe deep, to hold each breath carefully, like a fragile butterfly: Imagine the gentleness of its wings inside his lungs, she says, the feathery tips of its antennae, the tiny curl of its proboscis. He does this now, leaning his head against the cool cradle of the window. Wings with indigo diamonds painted on velvety black, the dim shimmer of a compound eye, legs as thin and delicate as an eyelash—
The tightness in his chest slowly subsides as the butterfly takes form in his mind. The rain keeps pounding. The door stays shut. Finally, after what seems like hours but surely isn’t, surely couldn’t be, except who can tell when the sun has left them so completely, he gets out of the truck and climbs the steps. He knocks. Is this really the first time he’s been on this porch since that day? Before he can think too hard about it, the door swings open, and there’s Phyllis, the bright spatter of her white hair appearing like a lighthouse on this gloomy afternoon, a warm glow spilling out behind her.