He reaches for her. The baby kicks again, hard, and she suddenly doesn’t have the energy to point out that they have this in common. That there is not one expert in this house but two. Soon, a third. Because what will this baby know but storm after storm?
Tears come, falling along with the rain outside—warm and steady, not yet thunderous. The prelude to something greater. Something torrential. She lets him hold her, both of them standing in the rainwater seeping from Kirby’s boots.
“I’m scared,” she whispers.
“Don’t be,” he says, and it makes everything so much worse.
Chapter 5
The power goes out in the middle of the night. It’s the kind of thing that most people sleep through, but Kirby is not most people. He is immediately awake, aware of the various degrees of silence where there was once a humming refrigerator, the tick of a wall clock, a purring fan, the quiet groan of the central air vent. The constant buzz of electricity waiting to be dispersed. It all clicks off in the same second, and Kirby hears it as if it were a sonic boom.
He rises quietly. In the bathroom, he notices the outline of a philodendron silhouetted against the bathroom window. It waves to him, a dark flutter of its enormous leaves. The winds are picking up. For a moment, he worries that he’s left boarding up the windows too late. It could be the storm moved more quickly than folks realized. Could be that Frida was right. Is it already here? An uncharacteristic pang of doubt shatters any sleep that still clung to him.
He dresses quickly, his Carhartts in a heap on the bathroom floor where he left them, the same stinking T-shirt he wore the previous day, still damp with sweat. The house is beginning to warm without the AC. He goes outside and fishes his headlamp out of the glove box of his truck. Putting it on, he’s glad the plywood is already sorted, relieved that the wind, stiff and uneven, is not yet dangerous. There’s a lull in the rain and he hurries to make the most of it.
Frida thinks he isn’t taking the forecast seriously, but he is too good at his job not to take it seriously. He’s just not willing to indulge her panic. There’s no lie in saying it will probably be nothing but a thunderstorm here in Rudder. This kind of reasoning used to soothe her, back when the trauma of Poppy was still fresh in her mind—but she doesn’t want to hear him tell her not to worry anymore. So then what is he supposed to say? It’s been a brutal season. Next year will be bad, too, but naming these realities changes nothing. He learned to close his mind to the carnage of other places a long time ago. In his line of work, he had to.
At the top of the ladder, with a piece of plywood under his arm and the drill in hand, he shines his headlamp on the window frame. It looks exactly as it did the last time he was up here. The plywood fits perfectly, as he knew it would. The holes have already been drilled and the screws zip into place. There is comfort in this. Comfort in physical tasks and their tools and the precision of a bit fitting into the head of a screw. If only the trouble with Frida could be so simple, so accessible. He imagines going into their bedroom with the drill, applying it to a secret compartment in the sole of her foot, the back of her neck, and resetting a mysterious switch while she sleeps. He imagines her undisturbed smile upon waking, the smile she used to give him, pure, as if seeing his face was all it took to make her happy. Is it unfair to wish she were…easier? Less work? It is. He knows it is. But he wishes it anyway. He wants to retrieve those days spent standing on this same ladder, paint roller in hand, making a weather-worn house feel new again.
Flip and Lucas come tumbling outside, awake and curious, and the feeling of that hot afternoon sun on his back fades. The smell of new paint leaves him. The rain begins again and the boys holler up at him, wanting to know what he’s doing up out here in the dark. On the other side of this wall, the best friend he’s ever had is curled around the child they’ll share, two overlapping bodies busy with the work of creation. This is what he has now. As the warm rain wets the earth, he is reminded that it’s enough. It’s more than enough. He is luckier than most. Today, he will be whatever this besieged family needs from him.
Kirby sets the boys to work and they are excited to help. Together the three of them ready the house, closing its glossy eyes against the coming storm, shutting those plywood lids one at a time.
Chapter 6
Inside, Frida has already been awake for hours. She builds a fortress of pillows around her naked body now that she is alone in this bed, one between her thighs, one at her back, one clutched against her breasts. Safely ensconced, she listens to Kirby and the boys boarding up the bedroom windows and lies very still. He is just outside, perched on his ladder, pressing the bit of his drill against the wall where their headboard stands, but it feels as if he is miles away. The bright light of his headlamp filters through the curtains, illuminating the pale pink nightgown she shed in the night, then the light is gone, four twirls of the drill, a thump, and the darkness is complete. She peels back the sheet; it’s too hot for anything to be against her skin but the air itself. She instinctively looks for the glow of the alarm clock, but it isn’t there.
He calls to the boys, “No, the big one,” and then there’s the whining motor of the drill again, the shriek of a screw, the thud of the board snapping up tight against the window frame. She knows it’s early. Knows that Kirby woke to the outage, as he always does, and was unnerved, knows that he didn’t expect to lose power until the afternoon at least. He’ll likely be called in to fix the downed line as soon as dawn breaks—or does not break, depending on the sky. Again, she wishes that just this once he had listened to her and the four of them were waking up somewhere in the Panhandle, far from the hurricane’s path. She wishes for a code she might speak that would convey this sense of emergency, this unhinged feeling she has that if he doesn’t let her be frightened, doesn’t let her exist in this fear completely and without apology, if he doesn’t listen, she might never recover.
None of this feels like a symptom of pregnancy, but maybe it is. She has to at least consider that, doesn’t she? Maybe this dread is part of making a life. She wishes her mother could be here to stroke her hair, to listen to her belly, to tell her little fibs about how much it will or won’t hurt when it’s time. Instead, she’s surrounded by men and little boys. Is it true that she doesn’t know a single woman here in Rudder? She tries to think, surely that isn’t the case, but it is. There’s a neighbor—an older woman who lives alone—but they’ve only exchanged pleasantries in the grocery store or met by chance, walking along the road.
Frida lived in Houston long enough to make a few good friends, but after Joy died, after Poppy, she couldn’t imagine going back and resuming her studies as if nothing had happened. So she lingered in San Juan, even after flights resumed. Her friends called to check on her, asking when she would be back, but she didn’t have an answer. She wanted to be close to people who understood what had just happened to her. Most of all she wanted to be close to Kirby. And he wanted her there, too. She’d never felt so wanted. She realized she was pregnant a few weeks before Kirby’s contract ended, and when he asked her to come home with him, it seemed fated. Now, it just seems rash.