“We’re hot,” he shouts over to Wes, who is hanging from a pole down the road. Wes gives him a thumbs-up.
On the ground, Kirby starts strapping the equipment back onto the truck. The groundmen finish with the fallen branches. Emilio cracks a window and lights another cigar. “Took you long enough,” he says. The cigar smoke curls upward in a steady ribbon for just a second before the wind comes and takes it; Kirby watches it go.
Chapter 10
The power flashes back on, and with it comes the hum of the refrigerator, the buzz of a lightbulb, the quiet thump of a clock. Most importantly, the whir of the AC. Frida hears the boys shriek with excitement and scramble for the television remote. This evidence of their delight has a strange dissonant quality to her—their easy joy is unrelatable. She recognizes it, but only vaguely, as if it is an emotion she dreamed once. In the dim cave of the house, she feels her dread widen and calcify. The empty spaces between furniture fill; the ceiling creeps downward. She goes to the bedroom, then back to the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the bedroom once more, turning on lights, then turning them off again. Nowhere seems right. Another wave of discomfort rolls through her. A different person might call it pain. A midwife might call it a contraction.
She remembers Kirby’s note on the fridge, asking her to fill the water jugs and the tub when the power comes back, and so she makes herself do that and tries to focus on the gush of the faucet, the shine on the taps, the hum of the pump kicking on. She packs the jugs into the freezer and the fridge, as many as can fit around the food, and then lines up the rest in the hallway. She fills the bathtub with cool water and sits on the bath mat, letting her arm dip beneath the surface. It levitates there, her fingers just barely touching the bottom. Frida watches her sleeve drag in the water and lays her cheek against the cold porcelain edge of the tub. She feels diminished. Dim. Losing light like nighttime coming on fast. Is it visible? Can they see her fading? It seems she is growing—her stomach, her ankles, her breasts—but surely it isn’t right that there is more of her now than there was eight months ago. Surely she’s shriveled since then.
Her stomach is propped up on her thigh, her temple leaned against the edge of the tub, waiting for the hurricane to sweep away this festering anticipation. This tightness in her abdomen. She can hear the philodendron tapping on the bathroom window, but she can’t see it. All she sees is darkness where the light used to be.
After Poppy, she remembers walking for a long time through the torn streets of San Juan, stumbling over debris, the mud sucking at her sandals. Demolished homes on either side, their roofs peeled back like the thick skins of oranges, exposed rooms filled with trash and muck and water. An unbearably blue sky hanging over all that wreckage. There was almost nothing left whole in that city, only pieces. Pieces of road, pieces of buildings, pieces of vehicles. A strange puzzle. Stray dogs followed her as she walked, their ribs threatening to burst from their thin hides. She passed a crew of linemen, newly arrived. Frida could barely stand to look at them, set against that clear blue sky she felt so insulted by. But she made herself look. She made herself absorb the sunlight, the flutter of a gull passing overhead, the tap tap tap of a lone hammer, some ways off, the sound of someone beginning to rebuild. She saw one of the linemen hanging off a freshly raised wooden pole, saw his heavy work boots, saw the solidity of his broad frame, saw his sweating, sun-beaten face beneath the brim of his hard hat; at the same time, he looked down and took in her stained dress, her tangled hair, her burning gaze pointed right at him. It wasn’t love at first sight. It was the feeling she got when she saw the Bridge of the Americas as a child, when she walked onto her first college campus, when she signed her first lease. The recognition of something that would later be important. A crux. A beginning. This. Here. You. Laying the foundation of a future she hadn’t yet imagined. Love came later.
Another wave of pain rolls through her. She grits her teeth, still unwilling to name it. It isn’t time. We aren’t ready.
Chapter 11
The boys kick at each other even as their eyes are fastened to the television, vying for couch space without committing to battle. By the time the commercial break comes on, Lucas has corralled Flip onto the third couch cushion, his own short body splayed across the other two. This is the way of things between them: the inevitable two-to-one ratio is a foregone conclusion. Flip hugs the arm of the sofa, curling himself into the corner that’s left to him. Lucas wriggles down farther, stretching his feet to invade Flip’s territory, always striving for more. Beating him away with a pillow and a curdled whine, Flip lashes backward only to realize that Frida is standing in the doorway, holding on to the frame. He isn’t sure how long she’s been there. Her gaze seems to settle on the television screen—crudely drawn creatures dashing across a ship deck, then plunging into the sea to look for buried treasure—but Flip can tell she isn’t really watching, that none of this is registering beyond flashing colors and high-pitched sounds.
“Lucas is hogging the couch,” he says, if only to bring her back into the room, to tug her attention away from whatever dimension it has drifted into. He won’t admit it to Lucas, but he’s beginning to like Frida. She’s kind to him. He didn’t even mind the potato skins. Lucas kicks him again and he bites back a squeal.
“Narc,” Lucas whispers, not knowing exactly what this means but feeling reasonably sure it fits the occasion.
“Turn it down, please,” she says, as if she’s only just remembered why she came into the room at all. “I’m going to lie down for a bit. Just stay inside, okay, and when your father comes home, tell him I need to talk to him.”
“Are you okay?” Flip asks.
“Fine,” she says. “Just…” She struggles for an appropriate symptom, something that won’t alarm them. “Nauseous. Lucas, be nice, please.”
Lucas picks up the remote and begrudgingly turns down the volume so she can see him doing it, then throws it at Flip, who cries out at this fresh injustice and turns to protest, only to find that Frida is already gone.
The episode finishes and the programming blinks over to local storm coverage. They gag as if they’ve ingested poison and Lucas turns off the television. These are Florida boys, born and bred; the drama of anticipating extreme weather is not special. Without the glow of the screen, the room becomes dark. A sliver of dim light creeps in through a rectangular pane on the front door that Kirby didn’t bother covering, but that’s the only evidence of a day that is passing unseen. The door to Frida and Kirby’s room is closed. The boys are alone, and there is something unusual charging the dust particles that swim in that lone splash of light. A silent voice that wants their attention.
“Let’s go outside,” Lucas proposes. “We could walk to the trailer park and play horseshoes.” That summer, he made a friend who lives in the park, and although this friend has evacuated, it seems like a sensible destination to him. He swings open the front door, quietly, so as not to wake Frida. The coolness rushes out while the wet heat rushes in and that quality of strangeness thickens. There is an urgency here. There is information.
“I don’t know,” Flip says. “We’re not supposed to.” He can feel a kind of data wrapped up in the humidity, but he doesn’t know what it means. He just knows it’s there. A message he doesn’t understand.