I wait until I hear her cabin door click shut before following her down the path. There’s a ring around the moon. The rains we hoped for are finally coming. I can feel it in the brooding air, the impatient sky. Outside Anna’s and my old cabin, where my children sleep, I pause. All their lights are off—even the dim glow of Jack’s computer. I listen to the silence, imagine I can hear their soft, safe breathing. No demons, no monsters. If I could protect them from every terror, every loss, every heartbreak, I would.
A swath of moonlight stretches toward me from the center of the pond, widening as it approaches. I push my way through the bushes to the water’s edge. The pond is low. In the wet, sandy shoreline, raccoons have left a trail of sharp footprints. I take off all my clothes, hang my dress over a tree branch, and wade naked into the silk water, the pond obsidian clear, the croaking of bullfrogs, the whisper of moths. I can feel the molecules Jonas has left behind him all around me in the water. I cup my hands in the pond, put them to my mouth, and drink him. In the distance, lightning fractures the sky.
I stop on the path outside our cabin, count the seconds, listen for the faraway rumble of thunder, watch as the acid strobe fades away, watch as darkness takes itself back. My body feels like a sigh—relief and regret. But for which swim? I climb the steps of our cabin, knowing the answer. For either. For both.
Peter is still in his deep, satisfied sleep. I unhook the skylight, lower it softly into place. I climb into our bed beside him, spoon him, latch on to him—the familiar warmth of his body, the comfort of his calming breath—and wait for the storm to make its way inland from the sea.
4:00 A.M.
At four in the morning, when the winds come up, it’s the cabin door rattling against its hinges that startles me awake. Outside, pine trees are bent sideways, limbs howling in rage. I climb out of bed and go to the door. A beach towel has flown off the laundry line and landed on the roof of my mother’s cabin. Birds tumble through the stormy sky like fall leaves wheeling through the air, helpless in the wind, the relentless, circular current. Wrens and finches, skylarks—airborne, but not in flight. I stare out into the dreamlike predawn light. A few inches beyond the screen, a ruby-throated hummingbird is thrumming, fighting to hold its ground in the air, trilling against the tide, its iridescent wings beating invisibly fast, a flash of gemstone in the gray sky. It is flying backward. Not pushed by the wind, but deliberate, frantic with purpose, pressing for shelter in a thicket of white-blooming clethra outside our cabin. Its wings, attached with minuscule wrists, make figure eights—infinity symbols.
I call over to Peter. “Wake up.”
He stirs, but doesn’t wake.
“Peter,” I say, louder this time. “Wake up. I want you to see this.” But he is dead to the world.
I go over to his side of the bed, nudge him.
“What?” he says, voice groggy with sleep. “Jesus. What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Early. But wake up. You have to see this. It’s insane out there—like some sort of bird maelstrom.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I think we might be in the eye of a hurricane.”
“There wouldn’t be all this wind—only dead air. It’s just a big storm coming. Nothing to worry about. Now fuck off and let me sleep,” he grumbles sweetly.
A few years after Maddy and Finn were born, long after our lives had meshed into a different song, Jonas and I were walking in the woods one afternoon and passed an oak tree entwined in honeysuckle. There were what seemed like a hundred hummingbirds drinking flower nectar with their needle-beaks.
“Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backward,” Jonas said. “It’s one of those facts that’s always astonished me. They can fly backward and forward at equal speed. Thirty miles an hour.”
“If I could fly backward, I would,” I said. To the safety of branches, to the time when my heart raced for him like a hummingbird’s, 1,200 beats per second.
And he said, as he always did, “I know.”
6:30 A.M.
When I wake again, the heavy rains have passed. Water has pooled on the floorboards next to our bed, soaking the stack of books I keep planning to read. Peter is dreaming. I can tell by the way his eyelids twitch, by the length of his rough-saw breaths. I brush the hair off his forehead, kiss his cheek, his brow.
He stirs, shifts, his eyes crack open.
“Hey,” I whisper. “You’re here,” and cover his face in butterfly kisses.