Chapter Ten
Palisades, New York
2023
Daisy.
So far, the calamity exists in only one word because Ruth cannot bring herself to place that word in a larger context, to surround it with other words. It is Daisy.
Ruth stands in the guest bedroom in front of the open closet where the large suitcase is stored. She opens her phone and scrolls through her list of saved cities until she finds San Juan. A technicality, really, because she knows the weather in Puerto Rico. The predictable twelve-degree window, the rain, the increasing annual terror of the hurricane season. But it’s only June now, so there won’t be the threat of a storm for at least another month, more likely two or three. And in any case, none of it will much affect what Ruth needs to pack anyway. She’ll be spending her time there in a hospital room. If she’s lucky.
So it’s only the comfort of habit that leads her to check. A quick glance at the forecast will allow her to pack without thinking. There’s so much to do. Airline tickets. Calling the boys. She has to tell Mama, too, and Dad. She can’t think past the immediate next steps. She checks her breath to keep herself present.
But what she sees on the phone screen produces a sort of clicking in her spinal column. She feels herself straightening up as she stares at the phone in her hand. The string of stacked sun icons is not there on the lefthand side of the screen where she expects to see it. In its place, the phone background is gray, filled with tiny lightning zappers. Ruth touches the top of her head to see if she’ll find her glasses there, because she’s now of an age where she can get only a vague sense of things without them. They’re not shoved into her hair. She turns in circles, pats her left-hand pocket where she sometimes finds them, gropes at her neckline to find that neither are they hanging there at her collar by one stem. She feels like a cartoon character in some macabre animation.
“Shit,” she says out loud.
She starts back to the kitchen still clutching the phone, where she finds the missing glasses abandoned beside her computer, of course. She always leaves them within arm’s reach when she’s shooting a video. That damned video seemed so important an hour ago. She slams the laptop closed and pushes the glasses onto her face. The weather app springs open in her hand: 100 percent chance of thunderstorms, 100 percent chance of thunderstorms, 100 percent chance of thunderstorms. For three days.
“Unusual,” she says quietly, because she always has had a gift for understatement.
Ruth makes her way back to the bedroom while peering at that dismal forecast, and feels a line of worry mark its usual crease in her forehead, feels her lips purse out from her face. But that’s it. Nothing more penetrates the whole-body cloak of composed fear she’s already wearing.
She stares into her phone and scrolls back up to the top where all is explained in the box with the tiny red exclamation point in the corner. Severe Weather Warning , it says. Ruth clicks “see more,” and watches her screen fill with bold red urgency, box after box. Hurricane Warning. Tornado Watch. Flash Flood Watch. Storm Surge Warning. Mudslide Warning.
Ruth backs up without looking until she feels the backs of her legs make contact with the bed. She thumps herself down there, and clicks on each of the warnings in turn. Even as she reads them and rereads them, she can’t locate the uptake button in her brain. It doesn’t make sense.
“It’s only June,” she says to no one.
Instead of processing what she’s reading, her mind is unhelpfully focused on denial and other futile pursuits. Why hasn’t she been paying attention? How can she be so thoroughly disconnected from Puerto Rico and her daughter that this storm wasn’t even on her radar? And most distressing of all, why, for the love of God, hasn’t she tried harder to work things out with Daisy? Whenever she and her daughter try to talk about Daisy’s life, they revert to a calcifying script where Ruth demands recognition from her daughter, and Daisy tells her mom to butt out so she can live her grown-up life on her own terms. Beneath this pattern of vexation, what Ruth really feels is rejected, because the modest college fund she worked so hard to establish is still rotting in the bank. She is hurt by Daisy’s dismissiveness, and hopes her daughter never has to learn how grueling it is for a single mom to raise three kids, let alone to save that kind of money for their education. But they haven’t been able to discover the tender parts of this feud because they’re both locked into the anger instead.
“I can literally hear you rolling your eyes,” Daisy said the last time they spoke on the phone, and then they bickered about the word literally .
When was that? Two weeks ago? Three? What a waste of precious breath, of time. Why hadn’t she said to her daughter, I love you beyond reason and none of this matters at all and every day that you breathe is a gift ? The words on Ruth’s screen run together. They tumble and whip and swirl, but they also bolt into her consciousness and temporarily blow everything else away.
Threat to life and property includes typical forecast uncertainty. Potential for winds greater than 120 miles per hour. Plan for extreme conditions. Prepare for catastrophic destruction including devastating structural damage to sturdy buildings, complete destruction of insecure buildings. Prepare for life-threatening storm surge up to 12 feet in coastal areas. Prepare for peak rainfall amounts to exceed 20 inches across the interior of the island causing extreme flooding where rivers may overflow their banks. Prepare for flood waters to overwhelm control barriers and escape routes. Situation favorable for tornadoes. Urgently bring emergency evacuation plans to completion.
Just a sliver then, the width of a knife blade. A tickle of horror that asserts itself as goosebumps across her arms, a hot wash of tingles across the back of her neck. A new layer of fear on top of the previous layer of fear, neither of which Ruth has yet begun to grasp. She has to get to Daisy immediately. And here is a monster in her path.
When the phone rings again, it wouldn’t be right to say that it startles Ruth from her thoughts, because Ruth is already in such a heightened state of alarm that it would be impossible to shock her further. She drops her cell phone on the bed and runs to the kitchen, to the phone that never rings anymore, which is now ringing again for the second time this evening. She does not say hello when she picks it up.
“Daisy?”
“Ruth Hayes?”
It is not Daisy, of course.
“Yes?” Ruth feels breathless and wild. She steadies herself against the wall with one hand.
“It’s Kevin, calling from the administrative office at the trauma hospital in Río Piedras.” The man on the phone is barely audible behind the loud internal thrum in Ruth’s ears. “We spoke a little while ago,” he says, as if Ruth might have forgotten.
“Yes.” She holds her breath, squeezes her eyes closed. Whatever questions are ready to fly from her mouth, she is not ready for the answers, so she swallows them. She will let this man talk.
“I’m sorry to bother you again,” he says. “I’m sure this is a lot to take in, and you must have your hands full making arrangements.”
Ruth does not like the sound of the word arrangements. She strains her ears to see if she can hear anything happening in that faraway room where Kevin is sitting, but nothing except his voice crosses the threshold of the distant mouthpiece. Ruth wonders if he has seen Daisy. Have they been near enough to mingle oxygen? Daisy is still breathing, still trading air with the people around her. Ruth would know if she wasn’t, because Ruth would stop breathing too.
“Is she—” Ruth cuts the question off right there because the confirmation she’s seeking is that Daisy is still alive, and she cannot bring herself to articulate the possibility that there’s an alternative.
“I don’t have anything new to report on your daughter’s condition, I’m afraid,” Kevin says. “I’m sorry.”
Ruth closes her eyes, an act of timid prayer in her eyelids.
“I’m just calling to ask about secondary medical insurance,” he says.
The words he is saying do not make sense. They don’t sound like Spanish or English.
“The what?” Ruth says.
“Does she have additional medical insurance?”
“She has Pinnacle. The diamond plan.”
“Right, we did find her insurance card, but I’m just wondering if there’s secondary insurance?”
“I don’t—” Ruth pauses to consider the question, not because it’s possible that Daisy has secondary medical insurance, but because she’s so confused by the sudden appearance of the question. Her brain is on a lag. “No,” she finally says. “No, that’s her medical insurance. I know because I pay for it myself. She has four more years before she ages out. It’s Pinnacle.”
“Right, but, I just thought she might have travel insurance as well?”
Ruth shakes her head, but the confusion doesn’t clear. “No, she’s, she’s not traveling. She lives there.”
“Oh!” The pitch of his voice shifts and then, almost more to himself than to Ruth, he says, “Oh, they had her home address listed in Palisades, New York.”
“That is where she’s from, it’s where I live.” Ruth presses the flat of her palm against her forehead, but she can’t get through the skin and skull to placate the uncomfortable spinning that’s happening underneath. “Can we, could we take care of this later?” she asks. “When I get down there?”
“Of course,” Kevin says. “Of course, we’re going to provide your daughter with the best possible care in the meantime. You don’t have to worry about that.”
She hadn’t been worried about that. But now she kind of is.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Just…”
Ruth can hear him moving papers around, and then some keyboard clicking.
“Just, if you can, Ms. Hayes, I would recommend calling your insurance company as soon as possible, just to verify coverage.”
“Verify coverage?”
“I’m sure it’s the last thing you want to be dealing with right now.”
There are worse things, Ruth knows.
“It’s just, Pinnacle is telling us your daughter isn’t covered in Puerto Rico.”
“What.” The word comes out without any upward inflection.
“Maybe it’s just because we’re out of network.” He sounds neither convinced nor convincing. “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding. I hate even asking these questions right now.”
He’s trying, bless him. But his kindness is only making things worse. Ruth recognizes this brand of kindness, she remembers it from when Thomas died. Surely hospital administrators are not this gentle when an uninsured patient comes in with a sprained ankle or a bump on the head. Surely they save this level of empathy for the truly imperiled.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’ll figure it out. I have to pack, book my flight. When my brain can make room for this, I’ll call.”
Rafaela sets her small table with a place mat and silverware. She places her crystal wineglass on a coaster because even though she lives alone, she’s not an animal. She dims the lights over the dining room table and is carrying her plate in from the kitchen when she sees the shape of her daughter appear outside the glass door on her little porch. Although they live about fifty yards apart, it’s unusual for her daughter to drop by without sending a text first. Still, Rafaela doesn’t think much of it as she waves Ruth in. She sits down and takes the first bite of her dinner just as Ruth opens the door and steps inside. Her daughter does not move into the room, which seems unmannerly to Rafaela until her eye lands properly on Ruth for the first time. She is crumpled, haggard-looking. Her breath seems to be stuck in her neck and shoulders, her face contorted with some unnameable emotion. Rafaela drops the fork on her plate and stands quickly from the chair.
“What’s wrong?” She crosses the space between them in a few quick strides, and gathers Ruth into her arms.
She knows even before Ruth confirms it that it must be one of the kids. Ruth has trouble forcing the words to exit her body. There is no wind to carry them. Only a single word escapes.
“Daisy.”
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
“What?” Rafaela says, now fully in the grip of dread. “What happened to Daisy?”
The odor of blackened fish and scalded oil sour the room. Rafaela has taken only one bite, but now she fears it will come back on her. Ruth is tense inside the fortress of Rafaela’s arms, a shuddering knot of grief and fear. Rafa’s hands are firm on her daughter’s shoulders. She holds Ruth at arm’s length and tries to peer into her daughter’s face. She needs to coax this horror into the light.
“What is it?” she says again. “What’s happened to Daisy?”
“An accident,” Ruth croaks.
Rafaela’s breath stops too. She can feel the clobber of her heart within her.
“Is she—” Rafaela sucks the beginning of that sentence back in. “Where is she?” she asks instead.
She steers Ruth to the couch. They sit down on the edge together, perched and curled.
“At the trauma hospital in Río Piedras.”
The assertion again of her skidding heart. So her heart still works, then. It does acrobatics.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, let’s go. Let’s pack.”
She stands up, but her daughter is still seated, reaching into the back pocket of her jeans and pulling out her phone. She opens it, hands it miserably to Rafaela. Ruth crumples over her own knees. Rafaela looks down at the screen, at the icons of doom, the whole impenetrable parade of them.
They will not be able to go, there will be no flights. They are stuck here, and that feeling of imposed stasis brings with it a sort of panicky claustrophobia. Rafaela feels the rush of determination fizz from her body, and in its place an alarming void opens up. The fog begins to filter in.
Ruth sits up quickly, suddenly, and takes the phone from Rafaela’s hand. “Benny,” her daughter says. “We have to call Benny. He can get to her.”
Ruth is trembling, opening her phone app, but Rafaela is momentarily blank. Benny. Benny. It takes her a minute. The blankness can be insistent, but it never lasts more than a few seconds, a minute. Rafaela patiently drops the bucket once more into the well of her memory, and it comes up empty. She tries again. And again. There. Shit. It feels like a pop, the onset of a secondary terror.
Benny. Of course, Benny.
Her son.