7. CHAPTER 7
KATHERINE
Work is the thing that keeps the fear in its cage. So I work.
I fill the bathtub first, then the sinks, then every pot and jug and the good salad bowl, because the roof tank will last until the pipes go and the pipes will go.
I crimp the drain plugs with rubber bands to slow the seep, a trick a plumber on the first island taught me when I was twenty-six and thought I knew things.
I waterproof the formula in doubled zip bags, then again in the dry bags from the boat locker, because formula is Sussanah’s whole world and wet powder is concrete.
Diapers, medication, the thermometer, the folder, the chargers.
Each thing into its bag, each bag onto the upstairs landing, each bag logged in my head with the quiet satisfaction of a woman who has run logistics for a construction crew of forty.
The flashlight goes on a lanyard around my neck. Headlamp on my head. I look ridiculous. Nobody is coming to photograph me, which tonight is a mercy.
I drag the sofa against the windward doors.
The dining table goes on its side behind it, legs braced into the sofa back, and I wedge the whole arrangement with the ottoman and two dining chairs until the doors can’t flex inward more than an inch.
My shoulder will complain tomorrow. Tomorrow is welcome to complain back. Tomorrow means we made it.
“You’re narrating,” I tell myself, in the living room, aloud. I am. I’ve been narrating since the helipad, a steady voice in my own head listing the next thing, and I know why, and I let it run, because the voice under the voice is the one that stood in the rain and watched the lights go past.
The rope. Noah said it before I did, which stung a little, and also steadied me, because it means my instincts and his experience are drawing the same map.
The shed’s rope is old but sound. I know because I checked it in the spring, the way I check everything, the trait Kurt teases me for, the whole personality.
I strap the coil across my back on the walk back from the shed with rain needling through my shirt and the path already underwater at the low spot, ankle-deep, warm, coming from the wrong direction.
I stand in it for one second longer than I should, registering what warm uphill water means.
Surge doesn’t leak, Katherine. It arrives.
I walk faster after that.
Inside, I move Sussanah’s world upstairs.
Her blanket. Her rabbit, which I take out of the bag and put back three times before I understand I’m rationing her comfort against disaster, keeping the rabbit for the worst of it so it doesn’t lose its magic before the worst arrives.
I settle her in the reinforced room with a bottle I warm against my own skin because the power has started flickering and I’m hoarding the thermos.
She drinks. She watches my face while she drinks, serious as a surgeon. Outside, the storm is building a voice.
“You’ve got the easy job,” I tell her. “Drink the bottle. Keep the rabbit employed. I’ll do the rest.”
She burps. Professional as ever.
I take one more pass through the upstairs before I settle in.
The nursery is last. I stand in the doorway with my headlamp on and look at the crib Kurt built, the joinery he refused to delegate, the mobile turning gently in air that shouldn’t be moving.
The framed resilience-centre sketch on the shelf.
The tiny folded clothes in the drawer, sorted by a woman who had time, yesterday, to sort tiny clothes.
I have an architect’s relationship with rooms. They’re not scenery to me.
This one I designed when I was six months pregnant, arguing with myself about window placement, and the version of me who stood here then believed she was drawing a safe room for her daughter.
I look at the crib a moment longer than the schedule allows.
Then I turn off the headlamp, close the nursery door gently, and take my daughter back to the reinforced room.
The satellite phone buzzes an hour in. Noah, with Kurt patched on the line, which is the arrangement now, my husband reduced to a passenger on his own network.
“Pressure’s bottoming out,” Noah says. “Peak winds in the next few hours. The villa’s your shelter while that lasts. You know the rule.”
“Move if water comes in. Not before.”
“Good. And if it comes to that, the shed’s the target. Not the bunker path. The low ground’ll be a river.”
“The shed,” I confirm. “I’ve already got the rope out of it.”
A pause travels down the line that I choose to read as respect.
“What about the staff?” I ask, because it’s been sitting in my chest since the helipad. “Grand Brooks, the crew in that housing—”
“Already moved,” Noah says. “Every one of them, into the hard shelters, before the rain even started. Deke didn’t wait for permission. Say what you like about your husband’s company tonight, the evacuation doctrine for staff worked.”
It worked because I wrote it. I don’t say that.
I hold the phone and take the one clean piece of news the night has offered, five hundred people in hard shelters because of a protocol I argued into existence over three budget cycles, and I let it sit next to the other fact of the night, the helicopter going the wrong way, and I don’t try to make them add up to anything.
“Signal won’t last the night,” Noah says. “If we lose you, you don’t need us. You have the plan. Water breaches, you go uphill. Everything else is noise. Katherine — you’re the right person to be in that house. I’ve trained worse and trusted them with more.”
“Careful, Noah. That’s nearly a compliment.”
“Take it up with me when you’re off the island,” he says.
“Everything else is noise,” I repeat, and I mean it to include the whole world.
Kurt doesn’t say anything on the call. I can feel him not saying it, and I let the silence stand, because anything he says tonight is either instructions I already have or promises I’ve already priced.
The window fails at a little after four.
Downstairs, windward side, the study. No warning, no crack-then-give, just a sound like the house clapping once, enormous, and then the roar is inside the building.
I’m at the top of the stairs with my heart going like a fist on a door before I’ve decided to move, and the house is full of wind, wind in the hallways, rain hitting the stairwell wall sideways and running down it in sheets.
I don’t go down. Every instinct I own says go down, do something, and the site manager says the study is lost, the doors are holding, the water’s the question, and the answer to the question is upstairs.
I close the reinforced room’s door and I stand with my back against it, breathing.
Not enough. The wind is in the house now and the rule is in my head, move if water comes in, and the low spot on the path was already running warm and uphill. I need to know what leaving would look like. I need to know it before I need it.
Sussanah goes into the carrier, strapped high and tight, rain cover clipped. I put the rope coil across my chest like a bandolier and my hand on the leeward door, and I count, and I open it.
The wind doesn’t come in. The wind arrives, all of it, at once, and the door is torn out of my hand so fast the edge of it burns my palm.
The frame catches it, barely. Rain hits me horizontal, needles, and the gust takes me under the shoulders and shoves, and I go backward, one step, two, and Sussanah’s carrier straps creak against the force and she screams, thin and furious under the roar.
I get my shoulder to the door and I put everything I have into it. It doesn’t move. Then the gust pauses, a quarter-second of mercy, and I slam it and throw the latch and stand there shaking, soaked to the skin in my own hallway.
Outside, past the door, the path lights are gone. All of them. The island I’ve walked barefoot a thousand times is out there somewhere in the black, and in this hour it would kill us both before the garden gate.
Not yet. Leaving now is worse. I make the decision with my back against the door and my daughter screaming into my collarbone, and it’s the right decision, and I hate it anyway.
“Flinched,” I admit to Sussanah, who’s gone rigid in my arms, picking up my heart rate through my shirt. “Mama flinched. It’s allowed. Once.”
The satellite phone buzzes again at half past four. Kurt alone this time. Noah’s channel dropped somewhere in the last gust band.
“You tried the door,” Kurt says.
So Noah told him. “I tested it. It failed the test. We’re sheltering until water says otherwise.”
“The villa will hold,” Kurt says.
He means it kindly. I know he means it kindly, that it’s a husband’s noise, the verbal hand on the shoulder. I also know what his promises are worth tonight, because I priced one on a helipad at two in the morning.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Don’t what?”
“Promise me another rescue. You already used up the last one.”
The line goes quiet. Somewhere under the static, two hundred miles north, my husband is standing in his operations room learning what it sounds like when I stop cushioning him.
“Copy that,” he says at last. Not arguing. It’s the smallest sentence he’s ever said to me and it costs him the most, and I don’t have room to care about the price.
The static thickens. The storm eats the call in stages. He’s still in the channel, still saying my name. “Katherine. Katherine, if you can hear me—” and the rain takes the rest.
The phone goes dark in my hand.
I stand in the reinforced room with my daughter and my dry bags and my rope, and I listen to the house do the job it was built for, up to the line where the job description ends.
Sussanah starts crying, the real one, the frightened one, and there’s no helicopter coming to ask what that sound is doing to anyone.
While we wait, I do the thing I can’t help doing. I assess.
I sit with my back against the interior wall and I listen to my house.
A doctor listening to a chest. The shutters are holding on the leeward side, gone or going on the windward, I can hear it in the pitch.
The roof is the question. I chose the roof system, standing on a scaffolding five years ago with a clipboard and a tan, and I chose it for the storm they promised us, and the storm we got is stronger, and the building doesn’t know I love it. It only knows its numbers.
Something big hits the house and lets go. The whole frame takes it and shudders and holds. Sussanah stiffens against me and I cover her ears with both hands, pointlessly, tenderly, and the house takes the next one too, and the next.
I do arithmetic to stay sane. Gallons of water.
Hours of formula. The rope’s load rating, which I know, and the shed’s elevation, which I know, and the distance between here and there, which I could walk blind.
If it comes to leaving, we leave with numbers on our side. It’s a thin comfort. I take it.
I bounce her. I hum the thing I hum, some old jazz standard Kurt would know the name of. The wind screams in the study and the doors hold, for now, behind their furniture, and I am the whole rescue.
“Okay, Bug,” I whisper, and it’s his name for her and I use it anyway, because the storm doesn’t get him too. “Okay.”