8. CHAPTER 8
KATHERINE
Surge doesn’t leak. It arrives.
It arrives at six in the morning, and Noah was right, there’s no mistaking it.
No seep, no trickle under a door. One moment the storm is a sound and the house is holding, and the next there’s a detonation of water somewhere below us, a crash that isn’t wind, and then the whole lower floor is in the sea’s hands.
I hear it climb the stairs. That’s a thing I will hear for the rest of my life, water climbing my stairs, patient, not fast, not slow, just certain.
The satellite phone is dead by then. Not degraded.
Dead, a brick with a flashlight icon, the antenna giving me nothing but its own little green blink that means searching, searching, nothing.
I put it on the lanyard anyway. Tools are tools even when they’ve stopped working.
You carry them because the alternative is admitting you’re done having options.
I check the windows on the upper floor, each one, methodically, because method is what’s left.
Windward rooms: gone to rain, shutters torn, glass strewed in diamonds across the beds.
Leeward: holding. I take mental notes for a report no one will ever read.
Habit is a spine. It holds you up when nothing else volunteers.
I stand at the top of the staircase with Sussanah in the carrier and my headlamp on, and I watch my living room disappear.
The sofa I dragged against the doors lifts.
Floats. Turns over in the dark water with the dining table beside it, and I have a stupid, vivid memory of choosing that sofa, of Kurt lying across it in a showroom with his eyes closed while the salesman pretended not to know who he was.
“Okay,” I say out loud. “Up.”
I take the stairs two at a time, one hand on the rail, one hand on Sussanah’s head, and behind me the water takes the landing.
The house sounds different from up here.
The crash of the lower floor is muffled, domestic almost, water finding furniture, drawers floating open somewhere, the small ridiculous sounds of a home being taken apart from the inside.
My kitchen. My coffee machine, smug to the end.
Kurt’s beam, the one he carried himself because the crane was late, holding the roof over our heads for as long as it can.
The reinforced room is on the upper floor but low in the plan, near the stairwell, and the water is coming for it first. The nursery sits higher, on the leeward side, the most intact room in the house now that the windward rooms are gone to wind and rain.
I move us there. There’s no clean word for how it feels to shelter in your daughter’s nursery because the storm has promoted it.
I put the dry bags on the changing table.
I put Sussanah in the crib for the three minutes it takes me, because her crib is the one place her body knows, and she grips the rail and looks at me with wet eyes and decides, generously, not to scream.
The roof goes while I’m repacking the bags.
Forty minutes. That’s all we get in the nursery, forty minutes of the house holding its last shape.
I spend it the way I spent the night, working.
Diapers in the dry bag, counted, enough.
The formula double-checked. I change Sussanah on the changing table one last time, fast and practiced, and she lies there kicking at the air with her socks falling off, and I think about all the mornings I did this exact thing half-asleep and bored, and I’d give anything, anything at all, to be bored again.
Outside the leeward window, in the gap between gusts, I can hear the reef. It doesn’t sound like water anymore. It sounds like machinery, enormous and close, the ocean running its engines over my island.
Not the whole roof. A seam, windward side, a peel and a shriek of fasteners letting go in sequence, pop pop pop pop, and then rain is falling into the hallway in a column.
I get the nursery door mostly closed and stand in front of it like that helps.
Water drips through the ceiling fixture.
The house groans, a deep structural groan I’ve heard once before in my life, on a site, in the instant before a wall came down.
I know that sound. My body knows it before my head finishes.
I stood on a site five years ago and heard a wall make that sound, and I was young then and fast, and I cleared eleven men off a slab in the time it took the wall to decide.
I got a scar on my knee and a reputation out of it.
Kurt heard about it before he ever met me.
The architect who runs toward the noise, he said later, admiring, like it was a cute story about his wife’s job.
It was never a cute story. It’s the thing I’m made of, and tonight it’s the thing my daughter has instead of a helicopter.
“Sussanah.” I cross the room. “We’re going. Baby, we’re going.”
The floor is wet. I don’t understand that at first, because the door held, and then I look down in the headlamp glare and the water isn’t coming from the ceiling.
It’s coming up. Through the floor registers, up the wall seams, a brown inch of it already and rising while I watch, and I understand that the surge has found the upper floor’s plumbing, that the sea is inside the walls of my house.
The crib lifts.
I will see this when I close my eyes for years.
The crib, Kurt’s joinery, his hands, rising off the wet floor as the water takes the room.
One leg catches on the rug. The crib tilts, the leg snaps free with a crack, and the whole thing rotates slowly in a foot of water, stately, unhurried, the most terrible object I have ever seen.
Sussanah is in my arms. She is in my arms. I keep saying it to my own hands.
The crib is empty because she is in my arms, and the water is rising, and a crack has appeared along the exterior wall, running from the ceiling seam down past the window frame, and it is wider than it was when I noticed it, and I noticed it four seconds ago.
The villa is done. The house that was rated, the reinforced room, the whole arithmetic of staying. The numbers have crossed, quietly, without asking permission. Numbers don’t ask. Staying is the danger now.
“Okay,” I say, and my voice is a stranger’s and it’s also mine, it’s the voice from the helipad, the one with no argument in it. “Okay. We go uphill.”
I think about Kurt in the four seconds this takes.
I don’t want to. He arrives anyway, uninvited and exact, like grief: Kurt in the operations room, Kurt watching a screen, Kurt believing whatever he’s telling himself about windows and contractors.
There is a version of tonight where he got on the radio and ordered every pilot on his payroll to do something insane, and half of me is furious he isn’t that man, and the other half knows that man would’ve died in the water and left us worse.
I put him down. Both halves. There’s no room on my back for him.
I have my daughter. I have a rope. I have a shed on high ground and a path I could walk blind. It’s enough, because it has to be.
I work fast because fast is all there is.
Sussanah into the carrier, chest-high, every strap doubled and checked, rain cover clipped, her blanket around her under the cover.
She’s crying now, steady, miserable, and I talk her through it in my site voice, calm, next step, next step.
She doesn’t understand the words. She understands the voice. The voice is the plan.
The rabbit. I grab it off the shelf and tuck it into the carrier pocket against her leg where she can touch it. She grabs an ear. Good girl. Hold onto your man.
I test the carrier with hard tugs on each strap. I’ve loaded this thing a hundred times. Today I check every buckle until my hands are sure.
The water in the nursery is at my shins.
The crib has drifted to the wall and knocked gently against it and come to rest, and I can’t look at it again, so I don’t.
The crack along the exterior wall ticks, ticks, each gust a little wider.
I know load paths. I know what that wall is carrying and I know what happens when it stops carrying it, and I know that my daughter and I are standing under it.
“Out,” I tell us both.
One dry bag, the smallest. Formula in its doubled bags.
Medication. The folder, flat against my back inside my shirt because I’d rather lose formula than lose her name.
Phone in its waterproof case on the lanyard, next to the flashlight.
Nothing else. I look at the shelf, at the framed sketch of my someday centre, and I leave it, and leaving it costs more than some things I’ve lost that were worth more.
The rope. I tie it around my waist, a bowline, a knot I’ve tied a thousand times on docks and sites, and I tie the free end in a loop around my forearm, short, so if I fall I don’t fall far from myself.
The rope isn’t for climbing. The rope is for being found, and for the shed door, and for all the uses I won’t think about.
I take one last look at the room. The crib turns slowly in the rising water. The mobile drips. Five months of 3 a.m. feedings and bad singing and the smell of her head, all of it going under, and the water doesn’t even have the decency to be loud about it.
“Daddy calls you Bug,” I whisper to Sussanah.
She has started crying, the thin frightened one, her fists up by her face, and the sound of her is the only thing in the world I can still steer by.
“Did you know that? He made it up before you were born. You were the size of a lime and he was already giving you nicknames.”
She cries. I press my lips to the top of her head through the rain cover.
“Okay, Bug. Mama gets us out.”
I’ve made promises tonight too. I know the difference. His cost him a phone call. Mine costs whatever it costs, and I pay it walking.
I don’t let myself think past the next four verbs.
Door. Path. Uphill. Shed. The crack ticks wider behind me, the water slaps the walls, and I open the nursery door into the black hallway with the rain falling through it.
The hallway floor is wet and sloping wrong.
Floors don’t slope. This one slopes, a degree, maybe less, and a degree is a verdict.
The leeward door. The one I slammed hours ago, the one that nearly took us. I put my hand on the latch and I look down at my daughter, at her wet furious face under the rain cover, and I make the calm face one more time.
This time the wind doesn’t push me back. This time I’m not testing.
The wind takes the door the second it unlatches, and I was ready for it this time, braced, and it still nearly has me.
I lean into it. Rain hits my face and keeps hitting it.
Somewhere out there in the black is a path, and a hill, and a rusted latch I complained about to my husband a lifetime ago, over coffee, on a morning when the sea was flat.
This time I open the door into the cyclone and I step through it, carrying everything I love, and I don’t look back at the house.