9. CHAPTER 9
KATHERINE
The storm knocks me down before I’m clear of the garden.
I made it maybe thirty steps from the door. My last clear thought before the gust takes me is a professional one, which tells you everything about me: the wind load on a standing human is a number I know, and tonight I am the number.
One second I’m leaning into the wind with my head down and the next I’m on my knees on the path, palms in gravel, Sussanah screaming into my sternum through the rain cover.
I get up. That’s the whole of it. There’s no decision in it.
My body was doing it before the thought finished forming, a hundred site falls in its memory, and I keep walking because the house behind me is coming apart and the shed ahead of me is sixty years of standing still.
The path lights are dead. My headlamp cuts a cone of moving rain and nothing else, and I walk by memory, by the slope under my feet, by the palm that’s been bent since before I owned this island, looming up out of the black exactly where my memory put it.
Thank you, tree. The wind takes it a moment later.
I hear it go, the whole crown tearing off, and I don’t turn around.
I try the phone once, the dead satellite brick. Searching. Nothing. I put it away and I don’t waste another thought on the north. The north had its chance.
Fifty feet. I count them. The low spot is a stream now, brown water rushing knee-deep across the path, warm, uphill, and I cross it sideways, one foot planted, one foot moving, Sussanah’s weight high on my chest and my arms wrapped around her so hard she’ll be bruised.
I will apologize for the bruises. I will buy her a pony. I cross the stream and I do not fall.
The branch hits me on the uphill side.
No warning. A crack, close, and then something the size of an oar comes out of the dark and takes me across the shoulder and spins me half around.
Pain arrives white and total and then narrows to a point.
Left shoulder. I move the arm. It moves.
It screams, but it moves, and screaming and moving is a working limb, and a working limb is all I need from it.
“Inventory,” I gasp, to myself, to her, to the rain. “Shoulder, functional. Legs, good. Baby—” I put my hand under the rain cover. She’s crying, hard, furious, alive. “Baby, loud. Loud is good.”
She grabbed my thumb through the cover. In the middle of all of it, with the rain hammering and the dark full of flying things, my daughter found my thumb and held on, and I stood there and let her, because it cost nothing and because I needed it more than she did.
The ankle goes at the debris field. Something’s come down across the path, a chair, half a fence, a tangle of the garden I planted, and my foot catches and turns under me and I go down again, and this time I stay down a second, assessing.
Ankle: rolls, hurts, bears weight. Not broken.
Broken would end us. It’s not broken. Get up.
The rope snags forty feet from the shed.
I’ve been paying it out behind me, tied at my waist, trailing a line back to the world in case, in case, I never finished the thought.
It catches in the wreckage of the fence and the wind hauls it tight, alive with intent, and I go down flat, full length, over Sussanah, taking the ground on my forearms so nothing takes her.
The rope hauls. I am anchored to a drowning garden by my own lifeline.
I have to let go of my daughter with one hand to reach the knot.
It’s the hardest thing I do all night, that one hand.
My fingers are numb, wet, stupid, and the knot is a bowline and I can tie a bowline blind drunk on a pitching deck and I cannot, for one long minute, get it undone.
The wind pulls. The rain hammers my back.
Under me, against my chest, Sussanah screams and screams.
The knot gives. I drag the rope free and coil it over my shoulder, and I crawl the last stretch because crawling is what’s left, knees and one hand and the other arm wrapped around my daughter, gravel and mud and something sharp that opens my palm, and I don’t stop.
I nearly lose her to the water once.
It comes across the path from the wrong side, a surge pulse, knee-deep and fast, and it takes my legs and I curl, hard, around the carrier, my whole body a shell, and the water goes over us and past us and pulls, pulls, and I am holding a sapling root with my bleeding hand, and the root holds.
It holds. We hold.
The rabbit doesn’t.
I feel it go. The carrier pocket, the tug, and when I look down the pocket’s open and empty and ten feet away, in the lamplight, a gray shape tumbles end over end into the dark, one chewed ear, gone.
I reach for it. My arm actually moves. And then I stop it, my own arm, because my daughter is against my heart and the water’s coming up and I am not, not ever, trading her weight for a toy’s.
I watch the rabbit go and something in me goes with it, the last soft thing, the last piece of the nursery, tumbling away into the storm.
Sussanah wails.
“You are not taking her,” I scream into the wind, at the water, at the sky, at my husband, at everything. “You are not taking her.”
The wind doesn’t answer. It doesn’t care, and there’s a strange freedom in that, in screaming at something that can’t be moved. For one second I’m not an architect or an owner or a wife. I’m an animal defending its young, and the storm is just another animal, and I’m the meaner one.
Then I get up.
The bunker path is gone. I find that out the hard way, thirty feet of my life wasted on a route that ends in a washout, the path simply absent, a raw gully of brown water where the ground was, and a fallen palm across what remains.
Beyond it, the bunker door, shut, mocking, unreachable.
I stand in the rain with my dead route and my dead ankle, and I let myself have five seconds of despair, counted out loud, one through five.
Then despair’s shift is over and I look uphill through the cone of my headlamp.
The shed. Higher. Rusty. Sixty years of standing still.
I crawl the final distance. There’s no other honest word for it.
My knee drags over something metal and opens up, the old scar’s twin, and I register it and file it and keep moving.
The slope fights me. Every yard is a negotiation I win by inches.
Up the slope on my hands and knees, my daughter lashed to my chest, the rope over my screaming shoulder, and the wind trying to peel me off the hill like I’m nothing at all.
I am not weather. I am a mother with a destination, and I get there.
The door is worse than I remember. The latch is a rusted joke, exactly as advertised, and the wind wants it.
There’s a pile of hurricane straps and scrap angle iron just inside, dumped there by some long-dead groundskeeper, and I kick it against the door base, all of it, every pound.
I get us inside, into the dark iron box of it, and I get the door closed and the rope around it, through the hasp, around the frame pipe, the knot I can tie blind, tied blind, in the dark, by feel, with fingers that barely work.
Then I sit down against the wall and the storm goes on without us.
The shed smells like rust and old oil and sixty years of tools.
My headlamp finds shelves, paint cans gone to rust, a coil of wire, a workbench with a vice.
I checked this place in the spring and found rope.
I find it again now with different eyes: a workbench to brace the door if the rope fails, paint cans to prop anything off the floor, walls that have outlasted everything this island has thrown at them since before my husband was born.
Kurt wanted to demolish it. I’m going to kiss this shed on the mouth.
Sussanah needs feeding. The math of the night doesn’t care that we’re in a shed.
I mix formula in the dark with the last of the bottled water from the dry bag, measured by feel, cool, because there’s no warm and cool will do.
She takes it. She takes it like babies take everything, and I sit against the wall feeding my daughter cool formula in a maintenance shed in a cyclone, and the ordinariness of the motion, her fists, her little sucking sighs, is the strangest and most sacred thing I’ve ever done.
I change her diaper on my lap afterward. In the dark. On a slope, in a storm, one-handed, with a sprained ankle and a wrecked shoulder. If there were medals for this I’d have a drawer of them. There’s just a clean baby, which is better.
It’s a long night. I won’t pretend otherwise.
The shed bucks and thrums. Water comes under the door in a thin sheet and finds the low corner and stays there, merciful, contained.
I sit upright because lying down is too much like giving up, and I take Sussanah out of the wet carrier and put her under my shirt against my skin, because everything I’ve ever read says skin to skin, and her crying slows, and slows, and stops, and her heartbeat settles against mine, and that, that right there, is the only moment in the whole night I come apart.
Just for a minute. Then I put myself back together, because she needs the put-together version.
“Your daddy better spend the rest of his life making this up to us,” I whisper into the dark.
I listen to it. Then I shake my head, against the wall, in the black.
“No,” I tell her, quieter. “He doesn’t get to decide that either.”
Hours pass. I know because my watch is one of Kurt’s old ones, waterproof to depths I’ll never dive, glowing faintly at me from my wrist. The rain on the iron roof is so loud it stops being a sound and becomes a condition.
Sussanah sleeps against me in stretches, waking at the big gusts, settling again when my hand stays on her back.
I talk to her in the lulls. I tell her about the resilience centre, the real one, the one I’m building now no matter what anyone says.
I tell her about her grandmother’s house on the coast, where the kitchen smells like toast. I tell her anything, because my voice is the only shelter I can build in here, and I build it and build it.
The storm peaks and peaks and peaks. Every so often, when the wind dips, I lift my bleeding hand and I bang on the shed’s exposed metal frame, slow and hard, three times, a signal anyone would know, in case someone comes.
Nobody is coming. I know nobody is coming until morning, until the water falls, until men like Noah can do what men like Noah do.
I bang anyway. On the hour. Every hour. Three slow strikes, into the dark, my daughter asleep against my heartbeat, while the cyclone spends itself on my island.
In between, I hold her and I don’t sleep. Sleep is for people whose roofs someone else is watching. I watch the door rope instead, and the water line in the corner, and the gray seam of dawn when it finally, finally starts.
So they’ll know where to look.