11. CHAPTER 11
KURT
Little Brooks comes up out of the water ahead of us and I don’t know it.
I built half of what I’m looking at and I don’t know it.
The dock is gone. Not damaged — gone, pilings snapped off at the waterline like teeth.
The palms along the shore path are stripped to poles, every one of them bent the same direction, like the whole island flinched and never straightened.
The guest bungalows are matchwood. And up on the rise, where the veranda used to face the sunrise, the villa stands with half its roof missing and one wall gone entirely, open to the sky, a dollhouse with the front off.
“Steady,” Noah says beside me.
I am not steady. I am the least steady I have ever been.
One of the divers crosses himself. Another one starts reading off assets in checklist order, voice flat, because flat is the only way through: two boats, six divers, one drone when the wind allows, dogs on the second boat out of the regional island, ETA ninety minutes.
The helipad is still there. I see it as we come in, and my whole body goes toward it, because three nights ago my wife stood on it and waited for me.
The pad lights are smashed. The windsock is gone.
The little shelter roof is intact, absurdly, a square of order in a world of wreckage, and I stand in the boat and stare at it like it might tell me something.
It doesn’t. It just stands there, empty, the last place I know she was alive.
We ground the boat in what used to be the boat basin, and I’m over the side before the keel settles, waist-deep, wading. Noah catches my arm with a grip I couldn’t break if I wanted to.
“You’re under my command out there,” he says.
Not loud. Absolute. “My island, my rules until I say otherwise. The structure is unstable, the debris field is live, there are nails and glass and power lines down somewhere in that water. You go where I point. You don’t run.
You don’t climb anything. Are we clear?”
“Fine.”
“Say it like you mean it or you sit in the boat.”
“I’m clear, Noah.”
He studies me a second longer, then lets go. “Then walk. Behind me. And Kurt — whatever we find, you keep your feet. That’s the job now.”
I don’t answer that. He doesn’t expect me to.
The debris starts at the shoreline and never stops.
Timber, roofing iron, a chandelier from the villa’s great room sitting in the sand like a landed spacecraft.
Katherine’s frangipani trees, the ones she fought the landscapers for, uprooted, every one.
I walk behind Noah up the path I walked behind my wife three days ago, and the island I knew keeps not being there.
At the villa’s steps I stop being able to do it his way.
“Katherine!” I’m running. I hear Noah behind me, hear him swear, hear him come after me. “Katherine! Sussanah—”
The great room is open to the sky. The veranda where she fed our daughter in the mornings is a skeleton of posts.
Her toast plate is still on the rail, somehow, unbroken, unbroken in all that wreckage.
I have to look away from it. I have to look away or I’ll stand here forever, in the rain, holding a plate.
“Kurt! The structure—”
The water inside the house is thigh-deep and brown, full of the house.
I wade through our living room. The sofa she braced against the doors is in the dining room.
Her coffee machine is on its back on the floor, and I register, insanely, that she’ll be annoyed about that, and the thought is so ordinary and so impossible that I make a sound I didn’t plan to make.
“Katherine!”
Nothing answers but the house, dripping.
“Ground floor first,” Noah says, at my shoulder now, not fighting me anymore, working. “Systematic. Left to right.”
We clear the ground floor. Nobody. The reinforced room, door open, dry bags gone — I note it and Noah notes it, and neither of us says what it means, that she packed to move, that she left. We clear what we can reach of the outbuildings. Nobody. The boat shed, the generator hut. Nobody, nobody.
From the generator hut I can see up the slope to the old maintenance shed, the iron box Katherine refused to let me demolish, and I lift the binoculars hanging off a diver’s chest strap and look.
Door shut, latch crusted with rust, nothing about it saying opened, nothing saying occupied.
The slope around it scoured clean of tracks by a day of rain.
And the wind is still high enough to swallow sound whole.
“She’d go there,” I say. “If she moved uphill. She told me about that shed. The rope, the elevation — she’d go there.”
“We’ll sweep uphill,” Noah says. “But look at the ground, Kurt. Everything came down. Debris line runs to the sea, every thread of it. We clear where the evidence points first, then we work uphill. That’s how you don’t miss anyone.”
He’s right. He’s spent twenty years being right about this.
I look at the shed one more time through the binoculars, shut tight, silent, sixty feet of churned mud between me and it, and I make myself put the binoculars down.
And then, on the wall beside the staircase, Noah’s light catches something and he goes still.
Hand smears. Muddy, small, at shoulder height and then lower, trailing up the stairs.
“She went up,” Noah says. “She was alive after the surge. Kurt — she was alive and moving and thinking.”
Hope is a physical blow. I sag against the wall with my hand flat in her handprint’s mud and for seconds, whole seconds, I’m the luckiest man alive. She was here. She was moving. My wife, who checks rope in springtime, was up here working her way through it.
“Nursery’s up there,” I say.
The nursery door is open. The room is waist-deep in brown water, and the light coming through the missing wall is gray and flat, and the first thing I see is the crib.
It’s floating upside down.
My legs carry me forward without consulting me. The crib, my crib, the one I built because I didn’t trust anyone else’s joinery, hull-up in the flood like a little boat gone over, and Sussanah’s blanket, the yellow one, tangled around the rail and trailing in the water.
I know every inch of that crib. I know the rail she chewed when the teeth started coming.
I know the joint I glued twice because the first one wasn’t good enough for her.
I know the height of the mattress, set low, because Katherine said she’s going to be a climber, I can tell already, and I laughed and lowered it.
Every decision in that crib was a decision we made for a future.
And here it is, floating upside down in a flooded room, and the future is not in it.
“Kurt. Wait—”
The water’s cold. I don’t remember going in.
I’m across the room and I’ve got the crib and I’m turning it over, and it’s empty, it’s empty, and there’s nothing under it, and the water sloshes against the broken wall, and through the gap I can see the slope behind the house, the debris line, everything strewn downhill toward the sea.
A gray shape in the wreckage of the garden fence. Twenty feet below the wall. I know it before my mind accepts it.
I climb out through the broken wall. I hear Noah shouting and it doesn’t reach me. I wade down through the mud and the torn garden and I kneel in the debris and I pick up the rabbit. One chewed ear. Soaked through, gray fur gone dark, small enough to disappear in my hand.
She doesn’t sleep without it. She screams for it at loud enough to wake the drowned. Katherine packed it first, I know she packed it, and now it’s here, in the debris line, downhill, with everything else the water took.
The water took them. The water came up the stairs and into the nursery and it took my wife and my daughter and the rabbit out of her carrier, and poured them out of my house and down my hill toward my sea.
I kneel in the wreckage of our garden with my daughter’s toy in my fist and I say it aloud, because saying it doesn’t make it any less true.
The thing nobody tells you about believing your child is dead is that the world doesn’t stop.
The rain keeps falling. The divers keep walking their grids.
Somewhere behind me a chainsaw starts up, practical and obscene, and the island goes on being an island while I kneel in the mud with a wet toy in my hand and try to remember how men survive this.
My father drowned and I was on the dock and they brought his boat back without him. I have spent my whole adult life making sure no one under my care ever waited for a rescue that wasn’t coming.
I made my wife wait on a pad in the rain for a helicopter I’d sent away.
“No.”
Noah gets me by the shoulders. “Kurt. We don’t know—”
“No.”
“Listen to me. The crib was empty. The rabbit’s here but there’s no — Kurt. Look at me. There’s no—” He can’t say bodies. He can’t say it either. “We search. We don’t conclude. We search.”
The ceiling shifts. I hear it, a deep structural groan, and Noah hears it and hauls me up with both hands, and I let him, because my body has stopped taking my own orders.
We get out through the gap in the wall and down the slope, and at the edge of the mud I bend over and vomit until there’s nothing left, and then I stand up with the rabbit still in my fist, and I say the true thing to the rain.
“I killed them.”
“You don’t know that.” Noah’s voice is iron. “And you don’t get to say it until it’s true. We have divers, we have dogs inbound on the second boat, we have daylight. Get on the radio. Make yourself useful or get on the boat.”
He walks away from me to organize the search, and the teams fan out along the shoreline, because that’s where the evidence points, the debris line, the drift, the sea.
The second boat arrives while I’m walking my grid.
Dogs, handlers, more divers, and Deke, who came without being asked and looks at me, then at the villa and says nothing at all.
He hands Noah a radio and me a pair of gloves, and the gloves are the kindest thing anyone has done for me in days, because they mean someone expects me to keep working.
I work. I turn wreckage. I call her name.
I look down at the rabbit in my hand. Then I put it carefully, zippered away, over my heart, and I start walking the debris line with the others, calling my wife’s name into a wind that’s already forgotten her.
An hour in, the drone goes up and comes back down with nothing but wreckage. The dogs work the shoreline and give their handlers nothing but drift. Every ten minutes my radio crackles with somebody’s clear — sector clear, shoreline clear, reef edge clear — and every clear is a door closing.
Noah walks the grid beside me for a while without speaking. Then he says, “Tell me about the house. Every room. Where she’d go, what she’d do. Everything you know about how she thinks.”
So I do. I walk the debris of my marriage and I brief my wife to my best man, her habits, her lists, her shed, her rope. It’s the only useful thing I’ve done since I got here.