by Cai Emmons
Meetings with Stuart are Bronwyn’s least favorite part of this job. For one thing, they always go longer than they need to. If you ask Stuart what appears to be a simple, short-answer question, he always answers with a disquisition. But the more important problem with him is that he can’t be trusted. At first she thought he was a very nice man, sympathetic, but it didn’t take long to see how his niceness was a screen for an untrustworthy nature. He is known for telling his staff one thing, his higher-ups another. In the end he always panders to the advertisers and the board, and the concerns of a mere meteorologist mean nothing to him. In her first month or so at the station she used to try to engage with him, but now she has learned it’s advisable to say little and allow his advice and lectures and attempts to be witty to simply run their course. She should have understood from his comb-over that he attempts to hide far more than his balding head.
Stuart’s office has a picture window that gives out to a grassy area bordered by woods. Rain falls in translucent beads that, even through the glass, can be heard resonating softly as they hit the ground. It’s a comforting sound and a peaceful, sylvan sight, and it brings to Bronwyn, despite the day, a rill of pleasure. Stuart’s gaze follows hers, and they both stare out.
“It must make you feel good having your forecasts come true.”
“You make me sound like a fortune teller.”
“Aren’t you?” He laughs, as if what he has said is terribly funny, and rolls his office chair forward into the mealworm curve of his desk. The desk is a reddish-brown and so heavily lacquered it seems to have its own light source.
“You’re a great asset to the station, Bronwyn. I’m sure you know that by now. Revenues are up since your arrival. People like hearing their weather from a pretty girl like you.” His brow ripples. “But we cannot, we simply cannot have you flying off in this speculative manner. Yes, I saw the broadcast, and I know where you were heading. First, you have no idea what the weather of the future will be like, and it is frankly ir responsible to pretend you do. Furthermore, even if you did know, our viewers don’t care. They want to hear about tomorrow’s weather and maybe a few days out to the weekend and that’s it.” He squints as if to make his stare pointed and hurtful, like one of those electronic fences that keeps dogs in check.
The rain seems to be coming down harder, though it may be that Bronwyn is confusing the rain with her own beating heart. Will it really clear by tomorrow morning? Today, like never before, Bronwyn feels invested in having her forecast come true.
“Bronwyn?” Stuart leans across the slick desk. “Bronwyn?”
She turns. “Yes?”
“Am I making myself clear? We’ve had this discussion before. I thought you understood.”
“I do understand.”
“You do understand, but—?”
“But nothing.”
“It sounded as if there was a but there.”
Behind Stuart’s head the rain is mesmerizing. It is a singular blue-gray which shimmers with all colors, and it descends with a singular beat which houses hundreds of variations. She can’t stop looking.
“There wasn’t a ‘but,’” she says, trying to track.
“We are here, you in particular, to be comforting, not alarmist. People want to know if they should take a jacket or an umbrella with them. You provide them with a practical tool to get them through their day.”
Her attention is fully in the room now, and she stares hard at the reflections in Stuart’s glasses. “I don’t think it’s always enough to simply tell them what the weather is going to be. I think they sometimes want to know why it’s going to be that way. Why, for example, have the tornadoes been so bad this year? Why has it been so hot and dry in the Southwest and California? I think people are interested.”
“But we don’t know why. We’re not scientists.”
“I’m sorry, I am a scientist. And I think we know quite a bit. We all know the planet is warming. Are you a skeptic?”
“My personal beliefs are not on the table here. Look, Bronwyn, you’re a smart woman, don’t ruin things for yourself. Just do the job you were hired for and don’t let your smartness turn to arrogance.”
Neither one of them speaks. Stuart’s breath is quick and shallow as if he’s taking a break in a boxing match. “That sweater isn’t right. It’s too big for you.”
She smiles. “I’m trying.” She unbuttons the sweater like a flasher to expose the grease spot on her sternum.
The Red Bull gets her through the night, but barely. She stares into the camera imagining Stuart watching her. She delivers cheerful conventional reports and only with effort holds herself back from sticking out her tongue afterwards. She thinks fleetingly of Reed, who indicated once that he did not much like her TV persona, though he didn’t say why. At eleven-thirty she’s in the break room gathering her things to go home. Archie comes up behind her and puts a cold beer in her hand.
“I can’t, Archie. I’m dead tired.”
“One beer.”
Exhausted as she is, the Red Bull still boils in her system. A beer might help. She takes it and collapses into a chair beside Archie.
“Is Stuart on your case?” he says.
She nods. “He’s so paranoid about me mentioning global warming.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“How can I report the weather without at least sometimes mentioning why it’s happening the way it is? He says people don’t care. Do you think that’s true?”
“Hm. They care, they just don’t want to be bothered with it right now.”
She nods. “I guess that’s more or less what he’s telling me.” She sips her beer, thinking of all the things she would rather not be bothered with at the moment.
“Hey—change of subject. You ever been to Alaska?” Archie says.
“No. I’ve hardly been anywhere. I took a trip to Colorado once with my old mentor. And my mother and I went to Yosemite when I was, like, eleven or twelve.”
“I was up in Alaska about this time ten years ago. Solstice, up in Homer. God, it was spooky. Beautiful spooky. The light changes, and you suddenly realize it’s not going anywhere. To me, it almost felt like being in water. Or like I was an astronaut suspended in space. Weightless. Something.”
“I’d love to see that. Did you sleep?”
“Oh, for three or four hours a night, not much more. Definitely puts you in an altered state. And I felt like I understood something about where I was on the Earth—all that shit about the Earth’s axis and rotation and all, it suddenly made sense to me. But at the same time, there was like this religious or spiritual thing happening—and I’m not woo-woo like that at all, believe me—but it was like other powers were at work. I was thinking about that today. We humans, we’re nothing, you know? We don’t know much about anything really.”
Bronwyn smiles. She can imagine Archie as a young man, tripping on acid, blabbing on about his mind-blowing insights. Bronwyn pushes her half-drunk beer toward him.
“You finish this. I’ve been up for too many hours. I need to go home.”
6
It has been raining steadily since Bronwyn left the station almost four hours ago. She was wide awake, disconcerted by the sound of her lids scraping across her dry eyeballs. Despite her exhaustion, she hasn’t slept for more than a few minutes at a time. As soon as she got home she peeled off her dress, hurled her shoes toward the bedroom, and came out to the porch couch. She’s been here ever since, rattling around under a sheet. And now it’s almost 4:00 a.m. and she can already hear a few waking birds. The dark is alive and porous. Dawn is clawing up the horizon, fighting with the rain like a scene-stealing actor impatient to make an appearance.
She always believed in her future with Reed. But why? There was never any hard data. It was all hunch and hope, the kind of lazy thinking Diane used to deplore. Bronwyn thought she’d cured herself of such thinking. She likes to think her opinions are fact-based, scientifically verifiable.
Wha
t exactly did she do to lose Reed? Was there a single moment where one thing sent their relationship perilously off course? Or were there innumerable miniscule things that, done differently, might have changed the outcome? How could you possibly know what those things were? Crucial, but so unknowable. The Butterfly Effect, sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Maybe she is just congenitally bad at relationships and will end up alone like her mother. Maggie slept with Bronwyn’s father a couple of times and never saw him again. He was an older man, a history professor she met on a train. He was probably married. There was no point, Maggie said, in Bronwyn looking for him, as Maggie never learned his last name. Bert Somebody. Who even knew if the Bert was true.
Perhaps one initial condition was that she and Reed were never suited to each other in the first place. Who knows? Relationships seem like fractals for which Bronwyn has no equation, oddly like the weather that defies easy computing with its multitude of variables: air currents and mountain ranges and bodies of water and gravity and rotation and humidity and wind speed. On and on. Everything in flux. This is what draws Bronwyn to weather, the salmagundi of forces that are nearly impossible to parse with absolute accuracy. Maybe previously uncharted human factors are also involved. Human intention. Human will. Human desire. A measurable energy attached to thought. She knows too much to rule that out. And far too little. Sometimes the things she knows are stashed too deeply for her to even realize she knows them. Then suddenly she does know. The onion peeled, her vision clears.
Though now her vision is far from clear about anything. Snippets of yesterday have been scattered randomly in different parts of her brain. She lifts and examines them. Reed’s pitying look. The celestial look of the light on the beach. The heat in her brain and the pounding singularity of her focus. Stuart saying, We’re not scientists. So glib. So rude. She feels a footprint planted on her heart.
She can’t call Lanny until at least 9:00 a.m. Lanny is off from teaching for the summer and she likes to sleep, long and hard. Her husband, Tom, takes the bus to the city to work in insurance, or some such thing, and Lanny sleeps and sleeps and sleeps. Often until ten or eleven or even noon. Once she confessed she didn’t even wake until 2:00 p.m. It is not in Bronwyn’s constitution to sleep that much. Perhaps her body could sleep that long, but her mind always wants to scold her body to attention.
She remembers it’s the solstice. Just her luck that she has to endure the longest day of the year when she feels so low. She makes herself stay put in hopes of more dozing. At 5:00 a.m. she glides along the uppermost surface of sleep, a state still hinged to waking consciousness that disallows the pleasure of oblivion. At 7:15 a.m. she finally concedes that the day has begun. The rain has stopped but the foliage is shedding droplets noisily and sunlight illuminates everything, spreading tiny rainbows and making every water-sheathed leaf and stem precious. The world is unusually active, as if it’s preparing itself for something. Her forecast was right after all, clearing by morning just as she predicted, but being correct doesn’t yield much satisfaction right now.
Despite the rain, the river looks unusually indolent today, almost sluggish. From where she lies she sees a hawk out on the water swooping low, intent on some prey. She will not succumb to the terrible inadequacy Reed has made her feel. She will climb out of this chasm into which she has fallen. She will pay close attention to the faulty functioning of her brain and try to repair it. She suspects that the antibiotic she took in late May might be responsible for her odd experiences yesterday. The doctor said it was a virus that was making her so tired. Then he prescribed an antibiotic. Didn’t he know antibiotics don’t cure viruses? Why do some doctors insist on doing that? Of course it is her fault for taking it, despite knowing better.
At 8:30 a.m. she can’t hold off calling any longer. Lanny grunts a greeting and adjusts herself in the sheets, waking reluctantly. But Bronwyn is out of the gate, already talking. As little as a grunt from Lanny can make Bronwyn feels she’s back in eighth grade, or even that she’s five or six years old again. She’s known Lanny that long; they could be sisters. Bronwyn doesn’t care how juvenile she sounds, how angry at Reed and his parents and his privilege. After ranting about Reed, she rants about Stuart, then whispers about her fear that she’s losing her mind, on the solstice no less. She pauses, on the cusp of crying, but not crying. Lanny has not said a thing. Bronwyn stops to listen. “Are you laughing?”
“No.”
“Yes, I heard you laughing.”
“I didn’t know who you were at first. You didn’t announce yourself. I thought you were some kind of weird recording. But I’m really not laughing at you.”
“Well, there’s no laughing with me because I’m not laughing. It isn’t funny.” But then, suddenly, it is funny, and Bronwyn begins to chuckle, a low sound fizzing up from her gut, involuntary, biological, unexpectedly delicious.
Lanny is fully awake now. “Call in sick,” she instructs Bronwyn. “We’re going away, you and I. I’m going crazy here anyway. It’s hot and everyone but me is working. I’ll come up there and we’ll go camping.”
“What about Tom?”
“He’s under a deadline. I’ve hardly seen him since school ended.”
“It’s been ages since I’ve camped. I have no idea if I still have any of my gear.”
“I’ve got everything. Find a sleeping bag and pull together some food and I’ll bring everything else. Junk food, comfort food, whatever you’re in the mood for, I don’t care. Oh—can you get us a campsite somewhere? I’ll pick you up in a few hours, as long as it takes to throw together my things and drive up there. I’m fast when I’m motivated.”
What a relief to have a plan and to be in the hands of someone she trusts. It was always this way in school, Lanny took the lead. She was the big brave one, the risk-taker. Bronwyn held back, formulating questions, calculating odds, not exactly the brains of their team, but certainly the thinker.
At 9:00 a.m. she calls the station and tells Nicole she expects to be out for two days. “Are you really sick?” Nicole asks. “Or is it more like mental health?”
Bronwyn clears her throat. “Of course I’m really sick.”
“You want to talk to Stuart?”
“God, no. Just tell him I sound bad. Chip will probably be happy to fill in for me.”
Chip, a reporter, has subbed for her a few times. He doesn’t have a deep understanding of weather, and Stuart doesn’t seem to like him much, but he can put together a passable report from the National Weather Service feed, and he has an acceptable, if somewhat boring, camera presence. Bronwyn likes having someone dull replace her occasionally so her contribution is more appreciated.
Once off the phone a little blip of glee comes over her, a feeling that she’s given Stuart the finger. Still not dressed, she wanders around the house in her underpants, a little aimless, making a pile on the living room floor of things she will take. She loves how bracing it is to sleep outside and wishes she camped more frequently, but the demands of school and work have made it hard in the last few years. She remembers her assignment to get them a campsite, and finds a place online, just off the Kancamagus Highway in the White Mountains, not far from Mount Washington. A surge comes over her—not well-being exactly, but the possibility of well-being awaiting her in the future. Outdoor living and some nights of solid sleep—surely they’ll begin to repair her bruised heart.
People often laugh upon meeting Lanny and Bronwyn together. What they see is a snapshot of an unlikely pair. Lanny, a high school gym teacher, is six feet tall and burly; she clips her hair short. Bronwyn is five-foot-two and slender, her long, wavy, dark-red hair a defining feature. Next, people notice their contrasting behavioral traits: Lanny’s boisterousness and lack of a verbal filter, Bronwyn’s public reserve. It is clear to everyone that theirs is a friendship born of complementarity. But what is not visible is the long history that holds the friendship together, their knowledge of each other’s families and of the private pains of the past. Bron
wyn was there in early high school when Lanny’s parents went through an ugly divorce. Lanny knows how difficult it was for Bronwyn to grow up with a frightened and often bitter single mother. They both remember Lanny getting her first period in seventh-grade math class, blood pooling over the seat. They remember Bronwyn’s broken arm from a ninth-grade bicycle accident. Bronwyn attended most of Lanny’s high school basketball games, and Lanny came to Bronwyn’s science fairs. After Lanny got her license she would often borrow her father’s car and take Bronwyn on road trips to the shore, or the Delaware River. Sometimes they took the bus into the city and wandered around the West Village. Lanny liked shocking people. She was the first among their classmates to get a tattoo, not a delicate one, but a dragon breathing fire that spiraled around her left arm. For almost an entire year in high school she wore the same pair of neon-orange cargo pants and a red paisley shirt. But in certain arenas Bronwyn and Lanny’s tastes have always been identical. They have always liked the same junk food (nachos above all else), and they are both hooked on the same old movies (Gone with the Wind) and old TV shows (“Seinfeld” and “The X Files”). Though tough on the outside, they are both closet romantics. Bronwyn has no idea how she would get through life without a friend like Lanny, even though they sometimes go through long periods when they’re out of touch.
Now they sit in low camp chairs at their campsite overlooking the Swift River, sipping bottles of beer, mesmerized by the river’s pell-mell rush over the rocks, bathing them in its negative ions. Chipmunks and nuthatches dash here and there. The light is a delicate damask; the air gloves their skin, a temperate seventy degrees. Nature could not have engineered a more perfect situation for soothing a human being.
The sun slips behind the trees, dimming the air, imparting a contemplative mood to the landscape. Lanny wants to climb Mount Washington tomorrow. Bronwyn is game as long as she gets a solid sleep. She hopes she’s in good-enough shape for such a climb. They prepare a dinner of spaghetti with meat sauce and salad and are in their sleeping bags by 9:00 p.m., the tent flaps open to the last embers of light. Night critters are venturing out. A bat circles overhead. An owl hoots. Tree frogs bleat. She and Lanny breathe in unison, as if entrained.