The Floating World
Page 38
He poured the Bordeaux into the tulip-shaped glasses and raised his towards her in a toast. “To better years.”
“To better years,” she repeated.
The wine, though, was thin and flat, almost sour; it had boiled, after the storm, in its bottle. But Augie, blinded by his hopes or his memories of what it should be, was smiling, and so she smiled too, put her nose in it. Hummed. Took another sip.
THE DOG WAS in the bed when Vincent awoke, her body curled up inside the bend of his knees, her warm body pressing against him and then easing off. There were others breathing in the room too, a concert of shallow inhalations and exhalations matched to his own, but it was too dark to see who was there. The only light in the room leaked in at the threshold, outlining the mouth of the cave.
Vincent breathed in—a crackling sound of air through water—and the others inhaled. He let his breath out in a long, slow gush, and they exhaled. Sheba, though, kept up her own rhythm, in out, in out, as even as the wash of the sea. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it—the sea coming up on the shingle, the tide creeping in, creeping out. Beyond the cave, the sun was only just rising, and he should sleep, since there was all the time in the world and no good reason to wake: if Sheba was in bed, that meant Sylvia was gone, out to the Pass to see her sister Pauline in that little wire house that smelled of salt. If Sylvia was gone, that meant he would have spread a towel over the coverlet and lifted the old dog up in his arms to be next to him, even though it wasn’t allowed, so that they could both sleep, safe and warm.
Sheba’s soft back pressed up against him, then eased away.
The gulf washed up to the cave mouth, retreated.
The sea was rising. It rose every day, but all around the bed the others were standing, ready to lift him over it, to set him in his ship if the water came too high. Sylvia, his mother and father, his shipmates, Pauline, that pale-pretty English nurse. Dressed in their mourning clothes, rings taken from their fingers, handkerchiefs clasped in their hands, they watched over him, and so it would be all right if he went back to sleep. It was hot here—he was sweating—and cold at the same time, here in the rushing sea air. But Sylvia had gone to the Pass, and he had all the time in the world. The tide would come slowly up to the cave mouth, and then it would fall away, and even if it didn’t, the watchers would see to it that the water did not enter while he slept. Sometime later, of course, he would wake, having slept his fill, and he and Sheba would move the stone from in front of the window and climb out onto the beach, and they would board the ship that was waiting for them and make the slow, gray passage to the far and unseen shore.
Ninety-Three Days after Landfall
November 30
Cora idled the truck up the long driveway, snowflakes spinning like moths in her headlights. She thumbed a button on the sunshade, and the corrugated garage door rattled up onto the orange-lit cave, cluttered with trashcans, ladders, tools on pegs.
“Here we are,” she said to herself as she did every day when she returned from work at the sandwich shop, like a promise, an incantation. “Here we are.”
The smell of onions, bacon, green peppers frying filled the truck, and she breathed in and lowered herself onto the ground. Inside the house, she could hear the boys running. Bea was yelling for them to wait, not just swarm out at her like a mess of wasps, and Cora could see them already in their collared shirts and uniform pants, she could smell Tyrone’s hair as she held him in her lap in front of the TV, Troy’s hand in her hand. But she felt uncertain, suddenly, unsure that it was real. She turned around, looking out through the open garage door at the driveway, at the leaf-strewn yard and the bare branches of the tree, the empty street.
She cast around for a second in the chill air, waiting for it to fill her up with something, some dread, some memory, waiting for it to wind itself around her, but the air was still, light, not weighted down with the smells of far-off bodies dancing in low, close rooms or of swamp plants rising huge out of the fertile soil. At the end of the driveway, the tree held the full moon by the tips of its golden branches; even after fading away to nothing, it was possible to creep back to wholeness by small degrees of illumination. Up in the tree’s crotch, a little dun-colored bird with an axe-shaped head and red wingtips was settling herself down into a nest of leaves, and Cora turned around to see the boys coming down out of the warm house towards her, Willy first.
“You’re home, you’re home, you’re home!” Willy was saying, his breath coming in dense white clouds.
She crouched down to them and opened up her arms, let them rush over her, let herself be pushed under by their kicking legs and little riotous hands.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m home.”
C. Morgan Babst studied writing at NOCCA, Yale, and NYU. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in such journals as the Oxford American, Guernica, the Harvard Review, LitHub, and the New Orleans Review, and her piece "Death Is a Way to Be" was honored as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. She evacuated New Orleans one day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. After eleven years in New York, she now lives in New Orleans with her husband and child.
Visit us at Algonquin.com to step inside the world of Algonquin Books. You can discover our stellar books and authors on our newly revamped website that features
Book Excerpts
Downloadable Discussion Guides
Author Interviews
Original Author Essays
And More!
Follow us on twitter.com/AlgonquinBooks
Like us on facebook.com/AlgonquinBooks
Follow us on AlgonquinBooks.tumblr.com
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2017 by C. Morgan Babst.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
eISBN 9781616207632