Heroism is all about timing.
“Isn’t that right, Angela Rose?” she would like to ask her daughter. Still in her pajamas, she pads down the hallway to her daughter’s room and opens the door, but the girl isn’t there. Mrs. McGinn pauses, examines the room. Everything is in its place: the shelves of stuffed animals, the plush pink carpet, the canopy bed and the quilt that Mrs. McGinn made herself, sewed with her own two hands by the light of the living room lamp. And yet something about the room does not seem right.
“Angela Rose?” calls Mrs. McGinn, but again there is no answer.
Mrs. McGinn’s mind flashes back to last night, to the dream she had of empty streets and empty houses. The entire town had been abandoned and she was left as its only occupant, bailing water from her diner with a white plastic pail in preparation for the customers who never came. The dream seemed so real that when she woke this morning her arms felt as though they were aching, muscles sorely tried by the task she had imagined for herself.
She wanders back down the hallway to her own room, where she dresses and arranges her hair as best she can. Her husband is already gone, transporting the day’s animal supplies from the town hall to the houses. He had woken her with the sound of breaking glass in the kitchen, but she had not ventured downstairs to find out if the crash was accidental or deliberate. Now when she walks through to reach the front door, she sees no sign that anything occurred at all. Say what people will about her husband and his temper—at least he does his best to keep his messes to himself.
Out on the main drag she wades through several inches of water, lifting her boots extra high in a futile attempt to avoid the fallen leaves and twigs that are bobbing around her ankles. The streets are flowing. She sees a lopsided bench, sinking into the mud, and a herd of elk examining her from the highest point in the park. A small child paddles by in a kayak. When she opens the door of the diner she finds that the water in the streets has begun to seep below the door, coating the main floor in a murky layer. She stabs at it with the toe of her boot and watches the ripples run over the tiles. A quick surge of fear rises in her chest, and she instantly quells it. Who ever heard of a rain that lasts forever?
She feeds the penguins and hangs a sign on the door (CLOSED TODAY, REGRETFULLY) and steps back outside while she mulls over what to do next. Where is her husband? Where is her daughter? Who can she find to help her clear out the water? From her position on the side porch, she can see past the wooden rocking chairs (rotting and sprouting moss) to the back of the diner, where the river is rising and slamming against the building’s foundations. No wonder her business is crumbling. How can anything withstand a force like this, day after day after day?
The fear rises and again she presses it back, tries to remind herself of what her mother used to tell her about being scared. Her mother’s theory was that anytime she felt frightened, she ought to channel that emotion into something else: she ought to get angry or passionate instead. This is why, even from an early age, Mrs. McGinn has always been a fighter.
She knows that she will find her troops in the general store. Mauro says that people have been storming in from dawn until dusk to complain of the slow leaks in their roofs and the water seeping through the cracks of their basement windows. When she marches in, he is in the middle of a tutorial. She stops and pulls up short inside the door, watching as he shows a group of his neighbors how to apply caulk around the windowsills and patch up fissures in the walls. Seeing that the townspeople still seem uneasy, he brings out the shoebox that he keeps on a shelf below the cash register and begins passing out his lucky coins, his lucky stones, and his ball-chain necklaces from which hang medallions with the tarnished images of saints.
“Here,” he tells his audience. “Take these. For the good fortune!”
Although the townspeople have always regarded Mauro’s superstitions as old-world and quaint, they take the objects from his oversized palms with ginger fingers and no complaints. Mauro’s turkeys glower at them from behind stacks of canned paint.
For Mrs. McGinn, this is as good a time as any. “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” she announces dryly, and the townspeople turn toward her. She sees Mauro wrinkle his forehead, trying to commit the phrase to memory.
“We need more than luck, people,” declares Mrs. McGinn. “We need to take a stand. We need to fight back.”
“Who are we fighting?” asks Leesl, who had been attending Mauro’s tutorial with a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen. Mrs. McGinn glares at her, as fierce as she has always been.
“The elements!” says Mrs. McGinn. “The river! The rain! This is our town, these are our stores and our houses. Don’t you want to take it all back?”
“The house is where a heart is, of course,” exclaims Mauro, smiling wildly. He, too, is afraid that this town is on the verge of collapse; he is terrified that his neighbors will all jump ship. And if they leave, what will he do, how will he live? His savings are gone.
The townspeople do not consider themselves to be fighters by nature; usually they leave the fighting to Mrs. McGinn. They are as tired of her as they are of the rain. They do not like each other anymore. They are here because they need to patch the leaks in their roofs, but they would rather be at home, shut up in their own dark houses with their own wild animals wandering through the living room. The animals do not bother them, do not ask them all these questions about the philosophy of staying or going, giving up or fighting. Unlike their human neighbors, the animals leave them alone.
“Do we have a choice?” asks someone in the back, once Mrs. McGinn has finished.
She stares at him. “No,” she says after a brief pause. “No, not really. Do you want the rain to win? Sound the alarm—tell everyone you can find. Mauro, you’ve got sand in the back?”
“Yes,” he says. “For the bagging!”
“Great. We’ll do that, load up your truck. Everyone else will meet us at the river.”
The townspeople go, grumbling and grudgingly. Mrs. McGinn and Mauro pour sand into canvas sacks and garbage bags and sling them into the back of his truck. Mrs. McGinn is already sweating only twenty minutes in, but Mauro works cheerfully, without tiring. On the way to the river, he turns on the radio and whistles along. He is glad for any chance to buy himself some time, to keep his neighbors in town so that he will not be left here on his own.
The trees near the bank are bent backward in the wind, the rain shuffling through their leaves. There is no sign of the cattle, the goats, or the caribou, all of whom have distanced themselves from the powerful rush of the river to seek food and shelter on higher ground in the town. The houses along the bank stand sober and gray, their windows shuttered, the water pouring from their roofs. Mrs. McGinn swivels her head as she climbs out of Mauro’s truck, searching for the flash of a colored umbrella in the streets, but in that moment she sees no one. From here, the whole town looks as though it has already been deserted.
Near the river she is struck by a chill so sudden that it takes her a second to realize that it isn’t the wind at all—only her own sense of dread. The rain falls into her eyes and runs down her cheeks and she looks up, glowering at the sky. It is drizzling again today, the clouds lightening in a way that suggests an end may be in sight, but for the first time since the rain began Mrs. McGinn feels as though she cannot trust that kind of sign. The clouds have lightened before, only to twist harder and darker for many days after. She has tried to be so positive about the situation in this town—she has tried to hold this place together—but things are getting bad enough now to deflate even an optimist’s faith in sunny days and happy endings.
And is she not an optimist? Mauro may be singing as he slings the sandbags down the bank, but why should he be happier than she? (Although this is not—she must remind herself—a competition.) She has always considered herself to be a cheerful person. Why else would she have kept getting married, for goodness’ sake? Once or twice really should have been enough. And yet she wants to b
elieve that the darkness will always give way to the light, that a person is not handed more sorrow than she can bear, that the universe would not wash away her home and her history without due cause. She has done nothing to deserve this.
When the headlights of her neighbors begin appearing at the top of the bank, she tries to shake off her sudden melancholy, tries to pull herself together. As they come trickling through the grass in their boots and their brightly colored slickers, she grabs another sandbag and hauls it down the hill, slipping a little in the slick and bending cattails.
Mauro shows his neighbors how best to construct the wall—a survival skill he once picked up from an independent, woodsy uncle. He staggers the rows and steps on the bags to compress the sand and seal them more securely together. It is difficult in the rain and the wind, but the pounding of the river against the bank and the perilous rush of the current keep the townspeople where they are, wiping earth and water from their eyes as they work doggedly and silently at their task. If any of them feel as though they are fighting a losing battle, they do not say so. The wall begins to climb, row by row, sack by sack, leaning into the sky. After only an hour Mrs. McGinn is already so weary, so sore, that she does not even have the energy to notice or admire the way that her neighbors have come together to wrestle with the forces of nature, to take the stand she recommended against the weather and the river and their own unhappy fate. Instead she keeps her head down in the rain, slogs slowly up and down the bank, listens to Mauro’s shouted words of affirmation with a mix of misery and detachment.
“If we are doing this so well together,” Mauro yells, “we can be doing anything! There isn’t anybody who can be stopping us!”
He makes a second run (and then a third, and a fourth) back to the store to pick up more bags. The wall continues to rise. When the river crashes against it the townspeople stop in their tracks and shield their eyes from the rain and look on, anxiously. So far, it holds. They work all day into the afternoon, long after they are soaked through to the skin and their fingers are numbed by cold.
Mrs. McGinn is taking a quick break, leaning against one of the cars and blowing on her hands to warm them, when the zookeeper comes to find her.
“Evelyn,” he says. His face is drawn tight, his tone strained with worry. “I think that Angela Rose is gone.”
“Gone?” repeats Mrs. McGinn, the word muffled by the rain.
He nods, pulls a sopping sheet of paper from his coat pocket. “She left a note.”
He hands it to her. Although she takes it from him, she cannot read it. Her daughter’s familiar script blurs before her eyes while the river rushes past in the background. How did they get here? There is not a particular moment that she can pinpoint; there was never a torrential downpour. There was just the slow accumulation of many days of rain—little by little, drop by drop, so that now it is too late for her to change her course.
If her daughter is gone, what is the point? It is all well and good to save this town, but the heroism feels empty in a way it did not feel before.
When the townspeople see Mrs. McGinn crumple to her knees, when they see her cover her face with her hands and hear her wail, their blood runs cold and their hearts plummet like stones. If she cannot hold herself together, what hope is there for the rest of them?
Perhaps it is time, they murmur to one another, watching one of the sandbags slide off the top of the wall and into the water. There is a splash, and then the river swallows it whole. Perhaps we have done all we can, and it is finally time to pack our bags and leave this place behind.
twenty-nine
Was it wrong of Noah’s wife to leave that town the way she did?
In the moment, she felt she had no choice. When Mauro surged into her living room, when he seized her elbow and brought her running out into the night to find Noah unconscious in the passenger seat of the truck, his head falling limply against the window, his clothing soaked, the skin on his face sagging and gray—well, her heart sank to her toes and ever since then her chest has felt so empty that she has found herself believing that she must have left it there, glistening on the gravel driveway in the rain.
Her husband needed help, and so she sought the only help she knew. But Dr. Yu insists that there is nothing she can do, her tone growing terser and more distant every time Noah’s wife asks for her advice. Noah, meanwhile, has not left the living room since she brought him home from church the afternoon before. He alternates between napping in front of the television and paging through Dr. Yu’s old textbooks, marveling over the intricacy of the organs and telling his wife that there is nothing he can do but wait for his next call. The elders will find a place for him, he is convinced; until then, he and she must bide their time.
“Please don’t worry so, my love,” he tells her when she wakes at dawn, his gaze unnaturally bright and his beard wild and unkempt. “This, too, shall pass.”
For the first time since she’s known him, his words ring hollow in her ears. She pauses, waiting for him to say something more meaningful, but he doesn’t look up again. That’s it? she wants to know, her exasperation increasing. She is tired of listening for calls, tired of waiting for a voice from on high to declare where they will go and what they will do. What if there is no voice on high? What if they are waiting for a call that will never come? Who will make the decisions then?
She cannot help but wonder what Mrs. McGinn would do.
Before the thought has fully formed in her mind, she is already out the door, across the yard, and turning her key in the ignition of their car. If Noah won’t take action, someone else should, she mutters, her knuckles white around the steering wheel. She will demand some answers—that’s what she will do. If the problem is that God is no longer speaking to Noah, then Noah’s wife will simply have to go and speak to Noah’s God on his behalf.
Once she arrives at the church, she parks at the same curb where she parked yesterday. She cuts over the lawn and holds her breath as she crosses the threshold. It is still early morning, and inside the building is empty and cool. Her footsteps resound against the stone as she hurries down the aisle to the altar and slides into her old familiar pew, setting down her handbag and bowing her dark head in prayer.
At first, when nothing comes to her, she worries that she must not be doing it correctly; the truth is that she has never tried to pray on her own. She had always assumed that it would be enough to follow Noah, that she could absorb his light and faith simply by being near him. She loved the ritual, liked knowing exactly what would come next. She felt reassured by the fact that in the church her path was predetermined, that everything she said and did fulfilled a certain purpose—even if she didn’t fully understand what that purpose was. But now when she knits her brow and tries to picture God, she can see nothing but human portraits: Mauro’s loose brown jowls, Leesl’s pinched expression. The faces of the townspeople tick through her mind like snapshots, each one of their gazes more piercing than the last.
“Excuse me,” says a voice beside her, banishing the procession from her thoughts. “Aren’t you Noah’s wife?”
Her head jerks up with a start. “I am,” she says. If for half a second (despite her better judgment) she mistook the voice to be the voice of God, the thought evaporates when she sees the warm human form beside her. She widens her eyes, recognizing the head elder. “Yes, I’m Noah’s wife.”
“I thought so.” The elder leans back into her pew, his robes draping full over his clothes and his hands clasped in his lap. For a few minutes the two of them sit side by side in silence. Finally the elder says: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you here without your husband.”
Noah’s wife nods. “This is the first time.”
“Ah,” he says, and nothing more.
She tries to interpret his silence. Is he waiting for her to say something else? If she confided in him, would he know how to help her husband? But the elder interrupts her thoughts before she can compose a question.
“Would you co
nsider yourself a believer?” he says abruptly.
She is taken aback. To believe or not to believe—that has never been her role.
“My husband believes,” she says automatically, and at this the elder raises his eyebrows.
“Does he?” he says. He smiles without showing his teeth. “Come now. You must know as well as I do that he’s not the man he was. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person so changed as he is, in such a brief span of time. Something happened to him in that town: he lost the grace of God. Anyone can see that.”
She stiffens. “No, he didn’t.”
“Yes, he did. Although—” Here the elder pauses, as if deep in thought. “He might have been lost before he went. Why else would he have left here in the first place, when we counseled him against it?”
“Counseled him against it?” she repeats.
The elder shakes his head. “We asked about you,” he tells her. “We told Noah—think of your wife, think of your family. But he insisted that this was the right decision.” The elder lets this sink in. “Listen,” he says after another minute has passed. “We can’t in good conscience send him to another church, given his condition. He needs to spend some time away.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him,” insists Noah’s wife, weakly. She thinks of her husband where she left him on the sofa, his clothes disheveled and his hair unwashed, and knows that this is not the truth. “Maybe he’s not as confident as he used to be, but—”
“That’s the crux of it exactly,” agrees the elder, rising to his feet. “It is only natural to doubt, but Noah needs to learn to conquer it. Right now, he’s simply giving in to it.”
The elder inclines his head and then he leaves her there, reeling. There can be no praying after this. Once he has gone, she stands, too, and stumbles up the aisle. In her agitation she reaches for the first door she sees, which is not the one she entered by. Instead of stepping out onto the front lawn, she emerges into the light at the far end of a cemetery, one that begins at the church and sprawls a mile or two down in the direction of the ocean. Noah told her the first time he brought her to the church that this cemetery was one of the largest in the area; this is where most of the city comes to bury their dead.
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