She pulled her face away from mine and I saw that she looked horrified.
“Oh my God, what’s wrong with you?” Pia said, dismounting and curling up in a ball at the foot of the couch. “We can’t have children! How can we bring children into this world? It’s poisoned. The air, the water, the soil, the fucking weather. How can you not see that?”
I considered reaching for my pants, but I wasn’t prepared to admit that the moment had ended.
“I thought that’s what you wanted, Pia,” I said, working to sound calm.
She shook her head. “I thought that’s what I wanted, too—six months ago. But that may as well have been a million years ago, before any of us knew how messed up things were. I need to focus now on getting prepared, taking care of us. I thought you understood that!”
She was angry.
“I don’t understand anything—obviously!” I screamed, jumping up to pull my boxers on. “You’ve lost your fucking mind with all of the end-of-the-world shit! There are worms living in my house, for Christ’s sake!”
She rolled her eyes, “Don’t start again with the worms. I thought you liked the worms.”
“I like the worms more than those paranoid lunatics you hang out with in your prepper meetings! So yes, I guess the worms are my favorite of all your current associates!”
Pia jumped off the couch, stark naked, and walked over to the giant worm box at the other side of the living room. It had become a piece of furniture, accumulating books, catalogs and an old water glass. She used her forearm to push everything off the edge, breaking the glass on the floor. She unlatched the lid and pulled it open, releasing a fresh waft of earthy stink. With one hand, Pia reached in and pulled out a mound of dark, writhing dirt. Worms were sliding around her fingers and dropping to her feet, but she didn’t seem to notice. She walked past me and opened a window with her free hand. With a slight windup, Pia threw the handful of worm dirt out the window, then went back for another, and another.
I watched as she threw handfuls of worms out into the yard, leaving a messy path of moist soil between the worm box and the window. And that was the point: it was a show for me. It meant that I was cruel for hating her worms; or maybe it meant that she felt misunderstood; or maybe it just meant that she really had lost her mind. I wanted her to stop, but I wouldn’t break so easily. I even felt a pang of guilt for the worms she’d banished to the outdoors. They hadn’t asked to join our broken household. But I wasn’t going to let her win.
After a few more dramatic trips to the window, I calmly wrestled her away from the worm box and closed the lid. I hoped that she’d cry, just crumple into a puddle and end the scene, but instead she stood before me, quiet and wide-eyed. We looked at each other for a moment, me towering over her naked body. Then she brought her hands up in front of her—they were coated in the nutrient-dense worm soil—and slowly dragged them down the front of my bare chest, leaving two cold trails of black dirt on my body.
We both contemplated our next move, and then Pia just walked out of the room. I heard her pad upstairs and slam a door. It sounded like a satisfied door slam, the slam of someone who’d just made her point assertively and creatively. Though I was shivering and filthy, I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of a big response. I walked to the kitchen and quietly wiped my bare chest with a dirty dish towel. Then, taking another beer from the fridge, I sat down at the table and chugged it. Having already been drunk and sober again on that day, the beer wasn’t particularly pleasurable, but I was way past any expectation of pleasure.
When the bottle was empty, I hoisted my healing foot up onto the table for an inspection. It didn’t hurt much anymore, but I had become preoccupied with its progress nonetheless. The area below my ankle was turning from purple to a sickly yellow and some of the tenderness around my toes seemed to be diminishing. But it didn’t feel as though my foot was getting any stronger. Instead, it seemed as if I was slowly losing all feeling and control. Maybe it would be best to remove the dead appendage and replace it with a prosthetic, I considered. I certainly couldn’t walk around with a dead foot. What if the death spread up my leg, or farther? It seemed a possibility and not one worth risking a useless foot on. I decided to make a return visit to the hospital sometime soon for a follow-up discussion about what was to become of the dead foot.
I waited twenty minutes before taking a shower and slipping into bed beside my sleeping wife. It seems strange to me now that we slept beside each other at the end of those contentious days, but sleeping apart would have been an admission of real change, an official shift in our marriage, and I wasn’t ready for that. There was so much change still ahead that I wanted desperately to maintain sameness wherever possible. We had no idea then what a silly impulse that would prove to be.
SEVENTEEN
“GOOD MORNING. It’s the ninth day of February and this is your weekly White House Weather Briefing. We begin today with some very promising news for the eastern seaboard...”
It was Saturday morning and I was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and listening to public radio. Pia sat quietly in the living room doing the same. It had been more than a week since our last fight, the last time we physically touched, the last discussion of the worms that continued to stink up the house. Isole’s sky had been dark and drizzly for that time, pressing down on the whole region with a humid hopelessness.
It was work to avoid feeling as depressed as the weather and my circumstances demanded. When I wasn’t at my computer, I was walking, trying to strengthen my foot, which was recovering albeit slowly. I replaced the medical boot with a smaller Ace bandage, and the only shoes that fit over it were my snow boots, which were hot in that weather. I took hour-long walks through the woods, across neighbors’ property, down logging roads that led to nowhere. Sometimes I would be out until dark and find myself guided only by the glow of the cloudy sky. Those walks were cathartic, but unsettling, too. I was afraid of reinjuring myself and being left to die alone in the woods.
Scarier than that was the absence of life. There were no birds or small mammals, only insects. Despite the fact that it was February, the temperature hovered around sixty. The mosquitoes seemed to be multiplying and growing in size. Apparently, that was happening everywhere. I had read about an outbreak of dengue fever in Bangladesh, spread by mosquitoes. I studied the magazine image of the Aedes aegypti mosquito closely, memorizing the white markings on its legs and the spot on its thorax, just in case I might happen upon one in northern Vermont. It wasn’t an outrageous theory—freaky things were happening around the world in those days.
An outbreak of malaria in Florida killed a handful of people quickly, and the incidents of Lyme disease in the Northeast had skyrocketed, which was unheard of this time of year. Insects were thriving in the new climate; they were the only winners at the expense of every other living thing. I wore netting around my head and waded through the swampy land trying hard not to think about why it was so damn swampy in February in Vermont.
August would have enjoyed those walks, but he was gone. Bev The Social Worker had driven him three miles down the road to the McGregor house, where he was to stay indefinitely. August cried and he fought her as she wrestled him into the car the previous week. It was the worst thing I had ever seen, almost worse than the images in my head when we thought he was dead in the woods. As he fought and cursed to stay with his terrible parents—who were high as fucking kites as they kissed him goodbye—I felt as if I was watching the extraordinary dreamer child I had grown to love transform into a hard, angry kid in the system. It was a death of its own kind, except that this time, we’d been the ones to kill him, all of us.
I turned up the radio to drown out my thoughts and sat down at the kitchen table. Pia was drinking coffee in the living room.
“With some new information we’ve received, we’re revising our storm forecast,” the nation’s chief cli
matologist went on. His voice had become that of a familiar authority figure—we reviled him but remained utterly at his mercy. “It appears that things may not be as dire as our long-range forecast originally suggested. The current warming—be it natural or driven by humans—may work in our favor. You see, the tropical storm that is expected to gather off the gulf is still on track to become a hurricane at landfall. But the arctic air that we expected around the same time from Canada and the Midwest now looks like it won’t be quite so cold. It could warm and dissipate by the time it reaches New England, sparing us the devastating storm collision we had originally feared. We’ve probably still got a fairly large hurricane on the way, which could do some harm from the Carolinas all the way up to New Jersey. But in the face of what we expected, this is a dramatic upgrade. All of this is forecast to occur in about six days. Things are changing rapidly and we strongly encourage Americans to continue to take the necessary precautions. But this is generally good news.”
“The Storm isn’t coming,” I said aloud. “This is our reprieve. The sun will come out and our drowning land will dry out and we will get back to normal.” This means, I thought, the storm could release its hold on my wife and we could begin to rebuild things between us. My heart was racing. The coffee was too strong and my head throbbed from the previous night’s beers, all of which heightened the weightlessness I was suddenly feeling.
“That’s a lot of bullshit,” Pia said as she walked into the kitchen, dropping her mug in the sink. “They’re just worried about the markets crashing and people freaking out. They’re trying to get a handle on things. It’s bullshit and it probably means that The Storm is going to be even worse.”
It was the first time she had spoken directly to me in days, but I could barely hear her. And at that moment, I felt too optimistic to argue. Of course she didn’t believe this new information. She needed The Storm. Her guiding purpose in life had become preparation for The Storm. Her identity had been refashioned in relationship to it. The Storm explained away all of her obsessive behavior. Without The Storm, those obsessions were syndromes, things with labels in the DSM and cleverly named designer drugs. A more attentive me, one from months before, would have worried terribly about this behavior. But I wasn’t that husband any longer. She was sick, but she was also an asshole, and I was tired of using one to excuse the other. The thrilling thought occurred to me for the very first time that maybe we should end this. We could both start over. It was only a fleeting idea and I didn’t allow myself to dwell on it, but it flashed before me, leaving a faint puff of hope before disappearing entirely. We would never do that.
I ignored Pia and walked upstairs to pull on gym shorts and a T-shirt. I had arranged to pick August up that morning to play basketball at the high school gym, and I wasn’t going to be late. It felt strange to make a formal date to see him, but these were the new terms and I still held on to a distant dream of having a more formal role in his life one day, improbable as it seemed. I worried a lot about August disappearing again, too. This new foster family couldn’t possibly anticipate when he was about to go missing. They wouldn’t recognize the look in his eye when he needed to retreat into the woods. And he didn’t know the woods by their house like he knew ours; he was more vulnerable there. I thought about him wearing his little blue backpack alone in the dark a lot in those days.
When I knocked on the McGregors’ door ten minutes later, August opened it instantly, as if he’d been standing behind it all morning.
“Did you hear?” August asked. “The Storm’s not going to come and everything’s going to go back to normal!”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, but he was happy, and so was I.
“Sounds like that might be right, buddy,” I said. “Hey, I missed you.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
He was pulling the front door closed behind him, so I shouted “thank you!” through the open space, grateful not to have to meet his new fake parents.
“Your car smells gross,” August said when we pulled onto the main road.
He was right. Ever since the big flood, it reeked of algae and old sneakers. Everything felt surprisingly normal.
“So how’s it going at this new place?” I asked.
He shrugged. “They have a lot of food. And a trampoline. The older sister is weird. It’s okay, I guess.”
He didn’t want to talk about it, so I didn’t press him.
“Hey, did you hear?” he went on. “They’re doing the Isole Festival this year! The Isole Festival is the best. You gotta come.”
I had been reading about the controversy surrounding the festival in the Isole Gazette. Apparently, it was always held on the third Saturday in February, which was one week away, but it had been canceled that year after much debate. I had been mostly ignoring the headlines and local chatter about whether or not this was the right decision. No doubt the Isole Festival was an important day in the lives of its people, but it had no special meaning to me. It was just one sad story line among so many during that period. I couldn’t muster the will to care.
But now, it was on. As if on cue, the sun had begun to peek through the low clouds above us, creating a sort of pink glow that was unsettling, but pretty. I decided to see it only as a sign of promise. The sun was coming out, and festivals were on again, and I was bumping along our ravaged roads with August!
“So, what’s the deal with this festival, August? Why is it so fun?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, annoyed by my ignorance, “there’s a parade with music and floats, and a cross-country ski race and a big outside party where they serve sugar-on-snow and hot chocolate and stuff like that. It’s only, like, the most important day here!”
His sarcasm made me smile.
“Sounds really cool. Maybe we could go together?”
“Sorry, I’m already going with Noah,” he said, as if I should have expected that he would already have plans for this big day.
When we got to the high school, there were a few other cars parked near the gymnasium entrance, but I didn’t see anyone around. As I pulled an old duffel bag filled with sneakers, a basketball and some water bottles out of the trunk, I heard someone run up behind me.
“Hi there!”
I spun around to find Maggie standing before me—Maggie, my startlingly pretty neighbor. It was only about fifty degrees outside, but she was wearing running shorts and a faded T-shirt with a reference to a road race from 2008 on it. Her red hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail and sweaty wisps had broken free around her face.
“Oh, hi! What are you doing here?” I didn’t mean for it to sound so rude. I was excited.
“I just had to get out of the house after all the rain and darkness. The track is one of the only dry places in town, so I’m trying to burn off some energy. What about you? How’s your foot?”
Maggie’s face—her whole body, really—was radiating an energy that I wanted to bask in. It wasn’t just fitness, which I envied so much at that moment, but also something more exuberant. It was uncomplicated and fresh.
“It’s getting better,” I said, opting not to tell her about my dead-foot theory. “Good enough to hobble through a few games of around the world.”
“Fun!” Maggie said, looking at August now, who was growing impatient with the conversation that had nothing at all to do with him. “And how are you, August?”
August mumbled a greeting in return. I didn’t know how they knew one another, but teachers have a talent for knowing everyone in their small town regardless of age and grade.
“You’re welcome to join,” I blurted out, feeling immediately stupid. I wondered if it was a strange invitation or insulting in some way.
“Sure, why not?” she said with a casual shrug.
“Whatever. Let’s go,” August pleaded.
She’s coming, she’s coming, she’s coming. I d
idn’t know quite how to behave, so I was grateful when August dragged us inside and bossily explained the rules of the game.
It was amazing to me, the way Maggie managed to be so buoyant and easygoing but not without depth. She was smart and interesting, too. She just seemed free of the angst I had come to associate with smart and interesting people. Angst was impressing me less and less by then. I was also intrigued by Maggie’s unabashed gladness at such a gloomy time; it was a quiet protest against the doom and I wondered how she maintained it.
We played basketball for what felt like a long time. I was good, but not great—only slightly more skilled than Maggie, but enough not to feel as though I’d humiliated myself. She was a natural athlete, but not at all competitive. And she was so at ease that it was impossible not to feel the same way in her presence. At one point, we bumped into each other and I got a faint whiff of her sweating body, which I bottled up in my brain for later uncorking.
When we came to the end of the game, I racked my mind for a reason to linger, but August announced that he was hungry. I remembered that the outing was for his benefit, so the three of us walked back to the parking lot. At Maggie’s car, I stopped and began bouncing the basketball, unsure of what to do with my body. A handshake seemed wrong, but so, too, was a hug.
“Thanks for playing a round with us,” I said, opting to keep my hands on the ball. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”
“Thanks for having me.” She smiled. “Maybe next time I’ll get you out on the slopes.”
Out on the slopes. It was the sort of phrase that I could never have said without sounding like a jerk, but it sounded utterly cool coming from Maggie’s lips.
“Definitely!” Did that sound too eager? I couldn’t tell.
“Come on,” August whined, saving us from another potentially awkward moment.
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