“Okay,” she said quietly. “That’s a good idea.”
Silence for a moment.
“Honey, things are all going to be fine,” she said. “They always overreact about weather and I’m sure this one will just blow past us like the rest of them.”
It was unclear whether she believed this or not, but it seemed an important theory to her. This was how my mother talked: “they” were the nonspecific authorities somewhere else that overreacted about everything, and the rest of us just waited for things to “blow past.” My parents were incapable of outsize reactions, a helpful quality for making young children feel safe and secure, but an utterly irrational one on that day. This compulsory need to believe in the absolute resilience of life as we knew it bothered me immensely as I held the receiver to my ear. It didn’t apply any longer and I expected her to know that.
“Mom, this storm is going to be bad. You should take the forecast seriously. Do you guys have everything you need?”
“Oh, you know us,” she said. I could feel her waving me off through the phone. “We don’t need much.”
This was true. But all of her stalwart bromides were meaningless then, reckless even, in the face of real danger. I wanted to reach through the phone and shake her by her small shoulders, tell her to wake up. But I didn’t have anything to offer her that would make her safer or more prepared. We were too far apart, and I was as helpless as she was.
“Um, okay. Anyhow, I love you and Dad. Be safe.”
“I love you, too, honey.”
And that was it, until the next time I would hear or not hear from my parents after The Storm. I knew I should call my siblings, too, but the conversation with my mother had been exhausting enough, so I decided to put that chore off for the time being. What were other families doing at that moment, I wondered. Was this the sort of situation in which extended families all came together for a big communal survival experience? No, not likely, I concluded. Maybe in other parts of the world, but not in America. We hunker down on our own here.
“I’m going back out for peanut butter. I think we need to have as much peanut butter as possible,” Pia said as she walked past me in the kitchen without a glance.
Ever since she had found me at the Isole Festival with Maggie’s hands in mine, Pia had been icy. We hadn’t talked about what she’d seen or her prepper convention. I supposed neither of us wanted to know. It was all business at our house and, for once, I was relieved to receive her laundry list of disaster preparation chores. She gave me orders and I executed them. This was a new strategy for Pia, one that required more restraint than I knew she was capable of and that frightened me all the more. Was there an enormous blowup in our future? Some cruel form of retaliation? My feelings on this were so jumbled that I worked to stay busy to avoid thinking hard about the state of things between us. To acknowledge it would have opened doors I wasn’t prepared to step through—sadness, rage or, worst of all, maybe relief. I didn’t want to know. I wanted peace and survival for the immediate future.
“Okay, thanks,” I yelled after her before the front door shut. “Maybe some more black beans, too.”
I watched her hustle quickly to the car and realized it had started raining. Shit, the windows. I needed to get those done. I went back outside and repositioned the ladder beneath another bedroom window. My body felt weak as I hauled a new sheet of plywood up the ladder, nail gun holstered around my waist. I hadn’t done anything that physical for that long in months and it was approaching excruciating. Still, I relished the feeling of fear mixed with urgency. It seemed so purposeful and managed to displace all other nagging emotions. I vowed to take on more home improvement projects after all this was over—a thought that I knew to be ludicrous even then, as if things would be pretty much the same on the other side of The Storm.
The rain was coming harder now as I finished one window and set the ladder up under another. My strategy was to hold the plywood against the window with my left knee and hand while I shot nails through to the outer border of the sill with my right. It seemed to hold okay, with lots and lots of nails, but because the plywood sheets were perfect squares, two inches of uncovered window still peeked out at the top and bottom. I couldn’t gauge how much of a problem I should consider this, but I had no other options and it was raining hard, so my system had to suffice.
It must have taken me a long time to finish the last window because Pia pulled into the driveway just as I dismounted the ladder and ran to get out of the rain. She was right behind me with bulging canvas bags of whatever could still be found at the food co-op. I stood in the entryway and peeled each piece of soaked clothing off my shivering body until only my boxer briefs remained, though they were soaked, too.
“Do you think we should start a fire?” Pia asked through wet shivers.
“Let’s wait,” I said. “We should save the cut wood until we really need it. I’m going to take a hot shower.”
She nodded and began putting groceries away, and I could see that this was the answer she was hoping for. It was not the time for luxuries like crackling fires. No discussion needed—not that either of us wanted discussion. Anyhow, the rain was coming down so hard that we would have had to raise our voices if there was more to be said.
The wind had begun to make a fierce whistling sound outside. We could hear it pick up the raindrops and send them hammering against one side of the house, and then briefly release its hold, only to swirl around again until another wall of rain slammed into a different side of the house. If there was a pattern to it, we couldn’t tell, which produced a menacing sense that we were being enveloped. Like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz, our home felt as if it could be picked up and whirled around, then dropped someplace else altogether. This effect was compounded by the fact that our windows were now boarded up, so aside from the uncovered strips of dim light peeking through the tops and bottoms of the windows, we couldn’t see outside.
I jogged upstairs into the frigid bathroom and let the water run until it was scalding. Thunder roared outside. Was it true that you shouldn’t bathe during thunderstorms or was that an old wives’ tale? I couldn’t remember, but it seemed best to get in and out before the weather deteriorated further. This was it; this was The Storm, I thought to myself. We had gone through so many false starts in those months, but we recognized the real thing when it arrived. The sky was darker and the rain was more forceful. Most notably, the authorities were unambivalent: it’s here and it’s worse than we thought, they told us. The Storm is upon us.
I let the hot water pour over my scalp until the chill was gone and my head started to feel fuzzy. In the days that followed, I would think of that shower, re-creating the sensation in my mind when the stink and the cold got to be too much. What an underappreciated luxury it is to shower at one’s will. I was unburdened then by the cost of such a luxury, which we all mistook for a right. As I stepped out of the bathroom, in my soft, silly sweatpants and an oversize flannel shirt, I had already moved on.
When I went back downstairs, Pia had poured two mason jars of cabernet and was sautéing vegetables on the stove top. I knew better than to mistake this as a gesture of peace—we needed to eat the overripe vegetables in the fridge before they went bad. Still, it was a welcome scene. I took one of the jars and moved to the living room, where the smell of worms had become so familiar that I almost didn’t notice it. (Years later, the smell of wet soil would always send me back to that house in those months.) I turned on the radio and stared at the muted television as if, together, they might give me the full story of what was ahead. But instead of the familiar grave tones of nameless experts, John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” skittered from the speakers, which I’d always loved, with its gentle precision that managed to somehow sound like a new and improvised journey every time. You had to pay attention to appreciate each little step and I was happy for the distraction. Apparently, there was nothing
left to be said about the approaching storm. There was only waiting.
I turned the volume up and walked over to a window. With my knees folded beneath me on the cold floor, I could look out to the backyard through the unobscured strip at the bottom. The naked trees thrashed against one another, creating a wet bed of branches and debris beneath. Beside a cluster of evergreens, I could look right through the leafless deciduous trees. At the corner of my view was Peg’s house looking small and sweet. Smoke puffed out the chimney. It was oddly comforting to know that she was there, maybe grading papers or reading a novel about a far-off place. The truth was that I didn’t have any idea what she would be doing because Peg remained a mystery to me. I didn’t even know if she was prepared for The Storm, which seemed a dire oversight now. We had become fast friends only months before, but as The Storm approached, something in her seemed to be changing. I suddenly wished that I had asked her more questions about her own life before The Storm began.
The wind picked up and splattered rain so forcefully against the window that for a moment I couldn’t see anything at all. Then it slowed again and, through the dripping pane, I watched the base of an enormous maple begin to disappear in a growing pool of accumulating water. I thought of the bear and her cub that we had seen less than two weeks before and wondered what treacherous hiding place they might be huddled in now. There would be no surviving this, not for the bears or any of the other confused animals that had emerged from hibernation prematurely, looking for spring’s bounty.
As I considered the lives that might be extinguished in the coming days—human and animal—my eyes caught something moving far away. It was near Peg’s house, in the woods between us. I couldn’t make out the form, but the bright primary colors of winter clothing were unmistakable. It moved a little and then got still, repeating the pattern twice.
“Pia, there’s someone out here!” I yelled from the living room.
“What? No. Who would be out there?” she said as she hurried over to join me at my lookout post on the floor.
“It’s Peg,” she said through squinting eyes.
“How can you tell?”
“She wears a blue-and-red coat. I’m pretty sure it’s her.”
Pia got up and walked back to the kitchen, where she was throwing pieces of a shriveled red pepper into her pasta sauce.
“And you think my friends are crazy, Ash?” she yelled from the other room. “That’s a strange bird out there.”
Sure enough, the longer I watched the form, the more it came into focus. It was Peg. Was she walking toward us? No. She seemed to be moving from tree to tree, though she was too far away for me to know for sure. She would have to be completely soaked and freezing. No normal person had outdoor apparel to match this rain. She was apparently just walking around outside, likely catching hypothermia, communing with the trees.
I needed to talk to her.
“Some people lose their grip on reality in times of crisis,” Pia said knowingly from the kitchen.
“Thanks, doctor,” I mumbled.
I sat and watched the figure for another five minutes, quietly urging it to go back inside and get warm. Peg was older than my mother, but heartier than August and certainly more knowledgeable about nature’s power than any of us. That was what made her behavior seem so reckless and strange, as if she wanted The Storm to take her. She stood mostly still out in the rain, but I never considered looking away. Finally, her figure disappeared into its safe cottage. I wanted to call her, to ask why she was out there and hear her rational explanation. She would tell me that she was gathering wood or some other ordinary task and we would laugh about the little scare she’d given me.
“Food’s done,” Pia announced.
I could hear a drink being refilled and her fork already moving around on the plate. I pushed up onto my good leg and went to meet her in the kitchen. Nothing else to do, really.
TWENTY-ONE
PIA AND I sat at the kitchen table drinking tea after dinner and looking past each other at the boarded windows that promised protection from The Storm. It felt like the middle of the night, but it was probably only about seven. We rarely did that—sat at the dinner table like contented partners with nowhere else to be. It was the sort of small but critical ritual that I wanted more of in our marriage, one of the things I didn’t think I needed at the start. Pia wasn’t as attached to such conventions; I’d always known that. And I liked that she wanted to rewrite the rules of domesticity. Still, I sometimes longed for some of the rituals of our parents.
In my childhood home, the kitchen table served as the nucleus for all familial activity. It was where we ate all of our meals but also where we carved Halloween pumpkins and colored Easter eggs. It never moved or changed, just acquired new blemishes that enhanced its familiarity. For all I knew, that gently treated pine table hadn’t been delivered to our home from a nearby furniture store years before, but had grown straight up through the floorboards. That was how rooted it was in our lives.
No such stability was present as Pia and I sat across from one another that night. She was jumpy and excited.
“Are you happy to be here with me?” I asked. I wasn’t looking for a fight, but some evidence of closeness that I could hold on to as The Storm gained momentum.
“I’m not happy about any of this, Ash.” She sounded annoyed, but her eyes twinkled. She was crackling with energy in anticipation of potential catastrophe. She could barely suppress her enthusiasm.
“Not happy,” I corrected myself. “I mean, are you grateful that we have each other? That it’s me you’re trapped inside with?”
“Sure. Yes.”
“What do you think other people are doing in their houses right now?” It was a dumb question, but I needed a new angle to break through to her. She wasn’t there with me.
“Jesus, Ash, I don’t know! What does it matter?”
Pia looked around impatiently and I knew it would only be a matter of minutes before dinnertime ended. That brief silence was interrupted by the sharp crack of a small tree breaking outside. She jumped slightly at the sound.
“I was just wondering,” I said. It felt pathetic, to ramble on while Pia stared at me silently. I wanted desperately to hold on to her attention while I had her there, but I knew deep down that I didn’t have her at all. She was looking through me, waiting for the conversation to end. The weather made me feel needier than ever, but it was having the opposite effect on her. Her mind was adrift.
The wind’s roar grew louder around us. Angry rain changed to sleet as I watched a thin visible strip of window blur under a new layer of ice that seemed to be enveloping the house. I wondered if it was possible to suffocate under a coating of ice. The temperature had dropped dramatically in less than an hour. Perhaps we would just freeze in a perfect house-shaped form, neatly preserved until the next thaw, when we’d be discovered intact like woolly mammoths of the Pleistocene age. My heart began to race and, despite the cold air in our kitchen, I was sweating through my shirt. My body seemed to be catching up with my mind, realizing that The Storm was upon us and we were trapped there together.
Weather events in the modern age test our faith in the almighty power of civilization. Sure, recent years had brought floods and earthquakes and fires of a terrifying new breadth and frequency, but still, Western technology had always prevailed. Until that storm, we could all trust that our electricity would eventually be restored and our delayed flights would run again. Even at the height of the disastrous events we’d already lived through before, many aspects of our lives chugged on obliviously. Our paychecks still appeared automatically in our bank accounts, utility bills still accrued and emails still bounced back and forth among us. Always, we believed then, we would trump nature. Remembering this fallacy is crucial for understanding why I did the reckless thing I did next.
“I have to get out,” I
said, pushing my chair back with a screech. I don’t remember deciding this, only doing it.
“What? No. No one leaves,” Pia said firmly.
I shook my head and began pulling on ski pants, boots, another sweater. By my reasoning, it was bad outside, but not so bad yet that the right gear couldn’t protect me.
“I have to get out,” I said again.
Pia jumped up in a weak attempt to stop me, which I was grateful for, but I wasn’t acting: I needed to get the fuck out. All of a sudden, every minute that passed felt like time lost to The Storm. It was getting stronger, and soon—we didn’t know how soon—it would force us to succumb, cowering inside in waiting. I needed one last breath of fresh air and human contact before that happened, and I was afraid that I would lose my nerve if I hesitated. I was going to Peg’s house.
I pulled down the earflaps of my red trapper hat and nodded decisively at Pia. She had her hands on her hips and a puzzled look on her face, but she didn’t protest further. As I left, the door slammed behind me, sucked back into place by a swirling gust of wind. I ignored the wave of panic that swept over me. Sleet was stinging the small strip of exposed skin around my eyes and testing the resistance of my winter layers. Visibility was almost nonexistent, just a wall of whirling black, but I reassured myself that Peg’s house was only a few minutes’ walk (under normal conditions) through the woods, a straight line if I watched my footing and followed the dim glow of her porch light. I was outside and there was no turning back.
Almost immediately, I tripped over a fallen branch and fell to my knees. My gloved hands sank wrist-deep in icy water, which seeped in toward my fingers and up my forearms. The water was deeper than I expected and hiding a messy bed of fallen branches, twigs and decomposing leaves. Already, parts of my body were soaked and freezing.
I stood back up and took slow, deliberate steps, holding my arms out in front to catch unexpected tree branches before they impaled me. On three occasions, a waterlogged foot fell so deep into the slush that I had to use my hands to yank it back out without toppling over entirely. My cheeks burned, but my still-dry midsection sweated as I huffed my way through the woods. The sleet was coming down hard and I figured that it would be a few inches deeper by the time I made the trip back. It wouldn’t be fun, but it would be manageable if I had some time to dry off at Peg’s first. The biggest challenge was trying not to fall over. A headlamp would have been smart. It seemed as if everything in the forest—every leaf and branch and rock—had come unattached over the course of the past few hours and was swirling in a cyclone around my head. If there was a word for whatever weather effect was occurring, I didn’t know it.
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