This Is the Story of You

by Beth Kephart

  Respect. Preserve.

  Like a dream.

  Like a death.

  I couldn’t sleep.

  The fire on the rock pressed its heat against my back. My clothes stunk of tears. Sterling’s fur was in my pockets. The trench coat was tucked to my chin. I nested my head on the walrus pillow. I told Sterling to come, and she did. Put the motor of her heart alongside mine. Raised her tail.

  “Come with me,” Deni had said, before she’d turned north for her house, for the brigade. “Come with me. There’s room.”

  I shook my head.

  “Brigade up there,” she’d said, all those tears still in her eyes, her skin pale, her bones shaky, her arm and her heart in a sling. “My mom. There’s room.”

  “Eva needs you at North,” I’d said. “She needs me at Mid. We still have to find her.”

  Because we hadn’t, not yet. We’d found the story of Ms. Isabel, the story of Haven in the smashed-in pools and the twisted teeth of silverware and fishhooks. We’d found new beards on old men, and women whose hair frizzed like bad wigs, and people we knew wearing other people’s coats, and Steffy Gomez with a sled behind her, pulling her perfect microwave like it was her one and only possession. We could not lose Ms. Isabel and we had. We could not be apart from the people we loved, but some of them were distant, some of them were far away in a hospital, where everything depended on the generators working, the water being clean, the doctors staying on call, the mother and the brother willing. Where everything had to be all right—it had to be. I couldn’t go on if it was not, so I assumed what had to be.

  We needed Deni at North and me where I was—both of us scanning the huddles, watching the tide, looking for a sign of our best friend, her big, good heart, her capacity for seeing. Tomorrow I’d get up and step down and walk into the sea and wash off everything that hurt me. I’d walk south toward the ruin of the cottage and climb the rope. I’d fortify, keep hunting.

  Nobody else was allowed to die.

  No more losses.

  Period.

  I’d be the hope. I’d be the heron. I’d do a goddamned something.

  We had to find Eva.

  The lights of Atlantic City were still dark. The stars were bright as planets. The moon was a little smaller than it had been. On Old Carmen’s radio they were telling the news like they had it—calls coming in from battery radios, helicopters flying overhead, White House sorrows. There were numbers and percentages. There was desperation along the coast. The power was down, the water was mucked, fires were burning, buildings had fallen, people were trapped, and the governor would be a long time coming. The barges, medics, firemen, the National Guard, the bulldozers that could dig us out, the armada we needed—it was all far away, still. It was en route. Patience, the voice on the radio said, and someone just beyond the big rock groaned, and nobody—no reporter, no eyewitness, no passing bird or cloud—had a word to say about Memorial.

  Old Carmen turned the dial.

  The voice went dead.

  I fed Sterling. I ate some peanut butter. I heard that strange song on sticky keys. I lifted my head and squinted into the flickery dark. I could see the armchair that had been dragged across the sand and left by the piano. I could see the outline of a person sitting there, hands like light rags at the end of dark sleeves. The song sounded like boots walking through rain, like no song I’d ever heard. I stared at it hard, listened. I heard the heartbeat of a heron flapping in.

  “Best thing for you would be some sleep,” I heard Old Carmen say.

  I turned toward her, the fire between us, the pink bow on Eva’s cactus getting singed. Old Carmen’s knees were up, her fingers laced beneath her head. I could see the crab traps on the rock behind her, the metal cubes she’d tossed into the sea all afternoon, standing there with the tide up to her knees. She’d put the crabs into a cast-off iron pot and carry the pot up the rock steps to her fire. She’d boil the crabs in seawater, snap off one leg, test the taste, agree with it, until soon there were others working the crabs with her—finding pots and pot lids, dishes and forks, ways to feed whoever had come to live and sleep near the rock. She had listened to the news about our teacher. She had put her powerful arm around me. She had shaken her head and a tear had fallen down and she had said, “Take this rock. Do your grieving.”

  Then she had climbed down the four stone stairs and called out to the others, as if Ms. Isabel’s death had left her even more resolute to do more to save Haven at Mid.

  You all have something, Old Carmen had said, that you can contribute.

  We can’t do this, she’d said, alone.

  She talked until the people stopped what they were doing. Until they looked up and listened. Until they were persuaded. Until they stood. Boxes of Pop-Tarts. Jars of jam. Granola bars. Containers of raisins. Planks of wood found steaming in the sun. Washed-up tablecloths that had caught the breeze and dried. It was as if Old Carmen were the mayor, the superintendent, the chef. It was as if her rules were the only rules—her instructions on crab, her arrangements of things, her ideas on barter and trade—a crab for a box of salt, a crab for a bunch of bananas that had washed up, ripe, a crab for something somebody needed more than the person who had found it—except that Old Carmen was keeping nothing for herself. Community pantry. Woolgathering for the days we’d have ahead, and she had the fire, she had the radio, she had the ideas, and they said yes.

  She’d left me on that rock. She’d left me, let me be, watched, I think, I know for sure now, as I curled into a fist and sobbed. We had to survive because others hadn’t. We had to grieve the countless losses. She’d form the brigade at Mid, she’d do what she could, more than she was already doing. I heard her up on the rock, felt the stoking of her fire, heard her No Surrender flag rippling the breeze. I felt her touch my shoulder. I turned.

  Best thing for you would be some sleep. I almost asked her then why she had come for me, why she had shared her rock with me, why I was the one out of everyone who had a fire to sleep with, her rope to climb down, her ration of bottled water to share. We had ignored her for all those years. She’d been as invisible as a larval blenny fish. We had left her to the weather and to the sea and she hadn’t been a Vacationeer and she hadn’t seemed a regular Year-Rounder and some had said that maybe she was crazy and all of us had called her old, but she had to have been young once, she could not have been, forever, Old Carmen. She had come to me, she had waited for me, she had saved me, and I could not save Ms. Isabel. And I might have asked her right then:

  Why me, Old Carmen? Why?

  What is the logic of rescue?

  But I had Ms. Isabel’s dying on my mind. I had Eva missing and Mickey and Jasper Lee gone and somebody stealing from the cottage that had broken apart, and if I’d asked her, she might have told me, and I might not have been strong enough for the answers she had.

  Sleep. That’s what she said. There was the song like the boots-inside-the-rain and the tapping of fingers on the Maytag. There was the sound of the fire on the rock. There was the crash of the waves against the sea of broken wings and the heartbeat of a heron.

  If I slept, I dreamed. If I dreamed, my dream was Ms. Isabel, high up now, and flying, the bright beam of my doublewide pointed toward the sky, connecting dots from earth to star—a doublewide Haven-to-Heaven highway.

  The ocean at dawn. My jeans rolled to my bruised knees. The brittle snap of the sea. My bones, my teeth, my shivering skate key. I let my body soak in the freeze. Bent and washed my face. Watched the Band-Aid float away, the dark stain of blood where the skin had split. My shins, my hands turned another color.

  There was no getting clean.

  There was a couple down by the tide, big hats on, poking through the remnants of the storm. There were brothers or cousins, kids I’d never seen before, screaming after a bird. Far away, in the gentle break of the waves, that spotted deer stood. I could see the pl
aces where its hooves had poked into the sand and how its ears twitched, but when I turned to slosh out of the sea it ran, and now, down on South, someone hoisted a kite with a bedsheet tail.

  First orange, first pink of the day.

  I looked for the girl with the ladybug wings. I looked for Eva and the O’Sixteens. There were more people walking out of the haze, maybe strangers or maybe people I’d known before—Cammy Vaughn and Missy Ator and Nan Higgins, the knitting circle, the tenors from Community Arts— but I wasn’t sure. They were far off, and I was walking now, drenched and cold, the sea in my hair, and the sky was more pink and more gold.

  I’d left Old Carmen sleeping. I’d left Sterling guarding the walrus. I was walking.

  Sometimes you hear things that aren’t there. Sometimes you don’t hear what is. I wasn’t nearly sure of anything. Nothing was purely blue, and nothing was purely clear, and I didn’t know, not anymore, what time it was, or what day.

  When I heard the moan I thought it was either nothing or far out at sea. I was walking and the pink was turning gold and there was a breeze and inside the breeze was a sound or no sound, there, or not there, like that deer that maybe instead was a mirage. My body kept walking, but my mind said Stop. I cupped my hand to one ear like a conch shell. I waited for some kind of sign.

  Nothing, or at least not at first. I stayed where I was, waiting on certain. I turned to the waves; they just kept coming. I turned in the direction of where the town used to be and where the mess still was. The sound wasn’t far, and it was actual.

  Very close, and very real.

  “Hey,” I said, and no one answered. Nothing again, and then a quiet thwack. I stood. I walked. I crept ever nearer. A McCauley’s crate and something trapped inside. My pulse was in my throat.

  Home of the brave, I thought. Whatever it was, however bad it was, this was pure and clear: the thing inside that crate needed me. I was the one it was depending on.

  I was close enough now to peer through the slats. I held my own breath. Between the splintery wood, I saw a black thing go thwack. I saw a furry edge, and the color cinnamon.

  “Hey,” I said again. “Hey. Hey.” Lifting the crate fast but still careful now. You can do this, I was thinking.

  “Almost free,” I was saying. “Gotcha, big fella.” And now the crate was off and it was Cinnamon Nose right there, but only his tail was moving. I threw my arms around his neck. I kissed his whiskery, sandpaper nose. I said his name, over and over, Deni’s name, too, told him how, forevermore, he’d be Deni’s good-luck news. Now, pulling back, I saw what the trouble was—how the dog’s back legs were tied up with burlap string, as if he’d stepped into a trap. I could see the places where the rope had cut in, slicing the skin, leaving him festered. I could see how hard it hurt. The knot was a Chinese puzzle, and now when I reached in to see what I could do about untying him, he yelped a terrible yelp, he begged me not to. I could see something like tears in his eyes. Don’t touch, he was begging. Please don’t.

  He’d lost blood. He was trapped. He was so far from home. He tried to talk, but he couldn’t, like his bark had been taken, too.

  “We’re going to fix you up,” I promised. “No lie, Cinnamon Nose. Worst of this is done with now, you hear? I promise you.”

  He tried to stand but he couldn’t. He tried to tell me something about his surviving—inside that crate, no water, no food, his legs lassoed. I couldn’t tell how long he’d been there. I didn’t know why he hadn’t been found. I just knew that I had to get him to North and that the sand would take us, the crate would be his sled.

  “You’ll see,” I said, and now I worked like hell— flipping the crate upright, shredding bedsheets that I found, making do with what we had.

  You can do this, Mira Banul.

  We can do this, Cinnamon Nose.

  We set off for North. I pulled my special parcel true—over the sand, between the ruins. The bedsheets held. The crate didn’t bust. The two of us were a spectacle, a small parade that became a bigger one as the people of dawn joined in, pushing from behind, clearing a path, helping me out with the load.

  “Dog needs to get home” is all I said. And everyone on Haven understood.

  The sea had gnawed off most of North. Entire chunks of land were missing, and the houses with them, the docks, the boats, and it wasn’t that the lighthouse had fallen, it was that the lighthouse was leaning, its stripes at an angle and its beacon blown off.

  I rounded the bend of it. I saw Chang and Mario way up ahead. I saw Taneisha, her arm full of bracelets, and the houses ripped in half, the curtains blowing in empty rooms, somebody’s attic on the ground, the backyard gardens in the street and a bird at a birdfeeder hung from a lampshade.

  There was the buzz of insects and the rot of food and the carcasses of dead fish, and the brigade, at last, up ahead, and now Chang saw me, and she called out, and Deni came running, fast as Deni could run—her arm in that sling, her brother’s boots on, the sky on the top of her head.

  “Found him,” I said. “Cinnamon Nose.” And now the parade stepped back, it gave us room, I reached into the crate, I kissed that dog on the top of his very gorgeous head.

  “Look who’s here for you,” I said, and Deni—Deni couldn’t stop sobbing, couldn’t stop thanking me, couldn’t believe her good luck, because it was luck, she agreed, and it was also, she said, her dad and her brother looking down, and she hugged that dog, and at last he barked. He found a word or two, for Deni.

  “He’s hurt pretty bad,” she finally said, through her tears.

  “He needs some food,” I said. “Some water.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He needs some help with his back legs.”

  “I see.”

  She pushed her hand through the spikes of her hair, rearranged her sunglasses. She patted her cheeks to dry her tears. She thought for a Deni minute, and she got herself a plan.

  “Let’s get him to the brigade,” she said.

  She stood beside me. Took the bedsheets in her hand. Halved the weight of the sled. She talked to that dog the entire time, listing out the what-nexts, making sure he understood.

  It was close to dusk by the time I returned to the rock, my clothes so full of dog hair and sweat salt that Sterling got suspicious in a second. She stayed away, though I talked to her. She pretended she couldn’t hear. I gave up after a while and went down to the tide. I cleaned myself up. I watched the sunset. I sacrificed my blisters to the sea.

  Sterling liked me better after that and even more after I traded my furry shirt for a cleaner hoodie, and when Old Carmen disappeared somewhere, I grabbed that cat and put her on my lap and told her she’d have been real proud of me and my rescue operation, that jealousy looks good on no one, that she was better than that. I said cats and dogs have to get along. I said, “So what did you make of yourself today?” and she looked at me with her sea-glass eyes, thinking maybe I was crazy.

  I served up a can of salmon. I made myself some peanut butter–marshmallow crackers. I was famished, I realized, and my bones were starting to show, and there was hardly anything between the purple bruise above my heart and my heart itself. I touched my chest. I felt my ribs. I thought of Jasper Lee, so far away. The hospital. The dark. I remembered a winter night, long ago, when it was just me and Mickey and Jasper Lee, lying side by side on the deck—the tartan blanket across us, the patchwork quilt, a pile of winter jackets. It was that cold. It was that bright. We had followed Mickey’s flashlight out onto the deck, and we had lain down and covered up, and we were together, the three of us, safe, no one and no disease could touch us. There were white dwarves above our heads and black holes and red giants, and nobody cared, even I didn’t care, what the stars were called. We just cared about the astronomical gleam. We said that it, like all the sky, belonged only to us.

  We were greedy that way, the Banuls. We were greedy in the ways we had
to be.

  “Found it,” Jasper Lee said that night.

  “Found what?” Mickey asked him.

  “My star,” he said. He took his little hand out from beneath the blankets and pointed, but we still couldn’t tell which star was his—maybe his hand was too small, maybe the stars were too thick. Mickey strained to see, then sat up quick. Felt around for her flashlight, the old doublewide. She flipped the switch. She handed it over to my brother.

  “Show us,” she said, snuggling back down into the warmth with us.

  Showing is what my little brother did. Six years old, and there he lay, shining his light on his favorite star, like the flashlight was the size of a Hollywood spotlight. He beamed the light up steady so that it was perfectly clear—his imperfect star, shining perfectly bright.

  “Best star in the universe,” he said, and we believed, and we lay like that, waiting for the sky to burst even brighter above us.

  Now, dusk fallen, Old Carmen still gone, the people of the beach pulling up their bedding for a new night, and the gulls doing their bedtime screech, I felt around on that rock and found the doublewide and flipped that switch.

  I pointed it in the direction of the mainland.

  I stared along the yellow ridge into the dark.

  “Best star in the universe,” I whispered, to Jasper Lee.

  And I waited, and I waited for him to whisper back.

  I woke early the next day. Sterling had stayed close, slept, snored tiny cat snores. She had, I knew, forgiven me. That’s what we do in families.