The Light Pirate(17)
By the pier, he sees two figures clutching at each other. They are too big to be Lucas and Flip, but he stops anyway and rolls down his window because no one should be out here like this. It’s a teenage couple, the boy cradling a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, presumably seeing how far they dare to venture from the sanctuary of their hotel’s lobby.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Kirby shouts. “Go the fuck inside before a tree falls on you.”
“You go inside!” the boy replies. The girl sways into him, laughing and squinting at Kirby through the rain. He can see the rivers of mascara on her cheeks, pooling beneath her eyes. The kid next to her is just a stupid, drunk frat boy who missed his flight home when the airports shut down. Kirby has seen so many of these idiots that they’re no longer individuals to him, just a category he could do without. But this girl—there is something about her that makes him look twice. Something that reminds him of Frida when they met. Her curls, her jagged edges, her bravery, the messy persistence of her.
Kirby rolls up his window and keeps driving, muttering to himself and looking back at the couple in his rearview. At the end of the boardwalk, he turns west, up one of the little unpaved lanes. The palms that line it lean at unnatural angles, practically bent at the waist. He knows that the time to be outdoors is long past, that he should be driving like hell for home, but the idea of returning without his boys is impossible, and so he keeps searching.
Wanda has been at sea for long enough. She comes ashore, and when she does, the wind is no longer only wind. The wind is brimming, carrying a hundred million grains of sand, pieces of shell, dead jellyfish, strips of seaweed, driftwood. Moving inland, carrying these spoils, she reaches down to gather more. Bigger things, heavier things: dinghies and signposts and trash cans and tree branches. She grinds against the earth, swallowing the town whole. Rudder is part of her for as long as she wants it. And everything in it is hers.
Chapter 19
The boys run like their lives depend on it, and by now, their lives do. Lucas is faster, but he turns to make sure that Flip is behind him every few minutes. It occurs to him that this is all his fault. The size of his mistake is suddenly clear. If only they had stayed home, like Flip wanted. He slows his pace so that Flip is running alongside him. They are vulnerable as they dart down the sandy trailer park lane and back out onto the road, going so fast they are skimming the ground, their little bodies moving toward home as if they might lift off at any moment, as if the furious churning of their legs could amount to the relative thrust of a bird’s wings.
This startling momentum has in large part to do with the wind—which is stronger than anything they have ever experienced and is assisting their flight home, sailing up the backs of their shirts as they run and shoving them firmly west. But the wind on this stretch of road carries more than just two small boys; there is also: a broken microwave, a folding chair, a few flowerpots, some pruning shears, an empty bin, a lemon tree ripped up by its roots. The air is bristling with weapons, the rain cutting down into their tender scalps and the backs of their furiously pumping calves, the wind slamming into them at a speed that will quite literally carry them away should it increase any more. A small boy does not weigh so much more than a lemon tree.
As he runs, Lucas’s thoughts cease; his guilt is on hold to accommodate this burst of adrenaline his veins require. He is only a body now, moving as quickly as it can, driven by a repository of energy that lies in wait for moments like this one. For a time, his legs move in exact unison, brief perfection, but it doesn’t last nearly long enough.
One great sideways gust knocks Lucas’s feet out from under him and he topples face-first into the asphalt. Flip pulls him up and pushes him forward. Lucas’s nose is broken, a warm iron gush down his upper lip, skin raw where it met the road. He cradles his bloody face and tries to keep going, but the wind sends him back down to his knees. Flip is a few paces ahead by then; he turns and shouts Come on, but there is no sound. The sky seems to ripple above them, darker now, pulsing with movement. Lucas begins to cry, tears and rain and blood swirling into watery pink tracks on his cheeks, but he orders his legs to keep going and eventually he is running once more.
An empty recycling bin smashes into a tree trunk a few yards ahead of him on the road’s shoulder. He runs faster. The red of Flip’s T-shirt flickers in front of him—he is probably just a few yards ahead, but Lucas catches only glimpses of his brother.
Almost there, almost there, almost there, he thinks.
Faster, faster, faster, he thinks.
He knows he’s almost home—but “almost” doesn’t mean anything now.
Chapter 20
Frida still has not moved from the doorway of the tool shed. Whether she cannot or will not is hard to say. The backyard—its patchy lawn flattened and full of migrating trash, its ailing citrus trees stripped of fruit—has become a wind-ravaged battleground. The stretch of earth between the tool shed and the house seems to sway before Frida, to ripple as if the ground is made of water. Perhaps it is? She is having trouble understanding what she is looking at. The pain that passes through her body again and again is debilitating; all of her energy is being funneled into simply bearing it.
At the edge of the tangled jungle that borders the yard, the trunk of one of the live oaks cracks and splinters. The sound is cacophonous, even in the midst of everything else. It seems to fall slowly, like a feather making its way down, but when it finally smashes into the ground, Frida feels it in the soles of her feet. As the other trees tip their branches to touch the earth and debris rushes past and rain drills down, the pain leaves her for a moment and she seizes her chance. Stumbling from the sheltered doorway of the shed, she wades into the rising water—so it is water after all. It’s nearly to her ankles, pocked by the rain that is driving down so hard the drops hit the surface and then bounce back up again. The hurricane’s voice is all around her and maybe also inside her, filling her head with a howling, mourning, bloodthirsty cry that seems to shake the ground. Frida battles forward and the mud sucks at her boots. The house grows nearer. The debris whizzes past. And the pain hits her again. It has a voice, too. Or is it her voice? Or is it theirs?