The Light Pirate(21)

He draws a ragged inhale through his nostrils; a bubble of bloody snot blooms and then pops as he exhales. “Just…gone.”

“Did you see? What did you see?”

“I saw,” he says, and will not say another word until long after all of this is over.





Chapter 27




“Oh god,” Kirby says, falling to his knees. “Oh my god. Are you okay? Where’s your brother?” And then he crushes Lucas against his chest and wraps his arms around him before he even has a chance to answer. Kirby can’t help it, he must fold himself around this child at all costs.

He finally lets the boy pull away from his broad, soaking-wet chest. He cups the back of his son’s head in his big hand, presses their foreheads together.

“Tell me now. Where is he?”

Lucas begins to cry. Kirby looks to Phyllis, who turns out her hands to show him that she has no answers. “All I could get out of him is that his brother is gone. He won’t say anything else.”

Kirby holds his boy for another second and then tries to call Frida, but that slim, flickering bar of service is gone entirely now. He stares at the dark void of his phone’s screen and keeps trying anyway. Lucas sobs against his father’s chest, teeth chattering, unable to form words, just wails. Kirby is lost now, unsure of what he needs to do next. In this moment he feels exactly like his son looks, like he is a small boy who for a brief time pretended to be a man, only to realize that he doesn’t know how to protect the people he loves. The worst has arrived, even after Kirby assured them all it wouldn’t. He holds Lucas tighter, too tight, but also not nearly tight enough.





Chapter 28




After an impossibly long time but also a relatively short while, after an overwhelming amount of screaming and agony and effort, there is somehow a baby girl in the room with Frida. She’s wet, fragile, and upset about being evacuated from her home, though she is technically still attached to it. Frida wraps her in a dish towel within reach and wipes away the goop on the baby’s face with her fingers.

The door is gone by now, ripped from its hinges, and the hurricane still rages just outside. The kitchen is in shambles: cabinet doors hanging askew, dirty dishes smashed against the wall. Somehow, nothing has touched Frida where she lies. Somehow, she has willed this small sliver of space she occupies into safety.

Frida looks down at the baby and something like electricity passes between them—a brief spark, a small jolt. Frida feels it enter her skin and skim along her veins, up into her thundering heart. At this moment, the wind outside pauses. If she didn’t know better, she’d think it was over. Frida does know better, but she’s still too exhausted to think about what waits on the other side of the eye. She just curls her body in the quiet center of the circling storm, sinking into the solace of her own kitchen floor, allowing the pause in all of this fury to wash over her. There is a shhh in her ears, a gentle rush like the faraway sound of a conch shell. The baby wails in her arms, but it’s as if they are both underwater.

“Storm baby,” she whispers, “Wanda baby.” She hears her own voice from inside her head, as if spoken by someone else, and lays her screaming daughter on the floor, nestled on her back in the blue-checkered dish towel, stained with spaghetti sauce or blood or both. Her body is a crescent moon around her daughter—a meager barrier, but the best she can offer—and now that she has managed this much, whatever power of will has sustained her this long leaves her. She closes her eyes, knowing she should keep them open, knowing that her work here has only just begun, and yet all of that knowing is not nearly enough. Something has gone wrong. She can feel it. There’s too much blood on the floor, too little left for her veins. She should try to stanch the flow somehow, but the distance between thinking this and acting on it is vast. The baby cries. The eye passes. The storm returns. In fact, it never left.





Chapter 29




Before Kirby has time to search for his youngest, the other side of the storm comes to bear. Wind batters the blue house as he keeps trying to call Frida, unwilling to accept the futility of this action, allowing himself to imagine that she will answer and tell him Flip is safely in her arms, all the while knowing by the look on Lucas’s face that Flip is not safe. He goes on dialing and redialing as if he doesn’t know better than anyone the kind of labor it will take to resurrect this invisible thread of connection.

The three of them wait, not speaking. What is there to say? Phyllis busies herself, setting Lucas’s nose and cleaning his face, drying his hair, insisting he drink a few sips of water. Kirby begins to pace. Every once in a while he goes to the door as if to leave and Phyllis has to remind him that there is nothing he can do out there. She guides him back to the sofa, to Lucas. But even beside one another, living through the same hell, they are alone.

When the wind allows it, they go home. It’s so close but even that short distance is fraught. The road is strewn with wreckage: branches and trash and rainwater so thick and fast he can feel the current pulling at his tires. And rising. At home, the water is almost up to his knees. There’s a storm surge coming—he’s worked too many disaster zones not to expect it. He lifts Lucas down from the cab like he is a toddler again and carries him inside. He isn’t thinking about Frida yet. He’s still focused on the absence of his youngest and now, the weight of his oldest.