The Light Pirate(39)
“I don’t know, man. For whatever you need. Storm’s coming.”
“I know.”
“Could be bad.”
The man stares at him. “Already is,” he says.
Kirby buys a rotisserie chicken and some sides at the grocery store, then drives home. When he tells the kids the pizza place is closed for good, they don’t seem surprised. Neither of them asks why. They all sit at the table and eat chicken straight from the plastic tray it came in, pulling the meat off the bone with their fingers while sounds of the local hurricane watch slip in from the TV in the living room to hover above their heads like dark clouds.
“Why’d they name it Braylen?” Wanda asks.
“Because that was the next name on that spillover list,” Kirby replies. “Already went through the alphabet once this season.”
“No, I mean…why’s Braylen on the list at all?”
“Well. Someone picked it. Who knows why they pick the names they do. It’s, um…random, I guess.”
Kirby watches her sit with this, chewing, staring down at her plate. He waits for it, feels it coming, but even so, he’s unprepared. It isn’t as though he didn’t know this conversation would happen someday. He just never figured out how he would meet it. “So then—” She struggles to find the right question. “My name. Is because of the list, right?”
“Yeah, in a way,” Kirby says. “It’s because of the hurricane you were born during. Hurricane Wanda. It was the next name on the list, and then your mother liked it, I guess.”
“Why?” Wanda frowns, and Kirby realizes that she’s angry. And why wouldn’t she be? Frida named her after the storm that mutilated a hundred miles of Florida coast, and then she died before she could understand what a name like that might do to a baby. But it isn’t Frida’s fault. Kirby is the one who could have decided to name her something else. He should have, knowing everything Frida didn’t. The thing was, when it came time to put something down on paper, he couldn’t think of anything better. He couldn’t think at all.
“Because she knew right away that you were a powerful girl and she wanted you to have a powerful name,” Lucas says suddenly. “And Wanda is the most powerful name.” Kirby’s gratitude is immediate and enormous.
“Oh.” She absorbs this, painting grease circles with her sticky chicken fingers on the surface of the table. No one chides her about the mess. “I never thought of it that way.”
Kirby feels he should add something. “She wanted you to know where you come from. And you come from storms, which can be hard, and people don’t always like them, but storms are important. They’re nature. You come from, um…” He looks at Lucas, floundering. “From…” He’s lost.
“You come from the elements,” Lucas finishes. “From the wild.” The three of them sit in silence, listening to the weatherwoman drone on about the cone of uncertainty.
“That’s sort of cool, I guess,” Wanda finally says.
“It is,” Kirby replies quickly, relieved. “It’s very cool.”
If the ocean is a body and the river is a body, then the groundwater is a body, too. The body no one sees. It lies in wait beneath the surface, rising through the cracks and crevices, filtering up and up and up until the limestone above is full and wet. This body sprawls, buried. Sleeping but not. Hidden but not. So deep beneath the earth that it stretches under the ocean floor, so close to the surface that it can tickle the sky when it rains.
Chapter 39
Hurricane Braylen tears through central Florida with sharp teeth and a full-throated shriek—a Category 3 by the time it makes land in Homestead—then pushes out toward the Gulf. On the east coast, people breathe a sigh of relief, but Wanda is less occupied with the news than the adults in her life are. None of this fazes her. She doesn’t listen to the reports about the damage done to Lake Okeechobee’s earthen dam as Braylen passed over, or the concerns about where funding for reinforcing the Hoover Dike might come from. The flood of 1928 doesn’t mean anything to her. Lake Okeechobee is fifty miles away. To Wanda, this distance is enormous.
These days, she is primarily concerned with that which is very small. The organisms she cannot see, or rather, the organisms she cannot see without help. Phyllis has shared the magic of looking down the tube of a microscope and glimpsing the squirming throb of tiny lives pressed between two rectangles of glass. A droplet of water expands beneath Wanda’s gaze and becomes—a world. She can’t get enough. Wandering through each day, she is overcome by her recent understanding that these tiny things are living absolutely everywhere. Inside her, even.
There are other things that interest her, but lately, everything comes back to Phyllis. The activities of her brother and father, the dreaded bustle of her school days, the ever-dire news—all of this pales in comparison to the enchanted expanse of Phyllis’s house. Wanda is enthralled by the things she discovers here. Today, Phyllis shows her the pantry. With a mixture of pride and bashfulness, neither of which Wanda is paying the slightest attention to, Phyllis brings Wanda to a room she wasn’t previously aware existed. Inside, she is astounded. Shelves as high as the ceiling are built into the walls, and there are more shelves, freestanding, in the center. Lining them are hundreds of canning jars labeled with Phyllis’s cramped cursive scrawl, Ziploc bags of dehydrated fruits and meats, gallons of fresh water, jugs of kerosene, big plastic bottles of cooking oil shining buttery yellow like lanterns.