The Light Pirate(46)
All these years, he’s known, but now he knows in a different way. He thought he was prepared, standing knee-deep in the surf, watching the wave approach, watching it get closer and closer, seeing the white of its crest, legs braced, leaning in, and then it knocked him off his feet anyway. Just like when Frida and Flip died: the sudden smack of it hitting him and then the long, deep, dark churn of being inside it. He finally gets out of his truck and lets the water touch his boots. This is the truth.
When he gets home, Lucas and Wanda are waiting for him. He’s exhausted. His body, so accustomed to physical labor, doesn’t know what to do with this churn of emotion. His heart aches as if it’s a muscle he’s worked too hard. His children sit at the kitchen table, smiling at him. Greeting him. He wonders how to tell them, or when. But he sees now that his children have something they want to tell him. Something that delights them. He cannot rob them of whatever this is. Not yet.
Lucas offers a few sheets of creased paper to Kirby with a sort of yearning he hasn’t seen on his son’s face in a long time. It reminds him of when he felt like he could protect his children from all this…a morning he hasn’t allowed himself to think about for many years. Putting up the hurricane plywood on the windows with his boys. On the ladder. In the rain. He remembers how excited they were to help. How eager. How grateful to be near their father, to have his attention in that dark, damp hour before dawn.
He takes the papers.
“Dad,” Lucas says.
Kirby looks down at what Lucas has given him, and it takes him a few minutes to realize they are acceptance letters. To colleges. We are delighted to inform you. Three of them: Georgia Tech, Michigan, UC Berkeley. Lucas waits for him to say something, but Kirby doesn’t have the words he needs for this moment. He looks at his son, his mouth empty of sound, still searching for the right shapes. Words never did come easy.
The letters fall from his hands and he pulls Lucas toward him, cupping the back of his head, holding him as he did all those years ago when he was small. His son is too big to be held in this way—there’s too much of him—but he stretches his arms as wide as they’ll go anyway, hugging with his whole body.
“So proud,” Kirby whispers eventually, just loud enough so Lucas can hear. “You did real good.”
Is the rain a body, too? Or is it many? All of these water bodies—the oceans and the rivers and the groundwater and the rain—they all give and they all take. This is the nature of being a body.
Chapter 43
When going to college was just an idea, it had no shape to it. Lucas would lie in bed imagining huge amphitheater classrooms, majestic chalkboards, library carousels, each with its own little light, but he didn’t spend time thinking about the other parts. Bureaucracy, for example. Class enrollment, health insurance, registrar paperwork, financial aid requirements. This sort of thing occupies him a great deal now—form upon form upon form. If going to college has a shape, he thinks, that shape is a sheet of A4 paper.
There are also the logistics of moving. This he feels more equipped to address. There are tangible items on this list, actions and objects: tuning up his car, packing his belongings, buying the textbooks he will need. And finally, there are the feelings that accompany moving: wisps of heartache hiding underneath the mundanity of his to-do list, bursts of pleasure to be shedding a life that doesn’t fit. It feels as bad as he was afraid it might, and it feels as good as he hoped it could.
When he calls to tell his mother the news, she says, “Finally,” and rants on and on about Kirby, about Rudder, about Lucas’s lost potential. He doesn’t talk to her often anymore, but after this, he knows he will talk to her even less. Things have been frayed between them since she remarried and moved to Minneapolis. No, longer—they’ve been frayed since Flip died. They love each other because they have to, not because they want to.
He’s more protective of Rudder than usual because he worries he’s betraying everything he comes from by leaving. Thinking of all the Gillians, the people who gave up on Rudder too soon, the people without whom Rudder couldn’t survive, he tries to assure himself that he isn’t one of them—but he is. Kirby sits him down and tells him about the municipality going bankrupt, then insists it changes nothing for Lucas. Though it does change some things. In some ways, it makes it easier. Lucas might have given up on Rudder first, but now Rudder has given up on itself.
Kirby promises to find work near whichever school he chooses, and in this sense at least, the future feels hopeful for his family—an experienced lineman can always find work. Lucas picks UC Berkeley, which offered him a generous scholarship, and applies for a loan to cover the rest. California has its own problems—fires, drought, earthquakes—but it’s still functioning with some semblance of how things used to be. That’s how the world is divided now: the places that still function, and the places that don’t. Florida doesn’t. Their local governments are dissolving, their infrastructure crumbling. Louisiana is fading, too. The Outer Banks of North Carolina are gone entirely. The Bahamas. Indonesia. More will follow.
The way he imagined leaving is hard to let go of. He wanted to leave Rudder in order to return with the missing pieces: the prodigal son, coming home with exactly the right tools at exactly the right time. It won’t be like he wanted. He sees that now. The dream dies gradually. It hurts to let it go, but this is part of what he wants to learn, why he applied in the first place—how to see what is. And then, what to do about it.