The Light Pirate(56)

In the morning, Wanda had to gently but firmly put Lucas in his car and insist he go. They all agreed again that Lucas would get settled in California and when it was right, maybe in a year, maybe two, Wanda would join him. At the time, they believed it. Phyllis and Wanda stood in the driveway and watched his car disappear while Blackbeard mewed at their feet, throwing herself against their legs, begging for their hands in her fur. Wanda bent down and obliged her, carefully attending to her nose, then ears, then chin, then belly. Phyllis watched, brushing tears from her eyes, suddenly struck by the newfound gravity of her own choices. The stakes were so much higher now.



Just like that, Wanda became hers. Her burden and also her joy. The blue house seemed to expand. It breathed. With Wanda inside it, the house lived. And so did Phyllis. She hadn’t been unhappy before Wanda came into her life. Not in the slightest. Phyllis had always found great fulfillment in her own self-determined research projects, and before that, when she taught, in her students, and before that, in her own schooling. Her life pre-Wanda had been a full one. Forestry work, academia, her research, a few lovers here and there, but most of all, caretaking the land she lived on. Her garden, her chickens, the slow, satisfying task of removing herself and her home from the grid entirely. Of becoming utterly independent from a failing system. She’d had everything she wanted out of her years on this earth. And then Wanda came and she got something she had never even known to yearn for—a companion.

Phyllis had tried living with a man twice and neither time suited her. There was Gabriel, when she was young, who taught her about guns and prepping and eventually left with another woman, and then there was Julian, who wanted her to put research aside to raise a family with him. She said no and he left, too. She liked the sex well enough—it was the rest of it that she was ill-suited for. The demands on her time, her attention, her space. She’d always been this way. Even as a child, she’d reveled in being left alone. Her parents didn’t understand her, and neither did her sister. Eventually they gave up on convincing her to join in, and let her be. She’d always been a satellite, orbiting out beyond the gravitational pull of family and community and togetherness. It was a peaceful way to exist. A good vantage point from which to learn. She’d never dreamed that she would find so much joy in the very thing she’d always been certain she did not want: a child. Then again, Wanda was not just any child.

Florida’s infrastructure limped along through the tail end of that summer after Kirby died. Rudder was bankrupt and Miami was under mandatory evacuation orders by then, but other pockets of the state continued to function. It was an in-between time. The flooding of Lake Okeechobee had hastened certain changes that might have taken decades otherwise. But here it was: happening more quickly than anyone had anticipated. Florida, returning to herself. Swamps that had been dredged and drained and developed reappeared, bubbling back up to the surface in parking lots and on highways and in gated neighborhoods. Sinkholes opened up and swallowed entire blocks whole. Houses and roads and crops disappeared into the edges of the ever-encroaching wild. Power was unreliable but it still flowed in some places. Cell and radio towers still stood. The question was, and always had been: For how much longer? Hurricane season had a slow start, but its peak was brewing. At sea, pockets of hot, moist wind formed, whirled, fed. They grew, waiting to be named. It wouldn’t take much to push the places that still functioned past their brink. And after—well, after was what Phyllis had spent her life preparing for.



In the blue house, Wanda’s presence began to take root. The study became hers in a much more permanent way. A twin bed frame with wooden pineapples carved into the headboard was assembled, hauled home in pieces from an abandoned house. A lamp shaped like the moon appeared on the desk, plucked from a garage sale. Little spiky sky plants were hung from nails on pieces of purple thread and dry driftwood. Rocks and fossils and shell fragments gathered from the permanent plots lined both windowsills. A wallpaper of botanical drawings accumulated, tacked one by one to the wall, each more detailed than the last. And the milk crate that had been Kirby’s, the remnants of a mother she’d never known—these artifacts of Frida finally were hers.

Together, they settled into a new routine while society disintegrated all around them. The school did not reopen in September, so Phyllis devised a sixth grade syllabus of sorts and for the first time, Wanda delighted in her studies. Data collection and biology became the focal point of her education. Drawing, fishing, canning, gardening, and first aid were also core subjects. Irrelevancies like cursive and gym and a version of U.S. history Phyllis referred to as “garbage” fell by the wayside. She taught Wanda another kind of history, an older one. Before the country had states. Before it was a country at all.

She taught Wanda how to use hand tools, how to make soap, how to shoot a rifle. Literature became a leisure activity that Wanda pursued on her own, no assignments required. It was a good syllabus. Each module was carefully designed for the world that was coming to bear rather than the one that was quickly receding. Without peers, Wanda relaxed into learning in a way she never had before. She asked as many questions as she wanted without rebuke and Phyllis answered them all to the best of her ability.

At the end of September, Hurricane Salina approached. They listened to its progress on a little hand-crank radio and when it was close, they stripped the garden of its produce, herded the chickens into the house, set the furniture up on bricks, and moved the valuables to the second floor. They latched the storm shutters and brought the solar panels in just as the sky began to darken, and by the time the winds arrived, they’d tucked themselves away, too. The blue house was as indestructible as an old house could be. Phyllis had spent years making sure of it. As Salina raged, the humans waited. The chickens fluttered and clucked in the bathroom, exploring the tub while Blackbeard listened, pawing at their shadows beneath the door. Outside, debris hurtled through the sky and wind clawed at the trees. The ocean waves swelled to the height of four-story buildings. The Intracoastal rose and then overflowed. The streets became rivers, the swamps became lakes. Rain fell in sheets, not drops. And then, after many hours of waiting and enduring, the storm moved on.