The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(16)
“When’s it fixed?” Annabel asked.
“I don’t know, Baby-bel. I don’t know, maybe tomorrow. Don’t be scared.”
Annabel leaned in and shook her head. “I’m not.”
Dorothy considered this. “Of course, you’re my brave girl.”
To Dorothy, the building felt eerily quiet. No humming from monitors or appliances, the subtle murmuring of the HVAC units tasked with moving air throughout the circulatory system of a thirty-eight-story building were currently quiescent. This new canvas of silence was being painted over by violent swashes of wind, hail, and thunder, framed by Louis occasionally yelling from the living room.
“I thought I told you to pick up some spare batteries for the flashlight. I can’t believe you forgot!” he shouted. “Wait. Never mind.”
She heard him tripping over furniture and cursing as heavy rain lashed the windows and lightning coursed through the sky.
Dorothy remembered an old line of poetry from Rupi Kaur: If people were rain, men would be drizzle, and women a hurricane.
“Why’s this happening?” Annabel asked.
“It’s just a storm, Baby-bel. They happen once a year now, and that’s why we live in this big strong building. We’ll be just fine.”
Annabel nodded as though that all made sense, or the tone of her mother’s voice was convincing enough that it didn’t matter what Dorothy said, but how she said it.
For a moment, she felt grateful they were far above the possible storm surge, the flooded streets, downed power lines, the perilous, flying debris. A fearsome gust of wind rattled the skylight windowpanes, and as the building swayed, Dorothy began mentally planning their escape to the stairwell if things got worse.
While Louis stumbled about the living room, Dorothy pondered Annabel’s drawings and the uncanny similarities to her own. As a parent, she expected Annabel to grow up and, at some point, have the same alarming revelation that she too—in so many subtle and unsubtle ways—had become her mother. As an observant adult, Dorothy had witnessed how children inherited traits from their parents, a receding hairline, a jawline, a tolerance or intolerance of spicy foods. She also understood that every child ends up an amalgam of genetics and modeled behavior, nature and nurture—at least to a certain point. Her enthusiastic friends were often beguiled by how their offspring shared similar tastes with their parents, or had the same claustrophobia, or fear of heights. To Dorothy, these observations had the same gravity and validity as the predictive power of a fortune cookie. More wishful thinking than science. An aspirational concurrence. An example of that reasoning in mathematical terms would look like this: imagination + a desire for the world to make sense = a society that thinks dogs always look like their owners.
But Annabel’s airplane drawing was an unsettling coincidence, something Dorothy endeavored to sort out in the light of day after the storm passed.
As the wind howled, Dorothy remembered how warm and welcome the rain had been during her time in Myanmar, back when she was a nervous, angry, twitching twentysomething. She’d arrived at the tail end of monsoon season. She’d felt compelled to visit and become what Kipling called “a neater, sweeter maiden, in a cleaner, greener land.” She thought the Burma rains would be baptismal, restorative. That she’d return with answers to questions she didn’t even know she had.
But all she brought back was malaria.
Louis walked in wearing a headlamp that gave him the appearance of a cyclopean coal miner. “This is all I could find. Plenty of batteries though.”
Dorothy chewed her lip. She wanted to yell. She wanted to argue that they should have done what more sensible people had done and left the city, moved to someplace inland, like Wenatchee, or maybe Yakima. That they didn’t need to be here. But a part of her felt comfortable in the storm. Happy that he was wrong.
Louis held up one of the loaves of bread Dorothy found at the store. “Why on earth would you bring home stale pumpernickel? Especially with a typhoon bearing down. We never eat this. You should have bought sourdough.”
This isn’t even a real typhoon, Dorothy thought. This is what—a post-tropical storm? The season isn’t over and there are other cyclones out there spinning, careening into one another, and here we sit. She imagined the South Pacific as a giant pachinko machine with lights and bumpers, bells clanging, chaotic. “Things could get worse.”
Louis opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated. He looked at her as though he wasn’t sure if she was talking about the bread, the storm, or their relationship.
As though on cue, a howitzer boomed from the roof, a crack of thunder so loud they all ducked down to the floor, crouching, covering their heads in a reaction that was a collective nod to some latent primal programming.
“Too loud,” Annabel said.
“We should move away from the windows.” Dorothy hoisted her daughter to her hip. “As far as possible. Let’s you and I sleep in the living room tonight, Baby-bel. It’ll be like we’re going camping.”
* * *
Sometime in the night Dorothy opened her eyes. She touched the empty space next to her where Annabel had been. The blankets were still warm. Dorothy sat up, unsure of the time because her phone died and the electricity still had not come back on, rendering the wall clocks and the timepieces in the kitchen useless.