The Storm King(2)



He often tries to recall the look in her eyes. What does a mother try to convey to her child when they have moments to live? Fear or regret? Sadness or pity? When Nate summons her expression in that instant, he tries to find love. But the only thing on her face is horror. They fall too quickly for it to be anything else.

In the movies Nate has seen, events like this are shown in slow-motion. This underscores the importance of the scene. In these fraught seconds, the slightest look and gesture is given momentous gravity. Consciousness extends as it senses the imminence of its conclusion.

But these moments don’t stretch for Nate. The Passat falls like the ton and a half of metal that it is. One moment they are weightless and his mother is looking at him, and then the windshield explodes and the lake takes them.



NATE COMES BACK to himself on the rocks. There’s a tortured sound around him. A raw and gasping cry like a person torn in half. It echoes across the water and up the cliffs as if it cannot find a place to rest. His chest feels as if it’s crushed in the fist of a giant. To breathe is agony. He cannot feel his arm, and his baseball uniform is now more red than white. His first thought is that the lake’s glittering surface was a lie, because he is cold to his marrow. There’s a phantom memory of ice water locked in a vise around his throat.



His body is wracked with pain and seizing with chills. He wipes blood from his eyes and searches the stony water for his family, but they are gone.

Only then does he realize that the scream he hears is his own.





One

Nate had missed holidays and weddings and more birthdays than he could count. It took a funeral to bring him home.

A Greyhound got him to Syracuse, where he transferred to a local line that made the long haul to the North Country. Eight hours after leaving Port Authority’s sticky fluorescence, he was again in the foothills of the Adirondacks.

A medical journal sat open on his lap, though he hadn’t read a word for miles. Instead, he was on his phone, listening to one of his section’s residents detail this morning’s battles. White blood cell counts, biopsy data, and scan analyses. Numbers falling, rising, and static. Today, more skirmishes were being won than lost: the closest thing to victory anyone who fights cancer could hope for. But the failures ached.

He’d called for the path results of a bulky lymph node resection he’d performed on Nia Kapur, a mischievous nine-year-old with huge amber eyes and the best, snortiest laugh Nate had ever heard. He’d worked with Nia and her parents since the beginning of his pediatric surgical oncology fellowship. But the results from her lymph node were not good. The data his resident delivered meant that his time with the Kapurs was drawing to its end.



“Dr. McHale?”

“Sorry, Gina, spotty reception up here.” He cleared his throat. “Can you give that last part to me again?”

Nate listened to what he’d missed, thanked her for the update, and wished her luck in weathering the coming storm.

Churning ever closer, a hurricane tore along the coast.

Medea.

Someone at the National Weather Service had been steadily replacing retired hurricane names with classically inspired monikers—Antigone, Brutus, Circe—giving each storm gravitas and a suggestion of animus. Nate thought the time might soon come when storms were named after forgotten gods, their energies stoked by millennia of human neglect.

The timing of the storm was terrible. But in its own way, it was also perfect.

The bus shuddered around a curve, and Nate watched as the lines between land and sky fell into familiar contours. It was September, but the window was ice under his fingertips, the luminescence of the summer mountains already fracturing into color. The wild forest began to lose ground to tidy colonials with manicured lawns and sculpted flower beds. Through the trees, he caught the first flash of light gleaming against dark water.

It had been a long trip, but Nate was finally there.

He was one of the last riders remaining on the bus, and the only one to disembark at the town green.

At first, Greystone Lake looked much as he’d left it. The town hall’s neoclassical dome was still painted the red of the autumn maples. The limestone fa?ade of the Empire Hotel still shone like a great pearl through the dogwoods that lined the green. To the north were the headlands, to the east was the Wharf, and to the south were the foothills. This was Greystone Lake. This was home. And Nate knew its every corner as if it were part of his own body.



He extended the handle of his bag and made his way down to the Wharf. It had been fourteen years since he’d walked these streets, and he had to remind himself with each step that this wasn’t a dream. The outline of each building, the arc of every curb and lamppost. Everything was familiar, but everything had changed. Nate had changed, too.

As he picked his way down Kingfisher Boulevard he understood why there were so many adages about this kind of homecoming. Each step was a new round of Spot the Difference. Fresh signage on familiar storefronts, obsolete pay phones replaced by sleek bike racks. Renovations, restorations, and new construction. Returning home after a long absence was a unique mélange of recognition and discovery.

A cluster of children, too young to be in school, were herded gently by their keepers along the edge of the town green. A gust kicked a drift of dried leaves at them, sending them into high-pitched squeals of mock terror. They were closer in age to Livvy, but right now Nia Kapur was the child at the forefront of Nate’s mind. He’d have to call her parents. It was the kind of news he’d rather give in person, but it’d be days before he’d be back in the city, and little Nia might not have many days left.

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