The Storm King(23)

Despite his umbrella, Nate was soaked to the knees by the time he got to Grams’s house. The home looked the way it was supposed to. The lights in the living room were on, and his grandmother’s car was in the driveway.

The door was locked again, and he had to ring the bell.

“I meant to give you a key,” Grams said as she opened the door. She looked him over. “Don’t tell me you walked, boy. I thought you’d get a ride with Tommy. I’d have picked you up.”

“I didn’t think you’d be back so early.” When he’d lived here, Grams rarely returned from the Union before two in the morning. He shucked off his shoes and peeled away his sopping socks.

“I let the managers lock up on weeknights.”

“Good. You’re not going to be young forever, you know.”

Grams snorted. “I don’t suppose you actually ate anything. Got some fish and chips warming in the oven. That a suit you’re wearing? Is the Academy Awards in town? Mailman must have lost my invitation again.”

As Grams went into the kitchen, Nate climbed to his bedroom. He changed from his suit into jeans and a sweater. Back downstairs, he flicked on the outdoor lights and surveyed the front lawn from the panels of the door. Raindrops glistened across the grass, and branches shuddered in the wind.

In the kitchen, an aluminum pan filled with breaded fish and French fries was at the center of the table between two place settings. Bottles of ketchup and tartar sauce were close by.

Nate sat at his old place.

This was how they’d eaten in his last years of high school. Grams would come home around six, and they’d share something from the Union’s kitchen before she headed back to the pub in time for the drinkers’ shift.



Grams asked how things had gone at the Empire, and Nate told her how great it had been to see Tom and Johnny. How he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed them. Maybe he’ll come back to town again soon, he said. Maybe he’ll bring the whole family.

It’s what she wanted to hear.

“You should have told me about the window at the Union,” Nate said once they’d finished eating.

“Now why’d Tommy go and bother you with that?” She started to gather the dishes. “I didn’t want you to worry. It was only a window. Just had it boarded up snug and tight to keep the inside dry. Nothing to fuss about.”

“A window here was broken, too.”

“What? Where?”

Nate could believe that she hadn’t noticed it. If she had, it would have been cleaned up. Grams started for the stairs, but he was quick to spare her the climb.

“My bedroom. I swept up the glass and boarded it with cardboard. Tommy’s having someone fix it tomorrow.”

“We have the funeral tomorrow.”

“And the hurricane. Don’t want to go into it already down a window. The funeral’s not until late morning?”

“Eleven o’clock.”

“I don’t know when the worst of Medea is going to hit.”

Grams flicked on the kitchen’s little television. The screen came alive with data and scrolling weather advisories. Medea was the only news.

The meteorologists had honed the hurricane’s projected path. Its trajectory would take the eye north of the city but south of the Lake. The coast would see the worst of it, but the storm had a diameter of over five hundred miles, so the Lake would get more than a glancing blow.



Nate tried not to let himself be lulled by the footage of shattered boardwalks and inundated towns. Surf churned where islands had been. Rain-glazed lenses filmed abandoned shore communities. This time tomorrow these places might not exist at all. When this was over, they might be only names on an obsolete map.

The universe didn’t care. It never had.

Shootings, wars, diseases, bombings. You had to work not to be dulled by the ceaseless repetition of tragedy. Because Nate knew it wasn’t enough to witness the pain of others. To make it matter, he had to feel it.

“Poor people,” Grams said. On the screen, sheathes of roofs cut through the ocean like breaching whales. “We’re so lucky, boy.”

Lucky that they didn’t live on the shore. Lucky that they didn’t want for food or shelter or so many other things. Lucky because of all the people they loved who’d been taken, they were still here.

“We are, Grams.” No matter what had happened, this was undeniably true.

Nate was grateful for the family he had and the life he lived. But he’d lost too much to ever feel safe.

Medea couldn’t be fought any more than reality itself. But this wasn’t true for everything. Drunks who ran families off cliffs, bullies who tortured the weak, vandals who attacked grandmothers.

They could be resisted. They could be stopped.

They could be punished.





November 30

I thought this journal was just another one of Dr. Karp’s stupid ideas, but I’ve got to get this down somewhere.

It started at the boutique. Or maybe way before then. Halloween? April?

I don’t know. It’s hard to track it all back to one thing. Karp says perspective can only be achieved by treading a path of time along an incline of self-awareness. Seriously, that’s what the guy said. Like he’s trying out slogans for crappy inspirational posters. Headshrinkery aside, I get that it can be hard to get a handle on things, especially while you’re still drowning in them.