She’d come for plywood as the radio advised.
“Ma’am, can you swipe your card again?” Mysterious forces had erased the magnetic strip on her Visa card. A manager is called over. Ada keels onto one hip while the people in line behind her rot and glare, their arms loaded with jugs of water, rolls of plastic. The air conditioning raises gooseflesh on Ada’s arms while she waits for the manager’s approval.
It isn’t until she wheels her purchases out to her car that the physics of the situation strike her. Her small sedan is no place for four sheets of plywood. Sweat makes dark circles on her tank top. She looks at the wood. She looks at her car. She tightens her ponytail and rather than asking someone for help or going to get a refund, she drags her teeth across her top lip.
In a few hours this parking lot will steam as the first rain drops strike. The light fixtures will ping as the wind picks up. The orange “H” in the Home Depot sign might loosen from its moorings, taking flight across the state of Florida, a glorious end to a bright career.
Ada leaves the plywood behind, nosed into the island between car grills. She starts her car and Neil Young sings, I saw your brown eyes turning once to fire. Signaling a right turn with her left hand crooked at the elbow, Ada pulls out of the parking lot.
When she’d first moved south from Rhode Island, it took her only three days to make the drive. She’d stopped at the halfway point in order to tell someone where she was headed. “Florida.” She’d smiled.
The Virginia rest area worker, positioned behind the Visitor’s Information desk, nodded. “Florida is nothing but an old coral reef. Geologically, it’s brand new.” He passed her a brochure for Colonial Williamsburg.
Brand new and improved, Ada thought, leaving the brochure behind.
In Florida Ada bought a tiny one-story rectangle. A square house built in the seventies with lots of tall glass windows that span floor to ceiling, lots of dark wood and the occasional odor of mold that comes with basement-free homes. The neighborhood is nothing much, some mobile houses and one family of eight who race ATVs up and down the street. But Ada can eat her breakfast on the lanai. She can sleep with the windows open, the sound of dry vegetation brushing up against the stucco. Kingbirds spear bugs and dead flowers in her yard. Lizards inflate their pink necks. It is nothing like Rhode Island but rather the sort of exotic home Ada had imagined when reading wire news headlines back up north: 26-FOOT PYTHON FOUND UNDERNEATH 75-YEAR-OLD FLORIDA WOMAN’S HOME.
Her neighbor Chuck is sitting half-in, half-out of his metal utility storage shed. It’s lightweight, made from aluminum and fiberglass; the whole thing held together with wingnuts. Chuck has set a metal folding chair and a TV tray just outside the door. That’s where he spends the day. Chuck lives in his storage shed. His sister Patricia has a three bedroom home on the same property but Chuck prefers to stay here, with no windows, no floor, and no plumbing. “I’m a green anarchist,” he said when Ada first met him — an ideology that has something to do with caveman times. It also involves dumpster diving and having friends in prison for blowing up car dealerships or animal research labs. Chuck doesn’t go shopping or burn fossil fuels instead he rides a ten speed bike around town wearing T-shirts magic-markered to read, “Reclaim! Rewild! Resist!” or “State Meltdown” or simply “Burn, Burn, Burn.”
His radio is tuned to the same station Ada’s listening to in the car so that the broadcast comes through in stereo with a slight delay. “I repeat SEVERE HURRICANE WARNING issued for Southern Florida. We’ve got Chief John DeLamian here. Chief, what can you tell us?”
“Well at this point, Mike I can tell you we’ve got a SEVERE HURRICANE WARNING issued for Southern Florida.”
“Chief, maybe you could clarify for our listeners the difference between a WATCH and a WARNING.”
“Sure thing, Mike. A watch means we’re just watching, just gonna wait and see while a warning–” Ada turns the car off.
“Hey, Chuck,” she says, passing through the low row of palms that divides her land from Patricia’s. Ada holds up two fingers as a wave, an Indian chief coming in peace. “I couldn’t get any plywood,” she tells him.
“They sell out?”
“My car’s too small.”
“A-ha,” he says. “Well then, I guess you’re in for it. Total destruction.”
“I guess so.” She chews her lip again.
Chuck looks at her lopsided. She’d slept with him once, right when she’d moved here. In the intervening months, she’d not made that mistake again. “There’s not much you can do to stop it anyway. A hurricane will just take your whole plywooded house and deposit it upside down, across the street.”
“I always thought those scenes on the news were fake,” she says. “It looks like a Christmas village when they show trailers stuck in trees.”
“You must be some sort of monster.” Chuck shakes his head. “You want a beer?”
Nowhere does a storm appear yet. “Sure. Thank you.”
He fishes her a can of malt liquor from out of an ice cooler. “Malt liquor gets the job done,” he had told her when they first met and, in the time she’s known him, she has found that to be true.
Dull sunlight shines into his shed. At the foot of his cot there’s a small steamer trunk with one blanket neatly folded across it. “You go ahead and sit down there,” he says pointing to the folding chair, the only seat there is. Chuck finds a spot on the ground, crossing his legs Indian style.
Ada stares at the chair.
“Don’t be such a Yankee.”
She takes a seat.
If Ada had met Chuck up north she would have mistaken him for someone who’s favorite book is “Helter Skelter,” someone who listens to hair metal bands. She’d think he wouldn’t care if a little bit of scrambled egg fell between the stove and the cabinet. He would just leave it there. For years. But now that she knows him, she likes him. “How come people aren’t catatonic with wonder?” he’d asked her once when a scarlet ibis walked through the yard on long yellow, backward bent legs.
And anyway Chuck would never eat scrambled eggs.
He explained his theory to her when they first met. “Most food is like 15% nutrients, 85% poison if you’re lucky. Everyone knows its true but most people just keep on eating. I can’t do it. It fogs up my brain whenever I have a sandwich.”
“Really?”
“Yup. People in government,” he continued, “keep a different food source. They give us this stuff to make us slow in the body, slow in the head. I won’t eat it. You shouldn’t either.”
“Don’t you get hungry?” she’d asked and Chuck turned to look at her as if that were the stupidest question he’d ever heard. Ada decided not to poke any further at what seemed a precarious foundation.
Ada and Chuck are close to the same height and the same age, closing in on forty-five. Both are skinny with crab-like long limbs and slightly stooped shoulders. Chuck’s hair is long but thin in spots. It hangs feathered from his face like a surfer’s might. His neck and skin are tanned, coarse as a beach bum’s. Everyday he wears Bermuda shorts, new tube socks and basketball sneakers. The sneakers remind Ada of high school and the things boys would say: sweater puppies, butterface, pearl necklace. The sneakers are creepy on a grown man but Chuck gets his wardrobe for free from a Catholic Workers Center where they hand out food and clothes to unfortunates on Saturdays.
Chuck is not technically unfortunate. He could live with Patricia if he wanted to. Instead he lives in his shed, seeing his sister only on Sundays. They sit together in her air conditioning, watching reality TV, the green anarchist and the real estate lawyer. He probably does his laundry over at her house, maybe he uses one of Patricia’s scented dryer sheets. He probably even has a snack, something really poisonous like a Pop-Tart or a Slim Jim or an Oreo cookie dipped in Fluff, Jif, Reddi-Wip.
“Does Patricia have a boyfriend?” Ada asks jerking her chin towards the main house, a dark thing with a large wrap-around porch. Ada had only met Patricia once though she’d spied her before, having a drink alone on the porch underneath yellow bug lights.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think she likes men, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“But I don’t think she likes women either. She likes her job. And God,” he says, finishing his beer. “You want another?”
For the first time that day the sky suggests the trouble moving in from out at sea. The wind begins to pick up, blowing a bit of sand and dirt around. The world gets darker. “Sure.”
In between songs, the radio is relating a top forty list of the world’s most destructive natural disasters. Andrew. Pompeii. Galveston. Katrina. And then, “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” There is no rain yet. They sip their beers.
“Any luck on the job hunt?” he asks.
“Nope.” Ada hasn’t done much since moving south. She usually wakes and has a cup of coffee in her living room.
The cup empties and Ada moves out onto the lanai to watch the ibises and the lizards. She’ll apply a self-tanner to her legs or follow a square of sunlight as it travels across the wall.
“Most people move because of a job,” he says, as if Ada were from outer space instead of Rhode Island and he, the green anarchist, has to explain to her how humans live, what their customs are.
“Not me.”
“No.” Chuck lifts his eyes, revealing a field of white below his pupils. He draws his knees into his chest and looks around himself slowly, to the left and right before asking, “So why’d you come here?”
A body trapped in a burlap sack, the answer squirms. “I already told you.”
One night they’d sat together drinking until it was dark and Ada had told him her reasons for moving. “I had a fiancée who died,” she’d said.
“I know you told me, but didn’t that happened years ago?” Ada had only been in Florida for a few months now.
She hesitates. “It took me awhile to get packed.”
“All right.” Chuck picks at the vegetation underneath his legs. “Shoot,” he says and then, “All right.”
Ada stands up. “Thanks for the beers. I’ll see you after the storm?”
“You know they’ve called a county-wide evacuation?”
Ada nods.
“You can just follow the blue signs out on the highway. Head west.”
“You’re not going to evacuate?”
Chuck looks over at Patricia’s house. It’s built like an Austrian chalet, a fortress.
“I’ll think about it.” Ada waves as she passes back through the palm trees to her own house, the one with all those windows and nothing but a crawl space for a lost python underneath it.
Part Two
The red light on Ada’s answering machine is blinking. Rhode Island. Foreign grunts from a lost civilization. No one in Florida knows the number yet so she ignores the message. She has a seat on her new couch, watching the wall of windows as if the feature presentation is about to start. She eats crackers and peanut butter while she waits.
The room darkens some and time passes. The answering machine continues to blink. Outside, branches start to move in two directions at once, then three directions, shuddering. More time passes. Ada smoothes the fabric of the upholstery and the hurricane beats the ocean with 120 m.p.h. winds. The lights flicker and brown for a moment, holding the world in pause until the full force of the storm and the sea arrive as if on cue. Rain pours down the glass and onto the lanai. More time passes. More rain falls. The wind across the roof and gutters snarls while any light left in the sky drains away. Some of the first debris to come flying by the windows are the gray, lower branches of ungroomed palm trees. They are brittle and snap off easily, their palms acting as sails. It’s “The Wizard of Oz” out there. A number of store circulars and plastic shopping bags fly past. Ada watches for something heavy and terrible, the neighbors’ above ground pool, a backyard grill, one of the ATVs. She waits for an eighteen-wheeler to drop into her front yard but the wind is not quite strong enough yet to pick up anything heavier than paper, plastic and dead foliage.
She presses the flashing red button of her answering machine.
“Hi, hon. It’s me.”
Rhode Island.
“I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else but Henry’s wife is pregnant. About seven months now. Give me a call.”
Then a dial tone. In the dark, she smells the rot of those words. Henry’s wife is pregnant. The storm sounds even worse. Ada closes her eyes.
“Hello, Sweetheart.” Flashes of black and white light behind her closed lids. A squiggle on a static-filled monitor. “Hello, Sweetheart.”
And when she opens her eyes the power is totally gone. The clock on the DVD is dark and the lamp switch spins round and round with no results. When she stands, she sees that there is a small stream now running through her backyard, cutting veins in the sandy soil. It flows directly underneath Ada’s house, in one side and out the other. How did that much water get there so quickly? She’s never seen rain like this before. Ada bends her ear to the floorboards, listening for the rush of water below but instead she hears a knock. “Come in,” she tells the flood.
“Are you all right over here?”
“Chuck?” It’s only been two hours, maybe three, since she last saw him but the whole world seems to have changed.
“Yeah.”
Chuck is soaked through. He removes his sneakers and socks in the front hall. “You’re about to get washed out to sea. Why don’t you get your things together and come over to Pat’s?”
“Man,” Ada says. “Look at you. You want a towel?” She passes through her bedroom and into the master bath with Chuck following, dripping throughout the house, accustomed to living where the floors are made of sand.
In the bathroom he twists the fabric of his shorts, wringing dampness out onto the tiles. There are two facing mirrors. Chuck moves his arm and a million arms move with him, replicated into infinity. His tanned skin, his surfer hair, his kooky ideas which at first don’t make any sense, until, quite suddenly, they do.
“What do you think of Florida now?” he asks still moving his arms up and down so that the millions of Chucks in the mirrors move with him.
There are four or five drops of water slowly making their ways down Chuck’s face, beading up into larger drops, waiting to fall but then not falling. “This is some storm,” he says twisting his shorts again. “We never had this many big storms in one season when I was a kid.”
She passes him a towel which Chuck holds but does not use. “That’s what they say.”
“And Patricia doesn’t even believe in global warming.”
One drop is swinging like a charm from his nose. Still he doesn’t use the towel.
Chuck raises the timbre of his voice to imitate his sister. “‘Now, Chuck, God won’t let us die.’ That’s what she says.”
He looks directly at Ada. It seems impossible that the drop can continue to hold on. “I tell her that God lets us die every day. I don’t even know what she’s talking about.”
It’s unbearable, hanging off the very tip. Ada grabs the towel and presses it up against him, both her hands open on his face. She holds it there, blotting him out. Ada can feel the cartilage of his nose through the towel, the warmth of his exhalation. She feels his cheekbones and the moisture off his skin. She removes the towel and there he is, dried.
He smiles and then stops. “Why’d your fiancée die so young?”
She drops the towel, pressing her low back up against the sink. Like a lie told in childhood, even Ada has almost forgotten that it is a lie. “Terrorists,” she says and begins to smile until she sees how that word tears through Chuck’s face like corroded blood or black ink.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he asks.
But Ada does not have a good answer. She pulls him to her to quiet him. She tilts her neck, smelling his metallic breath. She lifts her chin and Chuck follows, bending to the opposite side, closing in on her. When they’d been together before, it was a mistake, malt liquor, and she had told Chuck the following day, “Not with the neighbors.”
But here in the hurricane Ada opens her mouth. The wet and the wet. She silences him and he grabs her quickly with hands as plodding as baseball mitts moving across her back.
She’s glad the sneakers are already removed when they make their way through the nearly dark room and onto her bed.
Her nose presses up against his skin. Yeast and old newspapers. A wrong smell. Chuck is a wrong shape also, like a cord of wood or a tall, thin chest of drawers. They do not fit together but still she wraps her arms around him. She moves more out of memory than tenderness. She hitches one leg across him, tearing into him saying, “Shh. Shh. Shh.” Chuck is clean-shaven which means a bowl of cold water and a razor, grooming himself in the shed without proper plumbing. A gentle action. Two people who live their lives alone in rooms doing strange, gentle things, can, sometimes, be together in the middle of a dangerous storm in a house made of glass. “Shh. Shh. Shh.”
“Mercy,” he says, arcing his thinness above her. “Mercy.”
Ada hasn’t any idea what he means in asking for mercy.
Part Three
When it’s over they lie on their backs breathing, staring up into the storm though they can’t see it. Just a white ceiling with one small crack in the left corner by the door jamb. She brushes Chuck with her thigh. Maybe the wind will rip the roof from its joists. She can destroy order in the world. She does it all the time.
Eventually Chuck stands up and the two perfume bottles on her bureau click together. He is standing naked in front of her. “I’d be curious to hear what you think about it.” There are mysterious splotches on his torso like some rare infectious disease. “I mean when it first happened I wasn’t surprised. Right? We’ve been asking for it for years.”
At first she thinks he means this, here on this bed, until she realizes he doesn’t. “Oh.” Ada pulls the sheet up over her head hiding from her lie.
“It’s a war,” Chuck says. “And I don’t mean terrorism. I mean capitalism. If you’re going to set up hierarchies where one person has only that and one person has a lot more than that, then you’re asking for it.”
Ada waits perfectly flat under her sheet in the gray light. Her eyes dart back and forth as if some way out, a secret tunnel, might appear beneath the covers.
“And of course nature and the environment are always the lowest man on the totem pole. No one looks out for nature under capitalism and trying to persuade someone to not want more is like trying to persuade a person to stop breathing.”
She can see her chest rise and fall below the sheet. She hears Chuck pacing back and forth at the end of the bed as if delivering a fiery sermon.
“When it happened I thought, now America will wonder why we’d been attacked and then finally we’ll see how capitalism failed us, how it kills people everyday. Cancer, hunger, heart disease, alcoholism, car crashes.” Chuck drives one fist into his other palm. He keeps on. “Genetically fucked-up corn, tobacco, kids on anti-depressants, diabetes, asthma, drugs, pollution.”
The window screen in the bedroom sucks in and out as if it will tear. Something heavy strikes the bathroom skylight, a popping sound. Chuck finally stops. Ada sits up at the noise. She lets the sheet fall. A branch. An eighteen-wheeler. Her spine curls to a curve. Her boobs touch her stomach. Chuck’s nude body makes the trace of a ghost in the room. Here in the storm it is easy for her to see how rigid his spine is. Ada slouches further.
“Why was he there?” Chuck finally asks. “I mean I thought you said you guys lived outside Providence?”
Ada tries to focus her eyes on the individual fibers of tan carpeting. Thoughts she’d left back in Rhode Island arrive as if they’d been delayed by careless movers who came south via Alaska. “We’re here. Sorry we’re late.” Ada’s lungs slam shut. She looks at Chuck’s splotchy skin and imagines she is burning these red spots into his flesh with just her eyes as if the power of her thoughts could hurt someone. Or at least make him shut up.
“Hello, sweetheart,” she’d said to the ultrasound machine. Her Rhode Island obstetrician, having rubbed jelly across Ada’s belly, turned on the device so that an image appeared on the monitor. A tiny creature swimming inside Ada, its heart beating very quickly. The baby swam. Ada had reached her hand out to touch the screen, stroking the image there in black and white, petting it. A tiny spine, a tiny heart, the bones of the baby’s small feet. Ada could feel the warmth of the monitor underneath her hand as if it were her baby’s blood. “Hello, sweetheart. Hello.”
Part Four
She moves quickly, finding her clothes at the base of the bed. A long sleeved T-shirt, a jean skirt, slip-on leather sandals. She dresses. “Excuse me,” she says without waiting for Chuck’s answer. Ada closes the door behind her and using a chair from her dining set, she catches the bedroom door handle underneath it, wedging the chair, locking the door shut, just like in the movies.
“Chuck?” she turns slowly, speaking to him through the door, fingering the wood of it. “Try the door.”
“Huh?”
“I locked you in there.”
He tries the door handle and the chair holds. “Why?”
She says nothing but listens.
He’s quiet for a long time except for his breathing. “Oh,” he says. “I understand. I shouldn’t have said that about capitalism killing more people than terrorism. I’m sorry.”
“Chuck. You don’t know anything.” It comes out as less than a whisper he doesn’t hear.
“And in some way you’re right to be mad. I know there’s no such thing as Us vs. Them. Everyone cranes their necks about, Where’d all that violence come from? Not us, we say. It was them. But they are us. I mean where does violence really come from? And don’t tell me Cain and Abel. Don’t tell me evil, Ada. That’s bullshit. There’s no such thing as evil,” he says, pausing before he asks, “I mean what’s the difference between a hurricane and a terrorist attack?”
She leans up against the door.
“Not much for the people who don’t survive.” He answers for her.
Her head is pressed on the jamb. “Can you try the door once more? Really try it.”
“Ada? What in the shit are you doing?”
“Just do it. Please.”
He shoves, backs up and shoves again like he’s getting mad, ramming his shoulder up against the wood. The door holds. The chair legs are caught solidly in a crevice between tiles. “I’ve never done that before.”
“Trapped a man in your damn bedroom?”
“Used a chair to lock a door.”
“Well, fuck. Congratulations,” he says. “I’m not sure what to tell you. OK,” he says. “OK.”
“Chuck.” She whispers it, leaning into the door. “Can you hear me?”
He waits a moment. “Yeah.”
She bites into her lip without cutting it, just enough to make the pain shoot down her legs and into her toes. She lowers her voice even further. “I want to tell you something.”
“All right. Yeah. Tell me.” He lets out his breath.
“Terrorists didn’t kill Henry. That’s just what I tell people.”
Chuck is quiet. Ada pictures him, still naked, on the other side of the door.
“They didn’t?”
“No.”
“Then who did?”
Chuck could always just climb out the window. He’s not really locked in. But Ada doesn’t say anything about the window. She doesn’t want him to know that he’s free yet.
“I did,” she tells him, backing away from the door, noticing how, after that, Chuck has very little to say.
The new stream has swollen. It has crested above the lanai. Muddy, debris-filled water is rushing up against the windows. Bending low Ada lights a candle to have a look through the glass. Miniscule grains of sand and dirt glisten in the light. The whole storm in miniature swirls there, tiny golden grains floating in the brown water. This is how the world moves forward, in small moments: Sudden sounds from the street, an underlined phrase in one library book and perhaps it is true that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteorite, a phone call from the human resources department, a shotgun, a winter coat, a broken bottle. Existence in the miniature. Each rock and each bite of food. The brown flecks in the water. The little baby who never even had a name. The lizards and kingbirds. The bugs. But mostly the little baby whose death didn’t mean anything to anyone because it happened on such a large and horrible day.
She hadn’t killed anybody, not even Henry. She’d only wanted to, longing for a bit of violence that would set the world right. Henry’s alive and well back in Rhode Island. Still married to his wife, about to become a father.
Part Five
“Pregnant?” Henry’d said to Ada. “Well, fuck, that wasn’t part of the deal.”
But Ada had never realized that there was a deal.
“Pregnant?’ he’d said. “That’s just about the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, A.” And then he left and never came back and never called or even seemed to ever wonder what happened to the baby she had growing inside her. It wasn’t immediate but soon Ada started having evil thoughts about Henry. Hunting accidents, car wrecks and, though he was too young for a heart attack, Ada wished he wasn’t. Garden shears through the lungs, tractor mishaps, poison, each imagined death torturous and deserved.
She hadn’t meant to fall in love with a married man. In fact, Ada hadn’t even known Henry was married until they’d been together for months and then it was too late for her because, up north, falling in love is like animal husbandry. It’s necessary. She’s going to explain this to Chuck later, when she’s ready to tell him the truth. She’ll let him out and tell Chuck how once it snowed for eight days straight in Rhode Island.
She and Henry would go grocery shopping together. If he ran into to someone who knew his wife, he’d always pretend that he was just helping Ada out, as if there were something wrong with her mind, retarded or something, and he had to take care of her. The floors of the store would be slick from people tracking slush in on their boots. The cashiers kept their parkas on inside. But Henry’d grip the yellow plastic handle of the cart. His big, gentle hands, his wedding ring, and it seemed he was holding onto the whole world, making things steady and even as breath. Ada would see his hands and consider crying or screaming or throwing canned tomatoes, bricks of coffee at his head. She’d turn toward the shelf. Lightbulbs. She’d read the packages, looking for just the right wattage. She’d look down at the linoleum, swallowing the heat behind her eyes and all the while Henry would wait patiently, smiling, so full with all he had. Sometimes she could build up a resolve of hatred for him. “I’ll leave,” she’d think but it would never work. She’d take one look at his camouflage hunting coat and get lost in that familiar pattern, wanting only to rent a video and go home with Henry for the rest of her life.
But that didn’t happen. Henry didn’t want to be a father to her child and he didn’t want to get divorced so he left, and Ada lost the baby after carrying it for six and a half months and even though the doctor said there was a good reason for why she miscarried, Ada knew exactly what the reason was and there was nothing good about it.
The endtable would be just the right weight. She could lift it above her head. She could let the heft of wood have its way with the glass wall. At first there would be just a small crack, a spiderweb that would creep all the way down to the ground, though soon the force of the flood would break through. The window would crash into her living room allowing the water to enter behind it. Bits of glass in the brown flood. Water would flow into the house, down the hallways, into the kitchen, a shallow river in her dining room. It would flow up against the new sofa and into the low cupboards that are still mostly empty except for some old cassette tapes that Ada can’t even listen to anymore because all she has is a CD player. She’d watch the water make its way through the house and up to the bedroom door. Chuck’ll forgive her. He’s made for forgiveness.
Instead Ada opens the slider onto the lanai and steps outside. In the storm, the wind makes it hard to look up for long without losing her balance. The rain drenches her clothes immediately, smelling of salt and people. Maybe Chuck’s shed will come flying through the sky and land on top of her, leaving just her feet sticking out from under like some crushed witch who won’t ever have to tell the truth.
“Sorry,” the emergency room doctor in Rhode Island had said. It was just after nine o’clock in the morning. Ada could hear a number of starlings outside the hospital window, whistling, dive bombing an old pizza crust.
“Sorry?” Ada’d asked the doctor. That was what people said when someone was dead and here was Ada, lying on the gurney, perfectly alive.
Did she want to see the baby’s body before the morgue took it away?
Should they call someone, a husband or a boyfriend perhaps?
She said nothing. The doctor rolled his lips and as he did a frantic candy striper with perfect timing came running down the hall of the hospital, yelling. “We’re under attack! Dear Lord!” The voice drew the doctor out of the room.
Ada waited alone. The asbestos ceiling staring back at her.
“Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god!” another voice passing out in the hallway said. Ada climbed off the gurney.
She held tightly onto her now empty belly and the gauze padding the doctor had stuck up inside of her. In the hall people were crying, men and women, cardiologists. People were in pain. She watched them pass. Their breath was labored, their eyes in shock. It came as a surprise to Ada but all these people seemed to understand that the heart of one childless mother is too small a place to hold all her grief. Ada’s misery had spilled out into hospital, down the corridor, through the emergency doors and across Rhode Island, across the entire country. There was so much of it, sticky and choking. “My baby,” Ada said, still watching from the door. Hugs were being offered to techs, patients, administrators on the verge of collapse. People huddled around the televisions as if the anchors were going to instruct them. “Coming up. How to make death stop hurting us. Stay tuned.” One nurse held his head in his hands, rocking back and forth. Ada walked out into the hall, clasping her gown shut. She stopped to stroke the back of this nurse’s head. “I was her mother,” she told him and then repeated her claim on all this grief. “I was her mother.”
The water has dampened Ada’s clothes, camouflaging her with the oncoming night, darkening the difference between Ada and every other small thing lost in the hurricane. The tiny metallic bits suspended in the storm’s brown water circle and eddy. One by one, millions of miniature universes pass Ada by in the flood, remnants of time and shell and silica. They disappear underneath the house in Florida, all of them, each one, going down, down, down together.
