The e-mail went out at noon of the probability for Sudden Weather—this moniker a new subcategory of disaster coined in the Midwest from the microbursts and combustible clouds that magically appeared out of nothing, like Dorothy’s tornado, Sudden Weather now one of the many disasters listed on the New York preparedness website.
Shelter-in-Place activated, the e-mail subject line read. The text, as per the directive of Wayne Arden, the new interim, interim principal of Progressive K–8, a series of bullet points. Declarative sentences get to the heart of the matter, Wayne Arden had said at his Introductory Wine & Cheese, sparsely attended by the Applicant families and Vicky and Matty Tange. He stood in front of a PowerPoint and slowly read the declarative sentences, as if the gathered did not know how to read them themselves. He read the lines as if they were poetry. He had written them earlier with the help of Bernice Stilton, she the brains and balls of the operation, he understood from the start.I
Know that precautions have been taken.
Know that Progressive K–8’s Shelter-in-Place is in place.
Know that your children are safe with us.
Know that your children have been drilled.
Know that thousands of dollars have been spent.
Know that we are doing all this to keep your children alive.
This may actually be the big one, Jules says; he’s consulting his device although connections are fuzzy. The new mayor sounds nervous. He says it’s best to get out. If you choose to stay, he can no longer protect you. If you choose to stay, the mayor has said, good luck. Jules has heard all this on the radio; he passes along the news as Marie pours Elizabeth more wine and winks. Elizabeth smiles and closes her eyes, trying to calm her heart; in times like this she pictures the boat her father drove over the rough lake toward Grizzly Cove, the two of them inside it, the whitecaps swamping them in fishy lake water, drowning them, practically. “What are you made of?” her father had shouted into the wind. “Show me what you’re made of, Lizzie!” he had shouted.II
Shelter can be had for a song at PS 11, where the Gifted and Talented kindergartners—the ones who last week sold the trucked-in vegetables from the farm in Staten Island on the school steps, their handmade signs adorable, their enthusiasm contagious: ZUCCHINI! LETTUCE! STRAWBERRIES!—unpack the prepacked emergency kits: fresh towels and toiletries they will hand to their frantic neighbors when the rain begins. The rain is beginning and no one quite knows what will happen next. This may be a real emergency, someone says on the broken, staticky television Larry keeps on in Marie’s kitchen. He turned it on for company as he packed the last of Marie’s kitchen things. Might as well pack, he says. Keep busy, he says.
The sailboats in the Hudson tear against their moorings while above them helicopters drone, here and over the East River, the shoals of Staten Island and the New Jersey boardwalks, charred and still burning from last year’s fires.
“This is ridiculous,” Jules says, turning off his device. He can no longer get any bars, the system overloaded.
“What about the TV?” Larry says. He has bitten his fingernails to the quick and now works his cuticles.
“A joke,” Jules says.
“It works,” Larry says.
Mayors sit around a wooden table, arguing.
“It’s a rerun,” Jules says. “That’s Koch. Koch is dead. This is something else entirely, a different emergency.”
“I wish I could understand what they’re saying,” Larry says.
“It’s a rerun!” Jules says.
“It’s soothing,” Larry says. He sits very still, watching the old mayors who admit they cannot predict what’s coming next discuss what’s coming next.
I. Yet never in her lifetime would she forgive herself for what she believed was the responsibility she bore for the sudden departure of Margaret Constantine, PhD, for New Zealand, a woman she considered a friend at an age when friendships seemed almost too much to bear, given the accumulations and disappointments in a life, given what would eventually be lost. Many nights she returned to the drinks the two had shared at that sticky bar. How she had told Dr. Constantine about her oldest boy, Lenin, and dancing with Frank Sinatra, and how the next morning, or maybe the one after that, she had shown Margaret Constantine the way to Google Earth: Go on, she’d urged. Give it a try.
She had stood behind Constantine and watched as she typed in Ariel’s address, watched as the camera pivoted on the satellite in the very dark of space, above the atmosphere, even, though she couldn’t be sure of that, but somewhere far, far away, as high as the stars in their distant, fiery places, though what we see of any of it is already in the past. She and Margaret Constantine had watched as the camera zoomed in on what looked like brown swatches of nothing and then rows and rows of houses and then what looked like water and forests and then, finally, a bungalow of sorts, something built from wood and painted white, the banana fronds and ferns that shaded its front walk grown to almost the size of the house itself. The screen door looked propped open by a brick, or a rock; within the house barely perceptible movement and shifting shadows. Perhaps the play of all that vegetation or perhaps a person—her daughter?—sitting at a table, in a chair.
“Should I go?” Margaret Constantine had asked. And to this Bernice had said, “You must go.”
II. The years pass quickly, decades, even, accumulations of conversations and interruptions and good dinners and drinks, moves to houses first empty then filled to bursting—Marie’s brownstone to a brick colonial in Rye, higher ground, where the family suffers the rest of Ben’s teenage years.
He smashes the car against the flagpole and walks away with just a scrape: a miracle or someone watching over him. His first date a girl from a faraway Asian country he will grow to love and marry the day after graduation.
Elizabeth and Pete follow their son and his new wife to Canada given the forecasts, offering to babysit the grandchildren, three, every chance they get, Pete especially adept at getting the grandchildren to sleep, Elizabeth listening to the stories he spins out of thin air, leaning against the doorway, watching him, surprised each time a little by her love for this man—for their fiftieth anniversary she gives him a novel, The Possessed. The youngest grandson is Elizabeth’s particular favorite, a boy who will not look her in the eye or speak but who, every once in a while, claps and squeals at the top of his lungs. He is a handsome boy who grows to be the spitting image of his grandfather.
Outside the drought turns the green hills and the green valleys to mud and then dust, crumbling the earth to so many sand cakes. You used to call them sand cakes, remember? Elizabeth says. The old sandbox Mrs. Frank let you use in the backyard in Chelsea? She takes a walk along the cliff with Ben. She leans on his arm as he steadies her. Your father would have liked the view, she tells him, and her son says, He would have very much. The view is the Pacific Ocean, as constant as the North Star or the Insomniac on the ninth floor. Do you remember the Insomniac on the ninth floor? Elizabeth asks. When we lived in Chelsea? That building in back—the ugly one: he never turned his light off. Not once. Any time of night you’d look out and see the ninth-floor light. Mrs. Frank, do you remember her? Marie? Lovely woman. She called him the Insomniac of the ninth floor. She let you use the sandbox.
I remember her, Ben says, steadying Elizabeth over a particularly deep fissure. There are signs everywhere: AT YOUR OWN RISK. FALLING BANK.
Falling bank? Ben had said earlier. It should say, Failing bank.
Failing bank, Elizabeth said. That’s funny, she said. Now she grips Ben’s arm to get over the particularly deep fissure. Everything is at their own risk; there are no longer any protections in the field, landscapes awash with disclaimers. The National Park Service condo project, even, she has read, requires a certificate of noninsurance before money can change hands: fire, flood, tornado, earthquake. The Pacific Ocean roils and froths below, breaking over the rocky outcrops and small islands just beyond, the remnants of Highway 1 that appear only at low tide.
“Maybe there were just too many ghosts,” she says. “Maybe he just needed to keep the lights on.”
“Who?” Ben says.
“The Insomniac of the ninth floor,” she says.
“Maybe,” Ben says, his hand on her bony elbow, negotiating. “Maybe.”