• sea like a shroud

I’M GOING TO LOOK AWAY, soon.

I’ll have to look away and trust you’ll understand.

There’s a manner of telling what happened but description is not it. The act of describing is supposed to heal and we are exhorted to “talk it through,” but sometimes that won’t hold. Friends encouraged me to try it and I did. I tried with these friends and with a solemn lay pastor and a lay therapist which was the only kind nearby. How well they all meant. I valued them and tried to talk it through. When the moment comes I’m going to look away.

I can tell you Lark woke early and went to the shop as usual. That I rose somewhat later and moved through the house in the shadowy ease a person wants after revelry: gathering plates, glasses, bowls, flatware, running the sink full, resting my hands in warm water. At some point I thought grumpily about Kellan, who’d helped set up only to bail on Lark’s evening, then came back late and got stoned, his machine humming in the floorboards. It made me kind of mad. At noon I put together a toasted cheese and ate it in the stillness and only then clomped up the stairs to wake him.

I wanted him to help spade up the garden. The weather would soon moderate. Lark had sprouted tomatoes from seed weeks earlier. Our plot was large and spading it was a big job, usually one I did alone.

But Kellan was gone and this time really.

The blankets were heaped and his canisters gone and his child’s cardboard suitcase missing from under the bed. No sign no note no indication. I went to the window. No Ranchero. I admit sharp disappointment. Bitterness no doubt. Against judgment I went and got attached. You’d like a note at least. I shouldn’t have been surprised but was. Kellan just seemed like that paranoid kid brother I thought would stay despite his dread of pursuit.

Of course he was gone.

Stepping out on the small balcony that hung off the attic, I looked upstreet and down and out to sea. A dog whimpered somewhere. A pair of ravens muttered in the leaning fir. Someone had a chainsaw running not close enough to annoy.

Icebridge moved at normal low velocity.

•

“Maybe he just discerned your gardening plans,” Lark said. She was making light, trying to cheer me up. She and Maudie were the only ones in the shop. “I’d leave, too, if you sprung that spade business on me the morning after a big soiree.”

“He skipped the soiree. It was after noon. Also, I didn’t spring it on him. I didn’t think of it myself until halfway up the stairs.”

Lark put a hand on my arm. “Your feelings are bruised. I’m sorry, but didn’t he talk about leaving all the time?”

“He did,” I agreed.

“Did we drive him away?”

“No.”

“He was paid up till the end of the month,” she said. Lark kept all the ledgers.

I was quiet. Gently she said, “On the plus side, I will like having the house to ourselves.”

“I did come to think of him as a kid brother,” I admitted.

“Which he has completely lived up to,” said Maudie, joining us. “A young man lives in your house, eats your food, does a few chores to keep you sunny, then vanishes without a word. That’s the definition of the term.”

“Is it?”

Maudie was winding up to expand on kid brothers when the atmosphere perceptibly darkened. Outside and in—the bulbs in a pair of sconce fixtures beside the door browned and flickered.

“Oh my,” Lark said.

“Hang on,” said Maudie.

I opened my mouth but the wind cut me off. Normally wind gives audible notice, you hear it coming. Not these lunatic microbursts. They hit like a slap. When they do you always think the world might not recover. Overhead something bounced on the roof and took flight. There was the sustained high note of a vibrating guy wire. We peered at the yellowing sky. Happily, the bursts don’t last long. People emerge afterward to estimate wind speeds. A hundred ten, a hundred thirty. There used to be a wind gauge bolted to the fire station, but it blew off into the lake.

We stepped back from the window. The burst shrieked in the crannies. A Wellington boot cartwheeled by, then a peeled-back quarter panel from somebody’s car. A potted pine tree scraped upright down the sidewalk at a fast pace. A flock of shingles tore through. Then a red dog resembling a fox went skidding down the street baring her teeth at the wind and Maudie shouted, “There goes Vixen!”

Vixen barked soundlessly as she slid out of view.

A minute later the storm was past. We made a cursory check of the shop, but its old bank walls shrugged off all weathers. Maudie said, “Poor Vixen. A real fox would find a hole to crawl into. I better go find her.”

I caught Lark’s glance and offered to help.

Icebridge looked swept. The pavement was clear of sand and debris. Everything loose had flown or tumbled or slithered east. While we called Vixen and investigated backyards and alleys where she might’ve found shelter, I wondered about damage to our house. It had stood up to many a burst, but you never know.

We looked for the dog for almost two hours. She was an older creature and Maudie’s constant companion. We started where she’d slid past the window and followed the street until it ended a block shy of the water. The shallows were thick with bobbing papers, tree limbs, items of laundry. No dogs. Some kids were out scavenging after the blow and we enlisted them, then worked back to Maudie’s on cross streets. I finally left her in her kitchen stirring up brownies, hoping to feed them to the kids if they returned with Vixen.

It’s hard to describe now, the walk home.

This part I’ll talk out.

There was no sense of dark approaching, except for a set of spreading clouds and the smell of incipient rain. I saw a tall man slurping peaches from a tin can at the former bus stop. He was long shinned and gaunt and bent double over the fruit. It was easy to imagine him suddenly unfolding to a great winged height.

Reaching our yard, I was briefly glad. All was right. Nothing had blown off. The spade stuck out of the ground where I had left it. All siding and shingles remained.

Inside the house, nothing was right.

I entered the kitchen to drawers pulled free, to emptied cupboards and chaos underfoot. Confusion struck. At first I blamed the storm. Had I left windows open? Water dripped somewhere. I moved through on numb feet. The sofa lay on its back. It sank in that people had done this. Lark’s overstuffed chair was slashed. I called her name but no answer. Maybe still at the shop.

The stairs were scattered with pieces of clothing and up I went at a run.

More wreckage—dressers turned, closets gutted, our mattress an obscenity. Even the plumbing was sacked. Water pooled, looking for an exit.

I found myself in the attic hall.

The bedroom door half-open.

I saw her foot, twisted and wrong—Lark’s bare ankle, not itself.

A spray of glass, the corner of a tipped chair.

I saw the handle of a tool I would soon hear described as a “lump hammer.” It is what it sounds like.

I entered and knelt. Gathered her up, stood wavering, sank back to the floor.

Look out the window, will you? At the clouds, ripped at the edges and moving fast. The sea like a shroud. The eaves bare of ravens, every bird flown.