—
When we first saw this house on its sixty acres, I didn’t fall for the heart-pine floors or the attic fan that kept the house cool all summer without air-conditioning or the magnolias blooming their goblets of white light. I fell for the long swing in the heritage oak over the lake, which had thrilled some child, which was waiting for another. My husband looked at the study, mahogany-paneled, and said under his breath, Yes. I stood in the kitchen and looked at the swing, at the way the sun hit the wood so gently, the promise it held, and thought, Yes. Every day for ten years, watching the swing move expectantly in the light wind of morning, thinking, Yes, the word quietly piercing the diaphragm, that same Yes until the day my husband left, and even after he left, and then even after he died; even then, still hoping.
* * *
—
For a very long time, we sat there like that: my dad’s hand in mine, in the roaring black. I waited for him to speak, but he had always been a man who knew how to groom the silence between people. He smoked, I drank, and the world tired itself out with its tantrum.
I lost awareness of my body. There was only the smoothness of the porcelain beneath me, the warmth of my father’s hand. Time passed, endless, a breath.
Slowly, the wind softened. Sobbed. Stopped. The house trembled and moaned itself back to pitch. A trickle of dawn painted a gray strip under the door. My body returned to itself. I could hear only my heartbeat and rain off the roof when I said, Remember when you used to call your family in Hungary?
You were always so furious, he said. You would scream at me when I tried to talk. Your mother had to take you out to get ice cream every time I wanted to call.
I couldn’t eat it. I just watched it melt, I said.
I know, he said.
I still can’t eat it, I said. I hated that you opened your mouth and suddenly became another person.
We waited. The air felt poached, both sticky and wet. I said, I never thought I could be so alone.
We’re all alone, he said.
You had me, I said.
True, he said. He squeezed the back of my neck, kneaded the knots out.
I listened to the shifting of the world outside. This is either the eye or we’ve made it through, I said.
Well, he said. There will always be another storm, you know.
I stood, woozy, the bottles clanking off my body back into the bathtub. I know, I said.
You’ll be A-OK, he said.
That’s no wisdom coming from you, I said. Everything’s all right for the dead.
When I opened the door to the bedroom, the room was blazing with light. The plywood over the windows had caught the wind like sails and carried the frames from the house. There were rectangular holes in the wall. The creatures had left the room. The storm had stripped the sheets like a good guest, and they had all blown away, save one, which hung pale and perfect over the mirror, saving myself from the sight of me.
* * *
—
The damage was done: three-hundred-year-old trees smashed, towns flattened as if a fist had come from the sun and twisted. My life was scattered into three counties. Someone found a novel with my bookplate in it sunning itself on top of a car in Georgia. Everywhere I looked, the dead. A neighbor child, come through the storm, had wandered outside while the rest of the family was salvaging what remained, and had fallen into the pool and drowned. The high school basketball team, ignoring all warnings, crossed a bridge and was swallowed up by the Gulf. Old friends were carried away on the floods; others, seeing the little that remained, let their hearts break. The storm had stolen the rest of the wine and the butler’s pantry, too. My chickens had drowned, blown apart, their feathers freckling the ground. For weeks, the stench of their rot would fill my dreams. Over the next month, mold would eat its way up the plaster and leave gorgeous abstract murals of sage and burnt sienna behind. But the frame had held, the doors had held. The house, in the end, had held.
On my way downstairs, I passed a congregation of exhausted armadillos on the landing. Birds had filled the Florida room, cardinals and whip-poor-wills and owls. Gently, the insects fled from my step. I sloshed over the rugs that bled their vegetable dyes onto the floorboards. My brain was too small for my skull and banged from side to side as I walked. Moving in the humidity was like forcing my way through wet silk. Still, I opened the door to look at the devastation outside.
And there I stopped, breathless. I laughed. Isn’t this the fucking kicker, I said aloud. Or maybe I didn’t.
Houses contain us; who can say what we contain? Out where the steps had been, balanced beside the drop-off: one egg, whole and mute, holding all the light of dawn in its skin.
FOR THE GOD OF LOVE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
Stone house down a gully of grapevines. Under the roof, a great pale room.
Night had been drawn out by the way the house eclipsed the dawn. Morning came when the sun flared against the hill and suddenly shone in. What had begun as a joke in the dark came clear to the man in the fields who was riding a strange sort of tractor that straddled the vines. He idled, parallel the window, to watch. Amanda thought this was a very French thing to do. The heat in her face was not because of the nudity; rather, the plagiarism. Her idea had come from the tractor’s first squatting pass in the window. She slapped her husband’s stomach below and said, Finish.
A minute later she strode off the bed and went to the window and, leaning for the curtains on each side, pressed her chest against the glass, to tease. The man on the tractor wasn’t a man but a young boy. He was laughing.
In the curtained dark again, they heard the tractor moving off, then the flurries of roosters down in the village.
Nice surprise, Grant said, sliding his hand down her thigh. Hope we didn’t wake them up. He stretched, lazy. Amanda imagined their hosts in the room below: Manfred staring blankly at the wall. Drooling. Genevieve with her passive-aggressive buzzing beneath the duvet.
Who cares, Amanda said.
Well, Grant said. There’s Leo, too.
I forgot, she said.
Poor kid, Grant said. Everyone always forgets about Leo.
* * *
—
Amanda went down the stairs in her running clothes. She passed Leo’s room, then doubled back.
Leo stood on the high window ledge, his wisp of a body pressed against the glass. Here, the frames rattled if you breathed on them wrong. There was rot in the wood older than Amanda herself. Leo was such an intense child, and so purposeful, that she watched him until she remembered hearing once that glass was just a very slow liquid. Then she ran.
He was so light for four years old. He turned in her arms and squeezed her neck furiously and whispered, It’s you.
Leo, she said. That is so dangerous. You could have died.
I was looking at the bird, he said. He pressed a finger to the glass, and she saw, down on the white rocks, some sort of raptor with a short beak. Huge and dangerous even dead.
It fell out of the sky, he said. I was watching the black go blue. And the bird fell. I saw it. Boom. The bad thing, I thought, but actually it’s just a bird.
The bad thing? she said, but Leo didn’t answer. She said, Leo, you are one eerie mammer jammer.
My mom says that, he said. She says I give her the wet willies. But I need my breakfast now, he said, and wiped his nose on the strap of her sports bra.
* * *
—
Leo bit carefully into his toast and Nutella, watching Amanda. She’d never met a child with beady eyes before. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment, usually in middle age. She had to turn away from him and saw the light spread into the pool and set it aglow.
Are you a kid or a mom? Leo said.
Jesus, Leo, she said. Neither. Yet.
Why not? he said.
She didn’t believe in lying to children. This she might reconsider if she had one. Grant and I’ve been too poor, she said.