*
I have watched my mother roll over her deck railing and into the water below, dark and seal-like in her diving suit. A light splash, a crown of bubbles—the only evidence that she came from land. She carried an underwater flashlight and the white circle grew fainter the deeper she swam, until there was only a ghostly glow. I have watched her curl up on the cot during a migraine, a white washcloth draped over her eyes like a convalescent in an old war movie. I have watched her hand cut the air as she made a point to her chief engineer, the gesture of a person convinced of her own rightness.
After seeing all this, after watching her become not a dream but a person, I can’t stop myself from imagining my own abandonment.
Here is one version. She wraps me in the white shirt and lays the box on the steps with care. She shivers, pulls her coat sleeves over her hands—how long will it take for someone to find me? She looks into my wide, wet eyes. She strokes my cheek. She kisses my hair, leaving behind a string of spit, a bit of her. She can’t decide what her last gesture should be. What to leave me with. She feels her heart turn into a fist as she walks away. She is certain she will never do anything harder.
Here is another. The shirt is sour with milk. She sets the box down and I whimper and she makes no move to comfort. That list of things a mother can do that are worse than leaving? She can see herself being capable of something like that. She breathes in the cold and looks at the fat pink thing squirming in the box and waits to see what she feels, if she feels anything. She leaves without tears and once the hospital is out of sight, she is light with relief.
After one of these imaginings, I wander over to a window. We’re a week into January. Time has never moved so slowly. I look up through the glass, expecting to see something icy and pale, and am startled to find a dark and terrifying sky.
*
A blizzard, the first to come this winter. The snowfall gets so thick, I can’t make out the flat fields surrounding us. That afternoon, there is no sunset. There is only gusting snow and hissing wind and dark slivers of sky through the bars. We are plunged straight into the deepest night. On the speakers, the Pathologist summons the Floor Groups to the Common Room, where Dr. Bek and the nurses have gathered.
Dr. Bek reviews our inclement weather protocols. If we lose power, the emergency generators will come on. If we lose power, we should congregate in our communal spaces and keep each other warm with the heat of our bodies. We should stay away from the windows. We should not go wandering into hallways and stairwells. This is not the time to get lost.
The patients glance at the Common Room window with nervous eyes. Through the bars the sky looks like black paint being mixed around in a can.
In Massachusetts, I have seen snow that falls as heavy as a driving rain and drifts as tall as me. I have seen winds that shred power lines and uproot trees. I think I am prepared.
Dr. Bek asks if we have questions. Hands grab at the air.
“Are we going to die?” a patient from Floor Group three calls out.
He blinks rapidly, like he has something in his eye. “No one is going to die,” he says.
*
We lose power in the middle of dinner. The lights flicker and flicker and then go out. We sit in darkness, our trays in front of us, our food growing cold, and listen to the windows rattle behind the bars. We hear a humming and the lights come back on, but they are not the lights we are used to. They are a dull gold and they shine out from the corners, so some tables are trapped in a bubble of light, others shadowed.
We finish our dinner, our fingers moving dumbly in the partial light. I wrap my fist around a plastic fork and poke at a kidney-shaped piece of chicken. I can hear the staff breathing on the borders of the room. Floor Groups four and six leave their tables and begin collecting trays. Our table is cloaked in shadow, so they forget all about us. After dinner, the patients stay where they are, afraid to leave the enclosure of the Dining Hall. The faces around me are dark glimmers.
I’m sitting across from the twins. They have started a word association game, where they take turns calling out things that have to do with Hawaii. This is the memory trick Dr. Bek has invented for them. Whoever can keep it up the longest wins.
“Magma!”
“Lokelani!”
“Sugarcane!”
“What does the winner get, anyway?” I ask after Christopher wins for the fourth time in a row, clearly in no danger of forgetting.
“The distinction of having superior knowledge,” he says.
I hear the clank of a tray falling. Somewhere in the Dining Hall a patient is laughing. On the speakers, the Pathologist is making a sound that reminds me of the ocean noises on the video I watched at the museum.
What was I really looking for that day?
I overhear Olds say that when she was growing up in Michigan, they called weather events like this “silver storms.” I let that phrase linger with me. I imagine icicles hanging like tentacles from power lines and trees.
*
Once a thunderstorm knocked out power at the Stop & Shop. An emergency generator switched on, but the electronic lock on the manager’s office failed. A cashier went in and stole the manager’s computer and never came back to the store. If only that had been my shift. In the Dining Hall, I start to get ideas.
No one notices when I slip away from my Floor Group, into the cold hall. Faint lights run along the sides of the ceiling. My footsteps sound like falling rain. I’m halfway to the stairwell when I hear a scream spill out of the Dining Hall. I am afraid of what patients might become willing to do in the near dark.