CLARA
I wake to a knocking sound rapping on a wooden pane and, moving sleepily down the wooden steps, greet the flower delivery driver at the front door. It’s the third time this week that he’s come, his arrival always just shy of 8:00 a.m. Too early. He must sit outside in his car, waiting for what he deems an appropriate time to knock. Nobody wants flowers when a loved one has died, but still they come, these flowers, awakening me this time from sleep. I thank the deliveryman, quite certain he’s grown tired of seeing me in my pajamas again and again, hair a mess, sleep in my eyes, mouth repugnant with morning breath. I close the door, staring out the window at the evidence of last night’s storm.
It’s everywhere.
Tree limbs have been wrenched from the arms of trees and tossed capriciously across the earth; a half block down the street, a power line is down, lying recumbent on the road. I reach for the chandelier’s light switch and turn it on; the electricity is out. It will take hours for the electric company to remedy the situation, hours while Felix and Maisie and I have no access to light, to coffee, to TV. Important things. Across our lawn, the remains of an overturned garbage bin are strewn: a box, a fast-food bag, an empty container of cat litter; shingles are missing from the roof of a neighbor’s home. There are puddles on the street, which little perching birds bathe in, splishing and splashing their wings in the turbid rainwater and then, like Harriet the dog, shaking them out to dry. The sun is out, trying unavailingly to dry the earth. It will take time. A red-winged blackbird sits beside the puddle, watching me through glass.
I take a peek out the back door, beneath the pergola, to see if the man’s muddy footprints are still there. They’re not there. They’ve been rinsed away by the storm, as I convince myself that they were there, that it wasn’t only a dream. Nick’s muddy shoes beside the front door are proof of this, as is his rain jacket looped over a door handle. I didn’t make it up.
There is evidence of the storm inside the house, as well. Harriet, terrified of thunder, has defecated on the rug. She’s taken to chewing the arm of the sofa, too, and Nick’s forgotten gym shoe so that pieces of fabric upholstery and synthetic fibers litter the room like the garbage on the lawn. Harriet’s muddy paw prints are trekked across the foyer floor.
In Nick and my bed upstairs, Maisie, up half the night cringing at the wind and the rain, still sleeps, the door to the bedroom now pulled to. In the middle of the night I heard her crying and the muted rustles of no, no, no, no, no as she kicked angrily and unconsciously at the sheet. With the air conditioner out of commission, and the windows closed to stave off the rain, the house has become unbearably hot. Throughout the sleepless night I watched the thermostat move up to eighty-four degrees, listening as fifty mile per hour wind gusts rattled the home. As we slept, the sweat collected between my legs, making them viscous like hands coated with a thick emollient, the thin sheet clinging to my legs until Maisie in her restlessness yanked it from my skin.
And then I lay in bed, still sleepless, trying to remember what it felt like when Nick lay beside me, the sound of his ever-so-soft snore and the impression of his body, pressed against me, arms, torso and legs parallel to mine.
But I found that I could no longer remember.
Our town doesn’t have the best track record for good weather. Twenty-some years ago, a tornado plundered our community, putting us on the map. Nobody had heard of our little town before the twister hit, an F5 that lifted houses right off their foundations and catapulted cars across town, killing dozens of people and injuring hundreds in its path. Now our town is synonymous with tornado just as New Orleans is with hurricane. I walk throughout the house picking up the mess left behind in Harriet’s terrified trail, feeling grateful it was just a thunderstorm and nothing more. It comes as no surprise to me that when she awakens, Maisie doesn’t want to leave the safe confines of our home. But with the electrical outage comes an advantage; without electricity there can be no microwave pancakes and no TV: no SpongeBob, no Max & Ruby. Instead, there is the promise of a glazed cruller from Krispy Kreme and a trip to the park. And so, reluctantly she comes, changing out of her pajamas and into a pair of soft cotton shorts and a sleeveless T, and the four of us settle into the car, Felix, Maisie, Harriet and me. To keep her content, I hand Maisie my phone.
It’s not yet ten in the morning, and so after we gather our donuts and coffee, I make the decision to drive out to Harvey Road. It isn’t a thought that comes to me in that moment, but rather something I’d been thinking about all night, tossing and turning as the summer storm raged outside. And now, it returns to me as I drive through town and toward the site of Nick’s crash, the familiar scene creeping slowly into view. The horse properties manifest themselves on the sides of the street, along the straightaway before that dreadful bend. They are large homes, renovated, or modern farmhouses with horse stalls, barns, fenced pastures and an assortment of other outbuildings I can’t identify, placed in an unincorporated part of town. It’s different here than it is elsewhere around town. There is a distinct lack of commercial structures: no stores, no gas stations, no water towers. Everywhere I look, I see only houses and trees, houses and trees, and of course, horses. There is a church, a singular Presbyterian church abutting a small cemetery, which appears oddly welcoming with its wrought-iron gates and its bushes and shrubbery. The streets are narrow and empty, and as I open my window and let it in, the air smells fresh and clean but tinged with the distinct metallic remains of last night’s rainfall.