Ada and Chuck are the same height and the same age, closing in on forty-five. Both are skinny with crab-long limbs and slightly stooped shoulders. Chuck’s hair is shoulder-length and thin, hanging feathered from his face like a beach bum’s. His head is tanned, skin coarse. Every day he wears Bermuda shorts, bright tube socks, and basketball sneakers. The sneakers remind Ada of things boys said in high school: sweater puppies, butterface, pearl necklace. The sneakers are creepy on a grown man, but Chuck gets his wardrobe from a Catholic Worker center where they hand out food and clothes to unfortunates on Saturdays.
Chuck is not technically unfortunate. He could live with Patricia if he wanted to. Instead he lives in his shed, seeing his sister only on Sundays when they sit together in her air-conditioning to watch reality TV, the green anarchist and the real estate lawyer. He probably does his laundry at her house, using one of her scented dryer sheets. He probably has a snack, something really poisonous like a Pop-Tart or a Slim Jim or an Oreo cookie dipped in Fluff, Jif, Reddi-wip.
“Does Patricia have a boyfriend?” Ada jerks her chin toward the main house, a dark thing with a large wraparound porch. Ada has only met Patricia once, though she’d spied her before, having a drink alone underneath yellow bug lights on the porch.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think she likes men. If you know what I mean.”
Ada says nothing.
“I don’t think she likes women either. She likes her job. And God.” He finishes his beer. “You want another?”
For the first time that day the sky suggests the trouble coming from out at sea. The wind begins to pick up, blowing a bit of sand and dirt around. The world gets darker. “Sure.”
In between songs, the radio is relating a top-forty list of the world’s most destructive natural disasters. Andrew. Pompeii. Galveston. Katrina. Then, “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” There’s no rain yet. They sip their beers.
“I heard that maybe one of the reasons we’re having so many storms now is because we cleaned up the environment too much. Pollution used to keep the bigger storms in check.”
“Well, you heard bullshit.” End of that conversation. “Any luck on the job hunt?” he asks.
“Nope.” Ada hasn’t done much since moving south. Each morning she wakes and has a cup of coffee in her living room. The cup empties and Ada moves out to the lanai to watch the ibises and the lizards. She’ll apply a self-tanner to her legs or follow a square of sunlight as it travels across the wall.
“Most people move because of a job,” he says, as if Ada were from outer space instead of Rhode Island and he’s charged with explaining how humans live, what their customs are.
“Not me.”
“No.” Chuck lifts his eyes, revealing a field of white below his pupils. He draws his knees into his chest and looks around himself slowly, to the left and right. “So why’d you come here?”
A body trapped in a burlap sack, the answer squirms. “I already told you.”
One night they sat together drinking until it was dark and Ada told him her reasons for moving. “I had a fiancé who died,” she said.
“I know. Your fiancé. But didn’t that happen years ago?” Ada has only been in Florida for a few months.
She hesitates. “It took me a while to get packed.”
“All right.” Chuck picks at the vegetation underneath his legs. “Shoot,” he says, and then, “All right.”
“Thanks for the beers.” Ada stands. “I’ll see you after the storm?”
“You know they’ve called a county-wide evacuation?”
Ada nods.
“You can just follow the blue signs out on the highway. Head west.”
“You’re not going to evacuate?”
Chuck looks over at Patricia’s house. It’s built like an Austrian chalet, a fortress.
“I’ll think about it.” Ada waves, passing back through the palm trees to her own house, the one with all those windows and nothing but a crawl space for a lost python underneath it.
*
The red light on Ada’s answering machine is blinking. Rhode Island. Foreign grunts from a lost civilization. No one in Florida even knows the number yet. She ignores the message. She has a seat on her new couch, watching the wall of windows as if the feature presentation is about to start there. She eats crackers and peanut butter while she waits. The room darkens some and time passes. The answering machine continues to blink. Outside, branches move in two directions at once, then three directions, shuddering. More time passes. Ada smooths the fabric of the upholstery and the hurricane beats the ocean with 120 mph winds. The lights flicker and brown for a moment, holding the world in pause until the full force of the storm and the sea arrives on cue.
Rain pours down the glass onto the lanai. More time passes. More rain falls. The wind across the roof and gutters snarls while any light left in the sky drains away. Some of the first debris to come flying by the windows is the gray, lower branches of ungroomed palm trees. They are brittle and snap off easily. Their palms act as sails. It’s The Wizard of Oz out there. A number of store circulars and plastic shopping bags fly past. Ada watches for something heavy and terrible, the neighbors’ aboveground pool, a backyard grill, one of the ATVs. She waits for an eighteen-wheeler to drop into her front yard, but the wind is not quite strong enough yet to lift anything heavier than paper, plastic, and dead foliage.
She presses the flashing red button of her answering machine.
“Hi, A. It’s me.” A friend from Rhode Island. “I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else, but Henry’s wife is pregnant. About seven months now. Give me a call.” Then a dial tone. In the dark, she smells the rot of those words. Henry’s wife is pregnant. The storm grows. Ada shuts her eyes.
*
“Hello, sweetheart.” Flashes of black-and-white light behind her closed lids. A squiggle on a static-filled monitor. “Hello, sweetheart.”
*
And when she opens her eyes the power is gone. The clock on the stove is dark and the lamp switch spins around with no results. When she stands, she sees a small stream now running through her backyard, cutting veins in the sandy soil. It flows directly underneath Ada’s house, in one side and out the other. How did that much water get there so quickly? She’s never seen rain like this before. Ada bends her ear to the floorboards, listening for the rush of water below, but instead she hears a knock. “Come in,” she tells the flood.
“Are you all right over here?”
“Chuck?” It’s only been two hours, maybe three, since she last saw him, but the world’s changed.
“Yeah.”
He’s soaked through. He removes his sneakers and socks in the front hall. “Why don’t you get your things together and come over to Pat’s? You’re about to get washed out to sea.”
“Man,” Ada says. “Look at you. You want a towel?” She passes through her bedroom and into the master bath with Chuck following, dripping throughout the house, accustomed to living where the floors are made of sand.
In the bathroom he twists the fabric of his shorts, wringing dampness out onto the tiles. There are two facing mirrors. Chuck moves his arm and a million arms move with him, replicated into infinity. His tanned skin, his surfer hair, his kooky conspiracies that at first don’t make any sense, until quite suddenly they do.