Chloe’s boyfriend, Rafi, admires Ginny. That’s what Chloe tells Ginny. He’s coming into the city soon from Westchester, and he wants to meet Ginny in real life. Ginny smiles shyly. Can’t wait. Ginny adores the way Chloe and Rafi sometimes look at her, the moments when they appraise her and find her more than adequate. It doesn’t happen often. Mostly Chloe looks at Rafi, and Rafi looks at them both but rarely at Ginny alone. Chloe and Rafi Skype privately and then Ginny’s allowed in.
Ginny’s never had friends like these before. They don’t want to talk about television. Chloe sometimes talks about poetry. A moment of approval happens when she learns that Ginny’s dad is a poet. She tries to buy his book, but it’s out of print and Ginny doesn’t offer her one of the hundred copies from a box in the basement. She regrets this, because Chloe finds Nathan Palm’s blog. As she scrolls down, her brief respect for Ginny evaporates. She sends the link to Rafi and the two of them begin to analyze the blog on Gchat as if it were a book of poetry, except it’s about eclectic doorknobs and feng shui. They laugh at a video of Ginny’s father lovingly polishing a candlestick with a rag. Chloe says, “It’s like your dad thinks he’s hot. It’s so funny when guys think they’re hot.”
Then they try to find Ginny in the blog. They ask about an elbow. A bare foot on black-and-white bathroom tile. Fingers and knuckles wrapped around a fork. Is that you? Is that you? They want to catch Ginny, but Ginny says, No, no, that’s not me, until she finds the back of her head in a post about spackle holes.
“But I didn’t give my permission,” Ginny says.
Chloe and Rafi are about to attack Ginny for her complicity in her father’s lameness, but Chloe senses a shift in the group dynamic and signals Rafi to stand down. Ginny takes a breath and instructs Chloe and Rafi to write comments; Ginny will dictate. They each open a dialogue window and wait with fingers poised to attack. As anonymous Internet beings, Chloe and Rafi ask insensitive questions about Marion. Nathan happens to be updating his blog, and so when they publish, they are able to watch him try to respond in real time. He believes these new comments have stumbled accidentally onto the truth. He tries to be charming to evade answering. Ginny’s eyes narrow. She stands behind Chloe with her weight equally distributed on both feet and watches her father lie. “This will hurt,” Ginny says.
Electricity
A storm is going to visit the borough. Brown packages fill the foyer until Nathan finally rips into each one with a butter knife and pulls the contents from the packing peanuts. Bottled water, canned goods, duct tape, batteries, candles, even walkie-talkies. Jane and the missing boy watch from the landing, communicating and laughing. They both feel the storm but want to see what it’s made of.
Jane’s father wants to burrow deep into the earth. Jane should explain to him what the missing boy has explained to her: that resisting the force of the storm makes the damage worse. Better to let the storm water in. Expect disaster to your infrastructure. All the deliveries in the world will not protect this family from wind and rising water.
When the hurricane comes, the missing boy says, the sky will go impossibly dark and light at the same time. There is electricity up there. The birds will go mad. Dogs will bark. Cats will hide. It’s very compelling, and it’s powered by the ocean. You can feel it, the ocean above.
But Jane can tell that Nathan no longer looks up. She asks her father, “Can we go to the beach someday? Can we take the train to the beach?” Nathan looks at Jane with confusion. He doesn’t understand going to the beach anymore. Daddy is an inside dad. Daddy is no longer an outside dad. The missing boy goes to the front door and opens it for Nathan, and Nathan doesn’t see. He’s breaking down cardboard boxes to make room for other cardboard boxes. He’ll ask Ginny to take them out to the curb.
The Missing Boy
The boy’s body is found on Coney Island Beach. It washes ashore in pieces, which isn’t normal for drowning victims. “What exactly disjoined the boy may never be understood,” the detective says to the mother. “The ocean did too much damage. No, you shouldn’t view the body.” She asks how long her boy was in the water and how long he was on a train. The detective can’t answer, and the mother doesn’t know what answer she wants. Perhaps she wants to know the day her boy died. What she was doing on that day.
The mother is going to sue. Her boy never ran away before. It wasn’t like him to run away. It took the school half an hour to notice he was missing, and in those minutes her boy traveled miles. The city is on her side, and so the city promises that it will pay but still prepares to mount an impenetrable defense. The mother did not check to see if her boy was in the classroom; she left too quickly. The public school system and the NYPD can do only so much when a woman is a bad mother. The posters are taken down from the subway walls in the night. The city forgets.
Hurricane Preparations
In his office, Nathan is confused by the comments on his blog. Some remarks he made seem to have inspired strange reactions. He’s lost control of the tone.
Why’d your wife leave? Were you a bad husband?
He writes, I mean, I tried my best.
What if your best wasn’t good enough?
You spend a lot of time thinking about home repair. Maybe that got in the way of your best?
I don’t know why she left.
>So you weren’t paying attention.
This is an article about succulents. Do you have a question about succulents?
>>I don’t care about succulents.
Nathan tries to reason with the comments, get them back on track, and responds to Ginny, Chloe, and Rafi, who are on their respective computers, making life hard for him. It’s what they are doing to preoccupy themselves as they Gchat about where to meet in real life.