We Are Unprepared (23 page)

TWENTY

I CLIMBED DOWN
from a rickety ladder leaning precariously against our house and wiped the sweat dripping from my face with a quivering arm. I was only halfway through my task of nailing sheets of plywood over our windows and it felt like all the muscles in my body were going to give way. It had been almost a full day since we learned at the Isole Festival that The Storm was on its way and everything had changed since then. The sky was the darkest blue I had ever seen while still technically being daylight and the wind was so unrelenting that trees were beginning to fall already. The wind was loud, too, screaming like a banshee foretelling doom. It was impossible to forget for even a moment that The Storm was approaching.

While we all tended to our most immediate tasks of grocery shopping, boarding the windows, charging batteries and bringing wood in, we also consumed news. The hurricane coming from the Gulf Coast had made landfall and was at that moment approaching New York City. My internet connection was still working then, so I set up two computers on our kitchen table where cable news anchors could be seen yelling through torrential rains up and down the coast. Millions of people had already lost power in the Mid-Atlantic and the White House was declaring one state after another in an official state of emergency. There were rumors that congressional offices in DC were beginning to flood with people trapped inside. It was impossible to keep track of the horror stories suffered at hospitals, nursing homes and homeless shelters, and already, lists of names of missing people were circulating online, growing by the hour. At first, the fear felt familiar. Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy and Irene had brought varying degrees of terror to the East Coast in previous years and we knew what to expect. But that feeling of familiarity vanished quickly as every weather record was broken and it became clear that the devastation ahead was greater than anything we'd ever lived through. Our fears were no longer borne out of memory, but of imagination, which was limitless and terrifying.

I walked inside to get a glass of water and answer the ringing phone. It was our landline and I barely recognized its alarming trill at first. Cell phone networks were so jammed up that I had retired my smartphone to a drawer and told our families to use the house number. I knew it would be my parents calling and one of my last chances to talk to them before the storm arrived.

“Hi, Mom,” I said into the receiver, working to sound cheerful.

“Ash? Hi, honey. How is everything there?”

It was a relief to hear my mother's familiar, concerned voice, and I had the overwhelming urge to burst into tears and let her lavish me with maternal care, but I resisted. Like any parent of several children, my mother's energy was divided, but the division had become increasingly more unbalanced since my brother's addiction recovery in those years. I knew without asking that he would be staying with them for The Storm and I resented him for it. Maybe I should have resented her for it, too, but I didn't, and we weren't close enough in those days to have the luxury of fighting. I wanted more of her than she could give and keeping a distance made it easier to manage that desire. How much should a grown man need his mother, I wondered. What about in extraordinary circumstances?

“I'm okay, Mom, thanks. We're just battening down the hatches. What about you guys?”

“Oh, Dad is buzzing around fixing this and that. I don't know what on earth he's doing, but I suppose it's good to be prepared.”

She sounded distracted. “Never mind about us, Ash,” she went on. “Are you and Pia okay up there? Once The Storm starts, you're going to be really far from everything. Do you want to come down and stay with us?”

It wasn't a real offer, but I liked to hear it.

“Thanks, but we're fine, Mom. I don't think there's anywhere to hide from it now. We probably all should have taken a European vacation this week instead of sticking around.”

“Oh, I could never have done that,” she said. “This is our home, Ash. It wouldn't feel right to just run away. I guess I sound like one of those crazy people you see on TV who refuse to leave the beach right before a hurricane or something. But maybe they aren't so crazy.”

“Everyone's crazy now,” I said.

“So we're all the same—that's nice.”

The conversation wasn't going quite as I expected. I assumed my mother would be clearheaded about The Storm, offering sound advice and parental comfort, but she was somewhere else. There was a distant falseness to her voice that I didn't know or like.

“Mom, the phone lines are probably going to go out for a long time and we won't be able to contact each other. Let's promise not to freak out when that happens. I will be in touch as soon as I can after that, so just assume that all is well.”

“Okay,” she said quietly. “That's a good idea.”

Silence for a moment.

“Honey, things are all going to be fine,” she said. “They always overreact about weather and I'm sure this one will just blow past us like the rest of them.”

It was unclear whether she believed this or not, but it seemed an important theory to her. This was how my mother talked: “they” were the nonspecific authorities somewhere else that overreacted about everything, and the rest of us just waited for things to “blow past.” My parents were incapable of outsize reactions, a helpful quality for making young children feel safe and secure, but an utterly irrational one on that day. This compulsory need to believe in the absolute resilience of life as we knew it bothered me immensely as I held the receiver to my ear. It didn't apply any longer and I expected her to know that.

“Mom, this storm is going to be bad. You should take the forecast seriously. Do you guys have everything you need?”

“Oh, you know us,” she said. I could feel her waving me off through the phone. “We don't need much.”

This was true. But all of her stalwart bromides were meaningless then, reckless even, in the face of real danger. I wanted to reach through the phone and shake her by her small shoulders, tell her to wake up. But I didn't have anything to offer her that would make her safer or more prepared. We were too far apart, and I was as helpless as she was.

“Um, okay. Anyhow, I love you and Dad. Be safe.”

“I love you, too, honey.”

And that was it, until the next time I would hear or not hear from my parents after The Storm. I knew I should call my siblings, too, but the conversation with my mother had been exhausting enough, so I decided to put that chore off for the time being. What were other families doing at that moment, I wondered. Was this the sort of situation in which extended families all came together for a big communal survival experience? No, not likely, I concluded. Maybe in other parts of the world, but not in America. We hunker down on our own here.

“I'm going back out for peanut butter. I think we need to have as much peanut butter as possible,” Pia said as she walked past me in the kitchen without a glance.

Ever since she had found me at the Isole Festival with Maggie's hands in mine, Pia had been icy. We hadn't talked about what she'd seen or her prepper convention. I supposed neither of us wanted to know. It was all business at our house and, for once, I was relieved to receive her laundry list of disaster preparation chores. She gave me orders and I executed them. This was a new strategy for Pia, one that required more restraint than I knew she was capable of and that frightened me all the more. Was there an enormous blowup in our future? Some cruel form of retaliation? My feelings on this were so jumbled that I worked to stay busy to avoid thinking hard about the state of things between us. To acknowledge it would have opened doors I wasn't prepared to step through—sadness, rage or, worst of all, maybe relief. I didn't want to know. I wanted peace and survival for the immediate future.

“Okay, thanks,” I yelled after her before the front door shut. “Maybe some more black beans, too.”

I watched her hustle quickly to the car and realized it had started raining. Shit, the windows. I needed to get those done. I went back outside and repositioned the ladder beneath another bedroom window. My body felt weak as I hauled a new sheet of plywood up the ladder, nail gun holstered around my waist. I hadn't done anything that physical for that long in months and it was approaching excruciating. Still, I relished the feeling of fear mixed with urgency. It seemed so purposeful and managed to displace all other nagging emotions. I vowed to take on more home improvement projects after all this was over—a thought that I knew to be ludicrous even then, as if things would be pretty much the same on the other side of The Storm.

The rain was coming harder now as I finished one window and set the ladder up under another. My strategy was to hold the plywood against the window with my left knee and hand while I shot nails through to the outer border of the sill with my right. It seemed to hold okay, with lots and lots of nails, but because the plywood sheets were perfect squares, two inches of uncovered window still peeked out at the top and bottom. I couldn't gauge how much of a problem I should consider this, but I had no other options and it was raining hard, so my system had to suffice.

It must have taken me a long time to finish the last window because Pia pulled into the driveway just as I dismounted the ladder and ran to get out of the rain. She was right behind me with bulging canvas bags of whatever could still be found at the food co-op. I stood in the entryway and peeled each piece of soaked clothing off my shivering body until only my boxer briefs remained, though they were soaked, too.

“Do you think we should start a fire?” Pia asked through wet shivers.

“Let's wait,” I said. “We should save the cut wood until we really need it. I'm going to take a hot shower.”

She nodded and began putting groceries away, and I could see that this was the answer she was hoping for. It was not the time for luxuries like crackling fires. No discussion needed—not that either of us wanted discussion. Anyhow, the rain was coming down so hard that we would have had to raise our voices if there was more to be said.

The wind had begun to make a fierce whistling sound outside. We could hear it pick up the raindrops and send them hammering against one side of the house, and then briefly release its hold, only to swirl around again until another wall of rain slammed into a different side of the house. If there was a pattern to it, we couldn't tell, which produced a menacing sense that we were being enveloped. Like Dorothy's in
The Wizard of Oz
, our home felt as if it could be picked up and whirled around, then dropped someplace else altogether. This effect was compounded by the fact that our windows were now boarded up, so aside from the uncovered strips of dim light peeking through the tops and bottoms of the windows, we couldn't see outside.

I jogged upstairs into the frigid bathroom and let the water run until it was scalding. Thunder roared outside. Was it true that you shouldn't bathe during thunderstorms or was that an old wives' tale? I couldn't remember, but it seemed best to get in and out before the weather deteriorated further. This was it; this was The Storm, I thought to myself. We had gone through so many false starts in those months, but we recognized the real thing when it arrived. The sky was darker and the rain was more forceful. Most notably, the authorities were unambivalent: it's here and it's worse than we thought, they told us. The Storm is upon us.

I let the hot water pour over my scalp until the chill was gone and my head started to feel fuzzy. In the days that followed, I would think of that shower, re-creating the sensation in my mind when the stink and the cold got to be too much. What an underappreciated luxury it is to shower at one's will. I was unburdened then by the cost of such a luxury, which we all mistook for a right. As I stepped out of the bathroom, in my soft, silly sweatpants and an oversize flannel shirt, I had already moved on.

When I went back downstairs, Pia had poured two mason jars of cabernet and was sautéing vegetables on the stove top. I knew better than to mistake this as a gesture of peace—we needed to eat the overripe vegetables in the fridge before they went bad. Still, it was a welcome scene. I took one of the jars and moved to the living room, where the smell of worms had become so familiar that I almost didn't notice it. (Years later, the smell of wet soil would always send me back to that house in those months.) I turned on the radio and stared at the muted television as if, together, they might give me the full story of what was ahead. But instead of the familiar grave tones of nameless experts, John Coltrane's “A Love Supreme” skittered from the speakers, which I'd always loved, with its gentle precision that managed to somehow sound like a new and improvised journey every time. You had to pay attention to appreciate each little step and I was happy for the distraction. Apparently, there was nothing left to be said about the approaching storm. There was only waiting.

I turned the volume up and walked over to a window. With my knees folded beneath me on the cold floor, I could look out to the backyard through the unobscured strip at the bottom. The naked trees thrashed against one another, creating a wet bed of branches and debris beneath. Beside a cluster of evergreens, I could look right through the leafless deciduous trees. At the corner of my view was Peg's house looking small and sweet. Smoke puffed out the chimney. It was oddly comforting to know that she was there, maybe grading papers or reading a novel about a far-off place. The truth was that I didn't have any idea what she would be doing because Peg remained a mystery to me. I didn't even know if she was prepared for The Storm, which seemed a dire oversight now. We had become fast friends only months before, but as The Storm approached, something in her seemed to be changing. I suddenly wished that I had asked her more questions about her own life before The Storm began.

The wind picked up and splattered rain so forcefully against the window that for a moment I couldn't see anything at all. Then it slowed again and, through the dripping pane, I watched the base of an enormous maple begin to disappear in a growing pool of accumulating water. I thought of the bear and her cub that we had seen less than two weeks before and wondered what treacherous hiding place they might be huddled in now. There would be no surviving this, not for the bears or any of the other confused animals that had emerged from hibernation prematurely, looking for spring's bounty.