“Any higher than thirty-nine the depression is upgraded to a tropical storm.” He wears a hooded sweatshirt and purple shorts. He sits and scrolls, his feet up on the couch. He articulates his words very slowly and carefully. “Organized circulation and lower pressure are the first signs it has formed.”
For the hundred millionth time since she got here, Ellie watches Jack and thinks about her mom. She’s all over this place and worse than ever, because here is where Ellie’s always loved her mother most.
Magic happened to her mom in Florida. She was this other, happier, steadier person, so different from the person she was in New York. She woke them early in the morning to go sailing or watch the waves break. She didn’t mind that their dad often didn’t come with them. She cooked big elaborate breakfasts. Breakfast was the only meal that she could cook. She let Ben and Ellie stay up late watching movies, though she hardly ever let them watch TV at home. After a long day at the beach and everyone freshly showered, they’d all sit together, ordering a pizza and dozing through the sun-drenched afternoon.
One summer: Ben was six and El was eight; storms threatened often, hurricanes, tornadoes, big whirling masses of green and gray and orange coming at them on the TV screen. They seldom actually hit. Ellie learned then about low- and high-pressure systems, the eyes and tails of storms. Each time Ellie worried, and her mom stocked them up on water and canned foods and filled the bathtubs. Each time, she had some guy from down the road come and help her put up shutters. Usually their dad wasn’t there. This time they’d already heard the storm was missing them. Ellie sat close to her mom, and Ben was out back somewhere kicking around a ball, though it was dark and the ground was still soaking wet from that afternoon’s rain. The guy on the TV said the storm had turned within hours of the eye hitting, and Ellie’s mom explained to her again how the eye was the still and quiet that sat right in the center of the worst part of the storm. They sat and Ellie watched her mom’s breathing, slow again, as she wrapped a sweater around her chest and legs.
And then the switch that happened sometimes in her mother. She was strong again, and looked over at El and smiled. “You want to see something amazing?” her mom asked. Ellie could never in her life say no to the face her mom made then. She called to Ben out in the back and he came running. He was flushed and asked if they knew if the storm was going to come.
“Missed us,” said their mom. And she shook her head at Ben for asking with so much excitement. She found it wonderful, El knew, nearly everything her brother was. “Let’s go out,” her mother said.
Ben looked at Ellie, then back at their mother. Ellie smiled at him. If Mom wanted to go out, they would. They packed into the rental — their mom always splurged on a convertible on the trips when their dad didn’t come. She rolled down the top even though the clouds were out and the wind was blowing, even though it was already very dark. Almost immediately Ellie worried her mom would be too cold with the top down. But she was smiling. Her hair was long then, and though she mostly wore it up, that night it was down and twisted in the wind.
El sat up front and Ben got in back without anyone asking. When it was the two of them with their dad, it was the other way around. Their mom turned on her music, Jackson Browne this time, whom Ellie knew by the way her mom’s neck curved and softened as she sang along. They drove the six or seven minutes to the water. Ellie watched her mom, her hand over the side of the car and hanging, her sunglasses on her head to keep her hair from getting in her face. They crossed a bridge to get out to the ocean, and Ellie watched the chop of water underneath them, thick and frothy, rock the boats both moored and docked.
They parked and walked barefoot over the boardwalk and out onto the sand. The beach was empty of people, but it was a mess of stuff left over. The storm had come close enough that the tides had risen, dumping all sorts of debris out on the beach. Mounds of seaweed — it looked living — glistened in the dark. The sand was wet even far up by the boardwalk, and her mom pointed out the lines on the wooden poles where the water had reached. Ellie touched the line along one of the poles — it hit just above her head — the wood still wet and dark and slick. The ocean, though, was quiet now. It came in small rolls, trickles of black and gray, to shore.
Ellie’s mom wore shorts and one of their dad’s sweaters. She walked on tiptoes, long freckled legs. Her messy hair hung dark down her back. Her eyes were big and searching. Ellie loved them best when they found her. Her mom caught them both, Ellie and Ben, within her vision. She grinned. She walked closer to the water and stood a minute, letting the trickles splash over her feet. She nodded toward Ben and Ellie. They both followed, though Ben wandered quickly farther out. Her mom took Ellie’s hand and leaned down a foot or two from the shore break. Carefully, her sweater open and her hair fallen forward, she knelt, her shin and then her knee covered in sand. She picked up a mound of seaweed and held it in her hand. Her eyes up again, she shook her head and blew her hair out of her face, holding Ellie close.
“Come here, Benny,” she said. He stopped a minute, then came toward them. He’d gone in past his waist, his shorts and shirt now soaking wet.
Ellie smelled the seaweed that her mother held and wanted to ask if they could take it home.
“Watch,” their mom said, once Ben was beside her. She whispered. And Ben and Ellie leaned in very close.
Ellie’s mother shook the seaweed. It was dark brown and black, wet and shining. As it shook, Ellie got drops of salt water on her face and in her eyes. She watched Ben pinch his eyes shut and his lips puckered. It was there, though, when Ellie looked back down at the plant. Light, like a hundred tiny Christmas tree bulbs popping up out of it. Alive, thought El, and stopped breathing as she watched.
Ellie feels Annie somewhere close but doesn’t turn to find her. Either Jeff or Annie is always there somewhere when she’s with Jack. She wonders if they’ll ever trust her to be with him without them. It’s July and the sort of hot that Ellie had forgotten. She’d been so looking forward to the swimming; but all this time inside these past few days has begun to wear on her. She’s getting itchy, anxious, crazy. They keep all the doors open and she can feel his parents listening as she plods through her first attempts with Jack. She asks awkward unsure questions. And Jack is on and on with this stuff he finds on the Internet.
As welcoming as he was the first day, he seems to be pulling away from her instead of opening up. Annie has mentioned something about separation issues. Ellie’s not sure what this means. He always knows where his parents are, and the farther they are, the less likely he is to speak to Ellie. He likes bugs and she’s never been squeamish. She felt him suppress a smile her first full day, when she asked to hold one of the scorpions. He has two iguanas, countless lizards, an ant farm, and an assortment of spiders and beetles he’s caught himself and placed in jars. He has a small Jack-sized table set up in the corner where he dissects the ones that he finds already dead.
He leaves the computer now and goes back to his bugs, administering to each of them in some five-year-old version of efficiency, opening cages and jars, changing water pans and dropping food. Ellie flips through a book of stories that her mother sent down with her. Deborah Eisenberg. Her mom marked a story called “Rosie Gets a Soul.” Rosie, of course, is an addict, but Ellie’s read the whole thing since she got here. Against her will, certain bits of it—she’s had her hands full just standing upright. Just trying to work up some traction. Just dealing with the fact of herself, which pops up in front of her every day when she awakes, like some doltish puppet. So certain other worrisome items have slid off the agenda—have lodged themselves inside her brain.