Stuart turned and scanned the room, then took a bottle of lotion from the dresser. “Sunscreen, check,” he said. It was just right, this playing-along. But I confess that every time I felt myself warm to Stuart, the impulse fled as soon as I recognized it.
“The beach,” guessed Margo.
“You’re warm,” Dennis said.
“What else?” said Stuart.
“Sunglasses,” Dennis said. “Snorkeling gear.”
Margo sat up, clutching the sheet to her chest, and Dennis shifted backward. “The boat?” she said. Her hair was a mess. She was lovely. “Really?”
“We leave in fifteen minutes,” said Dennis.
We shut ourselves inside our bedroom. I took off my shirt, feeling the muggy air on my breasts. Dennis stepped into shorts and eased his hands into the pockets. He was lean and tan from a summer of half days at the office, afternoons spent jogging or boating. Before the wedding, we’d spent a long weekend at Stiltsville, and he’d worked out an exercise routine in which we swam laps around the house in the morning, then stretched and did sit-ups on the dock in the evening. He liked activity and goals—this was the same man who used to swim to the Becks’ house and back when he could have used the boat—whereas I was content to lie in the hammock on the porch, reading or watching the sky darken over the skyline. “This is strange,” he said.
I thought of Stiltsville, likely gone, and Margo, married. “I know,” I said. “I can hardly think.”
He looked at me. “What? I’m talking about this.” He motioned to his chest. He wore a Hawaiian shirt with the buttons undone.
“What is it?” I said, but then I saw: he was trying to button his shirt, but the fingers of his left hand trembled. “Oh, baby,” I said. “Let me.” I buttoned his shirt and pressed myself to his chest. His heart beat against my forehead. “It will be OK.”
The boat engines sputtered and smoked when they started. I handled the lines, and Stuart and Margo perched at the bow, their legs dangling over the water. Our wake lapped at the low stone walls that edged the waterway, where an occasional heron stood blinking at us, unperturbed. We cleared the mouth of the canal and the bay unfurled. Normally, Dennis would accelerate beyond the channel markers, but today he downshifted into neutral and we stood facing the miniature boxes that dotted the horizon. Our stilt house had stood seventh from the right. We counted under our breath: one, two, three houses remained, all west of where ours had been. The house was gone. From a distance, the breach seemed neat and deliberate, as if God had plucked our stilt house from its stem. I could only imagine how violent the destruction had been, and ached to think of it as I’d ached to think of Margo being teased or scratched when she was a child. Warm, wet winds ricocheting through our kitchen, living room, bedrooms. Floors buckling and mirrors fracturing into shards.
Dennis brought down a palm on the console, sounding a hollow thud. “Goddamn it,” he said.
“Dad?” Margo started toward him, but he held out a hand.
“Sit down,” he said. “We’re moving.” He shifted the boat into gear. I held on to my visor and turned away from Stiltsville, then watched the shore recede. To the east, the Cape Florida lighthouse stood at the tip of Key Biscayne, the sole structure on a beach darkened with debris. I imagined pieces of our stilt house stranded there—shutters or dock planks or even the hurricane tracking map that had hung in the kitchen, its little red and blue magnets scattered across the bay floor.
The boat slowed as we entered the channel. We passed one of the remaining stilt houses and waved to a man who stood on a ladder on the dock, boarding up a window. He raised one arm, a lonesome hello. Two other houses were missing dock planks and sections of roof. We passed slowly by, wayfarers through a ghost town.
Dennis had steered his way to that plot of watery land a thousand times. He could have done it blind. When he cut the engines, the boat drifted to a stop in front of four pilings that rose, slanting, from the water, no dock between them and no house behind. Dennis looped the bowline around a piling and I stood beside him at the starboard gunwale, staring into the sunlit water. I could see a few girders and joists embedded in the sand and some planks of wood, and that was about it.
Eighty yards east, where the Becks’ house had stood, there was a dock but no house. To the west, our hermit neighbor’s house had vanished entirely. My mind rested on the hermit: Where had he gone? Had someone entreated him inland? Dennis leaned over the gunwale and knocked on a piling. He turned to Margo. “Your grandfather built that house,” he said. His voice shook. “These pilings are buried fifteen feet into the bedrock.” He pushed against one and the boat carried us away, then jerked on its line.
When Margo was six, she’d sneaked down the stilt house stairs and slipped off the dock. Dennis had heard her cry out and jumped from the porch into the water, then swam frantically until she was in his arms. I wondered if she remembered. Once she was old enough to drive the boat, she’d spent time at the stilt house without Dennis and me; probably it was those days she remembered instead, friends and boys and sunshine. “I’m getting in the water,” said Margo. She retrieved a snorkel and mask for herself and one of each for Dennis, but when she handed them over, he just put them down. I felt his sadness blanketing my own, and it was difficult to breathe.
“There’s nothing to look at down there.” To me, he said, “What’s for lunch?”
“Egg salad sandwiches,” I said.
“How do we know until we look?” said Margo. She stepped onto the bow and untied the drawstring of her shorts, then kicked the shorts to the deck. She stood in her turquoise two-piece, our colorful and curvaceous bowsprit, then stepped over the railing and dove into the water.
“You should go,” I said to Dennis.
“I’m hungry.”
“Me, too,” said Stuart.
“Eat later,” I said. “Go.”
Margo swam beyond the pilings and over the scattered debris. Her snorkel branched into the air and her rump crested the surface; she kicked her pale heels. I handed Dennis the mask and he put it on and sat on the transom, the snorkel dangling.
“What are you waiting for?” I said.
He shrugged.
I thought of him teaching Margo to ski, to ride a bike. “Want me to push you?”
“Not really.”
Stuart spoke up. “Want me to go with you?”
“Sure,” Dennis said.
There was a mask for Stuart but no snorkel. The men sat side by side on the gunwale, then counted to three and pushed off. I opened a diet soda and watched them swim. Margo and Dennis kept their heads down as they kicked around, but Stuart kept righting himself to breathe. Once when he came up for air, he called out, “Frances.”
I looked up. “What?”
He lifted a hand and waved. “Come in.”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
“I’m fixing lunch,” I yelled, though I was finished.
“Spooky down here,” he called, then lowered his face to the water. I didn’t want to go in—someone needed to stay on the boat, near the life preservers—but I gleaned a certain satisfaction from the invitation. I lay on the gunwale, a boat fender my pillow. The sky was vast and blue, and the site felt lonely and remote. It was a treasure, this sense of isolation. How would we achieve it, if we didn’t rebuild? Many of our friends had bought cabins in the Carolinas, but we didn’t have the money for that, and it wasn’t the same. Over the years, Grady and Gloria had used the house less and less, and rarely stayed overnight; the decision about what to do now would be up to us.
Dennis hauled himself onto the transom, arms shaking with exertion. I brought him a towel and we sat at the stern, eating halves of the same sandwich. “I think we should rebuild,” I said.