He looked at me. “We’ve got ten percent of what we’d need here, at the most.” He stared down the channel, toward the houses that remained. “Let’s let it go. Can we let go?”
It would be only five years before our lease ran out, permanently, no matter what we did. And Dennis had never seemed so certain to me, or so weary, so I didn’t argue. Margo and Stuart climbed aboard, and after we were done eating, we made our way back down the empty channel.
Stuart came downstairs one morning while I was drinking my coffee at the kitchen counter. He said, “Margo would sleep until noon if I let her,” and I said, “Since she was a teenager.” He filled a mug from the carafe and stirred in creamer. The spoon clinked against the sides of the mug. Dennis was in the backyard, shoveling my rose plants—dead, every one of them—into a wheelbarrow. When he bent at the waist, I could see the faint, ridged trail of his spinal column under his T-shirt. Come here, I wanted to say. I wanted to say it all the time, whenever he was more than a room’s width away from me. Come here, sit down.
“Is Dennis OK?” said Stuart. “He seems tired.”
“He is. We all are.”
Stuart nodded. “The house on the water meant a lot to him. To you, too, I imagine.”
“Memories,” I said. I thought of telling him that when Margo was ten she’d spent an entire weekend lying in the stilt house hammock, reading The Grapes of Wrath from start to finish. Then, during a storm that had rattled the shutters and left foamy puddles on the porch, she’d written her book report at the kitchen table. Years later, she and Beverly had spent the afternoon slinging water balloons at a sailboat from the upstairs porch. You should have seen it, I wanted to say to Stuart, how the balloon punched the sail—thwack—leaving a wrinkle that filled with breeze, causing the boat to heel. You should have seen how the balloon slipped down the fabric and burst on the deck, and the captain hollered and the girls ducked into the house, leaving Dennis to gesture apologies. You should have been around a few years later, I wanted to tell him, when Margo and Dennis took up studying survival tactics. They’d quote to each other from camping manuals and field guides: “You can tell a manta ray from two sharks swimming side by side because the ray’s fins will submerge at the same time,” she’d read to him. Then, he’d read to her. “To survive one must overcome the need for comfort and maintain the will to live.” Once, she and Dennis had spent an entire evening on the stilt house porch discussing what to do when lost at sea, how to tell which fish are poisonous and how to catch and kill the ones that aren’t, how to bail the boat and check the wind.
Oh, let her tell him, I thought.
The night before, in bed, Dennis had remarked that Stuart seemed more self-confident than most short men. The comment struck me as both sensitive and callous—Dennis was tall, and so it seemed indelicate of him to comment on another man’s stature—and I wondered if Dennis was as good a sport as he seemed. We spoke regularly but obliquely of Stuart, the way we would come to speak of the hurricane: by listing each feature, struggling toward perspective. It continued to unsettle me that my daughter had become engaged to a man I’d never met. Did Margo not consider my opinion worth gathering? My mother had met Dennis during our courtship; I hadn’t asked for her blessing, exactly, but I had given her the opportunity to speak her mind. I worried not only that Margo did not want to hear what I had to say on the subject, but that she simply didn’t care. This wasn’t Stuart’s fault, of course, but it felt like it was.
Dennis took the wheelbarrow around the side of the house, and when he returned it was empty. Stuart dumped the remainder of his coffee into the sink and went outside to help.
That night, we lay on top of the sheets, craving breeze, listening to the crickets call up through the window screens, and I remembered that there was something Dennis had forgotten to tell me. “That policeman,” I said, “in the kitchen—what was that all about?”
He sat up and looked at the wall of our bedroom, where moonlight sliced by palm fronds interrupted the darkness. “Oh, Frances,” he said. “The Kleins’ oldest son—he’s missing. No one’s seen him since the day of the hurricane.”
The Kleins lived in the house across the canal. We’d been invited to a barbecue when we’d first moved in, but had scarcely said more than a few words to them since. Every so often we were in our backyard while they were in theirs, and we all waved amicably to each other. Their youngest son was named Ezra, but I wasn’t sure how old he was. Their oldest, Elijah, was at least eighteen, a few years younger than Margo. The night of the storm, Dennis explained, Ilena Klein had thought Elijah was at his father’s office, where he’d been all day. When the telephones had stopped working, she’d assumed that both men were stuck there. David Klein had arrived home alone the next morning; he hadn’t seen Elijah since the previous afternoon. “I didn’t want to tell you,” said Dennis. “I knew you’d be upset.”
I had a distant memory of Elijah jet-skiing down the canal in Bermuda shorts, chubby around the middle like his father. The image dissolved. I would find that my mind wouldn’t focus on Elijah. Instead, he teetered on the edge of my awareness like a slowing top.
We took long drives in the evenings, luxuriating in the car’s air-conditioning and gawking at the devastation: homes stripped of walls and ceilings, lots stripped of homes. But Dennis’s car—the junkier of our two—was running low on gas. We didn’t want to harm mine by driving it through debris-filled streets, and lines at gas stations were a mile long, so we decided to siphon gasoline from my car into his. I stood shading my eyes from the sunlight while Dennis inserted one end of a garden hose into the fuel tank of my car, then took the other end between his lips. He drew a breath and made a face, then moved the hose to his car. A splash of fuel hit the ground. He spat and I handed him a glass of water. “Disgusting,” he said, smiling.
Just then, a harsh and forgotten sound came from inside the house: The telephone! Civilization! The sight of land through desperate binoculars. We ran inside. Margo had the phone to her ear and was writing on the palm of her hand. She said good-bye and hung up.
“Who was it?” said Dennis.
“Penny Morales,” said Margo.
“Who?” said Dennis.
“The woman selling that house in Coconut Grove.” Margo and Stuart had decided to save money by not using an agent—his work paid well enough, but he was just starting out—and this had slowed the house-hunting process considerably, even before the hurricane. They’d called half a dozen home owners before the hurricane had brought down the phone lines. “She’s going to open up for us on Friday,” said Margo.
“We’ll go with you,” said Dennis, who was concerned about Margo’s poker face. He wanted to knock on walls and declare them sound.
Margo yelled upstairs for Stuart. “What?” Stuart called.
“There’s a house!”
“What?”
Oh, just go up there, I thought.
“A house!” she called again.
Stuart’s steps on the stairs rattled through the kitchen, and he appeared. “Was that the phone?” he said.
“It was that woman from Battersea Road,” said Margo.
He took her in his arms. “Which one was that?”
“The two-bedroom we saw in the paper.”
He swiveled her and she dipped. I looked away. “Excellent,” said Stuart. To Dennis, he said, “No offense, but we’re ready for some solo time.”
“So are we,” I said. I hadn’t intended to say it. Margo and Stuart righted themselves and stepped away from each other. I turned to the sink and opened the faucet, then busied myself washing dishes. Margo and Stuart left the room, and Dennis put his hands on my shoulders. He reached over me to turn off the faucet.