Through the windows we could see a number of people—detectives, probably, plus some family and friends—milling about in what appeared to be the Kleins’ living room. Ilena Klein sat in an armchair, staring up at a man in a suit who had his hands in his pockets. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell he was speaking. She lifted a hand to touch her hair, then returned it to her lap. Whatever the man said—an update on the search, perhaps—appeared not to make much difference. The man walked out of the room and Ilena Klein turned to the window. I feared she would see us standing there, but we were cloaked by the night.
“Frances?” Stuart’s voice came out of the darkness behind me. I turned. Stuart stood with his hand under Dennis’s arm as Dennis crouched on the sidewalk on one knee.
“Did you fall?” I said. “Are you OK?”
Dennis opened his mouth. He looked at me but didn’t speak. His eyes were bright and fearful, but his face was blank.
“Oh, my God,” I said.
“Something is wrong,” he said.
“What is it?” I said, but he just stared at me, his blue eyes. “OK,” I said. I helped him stand. “We’ll get a doctor. You’ll be fine.”
“Should I call an ambulance?” said Margo.
“No,” said Dennis.
“It’ll be quicker if we drive ourselves,” said Stuart. I nodded, thinking: ambulance? hospital?
We clustered around Dennis and started to walk, and before we turned the corner I looked over my shoulder at the Kleins’, and I understood that my life was going to change. It was terrifying, that knowledge. I have wondered, in rare, metaphysically inclined moments, if misfortune might be contagious. Perhaps the Kleins’ misfortune overwhelmed their house and spilled out with the light. Perhaps it stole across the canal to my doorstep.
Stuart knocked on our bedroom door a few mornings later. Dennis and I were awake but still in bed. Sunlight saturated the room. Dennis’s hand was on my stomach, his thumb stroking my skin. I find that the lens of memory focuses on him, regardless of what held my attention at the time, the heat or hot flashes or miscellany. “Swimsuits and towels!” called Stuart through the door. “Sunscreen and snorkels!”
The state of Florida had notified us by mail that it would send a demolition crew to raze the stilt house remains—at our expense, of course. We could have fought the decision, but we didn’t. We were adjusting our bearings. It was Stuart’s idea to have a last look around. “You need closure, Frannie,” he’d said to me. He was the only one who had ever called me Frannie, and I’d found I didn’t much mind it. “We’ll just throw anchor and say toodle-oo, old house.”
Again we coasted past the herons on the retaining walls, and Dennis steered through the bay to our spot of land. Stuart stepped over the boat railing and clambered onto the flat top of a piling. He sat there, balancing. “You brought the camera?” he said to me. I nodded. To Dennis, he said, “Back up a bit, would you? I want to see how it feels.”
Dennis shifted into reverse and we drifted away, leaving Stuart to perch over the water. I snapped photos as Stuart posed, arms and legs spread. Dennis cut the engines and stood beside me. He leaned close. “Should we leave him?” he said.
“Yes,” I whispered, but the bile was gone.
Stuart tried to stand but lost his balance and sat down again. “Don’t fall,” called Margo, and Stuart blew her a kiss.
Dennis started the engines and put the boat into gear. When we reached the pilings, Stuart gestured to Dennis. “Your turn,” he said, stepping onto the boat. “It’s surreal.”
“Take the wheel,” said Dennis. Dennis stepped onto the gunwale, using the rail for balance, and my heart seized. I wanted to stop him—what if he fell again?—but I did not. He climbed awkwardly onto the piling and shifted until he was facing us, then sat still with his hands on his knees, his shoulders slumped. I saw the shadow of the boy he’d once been flash across his features, then disappear. Stuart put the engines into reverse, and Dennis, unmoving, grew small.
“What did it feel like?” I said to Stuart.
“Scary,” he said. “Lonely.”
The doctor at the emergency room had referred Dennis to an internist, who’d referred him to a neurologist. We’d scheduled an appointment but it was weeks away. I now think of this period as stolen time, time to which we were not entitled and which we did not appreciate: an interlude. In the interlude, Elijah Klein’s body was found. He’d gone out on the bay with friends, and they’d run out of gas and capsized when the storm hit. The entire crew had drowned. Elijah had been invited at the last minute, apparently, and initially hadn’t been counted among the fatalities. I could not conceive how Ilena Klein would survive, how she would not simply stop breathing.
Also in the interlude, the National Guard left south Florida, the electricity returned, and Margo and Stuart secured a mortgage to buy the house on Battersea Road. They used money my father had left Margo as a down payment, and on the day they closed we brought over champagne and cleaning supplies.
I searched through old photographs to show Stuart the stilt house—but in our photos, there is only a dock under Margo’s feet, a railing behind Dennis’s arm, a doorway framing my face. There was no photo of the house the way I remember it: from a distance, wholly intact. I did not understand, taking those pictures, that history must be collected while the subject exists. If not, what goes unrecorded can fill an ocean.
I do remember, though, the night of hurricane Andrew. Margo and Stuart stayed upstairs in her bedroom and I sat in the living room, watching the local weatherman’s updates on a battery-operated television. It was late and the house was dark. Dennis stood at the French doors, staring out at the backyard and the boat bobbing on the canal. I wasn’t concerned about the boat—if it was damaged in the storm, we would have it fixed; if it tore loose, we would find it, or we would figure out a way to buy another one. I was concerned, though, that debris would strike the glass door and it would shatter, with Dennis standing close enough to see his breath on the glass. “Dennis, please,” I said. “We should be near walls.” Still, I went to stand with him. Between flashes of lightning, the sky was purple-black and inky, more substantive than air and water and wind, as if the storm were its own form of matter. The melaleucas in the backyard bowed, nearing the ground and lifting, bending again. Leaves and twigs swept across the lawn, licking the surface of the swimming pool. A tree branch raced by, and there was a sudden, throaty crack of lightning. I saw the jagged light to the south, but the target—tree or house or other object—was concealed. In quieter moments, the wind relented and the trees righted themselves and the canal stilled. I hoped in these moments that the storm would ease, but then the water rose and lapped the pier again, the wavelets like little soldiers approaching battle on their bellies, and the wind returned, more furious than before.
One moment was quieter and lasted longer than the others. Dennis loosened his grip on me and went to check the news report. The eye of the hurricane—a black center on the radar screen, encircled by speedy strokes of red storm—had found our house. The yard and canal were still; not the stillness of a clear day, but that of a room with no windows, that of a bubble of air trapped underwater.