There was the hard wind of her voice: “Daddy.”
She took him by the neck and pulled him into such a fierce embrace he could feel those hungry, impacted bits of cancer press into his organs. She stood there holding him and crying as Hannah slept in her stroller and the liquid light from the faux lake of the loons washed over them, as if they’d walked out of the darkest mountain valley into this sky, so cool and clear and blue it hurt his eyes. It made him ache for the haunting, unremembered glimpse when he came upon this light for the first time, this superlunary glare, locking him forever in panic and wonder, carrying with it the promise of the night making its dazzling return.
T
HE
Y
EARS OF
R
AIN AND
T
HUNDER
: P
ART
V
2039–
When my mom called to find out if Moniza and I had enough food, water, and batteries, I had to ask what she was talking about. I’d been buried in the den, working on this book with the internet disabled, trying to pay as little attention to the outside world as possible. News of the storm had yet to penetrate the Stanton-Farooki household. My mom asked if we might be able to drive down to the coast so I could help my dad board up windows, maybe ride it out with them. I could already see the look on my pregnant wife’s face if I tried to propose sitting through a two-day hurricane with my parents. I declined but thanked my mom for looking out for me as always. Turning the Wi-Fi back on, I called up the weather and at first thought the satellite image splashed across the home page was a joke, like I’d landed on a satirical news site. I even went to the front page of the Times, and then the Raleigh News & Observer to make sure these were not false-front web pages. As if woken from a bout of time travel, I checked the date: October 1, 2039.
I went to find Moniza in the house we’d bought right after we married in ’35. It dated back to the nineteenth century, originally modeled on the kind of homes you’d find in coastal New England but transplanted to what was then Carolina backcountry. We’d fallen in love with the house, overbid on it after seeing the screened-in porch overlooking quiet woods. Mo went weak in the knees for the rustic wooden doors, big bay windows, and a wood-burning stove in the center of the kitchen. I made my way from my nook of an office through the kitchen and dining room to Moniza’s more spacious accommodations. She always left her glass-paned doors open, and instead of a desk, she sat in an antique leather chair with a footrest and a curling lamp overlooking her white-hot career. Now I found her typing from her lap, her four-month belly pooching out in a swollen hump beneath her pajamas, the requisite mug of tea on the end table. I showed her my tablet.
“Oh Jesus, Mary, and whoever else,” she said when I showed her the satellite image: a bright-white cyclonic mass with its eye peering into the Atlantic like a monocle. It was the size of half the Eastern Seaboard, and tails of cast-off precipitation, wind, and waves were reaching both Portugal and Barbados. “I’ve just been minding my business. When in the hell did this happen?”
“It went from a tropical storm to a Category Five in twenty-six hours. That’s a record,” I read off the screen. “Sustained wind speeds of two hundred and eleven miles per hour with gusts up to two hundred and thirty, shattering all previous records for Atlantic hurricanes. Plus, it’s eleven hundred and forty miles across right now.”
Dizzy, my old cattle dog, and our new rescue Lila, who was part huskie, part sheep dog, trotted into the room to see if anything fun was about to happen.
“Well, is it going to hit this particular Carolina? Or are you just trying to make me squirt myself?” She had a rash of pimples on her forehead and each cheek, second trimester acne.
“It says eighty percent chance it’ll hit somewhere between Georgia and Massachusetts.”
Long, gorgeous eyelashes clasped over teakwood eyes as she blinked three times in succession. In all of Moniza’s time covering the crisis and all the years I’d spent in activism, we’d never actually spoken of how we might prepare for one of these weather events from another dimension. We were far inland, maybe one hundred and thirty miles from the coast, so there wasn’t too much reason to worry, but I couldn’t let my parents stay in Wildwood. Looking at the image of the storm, it was hard not to picture this behemoth gutting the entire frontal haunch of the United States. She reached up and touched my face, but not with tenderness.
“You have so many razor nicks,” she said.
“I’m going to tell my parents to come stay with us.” Moniza made the face I’d anticipated. My sister and Habswam were in Charlotte, but they also had three kids. We at least had the soon-to-be nursery with a guest bed. “Even if the storm doesn’t score a direct hit, I don’t want them on the coast.”
“Brilliant fun,” she said acidly. That morning, she’d forgotten to flush, and now I wondered if that had been a subconscious spasm of spite. I’d lived with women most of my life, so I was used to the intimate hygienic stuff, but with each passing week of pregnancy, Moniza’s hormones brought intemperance and mood swings that were out of character. She returned to her laptop, and I called my mom back to demand that they board up the windows, grab the important documents, and drive to stay with us.
By the time I talked her into it, and then got my dad on the line and convinced him, my writing day was shot. On the back porch, I took a seat in the deck chair and looked out over the quiet acres behind our house. The wild blueberries on the property line were at the end of their season, and the cobalt blue of the sky glowed through the forest beyond. There’d been rain the night before, leaving behind a sweet petrichor scent.
Moniza hadn’t said anything about it, nor had my parents, but it was a strange omen that brought strange guilt. The World Meteorological Organization had named this particular cyclonic storm Hurricane Kate.
I sat on the back porch for a long time, throwing a ball for Lila, while Dizzy was content to lie by my side. We stayed there until the sun was an Armageddon of red exploding into the horizon. The star spewed fire across tectonic clouds, big as undiscovered continents.
On January 20, 2037, the day Warren Hamby was elevated to the presidency through frenzied backdoor negotiations, Moniza was at her office in New York, and I was in our Carolina home. I’d been in the living room all morning, glued to the news of this unprecedented turn in American politics, and feeling a full-body gush of relief that The Pastor had been blocked from taking office. Maybe it was far from a democratic outcome, maybe our country was finally unraveling, but it felt like a stay of execution nevertheless. I watched our old ally Tracy Aamanzaihou, who’d voted for this compromise, in an interview. “Don’t count us out yet,” she had said that morning. “Movements for justice often take strange and winding paths.” The news had been nothing but terrifying lately, so I decided to take this moment of hope and go push around commas in an article I was writing for an environmental journal. I turned off the TV and my phone for the rest of the afternoon.
When I turned it back on, just before dinner, I saw triple-digit missed calls and texts from Moniza, my sister, my parents, college friends I barely saw anymore. I didn’t get really scared until I saw Rekia’s name. The last time we’d spoken was in the aftermath of the siege of Washington. As Kate’s insane dream played out, and she drafted more people into her occupation, I’d grown frightened because I knew she’d never give up. When Love did what he did, the world knew Kate had been taken into custody before it knew the full extent of the massacre. There’d been weeks of Rekia weeping about Tom and months of the two of us trying to use whatever sway we had left in Congress to get Kate and the others freed.