As they turned to walk out of my house, I said, “Coral.” They stopped and turned. “Why are you doing this?”
With a perfectly blank expression, they said, “You deserve to know what she was thinking. And maybe people deserve to know. That’s up to you.”
I huffed and shook my head at them. “Well, aren’t you worried my fridge is listening?”
“Yes,” they said. “I am.”
Then they walked out the door. I sat in my kitchen for a long time, trading my gaze from the refrigerator to that blue folder.
It took me a long time to actually bring myself to read the document. I hid it in a box in the crawl space and waited for Moniza to be out of town again. Then I poured myself a whiskey and began on this MNR of unknown origins.
When I finished, Jackie Shipman’s letter was long forgotten, and I couldn’t think and I couldn’t cry and I couldn’t understand what I’d just read. It cast a wide net over the people who’d been there for those sweltering summer months, the hope and the violence that followed. Hard to read because it felt like the MNR was inside them. But also, there was Kate in frightening three dimensions. Some machine learning algorithm had gotten closer to her than I ever had. Maybe that’s why, impulsively, I did what I did.
I’m not sure if Coral wanted me to hand that file over to Moniza to salve their own conscience, but that night, drunk as I’d been in years, all I knew was I didn’t want that file to exist. I took it to our firepit in the backyard and burned it. I’m not sure if I regret it. Some days I wish I had the document to read again. Others, I’m sorry I ever laid eyes on it. It frightens me more than that hideous image that arrived in my in-box.
I never told Mo about Coral’s visit, but when she came home, she could tell something was off. I couldn’t think about anything else. I couldn’t focus. I spent too much time on forums reading about AI narratives. Conspiracy theories were religions now. Acolytes claimed the newly awakened AI god was already here, speaking to us through the data, guiding the human experiment in ways either benevolent or pure evil, depending on who was postulating. All these wild, naked theories mixed with Coral’s visit and that terrifying blue folder and my mourning for the years at A Fierce Blue Fire: babbling with Coral uninterrupted for hours, Tom snarling his politics through a squelching dip, Rekia cutting to the moral core of any issue, Liza delivering every cutting line on cue. And coursing through it all, every precious memory of lying with Kate beneath hot stars in unbounded wilderness.
Moniza and I were in the kitchen, putting together lunch, when she stopped halfway through screwing the lid off a jar of mayo, licked her fingers, and put her hands on her hips. It was the way she phrased it that unnerved me.
“What’s happened, Matt?”
“What do you mean? Nothing’s happened.”
“Right now. Your face. It looks like a spanked bottom.”
She was right. I’d felt my face flush immediately.
“Your brooding is so obvious,” she said. “You can’t do it silently.”
It took me a long time to respond to that.
“You have to let me grieve.” And a ghost passed over my skin.
“Have I said anything?” she pleaded. “It’s been over two years now, and I haven’t said a thing, Matt. I’ve let English stoicism do all the work.”
We stood there together, a total impasse. Finally, she lowered her eyes to our hardwood floors. “Maybe you just need to say it.”
“Say what?”
“That you loved her. And that your heart is broken.” She put a hand to her cheek. She made certain her voice was under control. “I’d rather you just say that than feeling all the time like you’re so very far away.”
More so than when I found out, in that moment, I cracked. My wife took me in her arms, and she let me weep in her hair. I dug my fingers into the flesh of her back and felt how very solid and alive she was.
Mo and I were better after that. We found out she was pregnant in July, so she was four months along by the time Hurricane Kate grew to the most powerful storm ever measured in the Atlantic Ocean. My parents arrived at our house on October 3 as the cyclone churned toward the Eastern Seaboard. In the satellite images, it appeared to be preparing to swallow the earth itself. My parents had packed their Suburban with so much food and water, it took the three of us nearly an hour to unload while Moniza ran Xs of tape over the windows. By the time the storm reached us, we figured the winds would dissipate, but it was a worthwhile precaution. I wasn’t so much worried about wind as water. We lived in a narrow valley southeast of Raleigh not too far from the Neuse River, which had flooded before during Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Alberto. Most of the neighbors I spoke to seemed to think we were far enough inland. We’d be wet but fine.
Unloading their car, I looked at the pollen-colored sky, and the ridge in the twilight creeping toward us, this enormous black wave crested with brimstone clouds. In those shape-shifting lashes, I saw gruesome pareidolia, grinning demons, and charging armies.
Back in the house, my dad had already turned the TV to a twenty-four-hour news channel (non-Fox, at least), and he and Mo were squabbling over the windows.
“Just saying, I’d have boarded ’em up,” he told her. His gray-white hair had finally begun to recede, and his spine had a curve now. He didn’t stand as tall as he once had. Not far from here he’d built one of his first golf courses, which is how I’d found this house when Moniza said she’d move to North Carolina if we got married. “Tape is fine, but better safe than sorry.”
“He’s slagging me off on the job,” Moniza whispered to me as she passed. “Unsurprising.”
I was not looking forward to refereeing this for the next two days. It started to rain, the drops sprinkling through the wire screens of the porch. I joined my dad at the window with the thought of saying something, when a pop of lightning and crack of thunder pierced the darkening day.
My mom poked her head in.
“Yikes! That was a big one. Dan, Matt, my beautiful boys—what should we do? Make dinner? Play a board game first?” She looked so excited to be here with us. “Or I thought maybe we could do some planning about decorating the nursery? It’s going to sneak up on you faster than you think.”
We’d barely started collecting cards for Ticket to Ride when the power went out.
The rain grew louder, the wind harder. Gusts shuddered the windowpanes. We were prepared, with flashlights, candles, and a bright electric lantern in each room. Dizzy went to hide under the couch, and Lila paced nervously. For the next hour, we continued the board game, until I heard the sump pump kick on. After a few minutes it stopped. Outside, the rain continued to pound. When we finished, my dad winning with a train route from Seattle to Miami, I went downstairs to check on the pump, only to find the washer and dryer almost underwater.
“Oh shit.” This brought my family running. The basement had at least four feet of water in it, the major appliances bobbing in the dark. The sump pump hadn’t kicked off, it had been overwhelmed.
“It’ll be a mess, but nothing to worry about.” My mom nodded as she said this. “This is why you get a homeowners policy.”
“Our insurance company got a government bailout,” Moniza joked. “So it’s about time that paid off.”
“Should I get down in there?” I wondered. The water was cloudy and gray, full of shit-colored debris in the flashlight’s white beam.
“Lord, no, Matt, there’s nothing worth it down there,” said Moniza. “We’ll remodel after this.”
She took my hand and led me away, but we couldn’t play another game now that we had an intruder in the house. I put on a rain jacket and ran outside to check the cars. The rain stung, and I had to hold the hood to my head as burst after burst of wind tried to rip it off. With the power out, we hadn’t seen the water pooling in the driveway, but it was ankle-deep, cold, and soaking my feet. All three of our cars had water halfway up the wheels. Lightning flashed, and in the brief illumination of the sky, I saw the hurricane’s churning wall, white-blue clouds swarming counterclockwise. It looked like there were kites flying through the air, until I realized these were solar panels spinning madly in the wind. There was a piece of someone’s roof lying on our road, the shingles looking like wet scales. The wind dragged the section toward our lawn and then flipped it back into the road with a crash so that I could hear the wood splinter, the nails warping.