The Invaders (25 page)

After checking on Teddy, who was still passed out on his bed, I went through the abandoned neighborhood. Some windows were covered, but most weren't. My attempts at readying the house had failed. I power-walked past the Cronin house, trying to keep my hair out of my eyes. The wind and rain were brutal. The lights were off and in the fading light I couldn't see if Steven was there. I went into their yard, to the side door, and jiggled the door handle. It was locked. I looked around flower pots, rocks, mats, trying to think where Fran would leave the key for herself and others.

Her geraniums were slightly askew. I peeked underneath and a small rusty key was sitting in a thin layer of dirt. When I put it in the lock I had to jiggle it a bit but it worked.

The door swung open and the mud room smelled like spoiled potpourri. I didn't hear any movement in the house, so I pressed on. The
living room had plants in strategic places, but they looked too shiny and well maintained to be real. I didn't see any dry bits or dead parts. I touched the leaves: they were fake. The wind had picked up outside and it made the glass in the windowpanes rattle. I started moving through the house quickly.

I went up the stairs and stopped in the hallway. All the doors were closed. It seemed so cold to me, to have each room cut off from one another. The bathroom was the first door on the left. I walked in. It looked like it had just been redone with new wood paneling. I pulled open the drawers. They were empty. The house didn't seem lived in to me. Where was the mess? The bits left behind?

I spied Fran's visor on the towel rack. The one thing out of place. I took it, stared at myself in the mirror, and put it on. It was tight, but it brightened up my face. The pink brim hid the fine lines and wrinkles running along my forehead. I adjusted the strap as snugly as I could and left the bathroom, careful to shut the door behind me.

With the brim of the visor shading my eyes, I had to be careful how I walked.

The next door was the master bedroom. I looked through Fran's closet but nothing jumped out at me. She only wore muted tones, and mostly strange linens. There were cropped pants and shorts on hangers. I closed the door behind me when I walked out. Steven's room was at the end of the hall. It still had stickers left over from his adolescence—
STAY OUT
and
GUARD DOG
—stuck to the fake painted wood.

I hesitated. Would he be in there? Perhaps he hadn't fled the storm; maybe he was going to come back to me. I stopped and considered what I was doing there, then I put my hand on the knob and turned. He wasn't inside. It was empty and looked much like Teddy's room. Messy and almost unfinished. I heard a crash outside and moved quickly, rifling through Steven's things.

I sat down on his bed. Things happened on this bed. I could feel it. I
pulled back the dark blue comforter. His sheets were stained with dried semen. I bolted up and pushed the comforter back in its place. Didn't Fran ever do the laundry?

It was time to go. I looked up and saw Steven standing there, blocking my way.

“Why are you wearing my mother's hat?” he asked.

I touched it but didn't answer.

“Where did you go?” I asked.

“My parents wanted me to evacuate.”

I was so excited to be this close to him, I could hardly stand it. He came near me with his hand outstretched and there was a crash outside.

“Do you want to do it here?” Steven asked.

I closed my eyes and let him walk around me. I thought about being next to him last night and how that warmth had felt like a cocoon. He put his hand on me and I flinched.

“No,” I said.

He moved his hands under my shirt and tucked them under my bra, leaned in and put his face on my neck. I could feel his breath, hot and wet against my skin as he breathed openmouthed. I whispered what I wanted him to do to me and he nodded like he understood.

There was another crash outside and I jumped, nervous and suddenly self-conscious in his teenage room. He wouldn't let me go, though.

“I don't want to,” he said.

I told him what I wanted him to do again and finally I pushed him off me.

I ran past him, down the stairs and out of the house. I stopped to put the key back under the geraniums then took off again. He didn't stop me. The wet sand covering the concrete parking lot made strange squishing noises as I power-walked through it and up Club Parkway to survey the damage. As I neared the clay courts, I marveled
about how they'd be completely destroyed again in the flood and that's when Bunny Fogherty snapped me out of my reverie.

She slowed down beside me in her Aston Martin—vanity plates marked
BUNNY LUV
—with her cat mewing in a carrier in the backseat and peeing just enough to dribble on the leather. She had no idea.

“Where are you going, Cheryl?” she asked.

I kept my pace, not turning to look at her. “Home.”

The wind gusts were making Fran's pink Little Neck Cove Club visor flap up and I had to stop to adjust it.

Bunny pumped her brakes. “Everyone's evacuating! You should have left already.”

“High tide isn't until eleven a.m.,” I said. The visor strap was stuck in my hair and I couldn't untangle it.

“Where's Jeffrey? You have to leave!” she said with alarm.

I powered up the one-way street knowing she wouldn't follow me toward the ocean. The closer I got to the house, the thicker the wind. Rain and sand hit my skin and I pulled the visor down farther. The wind tugged at the back of the strap and I was sure it was going to pull my hair out. The waves were already crashing against the seawall and we still had two hours to go. It was time to hunker down.

Inside, the house was quivering and from the front windows I could see the water. We wanted to feel like the waves were close enough to touch and now they were. I wasn't going to leave this house. I had made my plan. When I went to turn the lights on, the power was already out. I only had scented candles from Christmas tucked away in the attic. We hadn't ever come up with a “go bag” that was of any use.

I passed a mirror in the hall and stopped to look at myself. The summer had taken its toll on me. The brim of the visor had popped up and the grayish-green light of the storm made my face look drawn. My time in this house had aged me prematurely. I tugged at the visor, but it would not budge off the back of my head.

I ran upstairs to the bathroom and started opening drawers. I could only find the curved scissors that Jeffrey used to cut his fingernails. I took them to the back of my head and started snipping blindly until the strap snapped free. I saw my hair knotted around the elastic and knew I had cut too much off. I felt a throb where I had cut.

The door opened and Teddy walked in, startling me. It felt good to see him, even with his black eyes and cut lip. He had needed stitches last night and I'd offered to drive him to the hospital, but he'd refused. He had been trying to play this one tough and had kept repeating that everything made sense now, kept using phrases like “new phase” and “fresh start.”

“I just woke up,” he said now.

I put the visor behind my back and he asked what I was hiding, but I tried to shoo him away and turned back to the mirror.

“You're bleeding.”

I raised my hand to the back of my head and realized just then that it was bad.

“It's nothing,” I said.

“Let me help you,” he said. He moved closer, trying to inspect the wound.

“It's okay, leave me be,” I said, covering it with my hand until he backed away.

Teddy rubbed his eye with the one hand he could still use. I turned away from him and his big black eyes and dropped the visor in the garbage along with my clump of hair. The windows rattled from the gusts outside and Teddy and I looked out onto the ocean. The water was coming closer with each crest.

“You think he's not going to come back for us?” he asked.

“The house is going to flood,” I said. “You should go.”

“Where are you going to go?”

I was staying with the house because this was my house, too. I could have a say in how things went. I heard a crash in the yard and went to check on it. The water was coming over the seawall, spraying up and hitting the first-floor windows. The rain was worse now and I saw our tree fall into Lori's yard, just missing her house. The flower bed was ruined, though, and Lori's azaleas confettied all over the yard.

This is why you stay
, I thought,
for moments like this
. I stared out into the rain and watched another tree fall. It brought a white picket fence and a honeysuckle bush down to the ground. The sound was immense; the force of the storm ripped the tree, roots and all, up out of the ground and blocked the one-way road.

“If you don't go now, you'll never make it,” I said to no one in particular.

I told Teddy to go and he said he wouldn't leave without me, but when I said I wouldn't go anywhere, he started to pack for himself.

He said, “We have to go. There's nothing here for us anymore.”

“Not for you,” I said.

He stared at me then.

“No one will miss you,” I said.

I didn't say it to be cruel. I said it so he would know that it would be okay, he didn't need to harness himself to this place anymore.

“No one will know you were here,” he said.

“I'm sorry for what I did to you,” I said.

Teddy stood staring at me, blinking, unsure of what I was saying, and then he realized what I meant.

He said, “Say it again.”

And I did. I said it over and over again: “I hurt you.”

He looked at me, wounded and surprised, and opened his mouth to say something. He stopped himself because there was nothing to say. He left me standing there, alone, as the windows trembled. I knew that when he opened the door the wind would be inside, the howl louder. I braced
myself but was still startled at the boom of sound. I ran to watch him fumble his way into my car and saw him drive over fallen tree branches and leaves down the one-way road. I knew he would be okay.

I watched the water rising and crashing against the fence. It was already soaking the yards. I stood at the window, mesmerized by the lightning skipping sideways from cloud to cloud. I knew hurricanes could rupture eardrums. That the sound of waves crashing could make ears bleed. I covered my ears at first, but the whoosh of water still made it through the cracks between my fingers. The tide was coming in. The spray seemed to want to shatter our windows. I was awestruck by the force of the water and let my hands drop to experience it at full volume.

The door opened and I stepped back from the window. Steven stood there, breathless. There was another crash of sea spray against the windows and I heard glass shattering, water spilling into another part of the house. I was unmoved.

“You can keep doing what you were doing,” he said.

I timed each crash and meditated on the rhythm, watching the water cascade down the glass. Sea foam filled our yard and the water rushed up and pulled small bushes out of the ground, all the mulch, and mixed it together, slamming it into the white fence. The water took as much life with it as it could. My ears rang from the violence of it.

“The fence will never hold,” I said.

Another wave crashed and my skin tingled with excitement as I watched the flower beds from next door float away. I stayed pressed close to the window as the house creaked and groaned around me, starting to give way to the oncoming waves.

I could hear Steven's wheezing breath getting closer. I found Mary and held onto her, running my fingers along the ridges of the robe, feeling the texture of her lips and eyes. I felt the swollen heart on her chest. I opened one of the French doors to let the air in and turned to see the rock in Steven's hand. His face was full of doubt, but when I nodded to
him and stepped out onto the soaked lawn, he hit me in the back of the head as hard as he could. I heard the same crunch I had heard on the nature trail and was suddenly blind with pain. I touched my head and it felt wet and sticky. I turned to look at his moving mouth, but all I could hear was a soft buzzing sound.

The next wave pushed its way into the house and took us both. Our ribs cracked and snapped under the weight of the water as it pulled us out onto the front lawn and out to sea. All around us, the waves ripped open homes and garages, pulling out soccer balls, trash cans and recyclables, wood pieces from projects unfinished, alongside lamps and winter coats, dining-room chairs, expensive kitchen mixers, and IKEA-bought paintings.

At first Steven fought back, and I saw him thrown around, as if weightless. He gasped for air as his arms crashed through the water. I wanted to tell him to stop resisting, to just submit. Instead, I kept my mouth closed as long as I could and let the water carry me. He swam against the current, back toward home, as I floated out to sea, past large black garbage cans and hollow plastic bowling pins, children's toys and all the detritus of our lives. I watched it all, pain in my head, blood clouding my eyes.

The water rose through the tennis courts, ruining all of the repairs. It made the golf carts that had been tied up with chains float like buoys. In the marshes, the only things that were unharmed were the tall posts with the bird nests atop them. The egrets watched as the water rose up around them and they rose up in kind, gliding through the sky. The water completely submerged the graffitied rocks and rolled over the trolley bridge like it was nothing.

Our yards eroded into the sound as the concrete wall that had kept the water at bay for generations broke into pieces and floated away. Whole gardens disappeared, and soon after our houses joined them. The homes with the best views came apart as if they were made from
glued-together balsa wood, crashing down on themselves. The fence went next. Long, white, and plastic, it jerked and spilled right into the murk.

I felt a tangle of seaweed around my ankles as my arms slipped under and then I let the water envelop the rest of me, down into small tornadoes of glittering broken glass. As the waves crashed and receded, I knew I could finally disappear.