Mrs. Ted Bliss

TWELVE

It was the only ship-to-shore telegram she’d ever seen.

They were married, Ellen said in the wire, by the captain of the cruise ship himself.

The irony was that Mrs. Bliss got the telegram a few hours before she heard the first reports about Hurricane Andrew that the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables had spotted 615 miles east miles of Miami growing winds of over 100 miles per hour and picking up speed as it moved toward the Bahamas. The old woman even made a small salacious joke about it.

Oh boy, she thought, Junior and Ellen on the Love Boat. Just married and both so unused to going to bed with anyone they probably started up that wind and those waves by themselves.

It put her in a good mood to think of the two of them together. Which put her in an even better mood.

Because it was a measure, she thought, of cut losses, her emotions in a sort of escrow, the heart in chapter eleven, receivership. Because she would have thought, she thought, she’d have taken it harder. Her widowed daughter-in-law, her dead son’s only wife. The real keeper of the flame when you came right down. The one so nuts about poor dead Marvin her grief made her nuts. Whose every New Age pilgrimage to the crackpot chiropractor in Houston had been like a feather in steadfast mourning’s cheerless cap. So her marriage to Junior was really a kind of defection, leaving Mrs. Bliss (according to Ellen’s own figures) high and dry to bear the lion’s share of their leftover bereftness.

Yet she did not feel betrayed. If anything, otherwise. Their absurd new matrimony making her smile, convinced that the joke was on one of them, though she didn’t know which.

If not entirely surprised by Ellen’s decision to marry Junior Yellin (indeed, the surprise was on the other foot so to speak; she could not have anticipated Junior’s proposal), she was at least a little startled by her own reaction to it, or rather by how gracefully, even cheerfully, she first acknowledged, then accepted, then actively embraced the idea. Only briefly, and out of one corner of her mind, did she have this flaring, fleeting synapse when it occurred to her to wonder whether Marvin might be turning over in his grave if he’d heard the news or read the telegram or maybe overheard the actual proposal Yellin had made to Ellen or Ellen to Yellin. This was merely the most vagrant of thoughts, yet in the short transience (that was even less than time) it took to entertain and resolve it, Mrs. Ted Bliss was brushed by what was at once both a conclusion and a conviction: that Marvin had not heard the news, had not been looking over her shoulder to read the telegram nor tapped into whatever solemn exchange had taken place between Junior and Ellen back there on the Love Boat’s high and rising seas.

Marvin was not turning over in his grave, she realized, because, well, because Marvin was dead. These simple, indisputable facts struck like epiphanies: Dead people do not turn over in their graves; the dead have no opinions. Well then, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, if it’s OK with Marvin it’s jake by me, and settled, stunningly, gracefully, even peacefully and, at last, conclusively and decisively into the idea that her son was dead. Settling up. I had the pie; you had the sundae; she had the iced tea. Well, thought Dorothy, that’s that, then. The kid’s dead.

It was this, she knew, that reconciled her to the news in Ellen’s telegram. It was this, however odd it might seem, that had produced such calm, allowed such cheer.

She had an idea! And what so delighted her about her idea was the fact that she knew she was rising to an occasion. She was into her eighties now. People in their eighties will have been called upon to rise to occasions countless numbers of times — all those births and deaths and ceremonies; all those pitched battles of obligation that made up a life, constructed it like a laborious masonry of rough expectations. The rare thing, the sweet and marvelous thing, was to rise to an occasion gratuitously, out of some sheer sense of its Tightness, its dead solid joy, all its, well, nondeductible, not-for-profit giftness.

She would throw a party for the happy couple when they returned from their honeymoon cruise. Her condo wasn’t big enough so she’d host it in the game room of Building One. She’d have to find a date when it was available, of course, but that shouldn’t be difficult. Since there were fewer occupancies in the Towers there was less demand on the facilities these days. Indeed, as the idea for the reception formed in Mrs. Bliss’s mind it became increasingly clear to her that the affair (the concept of the party already beginning to snowball, transmuting itself from simple party to reception to affair; if she didn’t rein herself in at least a little, before she knew it she’d have a full-blown gala on her hands) would have to be catered. This was beyond some one-woman deal. From the first she hadn’t even wanted it to be and, even if she did, she knew she wasn’t up to the task of preparing the game room, let alone all that food, by herself. The more Mrs. Bliss thought about it the less enthusiasm she had. Who would she invite? If she invited her family, whoever was left, the remnants of the old gang in Chicago, her kids in Cincinnati and Providence, all her globe-trotting, scattered grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it would send the wrong signals. This wasn’t intended to be some last hurrah thing. All she’d meant was to introduce the happy couple to each other’s neighbors and some of her Florida friends. Maybe she would even send a special invitation to Wilcox in Houston if for no other reason than to witness the cure he’d wrought.

All right, so the snowball was starting to melt, break up under the heat of her cooled-down second thoughts. But that was all right, too. Now she didn’t have to worry about arranging for game rooms and caterers and all the foofaraw a gala would involve. Not that she was losing her enthusiasm for the idea of doing something for them, just for the overkill of her first hasty impressions. One thing, though. She had better stop planning for the thing (whatever it turned out to be) and do something before all that was left of the snowball was a great puddle.

Commit yourself, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, and decided she would fire off a telegram of her own, offering her congratulations to the bride and groom and announcing her intentions about the party.

Which was easier said than done.

About an hour after she phoned in her message, Western Union called to apologize. They were sorry, the operator told her, but at this point they weren’t accepting nonessential civilian communication between the United States and the cruise ships in that area of the Atlantic. Both telegraphic and all two-way air traffic had been put on hold while the weather emergency was still in effect. If she wished, she could cancel her message or, if she preferred, they’d file it with the rest of their backlog and send it first-priority once the ship was out of harm’s way.

“Harm’s way?”

“Once they’re sure which direction this fella’s gonna jump,” said the male operator at the other end of the line.

Even more out of hunch than superstition, Mrs. Bliss told Western Union to cancel altogether. She’d call back when the coast was clear.

But maybe it was superstition. It made her nervous (it always had) to fix on a specific date too long before its time. Even when she’d organized Maxine’s wedding she had postponed making the arrangements for as long as she could. Don’t get her wrong, she was crazy about George, she was rooting for their marriage, and it had nothing to do with losing the deposit or anything like that. It was only that Mrs. Bliss felt there was something just a little too cocksure about making long-range plans. Man proposes, God disposes. Something like that.

And now, too, something spooky about that out-of-harm’s-way business. She was familiar with the phrase. It was something they always dragged out in wartime, impending crisis. She didn’t like the sound of it, and though Western Union had been very polite and explained to her about keeping the traffic lanes open between Ellen’s boat and the land, once the United States was dragged into it, everything started to seem much too important and official sounding. The United States?

Mrs. Bliss turned on the television to see if they’d interrupt a program for a special news bulletin. Sure enough, she didn’t have long to wait. They cut away to an expert standing by at the National Hurricane Center and then leapfrogged to another expert at the U.S. Meteorological Survey in Atlanta, Georgia. Both men seemed very excited. Andrew’s winds were gusting from between 100 and 130 miles per hour and had been unofficially clocked as high as 185 miles per hour. If it didn’t veer to the east it was expected to hit the Bahamas with heroic force sometime in the middle of the night. It would be, both the Atlanta and Coral Gables guys agreed, the mother of all hurricanes. Already, all ships in the area had been instructed to change course in the hope of either outrunning or evading the storm that was moving along at about 25 knots. She didn’t know what a knot was exactly, but the experts couldn’t get over it. Between them they had over fifty-seven years in the weather business and neither could remember a storm packing such high wind velocities to travel at such a speed toward whatever would turn out to be its ultimate destination. Because usually the more furiously a hurricane’s winds revolved about its eye the more moisture it picked up from the sea and the heavier it became. The heavier it was the slower it traveled toward impact. This one, though, this one was a horse of a different color, and may the good Lord have mercy on whatever got in its way!

Mrs. Bliss, hooked, watched all the channels for the latest developments. Again and again she saw the same experts talking to each of the anchors on the major networks. Idly, she wondered if these experts were paid extra for going on the different shows. Officially, she supposed, they were civil servants. Probably, if it happened, they were paid under the table.

Even the local meteorologists were having a field day. They put their Skywatch and Doppler Weather Alert and Skywarn and Instant Color Weather Radar systems into play, all their latest, fancy, up-to-the-minute machinery. Their jackets were off, their collars and ties undone, their sleeves rolled up. Only the civil servants, Mrs. Bliss noticed, shvitzed in their buttoned, inexpensive, dress code suits, but everyone, from the TV meteorologists to the experts at the National Hurricane Center and U.S. Meteorological Survey served up a kind of short course on hurricanes. Vaguely, Mrs. Bliss was reminded of the lectures delivered by the community college professors who used to come to the Towers game rooms to talk about their disciplines.

It was very impressive, lulling, too, in a peculiar way, rather like the gardening, cooking, and home improvement shows she sometimes watched — programs for young homemakers: furniture stripping, interior decoration, foreign cooking. Before she knew it she was as involved in the science of these powerful storm systems as ever she’d been in an actual entertainment show, absorbed in all the interesting bits and pieces — the gossip of tempest. She learned, for example, that hurricanes could be two hundred to three hundred miles in diameter, that they were nurtured by low pressure fronts and rose in the east and moved west (just like the sun, just like the sun! worried Mrs. Ted Bliss) on the trade winds, that an eye of a hurricane was about twenty miles in diameter and traveled counterclockwise from between ten and fifteen miles per hour as the winds blew it along above the sea, sucking up the warm, evaporating ocean. She learned that storm clouds, called walls, surrounded the eye, that it was these that caused the most damage, kicking up dangerous waves, called storm surges, that forced the sea to rise several feet above normal. Especially destructive at high tide, they brought on terrific, murderous floods.

Every hour or so astonishing pictures of Hurricane Andrew were beamed down to Miami Beach from satellites orbiting the earth. Mrs. Bliss watched, hypnotized, as the photographs collected themselves from a blur of vague dots and electronic squiggles and slowly resolved into clear, enhanced portraits of brutal, rushing power.

Gradually, as hard news started to trickle in (they were talking about a shift in the storm now, how it might miss the Bahamas altogether and then, gaining force, move toward the East Coast, and were even beginning to speak of the storm of the century) the meteorological anecdotes trailed off and they were speculating about momentum, land-fall, and drew thick black lines in Magic Marker, superimposing them on maps as if they were composing best-case/worse-case scenarios, or complicated plays in athletic contests. The wind speeds were stunning, frightful. No one had any idea how many ships might already have been impacted, turned on their sides, spinning like bottles.

Mrs. Bliss thought of the honeymooners, her heart in her mouth.

The storm was moving at thirty-one knots now, an incredible speed. Someone gave the equivalent of a knot to a land mile, and Mrs. Bliss got out Manny’s calculator and tried to work out what thirty-one knots was in real space. She got something like sixty-eight miles per hour and knew she’d made a mistake. No catastrophe could come on that fast. The end of the world couldn’t come on that fast.

Her heart was in her mouth, her fingers were crossed. Her heart was in her mouth and her fingers were crossed for the honeymooners, for anyone out there on that ocean.

It was very exciting, more exciting than the greyhounds. She bit her tongue and tried to take the thought back. But it was. It was more exciting than the greyhounds. Junior and Ellen racing wind, zigging and zagging through all the choppy minefields of an enemy air, Nature’s mortal fender benders, all its angered give-no-quarters. Was will in this, wondered Mrs. Ted Bliss, indifferent, merciless will like the thing of a thug, a sort of vandalism? Though, finally, she didn’t really believe it, any of it, as she didn’t really believe in God. Only force was in this, a slasher and a burner, making widows and orphans, murdering sons.

More exciting than the greyhounds. Force merely the mechanical rabbit, a towed, insentient tease. Why waste your time? Nah, nah, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, who, years past, had been on a ship or two herself, who’d wondered during each day’s required safety drill, What, I’m getting off this big ship and going into one of those flimsy, tiny lifeboats? What, in that vast sea?

So it never even crossed her mind to pray for them. She was for them, for Ellen and Junior; she was behind them one hundred percent, but she wouldn’t pray for them.

They were lost, the two of them, somewhere behind the lines of Western Union where neither she nor anyone else could get to them. For what it was worth they had her blessing, though she knew as soon as she gave it what it was worth. You laid your life down for people but you had to be close enough so it would do them some good.

And now (it was August 23; she’d started watching on the twenty-second and fallen asleep in front of the television) they had changed their tune, the weathermen.

The storm had grazed the Bahamas anyway, leaving four dead, and was on its way to Florida, maybe the Keys, maybe farther up the coast. They had changed their tune and were singing a different song. The hurricane was coming, the hurricane was coming to America. Vicious Andrew was serving and the ball could be in Mrs. Ted Bliss’s court any time now. It was 287 miles from Florida and the boys were into a different mode. They were giving instructions where to stand if the hurricane hit. (It was exactly like those safety drills on the cruises.) And Mrs. Bliss could never keep it straight in her head what you did in a tornado, an earthquake, a hurricane.

And giving words to the wise about provisions, supplies, laying them in. She didn’t have a flashlight, she didn’t have batteries, matches, candles, cases of mineral water. She didn’t have a portable radio. She didn’t have a first-aid kit, she didn’t have a generator. What she had were Ellen’s cans of minced game, her oddball teas and organic chowders — all Ellen’s reeds and straw. What she had was wild rice for the enemas. What she had was a freezer full of doggy bags of her own leftover, uneaten meals.

She was glued to the television reports. And the thing kept on coming and kept on coming. She stayed glued to the television, the only times she left it were when she went to the bathroom. (She didn’t have a full tub of bathwater for washing the dishes.) Or into the kitchen to eat. (Eating, as she told herself, while she still could, while the stove still worked and her can opener was still driven by electricity.) There was a small radio on one of her countertops, and she listened to it as she waited for her eggs to boil, her coffee to heat up, her bread to toast. The hurricane was on every station but the edge was off. She missed the experts, couldn’t take the news as seriously when it came in from disc jockeys, or supplied grist for call-in talk shows. This was why she brought her food back into the living room/dining room area and sat down to eat it in front of the TV set.

And now they were showing a video of the damage in the Bahamas. Awful, terrible. Roofs blown off houses, boats overturned. Hurricane Andrew had caught them with their pants down.

The hurricane would hit the coast of Florida sometime during the early hours of August 24. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. As advanced as weather forecasting was, they told each other, it was still in its infancy, an inexact science, almost an art form. They had the equipment, their scientific, state-of-the-art tools — their radar and weather balloons and eye-in-the-sky satellites, even their own daring, dashing flying squadrons of “Hurricane Hunters” in modified airborne AWACS with all their glowing jewelry of measurement, finely tuned as astronomers’ lenses and instruments. Yet even the experts acknowledged the final, awful unpredictability of their art, how their knowledge was humbled before all the intricate moving parts of climate. They trotted out the one about the butterfly beating its wings in Africa. They trotted out the moon and the tides. They trotted out God and force. It might or it mightn’t. They hedged their bets and settled for their “best guesstimates.”

All that could be done, they admitted, was hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

This wasn’t the first time Mrs. Bliss had waited for a hurricane to happen. There’d been warnings and alerts every few years since the Blisses had first come to Florida. There’d been one in the late fifties, when she and Ted were there as tourists. The management of the ocean-front hotel where they were staying announced during the dinner show — the comedian, Myron Cohen, was entertaining — that a great storm was expected and that everyone should proceed to the children’s huge playroom in the basement of the hotel to wait it out. There was no need to panic, they should make their way downstairs in an orderly fashion. The checks for their dinners had already been taken care of by the hotel. Myron Cohen would be along to join them and kibitz. Everyone applauded. It was one of the things Dorothy and Ted liked best about Miami Beach, the sense of some deep-pocket hospitality it gave off — fresh flowers in the room and a basket of fruit on the table when you checked in, a personal handwritten note from the manager, then, not fifteen minutes later, a follow-up phone call, were they satisfied with the room, did they like their view, would they permit the management to send up a complimentary drink and a small assortment of hors d’oeuvres. Even, months later, another personal note. Did Ted and Dorothy intend to return next year, would they like their old room — he gave the number of the room — again? The hurricane had passed them by that time. Cohen had never been funnier. The camaraderie while they waited for something terrible to happen to them was something to see. And other times, too. And always they had gotten away with murder. The only time anything significant happened was when a hurricane, diminished by bumping into Cuba and scraping along some of the Keys, had grazed on up the coast until it was at last downgraded to a tropical depression. The storm was still powerful enough to produce gale-force winds and over four inches of rain on Mrs. Bliss’s balcony, three iron balusters of which had been knocked loose as teeth that had eventually to be pulled and replaced. Their patio furniture, which never completely dried out or lost its strong musky mildew, they gave to Goodwill.

So though they’d had their share of storm warnings and alerts, nothing had ever really happened. With the fierceness of its weather — its four- and five-foot drifts, its killer ice storms — Chicago presented more risk in a single winter than Florida did in all the years they’d lived there.

This one could pass her by, too. It would or it wouldn’t. It might or it mightn’t. It could or it couldn’t. It will or it won’t.

And though it was the middle of the afternoon of August 23, the hurricane was still up in the air, so to speak. The experts were still all over the tube with their special reports, advisories, and up-to-the-minute’s, but something had happened, a subtle change in the programming, as though the Greater Miami area had been somehow politicized, or put under martial law or vague state-of-siege conditions. City, county, and state officials had begun to appear on her screen — governmental agencies, FEMA, even the Coast Guard.

What these various spokesmen said often contradicted what others before them had said. Thus, on the one hand, Mrs. Bliss was advised that just sitting tight (particularly if one was within a few blocks of the ocean) was like the piggies in their houses of sticks and straw in the story practically inviting the wolf to huff and puff and blow their doors down, and, on the other, not to try to make a run for it, that the danger of traffic tie-ups on the main streets and northbound thruways could create major gridlock, that folks stalled in their cars would be like fish shot in barrels for the pitiless winds but, that if one were absolutely determined on escape, one had better carpool. (Mrs. Bliss thought wistfully of the Buick LeSabre, recalling the smooth, troublefree rides and trips she and Ted had made in it, endowing it with magical powers like a beast’s in a legend. In her daydream Ted turned the LeSabre’s steering wheel to the left and it soared above gridlock, setting down on straight empty highways in Georgia, Tennessee, eleven miles from Chicago. He tugged it to the right and they were on access roads, coasting alongside big clean motel chains, their vacancy signs flaring like great cheery lights of welcome.)

They did a job on each other, these municipal, state, and federal spokesmen, a great debate, their raised voices in babble and argument, some great bureaucratic covering of all the bases, particularly, Dorothy guessed, their behinds. They left her, finally, with her options open. She knew from experience, though she didn’t know how she knew it, that no final order, no ultimatum, would be given (offered, granted), that everyone was on his own in this one. (Even in extremis, the woman subsumed in the male principle — the spokesmen, the spokesmen.) Though maybe she did know, she thought, how she knew. These guys, they were like Ted’s doctors, these guys. (Laying out choices for her, the pros and the cons, shtupping them with pros and cons, making them dizzy with alternative, forcing them to choose — chemo or radiation or surgery.) One of the spokesmen, adding insult to injury, pointing out what a gorgeous day it was, not a cloud in the sky, a regular our-blue-heaven out there.

Which was true. Mrs. Ted Bliss, up to here with the voices on the television, opened her glass doors and walked out onto her small balcony. The day was spectacular, the weather even nicer than the time she went in the limousine to visit Alcibiades Chitral. How could a storm be brewing in weather like this? Which wasn’t like weather at all, really, but as comfortable as the neutral, flawlessly adjusted climate on the ground floor of a department store.

She stretched. She took in immense drafts of perfect air, almost gagging on its richness after the close, soiled atmosphere of the condo, which she hadn’t left since Friday, the day before she received Ellen’s wire, the day before she took up her vigil in front of the television. She was momentarily dizzy, sent reeling on the sweet truth of the world, and steadied herself on the railing of the balcony, her palms spread over the area where the old balusters had been loosened by the storm. Mrs. Bliss had outgrown most of what few superstitions she may once have indulged, but when she realized where her hands had come down to halt her swoon her breath snagged, caught on an omen.

She recovered and had started to go back indoors when she became gradually aware of noises, a hubbub. These seemed to rise all about her, sent from the street to where she stood on her balcony on the seventh floor and, at first, it seemed through all the sharp shrills and trebles of her amplified deafness that the noises — she recognized certain voices — might be calling to her — impatient, urgent sirens. But when she looked down she saw great activity in the streets and driveways of the buildings adjoining hers, in the driveway directly below her own.

She was not so high she could not attach names to the figures making these noises, this frantic bustle, nor so low — at that unlikely moment she was suddenly touched by her dead husband’s middling intentions, the normative measure he’d taken of their lives, meaning neither to distance themselves so greatly above the world that they were carefully buffered from it, nor so close to the earth that they could sink into it, but here, just here, precisely in the heart of the building’s hierarchy, its Goldilocksian mean — to distinguish what they were saying, their furious gestures. Though she well enough understood what they meant. These were the noises of flight, of refugees, the sound her family might have made when it quit Russia and started its journey. Beneath her, men and women stood by their automobiles hollering orders and questions at their wives and husbands who’d not yet quit their condos, barking last-minute details at each other like the flight checks of pilots before they took off. It reminded Dorothy of the times she and Ted were preparing to check out of motels, Ted at the door and Dorothy making one last surveillance of the room, checking drawers, closets, to see if anything had been left behind. She didn’t care how comfortable or unpleasant (she thought of the farm in Michigan) a stay had been, there was always something anxious and a little rushed about every leavetaking, all departure a sort of scorched earth policy.

And now, here and there on the other Towers buildings, she could make out thick, fortifying strips of tape crisscrossing various windows, or wide plywood planks covering a balcony’s glass doors, transforming the Towers into a kind of crossword puzzle, or even giant, ambiguous, ludicrous games of tic-tac-toe.

They’re getting out while the getting’s good, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss a little guiltily. They’re making a run for it. They’re doing something, she thought forlornly. They’d heard the same pros and cons she’d heard. She’d seen the same programs. More probably.

She hadn’t bothered to change her clothes and realized she must have been wearing them since the day of the telegram. The famous, fastidious Mrs. Ted Bliss had let herself go. The baleboosteh was doleful, almost in tears, and let in a tub for herself. She washed carefully, dried herself on her thickest towels, applied powder, light makeup, perfume, and changed into fresh clothes. She thought, I’m nobody’s fool, this isn’t some ritual, it ain’t my bas mitzvah, I’m not committing harakiri. It is what it is, she thought. I stayed by the TV too long and now it’s too late. I’d call but I’d never get a plane out now. They must be booked solid. If, she thought, shrewdly, they’re even flying in this weather. (She was an expert, a forecaster herself now. She meant the weather on its way, the hurricane, or even, knock wood, tropical depression. She was just too slow off the dime, and now it was too late. I’ll just have to wait it out, thought this little piggy.)

She sat down by the tiny telephone table, found the sheet of useful numbers the condominium complex handed out to all owners, and called Tower Stores, realizing even as she picked up the phone that it was a Sunday, that less than half the staff was on duty on Sundays, that even the lifeguards had Sundays off. On Sundays, in mitten derinnen, it was strictly swimming at your own risk. Gentiles, she figured, showed you no mercy. Therefore, she was actually a little surprised when she got a busy signal. She had to call back three times before the line was free and somebody answered.

“Tower Stores.”

“Tower Stores, this is Mrs. Ted Bliss in Building One.”

“Hey, Mrs. Bliss. Hola, sholem, how are you?”

“Francis?”

“Si.”

“It’s Sunday, I thought you’d be off.”

“They called people in because of the hurricane.”

“You’re in Tower Stores now, not maintenance?”

“No, I still work maintenance. It’s the hurricane, all hands on deck.”

“You think it’s going to hit us?”

“Like a potch in tochis.”

Francis Moprado was an engineer in the Towers complex. Dark as an Aztec, he was a short, almost tiny man of fierce appearance whose amiability had earned him a kind of mascot status among some of the residents. He liked to spike his conversation with Yiddish words and phrases he’d overheard, and often showed up at many of the community seders (where he’d pretend to steal the afikomen) and even at some of the old Friday night services in the game room. At these times he always wore a yarmulke, not the interchangeable plain black almost patent leather-looking beanies most of the men took out of brown cardboard boxes before they entered the converted sanctuary and put back again when they left but his own knit beige beaded skullcap. Everyone knew he was working the room for Hanukkah gelt and tips but went along with Moprado’s bald-faced fawning deferences anyway, reimbursing him generously for favors received, topping him off with gas money for the wear and tear on his car, the rubber he used up when he ran them out to the Fort Lauderdale airport or went out on errands. A taxi would have been cheaper, they agreed, but enjoyed having the patronizing little son of a bitch for a pet. Mrs. Ted Bliss found him a great curiosity, not so much for his blatant ass kissing as his complicated Indian and Hispanic blood. She thought his bland compliance and odd Latino Step’n Fetchit ways an anomaly. Unlike the other Cubans, Central, and South Americans she’d had contact with during her years in Florida, he seemed utterly without machismo, yet she was more fearful of him, of his dangerous smiling mildness, than ever she’d been of all the hidalgos’ aristocratic distance, courtesies, tricks, and airs. Somehow she knew his sharp ugly features hid no sweet and gentle heart. She guessed how much he hated them, yet when she heard his voice she felt reassured, almost lucky. She’d found her man.

“When I went out on my balcony,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I saw big pieces of wood covering a lot of the glass doors and windows. Can I get those?”

“Oy vay,” moaned the Jew hater, “if you’d called ten minutes sooner.”

“I’ve been calling for twenty minutes. The line was busy.”

“Yeah, there’s been a run on the four-by-eights.”

“You’re all out?”

“Well,” Moprado said, “there’s still a couple in back but I wouldn’t feel right selling them to you. Warped. Damaged goods.”

“Oh.”

“Probably I could pound out most of the flaws. It’s just the building would have to charge you the same as if you were getting first quality.”

“How much?” she said.

He quoted an outrageous price, three times, maybe four, the rate she’d have had to pay if a hurricane weren’t on the way.

“That’s steep,” she said. She could almost see the long face he put on for her at the other end of the phone, his helpless shrug, but when he spoke his voice was bright with consideration and possibility.

“Tell me, you got someone to slap them up for you?”

“No.”

“Tell you what,” he said, “I could drop by and give you a hand.” He’d been pretending to look at his watch now. “I can’t tie this phone up much longer. I hate to rush you but there’s probably half a dozen people trying to get through. You ought to decide. The staff’s getting shpilkes down here, it’s got its own tsuris. Their own families to deal with, last-minute stuff. Any minute the Towers will be emptying out like rats jumping a sinking ship.”

Mrs. Bliss didn’t understand why, but she had a sort of vision, a kind of freestanding knowledge like her shot-in-the-dark certainty of Francis Moprado’s hypocritical pantomime of sadness, helplessness, recovery, and urgency. She didn’t so much see as feel, visceral to her as sour stomach, raw as sore throat or tender glands, that whatever was going to happen had already happened. It was aftermath, the solemn embering end of the world. Everywhere, filling the landscape of Mrs. Bliss’s vision were people, in pairs or groups of three, four, but never more than five or six, clumps and clusters of the lost, encrusted in dirt and filth or in some ragged cleanliness like a scour of rough handling, the work of wind and water, say, a fellowship of bunches, of tufts and clumps of survival drifting in place as if they were trying to stamp blood and feeling back into their feet. Great drifts of the milling, great swarms of the solitary.

Moving in and out through the crowd were gangs of profiteers doing a kind of triage among the numbed and needy casualties, sizing them up, pushing their wares, pitching them, selling them four-by-eights, flashlights, batteries, candles, first-aid kits, generators, matches, portable radios, tubfuls of bathwater at a monstrous going rate, whatever the traffic would bear. Gulling the remnant, ripping them off. Disaster profiteers, they gathered about the disparate rabble selling them canned goods like it was going out of style, like, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, like, my God, Ted profiteering on meat and food stamps during the war!

“I don’t want to handlen with you, Mrs.,” Moprado said, “but if you want them up I need at least an hour.”

“Want what up?” Mrs. Bliss said.

“The boards,” he said. “The sooner I get started the quicker you’ll be safe. We’ve got a pretty narrow window of opportunity here. Time and tide. This damn storm’s got bells on….Mrs. Bliss? Mrs. Bliss?”

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“You’ve changed your mind? You know what the hurricane could do to your place in two shakes of a lamb’s tail? You got any idea?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I think so.”

“I’m not promising there wouldn’t be damage. There’s no guarantees. But if you put up plywood you’ll definitely be cutting your losses. Plus it looks better for the insurance. That you made an effort….Mrs. Bliss?”

“No,” she said, “I’d like to see it. I don’t want to be shut up in a dark box when it happens. I’ve been watching the radar on TV for two days. At least I ought to see it.”

By ten that evening it had begun to rain. Nothing spectacular. Without her hearing aids in she wouldn’t have heard it at all. She might even have gone out on her balcony to see the rain fall into Biscayne Bay had it been coming down a little harder, but now, in the dark, there’d be nothing to see. Sometimes, during a shower, protected from the weather by the overhang, she’d venture outside to watch the rain dimple the water in the bay or lap against the sides of yachts riding at anchor there. At night, after the sun had gone down. It was interesting to her how snug the people aboard those boats must feel, the wet safety of all those bobbing, cradled craft a queer luxury of displacement. She, for example, didn’t feel nearly as secure in her rooted, stock-still condominium, but borrowed her comfort from theirs, tapping into their coze and filled with a light wonder that they didn’t miss it, her faint stealth adding to her contentment. It was like staring into fire licking at a hearth, and she could have remained like that for hours if the consciousness of her ancient body had not intruded.

Now, of course, it was a different story. Nothing could have forced her out into those elements. She’d already decided not to make a run for it, but her motives had nothing to do with folklore, nothing to do with those legendary old-coot heroics one hears about after a natural disaster. She wasn’t standing her ground. She had drawn no line in the sand. She was not in it to defy authority or deny the looters. Indeed, she’d packed a small suitcase, put clean underwear into it, a couple of changes of clothes, soap, a roll of toilet paper, and had been careful to tuck her good jewelry, her bank passbook, and a fresh sheaf of blank checks into its side pocket. She was ready. Had the city issued orders to evacuate the premises she would almost certainly have complied, waiting only for the bus they’d send to take her to the nearest, cleanest shelter.

So she didn’t understand the motive that had convinced her not to make a run for it. She had no motive. Simply, it was too much trouble.

Now, inside her seventh-floor condominium, she waited for the winds to start howling, the rains to lash her windows, but all that happened was that the light rain had tapered off, faded to a drizzle. It was almost midnight and Mrs. Ted Bliss was overcome by a peculiar letdown, a fizzle of expectation like the diminished rain, and she turned back to her television set for an explanation.

What they had experienced during the last couple of hours, the local weatherman said, had been merely the weather they would have gotten anyway, the normal working out of pressures and fronts wheeling in from Georgia and the Gulf, and had nothing to do with Hurricane Andrew at all. He was a little embarrassed, he said, but he’d been so preoccupied by the hurricane he’d neglected to give the viewers a less exciting forecast. He apologized, and hoped he hadn’t inconvenienced anyone.

If there was lightning, he warned — the storm was expected to strike somewhere in the Miami area between about two and three in the morning — it was advisable to disconnect all major appliances and to avoid using the telephone until the lightning had passed over since it could actually strike either through the ear- or mouthpiece. Mrs. Bliss shuddered, removed her hearing aids, and placed them on the telephone table. She disconnected the television.

Now she was frightened, alarmed, even a little angry at herself for her refusal to pay Francis Moprado his pound of flesh. It seemed inconceivable that she’d be able to sleep. How could she get into a nightgown with a hurricane coming? She’d just have to sit tight with the television on and maybe doze in her armchair. This would make how many nights now she hadn’t been to bed, three, four? Excuse me, she thought, but acts of God took their own sweet time to play themselves out, and Dorothy felt more than a little irritable, as if she were in a game of cards with someone who either didn’t know what he was doing or was deliberately stalling. She didn’t appreciate it in an opponent and she didn’t approve of it in God, and was thinking — it was already after two P.M. and she saw no signs of Andrew — come on if you’re coming, let’s see what you got. She wasn’t daring providence, she was just a little cranky and punchy from the fitful quality of her sleep and the sourness of her body.

She roused herself from her wing chair and shambled into the bedroom. Sitting on the side of the bed and, while the rain had stopped and the lightning not yet started, she tried phoning her children for at least the eighth or ninth time that day. And got the same three tones followed by the same recorded message, female, solicitous, and firm. “We’re sorry,” the voice said, “but due to heavy traffic on all long-distance lines, your call cannot go through just now. Please hang up and try again later.” It was the same woman who advised her that the number she had just dialed was not in service, or not a working number, or that she had failed to dial “1” for long distance. She spoke always in the same prim voice, and Mrs. Ted Bliss would have recognized it anywhere. It was the voice of power and denial.

Of course her children would be trying to call her, too. Practically everyone in Miami would have people to report to — their kids, brothers, sisters, concerned uncles and cousins and friends, and all of those people would have people whose safety they would want to check up on.

She tried to think of others she might call, outlanders in communities so remote it was almost statistically impossible that the lines connecting Miami to these outposts would be tied up. She racked her brains to come up first with a locality where she knew anyone well enough to ask them to get in touch with Frank or Maxine and pass on a message for them not to worry, that their mother was safe. She thought of a couple of such places — the small village in Michigan near their old farm, and the town in Wyoming where the airfield might be from which the plane that had borne their ancestral uncle’s ashes could have taken off. She could come up with the geography but not with any names, and felt a sense of relief, that it was out of her hands, that she’d done all she could.

Buoyed by this odd sense of achievement she permitted herself a reward and lay down on top of the bedspread, breaking one of her own strictest rules. Even in Chicago when her grandchildren were young and, later, in Florida, when Ted was still alive and they came down with their parents to visit, Mrs. Bliss read the riot act to anyone she found on her bed once it had been made. She wouldn’t permit herself to do it and didn’t tolerate it in others. Something in the act, its wild disarray, violated her baleboosteh soul, and Mrs. Bliss lost her temper whenever anyone tried testing her on this point. She still remembered the time Maxine had caught Judith and James playing on their grandmother’s bed and had warned them to get off at once, that this was their grandma’s pet peeve. “Peeve?” she’d shouted. “My pet peeve? It isn’t a peeve. I hate it! I hate it!” Isn’t it strange, Mrs. Bliss thought now, where people drew the line? And, forgiving herself, lay down on top of the brocade bedspread without even bothering to take off her shoes. She swooned into the deepest, most comfortable sleep of her life, snoring evenly, dreamlessly.

When the hurricane woke her it wasn’t its noise, its huge winds, loud and great and uninterrupted as a cataract not so much plunged as actually pushed over a steep precipice, loud, louder than a skyful of sorties laying down a carpet of saturation bombing. It wasn’t its violent thunder locked up in the wind like the sound of unmuffled drums. It wasn’t its mad, wild, tortured, sourceless groans, rasps, screeches, and bestial gutturals — all nature’s shrill, scorched harmonics. Though she heard it, heard all of it even without her hearing aids, as anything would have heard it — the windowpanes, the furniture and appliances, its queer, vibrating falsetto so rapid and filled with enough bump and bounce and friction to raise the temperature in the apartment by a couple of degrees.

Nor even the stinging drafts striking her through the imperfect plumb of her windows and coming in over the threshold of her off-true doors like a high tide.

None of these had roused her.

What had were tremendous bursts of light filling up her room and wiping away shadow and night like the fiercest sun in the fiercest noon. She’d been right to fear the sun, going out beneath its blinding, oscillating toxic fault lines like meat in a microwave. Here, in her blinding, strobic bedroom, lightning seemed to brighten every square inch of darkness, filling up, tightening it, pulling the room’s disparate angles together like a cat’s cradle, exposing everything — her closets, the fluorescent glare off her tile and porcelain in the master bathroom, even patches of dust that had somehow escaped her vacuum cleaner, the damp rags with which she polished the furniture — even the raging winds, and every drop of rain strafing the exterior walls and driven like nails against the window glass.

She felt rested though she couldn’t have slept for more than an hour or so. It was exciting to her, waking up in time for the hurricane, though she couldn’t know yet, of course, if it actually was the hurricane and not just some scout sent out in advance of the party, a tendril of exploratory, devastating weather.

She went back to the television in the living room and, leaning down, plugged it back in. Even after two minutes there was still no picture. What the, wondered Mrs. Ted Bliss, what the, what the. It’s picked a hell of a time to go on the fritz, she thought, who had been watching it for at least three days now taking hurricane instruction, but couldn’t blame anyone but herself because maybe it said somewhere in the manual. She knew where it was, but trying to read it now would be like locking the barn door after the horse had escaped. She knew better, anyway. Hadn’t she scolded everyone who held the refrigerator door open too long, predicting not only that the cold air would escape but that it was a strain on the motor? And warned against running the air-conditioning for more than an hour, or, in the old days, winding watches too tight? So, at least in principle, she knew better. It was terrible that her thoughtlessness had shut her off from the news reports and, remembering the radio in her kitchen, went there to see what she had missed since going to sleep.

But that had broken down, too. She glanced at the electric clock over the kitchen table. It had stopped running. Shocked, in a panic, she realized that the power was out, that what she’d been seeing she’d been seeing only by the light of the thunderbolts, flickering but almost constant, steady as a snowfall.

She wondered if she were the only one who hadn’t left the Towers. She was no martyr, not the type to stay behind to guard her property, not one of those who’d choose to go down with the mountain when Mount St. Helens blew its top, or defy catastrophe — floods, volcanoes, acts of God. Such people bought into a myth of their own rectitude and, she thought, felt better about themselves, throwing up first and secondary and tertiary rings of defense around their being as if they were causes, their own holy terms of survival. She didn’t give a plugged nickel for that sort of magical thinking. Indeed, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, didn’t it go against her own bloodlines? Technically, she, her family, her husband’s, were refugees, and though they hadn’t been driven from Russia by an act of God, they had by politics and an old hostility. So it was rather more a breakdown in history and in her character that she should have remained behind in the driving wind and hard rain while just that afternoon she’d seen so much hustle and bustle, the streets and driveways packed with her neighbors taking their leave with something so like gaiety it could have been a party. How much trouble would it have been for her to flag one of them down? Her suitcase was packed. She could have been out of there at a moment’s notice if it hadn’t been for the time she’d tracked the storm on the television, as tightly wrapped in her fate as someone caught up in a close game of cards. She could give away nothing, nothing, and had to stay the course to see how her hand would play out.

And she had. And had wound up losing all.

She went to the telephone table. And lifting the phone from its cradle found a list of the people who lived in the Towers complex, but the phones were still down of course, and Mrs. Bliss had never felt so forlorn. It was one thing to have lost touch with her daughter in Cincinnati, her son in Providence, but another entirely to be out of contact with all of her neighbors. She wanted some evidence she wasn’t alone in the building. All right, the lines were down. This was troubling enough, but suppose service were restored? So many of the owners had unlisted numbers. Mrs. Bliss shuddered. She hadn’t realized how many wanted to remain anonymous and thought, irrationally, that these would be the most dangerous. Sure, or what were they hiding? I mean, she meant, what were they protecting that made them willing to fork over whatever premium they’d have had to fork over to Southern Bell for the privilege of not being listed in the Miami telephone directory? At the very minimum they had to be deadbeats covering their behinds from creditors and, since the demographics had shifted, from all those to whom they owed services. Either way, thought Mrs. Bliss, they couldn’t be on the strict up-and-up.

I’m getting crazy, she thought, suddenly finding enemies, making them up. She’d never expected not only not just to run with the paranoids but actually pace them. And remembered the call she’d made to the Towers Stores and Francis Moprado. She wondered if he were still in the building and, jarred by the thought he might be, slowly managed to piece its number together by the flashes of electricity in the room and punched Towers Stores up once again, remembering only after it was too late that using the phone during an electrical storm was the worst thing you could do. She thrust it away from her and hoped it had landed where it belonged. It hadn’t and Dorothy, exactly as if a poisonous snake were loose on the carpet and striking at her heels, made a wild zigzag move toward the entrance (perfectly describing the wild arcs and angles of the lightning) to her apartment and pulled open the door.

Think, she thought quickly, don’t lock yourself out and, first pressing the automatic latch on the door, stepped outside her condo and shut the door behind her.

“It’s too dark,” she said in the hallway. “I can’t see my hand in front of my face.”

Because the power was still out of course. Because almost no lightning tumbled over the stunted clearances of the doorways. Because unlike the other buildings in the Towers the architects had made no provision for windows at either end of the long, dark corridor. No sudden bolts illuminated the different ends of the buildings, its distant poles.

With no shapes or dimensions to guide her she felt fear, and quite lost. Mindlessly, as though its sound were the only orientation available to her, she called her name aloud, like someone taking attendance in a schoolroom. Then, feeling her vulnerability, she deliberately began to lurch from side to side all along the walls up and down the length of Tower Number One and, here and there, to knock indiscriminately at the walls and doors.

It was a lesson to her, how soon the old become lost once they’ve slipped their tether. She was trying to get back home. That’s why she rapped at the doors, why, when she got no response, she fumbled in the dark at their hardware. Though how would she hear one if she got it? She’d pulled the appliances from her ears. “Foolish,” she scolded herself, “you wouldn’t recognize panic? Some scared ‘Who’s there?’ ” Even someone’s desperate, alarmed, and rushed elusions, the noise, she meant, of someone else’s danger. (She knew these places, their disparate configurations like the back of her own hand, that she, in their place, wouldn’t even have tried to hide. She lived, she understood, in a sort of corner. Space here was a fiction.) Only then, when she heard no panic or futile scurrying, when she’d raised some dim light of hope, did she try a door to see if it were hers. Again and again she tried but it never was. Then one was, and thinking some looting rapist killer lurked behind it, she turned the doorknob.

No one jumped out at her but this didn’t calm her. He could be lying low, he could be playing possum. Such was Mrs. Bliss’s fear and confusion that though lightning still flashed (diminished in frequency and intensity) and lighted up the place like flares behind clouds it was at least a minute or two before she was sure she was home.

Thinking: It looks familiar. That’s my wing chair, there’s my television.

It was the most amazing thing. There was nothing to do. She was bored in mitten derinnen. That’s life for you, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, a surprise in every box. Deprived of television by the power failure, she wondered what to do with herself. Though she understood she hadn’t been a proper baleboosteh in years, not since Ted was alive, as a matter of fact. She’d always been fastidious about her housekeeping, she liked to think she still was, but here she was in the middle of one of the most disruptive events that could happen to a woman like herself and what was she doing about it? Nothing. Not a damn thing. She knew the storm wasn’t done with her yet and that anything she did now would have to be done over when it was, yet she hadn’t even taken the measures taken by those who’d chosen not to go down with their condominiums. Where were the boards on her windows? Had she disconnected all her major appliances? Where were the provisions the experts had practically begged her to lay in? What equipment did she have on hand? There was nothing, nothing. Now the toilets wouldn’t flush and she had only her pots to piss in.

So she had nothing to do. She was already bored with her emergency and who knew how much longer it would go on?

She forced herself to think about what had happened to Ellen and Junior Yellin, whose cheery wire had indirectly led to Dorothy’s first awareness of the hurricane. She wished them well, alevai, but even as she did so felt a spirit of disclaimer come over her, something like the printing on the back of the ticket a parking garage might have handed Ted in the old days. Management not responsible for damage to automobile or for loss of any contents left therein.

She went up to her big wing chair and turned it toward the wide glass doors that led out to her balcony. She sat down. Here and there through the night pieces of lightning still lit up the sky but she could see that the storm, though not yet over, had moved into a new, perhaps even more treacherous, phase.

Mrs. Bliss, staring as far as she could into the western edges of the hurricane, tried to recall what the earnest young weather mavins had attempted to teach her about hurricanes, but except for the big stuff — wind speeds, the eye, periods of low pressure, storm surges, risen seas, terrific floods — it was all blur, a confetti of information. So maybe, she thought, if she just stared at it hard enough long enough, examining its progress and moods, she might be able to tell for herself where she stood, when she could declare the all clear (always mindful, of course, that it was provisional, merely the eye passing through, a grace period like the thirty days the insurance gives you before canceling your policy), and go out into the street again. To stretch her legs, get some fresh air, collect herself, regroup for the next onslaught.

Brushing up, studying, learning, cramming, burning the midnight oil, articling herself to it until she had the hurricane by heart. Making the adjustment from television to her great glass sliding doors as though the activity were only a shift in camera angles.

Mrs. Ted Bliss observing the winds bash the palm trees. Imagining the noise it made, so much it might have been the sound of a thousand fire trucks, as many police cars. Ambulances. An entire motor pool of disaster and death.

Something riding on all this close coverage and up-to-the-minute.

Her respite, that chance to catch her breath, get her second wind. When she realized: If the power’s back on, if the electric is up. Because how the hell else would she be able not just to make it down those seven floors but to climb back up them again, all those flights of stairs? Or even four of them? Or even three? It was maybe her third or fourth hour into the hurricane, and it was the first time she cried. She felt as if all breath had left her body. Breathless, alone, as though the vacant Towers were only another sort of necropolis. She could have been back in the Chicago boneyard where all her dead relatives were buried.

If Holmer Toibb were alive today, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, I’d breeze through his assignment with flying colors. My self, she’d have explained to him, my self is my interest. Because everything else falls away. Family, friends. Even love falls away. It chips and breaks up like ice. It falls off like a scab.

Oh, I’m not indifferent, she would have told the old therapeusisist, if anything, vice versa. She was highly partisan. Were it in her power she’d have done anything to save them. It wouldn’t even have to have been them. She would have saved anybody, everybody. She meant it, she wasn’t bragging on herself. Still, she had to admit it, she’d have used their salvation to forward her own. So what was the use? Who knows? Maybe she wouldn’t have done such a bang-up job on the assignment. Maybe all her good intentions added up to was a gentleman’s “C.” If it weren’t so late in the day maybe she’d have put her money where her mouth was. Maybe everybody would.

In her dreams the hurricane was even more animated than it was in actuality. She got better reception in her dreams. For one thing it was already light out. She couldn’t judge what time it was but supposed early morning since she saw no sun. Of course that might have been an illusion created by the gloom — some mean average by-product of the practically biblical rain. So God knows when those first few palm trees flew past her seventh-story balcony. It could have been as early as seven or as late as half-past six in the afternoon. Whatever the time, this was the worst Mrs. Bliss had seen yet. The trees flew past so rapidly and on so horizontal a course they could have been wooden torpedoes. She’d have risen from the wing chair, walked to the drapes to shut them to protect herself from the constant necessity of blinking or throwing up her hands like a boxer trying to protect his head if it hadn’t been for her fear that at any moment the wind could shift, pfftt, bam, just like that, and drive one of those palms directly through the sliding glass doors. There was nothing more Mrs. Bliss could do. Tracking the hurricane was fatuous now, quantifying it was. She dreamed she had fallen asleep in her chair, she dreamed that the eye of the hurricane had already passed over.

With this, she dreamed of how very depressed she was, for if its eye had passed over, then not only was the worst yet to come (and hadn’t it — those palm trees whizzing past — already started?) but she had missed out on what was said to be the most exhilarating aspect of a hurricane — the intense feeling of well-being and soft, luxurious fatigue that accompanied an extended period of low pressure. The experts were all agreed on this part, hammering away at their theme, their own disclaimer. You must steel yourself against the soft seduction of the eye’s low pressure, its perfect dust-and pollen-raked sweet room temperature ionized air, as though the same powerful winds that had blown it over and around her had pushed away all shmuts before them like a new beginning of the world. Stay indoors, stay indoors, they warned, drilling its dangers at her like a public service announcement. You couldn’t have paid her, who’d missed so much, to miss this.

And now she had, and woke from her unplanned sleep with a fatigue as sour as a hangover.

Confused, disoriented, she saw that it was still dark but took no comfort from the fact that she had not missed the eye’s wondrous performance.

A beam of fuzzily focused yellowish light, round and wide as if it were coming out the end of a megaphone, played over Mrs. Bliss’s living/dining-room area, frightening her, stiffening her back against the wing chair and forcing her to clutch at its arms like a fugitive flattening himself against a wall.

“Mrs. Bliss? Mrs. Bliss.”

She thought she could hear someone call her name, but without her hearing aids she couldn’t be sure.

“Mrs. Bliss?”

Furtively, she put her hand into a breast pocket of her pants suit and quietly as she could fumbled for a hearing aid. She didn’t think she’d made any noise but the appliance wasn’t in yet so she couldn’t be sure.

“Mrs. Bliss, are you there?”

“Who’s that, who’s there?”

She hoped it wasn’t Francis Moprado come to murder her for not allowing him to board up her sliding doors.

“It’s me.”

“What do you want, how’d you get in?”

“Passkey.” The security guard walked in front of Mrs. Bliss’s chair. “I come to check you out.”

“Oh, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“No,” she said, “it’s me. Elaine Munez’s daughter.” She turned the batonlike flashlight on herself for identification.

“I fell asleep,” Mrs. Bliss said. Inexplicably, she felt a need to account for herself, her wanton presence in her condominium in an abandoned building during a hurricane. Idly, she wondered if this were a citable offense, if she could be written up, decided that trying to explain would make too long a story. She wouldn’t fight it.

“Did you see my mother?”

“What?”

“Did you see my mother? I been trying to call since the first reports on my scanner. She don’t answer, Mrs. Bliss.”

“Darling,” said Mrs. Bliss, “the phones aren’t working.”

“Before they ain’t working.”

“People have been leaving the building, Louise. I saw from my balcony. It could have been yesterday. The day before yesterday.”

“She didn’t sign out,” said the security guard. “You got to leave your name with the security guard you go away overnight. I check the books. No Elaine Munez.”

“Well, everyone was in such a hurry.”

“She know the rule.”

“There must have been long lines. Everybody was honking their horns. Does Mother still drive?”

“No.”

“There,” Mrs. Bliss said, “you see? Her driver was giving her the bum’s rush. She probably didn’t have time for the formalities.”

“Not the formalities,” Louise said. She was close to hysteria. “She know how I worry.”

“You’ll see, Mother’s all right. Probably she tried to get a message to you. Everyone was in such a hurry.”

Was she crying? It was too dark to see but it seemed to Mrs. Bliss that the strange girl was crying.

“I come to guard her,” Louise explained. “To protect her from bandits and stranglers.”

“Oh, Louise,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“It isn’t secure,” Louise said, shaking her head desolately. “I’ll tell you something,” she whispered hoarsely. Remarkably, Dorothy could hear every word. She didn’t even have to lean forward, as if there were something in the complicated register of her alarm so insistent it wiped out all silence. “The building ain’t vacant!”

“You checked the sign-out ledger. Did many stay?”

“How hard it would be to sign out and stay behind? It make a good alibi,” she said professionally.

Mrs. Bliss looked toward the mad, improbable woman. Was it possible she knew what she was talking about? And recalled her paranoia in the hall when she’d called out her name like a talisman and stealthily tried all the doorknobs. But somehow her fear had been short-circuited. Sure, she thought, fear falls away, too.

“She could be anywhere,” Louise Munez said desperately. “She could be anywhere on any floor in any building.” Then, like a child, she said, “I want my mother, I want my mother,” and Mrs. Ted Bliss, who wanted her husband and her dead son Marvin, but now not so much, and her other children, too, and the gang, and all the others whom she loved who’d ever lived, but not now not so much, even Junior Yellin, even Ellen, was astonished to realize that the strange girl — she’d met her when she first came to the Towers — was no longer a girl but a woman in her fifties who even at that age was still forever frozen into whatever loony, skewed relationship with her mother had caused their breach and disappointed the mother forever. (Because of all the things that fall away — and everything did, everything, the whole kit and caboodle, even her condo, even the Buick LeSabre, the color of which she no longer remembered — thought Mrs. Bliss, maybe it’s only madness you can hang onto.) And felt something warm, even feverish, take her hand. It was Louise Munez’s hands, covering her own. “Oh,” she said, “I have frighten you.”

“No,” said Mrs. Bliss.

“I will wait with you,” she declared. “I will see you safe through the hurricane.”

Mrs. Bliss removed her hand gently from Louise’s and held her arms open. In the darkness she lifted her left hand to Louise’s head and began to stroke the dry hair.

Because everything else falls away. Family, friends, love fall away. Even madness stilled at last. Until all that’s left is obligation.