Sign Languages

RISING WATER, WIND-DRIVEN RAIN

August 1687

Pierre Eugene Berthier locked his fingers in the roots along the creek bank and pulled himself up. The two men below stared after him, shading their eyes from the terrible sun. Berthier ignored them; he walked away from the dry creek into the sparse shade of the post oaks. A dozen things might have troubled him, led to another series of desperate pains just below his ribs that would bring a cold sweat underneath the hotter, constant sweat. He scratched his arm covered with the red welts from mosquitoes which swarmed in black droves despite the lack of pools anywhere in the sandy bends of this goddamned nameless creek. “Should we name it, too?” they had joked at first, after they had strangled the bastard farther south on some other, larger creek. Maybe it was wrong to have done it then, as he knelt.

Or Berthier could worry about the Karankawas somewhere along here who ate flesh. Soaking it for two days in tidal pools. “They like their salt,” they had once joked. The weapons heavy, the helmets like ovens around their brains. The past an endless series of mistakes and deaths: shipwreck—“push on goddamn you men”—illness, wrong turns—“lazy bastards.” The names of saints pouring out of his foul mouth like some priest gone mad. Along this flat, wooded plain no heights to name but dozens of creeks colored by the clay in their banks. Once running blood red, yellow. But now, at best, damp patches of sand quickly shrinking under the long hours of sun.

Pierre Eugene Berthier left them in the creek. Call it St. Berthier, he thought. The creek of St. Jude. He smiled as he walked farther into the post oaks and onto what, in 150 years, would become the Mecham survey and, in 150 years more, lot 51 of Amarilla Creek, “Homes from the low 90s.”

There were no garden hoses underfoot, no edge of a porch to sit on. Down below, the two men chewed miserable pieces of tobacco leaf as thin as paper and looked at their hands. No faded Coke cans to pry from the yellow clay, not a single shiny piece of broken glass to snag their eyes.

Berthier sat and then stood again. It was not from a dream, he thought. So somewhere, at sometime, it had happened. He was thirty-seven so there was not all that much to recall. The singing of birds brought it back — the image of a rooster crowing. But there was no sound to it. The bird was red but mottled by the shade of a tree. It stretched its neck, flung wide its wings, and raised its beak skyward.

Must be the product of little food and diminishing portions of water, he thought. But he had recalled it the morning they had decided. He saw it right now as he considered moving them farther from the creek. “The hell with St. Jude’s course.” He’d move them overland and due east. Sitting, then rising again, he walked down to the men and thanked God for their salvation from the name-spewing madman. He recognized in his heart the rooster’s mark on him — whatever, whenever it had been. Always an anxious man, Berthier was less daring than determined. And despite the newly surging pain in his stomach, he felt he must read such a thing with optimism.

In a few minutes he would help them out of the creek and together they would continue listening for savages and the sound of running water, a sound easily hidden by the noises of birds, men, the soughing of the wind in these dwarf trees.

They would cross lot 51, where the contractor would build a solid two-story house, go bankrupt, and sell it for practically nothing to Evan Fredericks and his wife, Alice Wolff.

No one, back then, walked across lots 50 or 52. No cannibal Indians, Spaniards, Frenchmen. But whatever the rooster meant, it came only once more, when Berthier was eighty-seven, sitting in the sunlight of a doorway near Chartres, the cathedral spire directly before his eyes across a field full of late summer wildflowers. But it came and went with hardly a flicker, the smallest cloud across the sun, a brief shadow somewhere in the flowers. Berthier pursed his lips and took a long drink of water from the clay jug never out of reach. He always smelled ripe from the urine he had to pass so often. It frequently trickled in his pants before he could loosen the buttons. Everyone considered him a thoroughly disgusting and worthless old man.

April 1987

Evan Fredericks had not thought about the rain all day. Instead he had tried to concentrate on his work but had really only fidgeted. At lunch he had stayed inside and reorganized some files, straightened his desk drawers. He knew that eventually he would solve the problems they had passed on to him. He had always been able, with time, to get down to work. But it seemed to take longer and longer and he was just over thirty-seven.

Though rain had been forecast for several days, when he stepped outside the gusting rain surprised him, as did the thought he had just had — almost thirty years to retirement. Jesus, he thought. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, as he forgot to unfurl the umbrella but instead rushed down the steps and around the corner to the parking lot. There the full force of the wind hit, whipping his suit tight against him, the raindrops infrequent but large and with the sting of nettles.

Inside the car Evan caught his breath, let the energy of the coming storm distract him from the problems left spread across his desk on endless computer sheets. A design flaw by some young engineer, he thought, as he started the engine and turned on the wipers. The building emerged sharply from the watery blur. He watched other employees scatter across the lot. Wind-sculpted women’s dresses revealed panty lines, pubic bulges.

He turned the radio to his usual station to catch the last of the news, but there was only a steady buzz interrupted by the crackle of lightning. It’s off the air, he realized, as he pulled into the slow traffic.

Which slowed even more though the city was only medium-sized; one of the reasons they had taken this job, given the choices, was the city’s “driveability” as Alice called it. That and the promotion and leap in salary which provided the security for a down payment. He thought of the house, of Alice there now. Ahead of him, the traffic lights went black and the massive storm stopped brewing overhead and stalled, unleashing rain in solid wind-blown waves.

Evan brushed the windshield with the back of his hand, reached and turned the radio to a country-western station for news bulletins, but the announcer seemed unconcerned though the lightning punctuated a song about whores drinking sangria.

From a nearby car, the traffic now only inching forward toward the dead lights, Evan Fredericks would only be a blur through the downpour. Brushing the window free of fog or daring to roll it down, one would see only the silhouette of a thin man in a damp suit, the green light from the dash not softening the sharp chin and nose but rather somehow compressing them, making him look childlike and a bit ill. A boy, dressed in his father’s suit behind the huge wheel, pretending in the driveway. Green from having smoked a piece of cigarette from the ashtray. Moving the wheel a little, hoping to be found out soon. “Evan, what on earth are you doing? We’ve been looking all over. Your father… what’s that smell? Evan Fredericks…”

Taken from the car, right out of the rain. Angry, loving, sympathetic mother. Straight to his room. A slap on the bottom. A hot bath. The comfort of old quilts from dead aunts.

The man in the car was now at the light. The wipers, on high, slapped the chrome edging of the windshield. Evan pulled across the intersection slowly.

At some time he had convinced himself of everything. At some time he had begun acting the role of Evan Fredericks. But this was not what he told himself now, across the intersection, his eyes on the blur of taillights ahead, his left foot poised just over the brake pedal.

But sometimes he felt all the symptoms. Like earlier today when he doubted his ability for a full eight hours, moving from desk to coffeepot, to files, to phone. But not dialing anyone in the building, or Alice at home. Home and Alice, the two things he would not doubt, could not imagine such doubt as that would take. Though really he did. When he counted back ten years to before their marriage or considered the tumors once inside her like spongy fruit.

Or sitting on the floor in front of the sink, his head even with the plumbing, the water pattering from the plastic pipes. I should be able to do this. I can if I only try harder, if I keep calm. Look what you solved yesterday at work. And the gutters look fine. This, the front door lock next, flashing over the garage.

At night, for years, he waited for something to pull him together. I just have to take my time, he told himself. And not get anxious. Evan Fredericks playing the man in bed next to a woman; the man handy around the house. Playing this man in the car. Waiting to be caught, admonished. Eager to confess and make amends in exchange for love and everything else.

What he dreads would be a list including everything imaginable. He is tricked by events, fooled by something he can not describe, though he knows it is not just himself, but something outside somewhere. It all goes too far back. Only keep the bitterness away. Finally, it is all too unclear, too vague. Like this day of wandering thoughts, the problem clearly before him on printouts, the storm generating outside, and his mind on “heartache,” which is as close as he ever came to naming the smallest part of it. “Nostalgia,” he had only once called it. But he knew even back then, in the car, the cigarette butt dangling like George Raft’s, that the very instant of make-believe threatened him. As if he might not become Evan again, though he was unsure of the severity of the loss.

The man in the car rubbed his eyes. Already it had taken him longer to reach the loop than it usually took him to get home. He wanted to see Alice. Tall, stoop-shouldered, standing in the opened garage with a towel for his wet hair in her hands.

The rain had started along Amarilla Creek at noon. It had just begun to drum on Alice’s Honda when she pulled into the garage.

Now she drank a cup of coffee and watched it obscure the backyard and sweep heavily across the porch. The post oaks, always poised to litter the yard given the slightest breeze, had tangled the porch with branches, the green leaves dark waving blotches through the sheet of water pouring down the sliding-glass door.

Alice wiped a swath clear and pressed her forehead to the cool glass. But she couldn’t see the creek beyond the chain-link fence.

She wished she had fixed herbal tea. Something to calm her anxiety. A flash of lightning caused her to flinch; she jerked her vulnerable face from the glass and spilled some coffee on her stockings. “Shit,” she said, and when the thunder rolled past overhead she wished she had counted “one thousand one, one thousand two,” as she had earlier. But she was certain the storm was not moving much now. It was almost directly overhead and immobile. She set the cup down and bent to wipe her toes with a paper napkin. She had never enjoyed storms. Her father had been a cattle rancher, and storms had more likely meant drowned calves than green grass.

Alice Wolff had lied about this afternoon to her classes at Clarion Community College. There they were, ready to begin the final few weeks on their research papers, and she had faltered. Standing in front of them she stared at their faces, most of them adults, and she had let them down. Let herself down. Let Clarion down. Dr. Blocker, the department head.

Alice had sent them to the library with a hurried explanation. The younger ones had brightened up; the adults had looked concerned. “Are you all right, Mrs. Wolff?” Mrs. Vincent, too huge to sit in the small desk any way except sidesaddle, had asked. Alice pitied her but was also appalled at the size of her thighs, the flesh always trembling, quaking as if it were registering the faintest earth tremors.

“It’s my husband,” Alice had said. “Nothing major. Nothing bad. Just unexpected.”

But not unexpected. She had always hated the job. This one only a year old. But all the others, too. By March it was like prison. In the fall, she could bear it until Thanksgiving. When Evan comes home I’ll be fine, she told herself.

The next burst of wind seemed to change the pressure in the room. Her eardrums and skin felt it, registered something outside. Alice sat on the couch in the den and watched the silent TV screen. A man cooked in a wok. He was selling woks. Below the edge of his table, the weather warnings ran in a line of gold letters. Flash floods possible. Severe thunderstorms. High winds. The entire viewing area. Stay tuned.

Alice took most of her comfort from Evan. She always had. Before she knew she could not have children. Even earlier, when she first realized he was somehow crippled inside. She had learned not to think much about it all because she depended on him.

She had always relied on others. She had never found out exactly what she wanted to be. Her brothers, all older, had gone to college or into the Air Force or Navy. One was a pilot for TWA, one a computer programmer, the youngest a forest ranger in Oregon. But Alice, always the sister and baby, had never, it seemed to her, had much of a chance. Her mother had been that way, too. For a few minutes Alice remembered her before her death three years ago. Not senility but somehow worse. Unable to do anything alone. Frightened of people at the door, neighbors across the street.

Alice saw herself when she remembered her mother, though she had thought for the longest time — all through college — that her mother was the example driving her on. I can’t be that way. What way? she asked herself as the man chopped vegetables more deftly than seemed humanly possible.

She had become a teacher by default. Found herself finished with college and with a graduate degree in English. Someone mentioned teaching. The man she had lived with thought she could teach while she became something else if that’s what she wanted. But she had never intended to do anything at all it seemed. And she could organize a class well. She had always been efficient. The brothers had gardened and built fences and despised their father’s harsh command and never come home again after high school. She had taken over the ledgers and loved the cattle dotting the hillside and the sunsets beyond the serrated tops of pines. She still missed the house. Her brothers had left her to sell it and divide the money she mailed to them.

Alice had always wanted strength of will. She had been surrounded by determined women at college. But there was her mother as an example. Always quiet and courteous, listening and nodding, she directed Alice’s whole existence. Alice knew this about herself. And she believed no one she knew, no people in books, so thoroughly understood themselves. It was her triumph over everything else. Certainly Evan had no such understanding. Or Dr. Blocker at Clarion. Her mother or brothers. The fiery women at college.

She accepted herself. Home, alone, she was anxious. Once, given a new course to teach, she was sick to death. But she had planned it perfectly. Dr. Blocker came to evaluate her and nodded and nodded at what she said to the technical writing students. On the form he checked all the boxes marked excellent.

There were no tornadoes with this storm, so she could relax a bit. And, by the end of April, classes would be over. She would have made it through. And this summer they were going to Italy — their first vacation abroad in ten years of marriage.

As she was about to turn on a lamp in the den — outside it was as dull as dusk — she thought she saw a broad sheet of water rushing through the yard, swirling around the trunks of the post oaks just off the porch.

When Evan drove into their subdivision he was terribly worried. Though all the houses in Amarilla Creek Estates were well off the asphalt roads, hidden by yaupons and post oaks, the storm sewers were flooded and the rushing water threatened to reach his car doors. Today had been trash day, and he had to weave his way through tumbling plastic cans, their contents floating ahead of them.

On Creek View, his street, water covered the road and poured down the slope of his gravel drive. His front yard was flooded. Wiping the windshield, he slowed to a stop and tried to locate a reference — a newly planted bed of lantana, a water faucet at the foot of some yaupon — but couldn’t. He realized it had all disappeared under the yellow muddy flow.

Alice had the garage door open. She stood amid the rubble of boxes they hadn’t quite gotten to in over a year. They had laughed about what could possibly be in them since they seemed to have everything they needed. Maybe they’re somebody else’s, he remembered saying.

Evan slammed the door shut and splashed through the water, his head bowed, ready for the towel. But stopping in front of her, he raised his eyes. She had been crying; her face was puffy and seemed old. He hugged her awkwardly, causing them both to totter a little, their legs bumping into boxes. Alice held on; they seemed to dance a bit to gain their balance. She took a deep breath and brought the towel to Evan’s face, patted it dry as if he were asleep and she didn’t wish to wake him. He closed his eyes and tried to shut himself down a little.

“What’ll we do?” Alice asked and, laying the towel on a box, took Evan to the garage door. Looking down, he saw how the water had risen over the lip of the foundation and was slowly gathering itself to menace the nearest box.

“Jesus Christ,” Evan said. And for a while they stood there waiting. He felt caught again. The child playacting the adult. Alice was ready to mind. She was ready to wait and listen. She refused to notice his lips moving or to question whatever it was he had never possessed for himself.

The next day the newspaper would be filled with accounts of the localized flooding. Of how, for some reason unclear to meteorologists, the heavy thunderstorms had stalled directly over the city and dropped nine inches of rain in under four hours. Two young boys had already drowned in separate events — one lodged facedown in a storm sewer; the other swept off a raft he had launched down a street — but no one knew this yet. As Evan and Alice didn’t know that the rain coming down even harder now would produce real threats to them.

Soon they were working frantically. Evan tried moving the mystery boxes because the water began tunneling in from the drive. His mind churned a thousand ragged thoughts as he sloshed around in the cold muddy water. Twigs floated into the garage, pieces of trash from somewhere up the street. It’s not fair. It’s our first house. Goddammit, stop it now. He felt his pulse in his throat. His brain felt as if it were full of clots ready to break loose. I’ll die, he thought. I’m about to fall over with a stroke.

Later Alice phoned the police. 911. “What do we do!” she had asked in tears. “Put your furniture up. Take things to the second floor. Leave if you should. Where you are shouldn’t get too bad. Some people…” Alice slammed down the receiver. She ran upstairs and looked from the study into the backyard. Now it was almost completely dark, but though the lightning had almost died out, the sky was lighted somehow, the low swirling clouds at treetop level. Below she saw the roiling water sweep the porch clear. It took her potted plants, dammed the downstream side with deck furniture.

She came back down to the den’s sliding doors to see water coming through onto the linoleum. Save us, she kept chanting to herself as she lay rolled towels along the door and baseboards. Save us, she chanted, thinking she was asking everyone she knew for help. People from Clarion, her students, her parents’ spirits, God, Evan. She worked and imagined the community coming to pack sandbags, form a human chain to place them, bail water, put out fires, make coffee. “Please,” she said clearly out loud and surprised herself.

Evan discovered the water bubbling up around the baseboards in the living room. When she came in with the last of the towels, her footprints in the carpet filled with water.

She told him what the police had said. They pulled books from the bottom shelves of bookcases. They unplugged the stereo and television. Very soon they’d have to consider taking the furniture they could lift together upstairs. Alice carried, as far as the landing, a wooden rocker that had belonged to a great-grandfather.

She sat down in the soft circle of light from the chandelier high overhead. All the lights in the house on as if their heat would help dry the water up. “If we lose power,” he shouted up at her, “we’ll leave, okay?” She looked down the stairs to where a thin film of water, filtered clear by the carpet, flowed to meet the water coming in from the kitchen.

Some minutes later, Evan looked into the garage again. He had closed the automatic door and stuffed some work rags into the crack where the door met the concrete. But now the water bubbled up in long sighs and the rags waved like seaweed in the current.

“Goddammit,” he said, and stepped down from the door into ankle-deep water. He worked quickly, putting the boxes up on metal shelves and his workbench. He bent to retrieve things as they floated by: candles, shoes, a purse from some waterlogged boxes already split open. He didn’t recognize any of the objects.

All the time his mind seemed out of step with his hands grasping here and there. Lifting up, reaching down again. At one point he tried a foolish idea. He opened the garage door and water poured in; he looked back to see it lap over the doorsill and swirl under the poorly fitted door and into the utility room. Then he took his wide stiff shop broom and tried pushing the water back against itself and into the flooded drive. He strained more forcefully than he had in years. His pulse raced, his tie, which he had forgotten to remove, fluttered over his shoulder. He noticed himself reflected in a storm-door pane propped against a shelf.

But he barely recognized himself engaged in such a silly effort. Instead his mind worked in aspic, in thoughts slow and viscous. He despaired. It was their first house after saving money for years. He fretted for Alice inside; he believed he thought her thoughts for her and cursed such a punishing event. All the day’s thoughts came back. And yesterday’s too. And soon Evan stopped and wanted to cry out. He was a child trying to do combat only adults were able to comprehend. His heart ached more than it had in years. He wished for safety and comfort. It’s not right, he thought, as he dropped the broom and watched it float toward the car in the driveway, its headlights still on. I shouldn’t be punished. Or if this is the punishment, get it over with. He wished he had not come home from work. Or gone to a party and met her. He wished he had stayed in Oklahoma. Never undressed her, taken his own clothes off. He told himself he was a crybaby, but the admonition didn’t have much of an effect.

He sloshed through the cold water, leaves clinging to his pants legs. He grabbed the broom before it floated around the corner of the house.

He stood up under the eaves with it in his hands and looked around. The low clouds boiled overhead reflecting the city lights. Lightning occasionally ripped the sky. The rain had lessened some. Evan tried to gauge its intensity by holding out a wet arm. All around him the water sucked and moaned. Somewhere far off he heard a shout.

“Hello!” he yelled back through cupped hands. But instead of a reply, the klaxon of an ambulance or fire engine began in the distance. Stepping off the foundation, he felt the water rise to his knees. He clung to the brick wall like a blind man. Passing shrubs, he noticed the debris snared in their branches. At the rear of the house he stopped. Here the water rose to his waist as the yard dropped sharply to the creek.

Evan felt for the rain again with his bare arm. Then he watched something black and large emerge from the water in front of him. He opened his mouth and called Alice. Down the hill the landscape timbers of the perennial bed showed symmetrical in the twilight. The first thing he had built in his own garage for his own house. The water was going down. “Alice!” he shouted. “Alice, come look!” Yes, he kept thinking. Yes. Yes.

But then the rectangle lost its form, turned away from him. Rotated on its plane. Its shape dissolved and Evan realized he could see none of the plants, not even the top of the tall hollyhock, and he knew the water wasn’t going down. Then the floating landscape timbers eased over the farthest corner of the chain-link fence and rushed downstream. The cold water pulling at his thighs had told him the truth all along. But the betrayal wasn’t lessened. He retraced his way along the wall even though the swamped porch was closer. He remembered that floods brought out snakes. Back in the garage he looked at the incongruity of yellow flood water illuminated by the overhead light. He listened to the echo of his foolish shouting voice. “Alice, come look. Alice, we’re saved.”

Some time later Alice went to the garage for help. She had run out of towels, the floor was flooded, and she needed Evan to come back inside. But when she opened the door and saw him sitting on a stool looking out into the car lights, she closed the door quietly. There’s nothing to do, she thought.

Alice sloshed across the kitchen linoleum and opened the sliding door. She took in a deep breath of wet air and listened to the rain slashing through the oaks and yaupons. But over that noise and the distant sounds of emergency vehicles she heard the sharp cry of a cat. Stepping out into the rain to the edge of the porch, Alice listened until her eyes adjusted to the odd glow from the low clouds.

The cat clung to the top of the chain-link fence at the side of the house, its feet constantly moving, its balance uncertain in the tangle of trumpet vine. The black water ran easily through the open links but surged around the vines. The fence swayed, the precarious cat cried, its voice almost the sound of a baby’s.

“Here, kitty… kitty, kitty, kitty.” Alice slapped her thighs to attract its attention. And before she spoke again, the cat leapt into the water.

“That’s it. Come on,” she shouted as, crawling across the porch on her hands and knees, the water over her calves, she edged toward the railing.

“Come on… come on over here,” she said softly, almost to herself. For a moment the small dark shape of the cat’s head disappeared under a swell of water and Alice regretted calling it off the fence. But in a few seconds the slick head emerged. The cat paddled furiously toward her and, when it was within arm’s length, she lunged to grab it, falling across the flooded boards.

She sat up, the soaked cat against her soaked chest. For a while it was quiet from its exhaustion but suddenly it pushed vehemently against her chest until she dropped it. She watched it cross the porch and leap up on the railing. After a second’s hesitation the cat scaled a tree and disappeared above the roof-line. Alice smiled. She closed her eyes and relived the last few minutes. She saw the triangular head barely above the water, the cat swimming furiously against the current. She thought about how much cats hate water. It was something she had never seen before. Both their chests had rattled for a time. She opened her eyes and retraced the cat’s escape up into the oaks above Amarilla Creek.

Around ten the rain stopped completely and the water began to fall. By midnight their yard was empty.

They slept with the windows open so they could listen for more rain. The wet carpet and soaked boxes and furniture produced a sour pungent odor.

The next morning they both got up with headaches. Evan phoned the insurance company while Alice washed and dried towels. The water had left its level on the white walls in the living room. The legs of the dining-room table were discolored three inches above the floor.

Evan came into the utility room shaking his head. “Rising water’s not covered in this state.” He took Alice’s coffee cup off a shelf and drank. “Wind-driven rain… now that’s covered. That’s what I should have said. I’m sure that’s what she expected me to say… wanted me to say.” He laughed an ugly snort of a laugh. Alice looked at him and bent back over the clothes. She didn’t know what to say.

Angry all day Evan barked at people over the phone. Around noon two men came and took up the carpets and plugged in huge fans. Evan followed them from room to room telling them this was their first house. Before the men left, they told Alice to run the air-conditioner though it was cool outside. Mildew would ruin the carpet, they said, if she didn’t.

The next day they would take a walk around the neighborhood. And Evan would stop and point out the water marks on trees. He would laugh at rising water versus wind-driven rain. They would learn the neighbors had been better and worse off. One had just installed new parquet floors. Then, of course, there were the two drowned children.

But this day, with only drizzle falling out of a nonthreatening, light gray sky, Alice had finished the best she could inside and surveyed the yard. A jumbled carpet of waste paper and twigs covered the grass. One of the wooden flower borders had lodged in a corner of the fence. Broken planks, empty plastic flowerpots, a child’s sandbox, two pairs of garden gloves, and a ton of other odds and ends from neighbors upstream were wedged in yaupons, draped around the base of the oaks, caught in the porch railing.

“Shit,” she yelled, and hopped to the faucet to wash the biting fire ants off her bare ankles. “Bastards,” she said as she danced under the water. The flood had destroyed their beds and they swarmed over everything.

Alice worried about the flowers laid flat by the water. She hoped the sun wouldn’t come out suddenly and scald everything.

Back inside she dressed quickly in pants and a long-sleeve shirt. She gently opened the bedroom door and watched Evan under a pile of covers, only the top of his head showing.

“Hey, you going back to sleep?”

Evan moved his legs but didn’t turn over.

“Come on, let’s clean up outside. I think we can save most of the flowers. Come on, you won’t believe the stuff washed up out there. I think there’s a tennis racket in the willow over the creek.”

She waited, smiling, for Evan to speak. She wanted his help. She pictured them raking up the trash, cursing the ants they’d never considered when they’d decided to move south. She would have liked his direction about the side fence that now leaned downstream at an odd angle. How do we straighten this? What’s the plan? You, she thought, are the one with those sorts of ideas.

“Hey, come on.” She waited. “I’ll be outside. Come on out when you’re ready.”

But when he did appear, hours later, he only waved and sat on the steps drinking a beer. Alice saw his face and knew that whatever had always been the matter had gotten worse. She smiled at him and waved her rake. “The ants’ll eat you alive!”

All afternoon she forayed off the porch to work in a frenzy before the ants forced her to the faucet. She raked up huge piles of trash.

She was ashamed she felt better when Evan walked around to the front. To check out water marks, she thought. She considered the cat in the current and felt warm with embarrassment. It was too silly. It was a sentimental image from Walt Disney. The cat pawing the dark water. Its teeth bared at the struggle. It could be a poster for a child’s room; though probably too frightening. She considered some possible captions: “Just Keeping Your Head Above Water,” “Hang In There.”

She bent over to slap at the ants covering her tennis shoes. God, Alice, you are a silly girl.

May 2039

The thin old woman stopped to catch her breath, which came in shallow pants fogging the chill air. She set her net bag down and stepped off the narrow road to look first up the hill and then down to the monastery already hidden by the pines. She nodded and smiled in recollection of the monk jabbering away at her. She had bought soap and honey and fingered the lovely carved saints no bigger than the palm of her hand.

“You always speak the best Italian,” he had said.

And Alice had quoted the florid passage from some ancient poet that was inscribed over the entrance to the church. It was a ritual between them. Every two weeks for sixteen years.

Alice picked up her bag and crossed the mountain road to the side sloping down toward the river valley. She held on to pine saplings until she reached a level spot behind a large rock. She pulled down her pants and then her panties, the cold air chilling her hips. She peed only a brief burst. Then she wiped with a Kleenex from her pocket and reached forward to hide it under a rock. There was another there already and Alice laughed. She carefully worked her way back up the hill to the road.

She bent to her task, the bag slapping her leg. The monk had asked about her sister who had visited at Christmas. And Alice had laughed and reminded him it was her daughter. They had both enjoyed his transparent deceit.

She walked and tried to breathe deeply. She took in the odor of roasted meats from the roadside restaurant ahead. Farther up the hill she could see the stone fence of the first decrepit hotel that overlooked the Arno valley below. But Alice couldn’t forget what had happened earlier. She had risen long before Claudia, their housekeeper. She had made bitter instant coffee, listened at Evan’s door, and come out onto the small veranda perched above their yard. Only a sliver of the dull red river showed far below and at a distance of some miles.

Lifting the already lukewarm coffee to her dry lips, she had looked down and seen very clearly the head of a cat, chin down, eyes shut, wet. Paddling furiously. Alice involuntarily closed her own eyes but they saw only the morning light made red, the minute detritus of a night’s sleep passing like odd shaped bacteria under her lids.

She had never owned a cat. Allergies, she thought. She had never seen a cat swim. She was surprised by the vividness of detail.

Later, passing through Vallombrosa, walking easily downhill toward the monastery, she had changed direction, marched quickly into a bar where the locals usually waited for the bus down the mountain into Firenze. The old men were smoking and talking about the flood. There were no old women, of course. Some of the men nodded at her. The bartender shook her hand and asked about her husband.

“No, he’s the same. Good days and bad days.” She ordered a vermouth because it was the first bottle her eyes lighted on. The surprise of the taste so early almost choked her. She had looked at herself in the mirror behind the bottles.

Now Alice crossed the road. “She looks exactly like you. As lovely as they come,” the monk had said, complimenting Alice and Elizabeth. She had nodded, thanked him for his kindness.

Today she was not so fearful of sudden traffic, Italian men attacking the curves in small cars. The flood below kept the road deserted. It had for a week now. The old men in the bar read the Milano newspapers aloud to one another. Worst flood in eighty years. The Ufizzi damaged. Damage in the millions. Church frescoes awash and destroyed. They swore, slapped their knees. She had had one more vermouth — this one almost tasteless compared to the first.

The huge redheaded woman who owned the restaurant knew her and seated her in the window in the light. A warmer place for an old woman, Alice thought. She ordered roasted chicken from the spit and a liter of the local white wine. She knew she should go on home and eat something more sensible than the greasy chicken. But instead she took a long drink and smiled, wondering if she were becoming a lush.

Perhaps she and Elizabeth had come to look alike. Mutual osmosis. At Christmas, they had sat near the fireplace. Another warm place for old women.

Elizabeth was an old woman. Sixty-three. The adoption agency had been unsure of her exact birthday, so Alice had chosen November first for no good reason.

“How is he?” Elizabeth had asked in the concerned voice she manufactured only for him, for questions about Evan.

Alice had been thinking about the ten copies of her new book on technical writing Elizabeth had insisted on bringing from Boston. Alice had told her earlier about her latest idea for a book expanding the chapters on grant writing and proposals. But now they talked about Evan, Alice trying not to manufacture any tone at all. She didn’t think she was successful.

She chewed the juicy chicken slowly. But she drank the second glass of wine in one long swallow. He should have died long ago, she thought. I am not being cruel; it’s the truth. Three heart attacks ago.

Afterward the thin old woman walked up the hill in a bit of a daze. She stopped again and drank one last vermouth, almost deciding she would begin a tradition. She talked loudly with the old men about the flood. She imagined the odd swimming cat again.

It was two o’clock when she climbed the stone steps up from the road to their small house. Her legs ached. Her head was light and seemed pumped full of the cold spring air. Swept clear by breezes.

Alice stood at the edge of the small yard and looked past the serpentine road to the slice of river. The sun had come out a couple of times but had now gone behind dark low clouds threatening a continuation of the past week’s deluge.

Finally the wines neither jumbled things more nor sorted things out. What she had settled on for years was duty responsibility mixed with moments of pity and devotion — this almost in a religious sense; the closest she came to religion. She sometimes supposed all of this might be love. But she as often doubted that. Now the doctors said the most recent advances in chemical treatment could insure him five or ten more years.

Alice half turned to look up at the house behind her. She had almost forgotten him for some years after they adopted Elizabeth. Consciously and with devotion she had become the child’s mother. But he was never the father. It was not the arena he chose. Instead he wrestled great accomplishments from the work he seemed to despise. He kept at it with frightening obstinacy because the pain seemed to provide something of value. This she had reasoned out long ago.

The old woman’s mind was full of trick mirrors. And knowing this, she dismissed practically everything that wasn’t about the girl or her own work. She knew for certain he had never been cruel to any living thing except himself. He had struggled like some hopeless addict. He had become his only reason to wake up, eat, go to work, have heart attacks, come here to find Santa Maria del Fiore.

Alice turned back to look into the valley. Once she must have hated him or respected him. Maybe, she thought, that’s not the right order. Even now she would like to be able to ball it all up into something she might call love. Lately she desired some single word of summation. She was not restless without it, but she thought it couldn’t hurt anything.

She wondered if it was God and religion he looked for when, up until last year, he had been able to take the bus almost daily down the mountain to II Duomo. She saw the sullen face, the bright eyes across a dinner table. It did not seem the face of a pilgrim; but what did she know? Five or ten more years. If he had died with the first heart attack, he would have put his head down on his desk. His hands in his lap. The second and he would have stopped mowing, sat on the damp grass, his legs spread out touching a bed of turk’s cap.

Alice imagined the river; brought it up close as if her eyes were some sort of telephoto lens capable of great magnification. And she imagined herself floating downstream and into the city. She drifted through the flooded streets to the beautiful building that housed the Chamber of Commerce. She had scheduled a series of lectures to give on proposal writing. She would translate two chapters from the book Elizabeth had brought and adapt them to the Italian bureaucracy. Then she’d photocopy them and hand them out. She knew exactly what she’d say. She wanted the river to fall quickly and the city to dry out. Now proposals, requests for aid, would be more in order than ever before.

The particulars of the memory never came to him. Only the broadest terms. More an emotion, a passing feeling, than anything visual. It was like those involuntary shudders an aunt or uncle long ago would have explained by saying, “Rabbit ran across my grave.”

Evan looked out the window and down at the thin old woman. He watched her idly swing the net bag. Claudia sang somewhere in the house, the melody was low and guttural.

The feeble man wiped his sweaty face with a dish towel he kept in the pocket of his bathrobe. It was the new medicine. It came on like this in the early afternoon and, again, late at night. Soon the towel would be soaked, smelling of ammonia, and he would call Claudia for another. After this bout was over he would bathe, change his clothes, and lie down.

But the effort would be great. The towel remained poised without touching his forehead and cheeks. His skin splotched and oily. Raw from the salty water, from too many baths, the confines of stiff, newly washed clothes.

Instead he crossed the room to his bed but didn’t lie down. He stood by the foot of it. Then he stretched out to reach the stuffed chair first with his hands, pulling his tired legs after.

The feeble man considered his body. The joints ached. The sweat poured everywhere, collecting at his waist to puddle at his crotch. The room, no matter the careful cleaning and airing given it by Claudia, smelled of him. He inhaled deeply and paid attention to the overflowing bookcases, the nearby table piled high with drawings by him and others. The walls at both sides of the window were covered with photographs and reproductions of paintings. In some of the photos he could barely make himself out. In all of them there was the massive red-tiled dome of the cathedral.

But this was all he did now. Look at, not examine. He didn’t need to. He knew everything there was to know about Santa Maria del Fiore. II Duomo. Filippo Brunelleschi’s church of the dome. Since the beginning he had loved to say that name, Filippo Brunelleschi. And all the other names, too. The more obscure men, stonemasons. Some leaving only the faintest mark on the sandstone, the pietra serena. Serene stone.

Bathed in sweat, snared by aches, the man remembered walking under the dome or up the steep steps to stand on the roof. At some point they gave him free rein. He had sketched it from every angle in his desperately poor hand. They had let him wander the obscure passageways. The rough interior walls hidden in the dark for hundreds of years. The mason’s marks. A piece of frayed rope. The hidden holes for block and tackle.

He tried to love it as he first had coming out of a twilit, narrow street and into its presence. And on the best days he could sit for some time not noticing himself soaked and smelling. He was almost the architect.

But eventually he saw it happen from all points of view. It rose slowly in the air and turned just as slowly as if he could hold one of those vast wooden models of it in the Museo dell’Opera in his hands and rotate it. But the loving play of perspective was not there at all. For just as slowly it came apart at its joints. The cupola ascended higher, the naves slaked off and floated away. Everything in fluid motion and regular and slow — some metronome set on the particular swing of a grandfather’s clock.

He no longer cried out so Claudia or his wife rushed in to him. He either sat still or more often rose from the stuffed chair and lay on the bed, pulling the wilted sheet and quilt up to his neck. The feeble man feeling like a child. His emaciated body a boy’s body tormented by some sort of flu whose fever explained the drenching sweat.

He recalled that his initial feelings about the cathedral had been unmolested for a while. Before the advent of whatever it was that always acted as some potent distillate ungluing this and that in his life. Leaving the boy ill in his bed, the puzzle spread out on the quilt near his hands, unassembled.

But it was never God, hidden somewhere in the huge sky of the dome, he asked for. It was Filippo Brunelleschi. For only he could gather up the materials from the quilt and piece them together and leave them together for Evan to see until the unsticking came again.

The ill boy closed his eyes. He might stand up in a moment, the sweat gone. He might softly call out to Claudia or his wife and listen to his voice.

The medicine would be improved again. And such advances would keep him alive for twenty years more.