The Light Pirate(2)
“Boys,” she chides, doing her best impression of a mother. She has so little to guide her in these matters—when she was growing up, her own mother’s defining characteristic was her lack of mother-ness. Everyone said so. It isn’t that Frida regrets the way Joy raised her. How could she? Her childhood was singular, spent sailing between islands, with salt in every crevice and a vision of the sun permanently etched into the backs of her eyelids. She grew up everywhere and nowhere. The Keys, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Haiti, Panama, Venezuela. The only constants during Frida’s formative years were her mother and their decrepit sailboat and the ocean itself. There was no school outside of Joy’s instruction, and the friends she did manage to make could last only until Joy announced a departure date. When they pulled anchor, Joy always said it was time to find a new pair of sea legs. What’s wrong with the old ones? Frida would think. But she never complained. Of course she used to be brave. She had to be.
“Boys!” Frida says again, louder this time, but it still feels like a performance, something she’s only seen on television. They can tell, and so can she. If Joy were here, she would do all of this differently. She would be running through the house alongside them, playing their games, learning their secrets. She would be so unrelenting in her mission to win them over that finally these boys would have no choice but to love her. Except Joy isn’t here. This is the ache Frida is learning to live with.
She hears Flip and Lucas hurtling through the living room, the brisk creak of the screen door opening, and then a slap as it swings back against its frame. Out of sight, Kirby roars and the boys shriek, even Lucas, who recently decided that twelve was too old for games like this. All three of them round the edge of the house, back into view—the boys darting past the window, Kirby lumbering behind them with arms overhead, fingers wiggling. Frida instructs her nerves to settle and shoos away this circling, spinning unease. See, she tells herself, it isn’t real. No one else feels it. Everything is fine. She holds this assurance. Examines it. Does she feel better? Maybe. But then the baby, turning again and again, thrusting its limbs up against the constraints of her womb, up into her intestines, dislodges the seed of calm. Everything is not fine. Frida props her stomach up against the edge of the counter, and the Formica presses against her, against them both. She lets the edge dig into her, trying to quiet this spark inside her, but there is no suppressing it. Maybe this feeling is just a symptom of the murky greenish-yellow glow outside, or the way the baby is churning inside her today, or these unbidden memories of her dead mother, or the fact that this season, more catastrophic storms have made landfall than any other…a record that will undoubtedly be broken next year, and then again the next. But most likely, she thinks, it is the cumulation of these things packed together in the dense, hot air. It is the multitude, the crush of it all, the claustrophobic humidity of the atmosphere flooding her body, swarming along the surface of her skin. Surely that’s it. It’s overwhelm. Hypervigilance. Anxiety masquerading as intuition. But isn’t there at least a chance it’s the opposite? A pulsing intuition that she is trying her best to disown. A voice telling her that staying here will cost a great deal.
Kirby stops chasing his boys and returns to the wheelbarrow. He starts slapping the bags down in front of the kitchen door, the sound almost indecent, half-moons of sweat under his arms, a slick of moisture forming at his hairline, where just a few threads of silver are creeping into the brown. His every gesture claims competency, an all-encompassing aura of stewardship—over the sandbags and the doorstep they will shelter, over the ground he’s standing on, over the boys that flit back and forth in the yard behind him, over this house, this day, this moment. Wherever he goes, he is rooted. It’s what drew Frida to him when she saw him that first time, among the wreckage of San Juan. Even there, he exuded belonging.
She had planned only to visit Joy for ten days or so. It was the tail end of the summer before her last year of Rice’s architecture program, meant to be a quick vacation to her floating childhood home. The boat was docked in their favorite marina off the coast of Puerto Rico—just for the season. With Joy, it was always just for the season. Even after Frida left at seventeen, Joy went on sailing between her favorite islands alone, never more than a handful of months in one place. She could have chosen the Caymans just as easily. Or maybe that bay off of Taboga, the one they anchored in after Joy showed Frida the Bridge of the Americas for the first time and Frida decided that one day she wanted to build such marvels. But Joy didn’t choose either of those places. She picked San Juan.
Frida was excited to take a brief reprieve from the metallic crush of her life in Houston—two jobs, an unpaid internship, and soon a full course load, all clamoring for a finite amount of energy. She ached for the unrelenting enthusiasm of her mother, the old comfort of falling asleep wrapped in waves, the way a shimmer of salt clung to everything. It was meant to be a balm after the endless hustle of Houston, where she could never seem to break even and always felt like an outsider. Then, just after she landed at Isla Verde, they named the hurricane—out there in the Atlantic, whirling all alone. Poppy, they called it. No one who had endured Hurricane Maria took its approach lightly. Everyone was as ready as they could be; it didn’t matter.
What happened next is both vivid and incomplete. A therapist she saw a few times suggested that the missing pieces would return as the shock wore off, but Frida doesn’t want them. She remembers plenty: wading through floodwater and debris, trying to convince overrun funeral parlors to cremate Joy’s remains; the crowds in front of the airport, everyone waiting for the chance at a seat on a nonexistent flight to the mainland; sitting with a roomful of strangers in the FEMA shelter. And then there was Kirby, entering her field of vision like a beacon, like the first glimpse of land after so many days at sea. He was a man who knew what to do next when no one else did. She watched him and his crew survey the destruction and begin their work. Clearing debris, restringing electrical wires, planting new poles in the ground. Just one task at a time. The truth is, Kirby’s happiest when he’s fixing things. Sometimes she worries that this is the reason he married her.