Sunrise

Bob was coming. 

“What kind of name is that for a hurricane,” Maggie had asked her sister yesterday. There had been a pause, enough so that the silence was real. 

“Be careful with this one, Maggie,” Jillian had said. “It’s supposed to hit us.” Hit us, Maggie thought, as though Jillian were standing beside her and not safely in Manhattan. Maggie was on Nantucket, facing the Atlantic, and Bob was coming. 

Now Maggie sat on the porch steps and stared, her eyes wide open with awe, as dark red stretched out across the sky above the Atlantic, then streaks of brighter violent colors, all below a solid dark mass of clouds. “Red sky at morning,” Maggie said aloud, softly, although she was the only inhabitant of the houses that stretched to either side of hers. “Sailors take warning.” This late in September, she was the lone sentinel left on the bluff, beautiful manicured hedges stretching away on each side of her between empty swathes of bright green lawn; rosa rugosa stirring in the uneasy wind, marking the line between bluff and sky. Below the bluff, the ocean already roiled uneasily, slabs of dark navy and slate grey breaking hard against the shore.     

As the sun moved higher in the sky, it disappeared behind the cloud bank, and the air thickened with a virulent dark pink color. Sky should not be that color, thought Maggie. Sailors take warning.

She hugged her cardigan around herself, but she wasn’t cold anymore. The temperature was rising along with the humidity as the thermometer dropped. She thought she should go inside, catch another hour of sleep. But while she was sitting there, thinking about it, Lorne came around the corner of the house and stood in front of her.

Maggie jumped, and Lorne gave her a crooked awkward smile. He shrugged.

“Trespassing,” said Maggie.

“Almost every morning,” he agreed. “You don’t have security cameras.” 

Every morning whether she was there or not, Maggie remembered. Twenty years ago, he would stand on her porch steps with her to watch the sunrise and send her pictures taken from her porch after she went back to school. She remembered greeting the day with him, dancing across the lawn with him. She remembered holding hands and lying spread across blankets staring up into the August sky.  

I remember, Maggie thought. They looked at each other and knew they were thinking the same thing.  I remember, I remember, I remember. 

Lorne turned to look at the colors still spreading across the sky. “Jesus,” he said, “it’s going to be ugly.”

“Of course it is,” Maggie said. “It’s always the ones with stupid names. Who calls the mother of all storm systems Bob?”

Lorne smiled. He joined her on the steps and they watched the sky together. It wasn’t getting lighter as it changed. The sky felt like a backdrop to a drama, with the sun shining dimly to showcase the darkening colors.               

Lorne broke the silence. “You need to get that furniture in, Maggie May.” He said. 

Maggie looked at the sky, silent and dreadful and still. They had time. She stood up and stretched, fingers reaching to the eaves. “Coffee,” she said.

“Quickly.” Lorne said. “It is coming.” 

           “Bob is coming,” Maggie said and smiled. She was tempting fate, she supposed, with her cavalier attitude. She climbed the last porch step and crossed to the screen door. It was old, paint peeling and swollen with salt and damp. She pried it open and walked into the house. Someone stood at the door on the streetside.

Maggie went to open the door, not even really looking through the glass, so the uniformed police man was somewhat of a shock. “Oh.” She said stupidly, “officer?”  Maggie’s immediate thought was that she had done something wrong, an instant reaction left over from her teens and early twenties. But when he spoke, the officer said, I wanted to let you know that we’ve set up a shelter.”

“At the high school,” he continued, “Do you know where the high school is ma’am?” Maggie, caffeine deprived and still half overwhelmed by the colors of the sky, paused in the doorway and just looked at him. 

“Shelter.” She repeated.

“Do you have somewhere else to go?” the police officer asked.

“Why would I?” She began to ask but Lorne spoke from behind her. 

“The storm, Maggie, he wants to know if you have somewhere to wait out the storm.”

Lorne smiled at the cop and the cop smiled back, man to man, in a way that made Maggie want to stamp her foot on his instep. “Chad.” Lorne said.

“Lorne.”

“I’m not leaving,” Maggie said. “Why would I leave my house?”

Chad looked at her, not understanding. “There’s a hurricane coming,” he said, “it’s supposed to be a direct hit. You shouldn’t be alone out here.” 

Maggie started to argue but Lorne put his hand on her shoulder. “Thanks Chad,” he said, “I’ll take it from here.”

Now Maggie was sure she would smack him once the cop went away.

Chad was still concerned about the storm.  “You tell her, Lorne,” he said urgently, “the lights will go out, the wind can break the windows, and the ocean –”

Maggie didn’t want to hear about the ocean. She turned away. “Thank you,” she said over her shoulder and walked down the hallway to the kitchen. 

“Thanks Chad,” Lorne repeated more gently. Maggie heard the door close, and Lorne’s footsteps following her into the kitchen. 

Maggie was counting out scoops of beans. When Lorne tried to talk to her, she turned on the coffee grinder. 

“I’ll start on the furniture,” he told her.

“I don’t need your help,” she called after him.

“Yes, you do.” He called back and the screen door slammed.

Outside, the wind was rising, slowly and steadily, as Bob marched up the coast. Maggie and Lorne dragged rockers and Adirondack chairs into the living room, putting them together in a furniture jigsaw puzzle so they would all fit. Afterward, they went out on the porch to drink their coffee, but the wind drove them back inside. The sky was still dry, but the light had turned greener.

It’s coming, the world seemed to say.

Maggie wanted to be at war with Lorne, but she couldn’t make it happen. The furniture dance reminded her of those other days, long finished, when Lorne had come over to help her prepare for a storm. 

“Tape the windows, Maggie?” he asked.

She wanted to argue, but she nodded. “Tape the windows.” The houses to either side of hers, gentrified and rehabbed to the nth degree, had hurricane shutters. She had tape. That made her smile a little, and Lorne looked over at her. “Duct tape,” Lorne said.

It was ten o’clock in the morning, and they huddled around her laptop at the kitchen table, reading from NOAA’s website. Bob kept coming.

“Category 4,” Lorne said. Outside the first drops of rain slanted sideways out of the hurricane sky.

“You can go.” Maggie invited him, “you don’t have to stay here.”

           Lorne shook his head. “Maybe in a little,” he said, “when I’ve finished my coffee.” He looked around the kitchen, “and I know you have a baked good somewhere.”

Maggie made a face that could have been a smile and went to put some muffins on a plate. She knew as well as Lorne did that if he didn’t leave now, he wasn’t leaving. The wind would make driving too dangerous. 

Too late, Maggie thought. She made her non-smile again. Too late for a lot of things. 

Lorne looked at her. “Did you call home?” He asked.   

Maggie nodded. “I talked to Jilly,” she said. Maggie hadn’t called her husband and he hadn’t called her.

They went up the stairs together, Lorne checking the windows as they moved through the second floor. Her room looked over the bluff at the water hitting the dunes below. The tide was coming in and the storm surge beginning. A gust of wind hit the window so hard that they flinched and stepped back. Maggie remembered a day long ago when she and Lorne had stood hand in hand on the beach as the waves came in, water so riled up that the foam at the edges came up to their knees.

Bob was grimmer, a frightening hulking monolith of a storm bearing down on them. The threat of destruction punctuated by the sounds of the old house, loose windows rattling against the sills, an odd keening sound from the eaves on the northeast side.     

They wadded up towels under the east facing windows, water already seeping in around the sill as the wind drove it against the house. 

“Thank you,” Maggie said, “you could still go home.”

           It was an empty suggestion and they both knew it. As though to punctuate their silence, the storm window in her bedroom bowed in so hard it snapped. Wind gusted against the remaining glass, and the curtains billowed despite the window panes.   

They left the room and headed down the stairs. They spread quilts and blankets in front of the hearth. Lorne lit a fire from old shingles and knots of newspaper. “Do you have any wood?” He asked.

“No,” Maggie said, feeling defensive. “We’re closing the house for the winter.”

Lorne kept looking at her, light flickering across his face. “Are you?” He asked.

Maggie didn’t answer. Behind them, on the end tables, the lights surged on again and then went dark, struggled on for another minute, and died. They were alone in the dark house, while Bob raged around them outside. Maggie could hear the surf now, a steady bass growl cutting through the wind and rain. She would have gone outside to see, where are you now ocean, but the wind was too much. She thought of other storms, she and Lorne standing at the base of the bluff, unable to see where the water was, pinned where they were by a wind so hard it drove sand into her skin. We were stupid when we thought we could live forever, she told herself. 

They had been listening to CNN on her phone when it abruptly went dead; she had forgotten to charge it before the power went out. But Lorne’s phone went dead too as Bob took out cell towers in his rage.

When she leaned over and kissed him, it was so familiar that the action itself made her cry. Lorne cupped her face in his hands and kissed her back, then rubbed his thumbs under her eyes, wiping away the tears. She could barely see his face but she felt him shake his head. 

She pulled back from him and began to cry in earnest, barely visible in the gloom. 

“I’m not your lifeboat, Maggie,” he said. “I can hold on to you, but you have to save yourself.” A spark crackled in the fireplace and the light flared, spotlighting his face, his eyes shiny with unshed tears. 

They heard another window snap upstairs and the wind pushed through the house. A stupid name for a storm, Maggie thought, and stayed seated when Lorne went upstairs to see what he could do. 

But he came down shaking his head. “I just shut the door.” He said, shrugging. “Anything in there you really care about?”

Maggie wanted to laugh. Care? She was way past caring. She said no, her voice rusty in her ears. Lorne sat beside her again and they waited, solemn in the firelight. He put his arm around her, and she leaned her head against his shoulder, every muscle, his cotton shirt, the smell of him, all of it as familiar as the past. 

Later in the afternoon, they would light the hurricane lights in the kitchen and eat peanut butter sandwiches at the kitchen table. The kitchen windows faced the sea, but between the layer of salt on the glass and the storm, they couldn’t tell what was happening. They played backgammon and killed a bottle of red wine. Maggie brought pillow and more blankets from the back bedroom and they fell asleep in front of the fireplace, side by side, almost touching.

Maggie wondered if there would be a bluff in the morning or a house or a sunrise. She woke and used the bathroom, finding her way across the downstairs as easily in the dark as she would in the light. The storm outside was not as loud, although rain still came in spatters and the house still creaked and moaned in the hard northeast wind. Lorne still slept in his pile of blankets, a Maggie-shaped space beside him. 

Maggie lay back down and imagined that there would be a sunrise, detritus from Bob strewn across the lawns, hydrangeas beheaded by the wind. She would make her calls, letting her family know she had survived. Lorne stirred next to her, and propped himself up on one arm. “Hey,” he said. She could feel him lean towards her, and then the moment when he remembered the present. 

“Hey,” she said.

“I’ll go as soon as the storm dies a little more,” he said, and lay back down. “You’ll need help with that room.”

Maggie lay awake and waited for morning. She wouldn’t put the porch furniture out again, she thought. Maybe it was time to go home.