Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,108

wanted to stop him—what if he fell again?—but I did not. He climbed awkwardly onto the piling and shifted until he was facing us, then sat still with his hands on his knees, his shoulders slumped. I saw the shadow of the boy he’d once been flash across his features, then disappear. Stuart put the engines into reverse, and Dennis, unmoving, grew small.

“What did it feel like?” I said to Stuart.

“Scary,” he said. “Lonely.”

The doctor at the emergency room had referred Dennis to an internist, who’d referred him to a neurologist. We’d scheduled an appointment but it was weeks away. I now think of this period as stolen time, time to which we were not entitled and which we did not appreciate: an interlude. In the interlude, Elijah Klein’s body was found. He’d gone out on the bay with friends, and they’d run out of gas and capsized when the storm hit. The entire crew had drowned. Elijah had been invited at the last minute, apparently, and initially hadn’t been counted among the fatalities. I could not conceive how Ilena Klein would survive, how she would not simply stop breathing.

Also in the interlude, the National Guard left south Florida, the electricity returned, and Margo and Stuart secured a mortgage to buy the house on Battersea Road. They used money my father had left Margo as a down payment, and on the day they closed we brought over champagne and cleaning supplies.

I searched through old photographs to show Stuart the stilt house—but in our photos, there is only a dock under Margo’s feet, a railing behind Dennis’s arm, a doorway framing my face. There was no photo of the house the way I remember it: from a distance, wholly intact. I did not understand, taking those pictures, that history must be collected while the subject exists. If not, what goes unrecorded can fill an ocean.

I do remember, though, the night of hurricane Andrew. Margo and Stuart stayed upstairs in her bedroom and I sat in the living room, watching the local weatherman’s updates on a battery-operated television. It was late and the house was dark. Dennis stood at the French doors, staring out at the backyard and the boat bobbing on the canal. I wasn’t concerned about the boat—if it was damaged in the storm, we would have it fixed; if it tore loose, we would find it, or we would figure out a way to buy another one. I was concerned, though, that debris would strike the glass door and it would shatter, with Dennis standing close enough to see his breath on the glass. “Dennis, please,” I said. “We should be near walls.” Still, I went to stand with him. Between flashes of lightning, the sky was purple-black and inky, more substantive than air and water and wind, as if the storm were its own form of matter. The melaleucas in the backyard bowed, nearing the ground and lifting, bending again. Leaves and twigs swept across the lawn, licking the surface of the swimming pool. A tree branch raced by, and there was a sudden, throaty crack of lightning. I saw the jagged light to the south, but the target—tree or house or other object—was concealed. In quieter moments, the wind relented and the trees righted themselves and the canal stilled. I hoped in these moments that the storm would ease, but then the water rose and lapped the pier again, the wavelets like little soldiers approaching battle on their bellies, and the wind returned, more furious than before.

One moment was quieter and lasted longer than the others. Dennis loosened his grip on me and went to check the news report. The eye of the hurricane—a black center on the radar screen, encircled by speedy strokes of red storm—had found our house. The yard and canal were still; not the stillness of a clear day, but that of a room with no windows, that of a bubble of air trapped underwater.

I knew that when the storm started again, it would be instantaneous, a dropped curtain. Dennis stood several feet away, his eyes on the television, and the promise that he would return to my side tethered us like a mooring line. I felt a calm anticipation, a sensation I recalled from when Margo was an infant, from late nights when she finally fell asleep. The storm would return, but for now the world was quiet. Dennis was not beside me but he was nearby, and this fact filled me