Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,96

let our lease expire at the marina, and we moved the boat to the slip behind the house. One night just after we’d moved in, while there were still unpacked boxes on the kitchen table, Dennis dragged me outside in my pajamas, and we opened a bottle of champagne and sat on the boat drinking it out of paper cups, looking up the lawn at the house, which was lighted and still. I half expected to see a figure moving past a window—someone like me but not exactly me, someone who lived among us quietly and didn’t notice much when we came and went, but was always there lurking when we were gone.

I saw Jack again one time, a year later. I was waiting to board an airplane to Atlanta, for my father’s funeral. Jack was with his thin, red-haired wife at the gate opposite mine, and when their plane was called, I watched as they stood and gathered their things, and Jack put out a hand so his wife could walk ahead of him. And then maybe he felt me watching him, because he turned and looked at me, and after a moment he waved a half-wave, like he wasn’t certain he should, and I smiled without waving, and he turned away. I miss you, I thought—these were the words that came to mind: I miss you. Even as I wondered how it was possible, I knew it was true.

1992

Dennis stood beside the swimming pool in bathing trunks and goggles, snapping on a pair of bright yellow kitchen gloves. It was August 25, the morning after the hurricane, and we’d spent hours tramping through the debris that littered our property. Mr. Costakis’s royal palm stretched across our backyard, the deck sagged with split planks, and the swimming pool churned with foliage. Our street was impassable, crowded with shredded trees and a felled telephone pole, and the canal at the back of the house teemed with window shutters, patio furniture, palm fronds: little rafts escaping for the sea. Among the unsinkable, our boat listed against its battered pier, crowded but unharmed. We’d lengthened the mooring lines and padded the hull with fenders, imagining a storm that would lift the boat aboveground, then recede in a breath.

Upstairs, Margo and her new husband, Stuart, slept in her childhood bed. They were living with us that month, house-hunting in lieu of honeymooning.

Miami was still and cloudless, cruelly hot. Dennis and I had assumed, wrongly, that the electricity would return within days. I’d lived in South Florida for more than twenty years, and never had I faced August without air-conditioning; the prospect sent me into a mute panic. I was in menopause, prone to hot flashes. The hurricane, the tattered lawn, the leaky bedroom ceiling—these I could handle. But the heat and humidity coated the little woes like soot: it was all too much.

Maybe it was my heavy breathing as we crossed the lawn, or my profuse sweating—in any event, Dennis declared that we would skim the swimming pool first, so I would have a place to keep cool. He jumped into the deep end, then emerged with a bullfrog the size of a football squirming in his gloved hands. I shrieked. He ran down to the canal and tossed it in. When he returned, I lifted the camera—we’d brought it out to document the mess for the insurance company—and he posed, hands on hips and feet apart. “I am Captain Amphibian,” he said. “Rescuer of frogs.” His wet hair, the singed color of red clay roads after rain, lay flat against his forehead.

I skimmed the pool while Dennis fished out a few more frogs, and when the water was clear, I dove in. Dennis raked the yard, making piles, and the sodden leaves I’d trimmed dried in the sunlight, releasing a mulchy smell into the air. Dennis was just rearranging the junk, I thought. He was just moving it around, as Margo had done long ago with the vegetables on her dinner plate. He found a flattened soccer ball in the rose garden out front, and a windshield, scratched but not broken, in the bougainvillea. He found a whistle on a red shoestring, which he looped around his neck. Next door, Mr. Costakis whipped at shrubbery with a machete. I could see sunlight strike the blade between the tilting trunks of gumbo-limbo trees. Every so often a helicopter roared overhead, but otherwise, save for the whipping sound and Dennis’s raking, the