Flight Behavior

“What if I want everything to stay how it is?” he asked.

“Oh, man. That’s the bite. Grown-ups want that too. Honestly? That’s what makes them crap the bed and stay in it. I’m not even kidding.”

His eyes scooted away from hers, avoiding the verdict.

“It won’t ever go back to how it was, Preston. You have to say that right now, okay? Just say it, and I’ll give you a pod-thing.”

He glanced at her, making sure, and said it. “It won’t ever go back how it was.”

“Okay.” She handed it over. “You’re the man.”

On Friday she expected both the children home at noon, Preston from school, Cordelia and her father from Hester’s, where they’d gone while she prepared for her son’s birthday. But well before that hour she was pulled outdoors by the flood. She left a cake in the oven and many things undone to walk out the kitchen door in a state of inflated edginess, as if she had become suddenly too large in her skin. The radio had churned all morning with strange accounts, regardless of station. Flood and weather warnings, disasters. Something beyond terrible in Japan, fire and flood.

Outdoors she was startled by watery brightness. The ground was spongy with snowmelt and sank strangely under her feet. The hill on the other side of the road remained fully snow-covered in its own bluish shadow, north facing, but on this side the sun had leveled its light and the whole mountain of snow was melting in a torrent. Every channel gouged in this slope by a long wet winter was now filled to overflowing, and the runoff swelled out into sheet flow across the full breadth of the pasture. Ovid’s vehicle was gone for the weekend, nearly gone for good, and the sheep had retreated into the barn, alarmed by the running hillside and unaccustomed roar. She was alone out here. Water poured over the tops of her boots, as clear and cold as the ice it had recently been, and numbed her feet and pressed down the grass all around, the sodden pelt of a drowned earth. Tall weed stalks intermittently rose at angles above the water and were slammed down again, waving like skeletal arms.

Her feet sank deeper as the water reached her knees and the current pulled in a way she understood to be dangerous. This was where she lived. The phone was in her sweatshirt pocket, but she knew of no one to call in the event of something like this. She aimed for higher ground, slogging toward a spot where she could stand on a hummock in the high pasture, close to the spot where she’d rescued the lamb. That sheep must have had a nose for the terrain. It was the pasture’s summit, and now that she had climbed onto it, a tiny island nation of one. She was completely surrounded here by moving water. She turned to face south and the whole field lifted to her eyes as a single reflected sheet of brightness. An ocean, stippled and roiling in waves over submerged rock and rill, rising as she watched. She felt the reckless thrill of being at sea. Like Columbus on his ship, maybe, after he’d spent his life begging himself into debt, getting cornered. In no other way could a person strike out for probable disaster at the edge of the known world. Insofar as a person could understand that, she did.

On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day. Gone, gone, they rasped. Here was a dead world learning to speak in dissonant, unbearable sounds. The topsoil, the slim profit margin of this farm, the ground itself, rushed away from her, and when water spilled over her boots again she backed slowly into the violent current to find a better place. A chill of fear evacuated all her thoughts beyond simple locomotion. A slip could be the end of things. She wondered about the sheep in the barn, but concentrated on her own two feet, inching slowly uphill to avoid her demise. When she felt the fence behind her she rejoiced to meet that cold safety net of wire. She turned around to grip the mesh with both hands and pull herself along the fence line. At the upper gate she tucked in her toes and climbed over to the higher side, gaining dry ground again, at the foot of the forest this time. She sized up a stand of medium-young trees, any of which would hold her, she thought, if it came to that. Then looked back downhill.

She was stunned to see the water had now risen level with the porch and doorsills of her house. Its foundation and cement steps were no longer visible and the yard had eerily vanished, its embankment dissolved into the road, all memories of her home’s particular geography erased. All morning she’d listened to water pouring through the huge metal culvert under the road, echoing its thunderous threats of inundation over those that came in on the radio. Now that roar was engulfed, the culvert had been overwhelmed and the road was a broad, muddy river. Something floated there, a ragged V-shaped assembly of lumber that moved slowly past from the west. A portion of a roof she guessed, inverted. It moved with such ponderous, unhurried purpose it seemed to be yielding to a migratory urge. She noted that her station wagon was also following the call, relocating itself gently without a driver in an eastward direction.

She comprehended the terms of what she saw, but couldn’t turn away from it. Her children were elsewhere, at Hester’s and at school, facing this by other means, as she understood they would have to do. For the moment her fascination transcended ordinary fear and safety. It struck her that she had stood here months ago with her heels newly unearthed and her mind aflame, unexpectedly turned back to the place she’d fled. She remembered scrutinizing the dark roof and white corners of her home for signs of change or surrender, invisible then. Now they were plain. One corner of the house appeared to tilt as she watched, shifting the structure a scant but perceptible few inches on its foundation. This time she had to see. Soon the whole thing would drift away from its anchored steps and cement-block foundation, departing as gently as an ocean liner. Then it would not be a home, but a rigid, rectangular balloon with siding and shingles and weather-stripped doors, improbably serene, floating on the buoyant command of the air sealed carefully inside. Its windows would hold their vacant gaze on the wheeling view as the whole construction slowly turned in the current.

And even now, little dark birds gathered on the few high spots that shouldered above the flood. They poked in the mud for drowned earthworms, sustaining a far-fetched and implausible appetite for staying alive. Starlings, they must be. The day was absurdly temperate and bright. Last week she’d seen the pointy-nosed buds of daffodils coming up, and Preston had found hyacinths in their yard. The inundated, the gone, the somewhere-else-now yard. She’d forgotten she ever planted those. Their snub green leaf bundles had looked to her like the beaks of turtles rising from an underworld.