Charmed Particles (35 page)

This time he returned with nothing. Randolph imagined his trunk, his travel journals, swallowed by the ocean and sinking, finally, to its bottom. He'd been so tired of the clothes he'd arrived in—having lived in them for nearly a week—that instead of handing them over to Rose to be laundered, he had thrown them into the garbage, happy to be rid of them and their smell of mud and sweat and dark, stagnant water.

He had survived, he explained, by climbing into a tree from which he watched possessions, entire cars, splintered pieces of wood, hunks of metal, and people being carried away by the torrent below him.

And in telling it, he is again rolling with the water, rushing toward a tree he counts himself fortunate to have caught hold of. Catching his breath, he begins to climb, pulling himself through the fragile branches he wouldn't have gambled would hold him. But it is his only hope, the water below him rising, black as charcoal and filled with the detritus of what it has already encountered, splintered boards, concrete blocks, a bicycle, a woman.

“What happened to those people?” Lily asks.

“I don't know,” Randolph says—though he can still hear them calling out for help, some rushing past atop an island of debris. He'd had nothing—not even a rope to throw down to them.

Cars against cars, an ocean of steel and tin and wood filling what had once been the streets. And what to do? He had found himself praying.

“Then what?”

After a long while, the waters shifted, began to recede, returning to the sea. All around were still, shallow pools of dark water containing who knew what. He had climbed down then, out of the safety of the tree's embrace.

At the first muddy spot, he had fallen forward, palms against the wet, soft soil, touching his forehead to this solid earth, inhaling its smell.

He'd headed inland on the back of a motorcycle, hitching a ride with the local postman. Together they rode north to the airport along empty stretches of road. At one spot, the hulls of two enormous freighter ships lay across the road, the traffic—all motorbikes—passing carefully between the two beached craft.

On his second night home, Randolph had come to sit beside Lily in the living room, where she sat surrounded by her schoolbooks. “Your mother told me about your speech during the hearing,” he said.

For Lily, the hearing had receded from her mind, which had, instead, for so long it seemed, been full of images of rushing water.

“I'm very proud of you,” Randolph continued. “It's not always easy to stand up for what you believe in, especially in the face of friends, neighbors, and family who disagree, and on matters about which passions run high. I understand from your mother that you did so articulately and with grace.”

It seemed now like such a silly, inconsequential thing, Lily thought.

Randolph had been absent for so long that the daily rhythms of the Winchester home were entirely foreign to him, and he observed them as curiously as though watching a native people in their habitat. He learned the small, simple routines of the household—on what day the trash was collected, when he might expect the arrival of the newspaper.

Randolph and Rose's was a marriage that had, for years, been conducted in absence, via letter, scratchy phone connections that ran under the sea, long cables stretching from continent to continent. Now, as they each adjusted to the other's daily presence, Lily noticed the way her parents moved around each other in the kitchen in the mornings, bumping into one another as they both reached for the milk. It was as though they had to learn all over again how to live with one another.

Rose took pleasure in the routines that had sprung up among all three of them. The waking, each morning, to a warm presence in the bed beside her. The rising to prepare breakfast. The bustle of the morning routine as they all—three of them now—busied themselves preparing for the day ahead. She and Randolph, once Lily was off to school, retiring to their corners of the house to work—he to his study, she to her small desk in the kitchen, and how, now and then, they might meet in the hallway or over the teakettle. The house quiet, then coming back to life with Lily's return from school. Gathering in the kitchen to prepare their evening meal, now Lily's and Randolph's heads bent together over the last difficult bits of the crossword, here and there calling out clues for Rose. Dinners over which Lily regaled them with stories from school—then the quiet evenings in which they each withdrew to their work, Lily to her room, Rose to her small desk in the kitchen, and Randolph to his study. And then, at night, again, Randolph there beside her, and the whole lovely routine ready to spin out ahead of them once more each day.

There were moments when a map beckoned to him—this or that spot as yet unexplored. But for the first time in his life, Randolph did not feel excitement at the possibility of the unknown. At first he had not known what to call it—caution, a wariness, trepidation? But, he realized, with a sudden and shameful understanding, this was nothing more than fear. When he recalled his travels now, instead of thinking of them fondly as he once had, he found himself cataloguing the risks he had taken, all the tiny ways in which he'd been so lucky that he felt sure he must have used it all up. In such a new place, he thought, he wouldn't know how to save himself should the situation arise. He would not again be so fortunate. And so, each day, it felt reassuring to travel no farther than his study where, surrounded by his own memorabilia, he could recall his more adventurous days.

The editors of the
Nicolet Herald-Gleaner
, more than a little surprised to learn that there had been a Nicolet connection to one of the most significant natural disasters in recent decades, printed a long piece about Randolph's narrow escape. Randolph had not wanted to be interviewed, and so had asked Rose to speak to them instead.

Rose, for her part, found herself dominating the news cycle as coverage of the mayoral race began to increase. It was looking good for Rose, her campaign team assured her, though in the world of local politics, they reminded her, things could change dramatically in the months leading up to an election. And still there was the matter of the electorate's discomfort with her strange marital arrangement, her campaign advisors reminded her. Still, there was the matter of that for her to contend with. But now, even more so than before, it was a conversation she could not imagine having with Randolph.

Rose had begun to prepare, to steel herself against the announcement she knew would come soon enough: that he was again leaving. She knew that for the first time in their long marriage, it would be difficult for her not to ask him to stay.

She wanted him to stay. To unpack, to put away his boots and his travel guides and his journals for good. Not because of her political ambitions, not this time, but rather because she wanted the luxury of taking him for granted. The banal daily interactions over schedules and groceries had begun, to Rose, to feel almost sacred, full of meaning and intention and reverence.

She thought of the farm families she had grown up with and of her own parents, her farmer's upbringing—the notion that the harder a thing was to do, the more worth doing, the more valuable. And what, she had begun to think, could be more challenging than to go on loving someone through so many grim daily routines? To love one another not through absence and letters and joyful returns, but through snow shoveling, and meals together one after another, and bills pored over at the kitchen table. Through no longer the electric thrill of brushing against one another in the hallway or the kitchen, but instead through the possibility of growing so familiar that it sometimes felt impossible to still see one another. What love, to still love one another through that.

As Rose prepared dinner, Lily sat at the kitchen table, poring over her schoolwork, and Rose thought of how, at Lily's age, she had been just a few years from running off with Randolph, from taking flight from this farm town where she'd been raised. Now, here she was, perhaps about to become mayor of this town, though it had grown so different as to be hardly recognizable were it not for a few familiar landmarks—the granary along the railroad tracks just off Main Street, where bistros and coffee houses had begun to take up residence; here and there a silo in one of the fields that frayed off at the edges of town, not yet developed, not yet transformed into still more and more houses.

And here she was, also, quiet evenings at home with her husband, beginning to fall in love with the idea of a marriage that looked less like the grand love story she had always envisioned and more like the quiet, committed, humble marriages of the farm couples she'd grown up surrounded by and had vowed to be nothing like. Now, though, she could see the dignity in those relationships—the simple bravery of staying together through routine and hardship, through overwork and fatigue. She felt ashamed that she had ever been so dismissive. How little she'd known of life then. How little Lily knew, she thought, as she watched her daughter, bent over her schoolwork at the kitchen table.