Diane Cook: Man V. Nature: Stories

Hawks soar high in the pinking sky. I don’t know much about birds, but I imagine they need land somewhere nearby. If they are gulls, they can float on the water. I don’t think hawks can do that. Or buzzards circling a kill. If they were albatross, they could fly the length of one giant ocean and never get tired. I’ve heard they keep ships company on an entire journey and then keep going. There is something in the name that makes me believe this. Albatross. It feels never-ending.

I hadn’t considered that somewhere beyond my sight the world might be continuing as normal. If those are hawks, they’ll have to return to their treetops, high above houses full of sleeping families, husbands and wives, children lucky enough to be born. Just beyond the curve of the earth, out of my view, skyscrapers could be creaking slightly in the newly blistering wind. Newscasts could be reporting about us, the ones who perished. But I’m still here.

I’m surprised how easy it was for me to believe I was one of the lucky few left. If people are watching this sunset all over the world, then I’m not so lucky after all, sitting up to my chest in cold ocean water that’s cluttered with debris and oily with human waste. What makes me so special? I had a house. I had Gary. It felt like enough for the end of days.

Soon someone will need to open the door. They have flush buckets to fill. Cans, bottles, batteries, to toss. Don’t they? I could wait.

I try to imagine it: me in there . Pressing palms, talking about the lives we’d lived. Being nostalgic, but for what? Eating crumbs together? Of course, if they let me in, I’d be expected to give over my house and supplies. They’d paw my antiques. They’d mess up all the beds’ bedding. I’d never again enjoy that morning echo of solitary me padding across the floors of my house.

If I go home, I’ll live longer. It is indisputable. I don’t know what more I could ask for.

“Okay, Gary. Last chance. I’m leaving,” I call out. I wait a beat, listening for the door to creak, for curiosity or need to win out.

Instead, I hear laughter behind my neighbor’s door.

I know that soon they will come. Gary will lead them. It could be any minute now. They’ll wade, swim, or selectively drown their way across the moat and savagely break through my great window and splinter open the locked front door. It’s a quality door. It won’t be easy.

Then the water and weather will get in and eat the house from the inside. They’ll be left with nothing yet again. I could warn them, but do I have to think of everything?

I wait in the widow’s walk, surrounded by soft down pillows, a tower of blankets. I have with me water, crackers, tinned meat, and my two biggest knives, but I hope it won’t come to that. I don’t think Gary will let it. True, I feel betrayed. He knows all my secrets, what I’m most afraid of, all the combinations, and where anything of worth is hidden. But I will still be his friend. If he’ll have me.

The moon rises, dips, rises, dips. The tide rolls in and out. I wait for the end. Frigid air pries itself inside. Even shrouded in blankets, I’m folded over from shivering. I wait for them. Pieces of my neighbor’s house are letting go, dropping into the sea. Some break windows as they fall. Is that a piano I hear tinkling, or glass shattering? Is that the sound of singing or of wood creaking to its breaking point? The whole house leans. The wind keens something awful. The sea is knocking, but his door remains shut.

Linda swaddled her newborn Beatrice in the butter-yellow blanket the neighborhood women had knitted, and joined her husband in the car. They drove from the hospital, smiling at the baby and each other. They turned onto their street and smiled at their house, which they’d had restored and painted a color they believed would make all the difference in raising their family. Then their smiles vanished.

The man was already in the yard.

They pulled into the driveway, and the man skulked behind the maple. When he saw that they’d seen him, he stepped out from behind it. He loped across the yard, then back.

Linda hugged Beatrice close, let her husband do the job of slamming the car doors, shouting, staring the man down. She felt helpless, and so she scurried quickly to the house, knowing that her husband’s attempts to be menacing would fail.

Inside, she watched the man in the yard watch the house. She knew it wouldn’t be long before he got inside. He always did.

And so Linda never left the house unless she had to. She locked up after her husband went to work. She installed bars over the windows. In the nursery she stood behind the curtains while Beatrice slept, and she watched the man. When she took out the garbage, she clutched her baby to her chest and locked eyes with the man as she stumbled past with the leaking bag. But all it would take was a brief moment; she knew that. If she spent too long looking for something in the fridge. If she sliced her finger cutting carrots and grimaced in pain. If she fell asleep while Beatrice napped. It would be some small thing.

Linda had asked her neighbors to call if they ever saw the man approach. She could hear them hold their breath cautiously over the phone.

We’ll try, but Linda, you know, they’d start to say, and Linda would hang up. She knew what they wanted to tell her, and she didn’t want to hear it. At least if she could see him, if someone could see him, it meant he wasn’t already inside.

But then one day a package was delivered. She signed for it carelessly, looking instead at the man in the yard. Inside the house, she drew out a knife to slice the box tape, and noticed the package wasn’t addressed to her. It wasn’t even for someone on the block. The deliveryman had given her a stranger’s package. He was already down the driveway in his truck.

Wait, she called, running to stop him before he pulled away.

He jumped from the truck to meet her, and something about his quickness made her suddenly remember the man in her yard. How easily her mind had let go of that burden. Some dumb box was all it took. She dropped it, ran into her house screaming. But it was too late. The man had come and gone, and he had taken Beatrice with him.

There’s nothing you can do, her neighbors reminded her as she grieved. A few had stopped by bearing casseroles, homemade jams.

You’ll get past this, and then you’ll have another, they said.

But he’ll just take that one, she cried.

Maybe not, they exclaimed hopefully. Sometimes he only takes one!

I couldn’t bear it if he took another, she sobbed.

There, there. They smoothed her hair, squeezed the tension from her hands. We know what you’re going through.

Then why are you smiling?

Because we know you’ll try again and have the family you want. They beamed at one another. We did.

Linda sniffed. Well, maybe I’m not like you.

What a shame, her neighbors thought. Imagine giving up a family — a family —because it was hard. Of course it was hard — the man, the fear, the pummelling grief. But giving up only brought emptiness. She could have such a nice family with just a little more effort.

But a few years later Linda did have another child, a boy she named Lewis, and she cried with relief as the doctor laid him on her chest to nurse. Linda looked at his face, and it was as if she’d never seen another baby before, he was so perfect. She felt whole. She was glad she’d tried again.

Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you home? her husband asked, bending into her car to touch Lewis’s warm belly again for no reason. His car idled beside him.

Go to work. Linda smiled. I’m fine. She really felt fine. She believed everything was going to be fine this time.