Free This Is the Story of You by Beth Kephart Page B

a locomotive was coming, you might have thought there’d be the big Evacuate Now—the horns that said,
Get yourselves out of here
. But it was late, and we believed what we had been told. That this storm was but a passing thing.
    The only thing certain is the past, and even the past is up for grabs—both the textbook variety and the personal kind, and every single one of Eva’s lost cities. I’m telling what I am telling, but I have to take it slow. It was dark, and it was night, and it came—a high-tide ride, four stories tall. I checked the records for that; that is the number. A high-tide surge that rose and rose and crashed against the lighthouse stripes, the anchored tankers, the sailboat sweets, the black boulders, the piers and the pebbles and the gutters of the houses by the edges of the sea, the laminated windows, the bridge between us and the world, and all the nests of all the birds in Ms. Isabel’s sanctuary and the beard of the great blue heron. A colossal wave was coming, then it came: water tonnage. A mind-of-its-own monster, beating every single odd.
    The big wave coming, the big wave crashing—up against the barriers and through the rocks and into the safe parts of the Zone. A wall of sound and then it was back again, closer, harder, at our door, knocking with its frothy fist.
    And Sterling stood.
    And Sterling growled.
    And the lights ticked off downstairs.
    And I was more afraid than I’d ever been.
    I shot up from the bed. I yanked on my jeans and my Day-Glo waders, my khaki trench coat with the big buttons and the sash belt and the eight never-ending gonzo pockets. I stood, sick inside and off my balance, and listened, and yes: The wind was a beast. The rain was a horizontal slash, it was bullets up against the glass, it was the end of all things. I felt my way across the room, toward the closet. I fell to my knees. I couldn’t swallow, could barely breathe, could hardly think, but then my hands were thinking for me—tossing aside the heaps of left-behind things until I finally found the trunk Mickey had prepared just in case “the big one” came, and yes, this was the big one. The big one did come. Out there, beyond me, the ocean was throwing a fit and sucking back. It was rushing forward, it was pissed-off hungry, it was full of rush and gush. I heard it, I could imagine it. It wasn’t a dream.
    Beneath the wads of old dresses and scarves and useless things, beneath everything my aunt hadn’t wanted and my mom hadn’t tossed was the kit; I found it, blind, with my hands, dragged it out into the room, opened the lid. Extra water, fish in cans, chips in bags, peaches in sugar syrup, a mother lode of Hershey’s Kisses, wrenches, toilet paper, matches, bug spray, candles, all those extra sets of batteries, and plastic sheets and plastic ponchos and the flashlight we called the doublewide.
    I switched it on, and I could see.
    It was too late for almost everything. Too late to plywood the windows. Too late to call for help. Too late to get out.
    Think, Mira. Think. I counted Slurpees. I categorized. I put the moment into taxonomic order: Animalia, Chordata, Mammalia, Primates, Hominidae, Homo, Homo sapiens. Me. I may have been part of something so much bigger than myself, but it all came down to me.
    The only defense against the storm would be the hurricane shutters my aunt had left us with—the solitary, rusted pair that ran across the sliding glass door to the deck. I turned the broad yellow eye of the doublewide in that direction. I stood and I walked—one step, another step: Mira Banul, be brave. I reached the shutters, lay the flashlight down, and cranked those things like my life depended on it, because it did. Sterling wound like a silver thread between my legs. “Home of the brave, home of the brave, home of the brave,” I said, and the sound of the rain on the roof and on the walls was so gigantic, the sound of the