Sandy, 2012
/Kayla Kavanagh
I failed my license test last Friday. The DMV employee called driving the wrong way down a one-way a “fatal error.” This morning I am holding six sets of shaking keys and wondering which one might start Lisa Morrison’s car.
Years from now this storm will be fondly remembered by my friends for getting us a week off from school in October. They will speak of boardwalks splintering and homes melting into the Long Island Sound. Today I only know that I’ve woken up to a world sheathed in ice, every autumn leaf and every blade of grass petrified in time.
My legs slip beneath me as I shove every key into the car door. I drop the ones that don’t fit at my feet and they begin sliding down the frozen driveway. This will later become one of the details I find amusing, all those keys in my hands, the many different shapes I believed could fit into an ignition.
The Morrison boys have always been angry. They’re eight and ten and they shove forks down the garbage disposal when I babysit in hopes of hearing me shriek when I turn it on. They live at the edge of town, and when they play in the woods they come back with blood in their hair. Lisa calls this “roughhousing” and stared at me blankly one night when I told her Tommy bit through Collin’s skin at the dinner table.
Last night Lisa never made it home from work, saying the roads were too bad and asking me to stay with the boys. We sat up late and listened to ice crash against the windows. The only time I’ve ever had their full attention was when the power went out and I lit a few candles: the shudder of match against matchbook, the orange light flaring in their sleepy, slow-blinking eyes.
Now I’m almost certain Collin is dead. This almost-but-not-quite certainty will become another detail I fixate on in adulthood. I will deliberate whether my uncertainty after finding him at the base of the stairs signified strength or delusion or denial. I will be told that I was not so crazy to believe he might still be living, that spinal cord injuries can be invisible. There was the evidence of his severely bent neck, however, and the stillness of his body as I carried him from the bottom of the staircase to the car I couldn’t quite drive.
Tommy is silent in the backseat, his forehead pressed against the window, his body turned away from his dead or dying little brother. I throw the car in reverse, knowing the ice will carry us down the steep driveway, knowing it’s too early to expect rock salt at the outskirts of town, knowing the scuffle I heard after putting the boys to bed last night was not tree branches writhing against the house as I’d originally suspected.
I know the emergency room is across the street from the library, so if I can find the library, I can find the emergency room. I know my way to the library from my house, and from my house to the Morrisons’, but I don’t know my way from the Morrisons’ to the library. It’s something I will later watch my own son do when he learns to drive: losing his way in the only town he’s ever known, discovering that being a passenger does not at all prepare you to sit behind the wheel.
The car creeps toward South Main Street, where I’ll get my bearings if the snow and ice can stop emitting a searing white light for a moment, if the sun can dip behind a cloud, if everything can melt so I can see. Maybe Collin went downstairs for a glass of milk and couldn’t see without the lights. Maybe he lost his footing on the slippery staircase and that was it, his fatal error. Or maybe they had an argument. Maybe Tommy followed his brother down the hall and gave him a shove in the back, not anticipating the outcome, not possibly imagining he could wake up to snow in October. The cars are backed up on South Main because McDonald’s has a generator and everybody who’s old enough to drive wants a coffee. Now I’m turning off the car and stepping into the road, blinking at the rock salt, knowing I’ll never find the emergency room, or the library, or wherever it was I was meant to be going, and now I’m knocking on the window of the car in front of me, knowing that, years later, stuck in traffic, I will be waiting for a girl to knock on my window, too, so she can tell me that she has just failed her license test, and that the little boy she was babysitting may have died.
Author’s Note: Since childhood, I have been haunted by a story my father told me about accidentally piercing his sister with a pitchfork when they were young. While she turned out fine, the idea of children harming each other irreparably both terrifies and fascinates me. Hurricane Sandy had the same effect when it swept across my state one autumn afternoon.
Kayla Kavanagh is an MFA student at the University of South Florida. Her work has appeared in the West Trade Review, Little Patuxent Review, Typishly, LandLocked, Body Without Organs, and elsewhere.
