WE ARE UNPREPARED...

This is a novel about the superstorm that threatens to destroy a marriage, a town and the entire Eastern seaboard. But the destruction begins early, when fear infects people’s lives and spreads like the plague.

Ash and Pia move from hipster Brooklyn to rustic Vermont in search of a more authentic life. But just months after settling in, the forecast of a superstorm disrupts their dream. Fear of an impending disaster splits their tight-knit community and exposes the cracks in their marriage. Where Isole was once a place of old farm families, rednecks and transplants, it now divides into paranoid preppers, religious fanatics and government tools, each at odds about what course to take.

WE ARE UNPREPARED is an emotional journey, a terrifying glimpse into the human costs of our changing earth and, ultimately, a cautionary tale of survival and the human spirit.

We Are Unprepared

Meg Little Reilly

www.mirabooks.co.uk

This book is dedicated to the wild places worth protecting.

And to Dan, with whom I want to explore them all.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Title Page

Dedication

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

PART TWO

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

PART THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WE ARE UNPREPARED READERS GUIDE

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Copyright

PROLOGUE

Isolé—(French) / EE-zo-LAY / adj.: isolated, remote, lonely.

Isole—(English) / i-sol / n.: rural town in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Population: 6,481.

IT WOULD BE narcissistic to assume that the earth conjured a storm simply to alter the course of my life. More likely, we’d been poisoning this world for years while ignoring the warning signs, and The Storm wasn’t so much a cosmic intervention as it was a predictable response to our collectively reckless behavior. Either way, the resulting destruction—to North America and our orderly life in Isole—arrived so quickly that I swear we didn’t see it coming.

Looking back, I realize how comforting those months leading up to The Storm had been as we focused on preparing for the disaster. News of the changing weather patterns gave each of our lives a new clarity and direction. It didn’t feel enjoyable at the time, but it was a big, concrete distraction in which to pour ourselves, even as other matters could have benefited from our attention. It was urgent, and living in a state of urgency can be invigorating. But the fear can be mistaken for purpose, which is even more dangerous than the threat itself.

PART ONE

I pine, I pine for my woodland home;

I long for the mountain stream

That through the dark ravine flows on

Till it finds the sun’s bright beam.

I long to catch once more a breath

Of my own pure mountain air,

And lay me down on the flowery turf

In the dim old forest there.

O, for a gush of the wildwood strain

That the birds sang to me then!

O, for an hour of the fresher life

I knew in that haunted glen!

For my path is now in the stranger’s land,

And though I may love full well

Their grand old trees and their flowery meads,

Yet I pine for thee, sweet dell.

I’ve sat in the homes of the proud and great,

I’ve gazed on the artist’s pride,

Yet never a pencil has painted thee,

Thou rill of the mountain side.

And though bright and fair may be other lands,

And as true their friends and free,

Yet my spirit will ever fondly turn,

Green Mountain Home, to thee.

—“Green Mountain Home” by Miss A. W. Sprague of Plymouth, Vermont.

First published in 1860.

ONE

WE WERE DRIVING east on Route 15 when the world first learned of the coming storms. Pia and I had just met with a fertility specialist in Burlington and we were both staring straight ahead at the road as we digested the information we’d received there. I didn’t want to see a doctor about having babies. That was for people who were old or sick or in a rush, and we were none of those things. But it was true that we had sort of been trying on and off for a year, so with little persuasion, I agreed to the appointment. Conceiving a child had become Pia’s obsession in the preceding months, and her determination trumped my ambivalence.

We sat completely still in our seats and stared at the empty road as we drove back toward our new home. I gripped the wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock, focusing on the act of driving to avoid looking over at Pia, who I knew was crying silently. I could feel the steam from the fat tears that rolled down her smooth face. I wanted to comfort her, to make them stop, but I couldn’t will myself to.

There had been soft Celtic music playing in the waiting room of the Full Moon Fertility Center and amateurish oil paintings of naked women in various states of pregnancy hanging on the walls, all of which annoyed me immensely for their obviousness. Weeks earlier, blood had been drawn and samples had been submitted, and this was the day Dr. Tan-Face explained to us in a soothing voice that conceiving a child on our own was unlikely. Pia had a hormone imbalance that would require “assistance.” It made Pia cry to hear this word, which made me almost as sad to see.

It was a hot September day in Vermont and everything that had been green was beginning to turn brown under the unrelenting sun. It was hotter and drier than it should have been on September 20. We passed roadside produce stands and fellow drivers occasionally but were mostly alone for miles of farmland. Fireweed grew along the edges of the road and, if I squinted, I could see fluffy dandelion heads mingling with drying milkweeds in the fields. There was a group of grazing cows and a carload of children pointing excitedly at the lazy ladies. I was trying to conjure more sympathy for my wife as I took this all in. Species were propagating all around us, but we needed assistance. I understood why this news was difficult to hear. Other couples had told us of the heartache of infertility and the shattering of a romantic fantasy for how this milestone is supposed to unfold. I wanted to feel that heartache with her, but any sadness was crowded out by an overwhelming sense of relief—relief that it was her faulty machinery and not mine and, mostly, relief that we had just been given the gift of more time. The doctor had explained that getting pregnant might take a little while, which was all I really wanted to hear him say—that I would have a little more time to live life like the young, happy thirty-five-year-old I believed myself to be.

The air blowing in from our open windows smelled like overheated livestock and corn that had passed its prime. I could picture the exact stage of transformation that the kernels on the mature stalks would be entering at that moment. The extreme heat had forced early harvests and they were already losing their plump, yellow corn complexions as the sugars dulled to starch. I knew those smells. I knew that the cut stalks were already so sharp that if you ran through them in your bare feet, they could slice right through the skin. These were passive memories, absorbed unknowingly in childhood and left dormant for the years I’d been away from Vermont. They surprised me in their specificity and sureness, awakened by the smallest triggers. It was as if a whole room in my brain had been locked for a long time, but when it finally reopened, every object was just as I had left it.

When the silent crying and focused driving got to be too much, I reached for the stereo dial on the dashboard of our aging Volvo, permanently set to Vermont Public Radio. It came on too loud, which was awkward at that moment. My hand rushed back to the knob, but as I started to turn it down, Pia grabbed my wrist and said, “Wait, Ash.”

A somber, male NPR voice was explaining that the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had just briefed the president of the United States about the latest long-term storm forecast. At first, it didn’t sound all that serious. Big storms had already become the norm. Tornados, wildfires, floods, hurricanes—it seemed as though some part of the country was always in a state of emergency. But the tone of the reporter’s voice and the odd timing of the report suggested that there was something new here.

“What we know for sure,” the reporter said, “is that, due to rapidly rising sea-surface temperatures in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, we are now approaching a period of extreme weather events. NOAA is predicting as many as thirty named tropical storms and hurricanes in the coming months, along with likely heat waves and drought, and even severe blizzards. It’s too early to know precisely when or what we’re in for, but these water temperatures are unprecedented and the storms they trigger will almost certainly be record breaking. These storms have the potential to be very, very disruptive.”

He said disruptive with emphasis; we were expected to infer larger things from the restrained word.

“Jesus,” I said out loud.

Pia had stopped crying. She was leaning in toward the dashboard as if coaxing the news out of the speakers.

“How firm is this science?” a female interviewer asked the male voice, and I wished that we had heard the report from the beginning.

“Government scientists say the data on rising seawater temperatures and levels are reliable. They are less certain about how these variables will interact with other weather forces. Storm experts that I’ve spoken with say that there is a plausible worst-case scenario that the government doesn’t want to talk about just yet.”

“And what’s that?”

“If this warm air above the Atlantic collides with a colder pressure system from the west, they could create a sort of superstorm along the eastern seaboard that could be positively devastating. But again, no government officials have made such a warning. All we know for sure right now is that we have several months of extreme weather events ahead. But I believe this is the first time the federal government has issued such an early and emphatic warning of this kind, so it must be dire.”

The radio voices went on to discuss global ramifications of extreme weather—food scarcity, political unrest, war—but we had already drifted back into our own minds by then. Moments before, we were fixated on creating new life, and now we were confronted with the uncertainty of the life before us. We didn’t linger for long on the thought—our babies were as abstract then as the coming storms.

I turned right, toward our house, past the broken mailbox I kept meaning to replace and down the dirt path that served as our driveway. I loved everything about that house. I loved the way the overgrowth of sugar maples and yellow birch trees along the driveway created a sort of enchanted tunnel that spat you out steps from our expansive porch. I really loved the way the porch, crowded with potted plants and mismatched furniture, wrapped all the way around the faded yellow farmhouse. This was our dream home in our dream life and, though we had been there for only three months, it felt as if we were always meant to live there. The yellow farmhouse was the realization of all the fantasies borne from our marriage. To be there, finally, was a victory.

There was a creek that ran through the backyard, threading all of our neighbors and hundreds of spring thaws together. Some of the people in the area kept their yards neatly manicured, but most were like us: they mowed now and then, but they gave the wildflowers a wide berth and relished the sight of a deer or—even better—a brown bear, snacking on the ever-encroaching blackberry bushes. This was where you lived if you wanted not to conquer nature, but to join it. This was the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and there was nowhere else like it on earth.

I turned off the engine and looked over at Pia, whose expression had turned from sullen to intrigued. Her face had reassembled itself back to its baseline of beauty. Pia was gorgeous. Her thick, wavy blond hair was twisted off over one shoulder, frizzing slightly in the unseasonable heat. She had bright green eyes protected by long lashes that were still wet with tears. She sat back and looked at me with one bare heel up on the car seat, short cutoff shorts nearly disappearing in that position. Her body and her utterly unselfconscious ownership of her body was an invitation—not just to me, but to the world. Pia was that enviable combination of beauty, self-possession and grace that makes people want to be closer. She was magnetic. Not quite fit, but small and smooth in the most perfect ways. She attracted attention, male and female, everywhere we went. Every head tilt and arm stretch seemed effortless, though I knew that they were choreographed for an imaginary camera that followed her around. As an artist, she’d achieved only middling success, but Pia was unmatched for the artfulness with which she inhabited her own skin.

“I think this is serious, Ash,” Pia said. Her eyes were wide. “We all knew these storms were coming eventually, and now they’re here—not that they would ever admit the real cause.”

There had been no mention of global warming in the news report, but by then no one needed our reluctant government to confirm what we knew to be true. Pia was reflexively defiant of all authority and she seemed to enjoy the vindication that this weather report was already providing. I reached a hand across the front seat to squeeze her knee, sensing that the mood in the car had shifted. We had been drawn out of our own anxious heads and were feeling unified now by our fear and fascination with the coming storms. A familiar wave of guilty relief washed over me. I suggested that we relax on the back porch with cold beers, which she did not object to.

Pia stretched out on a hammock on the porch while I went inside to grab two Long Trail Ales from the fridge. The sun was low in the sky by then and our house was finally beginning to cool. Even though it was September, the temperature hadn’t dropped below eighty-five during the day yet.

I held a wet beer against Pia’s thigh, which made her squeal. She pulled me into the hammock with her, an unsteady arrangement, but I was happy to have her body pressed against mine after a particularly trying couple of days. She was a virtuoso of affection—both creative and infectious with her demonstration of love. After years together, I was still always grateful to receive it.

I ran a finger along the curve of her breast and she closed her eyes.

“We need to start planning,” Pia said. “We need to start stocking up and fortifying the house and...getting seriously self-reliant.”

We talked about self-reliance in those days as if it was a state of higher consciousness. It was the explanation we gave for leaving our jobs in New York and starting a new life in Vermont. We wanted to grow things and build things, preserve things and pickle things. We wanted to play our own music and brew our own beer. This, we believed, was how one lived a real life. There was a pious promise in the notion of self-reliance—a promise that we would not only feel a deep sense of pride and moral superiority, but also that it would ensure eternal marital bliss. Some of this we were not wrong about: it was supremely satisfying to eat cucumbers that we had grown and sit on furniture we had made (two Adirondack chairs assembled from a kit, technically). Pia was taking a pottery class in those days and our house was filled with charmingly lopsided creamers and water pitchers with her initials carved into the underside, like a proud child’s bounty from summer camp. I had taken a weekend-long seminar on beekeeping and the unopened bee materials that I ordered online were still stacked neatly against the house. When the news of The Storms broke, we were only three months into this real-living adventure and we hadn’t learned much at all yet.

Pia and I weren’t alone in these aspirations. There were others like us around the country, young(ish) people, intent on living differently. In the aftermath of America’s economic crisis, a burst housing bubble and an overheating earth, we were part of an unofficial movement of people who wanted to create a life that wasn’t defined by a drive for more stuff. We wanted to spend less time at work and more time with each other. We were smug, sure, but I still believe we were basically right in our quest to find pleasure in simpler pursuits. It wasn’t so much a rejection of our parents’ choices as it was an admission that those choices weren’t available to us. The world was different and we were adapting.

Isole, Vermont, was an answer to those yearnings. It offered a delightful mix of hippies and rednecks, cohabitating in the picturesque valley between two small mountains. You went there only if you knew what you were looking for. There were old farm families and loggers who had been in Isole long enough to remember when it was pronounced in its traditional French way: EE-zo-LAY. But the economic engine of the region came from outside money in our time—reclusive liberals with trust funds, self-employed tech whizzes and socially responsible venture capitalists, all hiding out in a picturesque hamlet that was too far from a city to ever be truly civilized.

I liked to think of myself as a native because I grew up in central Vermont, but the real locals knew us as outsiders. We had come from Brooklyn, where we’d spent the previous twelve years building successful and lucrative careers. Pia had worked in advertising and I was a partner at a graphic design firm. The firm was well established by the time I sold my portion of the business back to my colleagues, but I had been there in the early days, before we had an in-house gym and black-tie holiday parties.

Pia and I fell in love with our Vermont farmhouse on vacation earlier that year. We had taken an extended spring weekend on Crystal Lake. It was too cold to swim, so we took long drives around the Northeast Kingdom, basking in the slowness and serenity. On the last day of our stay, we drove past a perfect yellow farmhouse on a slanted dirt road with a just-posted for-sale sign out front. It was our sign, we decided. We had been waiting for it.

Years before, Pia and I had made a pact to live a different sort of life one day. We had only the vaguest plan to escape the city and remake ourselves, but we were sure the details of this plan would present themselves when it was time. So when we found the farmhouse, we recognized it as the natural extension of the dream we had created together. I sold my piece of the firm and stayed on as a long-distance consultant. Two months later, we were unpacking in Vermont. It was such a fast and easy process that we didn’t have time to iron out all the wrinkles of our new life. Pia didn’t have a new job lined up yet and we hadn’t met a soul there.

It sounds reckless in the retelling, but that was an important part of its appeal. Pia was great at embracing the new and unpredictable, but I was far more cautious, so this leap to a new state also felt like a leap toward my wife. We were going to forge a new path together, armed only with years of shared daydreams about a country life.

The hammock rocked gently as the breeze picked up, and I could smell the goldenrod that was being mowed at the farm upwind. Pia was still listing things that would need to be addressed before The Storms came: gutters, faulty wiring in the basement, a stuck bedroom window. I knew she was probably right; if this storm was for real, then we did need to start preparing. But I stroked her hair and suggested that we spend the rest of the now-enjoyable Friday relaxing. We could get to disaster preparations tomorrow.

“Hey, dudes. What are you doing?” said a squeaky voice.

Approaching us was our seven-year-old neighbor, August, whose dilapidated little house sat on the other side of a thick wall of trees and shrubs to the east. His place was invisible from our porch but connected by a short, neat path that I had helped August clear to facilitate easy movement back and forth. I had met August on the first day of our arrival, when he walked through our open front door and began peppering us with questions. He seemed desperate for friends and bubbling with curiosity. Since then, I’d seen him almost every day. He’d come over to kick a soccer ball back and forth or invite me to check out the new fort he’d built in the woods behind our homes. Pia thought August was sweet, but it was I who spent so much time with him. I wondered sometimes about the adults in his life who had left him so hungry for attention, but I didn’t ask many questions, mainly because I didn’t know what exactly to ask, but also because I enjoyed our time together and wanted to just be with him. And August was helpful. He’d spent his entire short life in those woods and he knew more about self-reliance and country living than Pia and me combined.

“What’s up, buddy?” I said, reaching a hand out for a sticky high five.

As usual, August was barefoot, filthy and smiling. The burdock lodged in his curly auburn hair appeared to have taken hold days before.

August wanted to play Frisbee, so we hoisted our bodies out of the hammock and met him on the lawn. The mood had shifted and we were happy to play. That was the way things changed with Pia: she could be crying and sad, but the minute it was over, it was really over. Most of the time, this was a relief, though there were times when I knew we probably should have actually worked things through instead of just riding them out. But it was so much easier to just wait for storms to pass, and the highs were so high that we didn’t want to look back at the lows once we had escaped them. We just drove forward, secure in the knowledge that we were in love and nothing was worth dwelling on. This unspoken arrangement required a willingness on my part to indulge every emotional whim that Pia wanted to follow. In return, she kept things uncomplicated and asked very few questions. Abiding by the rules of this dynamic felt intimate. It worked for us.

Pia dived theatrically as the Frisbee left August’s hands, which made him double over in laughter every time. I laughed along with them but let my eyes wander to the group of flycatchers above. They were migrating south, no doubt, but they were several weeks late. They should have been in Central America by then. These were the details of nature that I never got wrong. I was as passionate about nature as Pia was about art, and I knew bird migratory patterns like the moles on my left arm. I assumed they were just as immovable. But the birds were confused and their travels had changed.

Our backyard was magnificent that day. The enormous sugar maples along the lawn’s perimeter swayed cheerfully as the low sun illuminated their drying leaves. It would have been a perfect July day, were it not for the fact that it was late September and there was no shaking the feeling that everything was off. The leaves seemed to be skipping past their most brilliant orange-yellow-red phase and going straight to the browning at the end. We were playing Frisbee in shorts, for Christ’s sake.

Weather was the primary topic of discussion in the Northeast Kingdom that summer—even more so than usual—because it was all so wrong. Everyone was nervous: the farmers, the maple sugarers, the people who relied on ski tourism, the ice fishermen and the hockey fans. Pia talked a lot about a global-warming government cover-up, but I was the one in our household who truly mourned the changing Vermont climate. I had grown up there (technically, I grew up in Rutland, a sturdier, postindustrial town in central Vermont). Every milestone of my life was tied in some way to New England weather; and every romantic vision I had for our new life relied on the weather being right. Some part of me understood this to be unrealistic, but I wasn’t ready to accept that.

When the sun finally disappeared and our toes started to chill in our flip-flops, we sent August home and Pia and I went inside to make dinner. I loved making dinner together. It was an activity that could lay the groundwork for hours of sexually charged companionship. It wasn’t just sex—though that almost always came later—but also wine and storytelling and laughter and touching. Those nights always felt to me like scenes from a movie. I envisioned someone watching us through a window, not hearing exactly what we were saying, but being impressed by the ease and tenderness of our home life. It was the shade of domesticity that I liked marriage in.

Pia browned fat chunks of bacon in a pan that would soon be joined by split brussels sprouts and a drizzle of maple syrup, an addicting recipe she had acquired from the little girl who ran the farm stand down the road. These were the details we relished but worked hard to seem cool about when we breathlessly relayed them to our friends back in Brooklyn. We buy our sprouts from a farm girl down the road! That’s where we get our eggs, too—you have never eaten eggs until you’ve had just-laid eggs. I can’t believe we ever bought our meat vacuum-sealed at the grocery store. Just-butchered and free-range is the way to go. It’s just the way life is here... The narrative we’d created about our life in Vermont was almost as important as the experience itself.

I massaged salt and pepper into a local sirloin and carried it out the back screen door to place over high flames on the grill. Pia joined me minutes later, slipping a hand around my waist and lifting her pinot noir to my lips. I took a sip before leaning down to kiss her hard. I loved that I was almost a full head taller than her. Being tall and broad was my best physical feature. Without expending much effort on appearance, I projected the illusion of general fitness, even as my stomach softened slightly and my dark, groomed beard sprouted grays. I drew most of my confidence with women from my size, which worked fine for Pia, who liked to be enveloped by someone larger than herself. On cue, she melted into my chest and then pushed me away, darting back inside to tend to her sauté pans.

* * *

“I want to change the world,” I once said to Pia during a marathon late-night session of drinking, fooling around and philosophizing early in our courtship. We were on our second bottle of wine and both feeling drunk.

“No, you don’t.” She laughed.

“I do!”

“No, people who want to change the world go on disaster relief missions in Haiti and deliver vaccines to babies in Africa. You just want to be outside and feel like less of a yuppie dick.”

I considered this correction as I studied the pattern of the blanket beneath us. We were sitting on the floor in our tiny Brooklyn living room having a sort of indoor picnic.

“It’s okay,” Pia went on. “I’m the same. I’m too selfish to do something truly good, but I think choosing to live a life that doesn’t make the world worse is okay, too.”

“Shit, you’re right,” I conceded. “So how do we not make the world worse?”

“Smaller ecological footprint, conscientious consumerism, freedom from prejudices, that sort of thing. It sounds trite, but I don’t think it is. You live a more thoughtful life than your parents did, and you teach your kids those values, and voilà: the human race evolves. That’s meaningful.”

“I’d rather actually be a good person, but I guess you’re right. Maybe that is meaningful,” I agreed. “So let’s make a pact to live that way. Somehow.”

Pia stretched a hand toward me to formalize the agreement. “I love that. It’s a deal.”

We shook on it.

“I feel like a good person already,” I said.

“Not good, just a not-bad person,” she corrected.

We set our wineglasses aside and I dived toward her. She enveloped me with her legs and fell back.

Pia was a marvel to me in those early days—as witty and esoteric as she was sexy. It was just nice being together and we never wanted to stop.

* * *

Dinner was served on the dirty porch furniture, which looked perfect in the glow of a dozen tea lights that Pia had carefully arranged. We sat across from each other, drinking wine and discussing the superior origins and experiences of the dead animals before us. There would be no mention of her ovulation cycle or my quiet resistance to the project. This was a good night. After some discussion of the strange and beautiful sky, we eventually turned to the most obvious topic.

“So, what are we going to do, love?” Pia asked, more excited than scared. “These storms are just terrifying! We need a plan.”

I nodded. “We do need a plan. I can’t imagine that our little landlocked state is in all that much danger, but I guess we should err on the side of caution and get this leaky old house sealed up. I assume that we’d stay here, even if a really big storm came, right?”

“Of course—we have to stay!” Pia said, gulping her wine. “This house is our baby. And where would we go anyhow? Certainly not to your parents’ place. And certainly not to mine!”

I was surprised that she hadn’t considered the possibility, but it was true that there wasn’t really any reason to go to either of our parents’ homes in the case of an emergency. We were adults and we were no less equipped to handle disaster than they were, though I felt as though they’d attained a level of adulthood we hadn’t yet graduated to.

Pia’s parents, both academics, lived in a tony Connecticut suburb outside of New York City, which was where they had raised their one beautiful child. They were aloof and opinionated, but they had always been kind enough to me. Pia spoke of them as if they were monsters. And maybe they were. I once assumed that she liked believing that hers had been a cruel childhood because it made her more interesting and tortured. But I was wrong about all that. Something had been missing from her childhood; there was a chaos inside of her that I couldn’t account for.

I didn’t like Pia’s parents, but not for the reasons she provided. They offended a Yankee sensibility in me that valued industriousness and discipline. I couldn’t understand what justified their haughtiness when, as far as I could tell, they hadn’t left much of a mark on the world. It wasn’t that their pretensions were unfamiliar to me—there was no shortage of artsy liberal affect in the corner of New England I grew up in. I just hated playing along with it. Pia’s parents attended the symphony and followed culinary trends and read theater reviews, but they didn’t create anything themselves and this bothered me. They seemed to believe that, by virtue of association with greatness, they, too, were great. They told us stories about so-and-so who just produced a one-act play or wrote a book about his trek across Nepal as we nodded with appropriate awe. Visits with them required pretending that we weren’t having cocktails with appreciators of great art, but with the artists themselves. All of this was made even more maddening by their undiluted disappointment at the lack of formal culture in our lives. That was their term for distinguishing the kind of culture that we enjoyed from the established arts of the aristocracy they believed themselves to be part of.

My family was less complicated in every way, a point that Pia liked to make when she was annoyed with me. My father was a lawyer at a local firm in Rutland, where I grew up with two sisters and a brother. I came second, which secured my rank as neither the most successful nor the most screwed-up of my siblings. My mom stayed at home and I believe Pia disapproved of this, but she never said so aloud. My parents volunteered at our schools and picked up trash on green-up days and supported local theater. Since moving to New York, I hadn’t met anyone who cared about their community in the way my parents cared for their struggling town. I like my parents and, although my younger sister’s kids and my brother’s drug habits had commanded most of their attention in recent years, we were all okay. (My older sister lives in London with her wife. We had always gotten along well, though we’ve fallen out of touch in recent years.) This is what family looks like to me. It’s not always joyful, but it’s big and messy and kind of fun some of the time. I expected to have something similar one day, when I was ready.

“Yeah, we have to stay here no matter what,” I agreed, pulling the collar on my sweater a little higher. It was cool outside now and so dark that I could barely see Pia’s face floating above the candles.

She moved our bare plates aside and took a small notebook with a matching pen from the pocket of her bulky sweater. It was list time. Pia loved the idea of being a writer, someone who writes, so she was forever collecting pretty little notebooks to have on hand in case inspiration struck. But inspiration never stayed with her for more than a few minutes, so her notebooks were mostly used for frantic list making, which struck much more frequently. She listed books she planned to read, organic foods she wanted to grow, yoga postures that would heal whatever was ailing her. Her lists were aspirational instructions for a life she wanted to live. They rarely materialized into much but served a constructive role nonetheless, as if the mere act of putting her plans in writing set her on a path to self-improvement. I didn’t object to the positivity of it all.

Pia had begun a shopping list of home supplies we would need for The Storms. She wrote, “canned goods, multivitamins, water filtration system, solar blankets.” It read more like a survival list for the apocalypse than a storm-preparation plan.

“Babe, I was thinking we would just, like, board up the windows and try to seal up the root cellar a bit,” I said. “Do you really think we need all that?”

“It can’t hurt to be prepared.” Pia shrugged, still writing in the dark. “And if nothing comes of these storm predictions, then we’ll have some extra supplies the next time we need them. No harm done.”

Her reasoning was sound, but there was an edge to her voice that surprised me. The coming storms excited her.

Pia came around to my side of the table and wrapped a wool blanket around both of our shoulders. It smelled like campfire from a previous summer outing. She put her arms around my chest for a quick squeeze and then turned back to her notebook. I listened to the leaves swaying with the wind and the din of summer insects that were somehow still abundant. Her hair fell all around us. I could smell the natural almond shampoo she had started using since adopting a more country approach to hygiene, which made her hair wilder than it used to be. Pia was getting charged with each new idea she recorded. I loved her like that: present and energized. I knew what my role was at those moments. I would be adoring and attentive, which I really was.

Pia pulled a knee up to her chest and I noticed a new drawing in ballpoint pen on her upper thigh. It was a tree with the face of an old man in its trunk. She must have done it that evening, mindlessly doodling in a moment of boredom. Our lives were filled with these small reminders of Pia’s artistic gifts, washable and impermanent, but impressive. She had won awards in college for her oil paintings, and a prominent gallery in Manhattan had offered to show her photography years before. But Pia lacked the discipline to carry out long-term projects and she changed mediums too often to be truly great in any of them. With focus, she could have earned a living doing the kind of art she loved.

“You’re going to be great at this,” Pia said.

“At what?”

“You know, bracing for these big weather events, finding industrious solutions to things, living without some of our old comforts. You like things a little difficult.”

She was complimenting me, but teasing, too. Since we’d started making real money, modern life was feeling a bit squishy for me, all morning espressos and personal trainers. I secretly feared that I was growing too attached to it all. A tiny alarm in the primal recesses of my brain had been going off, warning me to stay sharp and focused in case of future uncertainty. I never told Pia about this growing discomfort, but I should have guessed that she could sense it.

“Fingers crossed for frozen pipes.” I smiled.

We stayed outside until nearly eleven, building our plan for The Storms and laughing—flirting even—as we huddled together in solidarity. When I finally convinced Pia that it was time to go to bed, she took my hand and led me upstairs to our bedroom, where she instructed me to sit in a small antique chair to watch her slowly peel off each layer of her clothing.

It would have been comical on a less beautiful woman as she unbuttoned her oversize flannel shirt and pulled off fading green cotton underwear, but it wasn’t. My physical response to Pia’s naked body hadn’t flagged in the years we’d been together. If anything, it had grown more intense as sex tapered off a little. When she was done undressing, she turned and walked her naked body to the bed to wait for me. Her ears and nose were still cold from the evening chill, but the rest of her body was warm, hot even. I attempted restraint at first, but that didn’t last, and what followed was the wild, forceful passion that we’d founded our relationship on years ago. Better even. We fucked like two people desperate to occupy one another. It was feral, afraid. Pia was alive, the weather was our common enemy and I was relieved.

As she fell asleep beside me, my mind drifted back to our unconceived baby and the news of The Storms. I wasn’t ready for a baby, not then, but I loved Pia’s desire for one because it was the embodiment of my favorite things about her: a hunger for new beginnings, adventure and, above all, optimism. Whether there was a place for optimism in the stormy new world we inhabited, I didn’t know. And I wondered—for the first time in my life—whether this was still a world that babies wanted to be born into. And how could the answer to that question be anything other than an emphatic yes if we are to go on living wholeheartedly? Is there a moment at which the human race should decide not to perpetuate itself, or will we keep going until the universe decides that for us and just wipes us out? The latter seemed more likely. So I wondered how the universe might kill off our species, whether it would be instantaneous and painless or cruelly slow. Perhaps it was already happening at a pace just slow enough to go undetected. Were we at a beginning or an end?

TWO

WE WOKE UP early the next morning, a clear Saturday that seemed incongruous with the austere task ahead: storm preparations. Pia walked around the bedroom naked for a few minutes, checking her phone, tying her hair up and then taking it down again in front of the mirror. The warm mood of the previous evening still lingered, though daylight had brought a new urgency to our self-assigned task of storm shopping.

I walked downstairs and turned the radio on even before making coffee, hoping for the latest from NPR on the new weather predictions. No one seemed to have any more information, but overnight, countless opinions had been hatched and opposing teams established. A conservative commentator suggested that this was part of a wider liberal scheme to divert public funds to global-warming-research and climate-change “slush funds.” Someone from a think tank feared that the president was withholding information and called for a congressional investigation into what the Department of the Environment and NOAA knew. Pia and I drank coffee with sweet local cream while we watched old men on network TV discuss how this might influence the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections. The Storms dominated everything, but they were still only an idea. It was just a Saturday project for us.

We took showers and climbed into the Volvo, bound for the closest family-owned hardware store, twenty-five minutes away. That morning felt like what I thought our Vermont experience would always feel like. We were close, she was smiling and the landscape unfolded before us like a picture painted by a child in crayon: all blue skies and red barns. The windows were down and we talked about how the smell of manure made us feel. Pia said she hated it but couldn’t resist taking a few deep breaths. I took a native’s pride in sharing that I loved that farm stink. It evoked for me a million childhood experiences, most real and some fabricated in the haze of nostalgia. She leaned across the front seat to kiss my neck and call me a hick as I pulled into Dewey’s Hardware.

* * *

“You’re so country.” That was what Pia had said to me when we met nine years earlier. We were at a raucous costume party in Williamsburg and I was fighting my way through a wall of bare male torsos, trying not to touch the smooth, sweaty shoulders standing between me and the keg. The host, a mutual friend, was a professional party thrower and an amateur drug dealer. His events were always predominantly gay and half-naked, but this one was exceptional even by his standards. My chances of talking to a pretty girl seemed better than average, given the demographics, so I took a risk and smiled at Pia, who was still unknown to me then. She immediately grabbed my arm and pulled me through the crowd until we found safety in an unoccupied corner of the room.

“You’re not from here, right?” she yelled in my ear.

Her costume was composed entirely of a vine that snaked around her curvy body, with plastic leaves covering all the critical areas. It was held in place with flimsy green tape.

“No one’s from here,” I said. “This isn’t real. It’s a costume party within the costume party of Brooklyn. This is a redundant party.”

Pia seemed impressed by the profundity of this drunken observation, so I kept going. I explained that I had been living there since I graduated from Amherst, that I was working in graphic design and that I had no intention of staying in Brooklyn forever. “I miss trees,” I said, which she liked a lot. When Pia, who had attended Middlebury, learned that I was from Vermont, she touched my arm and told me that she was “madly in love with the dirt there.” I told her about a harvest festival near my hometown that she would enjoy, which was when she smiled an amazing smile and decided that I was “very country.”

We slept together that night. There was no courtship or pretense. She just took me back to her messy apartment and, without a hint of modesty, pushed my head between her legs as if she was giving me a gift I had been waiting for. For the briefest moment, I considered fainting in the humid, earthy cave of her body, but I didn’t. I came alive. Pia didn’t exude the soapy perfume of the girls I’d been with before; she was all salt and musk. She was the most animate being I had ever encountered and a switch was flipped inside me. I wanted to consume her and she wanted to be wanted by me, so our frenzied union felt like a perfect fit. I knew from the start that with her passion came a moody and mercurial element, but that was fine with me. Life was so much more fun with her in it. So we built a relationship there, on a lumpy mattress, beneath glittery, draped tapestries, surrounded by stacks of books in unreal Brooklyn.

My confidence in those initial days with Pia can be largely attributed to the recent realization that my specific brand of geekiness was in high demand in that particular corner of the universe at that moment in American culture. I had always been a tall, slightly awkward dork who would rather be reading nature journals or distance running in the woods than mingling at a party. In Brooklyn, this was misinterpreted as sensitive, progressive and cool. Even my accidental wardrobe (workman pants, flannel shirts, hiking boots) seemed to impress. I would have resented the objectification if it didn’t work so well with hot hipster girls.

* * *

“I knew we should have left earlier,” Pia said from the passenger seat as we approached the hardware store.

The parking lot was surprisingly crowded for nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, but we found a spot in the farthest corner, next to a pickup truck with giant, muddy wheels. Two rows down, a woman hurried small children into the backseat of a car filled with shopping bags.

“Whoa” was all I could say when we entered the store. The normally orderly establishment was roaring with people pushing squeaky shopping carts, many holding lists of their own.

A young man wearing a navy Dewey’s Hardware polo shirt nodded at us from the entryway. “It’s the latest storm report,” he said. “Everyone’s getting prepared.”

I wanted to talk further with this teenager, who probably could have been helpful to us then, but Pia had already claimed a cart and joined the melee. We moved quickly up and down the aisles, most of which had been picked so bare that it was impossible to know which essential items were no longer available to us.

“Tarps have been sold out since seven this morning,” one man reported, “and don’t even bother trying to find sandbags.”

Neither was on our list, but they sounded important all of a sudden.

As whole sections of the store were emptied, shoppers veered to other areas looking for creative uses for seemingly useless items. One man bought all the remaining plastic sleds from the previous winter. I watched him jog to the register with his purchase, satisfied with whatever discovery he thought he’d just made.

It wasn’t the bare shelves or the full parking lot that unnerved me that morning; it was the behavior of the patrons. We were in the heart of the Northeast Kingdom with people who had lived through dozens of epic weather events. They had seen ice storms kill harvests, barn roofs collapse under wet snow and heavy winds bring trees down over livestock. They adapted to bad weather with whatever was in the shed or could be borrowed from a neighbor and they never, ever panicked. This wasn’t full-blown panic, but it was something close. (We would learn later what real panic looks like.)

Pia crumpled up the list in her hand and stuffed it in the pocket of her jean shorts. We wouldn’t find anything on that list. Taking a cue from the shoppers around us, she started just grabbing random items: gardening gloves, a box of large nails and a hammer, three bungee cords, shipping tape. I considered stopping her, but she looked committed, so I stood back. We went around the store like that for a while before finally making our way through the checkout line and out the door, arms full with plastic bags of odd items. As Pia had said the night before, there’s no harm in being prepared.

When we stepped outside, fat raindrops hit our faces and the temperature seemed to have dropped dramatically.

“Shoot, the windows,” I said, remembering our exposed car.

We broke into a clumsy run toward the Volvo, hoping to beat the rain, but the unexpected storm was much faster than us. The raindrops grew larger and somehow sharper as we ran. I felt one sting my ear and heard Pia shriek from up ahead. When we finally got to the car, we jammed our bags in the backseat, rolled up the windows and huddled in the front, stunned. I blinked the water out of my eyes and realized that it wasn’t rain anymore, but hail. Icy golf balls were pelting cars and frantic shoppers. The sky was dark directly above us, but bright and inviting just to the north. On the grassy border in front of the car’s bumper, I could see two birds—more flycatchers on their way south—lying dead, their faces frozen in shock or pain. I hoped Pia didn’t see them.

“Fucking biblical,” she said. Her hair was wet and she was shivering, so I reached into the backseat for a dirty sweatshirt that I’d left there weeks ago. She pulled it on and shook her head in disbelief at the weather change. There was a slight smile on her face.

“Ash, we should keep shopping...track down the stuff on our original list. This isn’t going to get less weird, you know?”

I did know. I felt it, too. The sun was already returning, but an uncertainty had stung us with that hail. We needed to start doing things. So I steered the car toward Burlington and the big-box stores that would have what we needed and the countless new items that popped into our heads as the distant notion of catastrophe inched closer.

Pia laughed out loud as we gained speed on the highway. “It’s kind of fun, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Waiting for disaster. It shouldn’t be, but it’s kind of fun.”

I knew what she was talking about. Candlelit blackouts and immobilizing snow days always thrilled me. To be briefly thrust into a more primitive lifestyle awakens something in us. But it must be brief and risk-free to be fun. It can’t be real. The storm predictions before us sounded more consequential than those fleeting adventures of the past.

“Remember that summer storm in our old place when we lost the power for three days?” she asked.

“It’s one of my favorite memories. My sister still talks about it.”

Years before, soon after I had proposed to Pia, a hurricane hit New York on its way off the coast, bringing torrential rains, followed by three hot, powerless days. My sister and her girlfriend were visiting from London at the time, and I was already uneasy about their first encounter with Pia. But I needn’t have been because Pia was at her best when life went off script.

* * *

We spent two boring days playing board games in the dark and finishing all the wine in the apartment. Without air-conditioning, we were grumpy and smelly, just waiting for life to return to normal. Pia was bouncing off the walls and I could tell that she was going to manifest action imminently. Finally, the rain stopped and Pia went outside. She ran to the corner store for a thirty-pack of Miller Lite, turned our speakers out the window toward the wet street and started knocking on neighbors’ doors. She had started a block party. People poured out of their apartments, many contributing to the beer tub, calling their friends to bring more. Makeshift barricades of chairs and garbage pails were set up on either side of the block to keep cars out, and someone filled a kiddie pool with fresh water. Within twenty minutes, there were close to a hundred people in the street, shaking off the sweaty cabin fever of the preceding days. It felt organic and spontaneous—the big bang of block parties—and no one remembered later how it began. But it wasn’t organic; Pia created it out of nothing. She saw the world for its potential and made interesting things happen. Life with someone like that is limitless.

“She’s rad,” my sister said later. “Fucking nuts, but rad.” That was Pia’s effect on people.

* * *

We drove along in silence, thinking about that party and the complicated pleasure of doom.

“I saw the birds,” Pia said quietly. The sun had reappeared. “The dead ones. It’s spooky—the hot weather and the sudden hail. Everything is a little wrong.”

I nodded and put a hand on her bare knee. There wasn’t much more to say, so I kept driving silently. It was eighty degrees when we woke up, and now the dashboard said sixty. The hail, the birds, the panicked shoppers. It was spooky, but I was grateful for the simple, shared task before us.

Forty-five minutes later, we were making our way up and down the aisles of Home Depot, joking about the impending apocalypse and thoroughly enjoying each other’s company.

“Of course, the dollar will crash after The Storms come, and we will have to turn to primitive forms of currency,” I said with a wide sweep of my arm as we passed the lawn mowers.

“Like spices and fermented cider and stuff?” Pia played along.

“No, much more primitive than that. Blow jobs primarily. Hand jobs also, though they aren’t worth nearly as much.”

She shrieked with laughter, turning several heads around us. Pia never cared who saw her laugh (or cry). I felt proud to be responsible for delighting this beautiful woman.

We bought a snow shovel and two pairs of work gloves, caulking and sheets of insulation. We didn’t know what we were doing, but it felt proactive. The hurried shoppers around us made small talk about which items were essential in which types of weather events and I studied them closely, eager to pass as an experienced local. We bought what they bought and hoped they were right.

Several hours and hundreds of dollars later, Pia and I were drinking wine on our back porch again, surrounded by bags of items that promised to keep us safe from whatever was coming. The back porch was the best part of that house, looking out on our unkempt backyard that dissolved into dark woods. It was home.

I don’t remember the indoors of my childhood. I grew up in a pretty Victorian house, bigger than most of my classmates’ homes and lovingly cared for, but I didn’t spend much time inside it. My parents were strong believers in the character-building properties of outdoor play, so they hurried us into the woods behind our house as soon as the sun was up each morning. We played until we were shivering, hungry or injured and then slept as if we were dead each night. My siblings eventually resisted this parenting technique, which would undoubtedly classify as some form of neglect today, but I embraced it until high school. The woods were freedom to me: undeveloped; unregulated by grown-ups and infinite in their potential for discovery. There was an order to the woods, but it wasn’t dictated by man. I wanted to understand that order, to have dual citizenship in both the natural and human worlds. Passing freely between them seemed the ultimate power. So I became a voracious consumer of science and nature writing. I wanted to know every species of wildlife and the subtle languages with which they spoke to one another. I wanted to be a part of that organism and welcomed by its inhabitants.

With puberty and the new concerns of young adulthood, my commitment to that mission waned and I eventually left the woods. I went inside. I didn’t think much about that departure at the time, but I’ve come to realize that it came at a cost. The sense of purpose and belonging I’d had in those woods hadn’t been replaced by anything in adulthood.

Pia had her head resting in my lap as we swung back and forth on the bench watching the sun set. It was warm again and there was no evidence of the surprise hailstorm that had barged through earlier that day.

“This isn’t what September is supposed to look like,” I said, shaking my head. I was comfortable with her there in my arms, but unable to relax entirely.

“But this is lovely,” Pia said with her eyes closed. Beauty, she believed, had inherent value. “Remind me what September in Vermont is supposed to look like.”

I swatted a mosquito from her forehead and thought for a moment.

“I don’t know... Colder, quieter... The wind should be louder than the bugs and animals. Do you know that some years on Halloween, we would have to trick-or-treat in the snow? That’s only a few weeks away.”

Pia opened her eyes and touched my face. “I don’t think that’s going to happen ever again, my love. It’s sad, really. Lots of things are going to be different for our kids.”

It was a surprisingly dour observation considering Pia’s recent obsession with having children. But I didn’t know then that her attention had already shifted away from those hopeful plans.

THREE

“SURFACE WATERS ARE expected to reach eighty-two degrees—maybe even higher—sometime in November. We will also see warm, moist air traveling up the Gulf Coast and very low wind shear.”

A familiar NPR storm reporter’s voice issued from my desk radio as I stared at the computer screen, attempting to work. It was only a few days since news of The Storms broke and the first day since we moved to Vermont that I deviated from my morning work routine. Normally, I woke up around seven, drank one cup of coffee at the kitchen table with Pia, who was less enthusiastic about mornings, and brought a second cup back upstairs at eight, where I posted up at a large antique desk in our airy bedroom. From my desk chair I could see the backyard over the top of my computer screen and a banged-up thermometer that had been nailed outside the window by a previous owner. If I worked until two—including breaks for more coffee and lunch—I could get more client work done than I ever did in the office. My colleagues back in Manhattan seemed satisfied with the arrangement, so I was careful not to abuse it.

But on that day I couldn’t sit still or will myself to turn off the radio. I was already on my third cup of coffee, which was bad pacing. “It could start with a series of nor’easters this winter, each moving up from the southeast and hitting inbound arctic systems from the northwest,” the deep radio voice continued. “Everyone from Chicago down to DC and as far north as Maine can expect several feet of total accumulations and high, damaging winds at various times. Those storms alone will be costly and dangerous. But there’s another possible scenario that would be worse. The frequency and intensity of this year’s hurricane projection makes it likely that a tropical storm caused by the record-breaking ocean temperatures will be gathering around the same time as these snowstorms. Because the water temperatures are higher than we’ve ever seen, we don’t quite know how large any one of these hurricanes might get, but we know they could be enormous. If the arctic air coming in from Canada and the Midwest collides with this warmer air from the Atlantic and the Gulf, we will face the ‘frankenstorm’ effect that we saw back in 2012. But in this case, that cold air will be moving faster and covering more of the US than we’ve ever seen before. Here, again, we’re in uncharted territory.

“There are so many variables that could determine this winter storm season, but given what we know, it’s wise to assume that the eastern side of the US is looking at several hundred square miles of direct contact with at least one massive hurricane and several blizzards, with accompanying flooding and broad wind damage. I’m not even sure hurricane and blizzard are adequate terms for what could happen here. If any of these storms are as large as the most pessimistic forecast models project, it won’t matter if you’re in their direct paths because wind and flooding in surrounding regions from storms of this size can be just as damaging as what occurs in the path itself.

“Even in the most optimistic scenario, forecasters are expecting tens of billions of dollars in losses to the US economy and our basic infrastructure. The worst-case scenario is almost unthinkable at this point.”

I heard the car door slam outside as Pia drove off in search of groceries and probably a hidden antiques shop or two. She was better with a job, we both knew that, but her motivation to find one seemed to have diminished in recent weeks. As someone who believed in routines, I wanted badly for her to find somewhere to go each day or something to do. She was good about leaving me alone while I worked, though I knew it was hard for her to fill the time. She ran errands and took books out from the library. At the start, she’d spent hours researching possible job leads in area arts organizations, but that wasn’t happening anymore. We had enough in savings, for now, as a result of my buyout from the firm, but my income wasn’t as high as it used to be and it wasn’t a sustainable financial arrangement. She would need to find at least a part-time job by spring if we were to stay afloat. Still, I liked the companionship, hearing her putter around the house planting things and cooking things as the spirit moved her. It felt more like playing house than actual domesticity, as if we were putting on an ironic performance instead of careening toward an inevitable financially precarious rut. Every few days, Pia would find a recipe that inspired her and dance around the kitchen for a few hours until something delicious emerged. Or she would decide that we needed a new accent table and spend the whole afternoon browsing quirky local shops. But we were really only playing; there was no consistency or order to it. Dinner was often organic frozen pizza, and dust gathered in the corners of our beloved home at an alarming rate. We hadn’t been playing house long enough to get the act down.

I spent the first hour of my workday looking past my computer screen through the dirty window that framed our backyard. The browning grass was about six inches tall and peppered with old dandelions. Lady ferns spanned the perimeter of the lawn, claiming more of it all the time. I thought I saw the vibrant blue of a closed gentian flower, a comforting sign that autumn was close and nature’s clock wasn’t entirely out of whack. This day didn’t look like the previous one. Darker clouds had moved in and parked right above us, as if daylight had never quite arrived. The thermometer said sixty-eight, so it was moving in the right direction, but still too slowly.

August emerged with a soccer ball from the path in the woods that connected our homes and I watched his little body dribble around imaginary opponents. It was just after eight, so he wouldn’t have to leave for school for another half hour. My stiff legs twitched at the sight of August’s weightless movement around the yard and couldn’t resist joining him. With a few brief words, we were passing the ball back and forth between us. His kicks were usually too far to one side or the other, so I spent a lot of the time chasing after the ball and dribbling back to the center of the yard. After a thoroughly aerobic kickabout, a wild shot to the left planted the ball into a dense blackberry bush.

“This one’s all you, buddy,” I said, but August was already parting the prickly branches.

I bounced on one foot and then the other, trying to revive the spring I remembered in my feet from youth soccer games.

“Hey, look at that.” August pointed to a patch of moist earth beneath him where a perfect footprint had been left by a small animal.

I leaned in. “A fox maybe? I don’t know...” I crouched down to get a closer look as August pulled himself out of the bramble and fastidiously cleaned the soccer ball with his hands.

“When I was a baby fox...” he started.

“What?”

“When I was a baby fox, I liked to run through these woods.”

When I was a baby fox. He wasn’t talking to me, exactly; just reminiscing to himself. He was in his own head now. He said things like this from time to time, weaving imaginative fantasies with the tangible present. It wasn’t the sort of thing that seemed worrisome, not to me anyhow. No, these were precious clues about who August was. This was a small, open door to a brilliant and busy interior life. A vibrant ray of light poured out that door, illuminating a slice of our backyard. I wanted to see more of it. Were all children this amazing and I’d just failed to see it before now, or was there something special about this dirty, neglected little boy who roamed these woods alone whenever he had a chance?

I knew that the neglect was in some part responsible for what made August extraordinary. He hadn’t been properly socialized. August was unschooled in the parameters of our adult reality. He was smart—above average at least—but like a baby, he still lived in a world in which you could hear colors and touch sounds and reach back to memories from lives lived before this one. The curtain between real and unreal hadn’t yet come down for August. I don’t know when it comes down for the rest of us, but tragically, it must be so early in our lives that we retain no recollection of the change. Or perhaps that’s an act of mercy committed by our brains because the memory of our former selves would leave us wanting forever. August was still that early self, unmolested by reason and order. I hoped for him to never change. Like a collectable figurine, I imagined boxing him up neatly and preserving him on a shelf. But of course, that impulse was in direct opposition to the conditions that enabled him to grow this way. He needed safety, but not captivity. How a parent maintains such a balance, I couldn’t imagine.

We kicked the ball back and forth for another ten minutes before August announced that he needed to catch the bus for school and disappeared into the path that connected our homes. I spent two more hours at my computer before calling it quits and heading out to the shed. I’d been making incremental progress on a maple coffee table for weeks and was itching to get back to work on it. It wasn’t real woodworking—I bought each of the raw pieces precut from the lumberyard—but the act of sanding and hammering and staining was no less satisfying. I had a compulsive need to drive each day forward with projects, tangible evidence of progress made. But more than other hobbies I’d flirted with over the years, making furniture felt like the best fit. To be dirty, scraped and physically tired—these were admirable male traits to me. As a child, I most loved my father when he was building things. I can distinctly remember the smell of his sweat mixed with sawdust and the way his thinning T-shirts clung to his skin. Even after years spent in Brooklyn, living among the overeducated creative class, that was what truly stirred admiration in me. It was self-improvement by hammer, and I nearly believed I was building a better version of myself with each swing.

I moved a hand plane slowly back and forth along the underside of the tabletop and thought about August in that small dark house. He was the only child of two reclusive, spaced-out aging hippies. The father never seemed to leave the house and the mother was a part-time cashier at the yarn shop downtown. They were poor, but not hungry. What worried me was their absence from August’s life, his unfettered freedom to roam and their apparent disinterest in his whereabouts. There was something going on inside that run-down little house that wasn’t right, but I hadn’t put my finger on it yet.

Swish, swish, swish. The plane moved rhythmically with me until it felt like a part of my own hand and the texture of the smoothing wood passed right through it to my fingertips. I thought about August, the dimming woods behind our house and the enormous changes our lives had undergone in just a few short months.

I must have been out there for several hours because I didn’t notice how cool the air had gotten until Pia’s voice shook me out of my trance.

“What are you still doing out here, Ash?”

She stood in the doorway of the shed, her keys dangling in one hand and a cloth shopping bag in the other.

“I’m working on the legs to this table. Come take a look. It’s really coming together. I need advice on the finish.”

I suspected that she wasn’t interested in the finish. It was getting dark out, though I guessed it was only about one in the afternoon.

“We need to go inside and start preparing,” Pia said, slightly agitated. “Have you looked at the sky? Those snowstorms are coming. This isn’t a joke.”

Behind Pia’s silhouette in the doorway, I could see charcoal clouds moving in. I hadn’t noticed the weather change from dim to ominous in the time I’d been working, but something had indeed shifted. Anyhow, I was tired and happy to have her back, so I followed Pia inside to the kitchen table, where she unpacked the contents of her shopping bag. I mentioned that the nor’easters weren’t expected for another month or so, but she pretended not to hear me.

“Heirloom seeds are the way to go here,” Pia said as if I’d asked. She pulled handfuls of small paper seed envelopes out of a cloth bag and stacked them on the kitchen table. “Hybrid and GMO seeds are going to be useless in the future because they aren’t stable, or can’t be stored, or something. Apparently, we have to have heirloom.”

She was lining the seed envelopes up in rows, according to variety.

“I have black turtle bean, snowball cauliflower, green sprouting broccoli, champion radish, golden acre cabbage,” she went on. “Plus I got these moisture-sealed containers, which will protect seeds in even subzero temperatures.”

Pia pointed to a cloth shopping bag on the floor that held small hard boxes one might take on an underwater expedition. She stopped to take inventory of her purchases, her finger nervously tapping a bag of radish seeds.

“Wow, you’re not kidding about these disaster preparations!” I laughed, assuming she’d appreciate the humor in it all, but she didn’t laugh back, so I stopped. “Pia, do you really think our food supply is going to disappear because of a big storm? In the United States?”

She looked up at me, frustrated. “Maybe not right away, but eventually, yes, it could. Ash, you know you have an almost fanatical trust in the system—our government, capitalism, whatever. It’s possible that our civilized society is only a few bad storms away from chaos, you know?”

Her humorlessness was a surprise to me, but I got the message: take this seriously. I didn’t have any reason to fight with her about it, so I shrugged and walked to the refrigerator to take stock of its sad contents. Should it matter that she was going a little overboard with this disaster planning, I wondered. What was the harm in being prepared? It irked me that she couldn’t laugh about it as we had in previous days. But, whatever. The refrigerator housed a slimy bag of scallions, separating cream in a precious glass bottle and a growler of lager. My stomach fluttered.

“Okay, I have no problem with all this, Pia, but don’t make this about me.” It came out meaner than I intended.

“It is about you,” she said. “It’s about you and me and our life here in the woods. Will you help me get ready for these storms or not?”

I realized that we had already settled into a language for the new weather reality before us. There were The Storms: immediate, multiple and unseasonable storms of every variety that we should expect for several months, beginning soon. There was also, further off in the future, The Storm: the collision of several atmospheric forces that would create something so historic and violent that we still chose to believe it was a statistical improbability.

Pia went on, “Ash, I’m going to a meeting tonight and I would really like you to come. It’s just a group of locals who are brainstorming about storm preparations. I think it’s important.”

I didn’t want to go to a meeting. I wanted to lie on the couch and drink a beer and read a book that had nothing to do with weather or survivalism. But she looked like she needed me.

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to listen.” I shrugged.

Pia jumped up to throw her arms around my neck and I was immediately pleased with how I’d handled the situation. I didn’t mind being taken on her impromptu adventures and I appreciated the freshness they injected into married life. Freshness was never a problem for us.

* * *

“Let’s memorialize this moment!” That was what Pia had said when we first arrived at our new Vermont home.

It was a brutally hot June day and we’d been driving for seven hours. The air-conditioning in our car had broken in Connecticut, so our clothes were damp with sweat when we finally peeled ourselves out of the seats at the end of our journey. I got out first, sending Dunkin’ Donuts cruller crumbs everywhere as I stepped away from the car to relieve myself. Pia wiped her sweating face on her shirt and stretched to touch her toes.

It was just us and our new house on that steamy, overcast day. The movers weren’t expected to arrive with our belongings for another two hours and, although we were tired and dirty, it was euphoric to kick our shoes off and feel the grass under our feet. Our grass. Grown by the clean air and rich soil that was ours now, too, free of the pollutants and cynicism we had left behind. We were in Eden.

I walked to Pia and wrapped both my arms around her, squeezing hard, and we held each other silently for a long time, exhaling.

Finally, we walked up the porch stairs to the front door and turned the key. It was just as I remembered the house when we last saw it, but even better now: clean and scrubbed of any evidence of previous lives lived there. We hugged again quickly and then ran from room to room to reacquaint ourselves. After so many years of small urban apartments, it felt obscene to be in possession of so many rooms dedicated to subtly different activities. The kitchen was bright and airy with shiny outdated appliances and plenty of counter space. A stream of blinding light in the living room drew a straight line to the ancient woodstove—the most substantial machine I had ever been responsible for. And the two upstairs bedrooms oozed charm with their countless gables and unfamiliar angles. It was gluttonous to us then, but we hungrily ate it all up.

There wasn’t much to do without furniture, so we eventually walked to the back porch and sat side by side.

“We have to do something that we’ll never forget to mark the beginning of our new life here. What should we do?”

For once, it came to me first. “Let’s go skinny-dipping in the creek.”

“Yes, I love it.”

We stepped off the porch and began peeling clothing off. The enormous trees around us were lush with leaves by then and we were hidden from the rest of the world on every side.

I’m not a prude, but I’ve never been the sort of person who’s entirely comfortable with nudity in nonsexual, broad-daylight situations. All that pink flesh rubbing and bouncing is a little too much reality for me. But Pia was just the opposite. She was entirely comfortable with her own nudity—which wasn’t much of a feat, since she looked fantastic naked—and she also appreciated the naked form on others, marveling at the beauty of human imperfections. She once told me that she saw God’s artistry in the way time drags and molds our bodies into new shapes. It was as if she didn’t understand shame at all. What a gift that must be.

I was happy to ignore the embarrassed voice inside me as we stripped down and ran toward the creek at the far end of our backyard. Pia let out a celebratory holler and we stepped into the cool woods to look for just the right spot for our swim.

It wasn’t swimming, exactly—the creek was only a foot deep in most places—but there was one perfect little basin lined with rough sand where the incoming current pooled and swirled before moving farther down the rocky path. We stepped carefully along mossy rocks and into the pool, startled by how cold the water was. It was almost numbing, but we didn’t care. We were hot and happy and so insanely in love at that moment.

“It’s incredible to think that almost two hundred years ago, another family was living in this house and probably washing their clothes here in this creek,” Pia said as she squatted in a little shivering ball in the water. She had created a romanticized historical narrative of our new location in the weeks before, and I couldn’t resist teasing her about it.

“Ah, yes. The Green Mountain Boys probably washed their uniforms in this creek.” I smiled and blew bubbles into the dark water.

Pia moved in and wrapped her legs around my lower half. We kissed and laughed in high, frigid octaves, working hard to stay in the icy bath.

When finally it got to be too much, we stepped out of the creek and walked up the bank toward our home. The humid air of our new backyard was a relief as we roamed aimlessly around waiting for the air to dry our bodies. I picked a young green blackberry from its bush and tasted its tart flesh. Pia lay flat on her back in a cluster of red clovers. Our red clovers.

I went to her and lay down on my side, one hand resting on her bare stomach. The new, verdant smells of late spring were all around us, competing for our attention. Wet moss, honeysuckle, stinky trilliums. It was hotter than it should have been in June, but we didn’t mind. In those early days, we still thought hundred-degree June temperatures were just flukes, delicious details in our sweet homecoming story.

Pia rolled onto her stomach and kissed me while my hand wandered toward her smooth bottom. I began to inch closer toward her when we heard the sound of a nearby car door slam. We both froze.

A tall twentysomething man appeared in the yard and immediately spun around when he discovered us.

“Put some clothes on, Adam and Eve. Your shit’s here.”

We erupted into laughter and scrambled to find our clothes while the movers waited safely at the front of the house. We pulled everything on and tugged it all back into place and then broke down once more, this time in a fit of laughter that had us choking and snorting on our knees. It was a perfectly memorable start.

* * *

At six o’clock that evening, Pia and I were sitting in folding chairs in the basement of the Elks Club in downtown Isole. There was no signage outside or handouts at the door or anything else that would have signaled that something formal was occurring. I wondered how Pia knew about the meeting. The chairs were arranged in a circle that filled up quickly around us and stragglers had to drag new chairs over to form an outer ring. There were seven men and four women, most of them decades older than us. A bearded fiftysomething man wearing a faded denim vest greeted Pia warmly, as if they had met before, then he walked to a chair at the center that seemed designated for him.

“Thanks for coming everyone,” the bearded man said. He rolled up his sleeves and pulled a military dog tag out from beneath his shirt. “My name is Crow. Glad everyone found the place okay. I’m not big on email—because of the surveillance—so we will continue to rely on word-of-mouth for these meetings. Please do your part to let people know about them.”

Several people nodded. An elderly woman I recognized from the local ski shop adjusted the position of her chair across the room. Then she patted the hand of a young man to her left who could barely keep his puffy eyes open and I felt a pang of jealousy at his freedom to be so unabashedly stoned.

“We have a lot of ground to cover over the next few weeks,” Crow continued, “so we’re going to dive right in tonight with a focus on energy. Later we’ll get to water safety, food supply, communication technology and, finally, personal protection.”

In the corner of my eye, I saw Pia glance at me. This meeting didn’t feel as though it was going to be about what she had led me to believe it was about. But what was it?

A middle-aged man in neat khakis and a plaid shirt cleared his throat. “Crow, what’s your advice on solar? It’s easier to set up than wind, but it’s too unreliable if you’re planning on unplugging from the grid.”

“Good question.” Crow nodded. “The key here is to maintain a hybrid system. Ideally that would mean wind, solar and hydro. But you have to tailor that plan to the available natural resources on your land. I know you’ve got very little wind in your woods, Ron, but you do have that creek, so maybe look into hydro to supplement solar.”

An obese woman to my right took frantic notes whenever Crow spoke. I leaned to my other side.

“What is this?” I whispered to Pia.

She pretended not to hear my question and instead jumped into the conversation that Crow and Ron were having. “What about gasifiers? I’ve been reading about that as a viable option,” she said.

What did Pia know about gasifiers? The lady to my other side craned to see who had asked the question.

“Such a good point, Pia,” Crow said a little too enthusiastically. “Wood gas is a great option. It can be loud and a bit dirty—and I can’t speak to its legality around here—but if all hell breaks loose, that’s going to be the least of your problems.”

A round of nods ensued. The stoned guy smirked in apparent response to Crow’s disdain for the law. What the hell was this, I wondered again. How did they know Pia?

“When all hell breaks loose,” a crouched older man corrected. He looked like Crow would in twenty more years. “And when hell breaks loose, it will be the preppers who survive.”

Preppers. I’d read a New Yorker piece about them several months before. These weren’t concerned locals who needed advice on how to water-seal their windows. These were deranged weirdos fixated on the apocalypse. As I understood it, they were people like Crow whose minds hadn’t recovered from the damage of earlier wars, and antigovernment recluses who trusted no one, and angry bigots who relished the idea of a race war and religious fanatics who thought God was coming to punish the unsaved urban intellectuals. I wasn’t one of these people and neither was my wife.

A ten-minute discussion about superior brands of rechargeable batteries ensued (a “no-brainer”), and then we broke for coffee in small disposable cups. I was annoyed and itching to leave.

“Polystyrene cups,” I sneered to Pia. “It’s almost quaint in its inappropriateness.”

She didn’t laugh but sighed instead. “I should have known you wouldn’t get this. You’re too conventional for this kind of thing. I shouldn’t have asked you to come.”

She was disappointed by my reaction, which I felt bad about, but her disappointment was mean, too. It was a new tone. All of a sudden, I didn’t want to accommodate her.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “This is pretty extreme. Can’t we just buy a how-to book or something?”

She shook her head in apparent exasperation with my naïveté.

“Let’s reconvene, people!” Crow shouted with a few claps.

I felt myself being shuffled back to my chair between Pia and the note taker.

“Before we move on to the next topic,” Crow started, “I’d like to say a few things about our little group and...society.”

He leaned into the last word and looked around, as if he was using a code that everyone in the room would recognize.

Crow went on, “At times like these—when we’re lookin’ straight into the eye of disaster—authoritarians will try to wrestle control from the people. Governments and power keepers will do their best to make the public frightened and submissive. They will take away the people’s will and make them think they gave it up freely. What we’re doing here isn’t just helping each other prepare for a life of self-reliance—we’re thinking for ourselves and protecting our free will. Let’s all just keep that in mind.”

Several people nodded their heads, and I noticed the oldest man purse his lips together, angry at the sheer mention of our authoritarian government.

“This isn’t my scene,” I whispered to Pia. “You can stay as long as you want, but I gotta get out of here.”

Wishing that I had made my exit before everyone sat back down, I took a few moments to plan a graceful departure. Finally, I forced a fake cough and walked out quickly to tend to my phony problem. I knew it was a bratty move and that Pia would be angry, but it seemed too late to avoid that now. We didn’t fight often, but once a disagreement was sparked, its natural life cycle involved several childish acts by each of us, followed by a passionate recovery. It seemed a worthwhile price for leaving the prepper meeting.

I walked up a flight of stairs and through the front doors of the old building. A blast of cool, dark air hit my face as I peered down Isole’s Main Street, relieved to be outside and alone. I was a five-minute walk from the cluster of downtown establishments that comprised most of our local commerce. The Blue Frog. That was where I would go, I decided. The Blue Frog was a newish bar that catered to people just like me. It had a sophisticated microbrew list, locally sourced chili, and, on most nights of the week, you could find someone singing folk or bluegrass in the corner.

As I walked down the dark street, the only other person I encountered was a shopkeeper locking his bookstore for the night. We exchanged a nod and I noticed that he was roughly my age. Seeing anyone from my own demographic living and working in Isole always puzzled me. How does a thirtysomething guy come to own a bookstore in a small mountain town? This stranger was a reminder that paths other than the one I had taken after college existed. It would never have occurred to me as a younger man to live in my home state and pursue something as parochial as running a small business there. But seeing it now, I wondered if there was any more perfect life than this guy’s.

As I approached the door of the Blue Frog, I saw a large group of people five years younger than me laughing around a rustic wood table, and I became suddenly aware of my aloneness. Normally, I wouldn’t mind having a beer on my own, but I wasn’t up for it at that moment, so I kept walking. When I got to Polly’s, the darker, sadder townie bar several doors down, I opened the door.

Polly’s smelled like old cigarettes and my feet felt sticky on the worn carpet as I stepped to the bar. There was one other patron in the room—a large, red-faced man at the far end of the bar who was busy circling things in the classified newspaper pages before him.

“What can I getcha?” a petite, female bartender asked me as I took a stool. “We have draft Bud. Everything else is cans and bottles.”

She wore a tiny cropped shirt that appeared to be constructed of macramé over a denim miniskirt. It was distracting how much of her body I could see and I was grateful for the curtain of dark hair that hung behind her. How old could she have possibly been—twenty-two, maybe? I couldn’t tell.

“Budweiser is fine, thanks,” I said. “Are you guys always this quiet on Tuesdays?” I couldn’t think of anything more interesting to say than that.

“Yep, until the preppers let out. Then we get another wave.”

I tried to look casual in my curiosity. “Oh right, the preppers. So what’s the deal with them anyway?”

She handed me my beer and started drying glass mugs, one hip gently leaning against the sink in front of her.

“They’re freaks,” she said matter-of-factly. “I get some weirdos in here, you know? But these guys are, like, totally paranoid. And they never shut up about it. They come in here all fired up after their meetings and lecture me about how I need some kind of bunker for when the end of the world comes. I tell them, if the apocalypse comes, I’m not sticking around this shitty world anyhow.”

“Yeah, they sound really weird.” I nodded into my beer.

She stopped drying mugs for a moment and looked up at me. “So what’s your deal? You’re not our usual type. You hiding from a girlfriend or something?”

“Kind of,” I said.

“That’s what I figured. Not like it’s such a genius guess—most guys are doing that. But you’re more of a Frog type,” she said, referring to my original destination. “I bet you guys live up the hill in an old house, and you’ve got a little organic garden and some nice wine in your basement. What’s wrong with your life that you gotta hide? Sounds nice to me. Did you cheat?”

It was embarrassing and somehow emasculating to be summed up so neatly by this tough little girl.

“No, I didn’t cheat. And we hardly have any nice wine at all!”

I smiled and she tossed her head back to laugh. This was the first time I had spoken with anyone other than Pia in days and the conversation was refreshing.

“I just needed some air, I guess,” I said, sipping my beer.

“That’s what everyone says when things are going bad.”

“Oh, no, things aren’t bad. I wouldn’t say that. Just not good tonight.”

“Sounds like the same thing to me, but what the hell do I know?” she said. “I’ve been living in this town my whole life.”

“I love it here.”

“Sure, because you don’t have to be here,” the bartender said as she dried one mug after another with great efficiency. “I wouldn’t even care if I was in another shitty town, you know? It just wouldn’t be the one I grew up in. That’s the difference.”

I was sure that I didn’t know what she meant, but I nodded my head like our problems were all about the same.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “I got a friend who runs a fancy bar on Martha’s Vineyard, and as soon as I have enough savings, I’m going to meet her there. I figure it will be like a working vacation.”

She walked away to check on the other guy and I puzzled over the idea that someone could be stuck, financially marooned in our town. This was a side of Isole I hadn’t experienced much of since moving there: the real locals. There are pockets of immense wealth and worldliness in northern Vermont, but the state wasn’t built on those people; they’re just interlopers in its history. At its core, Vermont is defined by tough, industrious people who live modestly and know the land intimately, even if they no longer make their living from it. They prize independence and privacy over any allegiance to a nation or political identity, and they resent the ceaseless push by outsiders to transform the state to a socialist utopia. (I knew such generalizations made me seem like a patronizing asshole, but the locals had their own generalizations for me, too; it was how we made sense of our cohabitation.) Pia’s prepper meeting was a funny mix of the old and new Vermont, I realized, though it wasn’t a flattering light for either camp.

The clock above the bar struck eight, so I paid and thanked the bartender for her wisdom, which sounded stupid as soon as I said it out loud. I just wanted to get out of there before the prepper meeting ended, and Pia and her new friends made their way to Polly’s. It seemed important that this nameless bartender never find out that I had been at that meeting. Plus I was concerned about how angry Pia might be.

I walked back in the cool air and waited in the car as people streamed out of the Elks Club and said their goodbyes. Some were laughing as they emerged, but there was a seriousness to the whole enterprise. That was perhaps the part that bothered me the most. On its own, preparing for disaster was inarguably a wise thing to do. And if Pia hadn’t dragged me to that meeting, I would probably have regarded those people as nonthreatening curiosities. But Pia was always searching for religion. When she was a vegan, she emptied our fridge of all my favorite foods; and when she was a performance artist, she announced that she needed to be surrounded exclusively by creative people; and when she was a political activist, she accused her parents of being fascists.

Then there was the time that she actually did find religion, when she decided that we should be Buddhists. It involved a lot of Tibetan prayer flags in our apartment and mercifully little else. Her zeal was always genuine, but she lacked the conviction to see any of it through. And, inevitably, her avocations failed to deliver on whatever promise she thought they held. I regarded all of these phases as the hobbies of a passionate artist seeking purpose. They gave her focus, briefly, and a frenzied sort of pleasure. It wasn’t a placid existence, but it was interesting.

This particular hobby, though, seemed more morbid. Her new friends weren’t the ethereal waifs she used to bring home from tantric yoga class. (Weirdos are always harder to spot when they’re bendy and beautiful.) No, this was darker and stranger. And maybe I knew it appealed to something frightened inside her, a part of her that I never fully understood. I wanted to believe this was out of character, but somewhere in my brain I knew that wasn’t true.

The passenger door opened violently.

“We can go now. Are you happy?” Pia said, dropping into her seat like a child.

I looked at her in disbelief. “No, I’m not happy at all, Pia. I’m annoyed and a little freaked-out about the meeting you just tricked me into. What was that about?”

She shook her head in disbelief. “It was about seeing the truth, Ash.”

And with that, our fight was under way. I didn’t bother trying to reason or even argue; I just drove and let her fume. She pinned her hair up and took it down again, making the faintest huffing sounds to herself. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of an argument. My plan was to just get home, open a bottle of wine and, after she’d consumed most of it alone on the couch, feel her groggily fall into bed beside me. That was how it was supposed to go.

But when we got home, Pia wasn’t interested in wine or the couch. She sat down at the kitchen table and pulled out her little book of lists and nonsense. The handwriting was wild—alternately big and sharp and then small and controlled. She was making notes in the margins in a tiny new cursive style.

“You can go to bed, or do whatever you do,” Pia said without looking up.

Whatever I did wasn’t such a mystery, really. Unlike my wife, I was predictable, boring even. When it was warm outside, I would drink one or two Otter Creek Ales on the porch with a book until I got tired enough to pad upstairs to our bedroom. Pia would join me outside sometimes and we’d talk about all our plans for life in Vermont. And on the rare night of marital discord, we would just give each other space to ride out our anger privately. It was comforting to know that the parameters of our conflict had been set.

What I wanted to do at that moment was storm into another room and watch cable television loudly, but that wasn’t an option. I missed ESPN and the foggy passivity that only mindless TV can enable. But Pia said that it would be “counterproductive” for us to get cable in our Vermont life. And, even though we had it in Brooklyn, thanks to a spliced wire from a neighbor, she felt that we didn’t really have it have it. We didn’t pay for it and, most important, we had an Argentinean tapestry draped over the shameful box when it wasn’t in use—like it didn’t exist at all! This always struck me as comically pretentious, but in truth, I’d adopted enough of these pretensions by then to go along with her. So the tapestry and its dirty secret followed us to Vermont, but our only option on that night was fuzzy network news.

I decided instead to sit on the porch with a wool blanket and a book about bird migrations of North America. The temperature had cooled to the low sixties, finally, but the sounds of summer weren’t completely gone yet, which was disorienting. I could hear the unmistakable call of an American bullfrog—a rare treat anytime, but unheard of in late September. When we were little, my older sister and I used to go for walks down our dirt road in bare feet, collecting any living thing we could find in buckets. It was red salamanders mostly, sometimes dozens if we went out on the right day, but wood frogs and bullfrogs on occasion, too. They were hard to contain, so if one of us was lucky enough to capture a bullfrog, we’d stop everything to consult my pocket guide to amphibians before letting the terrified thing go again. I thought about digging around for that old book, but instead I rocked on the porch swing until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.

FOUR

“ASH, OPEN UP!” Bang, bang, bang. “Are you in there, Ash?”

I pushed my laptop aside and jumped off the couch for the front door. When I opened it, the first thing I saw was August’s mother standing before me. She wore a knitted red cap over long gray hair and a terrified look in her eyes. This was the closest I had ever been to her and I could smell something on her that reminded me of dorm-room incense.

“August is missing!” she said. “Do you know where he is?”

My stomach jumped as I worked to take in the scene before me. It was late afternoon on a cool, windy day. August’s father stood a few steps behind the mother. I couldn’t remember either of their names, so I wasn’t sure how to address them. He was thinner and sadder, but they could have been siblings, they looked so much alike to me.

“No, I don’t,” I sputtered. “How long has he been gone? Wait, let me get my shoes.”

I stepped outside again with sneakers and a light jacket. This time I noticed a short, round, middle-aged woman with a nice face standing in the driveway. Despite the cool air, she wore a large T-shirt with a picture of an amusement park on it. She was moving her cell phone around, trying to find a signal. I had a hard time focusing on the scene before me as panic took hold of my body. Pia had left early that morning, still angry about our fight the night before, and I wished that she was there with me.

“What’s going on? What happened?” I asked the group.

The new lady put her phone in her pocket and stepped toward me. “August has been gone since last night. He does this—wanders off sometimes—but this is a long one, even for him.” She glanced to her left at August’s parents and planted a lingering look of disapproval on each of them. “He goes into the woods. We need to get in there and fan out.”

“Have you called the cops?” I asked.

August’s mother stiffened. She hated that idea.

My stomach turned over and over on itself.

“They’re already in there,” the lady said, nodding at the woods behind me. “We have to get going, too.” She pointed at August’s parents now. “You guys go to the east. I’ll pair up with Ash and we can go to the west. Go on.”

August’s parents walked away quickly and obediently. They didn’t look confident in their ability to brave the woods alone, but this woman wanted to be alone with me for some reason.

“I’m Bev.” She put her hand out for a quick, joyless shake. “I’m the social worker. August says you’re his friend, so let’s talk.”

I nodded and we walked toward the woods with impatient strides.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” I said.

“As you’ve probably figured out—” Bev was walking ahead of me and pumping her arms “—August’s parents are not up to the job. His father has paralyzing depression, which leaves him near comatose most of the day. And his mother is so panicked about the father that she barely notices the poor kid. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, but I know he looks up to you and I need another set of eyes on him. They abuse prescription drugs in front of him and can’t be bothered to keep a damn thing in the fridge. They’re not monsters. They love him. But they’re selfish and irresponsible and getting worse all the time. I first started coming around here a year ago when August’s ‘treks’ started. That’s what he calls it when he goes off into the woods. He always has some important mission or something in mind and just takes off with a backpack. But it’s usually just for four to maybe six hours. Once, it was eight. But he has never been out overnight and this is just... These goddamn people... I’m sorry. I’m mostly mad at myself. I should have removed him months ago.”

My toe caught on a root and I nearly fell over as I tried to wrap my head around what she was saying. “He’s been out here overnight? What could have happened to him? What does he do out here? We’ll find him, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know. I think we will. August is a real adventurer, but he’s not stupid. This is really bad, Ash.”

“Wait, you said ‘remove him.’ Are you going to take him away from his parents?”

She shook her head, still walking quickly ahead of me, and said, “Forget that for now. Let’s just find him. We have to just find him.”

My head was spinning now, on top of my churning stomach. August had been out there all night long. I tried to imagine him smiling, sitting at the base of a tree with a piece of beef jerky in hand, talking to a chipmunk. But I couldn’t hold on to the cheerful image. Unwanted pictures kept flashing before me: August, shivering in the dark; August, injured and crying; August, facedown in the fall leaves. The feeling was unbearable, like no other concern I’d ever felt. That wasn’t even the word for it: concern. It was heartsickness and desperation—and I had known August for only a few months. I wondered how his parents were feeling at that moment. Desperation mixed with guilt. Those motherfuckers. I felt guilty now, too, for not seeing it all sooner. All of a sudden, I wanted to find them and push them into the forest floor, make them stay there all night. Whatever happens to them will be deserved, I thought. But August, we have to find August. Stay focused.

“Ash? Ash!” Bev was right beside me, yelling to break through my nightmarish thoughts.

“What?”

“You look pale. Are you okay? I need you to stay with me here.”

I rubbed my face with my hands. “Yeah, I’m okay. Should we be shouting his name? Let’s do that.”

“Yes, okay,” Bev said. She seemed at least as frightened as I was, but not as confused. Bev had seen families like this, cases like this, no doubt. She was probably fighting back her own images of what had become of August, but hers would be more vivid and plausible because she’d seen it all before, I imagined.

We watched our feet as we walked along the uneven forest floor, veering close to each other and then back out again. I shouted August’s name, loud and hoarse. It hardly sounded like my own voice and I wondered if the boy would recognize me if he heard it from afar. As I walked, I had a strange realization that this was the longest I’d gone in weeks without thinking of The Storms. The weather seemed insignificant all of a sudden. And then it didn’t. What if the weather changed tomorrow, before we find August, and he’s trapped out here without a coat? What if the cloud cover gets so bad that he can’t use the sun for direction and time? This was fear compounded by fear.

I wanted to ask Bev how this works. How long do we look and what clues can we search for and where were the police... But we just kept going. Step, step, shout. Step, step, shout. After an hour, I excused myself to pee behind a large tree and check my phone, hoping to see a message from Pia. I wanted to tell her what was going on and ask her to join me. This was too hard without her. She would be a help and a comfort. But she hadn’t called. As far as she knew, this was still a normal day in which she could stay mad for hours and wander back when the feeling faded.

I sent her a text: August is missing. Please come home. I’m sorry for everything.

Within seconds, she responded: I can be there in twenty. That’s horrible.

I felt a small, unsatisfying flash of relief as I pushed my phone into the back pocket of my jeans, but then I was back in reality, looking for my lost seven-year-old friend. He was my friend. That was the word, I suppose. Or was I his mentor? His surrogate big brother? It wasn’t the sort of friendship I’d had before, but I wasn’t a parent, so what else could I have been?

I looked up to find Bev talking to August’s parents. I wasn’t close enough to hear what they were saying, but she was moving her hands around, giving them instructions.

When I approached them, Bev said, “These guys are going to go back to the house in case August shows up there. The police are moving toward us from the far end of this forest. Ash, if you’re up for it, you and I can just keep pressing forward until we meet the cops. Hopefully, one of us will find something before that happens.”

Find something. It sounded like a compromise in expectations and it made my head hurt.

“Yes, of course. Let’s keep going.”

I sent Pia one more text explaining that we were too deep into the woods for her to meet us and that I would be back when I could. I wanted to hear her voice, but the reception was too poor for anything more than that. I looked back up at Bev The Social Worker and nodded. Let’s keep going.

We walked for another hour. More yelling his name, mixed with feet crunching on branches, but no talking. There was nothing to say. It was starting to get dark and we didn’t want to acknowledge what that could mean. I was hungry, or I would have been if I could feel anything other than panic and sickness. We just had to keep going.

“Hello?” a deep man’s voice called from somewhere to our left.

“It’s Bev and Ash,” Bev yelled back.

“We’ve got him,” the voice said.

Bev and I broke into an awkward run toward the voice until a large police officer came into focus. At first, we couldn’t see him, but then the officer turned to reveal a tired, dirty August clinging to him piggyback-style. The boy’s too-short pant legs wrapped around his torso. A smaller cop stood next to them, holding August’s blue backpack and a large water bottle.

When August saw us, he released his hold and dropped to the ground, landing on his feet and sprinting toward us. For a moment, I wasn’t sure who he was running to, but it was me. He gave me one quick squeeze around the neck as I crouched down and I wrapped my arms around his little body so hard it made him squirm. He was happy to see me, but a little confused by all the adult dramatics. He seemed fine.

“I made a sweet fort, Ash! But then it got so dark and I lost my compass and I had to stay in one place. That’s an important rule of ranger safety: stay in one place if you’re lost.”

I smiled. “Yes! Good thinking, buddy. Are you okay? Were you scared?”

August shrugged. “Yeah, I was a little scared.”

And that was it. We would get more from him later about where and how he made it through the night, but none of that mattered at that moment. We walked back through the woods in a long line with the officers at the front, followed by Bev The Social Worker, then me with August on my back. It took over an hour and my legs ached, but I was so grateful for the weight of his body and the sound of his soft breath near my ear. I was surprised he let me carry him like that for so long. We had never before touched beyond the occasional high five, but this felt perfectly natural. August fell asleep like that for the final stretch and I wondered what his parents would think when they saw me deliver him to them, his body melting into mine, in all its trusting vulnerability. “Attachment issues” is what Pia once called it. She said August seemed to have some attachment issues with his parents, which may have explained some of his neediness with me. It made more sense now, though I’d thought she was overreacting at the time.

August awoke as we approached his house and I watched his parents run out to make a big show of hugging him in front of us all. They had been terrified, no doubt, and were so grateful to have him back, but I saw them in a new light now and felt them unworthy of his return.

“Let’s talk,” Bev said, nodding at the path that led to my house.

We thanked the officers and walked back to my home, which was invitingly warm and bright as we stepped into the kitchen. I kissed Pia long and hard and introduced her to the social worker. She put a pot of water on for tea, but Bev said she wasn’t staying long.

“I wanted you to know that I’m taking August away,” Bev said. “This is the last straw for those two. Strictly between us, the officers searched their home and found illegal pain pills in several places. They’re probably high right now. Who knows how long he had been out there before they noticed. He can’t stay in that home.”

“But where will he go?” I took the kitchen chair opposite Bev and Pia sat down beside me.

“Into the foster care system. We will find a temporary home for him.” Bev shook her head. “It’s not an easy case. August’s parents don’t abuse him, but they aren’t present either. Neglect is easy to overlook, but it can be life-threatening, particularly because August just keeps wandering off. And who can blame him? It’s awful in that house with those two zombies.”

I tried to imagine August moving away, into a different family, a different house. It didn’t seem right. He would hate to be away from these woods and me and his stupid parents. He loved his parents. But I wasn’t sure how to talk about this. I didn’t have the language to navigate this world of social workers and foster care.

“What if...” I started. “Can you just wait? Do we have to do this now? What if I kept an eye on him? I could check on him every day, do activities with him. I could even make sure he eats a healthy meal each day.”

Bev shook her head. “Ash, you can’t look after him all day. August is desperate for attention and boundaries right now and he’s going to keep pushing limits and taking risks until someone provides him with that. Right now, he needs constant attention. Now, if you wanted to be a formal caregiver, that would be another question...”

Pia’s eyes opened wide. “You mean, be his foster family?”

Bev shrugged, leaving the possibility out there on the table.

I raised my eyebrows at Pia. It sounded crazy, but maybe it wasn’t crazy. Maybe this could save August; wonderful, weird August. She stared back at me in shock. I knew that look. We needed to talk. Of course I wouldn’t commit us to something so big without a lot of discussion between us.

Bev understood. “It’s not as simple as this. Any potential foster family needs to be thoroughly vetted. And you would need to be 100 percent on board with this idea. There can be no uncertainty.”

“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Pia said politely.

“Yes, we need to talk about this,” I added. “But what will happen to August for now?”

Bev took a deep breath. She was unsure herself and it struck me just how haphazardly a child’s future could be decided. This woman had too much discretion, nice as she was. And none of the answers seemed obvious to a table of adults. I wasn’t even sure I understood what the question was.

“I’ll let him stay over there for now,” Bev said, “on the condition that you promise me to check in with him every morning and evening. I’m going to be calling you for updates.”

I nodded.

“But we can’t do this for long,” she went on. “You’ve got three months to decide what you want. After that, I’m putting him in a foster family. I don’t want him in that house when these storms come. That’s not happening.”

Pia and I both nodded. We knew that she was serious. And she was right: August’s fate needed to be determined before The Storms came.

We sat silently at the kitchen table for a moment, listening to Bev’s car drive away. When there was no chance of her return, I put my head into my hands and yelled, then rubbed my face over and over. Pia walked over and wrapped my head in her arms as she stood above.

“I thought he was dead,” I said into her body.

“I know.”

“I kept seeing these images of him in the woods... It was so bad.”

Pia released me and sat in the closest chair. She nodded in sympathy, which was all I needed her to do. There was nothing else to be said about that horrible day. August was okay.

“How could his parents just lose him like that?” I asked. “The social worker’s right. He can’t stay in that house.”

Pia drew a reluctant breath. “You want to take him, don’t you?”

“Yes. Don’t you?”

She breathed again, then shook her head. “I see what you’re doing here and you have to stop.”

“What?” I asked.

Her tone was kind, but firmer now. “Don’t confuse this situation for a message from the universe about us becoming parents. Don’t do that. This isn’t serendipity; it’s ugly reality. It’s a poor kid in a marginally dangerous household. This isn’t ours.”

“I’m not doing that,” I said, shocked. I didn’t think I was doing that. I wasn’t sure.

Pia looked at me kindly, almost pitifully so. “I love that you want to save him and that you think we can. I love that about you. But it’s not black-and-white, Ash. This is so much more complicated than what we’re equipped for. It can’t be solved with love.” She said the last word as one might refer to Santa Claus.

I understood the point she was making, but it seemed irrelevant. “Some of this is perfectly black-and-white, though. He either stays here with us or he goes somewhere else, with people he doesn’t know and a million other unknowable variables. There’s a deadline and a decision to make. It’s not a philosophical difference we’re talking about here; it’s August’s life. He’s here or he’s somewhere else, probably somewhere worse.”

I suspected that Pia thought this sort of reasoning made me simple and naive. I was okay with that. A problem existed and we could offer a solution. It wouldn’t be uncomplicated or easy, but how could we leave this helpless young human to such an uncertain future? It was uncertainty multiplied by uncertainty with the storm looming. And I wasn’t suggesting it out of a misguided sense of poetry—to have a child that binds us forever—I was suggesting it because it was right.

“This is the right thing to do,” I said. “You know that it is. It’s not a fashionable reason, but it’s just the right fucking thing to do and we will always hate ourselves for doing the wrong thing.”

“Oh, don’t do that.” Pia shook her head. She had shifted back in her chair, away from me. “Don’t be good because it makes you feel superior to me. The stakes are way too high for that. You’re not considering the very real possibility that we would be terrible parents to this kid. With his upbringing, he probably has special behavioral needs that we know nothing about; and maybe he needs special doctors or schools that cost more than we can afford. Maybe we are the bad option for this poor kid. It’s arrogant to assume we’re not.”

She was making perfect sense and gaining speed with her strengthening argument. It was true that we probably weren’t equipped to handle a traumatized seven-year-old boy. Was that what this was: trauma? I didn’t know. Pia was right about all this, but it still made me sick to imagine him alone in a world of strangers who didn’t appreciate his specialness. Or worse, people who confused his specialness with dysfunction, something to be fixed and medicated. It got worse and worse as my mind wandered.

“But did you read that think piece, in the Nation, I think it was, about how horrible foster care is?” I asked. “All that sexual abuse and fraud. We can’t let him go into that.”

“I’m sure it’s not all like that,” Pia said. She paused and then seemed to collect herself after a moment of weakness. “Anyhow, it’s not a problem that we can solve. That’s the point here. All of these options are bad, including us...especially us.”

I stood up and walked to the sink, which was filled with dirty mismatched coffee mugs from the previous three days. A rind of whole wheat crust floated in dirty water. “I don’t know. I have to think. We have to decide quickly.”

“Also, who would be the primary caregiver?” she asked. “It can’t be me. I have to figure out my career.”

“Yes, you do,” I agreed.

“Well, don’t say it with such disdain. It’s not a crime to be unemployed and confused.”

I had never heard her describe her situation so honestly.

She went on, “You know, we were told our whole childhoods to find something that we love doing. Major in something we love in college and all that. So I did those things, but then the world changed, and now we have to just do anything that pays. I’m sure I sound like a privileged brat, but I haven’t adapted to this new world. I don’t want to just do something that pays.”

It was privileged and bratty, but Pia was being honest and she looked ashamed by this admission. I didn’t want her to have to do something she hated either. For me, it was different. I didn’t have a singular passion like she did for art. I was better when I was working and the work could be more broadly defined. I didn’t really know the feeling she was describing, but I knew she was sincere about it.

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “This is a discussion worth having, but it’s a different discussion from the August one.”

“Well, maybe not.” Her shoulders rose and fell. “It’s a discussion about what we want to do with our days. I’m telling you I don’t know what I want to do with my days and that’s not the right way to be thrust into parenthood.”

“Everyone is thrust into parenthood, though.” I didn’t mean for it to sound so grim. “I mean, it starts abruptly.”

“A lot of things feel abrupt lately.”

I knew what she meant. We had moved to Vermont only months before with only peaceful daydreams of a more rustic life, and then we learned of The Storms, and now this. Things just kept happening at us.

I stood up and kissed the top of her head. “I hear everything you’re saying. Please, just think about this for a few days. I will keep an eye on August for now, but let’s keep talking about this, okay?”

“Okay,” she agreed, but her thoughts were already elsewhere.

FIVE

BY MID-OCTOBER, insomnia had become a regular occurrence. I had always been an easy sleeper, out by eleven most nights and unmoving until dawn. But everything changed that fall when the fear crept into our lives. At first, it was just a few restless nights—I hardly noticed the change—but soon a pattern emerged. And by the time this particular evening rolled around, October 18, I expected one to two hours of generalized anxiety before I had any chance of sleep. My mind jumped back and forth between present dangers and old memories. I tried to dwell on the old stuff, the good stuff.

* * *

“Our kid will be cool,” I said. “Or kids, plural.”

We were lying on our backs in the grass of our backyard, looking up at the clouds. It was the second day in our new Vermont home.

“Yeah, they’ll be cool,” Pia agreed. “But not, like, into being cool. They’ll just be really great people, but they won’t care about the idea of being cool.”

“Right. Smart and funny and fearless.”

“So fearless,” she went on. “They will need to be... The world is changing. Things might be harder for them.”

I remember wondering what she meant by that, but I didn’t ask.

“Oh, I’m not worried about our imaginary kids,” I said. “They’ve overcome every imaginary obstacle they’ve faced.”

“They’re really kicking imaginary ass,” Pia agreed. I could feel her smile beside me.

“They are.”

We laughed and kissed, so pleased with our wit and drunk on our hopeful fantasies.

* * *

I tossed in bed with my gentle memories and emerging concerns. Would the world be different for our kids, I wondered. Of course, it’s different for every generation, sometimes easier, occasionally harder. That’s just the ebb and flow of humanity, right? Cultural pluralism is winning in America, but California is running out of water. Gay marriage is law, but social mobility is reversing. Is it getting better or worse? And do we have an obligation to consider the conditions our not-yet-conceived children might live under?

Finally, I drifted off, only to be woken again by a clanking. Bink, bink, bink. It sounded as though someone was banging on the kitchen sink with a hammer. Oh my God. Pia? She wasn’t in bed beside me. Where was she? I reached under the bed for a wood baseball bat that had been signed by Wade Boggs in 1990 and ran downstairs in my boxers. I imagined that someone was breaking in through a window, maybe collecting what little we had of value or, worse, attacking my wife. Though I had been asleep less than a minute before, I could already feel my armpits tingling with sweat and my head pounding audibly. At that moment, only my truest, most elemental feeling about Pia was known to me. It was the feeling of desperate, protective animal love that a parent might have for a child. I was ready to attack, maybe even kill someone at the thought of helpless, beautiful Pia being harmed. It’s a thrilling feeling—to know that your primal self has not been dormant for so long that you can’t transform into an attack dog when you must.

I thudded downstairs with my arm cocked back, ready to strike with the bat at whatever I encountered. But there was no intruder. Pia stood at the kitchen sink in a long, ratty nightgown with a hammer in one hand and a plastic tube in the other. She obviously heard me but didn’t acknowledge my arrival.

“What are you doing?” I huffed, still on a breathless high from the sprint downstairs.

She looked frustrated, close to tears, over whatever project was keeping her up at three o’clock in the morning.

“This, this thing!” She waved the tube in front of her, looking near me but not exactly at me. “I have to get it to fit into that other piece, but it’s impossible!”

There was a pile of odd parts on the floor beside her, which, according to the empty box nearby, was supposed to be a hand-crank water sterilizer. I noticed that her feet were filthy, as if she’d been walking around outside. I thought I would find a robber or rapist when I ran downstairs, which now seemed like a much less complicated situation. The obsessive, wired woman before me was more frightening.

“You don’t have to do this—not now, love,” I said gently. “Let’s have a cup of tea and then go to bed.”

To my surprise, she nodded and stepped out of the mess of objects into my arms. I led her by the hand to the couch in the living room, as if a stranger might still be lurking around a corner, and threw a blanket over her while I prepared mint tea for each of us. It was cold downstairs. We had turned the woodstove on earlier that week for the first time, but it had burned out hours before. I focused on making the tea, unsure of whether I was angry or frightened.

It wasn’t uncommon for Pia to find inspiration at odd hours or obsess over a project for a few frantic days. Those episodes were exciting for her, but never upsetting. And often they really did produce something inspired, like the time Pia made an entire quilt to hang on the wall in our old apartment. She had taken a workshop in abstract quilting and spent hundreds of dollars at the fabric store. Oddly shaped strips of colorful torn fabric shed threads around the living room for days, until one sleepless night, I awoke to find a striking quilt the size of an entire wall draped around her as she trimmed stray ends. The vibrant colors danced together in an explosive design that looked something like a sunrise. It hung in our apartment for two years, until we moved to Vermont. The quilt was a symbol of Pia’s exuberance and artistic gifts. I don’t know why we hadn’t hung it yet in our new home, but I missed it as we drank tea on the couch. The quilt always helped to explain and excuse the erratic aspects of passionate Pia.

We sat quietly for a while, staring forward at the inert television.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I don’t like this about myself. I wish I could change it.”

I hugged her. “I know.”

“I’m just...scared. I can’t explain why.”

I wanted to be entirely there for her, to dedicate myself to conquering the internal and external threats that frightened her. But I was scared, too. The future that we’d planned for had been unmoored by the storm reports, and I wanted comfort now, as well. I didn’t know where self-care ended and selfishness began or what my obligation to my wife should have been then. I only knew that suddenly I didn’t have that selflessness in me. I was afraid, too.

We shivered together under a blanket, each privately fearing the changes afoot.

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