Surtsey

All he could think about was bailing, one bucket after the other, as if the house he’d lived in all his life was a boat out on the open sea. The front door was sandbagged, inside and out, but the waves kept rolling across the yard, already as high as the seat on the swing set he used to play on as a kid, and there was no stopping them. The ridiculous thing was, where was he supposed to put the water? He just opened the window and flung it out, but since the whole yard was the lagoon now it would have taken the sorcerer s apprentice—or no, the sorcerer himself—to put an end to it. Every bucket he tossed was one more bucket leaking in around the door frame. His father had the mop, really going crazy with it, and his sister, Corinne, was bailing too, but they had the same problem he did, just dumping the water out the window as if the window was on top of a mountain somewhere, and the wind blowing half of it back in again anyway. As for his mother, she did what she did anytime they had a crisis, like when the stovepipe overheated and burned a hole in the roof so for two weeks it was as cold inside as it was outdoors, or when his father had an accident on his ATV and broke his collarbone in two places: she just got in bed with one of her books and started reading.

That was where she was when the storm surge hit, and though the house was four feet up off the ground on pilings, that wasn’t really going to help all that much because this was a storm surge riding in on a supertide, the sun and moon in alignment on the autumn equinox and the bad luck of a major storm on top of it. A.J. didn’t like seeing her there in the bed with the water already rippling across the floorboards in little wavelets and the bedposts dark with wet, but that was her way—what was going to happen was going to happen and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it. Try arguing with her. Try telling her they needed to bail and mop and save what they could, stack the best things on top of the not-so-good things and the not-so-good things on top of the throwaway things, make do until they had no choice but to go over to the school, which sat on the highest ground of the island—all of eight feet above sea level, but that was better than where they were—and she would just say, We’ll go when we go, and What do I look like, Noah?