Chapter 5

LilLi

The storm had been building all afternoon, a low bruised line of cloud stacking itself along the western edge of the sky while Calder and I brought in what we could of the garden and battened down what the wind might take if we left it loose. Emmie helped where she was allowed to, hauling the smaller baskets, her face turned up now and again to watch the sky the way children do when they sense something large coming and haven’t yet learned whether to be afraid of it or thrilled by it.

Calder read the weather the way I imagined he read most things — quietly, without much fuss made over it, checking the horizon every so often the way another man might check a clock. “Big one,” he said, once, hauling the last of the tools into the barn. “Ground needs it, though. Been dry three weeks.” I found something almost comforting in the plainness of that, the way he seemed to measure the coming storm only by what use it might be to the land, no fear in it at all, and I let his calm settle into me the way I’d learned to let most of his steadiness settle into me these past weeks, borrowed confidence in a place I still didn’t fully trust to hold me.

By full dark it was neither building nor coming. It had arrived. Rain came first, hard and sudden, drumming on the roof loud enough that conversation at supper had to be raised above it, and then the wind picked up behind it, worrying at the eaves with a low, constant moan that Calder said, without much concern in his voice, happened most every summer out here and never yet taken the roof off. I believed him. I had not, in two years in Dry Creek, lived through a storm quite like this one, out in the open where there was nothing between the house and the whole raging weight of the sky, but I trusted a man who’d weathered a decade of these nights not to be troubled by one more.

Emmie ate her supper quiet, quieter even than her usual quiet, her eyes going to the window every time thunder rolled through, though she said nothing about it, and neither Calder nor I pushed her to. We settled in after, Calder mending a bit of harness by the lamp, me with my sewing, and for a while the evening held the shape of any ordinary one, if you didn’t count the storm working itself up steadily outside, closer now, the gap between lightning and thunder shrinking with every pass.

It was near nine when the sky split open in earnest. Thunder cracked directly overhead, a sound so large it seemed to move through the floorboards rather than simply through the air, and in the white flash that followed I saw Emmie, already sent to bed an hour before, standing frozen in the doorway of her room, her rag doll clutched so tight to her chest that her knuckles had gone pale.

Calder was on his feet before I was, closing the distance to her in a few long strides, but when he reached her doorway he stopped there, just inside it, and didn’t go further. I watched him crouch, watched him reach a hand toward her and then let it hover, uncertain, the way a man’s hand hovers over something he’s afraid of breaking simply by touching it. Another crack of thunder rolled through and Emmie flinched hard enough that her whole small body seemed to fold in on itself, and a sound came out of her then, not quite a word, closer to a sob choked halfway down before it could finish leaving her.