Hurricane

Wilma was coming directly our way. The sound of the howling wind and my husband Misha’s damnations accompanied his struggle to lock the balcony shutters. The outside noise subsided after his victory cry. He came over to the kitchen and stood waiting for my next command.

“Sit,” I said.

“But we have to do something. We can’t just wait.” He slid into a chair, pressed his elbows against the table, and ran his hands through his hair. Whenever he noticed a stray gray, he pulled it, a squandering most of our male neighbors couldn’t afford. The real-estate agents who’d brought in young buyers never missed a chance to single us out in the lobby and gush about the demography of our building getting younger. We’d heard the lie often enough to stop blushing. As far as the residents’ average age was concerned, we were living in a marble- and mirror-clad twenty-two story beachfront waiting room to Beth David Memorial Gardens, a Floridian camp for parents of successful northern children who visited for Thanksgiving, Christmas, then for funeral and quick estate sale.

Misha and I were a thorn in the other children’s side, always made an example of filial love, the only couple who lived in the building to be close to the aging parents, Misha’s on the eighth floor and mine on the eleventh. But then, the residents would take pity on their mortified adult kids, who stood eyeing us in the elevator on such occasions as if we were freaks. They’d offer an excuse, “Misha and Masha emigrated from the old country.”

The good old-country Misha and Masha. We avoided looking at the adult children’s faces, so they wouldn’t detect our unease. Living among the frail, deaf, and wrinkly people before it was time for us to be frail and deaf set an internal escape alarm in us. But whenever we confided in each other about this, we came full circle in taking the long view: our aging parents didn’t speak English that well, and if anything went wrong, they’d be lost without us.

So here we were, no more than minutes before the hurricane would make  landfall, sitting on the twenty-second floor of our half-empty building. Snowbirds hadn’t arrived yet; some year-round residents had also left for the worst of the hurricane season (including our parents; we had sent them to visit their grandchildren in Boston), but there were still dozens of old folk on high floors who wouldn’t be able to make it downstairs in case electricity was cut off and elevators stopped working. I hoped they had drinking water stored if the taps were turned off.

Though a giant wave wouldn’t be high enough to reach our floor, would the construction hold if it got as high as the tenth floor? When the building was built thirty-years earlier, were the codes as stringent in hurricane-prone areas as they were today? Our high-rise could topple down, and the thought of being crushed and drowned set my teeth on edge. I kept myself together for Misha’s sake. He was agitated as it was.

I poured him a cup of thick black coffee, the way he liked it, straight and bitter. He raised it to his lips, then immediately put it down. “I’ll go check the shutters in the parents’ apartments.”

“You checked them twenty minutes ago.”

“But we can’t just wait. We have to do something.” He jumped up and ran into the hallway.

“Don’t use the elevator,” I yelled. “No one is going to come and get you if you get stuck during the hurricane.”

The shutters clattered in the wind with intensified violence. The air whizzed and whined like the soundtrack of a horror movie. The only place to see what was happening outside was our bedroom where we had hurricane-proof windows. I went there and pressed my nose to the pane. Rain pelted the glass; rivulets quickly merged into sheets of water. I made binoculars out of my hands and squeezed my eyes for focus. Pieces of orange awning and a complete bamboo patio sofa flew in the air below us. Paisley seat cushions and huge palm fronds circled over the beach park. A woman’s sandal struck a piece of two-by-four; newspaper pages thrashed about like pelicans fighting over the black roiling ocean. Enormous waves conquered the beach and were advancing on the adjacent building. Everything outside whirled and wailed.

Insistent jingling came from the living room. I abandoned the window lookout and went toward the sound. The chandelier was swaying as if our apartment was on a boat, its crystals banging against one another. We were cruising amid a stormy sea on a high deck.

Abruptly, the lights went off, the refrigerator stopped buzzing, and the air vents stopped blowing cool air. I took a moment to get used to the stillness and darkness, but quickly grew restless, wondering what I should do if I couldn’t read, watch television, cook, clean, or walk outside. Soon the temperature in our apartment would frisk to a lively ninety plus; the electricity might not be fixed for days if not weeks.

Apprehension rising in me, I paced around, getting spooked by the creaking bookcases, the tinkling of glasses and dishes, and my own breathing.

“He-e-e-lp, he-e-e-lp,” came feebly from the hallway. I darted to open the door. The sage-green carpet appeared black in the gloomy emergency light. The bleating was coming from the other side of our square landing, blocked by elevators in the middle.

The elderly woman from 2204, dressed only in a pale cotton nightshirt, walked shaking her arms high in the air. What was her name? Rose? I vaguely recalled her husband addressing her that way. As a child, I knew the first names and patronymics of everyone in our five-story khruschevka. But that was another time and another place, four decades, a lifetime.

“Rose,” I called her. She flinched and peered at me with her watery eyes. Her sparse white hair hung down to her shoulders, emphasizing the smallness of her face. Without her usual lipstick and rouge, it seemed made of white tissue.

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