Emilia's Storm

Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead as she looked out across the lake. The lake was gray, too, a high wall of clouds cutting over it but not yet blocking out the low-angling sun.

We had come up for the weekend and everything had been a little off. It was looking like rain the whole way here, but when I asked her if she wanted to turn around, spend the weekend in my apartment in the city, she just shook her head.

She hadn’t been back since--and I was interrupted from my brooding thoughts about whether or not she even knew I was with her by a roll of thunder. It made me jump and for the first time since we had made our plans, I saw her relax, as if she had been coming back here for this, as if she had been waiting all morning for it.

“Jesus!” I said. “That surprised me.” I swished my drink around so the ice cubes clinked against the glass. “Where did that come from?”

“From that,” she said simply, pointing into the heart of the clouds that were growing darker. The wind picked up suddenly, tossing the tops of the feathery white pines on the other side of the lake, slapping the water from gray to white and then rushing at us as if to blow us off the dock.

“Jesus Christ!” I said, slapping a hand to my hat. “Emilia, I’m going in.” She didn’t respond--just hugged her knees and stared out as if she were waiting for what would come next.

“Emilia--” but I knew that posture, that look. I sighed very slightly and then cursed again as the lime toppled off the edge of my glass and into the lake below. “If there’s a tornado I’m coming to get you. Don’t make me carry you in...please.” I could hardly tell if she had even heard me, so intense was her gaze--like a cat I once knew who would get that same look sitting at the edge of a field for hours, waiting for the mouse to think it was safe and reappear.

She sat out there as the rain came down--I watched all of it from the picture window up in the old cabin on the hill, jumping back from the glass whenever the lighting flashed. The water beat against the house and I decided to go get her, but the intensity, almost anger of it drove me back inside.

“Christalmighty, it’s her lake--she can do what she wants!” I kept on muttering arguments with myself as I poured more gin and tonic water into my glass.

I peeled off my now-wet shirt and went back to the window. The tv showed the heart of the storm poised over us. I could hardly see her when I looked out again--the sky was a [wash] of wind and rain, and the sun was long gone.

When the lightning flashed again I saw her caught as if by a flashbulb of her former life. She was standing spread-eagled on the edge of the dock--arms out and head tilted back. When the flash came again I saw that her mouth was open wide, eyes screwed shut, as if swallowing the storm or screaming.

I paced the decades-old carpet and flipped through the handful of channels until at last the hail drove her back in. She burst in through the door as it pelted down like a broken pearl necklace. I held out my arm to pull her in, but she stood there in the doorway looking wild and triumphant with the storm hurling its stones at her back. Her hair was plastered to her head, her clothes stuck to her body, but the flatness was gone from her eyes, as if she had swallowed the lightning, and Emilia, as I had known her long ago, was back.

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Italicized first line come from "The Great Gatsby." I learned this trick at a writing group--to open a book and pick a sentence as a starting point or inspiration.

27 January 2011