Sasha Tandlich

When news of the storm hit, the first thing Chris thought was Oh, maybe I’ll finally finish reading that book. The book had been her little reward while Juana was off on location and could not rope her into another TV episode or Canasta rematch. Of course, the book mostly sat on her nightstand, a photobooth picture from the last wrap party tucked inside to mark the same page for… she didn’t like to think for how long. Chris would pick up the book before bed, turn on her nightstand lamp, and then her phone would vibrate with a good night text and she’d be swept away: Instagram, Twitter, Co-Star daily updates, Co-Star updates with Juana (so that was why Chris was feeling so distant), Period Tracker (or maybe it was that). 

Chris opened the closet under the stairs where she stored the large box of Bath & Body Works candles. It was a pandemic impulse buy, and she was still getting through them a year and a half later. Juana was allergic to most artificial scents, but Chris turned them up when she was gone to replace the regular human smell of regular human life. She ducked under the doorframe, which Juana could walk through almost without effort, and slid the box noisily out of the cupboard. Juana would scold Chris for dragging the box across the new flooring, but she wasn’t around to help lift it, was she?

Chris was being unfair. Juana had been texting her nonstop since the school district announced two official hurricane days, begging her to take the last flight out to Atlanta or to drive up before it was too late. Instead, Chris pulled one candle after another out of the box, setting them up all around the house. There wasn’t much more preparation left to do, which felt unnatural to Chris, who had grown up around here and spent countless hurricane seasons helping her parents put up shutters and squeezing through packed grocery store aisles for the last can of frijoles. Juana, before leaving, had set them up with supplies and a generator that Chris had no interest in learning how to use.

The clouds through the window were low and close, dark grey inching across the remaining streak of sunny sky. It was too late for Chris to get out now. She’d made her bed, literally, soothed by the ease of it, the tidy corners tucked away. When Juana was around, she was always sleeping in late, tossing the covers this way and that and flinging pillows across the room. For how fitful Juana’s sleep was, it was Chris who could never get through the night. Without Juana there, it was better at least; without Juana she didn’t have to take a knee to the gut that Juana would never feel or remember.

Juana. Eight years in, and Chris still braced herself whenever she had to introduce Juana to someone new. “You never wanted a nickname?” Chris asked, even now. “Nah, Juana’s fine.” Chris, who had abandoned Christina before she could remember, didn’t get it. “¿Porque tus padres te zumbaron con ese nombre de viejas?” Chris asked Juana in the early days when they were first starting to feel comfortable with each another. She didn’t want to admit it outright, but Juana’s name embarrassed her; it was so old fashioned, so Cuban, so gendered. “I didn’t get a word of that,” Juana had replied. Despite her name and Spanish-accented inflection, Juana was one of those Miami Cubans who, even with two immigrant parents, had never learned Spanish. Chris found that inconceivable, herself only half but still fluent. When they went out, it was Juana the viejitas came asking to translate, and Chris who always had to step in to help.

Chris wandered into the garage, though there was nothing left to check. The car was parked, the gas tank nearly full. Chris was lucky that she didn’t drive anywhere except to work and back, so she didn’t have to wait in the gas station line that ringed around the neighborhood, everyone frantic in their preparations. Lucky, that was a funny word for Chris’s life now, so small that it fit in this fifteen-mile radius. It was silly to work so close to home, to create a scenario where she would inevitably run into her students, always looking her worst; she could stop by the grocery store every day after work, but run out once in pajamas to grab a lemon and it was Hi Miss. “Just leave your job, come hang out in Atlanta with me,” Juana was always saying. Chris couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do it.

When Chris was in college, when she had made her escape from Miami, she had only dated the whitest of white girls. The Mackenzies, the Catherines, the Kellys and the Mollies, she had thrown herself at all of them, at any woman with green eyes or blue, with hair that was lighter than her brown that people called black. And yet, after all of it, she had returned home (ashamed she couldn’t hack it, the winter coats still taking up space in the back of her closet). She had returned home and almost immediately met Juana, almost immediately fallen for her, Juana with the dreams of being whisked away on location, location almost always meaning Atlanta these days, and Chris was always steeling herself for the inevitable talk of the big move. She could picture her life in Atlanta, and it was exactly the same. She knew she would just bring her same self everywhere.

Chris could see the clouds gathering outside, and she hated it. The rain began and each drop seemed to pummel the glass, shooting straight at Chris. Who had come up with the idea of hurricane proof windows? Chris was the kind of person to close her eyes on a roller coaster—Juana, of course, was unblinking, hands in the air—, so the last thing she wanted was to be stuck inside this house, watching the course to its destruction. Better to be left in the dark, like the hurricane days of her childhood. She remembered board games with her family, updates on the handheld antenna TV, reading in solitude by candlelight. Chris was going to read in solitude by candlelight. Is the power out yet? Juana texted.

Chris groaned, but as she went to answer nope #blessed, she heard the collective sound of electronics falling to sleep, then the resulting silence beneath the gusts of wind and rain. She still had service on her phone—ugh, nothing was sacred—but she flicked it without thinking to Airplane Mode. She deleted her text and typed just went out :’( and hit send, just to watch the bar fail in its progress, the little red exclamation point appear in the corner. She could say she’d tried to text, only the storm was so very disruptive.

When she was younger, Chris had had this fantasy that the neighbors would have some kind of damage to their home (something big enough for them to run out in the rain, but small enough that it could all be fixed later) and have to come stay with them during a storm. This was back when the neighbors were that family from New York that only lasted a year in the suburbs before moving deeper into the city. They had a kid Chris’s age, who only wore Yankees gear even though it was one of those good years for the Marlins, and Chris found her so irritating, so self-important, but in this fantasy, they had no choice but to share a room, and the storm outside was so scary (even if you couldn’t see it through the windows), and so...

Every time there was a banging, Chris jumped, freaked that it was one of the neighbors come to shatter her solitude. Chris smiled at the neighbors, gave a wave and even a good morning when she’d had her coffee, but she wasn’t about to host a neighborhood block party. Juana would chill in neighbors’ garages, drinking their beer and learning how to feed their fish. She kept a box of their keys in the house, in case of emergencies. So, when she first got the generator, she offered it to everyone. Any issues, come on over! And, when she was in Atlanta, which she should have predicted in the first place (when was she not?), it was the texts: Don’t worry, Chris is home! I showed her how to use the genny. She had started abbreviating it like that, like they did in production. Chris thought that Juana thought that it made her look cooler than it did.

Chris flinched. Not a neighbor, but another piece of tree flung from the sky into the window. She was surprised there were no cracks in the glass; the technology, admittedly, was impressive. The reading, though, was not going well. There were people, like Juana, who loved thunderstorms, found them relaxing. Chris did not like to fuck with nature. When the principal’s voice came over the PA system, hurricane day made official, and everyone cheered at the time off, Chris did a silent internal prayer (as a student, and now as a teacher). She wasn’t religious, but she was superstitious, and she knew it was only a matter of time. If a hurricane didn’t get them, the rising waters would. Or Juana could take her away, like she’d promised all those years ago with the big talk and the big dreams. Not to Atlanta. Didn’t they shoot movies in Europe?

Chris moved away from the windows into the bedroom closet, like she used to as a kid, when she’d count the seconds on her fingers between the flash of lightning and the jolting clap. Closets had a bad reputation, but Chris found them cozy, this one just big enough to be called a walk-in. Settled in with that fluffy blanket Juana had gotten as a wrap gift, the name of the movie now faded so many washes in, she hoped the candles were okay downstairs. She opened her book, but not before laughing at the image of herself in the closet reading by the light of her headlamp. She had to stop herself from reaching for her phone for a selfie. Instead, she read. And she kept reading. Wow, reading was so amazing; why didn’t she do it more often?

The air shifted. At first, Chris didn’t understand what it meant and wasn’t too inclined to find out. She could just stay here reading, let the house fall down around her. Then the vibrating began. This is it, thought Chris, I’m okay with it. There was a lot of vibrating; it was kind of hard to keep reading, honestly. Chris put the photobooth picture back in the book—she was past the halfway mark! —and looked around. Oh. It was her phone. Chris didn’t even remember bringing her phone in the closet with her; she’d meant to leave it behind. How annoying, the way her hand was always drawn to it, bringing it from room to room without thinking. How was it…? Oh. The power was back.

Babe?

Freddy is texting. He said the power went out, but he still has service. 

You ok? 

Should I send Freddy to check on you?

Ok, he looked through the window and said our house looks ok. But let me know?

Nobody can reach you. 

Didn’t you use the genny?

Chris turned the phone off. She opened up the book. See, it was just that her phone had died; she’d forgotten to charge it. And the instructions for the generator were all saved there. What a mess. No, she wasn’t ignoring Juana. She would text back later. She was going to finish her book—she was doing it, it was done! She didn’t know how the photobooth picture found itself in the pages of another one, long ago abandoned, now suddenly so easy to read. She was a regular bookworm, who knew. Of course, she was still going to text Juana; it was the next thing she would do. Just one more chapter.