Storm Ellie

Russell sat at his kitchen table, plucking fingerfuls from a stale bloomer the neighbour must have left him. All around him the town lay waiting, silent save for the odd rumble of a straggler’s engine. He’d promised his sister he would at least consider joining them.

He hadn’t.

He’d known since the moment the watch was issued that he couldn’t. It was easier to ignore the texts than try to explain. She wouldn’t understand.

As the day went on, watches had turned to warnings. Updates poured in, and people poured out.

But Russell stayed.

As dusk retreated with the final straggler, he was left alone with nothing more than his list and an old radio for company. Tin voices scratched his ears as he traced his thumb across the paper; dronings of bridge curfews and gridlocks.

It was too quiet, without them.

The sheet was practically embossed, each item struck out by three, four, five lines apiece.

All except one.

He knew there was nothing else to add; nothing more to tie down, check, charge or count. Russell had grown up in the lightning capital, smack-bang in the middle of a plain that hurricanes used as a dock marker. This wasn’t his first storm.

Just the first one, since.

The final item mocked him, unblemished, from the bottom of the page. Even in planning, he’d put it off for as long as he could. The very thing he’d stayed for, and the one he couldn’t face.

Determined to find anything else, Russell thumbed his way through list and loaf until the radio presenters changed shifts, the breakfast show crackling to life.

Morning had found him.

He should sleep, and he would—after. Once the crumbling pile of concrete blocks he considered family was safe, he would.

Outside, the air grew heavy, and the first bands of rain pelted the gutters. The winds were coming.

Before he could think his way out of it, he pulled his numb body from the stool. Within the space of a jarring commercial for yet another auto dealership, he was armed.

He would never be ready.

***

Russell couldn’t remember the last time he had climbed those stairs, or turned on those lights. They flooded the upstairs hallway, casting long-lost shadows across the floor.

The attic room had been part of their moving agreement. After a four-hour drive filled with the hysterics of a six-year old being asked to leave her bestest friends—even just for a viewing—he hadn’t been hopeful. Even the treehouse hadn’t consoled her; a girl who’d spent half of her life climbing the sycamore in their backyard since she was tall enough to reach the first branch.

But the attic, well, that had a window to the sea.

Only a foggy little sliver far beyond the trees, but enough to make his strange and stubborn daughter concede to a deal. In writing; he still had the ‘kontract’ somewhere, with its red markings where ‘get puppi’ had been scratched, and ‘serfing lessons’ added.

Negotiations were heated, but in the end, it was the view from that window that tipped the scales. Along with the promise of weekly beach walks.

He never broke that promise. Even when she’d had knee surgery—courtesy of the treehouse she hadn’t wanted—he’d bundled her in blankets and dragged her along the shore in a gardening trolley.

Before the memory could lift a smile from him, he reached the top of the stairs.

The sight of the door nearly buckled him.

She’d made the sign from a set of beads her aunt bought her, for some birthday or Christmas. Or no reason at all, knowing Julia. She was so small, he’d had to help her set them with the iron and some baking paper, much to her offence. But she’d never outgrown it. Curving at the corners and partially melted in spots by many hot summers, the blue mountains and starry sky that spelled her name had survived every phase. Even the slamming one.

Russell clung to the wooden boards like a raft as he moved to open the door. The handle grew warm in his palm before he managed to turn it.

With shut eyes, he slipped through the crack and closed the door behind him, careful not to disturb the air. The heavy canvas jacket that still hung from it brushed against his shoulder. It no longer smelled of rain, or saltwater.

Or Ellie.

The clock must have stopped, at some point, and a foreign draught whistled faintly through the ducting. It was hidden, before, beneath guitar strings and all-night phone calls, and the gurgling of lava lamps.

Through his slippers, the coldness of the plush carpet crept into his aching feet. Julia had turned the radiator off, not long after.

He shouldn’t have let her.

Adrenaline cycled through him, with nowhere to go. He had prepared; had spent the entirety of the night readying himself to face her again.

But there was nothing here.

Choked by the stale air, he forced his eyes open.

There she was. In the towering piles of CDs that had far outgrown their stands, and the sun-faded Polaroids which streaked the ceiling on banners of string. In the half-finished mural of the forest—the one she’d restarted three times—and the blue stains on her nightstand where countless raspberry slushies had spilled and melted.

But more than anything, she was in the window. In that postcard view of the woods and the sea, and everything she had loved.

Years of overzealous plant-watering had warped the sill; the paint bubbled where the wood beneath had bloated. He’d told her so many times over the years to move them outside—but they might get lonely!—and offered to make her a proper window box, with proper drainage—I can do it myself!

She might have done, one day.

He ran his fingers over the surface. The bubbles were cracked and hollow, the moisture long gone. Along with her plants. Somewhere in the haze of those early days he’d caught Julia in the middle of the night, burying their brittle corpses in the compost like a dirty secret. He’d hated her for it at the time, for trying to save him.

He was grateful, now.

The winds blew over the treeline as he stood, waiting for a courage he knew would never come.

It was only a window. The fourteenth one he had done. And so, releasing his raft of boards and retrieving a handful of nails from his pocket, Russell returned to mechanics.

The sliver of ocean was the last to disappear behind the wood.

It took only minutes, the job that had loomed over him for forty-eight hours. Once he had finished, the familiar weight of numbness had returned to his body, and sleep was tugging from the room.

He didn’t look back, when he slipped from the door again.

The room was too much.

It would never be enough.

***

There was nothing to do but sleep, and yet Russell couldn’t.

After doing little more than wreck the bedsheets with hours of tossing, he’d found himself back in the kitchen, pace-induced tenderness hammering at his soles. Squalls battered the south-face of the house, several of the roof tiles already flung and smashed against the overgrown patio.

He’d had to turn the radio up. It would be too loud to sleep soon, anyway.

Three more texts from Julia sat unopened on his phone. He tried to coax himself into replying, but there was nothing to say. Nothing but the room, devoid now of even the sunlight, in his mind.

Deciding to make the most of the power whilst he had it, he set about making himself eggs, smashed with butter in a mug the way Ellie had liked them.

They grew cold, on the table by the list.

Just as Russell had forced himself to open the messages, the tin voices shifted, their sombre tone unspooling. Words like side-winds and recurvature drifted through the kitchen.

The storm was shifting, curving eastward. It might not even make landfall, the voice said.

He should have been relieved; the house was safe, the room was preserved.

He wasn’t.

He remembered the last time a warning had been called off. How his reckless little daredevil had bawled, here in this very kitchen, because he had promised it would come. How she’d begged him to take her in the truck, and threatened to chase the storm on foot when he denied her.

He realised, with sinking guilt, that somewhere in that threat of wreckage and destruction had been a promise for him. One of change.

He didn’t need to prepare, this time.

He took the stairs two at a time, back to that sign at the door. Back to that tomb he’d condemned to darkness, knowing when he left it that he wouldn’t be able to face returning.

When he entered, he took one long, final look. At the piles of clothes and unread books that teetered by the bed. At the smudge-covered guitar and stereo which haunted the corners, unplayed.

She was everywhere, and nowhere.

With bare hands and more clarity than he’d felt in years, Russell tore down the boards. The landscape that had won his daughter’s heart re-emerged piece by piece, thrashed by winds that bowed the trees and sprayed the shore with frothy waves.

With laughter in his throat at the thought of his daughter’s joy, he ripped the seized latches from their brass casements, and flung open the windows.