All of Us and Everything Read Free

Augusta Rockwell and her three daughters before and during the hurricane that unearths the package destined to change their lives forever.
    SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2012

“I didn’t know you were supposed to shave collies,” the headmaster said while he patted the dog’s long thin snout and took a seat in Esme’s living room. “I mean, I’ve just never seen it.”
    “I don’t think it’s recommended but imagine living with him! It’s like having a Russian in your living room who refuses to take off his fur coat and hat in the middle of the summer. Like Dostoevsky himself, brooding away.” Littering a conversation with literary and pop-culture references had become an anxious habit for Esme, maybe the result of the stiflingly crowded overeducated population that made up faculty housing at a boarding school. On campus, all of the dogs and cats—and many of the faculty children themselves—were named with some clever allusion in mind. Atty, Esme’s daughter now fifteen and sitting beside her on the sofa, was named after Atticus Finch, a man’s name, yes, but Esme didn’t want to saddle Atty with the name Scout and she was set on which book she wanted to allude to. Ingmar, the collie, was often mistaken for a Bergman reference but actually it was a more obscure reference to the lead character in a Swedish film that Esme and her husband, Doug, saw when they were dating.
    “But it’s October,” the headmaster said. “Shouldn’t he be bulking up his winter coat?”
    “Still, the metaphor stands even if it’s cold out.
I mean, hey, take off your coat, fella, and stay awhile!
Am I right?” Esme said, trying to lighten the mood. She’d actually shaved the dog specifically for this meeting. Ingmar’s coat had become matted from muddy romps out by the pond, and dogs weren’t supposed to be off their leashes. She looked at her daughter for a little help.
    Atty—a budding social media guru—looked up from her iPhone, leaned forward, and said, “This dog’s no Dostoevsky. Don’t you worry.” As if the burden of being in the same room with a dog capable of literary genius would be too much for the headmaster to bear. “A corgi on human growth hormones, maybe, but that’s about it. He couldn’t get a kid out of a well if his doggy life depended on it.” She then tweeted both sentences with the hashtag
#lifewithcollie.
    “There are no wells on campus,” the headmaster said, defensively.
    Atty looked at Esme in a challenging way. Neither of them was a great fan of the headmaster. Behind his back, they both referred to him as Big-Head Todd. He had a very big head and the history teacher, also a Todd, had a very little head so they called him Little-Head Todd. Atty’s look was meant as a reminder to her mother that she’d promised to call the headmaster Big-Head Todd to his face, one fine day, before she graduated.
    Esme understood the look immediately and shot her a look that meant,
Not now.
Then she smiled at Todd. “Listen. What do you need to tell us? You’re here, making a house call on a Sunday with a huge storm moving up the coast.”
    “A
Frankenstorm,
” Atty added. She’d been following video clips on weather.com, the growing buzz of online hysteria, mandatory evacuations on the coast—even in Ocean City, New Jersey, where her grandmother lived. Did her mother really care about this storm? Was she too busy bracing for this meeting, which was clearly going to be about Atty’s shit midterm grades and her diminishing prospects for a good college education? Atty could almost hear the headmaster saying,
We’re talking fourth tier at best, now. Fourth tier.
    “And you didn’t cancel because of the storm, which would have been fine.” Esme knew this visit might have something to do with Doug. He had led a group of sophomores on a study abroad program in Europe. Atty was a sophomore but her grades had been too low to make the cut, which meant that Esme had to stay behind with her. Esme had asked