Via Dolorosa Read Free

be fine,” he assured her.
    “I can’t find sleep. The rain is too much and I can’t find sleep.”
    She was silent for a while. Then, at one point, he heard the bed creak. In turning slightly and looking over at her from the corner of one eye, he could make out her slender, pale form slipping off the side of the bed and moving through the darkness of the bedroom toward the patio doors. She did not say a word. He watched her linger, unmoving, before the midnight glow of the storm, her figure silhouetted against the moonlight and framed in that rectangle of double-doors, and did not say anything. To him, her form was familiar, unlike her breathing had been only moments ago, and he found a confusing mix of emotions in such a familiarity. The urge to go to her was suddenly overpowering. Yet he did not move from his place in the large bed except to pull the sheets up tight around the base of his neck and against his collarbone. The girl hadn’t closed the drapes, and he watched the rain slam against the patio doors and watched her slight frame stand before the doors, her thin and pale arms hugging her body. It was a hard rain. He could smell the girl, could still smell her in the pillow and in the sheets, and the smell was warm, clean, domestic. It was a smell only the slightest bit salty from the sea.
      “It’s like a completely different place,” the girl said, facing the storm. “It’s as if we’ve been uprooted and dislocated and we’re trapped here, now and forever. It’s like a dream, a bad dream, but I know I’m not asleep and I’m not dreaming. It’s hard to find sleep thinking of it in that way, and thinking of us uprooted and dislocated that way. It’s so sad, to think how wonderful and bright and sunny yesterday was, and all the other days, and then how dreary and sad it all was today.”
    “It’s only rain,” he told her. He tried to recall the sensation of her warm legs and cold feet against him beneath the sheets as he had experienced it as recently as the night before. But it seemed a distant memory, and it was as though something deep within him refused him access to it. He remained on his back, unmoving, his eyes locked on the patio doors across the room, and on the shape of the girl standing before them. “Everything,” he said, “will be better and back to normal once it passes.”
    “Do you promise?”
    “Sure.”
    “Do you think it’s possible for the whole island to drown?” the girl asked.
    “No.”
    “Are you sure? It seems like something I might have heard once, or maybe read in the papers.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “It’s a tremendous amount of rain.”
    “It’s a very large island. Anyway,” he said, “they’re prepared for storms like this.”
    “I saw that,” said the girl.
    “Saw what?”
    “The blue signs posted along the highway on the drive in. Didn’t you see them? They were big blue signs with a picture of a hurricane on it. We drove in along the evacuation route.”
    “This is just a storm,” he said, “not a hurricane.”
    “Can you be so sure?”
    “Hurricanes are different. They’re stronger and there’s more wind and they come much more suddenly than a regular storm.”
    “Have you ever been in a hurricane?”
    “No.”
    “Then how do you know?”
    He shifted his eyes away from the patio doors and stared up at the ceiling. The room was suddenly very dark. He watched for quite a while the blinking red eye of the smoke alarm above him.
    “How do you know?” she said again.
    “Excuse me,” he said, peeling the sheet off and standing and moving across the small room to the bathroom. He turned the light on and washed his face in the sink. There were seashells placed randomly around the sink basin; she had spent yesterday afternoon collecting them at the edge of the water. He continued to wash his face and to examine it in the long mirror above the sink. What a long, sad, old-looking face you are, he thought. You’ve only been on