Gathering Lies

The once broad, white portico that had fronted the house was now only a pile of lumber. The front door had fallen completely off its hinges. Tall windows beside it had shattered and now lay in glittering heaps. Kim and I made our way up a path of cobblestones that had scattered in many directions. As we reached the broken glass, I forged a path to the door, kicking shards aside with my hiking boots. Kim, in her canvas shoes, brought up the rear.

Inside, plaster had crumbled, and chairs, sofas and small tables had been strewn in every direction. The overall effect was that of a junkyard—or, I thought, Homestead, Florida, after Hurricane Andrew. A jumbled pile of wreckage.

“What a mess,” Kim said.

“It sure is,” I agreed, sighing. I had spent many happy hours here as a teenager, pretending to read if Luke wasn’t around, listening to my dad and his talk law.

Luke’s father was a judge in Seattle, and the last I’d heard, he had retired. I wondered how he’d feel if he could see this devastation. Charles Randell Ford had taken great pride in his home, as had Luke’s mother, Priscilla. They were high on the social ladder, and entertained here throughout the summers, bringing in guests on private ferries that pulled up to a dock strung with tiny colored lights and Japanese lanterns. The music from the live bands they brought in could be heard all the way to Thornberry, and there were many nights when I would sneak out through my bedroom window at Thornberry and make my way through the woods to Ransford. There I would sit out of sight beneath a tree and watch people dancing on a platform erected on the lawn. I’d read The Great Gatsby one of those summers, and the Fords became my Gatsby—a standard for elegant living. Now and then I’d even get a glimpse of Luke—though he would more often than not be dancing with some girl I didn’t know, which also, more often than not, sent me home in a bad mood.

I never knew, till that last summer when we came together, if Luke would have danced with me at his parents’ parties. The one time I was invited by his parents, my own had refused to let me go. I was too young, they told me.

“But Luke’s not too young, and he’s the same age as me,” I would argue.

I never did win one of those arguments, and came to understand how difficult it was, for a teenager, having a lawyer for a father.

“The stairs seem intact,” I said, looking at the wide circular staircase that rose to the second floor. It was covered with debris, however, largely plaster and wood from the walls. The ceiling was, miraculously, still in place.

“Why don’t we start downstairs?” I suggested. “Let’s see if we can find a cell phone or a radio.”

We began digging through the rubble with our hands, but as cuts developed, we came up with the idea of using short pieces of lumber to push things around. In the kitchen area, where the refrigerator had toppled and shattered dishes lay on the floor, we were thrilled to find a dustpan. No brush, but we used the pan to scoop trash out of the way as we sorted through it, looking for anything useful. Surprisingly, many dishes had survived intact here, and even a full set of glasses. Odd, I thought, the things that make it through an earthquake. It’s like after a tornado, where one house is left standing untouched, while the one next to it is demolished.

There was little of use in the way of food, however. I would have expected the Fords to be more prepared for a disaster, as wild as the weather can get up here. There were a few canned goods—pork and beans, chicken and rice soup, creamed corn and a variety of other vegetables. Eighteen cans in all. But no radio. And no cell phone, unless it was hopelessly lost beneath rubble we couldn’t lift.

I wondered where Grace, Jane and Dana were, and what was taking them so long. We could use them to help us clear the stairs to the second level.

Exhausted, we stood with our hands on our hips and looked around, shaking our heads in discouragement.

“Reminds me of that old joke,” I said.

“Joke?”

“The woman walks into her apartment with a new friend, and it’s a mess. Clothes, books, tapes, food all over the place. Bureau drawers wide open in the bedroom, shoes all over the floor. The friend says, horrified, ‘My God, you’ve been burglarized!’ The woman says, ‘No, I just didn’t clean today.’”

Kim laughed. “Works for me.”

We decided to go through the mess once more, on the theory that we might have missed something useful, focused as we’d been on finding a cell phone and radio. After another twenty minutes of scavenging through kitchen and living area, we had little to show for our efforts: the cans of food, a pair of suede gardening gloves, a screwdriver, and one huge Tweety Bird beach towel.

“Too bad we didn’t bring backpacks for this stuff,” I said, looking at the results of our heist. “I had two of them, but they were buried in my cottage under all the mess.”

“I’m afraid I never dreamed I’d need a backpack here,” Kim responded. “Talk about a babe in the woods.”

I made a knapsack of the beach towel by tying the corners together, and put our cache inside.

At my insistence, Kim was already wearing the gloves. “When we get out of this,” I’d argued, “you can’t be making movies with your hands all scarred up. Me? If I ever get out of this, I may just beat a few people up. I could use some calluses.”

I took the knapsack and set it by the kitchen door, thinking we’d go down to the dock and look around before we left. “I guess we should tackle the second floor while we wait for the others.”

Kim had been standing at the door, which, since Ransford had been built on a small peninsula, faced the opposite shoreline from where we’d come. Over the past few minutes, dark storm clouds had formed, and a brisk wind was kicking up. Kim anxiously scanned the horizon.

“What’s next, do you suppose?” she said. “Hurricane? Floods? Pestilence?”

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