Do you not see the risk? she’d wanted to say. Do you not see that calling
our son Gordon might mean he ends up like you? But she couldn’t. Because
surely that was the point.
She rests the crook of a bent finger against the warmth of the baby’s
cheek as though his skin might transmit some vital message. Of what he
wants. Of who he might be. But before anything can be divined, something
crashes against the back wall of the house—a sound both heard and felt.
She draws the baby closer as the security light flickers on outside,
illuminating the roiling silhouettes of the firs. Vast and looming, then
receding, before being made large again. She hears Gordon emerge from the
next room and belt down the stairs, pictures him striding pajamaed across
the dark of the living room toward the patio doors, then standing in the
spotlight, squinting without his contact lenses, trying to determine what’s
out of place. She imagines him reduced by the looming threat of the trees,
the immensity of the storm.
A few minutes later he opens the door to the nursery, and Cora feels a
draft of cold air, as though it’s attached itself to his clothing and followed
him up the stairs. “It was just the watering can,” he says. “Come back to
bed now.”
“Soon,” she agrees. But she doesn’t want to leave the baby alone and so
she lets him sleep on, his head heavy against her arm as the sounds of the
storm meter out the minutes of night unraveling into day.
GORDON IS ON the phone to a colleague already at the practice. Cora
overhears them discussing the lack of warning in the previous night’s
weather report, then the possibility of canceled appointments and staff not
getting in. She makes breakfast one-handed, the baby preoccupying her
other, as she helps Maia tune in to a local radio station to listen as names of
schools closed by storm damage are read out. Maia’s comes halfway down
a roll call of unfamiliar primaries, eliciting a small, delighted smile and a
silent thumbs-up, which falls to her side as her father enters the room.
