Captain’s Log: Day Four

I didn’t hear the crack or the boom when the lightning hit the slender pine standing just a few feet from my bedroom window.

I did hear the scream of the fire alarm, and the loud man’s voice commanding me to get out: FIRE! ALERT! FIRE! ALERT!

I stumbled to the bunk room, where the children sleep. The Poo and her cousin sprawled in their beds, mouths agape and hair spread on white pillows. The Babyman was up, standing at the rail of his crib, shaking, too scared to really cry.

I swept him up and covered his ears with my hands.

“What is it!?” I yelled to my brother-in-law. He shrugged and began to wake the sleeping girls. It must be a false alarm, I thought. It must be because of the storm.

“I can’t turn it off!” My mother, bleary-eyed without her glasses, calves bare and vulnerable in a nightshirt. My heart began to beat faster, The Babyman cried and I turned to see my daughter holding her uncle’s hand as we hurried out of the house.

We stood under the portico–thank God for the portico!–and The Poo pressed her body to mine. A current ran through her, she shook so hard I could hear her teeth. She couldn’t speak, her bare arms covered in goosebumps held my waist with surprising force.

It was pouring. Thunder boomed overhead, and blue streaks lit the sky. We ran for the cars, not knowing what else to do.

I laid The Babyman in his carseat, heartbroken by the look in his tired eyes. Please, Mama, his eyes pleaded. Not the car. But he laid there sweetly, obediently, in his orange- and yellow-striped pajamas. I ran to the other side of the van, and climbed in. The Poo sat in her booster, eyes wild.

“It’s the fire alarm,” I explained as calmly as I could. “We need to stay here to make sure everything is safe.”

Her small face collapsed. “Mama,” she whispered. “Bunsie is still inside!”

Eventually the fire department came and I was cleared to go back in and fetch pillows and blankets, car keys and the girl’s beloved Bunsie. She curled up in a ball and watched the flickering screen of the DVD player while I scurried back and forth to my sister’s car in the torrential rain.

Lightning strike. Electrical damage. Blackened wall in the garage, below the sleeping heads of our children. Propane-powered generator shut down. Main connect shut down.

We could stay in the house, the firemen said, as long as we took shifts keeping vigil. There was no way to tell if a spark inside the walls would take the whole house up in flames.

There we sat, in the cool living room, in awkward, makeshift beds, in a house that sits on the highest point in Wellfleet. Eighty feet below, the ocean rocked and rolled as the storm headed out to sea. Candles smoked and children wept as a long-awaited and much-cherished vacation hung in the balance.

But in the morning, there was light.

Light, and an eccentric, long-haired electrician who called the house “semi-smart” and gently mocked my mother’s attempts to make it fail-safe.

Nothing is ever fail-safe. This, I know.

By noon we had hot coffee and a humming refrigerator. No TV or Internet, but lights to read by and a working pump for our water pipes.

All was well.

Today, four days later, I sat at sunset and looked out over the round, stone terrace that sits gracefully at the end of the long, cedar-floored porch. The sun peeked around the trunks of swaying pine trees. I thought about my father, and the two girls who slept right through a fire alarm, and said prayers of thanks that their small bodies were safe and sound.

What if there had been a fire? They did not wake up.

They did not wake up.

Yesterday, I swam in the ocean. The water was a balmy 61-degrees, the waves pounding me mercilessly as I laughed and screamed. The power of the sea makes me feel at once wretchedly insignificant and vibrantly alive.

They did not wake up.

And I? I will not sleep soundly for a very long time.