“When will be the right time, Makayla?” he asked. His voice had not risen to match my own; it was still calm and low.

Jaden went into Kyle’s room to sleep for the night, leaving me alone in the living room.

5 Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had ’trosh nightmares. That night was no exception. The dream didn’t start out so bad. In it, I was in the park near my house, flying kites with my dad. The kites were high up in the sky, just specks, and my dad was saying that I had to let go of the string. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want the kite to fly up and away forever or, worse, take a nosedive somewhere far off where I’d never be able to follow it.

“I won’t!” I screamed at my father.

Suddenly, he was clutching his chest. I was screaming in his face, and he was curling up smaller and smaller, as if he was trying to climb inside himself. He was having the heart attack that had killed him in the waking, living world. The one that had taken him right out of my life two years after my mom checked.

“Daddy!” I was screaming, which I hadn’t called him since I was a kid. Certainly not in the bad years that had come between when I was a kid and when he had died, when I had run wild and he’d watched me, knowing how easy it would be for me to slip and fall down and never get back up again. But now I was calling him Daddy again, and begging him not to go.

The dream shifted, then, and we were in a hospital with no lights and no machines. He was still having a heart attack. I couldn’t see him anymore, just hear him crying and begging in the darkness that couldn’t begin to compare with the darkness that waited for him after the pain was over.

I woke up moaning and tossing and turning.

Jaden was there almost immediately, wrapping his arms around me and telling me that everything was okay.

“I’m here, I’m here,” he kept saying.

As I got my bearings, as my mind cleared, one thing remained with me. The image of someone dying in the dark. How many people had had surgery just before Bernice hit? Or were having heart attacks right now and couldn’t get to a hospital at all? How many people were gasping in the dark for air? Or checking alone?

“What do you think is happening at the hospitals?” I asked Jaden when my own breathing returned to normal.

“They must have backup generators,” he said. “For the patients on life support and things like that.”

“But aren’t those generators in the basements? And won’t the basements be flooded?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He stroked my hair as he held me close to him.