The first storm when I lived there, Fiona, wasn’t so bad. Water got in a bit to the basement, and the apartment owners had to have the mold it caused professionally removed. So I didn’t think that when Maxwell hit there would be much more damage besides that. I was wrong. Water got into the ground floor and ruined a lot of my things. The antique mahogany headboard on my bed that had belonged to my grandparents got waterlogged and warped. It was really sad because it was the first gift my grandfather had bought my grandmother when he got his first real job that actually paid him more than what he needed to live on. I had wanted to keep it forever, then give it to my kids. But it got destroyed. The same thing happened to my all-organic-material mattress. I had taken the rare books I collect off the bottom few shelves of the bookcase in my living room and placed them in boxes up higher, but the water had still risen high enough to destroy my signed first-edition Fountainhead and some of my first-edition lithograph books. And, worst of all, it traveled far enough up the wall to damage the Basquiat my dad bought me as my first serious piece of art when I graduated from Parsons. I loved that painting so much. It was the first thing that ever made me feel full. When my dad gave it to me, this kind of whatever feeling I have a lot of the time disappeared in this wave of color and emotion. It was so bold, so jagged, that I couldn’t help but feel so much. That’s the way it’s been every time I get a new piece of art, but never quite like that first time. God, I love Basquiat. I kept kicking myself for not taking it out of the apartment, but it was my home, you know, my home. I didn’t think something that bad could happen in my very own home. I laid there thinking of that painting, how beautiful and irreplaceable it had been, and how it was gone now. I started to cry a little. That’s when Pollock started to cry, too. He’s very attuned to my feelings. Sometimes even more than I am, I think. He pressed his wet nose against me, digging it into my arm, my armpit, my cheek, as I lay in bed crying.