Next she got the air mattress out of the garage, the noise worse out there. She filled the mattress halfway and squeezed it through the bathroom door. Put more air in. Tented it over the tub. Went and found the flashlight, got a bottle of gin out of the freezer. It was still cold, thank God. She swaddled the iguana in a towel that was still stiff with Jason’s blood. Put it in the tub again. Sleeper and iguana. Madonna and her very ugly baby.

Everything was clatter and wail. Lindsey heard a shutter, somewhere, go sailing off to somewhere else. The floor of the living room was wet in the circle of her flashlight when she went back in the living room to collect the other iguanas. That was either the rain beginning to force its way in under the front door and around the sliding glass doors, or else it was the canal. She collected the three other iguanas, dumped them into the tub, too. “Women and iguanas first,” she said, and swigged her gin. But nobody heard her over the noise of the wind.

She sat hunched on the lid of her toilet and drank until the wind was almost something she could pretend to ignore. Like a band in a bar that doesn’t know how loud they’re playing. Eventually she fell asleep, still sitting on the toilet, and only woke up when she dropped the bottle and broke it. The iguanas rustled around like dry leaves in the tub. The wind was gone. It was the eye of the storm or else she’d missed the eye entirely and the rest of the hurricane as well.

Light came faintly through the shuttered window. The batteries of her emergency radio were dead but her cell phone still showed a signal. Three messages from Alan and six messages from a number that she guessed was Jason’s. Maybe Alan wanted to apologize for something.

She went outside to see what had become of the world. Except, what had become of the world was that she was no longer in it. The street in front of her house was no longer the street in front of her house. It had become someplace else entirely. There were no other houses. As if the storm had carried them all away. She stood in a meadow full of wildflowers. There were mountains in the far distance, cloudy and blue. The air was very crisp.

Her cell phone showed no signal. When she looked back at her house, she was looking back into her own world. The hurricane was still there, smeared out onto the horizon like poison. The canal was full of the ocean. The Splinter was probably splinters. Her front door still stood open.