The storm was taking its time. It seemed that she’d been watching the sky’s gradual darkening, the gathering clouds, for hours now. Above the smoothness of sand worn down by surf, there was a thick stratum of black, papery-skinned mussels, each one broken open and picked clean by a seabird.

Oh, I’m as happy as a clam, Marianne remembered telling Ruth once, when her sister asked over the phone how she was doing. It was maybe a year after their mother died, and every call from home was still a shock. It was her mother she wanted—to tell about her classes, her friends, the problems of dorm life. Any other voice, even her baby sister’s, left her with a hollow feeling in her stomach.

Just how happy are clams anyway? Ruth had asked. In her youth and her earnestness, she’d been serious, though for a moment she’d sounded just like their mother, had brought her back to life, performed a miracle.

Sometimes it made Marianne angry, not believing in God.

2

The storm arrived on Thursday, as the woman in the supermarket predicted, but aside from a brief loss of power and general strewing of detritus—brown rafts of seaweed, torn palm fronds, the contents of an unsecured trash can—there was little damage. Marianne spent the storm in what Eric later told her, during their weekly check-in, was the least advisable part of the Ranch—the big rec room with its plate glass window, which could have easily shattered into a thousand flying shards. Marianne said he might have told her that before the storm, but Eric said everybody knew that you should stay away from big windows during storms. “Do not assume I know what everybody knows!” Marianne had shouted into her computer. “I do not have that sort of knowledge!”

But she had not felt threatened sitting in the chintz-cushioned wicker armchair she’d dragged near the window, a plate of peanut butter sandwiches and a flat of bottled water at the ready. Even after the power flickered off in the late afternoon, the room felt cozy and familiar and safe, with its shelf of ravaged board games and terrible novels. The gulf disappeared behind rain that splashed in gray sheets, but other than a brief screeching of wind that happened at full dark, there was little to send one running for cover. The next day everything sparkled with raindrops, even the plastic cups and bottles and grocery bags that littered the beach.