Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [135]
“I can try,” Kenzo said. “Here, let me…well, it looks like the boat belongs to the marina on Roosevelt Island.”
“That would make sense. Is there a phone number for it?”
“Let’s see—that should be in the Coast Guard records. Wait, they’re not open files. Hold a minute, please.”
Kenzo loved these little problems. Frank waited, trying not to hold his breath. Another instinctive act. As he waited he tried to etch the woman’s face again on his mind, thinking he might be able to get a portrait program to draw something like what he was remembering. She had looked serious and remote, like one of the Fates.
“Yeah, Frank, here it is. Do you want me to call it and pass you along?”
“Yes please, but write it down for me too.”
“Okay, I’ll pass you over and get off. I have to get back to it here.”
“Thanks Kenzo, thanks a lot.”
Frank listened, sticking a finger in his other ear. There was a pause, a ring. The ring had a rapid pulse and an insistent edge, as if it were designed to compete with the sounds of an inboard engine on a boat. Three rings, four, five; if an answering machine message came on, what would he say?
“Hello?”
It was her voice.
“Hello?” she said again.
He had to say something or she would hang up.
“Hi,” he said. “Hi, this is me.”
There was a static-filled silence.
“We were stuck in that elevator together in Bethesda.”
“Oh my God.”
Another silence. Frank let her assimilate it. He had no idea what to say. It seemed like the ball was in her court, and yet as the silence went on, a fear grew in him.
“Don’t hang up,” he said, surprising himself. “I just saw your boat go by, I’m here on the levee at the back of the Davis Highway. I called information and got your boat’s number. I know you didn’t want—I mean, I tried to find you afterward, but I couldn’t, and I could tell that you didn’t—that you didn’t want to be found. So I figured I would leave it at that, I really did.”
He could hear himself lying and added hastily, “I didn’t want to, but I didn’t see what else I could do. So when I saw you just now, I called a friend who got me the boat’s number. I mean how could I not, when I saw you like that.”
“I know,” she said.
He breathed in. He felt himself filling up, his back straightening. Something in the way she said “I know” brought it all back again. The way she had made it a bond between them.
After a time he said, “I wanted to find you again. I thought that our time in the elevator, I thought it was…”
“I know.”
His skin warmed. It was like a kind of St. Elmo’s fire running over him, he’d never felt anything like it.
“But—” she said, and he learned another new feeling; dread clutched him under the ribs. He waited as for a blow to fall.
The silence went on. An isolated freshet of rain pelted down, cleared, and then he could see across the wind-lashed Potomac again. A huge rushing watery world, awesome and dreamlike.
“Give me your number,” her voice said in his ear.
“What?”
“Give me your phone number,” she said again.
He gave her his number, then added, “My name is Frank Vanderwal.”
“Frank Vanderwal,” she said, then repeated the number.
“That’s it.”
“Now give me some time,” she said. “I don’t know how long.” And the connection went dead.
THE SECOND day of the storm passed as a kind of suspended moment, everything continuing as it had the day before, everyone in the area living through it, enduring, waiting for conditions to change. The rain was not as torrential, but so much of it had fallen in the previous twenty-four hours that it was still sheeting off the land into the flooded areas and keeping them flooded. The clouds continued to crash together overhead, and the tides were still higher than normal, so that the whole