Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [188]
The roar of rain, pounding rain on the cabin’s tin roof, was loud enough to drive a mind to madness. It occurred to Deanna that if she screamed, she probably wouldn’t hear herself. She opened her mouth and tried it. She was right.
She sat on the bed, hugging her knees to her chest. Trying not to think of it as the bed, she’d pulled up the blankets and propped pillows against the wall to make it into a couch or something—someplace to get comfortable that wasn’t bed. Inside this white roar she felt as cabin-fevered and trapped as she’d been in the dark of last winter. She plucked at a hole in the toe of her sock, picked up a book, put it down again. For hours she’d tried to read, but the noise had reached a point of drowning out all hope of concentration. She covered her ears with her hands for some relief, and listened to the different roar created by her cupped hands. A throbbing whoosh, the sea in a seashell—she remembered hearing it for the first time on a beach. She and Dad and Nannie had gone to Virginia Beach two summers in a row. A hundred and ten years ago, and a hundred and nine.
It wasn’t the ocean, of course, but the tide of her own circulation pulsing inside her, sound carried through bone to her eardrums. Deanna shut her eyes and listened harder, trying to hear some small difference now that her heart was pumping her blood through an extra set of arteries. She’d been craving some proof, but the change so far seemed to inhabit her body only ethereally, like a thought or a magic charm. For now she would have to live with magic.
When she dropped her hands from her ears, the rain seemed even louder. Flashes of lightning brightened the window in an irregular but steady way, like fireworks. The thunder she couldn’t hear, but its vibrations reached her through the floor, shuddering up the legs of the iron bed. She considered climbing under the blankets and covering her head with the pillows, but that would be bed, alone, and the awful trembling would still reach her. There was no escape, and this storm was growing closer. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, but the sky was dark as dusk, and darkening deeper by the minute. An hour ago Deanna had decided she’d never seen a storm like this in these mountains in all her life. And that was an hour ago.
Surprised, she remembered her radio. It offered no practical assistance, but it would be company. She jumped up and crossed to the desk to retrieve the little radio from the bottom drawer. She turned it on, held it next to her ear, heard nothing. She studied the thing, located the dial that controlled the volume, and turned it all the way up, but still not a crackle. Batteries, she thought: they’d go dead over time just sitting around. She ransacked the drawer for more batteries, knowing perfectly well she always forgot to put these on her list. Finally she scavenged the ones from her little flashlight, the spare she kept on the shelf by the door.
Lightning hit then, so close to the cabin that she could actually hear its crack above the rain’s roar. The sound and light were simultaneous; that was here. Probably one of the tall poplars on the hill above the cabin. Just what she needed now, a tree falling on her. Her fingers trembled as she turned over the radio and pried open its back to fish out the old batteries and pop in new ones. “Plus, minus,” she said aloud, lining up the poles, her voice completely inaudible to her ears. Even that was terrifying, like a darkness so dark it looked the same with eyes open or shut. She’d had moments of panic in that kind of darkness, wondering whether she’d gone blind, and now it occurred to her that this might be what deafness was like. People assumed it was silence, but maybe it was this, a solid white roar.
She tried the radio again. If she held the little holes against one ear and covered the other, she could hear sounds. Just static at first. It was a tedious business to adjust the tuning, listen, and adjust again, trying to find the Knoxville station, but at last she heard a faint, tinny music of a type she couldn