Mary Laura Philpott - Bomb Shelter : Love, Time, and Other Explosives

This book is a must-reada treasure to savor now and save for always. I loved it. Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed and founder of Together Rising

Bomb Shelter

Love, Time, and Other Explosives

Mary Laura Philpott

Bestselling author of I Miss You When I Blink

To JP

To WC

To MG

Team Philpott Forever

In Brueghels Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. AUDEN, MUSE DES BEAUX ARTS

Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

JOAN DIDION , THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

I remember now standing with my face to the horizon in the waist-deep tide of the Gulf of Mexico, making up a dance routine. Whats strange is that this memory was lost under a pile of other moments and more pressing daily calculations for decades; then, a couple of years ago, it floated right up to the surface, as clear as the water in the gulf.

At nine years old, I liked to imagine that I might one day command an audience in some sort of performancenot ballet, I was no good at it, but maybe some kind of pep rally like the big girls at my school were always having, or in a dance contest where most of the dancing was just walking and clapping and doing jazz hands. In the water, I was hard at work on choreography for Stop! In the Name of Love, one of the songs my mother had sung along to on the oldies station as we drove down the highway from Tennessee to the Florida panhandle. We were on our annual beach trip with my grandmother, whom wed picked up in Alabama.

Loud voices broke my concentration.

Little girl!

I turned around.

Little girl! a mans voice yelled again, but I couldnt identify the source of the voice, because gathered on the shore were dozens of people, all bunched up at the waters edge. Everyone was shouting.

Was a girl in trouble? Was she breaking a rule? Or was everyone cheering for her? Had she done some kind of trick? I looked around the breakers on either side of me, searching for another person about my size, another girl in a stretchy nylon bathing suit with a worn, pilled bottom from sitting in the sand. Another girl with her elbow-length, sun-bleached hair tied up on top of her head in a bun that had been soaked in salt water, then dried, then soaked again, creating a nest of knots that would take an hour of combing to remove. The water had been full of children a second ago. Where were the other kids? Where was that little girl?

Had she gone under? I peered down and didnt see anyone swimming under the surface, no girl sneakily holding her nose to fool her parents into thinking she had disappeared. What I saw instead were empty trash bags, at least twenty of them. Black, floppy, as wide across as my own wingspan, the bags drifted through the water past my feet, pulled along by the current. Just beneath and behind them, their matching shadows floated across the sandy ocean floor.

Thats littering. I thought of the owl in the public service announcement that was always interrupting Saturday morning television: Give a hoot, dont pollute.

I began wading back toward the beach to find out what all the fuss was about. I lifted my knees high, careful to take big, marching steps, which I imagined would warn any crabs to scurry away before I stepped down. I didnt want to hurt any ocean animals. Also, I had seen on cartoons how crabs were always chomp-chomping their crab hands, and I didnt want them to hurt me either. I had never actually been pinched, but I still thought crab whenever the jagged edge of a broken shell nicked the raisined flesh of my foot.

Pokes and scrapes on my feet were part of going to the beach, just like the stinging rash that covered my skin. If you lined me up next to the rest of my family, I looked like the guest they had brought on vacation. Tanned to a deep brown within twenty-four hours of arrival, my mother and brother didnt have to bother with sunscreen, but I always burned crimson. (My dad, a doctor, had coloring closer to mine, but he usually stayed home to work.) All the sunblock products available at the time contained an ingredient that inflamed my skin; still, I swiped the SPF 15 stick across my cheeks every morning before we made the trek out to the sand. My mother encouraged me to reapply at lunchtime. It was either chemical burn or sunburn; at least the chemical burn meant we had tried.

Still, I loved the beachthe sea an endless swimming pool, the days so long you had to make up games to fill the time. I never wanted our beach week to end, no matter how many tangles, rashes, or cuts on my feet. The pain came with the territory, but the territory was so glorious that the pain didnt matter.

Stop! screamed a chorus of adult voices.

I froze where I stood in the water. And then I realized with a flash of hot embarrassment, as if Id been caught stealing a piece of gum from my moms purse, that they were all looking at me. Screaming at me.

I can feel that realization clicking into place all over again. Oh.

Surely and suddenly, I understood: The commotion was my fault. But how? Where was my brother, who had been playing next to me a moment ago? Where were my mom and my grandmother, who had just that morning unfolded two rusty metal and canvas lounge chairs to claim our familys plot in the sand?

Half the strangers on shore held up their hands at me like stop in the name of love. Others were sweeping their arms out and back, miming the motion of scooping me out of the water. Some were jabbing their fingers in the air. What were they saying? What had I done? What was I supposed to do?

I ranor did the closest thing a child can do to running through moving water, high-stepping at double speed through the low waves to the hard-packed wet shore and into the softer white sand that gave way beneath my feet, slowing me down.

I didnt stop running until I found our chairs, where my brother stood open-mouthed and the adults sat up, craning their necks to look behind me. I fell into the sand by my grandmother, pressing my face into the towel draped over her shoulders. What? What? What?

Look. She pointed to the water.

I lifted my face from the towel. To my relief, no one was looking at me anymore. Every beachgoers face was aimed at the water and turning slowly to the right, watching the trash bags float by.

Whoa! my brother shouted.

Everyone but me must have heard the crowds warning. Everyone but me must have seen them coming, a school of creatures known to be docile only as long as theyre not provoked or stepped on. Everyone but me must have seen the barbed, poisonous tails whipping around my ankles as I danced and sang, unaware, in the shallow surf.

I ran through stingrays, I whispered.

When I heard the words out loud, I began to cry so hard I could barely breathe.