The Light Pirate

Kirby reflects on how his long work schedule caused his relationship with his sons and his ex-wife, Chole, to deteriorate. He met Frida soon after the divorce, and he knows that his sons’ antagonistic stance toward her is his fault. Early in their relationship, he felt that he and Frida were helping one another grow and heal, but now he feels as though they’re falling apart. He views Frida’s anxiety over the coming storm as a regression. Lucas helps Kirby retrieve plywood window coverings from under the porch. Kirby reassures his son that the coming storm is only a little wind and rain. Frida overhears, and her “puckered and tearful” (24) face shames Kirby. He snaps at Lucas instead of giving her the apology he knows she deserves.

Twelve-year-old Lucas and eight-year-old Flip are only with Kirby and Frida for weekends, summers, and some holidays. They resent Frida because she has abundant time with their father while they are ravenous for his attention, “fed on scraps when he had the time and energy to play” (25). The boys pick at the dinner Frida prepared, and Kirby orders them to eat. Frida knows that this sort of forced compliance will only make her stepsons dislike her more. Lucas and Flip see Frida as “an interloper, another heart for Kirby to feed, a reason the boys have less than they used to” (26), and they see her unborn child as a formidable rival for their father’s love.

Frida adds the leftovers from dinner to the myriad containers in the fridge, “a constellation of food that no one wanted the first time” (27). Being solely responsible for the meals of four people and having her efforts go unappreciated is souring her love of cooking. She criticizes Kirby because he hasn’t put up the window coverings yet, and he swears and tells her that he’ll take care of it in the morning. Frida grew up sailing from island to island with her mother, Joy, and it bothers her that Kirby doesn’t seem to place any stock in the fact that she is also an expert when it comes to weather. Kirby tries to deescalate the fight, and a tearful Frida lets him hold her while she frets about the storm-ravaged future that awaits their baby. She whispers that she’s scared, and her husband “makes everything so much worse” by telling her, “Don’t be” (29).

The house’s power goes out in the middle of the night, and Kirby gets out of bed and screws the plywood window coverings into place. He wishes that erasing his wife’s worries was as simple and straightforward as this task, but he knows that’s unfair of him. Lucas and Flip come outside to see what their father is doing, and they happily assist him with the window coverings. Kirby thinks of Frida—“the best friend he’s ever had” (32)—and their unborn child, and he resolves to be “whatever this besieged family needs from him” (32).

Frida lies awake in the stuffy bedroom and listens to her husband and her stepsons barricade the windows. She feels as though she may never recover if Kirby doesn’t listen to her or “let her exist in this fear completely and without apology” (34). She ponders the possibility that this crushing sense of foreboding is a pregnancy symptom and wishes that she had women friends in Florida she could talk to.

In his 15 years as a lineman, Kirby has brought power back to areas struck by blizzards, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The most dispiriting assignment he ever worked was in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The city’s entire electrical grid needed to be replaced, and he knew that the United States government “had left this place to drown and sent men like him to pretend they’d done all they could” (38).

Kirby makes breakfast for Lucas and Flip, unaware of how precious these moments are to them. He jots down a list of tasks that he intends to complete for Frida and puts it on the fridge. His foreman calls him into work, and he tells the boys to let Frida sleep. Kirby leaves the house, not realizing that he will soon wish that he’d taken the time to hug his sons goodbye or “caress their soft, sleep-worn heads” (39).

Kirby leaves for work without kissing Frida goodbye, and neither of the boys returns her greeting when she wishes them a good morning. She dreads the thought of being cooped up inside for days with two “little boys who hate her” (41). Her imagination conjures up a vision of her life if she’d returned to Houston and finished her master’s degree in architecture, a daydream in which her “body is her own and her potential is enormous” (41). Frida sees the note that Kirby wrote and thinks it is a list of tasks he expects her to complete before his return.

One of Kirby’s coworkers informs him that the hurricane has been upgraded to Category Four and is headed right for them. Kirby disconnects a downed power line lying on the road, “a hot, sparking snake slapping against the pavement” (45). While Kirby replaces the line, he thinks about how hurricanes have become far more powerful in the past few years and how the oncoming storm will likely render this morning’s work futile.

When the power comes back on, Frida busies herself with the list of tasks that Kirby left, even though she is starting to have contractions. The despondent woman remembers how lost and dazed she felt as she walked through San Juan after Hurricane Poppy reduced the city to a “strange puzzle” made of “[p]ieces of road, pieces of buildings, pieces of vehicles” (49). She recalls seeing the solid, efficient Kirby for the first time and realizing that he would become important to her. As another contraction pains her, she thinks, “It isn’t time. We aren’t ready” (50).

Frida tells the boys that she is going to lie down and asks them to stay inside. Once she’s out of sight, Lucas badgers his younger brother into going to a nearby trailer park with him. Flip, who is secretly starting to like Frida, reluctantly agrees. The park is abandoned, and Lucas goes inside an unlocked trailer. Flip, who is more attuned to the weather than his older brother, feels “a warning prickling against his skin” (55), but Lucas ignores him when he says they should leave.

As Kirby drives home, he takes in the worsening weather and feels ashamed that he didn’t take Frida’s fears seriously. He reflects on how catastrophic weather, political coups, poverty, despair, and humanitarian crises are ravaging the world, and he tearfully realizes that all Frida has been asking of him is a “shared understanding of everything that is askew” (57). When Kirby returns home, he sees that the boys are gone and informs Frida of this. He declines her offer to help and ignores her when she calls to him to wait.

Fear of the harm the hurricane could wreak on her family causes Frida to gain a newfound appreciation for her husband, her stepsons, and her baby. She braves the driving wind to check the shed even though she knows the boys aren’t hiding there. Both the contractions and her panic agonize her, and she realizes that she has “so much to lose” (63).

As the rain and wind batter the trailer, Lucas insists on staying. The more that Flip appeals to his older brother’s conscience and common sense, the more stubborn Lucas becomes as if compelled by “some primal urge to assert dominance, to insist upon the corruption of his younger brother” (66). He steals some cash from a drawer after Flip tells him to put the money back. Flip shrinks in on himself, wanting nothing more than to return home and for his brother to stop acting like a bully.

The local high school’s auditorium has been converted into an emergency shelter, and Kirby goes there in the hope of finding his sons. The boys aren’t present, but a man from the Emergency Operations Center puts out an alert for Kirby. The man’s calm, empty optimism rattles Kirby, and he realizes that he’s been giving Frida the same kinds of pat, unsatisfying answers. Kirby resumes his desperate search.