He leads the way into the bedroom. “In here.”

The moment I cross the threshold, my breath catches. My face is a foot away from a shimmering oak branch. Gazing upward, I see the jagged hole in the roof, another thick branch halfway in, and a torrent of rainwater blasting through the opening. A wad of shingles lies on top of Tommy’s bed.

At first, I can’t say anything. We look at each other, and his manic thrill jumps the divide, setting off a tingle along my spine.

“Cool, huh?” he says.

“You were in bed when this happened?”

His head shakes. “I heard this loud crack – must have been the trunk snapping or something – and my body just took over. I reached the door right when it hit.”

I run the light over him again, hardly believing he came through this unscathed, but there’s not a scratch on him. He starts jogging in place, like he’s cold, or maybe brimming with nervous energy.

“Let’s move what we can move,” I say, “then you can spend the 286 rest of the night in the house.”

“Maybe I’ll sack out on the couch. I kind of don’t want to leave.”

“You’re leaving,” I say. “Don’t even think about staying up here.”

We leave the furniture in place – the bed and dresser – just taking the drawers out. Everything from the closet ends up on the living room couch. When we’re finished, I go outside for a look at the damage. The tree came from next door, smashing the far side of the garage, which is why I couldn’t see anything from my bedroom window.

Seeing a tree like that upended, a hundred years thick, its earth-clotted roots naked to the rain, at first I can’t take my eyes off it. It didn’t break so much as it was uprooted, leaving a muddy crater rimmed with St. Augustine grass, super green in the Fenix light, as if the storm brought all its chlorophyll to the surface, the way grass might look if it could blush.

Through the roots and down the length of the trunk the whole tree seems intact. Severed power lines crisscross the horizontal canopy as if, once it began to teeter, the tree reached out and tried to steady itself, grabbing hold of the fragile cables, bringing them down with it. I’ve seen branches break off in high wind and even trunks split by lightning, but never anything like this. One of the lines lies dormant in the neighbor’s yard. Another snakes across the garage roof. I’m happy all the sudden that the power’s out.

To be on the safe side, I back the cars out of the garage and move the essentials – our rarely used bicycles, the generator, the fuel and water, my tools – onto the back deck. With the weight of that oak still resting on the roof, there’s no point in taking chances. Back inside, I throw some sheets on one of the couches, but Tommy’s too wired for sleep. He darts through the house, front windows to back, like he’s rooting for more damage and doesn’t want to miss anything.

Giving up on sleep, I rummage through the fridge, which already feels lukewarm. We’ll need to get the generator started pretty soon. But for now I grab a bottle of still-cool water and imagine the phone call I’ll have to make later today.

The bad news, Charlotte, is that your garage has a new skylight. The good news is, your tenant’s going to need a new place to live.

In her mind, it’ll seem like a fair trade.

Just after daybreak, the empty water bottle still resting on my chest, I hear Tommy above me and open my eyes. I installed myself in a chair, not meaning to nod off. He hunches over, speaking in a whisper.

“Hey, Mr. March. The cops are outside.”

“The cops?”

“There’s one coming up to the door, and another one in the car.”

He’s talking like we might be in trouble with the law, like maybe it’s time to bolt out the back. I pry myself out of the chair, the bottle dropping to the floor. I peer through the front window, then open the door. Sergeant Nix is shaking off his rain poncho on the porch. He looks up, smiling awkwardly.

“How ’bout you get yourself dressed and take a little ride with me?” he says.

“What’s the deal?”

He glances back to the patrol cruiser on the curb. “I’m bending the rules as it is, but I figure I owe you after the other day.” His eyes drop to the bandage half-exposed by my shorts.

“Yes, you do,” I say, patting his arm. “Give me five minutes.”

My mind racing with possibilities, I head up the stairs, ignoring Tommy’s whispered questions. I pull on a pair of cargo pants, a black T-shirt, and a lightweight raincoat to keep my gear dry, then I’m out the front door, trailing Nix, who opens the back of the cruiser for me, ushering me in with an ironic bow.

“This is Webb.” He motions to the uniform behind the wheel.

Webb takes us down Durham, across Interstate 10 and the Allen Parkway, until it becomes Shepherd. Though the storm has passed, the wind gusts remain strong enough to lift the wiper blades off the glass. Condensation spider-webs the edge of the windows. We turn on West Gray, passing between the two Starbucks locations that sit like Scylla and Charybdis on either side of the street. Onto Montrose, heading back to the neighborhood where I left Carter Robb, near Joe Thomson’s Morgan Street studio.

Nix gives verbal directions at every intersection, but Webb anticipates most commands, leading me to suspect that we’re returning to someplace they’ve just come from.

We drive the rain-slick streets, avoiding side turns where water’s risen higher than the road, and the power lines snapped free and coiled through severed branches. As the sun rises, we see a few people emerging from shelter for their first look at what the hurricane has done.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” I ask.

Nix shakes his head. “I’m gonna show you.”

Ahead, a side road is blocked off by a parked hpd cruiser. Nix tells Webb to turn and then to pull to the curb. Soon he’s out the door, advancing toward some debris strewn across the road, motioning for me to follow. A derelict building off to the right has come apart under the pressure of wind, giving up the scraps of plywood that have long sealed its windows and doors. Out of them poured the structure’s long-abandoned contents, mainly soaked boxes and broken-down furniture, a refrigerator door, a lidless cooler with rusty stains inside.

I know these blocks pretty well, and no doubt I’ve passed this building a thousand times before, never taking any particular notice. On the opposite corner, a sleek modern three-level house is going up, or was until the storm knocked a padlocked trailer sideways against the cantilevered porch.

A long spool of plastic sheeting has unwound, too, running across the derelict’s yard and into the street. It snaps like a sail in the wind. As I approach, the plastic glistens, streaked with mud and leaves. Lumps of debris are caught up inside. It makes me think of a distended intestine. The tail end, right across the middle of the road, swells like the body of a python after it’s swallowed something whole.

Nix hunches over the unspooled plastic, lifting corners as he edges along its length toward the swollen end.

He grins. “Nothing like a decomp first thing in the morning.”

The plastic is opaque, the kind of sheeting used on construction sites to seal openings. I kneel beside the swell in the plastic, which is in fact a swaddled corpse. Discolored clothing, an emaciated and withered shape, a brownish husk of a human being, gender indeterminate, age indeterminate. Small enough that it must be a woman, though, or maybe a child.

My eyes trace the long spool of plastic back to its source, the derelict building, yet another square two-story structure in brown brick, a former business or maybe a duplex but now just a rotted shell waiting to be rehabbed or more likely demolished. Ten blocks or so east of Montrose, ten blocks or so north of Westheimer, tucked into a neighborhood without sidewalks where time-blackened bungalows sit cheek by jowl with the kind of glass and steel architecture projects going up across the street. The yard is overgrown, the windows boarded up, the doors inaccessible, a place so forgotten its plywood coverings aren’t even tagged by spray paint.