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Humidifying: Excercise in Character and Situation


My middle daughter is leaking out of every pore in her body. She's steaming because she's running a fever, and the entire bedroom is hazy. When I roll her over so she can breathe, and she attempts to speak, it's just gurgling. (Later, when she becomes a hurricane and I stop chasing her, I gurgle water, attempting to make every possible sound to try and decode what my daughter might have said.)
Before I close the door and call the doctor, my daughter might be crying, though I can't tell because of all the water, but she looks oddly peaceful, and the door doesn't close easily because the carpet has curled up on account of a small stream of water beginning from the bed of her fingernail on the ring finger of her left hand. The next day, my daughter is a Category 2 hurricane, knocking down every stalk of immature corn in the tri-county area. I deduce that she escaped through the tiniest crack from where I had attempted to close the window the night before. She vaporized int oa cloud before that, of course, and then she met the necessary atmospheric conditions to become a hurricane.

The meteorologists have never seen anything quite like this. Doreen, my girlfriend and sometimes fiancee, walks to my house with difficulty, and says upon entering,"your daughter" but doesn't finish the statement because at that moment the eye passed over us. Doreen looks at me and I look at Doreen and we probably should have kissed. We pile into the pickup, the kids in the back, the youngest on Doreen's lap, and we follow the eye for miles, until finally Doreen tells me that being in the eye for so long is like being in the secret place that every woman has. I look to my oldest daughter for confirmation, remembering her awkwardness, and she is too busy looking at the rain.

We stop the pickup and let the storm overtake us as we watch the path of sunshine move into the distance and then disappear over the only hill in the county.Then it starts to rain again. My daughter becomes a Category 3 on day 3. Scientists say this is because of all the heated pools that she is sucking up, but the experts are just grasping at straws. My daughter as moved forty-five miles; and, after each one, we comb through yards and fields and streams to look for pieces of her. Once, we find a fingernail, and another time we find a 7-carat diamond, but these belong to other people.

We decide to set up base camp for a while. One night Doreen sits on my bed in the motel and looks at me in the mirror as I'm gargling and trying to decipher my daughter's last words.After Doreen undresses and I spit out the lukewarm water, we both in, our own way, move on. The hurricane, two days later, swings back around and that night I sit in the long, open hallway of the motel and listen for anything my daughter might be screaming in the wind, but never hear anything, though the oldest said she hears something. I don't believe her.

We track her progress for a while, watching the red lines on the computer trace a line through the Midwest, half-hoping that she is trying to spell something out, but there are only swirls, and I am reminded of a spirograph.

One night, the youngest asks me where she is. A cloud, I say, or Heaven.

The hurricane hunters let me ride in the plane and drop off messages to her, along with scientific instrumentation. I gather letters, report cards, toys, whatever, filling capsule after capsule. Each time I open the hatch, rain flies in, and I imagine that these raindrops are molten parts of her body, a lobe of her liver, perhaps, or a pancreas.

My messages are like the contents of a time capsule, and in a thousand years, an archaeologist might find them: a girl's shoe, a magazine, a Chinese finger trap, and these archaeologists might think that we were very bored, but in reality, I am scared she forgot all of these things once she attained the power and freedom I could never grant her. I drop capsule after capsule until we reach the eye again, and then we turn around, waiting for a message to appear. It never does.

Soon, she veers into Lake Superior, like some animal going to die. That's what the scientists say. The hurricane can't sustain itself off of that cold water, but I stay that she was always the first person in the pool on Memorial Day, when the water is cold and everyone else is scared.

Later, in the motorboat, we scour the lake, finding pike and largemouth bass, cutting them open to look for something, anything of hers, but we only find flotsam floating on the surface: a house; a wig; a bloated body from Peoria; a dog; three wedding rings and a hamster, but nothing nothing nothing of her and nothing or ours.