The Light Pirate

Frida looks back on her life as though she’s studying a blueprint. She recalls her freewheeling childhood on a sailboat with her mother, the scholarships and opportunities she earned after she decided to build a life for herself on land, and the jumbled mess of her current existence with a “man she doesn’t always recognize” (72). She tries to walk from the toolshed to the house, but an “inarguable, indefensible vise-grip pain” seizes her (73).

Upset by the theft his brother committed, Flip tries to exit the trailer. As soon as he opens the door, the boys become aware of how deadly the weather has become. They take in the wind and the rain, convinced that the storm is “a strange and brutal kind of justice for these sins they have just committed” (74). As the boys race homeward, Flip feels like a baby bird, “too small for this world, too new” (75). He recalls a nest of baby birds he once showed to Frida and how they were later devoured by a possum.

Kirby checks the beach because he’s been promising to take his sons there all summer. From the shore, he can see the stone-gray eyewall of the hurricane.