Praying for Sleep

trot forward. Heck followed, feeling the line go taut and Emil pick up the pace.
    What’s going on here?
    The breeze blew over them again and Emil began to run.
    Glancing down at the asphalt, Heck closed his eyes in disgust. “Goddamn! What was I thinking of? Bicycle!”
    Heck commanded Emil to stop, then examined the asphalt and found a tread mark leading unsteadily from the car toward the highway. The tread was very wide; the rider could easily weigh three hundred pounds.
    The surest clue though was Emil, whose nose was in the air. When a dog raises his nose and switches from trailing ground scent to trailing airborne, it’s a good sign that the quarry’s on a bike or motorcycle. They’d probably been upwind of the scent until the breeze a moment ago blew a bit of it back in their direction. Emil’s ears twitched and he doled his weight from the left paw to the right and back again, ready to run.
    Heck was too. Airborne scent is the hardest to track and even a moderate wind will disrupt it. A storm of the sort that was expected would surely obliterate it altogether.
    Strapping the thong over his pistol, he wrapped Emil’s red lead around his left hand.
    “Find, Emil. Find!”
    The hound broke from the starting gate and surged down the road. They were on the trail once again.
     
    What’s different?
    Standing on the edge of the lake not far from the patio, Lis was momentarily disoriented. This place seemed both familiar and foreign. Then she understood why. The lake had risen so high that the shape of the shoreline had changed. What had been a voluptuous outcropping of lawn and reeds was now concave, and a cluster of small rock islands roughly in the shape of the constellation Orion had vanished—completely covered with water.
    She turned back to her labors.
    The two women hadn’t returned to the dam but chose to build the new levee closer to the house, filling and piling sandbags where the culvert met the lawn. Even if the lake were to overflow the dam a line of bags here would, if it held, stop the water from reaching the house. Besides, she decided, they hardly had the time or strength to cart several tons of sand a hundred yards through a rocky culvert slowly filling with water.
    Portia filled the bags and Lis dragged or carried them to their impromptu line of defense. As they worked, Lis glanced occasionally at her sister. The rings and crystal necklace were gone and her delicate hands and short, perfect nails—fiery red—were covered by canvas gloves. In place of the black lace headband was a Boston Red Sox cap.
    Portia lunged energetically with the shovel, absorbed in the task, scooping huge wads of sand and pitching them into bags. Lis, with years of gardening and landscaping behind her, had always assumed herself the stronger of the two. But she saw now that they were, in strength at least, on par. Thanks, she supposed, to the hours Portia spent on health-club treadmills and racquetball courts. Occasionally the young woman would stop, pull off a glove to see what sort of honorable callus she might be developing, then return to the job. Once, as she gazed out into the forest, Portia twined a strand of hair around her finger and slipped an end into her mouth. Lis had seen her do this earlier in the evening—a nervous habit that she’d perhaps developed recently.
    But then, Lis thought, how would I know if she’d picked it up recently or not? She reflected how little she knew of her sister’s life. The girl had for all practical purposes left home at eighteen and rarely returned for any length of time. When she had, it was usually for a single night—a Saturday or Sunday dinner—with her current flame in tow. She even spent the majority of holidays elsewhere—usually with boyfriends, sometimes workmates. A Christmas for two in a far-off inn, however romantic, didn’t appeal much to Lis. During summer breaks from college Portia would travel with girlfriends, or work at internships in the city. When she’d dropped out of school her junior year, the girl had abandoned her Bronxville apartment and moved to Manhattan. Lis was then working at Ridgeton High School and living in a small rental house in Redding. She’d been hoping that after her sister left Sarah Lawrence, the young woman might come back to the area. But no, Portia smilingly deflected the suggestion, as if it were pure craziness. She added that she had to move to New York. It was time for her to “do the city.”
    Lis remembered