The Signature of All Things

earth between the two heavens until the sun rose and all the stars vanished from both the sky and the sea, but still nobody told her anything.
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    T hen Christmas came, and with it the rainy season. The rain brought relief from the infernal heat, but it also brought snails of amazing size, and damp patches of mold that grew in the folds of Alma’s increasingly shabbyskirts. The black sand beach of Matavai Bay grew sodden as pudding. Drenching rainstorms kept Alma in her house all day, where she could scarcely hear her own thoughts over the thundering water on her roof. Nature increasingly took over her tiny living space. The lizard population in Alma’s ceiling tripled overnight—a near-biblical pestilence—and they left thick drops of excrement and of half-digested insects throughout the fare . The one shoe that Alma had left in the world sprouted mushrooms within its festering depths. She hung her bunches of bananas from the rafters, to keep wet and insistent rats from absconding with them.
    Roger the dog showed up one night, as per his usual evening patrol, and then stayed for days; he simply did not have the heart to face down the rain. Alma wished he would take on the rats, but he did not seem to have the heart for that, either. Roger would still not allow Alma to feed him by hand without snapping at her, but he would now sometimes share her food if she put it on the floor for him and turned her back. Sometimes he permitted her to stroke his head while he dozed.
    Storms came in irregularly timed onslaughts. One could hear the storms building from far across the sea—steady roaring gales from the southwest that grew louder and louder, like an oncoming train. If the storm promised to be unusually severe, sea urchins would crawl out of the bay, seeking higher, safer ground. Sometimes they took shelter in Alma’s house: another reason to watch where she stepped. Rain came like a spray of arrows. The river at the other end of the beach churned with mud, and the surface of the bay boiled and spat. As the storm grew heavier, Alma would watch as her world closed in on her. Fog and darkness would approach from the sea. First the horizon would disappear, then the island of Moorea in the distance would vanish, then the reef was gone, then the beach, and then she and Roger would be all alone in the mist. The world was now as small as Alma’s tiny and not particularly waterproof house. The wind blew sideways, the thunder bellowed frightfully, and the rain attacked with full force.
    Then the rain would stop for a spell and the blistering sun would return—sudden, brilliant, stunning—though never long enough that Alma could properly dry out her sleeping pallet. Steam rose off the sand in billowing waves. Currents of humid wind swept down the mountainside. The air across the beach snapped and shimmied, like a bedsheet shaken out—asthough the beach itself were shaking off the violence that had just been visited upon it. Then a humid calm would prevail, for a few hours or a few days, until another storm rolled in.
    These were days to miss a library and a vast, dry, warm mansion. Alma might have fallen into terrible despair during the rainy season in Tahiti, but for one delightful discovery: the children of Matavai Bay loved the rain. The Hiro contingent loved it most of all—and why wouldn’t they? For this was the season of mudslides and puddle-splashing and dangerous rides through the wild torrential currents of the now-swollen river. The five little boys turned into five otters, not merely undaunted by the wet, but delighted by it. All the indolence they had demonstrated during the hot and dry season of cravings was now washed away, replaced by vivid, sudden life . The Hiro contingent were like mosses, Alma realized; they might dry out and go limp in the heat, but they could be revived instantly by a good soaking. Resurrection engines themselves, were these extraordinary children! They had such purpose and vigor and ebullience as they sprang back to action in this newly soaked world that it caused Alma to think back to her own childhood. The rain and mud had never stopped her from exploring, either. This recollection raised a sharp and sudden question: So why was she cowering inside her house now?She had never avoided inclement weather as a girl, so why avoid it now, as an adult? If there was no place to shelter on this island where a person could stay dry, then why not simply get wet? This question provoked