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generations.
    “We’ll have to tough it out!” Jessamine said.
    Jessamine’s aged face was brightly lit by a bolt of lightning. Augusta barely noticed her own white hair, sagging neck, and puckered dimples, but she knew time was wearing on because of Jessamine, her lids droopy and creased, her face sagging to a handful of draped skin tucked under her jaw, and arms and legs dotted with liver spots and white spots and pink spots. What were all of these spots? And Jessamine had gotten shorter and more frail—so much so that, instead of dying, Augusta sometimes worried that Jessamine might disappear. Everything seemed to have changed incrementally while Augusta wasn’t paying attention.
    “I wonder where my girls are!” Earlier, Augusta had pulled out a stack of records, filmy with dust, in the hope of doing a little conducting. She’d even found an old Hector Berlioz record that had stood out to her for reasons she couldn’t name.
    “Esme has called many times,” Jessamine said.
    “No, no,” Augusta muttered. She didn’t mean where her grown daughters were at this moment in time. She’d meant it figuratively. Where were the little girls who’d once been her daughters, the girls who—once upon a time—had taken so naturally to conducting storms? She missed her girls, and her daughters would never be able to fulfill
that
longing. The thought scared her, as did the lightning. A bolt cracked so loudly that she felt it in her ribs. This was dangerous. They could die. The governor might be right after all. “Jessamine,” she said, “maybe you should go home to your husband.”
    Jessamine shook her head. “He’s dead.”
    “What?” Augusta said. “When did he pass?” She almost wondered if he’d died in the storm, just now, as if Augusta had missed an urgent call.
    “It’s been six months.”
    Augusta was startled by the news. “Jessamine, I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you—” She was going to ask her why she didn’t share the news but, of course, she knew why. They had boundaries. It was how they’d lasted so long together.
    Jessamine answered the question anyway, letting Augusta off the hook. “There wasn’t a good moment. Plus, this became the place where I didn’t have to deal with it.”
    “He was a good man,” Augusta said, but then realized she had no idea if this was true. She’d never met Jessamine’s husband. “Wasn’t he?”
    Jessamine nodded. “He was a very good man.”
    “I’m so sorry,” Augusta said, and then she felt a twinge of jealousy. Jessamine’s loss in love could be public, could be addressed. Augusta’s own losses had to be kept quiet all these years. Maybe this was why she hadn’t known that Jessamine’s husband was dead; Jessamine couldn’t be honest with Augusta because Augusta could never really share anything with her. It’s strange how the decision to be private affects things you’d never expect.
    And now Augusta felt disoriented. Once upon a time, this room had been nearly empty. Time had filled it up. The accumulation of life and its stuff, but sometimes she wondered if she’d ever really lived.
    “This storm could take us,” Augusta said.
    Jessamine nodded. “Yes, it could. The waves have crested the houses just there,” she said, pointing across the street. “These waves will reach us too, most likely.”
    The two women had no idea how bad things were—that escalators would start pooling, subways flooding, that taxis would soon bob and knock together in newly formed rivers in Lower Manhattan. Block after block had already gone dark. Ground Zero would turn into a series of waterfalls. Ambulances were lining up for evacuations. Oxygen supplies were going dead, knocked out with the power. Sudden tidal pools would soon blast people into glass-front stores.
    A seven-hundred-ton tanker, unmoored, unstaffed, floated toward Staten Island.
    Waves from the East River crashed against the acrylic walls that encased Jane’s Carousel, which from afar