Insulation

It rained every day that August, like clockwork, at the same time,” Ophelia says in her sweet voice, just a whisper over the pattering water hitting the walls of the rickety house.

The window was open a crack and the sound echoed against the dark vinyl floor. It had not rained often after the devastating hurricanes in October.

Her outspoken thoughts made light through the grooves of the glass plates on the small wooden table. She had decorated the table with lavish arrangements of a new recipe, her favorite, injera-breaded and fried Spanish octopus.

The godfather indulged in each bite. He didn’t take the time to look all the way up, but smiled at the sound of her.

“I remember that,” he said.

Then the silence between them was like goodness.

Ophelia remembers it this way. The rain. The dark floor. The glass plates. His smile while he ate the strange food she made him. Memory preserved certain things with impossible detail and let other things disappear.

She remembered how the rain in August always seemed to come at the same time she had to go to work. She drove a motorcycle then and would stay wet for hours some days.

Deep in her mind she trailed thoughts from the memories of the rain. She thought of the distance between herself and her family. They lived across the country. They did not support her in the ways she wished they would and sometimes caused her grief. Demons hid behind the layers of her past life.

Ophelia was not always able to be happy, even inside happiness.

The thoughts arose every day at least once, interlacing her newest identity with the old self and the choices she once made. She was still young, only a girl of twenty-three. She did not completely know what she wanted, and her obsession with counting calories did not always help her build relationships. Ophelia liked to think about herself on a pedestal sometimes. It made her feel less pinned out of place. She knew she was different from her peers.

The godfather was a fifty-one year old  handyman with a bald head and a sleeve tattoo. He was a special blessing for Ophelia.

They met through a mutual friend’s crystal business based out of Madagascar. After their casual exchange, Ophelia brought him to the gym through her personal fitness training business. The godfather wanted to lose weight. He was a hard worker and had a tender, muscular body from years of laborious work. Mostly, he needed help with his diet.

Ophelia was giddy that the godfather would eat the strange, healthy food she cooked. Somehow, feeding him brought her more satiety too.

She knew her constant seeking for exercise and diet information came with the cost of unmindful body awareness. There had been countless days when an unsatisfied appetite, strange brain chemistry and painful emotions overcame her discipline. She struggled with binge eating, in private, of course.

Ophelia took a breath and another bite, making sure to acknowledge the divine texture. Using intention, she hoped the octopus would provide her more energy and insight about her surroundings.

Octopuses were good at doing that with their tentacles.

She considered herself a reasonably sensitive and unique person. She knew this recipe would enhance her abilities and character.

“I think the rain every day was better than the three hurricanes we had in the last three weeks,” the godfather said, bringing her back to the weather.

In Florida, hurricanes had destroyed islands along the Gulf of Mexico and left houses flooded and moldy. The godfather owned a restoration company. His business had been built out of disaster.

“Yes, but we wouldn’t have jobs without them,” Ophelia replied with gratitude.

He had started the restoration company during the hurricanes because he had a big heart and knew the community needed help. He offered Ophelia work, granting her a job that allowed her own dreams to flourish.

They became very close over weeks of hard demolition on multiple projects. Some homes had flooded four feet high. Ceilings leaked. Walls were covered with mold, and wet insulation hid inside of them.

Ophelia learned so many things in a short time.

She had spent the year before the restoration company praying, wishing and waiting for opportunities to find her in Florida. She searched constantly for some deeper purpose that could fulfill both her skills and the strange dream life she imagined for herself.

The rain outside was still pounding.

She turned the inner voice in her head toward gratitude—for her friends, for the godfather, for the new memories.

The humid environment forcefully grew blooms of joy in her heart. Florida weather could grow just about anything.

And finally, for the first time in Ophelia’s life, she felt stable.

It was strange how quickly happiness could become a memory.

By December, the debris had begun disappearing from the roads, although evidence of the storms remained everywhere. Houses stood open to the air where drywall had been ripped away. Mountains of ruined furniture still appeared along curbs. The smell of damp wood and old water remained long after the water itself disappeared.

The godfather stayed busy.

There was always another house.

Another person.

Another problem he somehow made his own.

Lana was one of those people.

She had two children and a life that had rarely allowed her to stand still for long. There had been strip bars, difficult men, unstable homes and years spent surviving circumstances that seemed to multiply as quickly as she escaped them.

The godfather had known her long enough to become the godfather of her children, too.

With him, that title meant something.

When flooding left Lana and the children without a place to stay, he gave them an RV.

It wasn’t beautiful, but it was dry.

For a while, dry was enough.

Then they needed somewhere to put it.

Eventually, they found a temporary answer at one of the demolition properties. The house could hardly still be called a house. It had been stripped bare in places. Open walls exposed framing, wires and insulation. The electrical system was questionable, and it certainly wasn’t somewhere a mother and two children were supposed to make a home.

But they needed electricity.

Temporary was better than nowhere.

The day before New Year’s Eve, the godfather came to see Ophelia.

Something was wrong.

Anger looked strange on him.

Ophelia had watched him become irritated with broken equipment, exhausted by impossible jobs and frustrated with people who didn’t show up when they promised. But she had never really seen him like this.

He was angry with Lana.

There had been fighting. Money. Demands. He felt manipulated and used.

Ophelia listened to him.

She didn’t have anything intelligent or profound to say that could rearrange the situation for him.

Sometimes love was the only language she knew when words failed.

Before he left, she wrapped her arms around him.

“I love you,” she said.

Then she let go.

She did not know she was saying goodbye.

New Year’s Eve arrived with the strange excitement of endings.

The godfather went with Lana to the demolition house to finish setting up the RV.

The children needed electricity.

There were wires to connect and another problem requiring his hands.

At some point, Lana couldn’t find him.

Hours passed.

He had disappeared.

That was the word everyone kept using.

Disappeared.

Later, Ophelia would hate that word.

The godfather wasn’t a man who disappeared.

He was the man people called when everyone else did.

Afternoon became evening. Calls went unanswered. Nobody seemed to know where he had gone.

Eventually, Tiffy, another crew member, came to the property to look for him.

She searched the unfinished house.

Empty rooms opened into other empty rooms. Torn walls exposed the hidden anatomy of the building: wood, pipes, electrical lines and insulation.

She called for him.

Nothing.

Then she looked toward the attic.

The godfather was there.

He had never left the house.

He had been above them.

Electricity had taken him while he was working.

There were details afterward that Ophelia could never arrange correctly inside her mind.

The breaker had been on.

That bothered her.

The godfather knew houses. He knew construction. His hands carried years of understanding about the things hidden behind walls. He knew what could cut a man, crush him, burn him or kill him.

He knew electricity.

So why was the breaker on?

Ophelia searched for explanations because explanations were easier to live with than questions.

Maybe he was tired.

Maybe the wiring was worse than anyone understood.

Maybe something changed without him knowing.

Maybe a man who knew better still made one irreversible mistake.

She knew all of those things were possible.

Still, another thing remained in her mind.

Lana had been there.

They had gone to the property together, yet for hours the godfather was treated as though he had disappeared.

Ophelia couldn’t understand how someone could disappear from a place without leaving it.

She didn’t know what happened during those hours. She didn’t know what happened in the minutes before electricity entered his body.

She couldn’t turn suspicion into truth simply because grief wanted an explanation.

So the questions remained questions.

The new year came anyway.

Somewhere, fireworks exploded.

People counted backward from ten.

Champagne bottles opened. Strangers kissed each other. Phones filled with messages about fresh starts and new beginnings.

And the godfather was dead inside a house already being torn apart.

Ophelia hated that.

The entire world had changed, but midnight still arrived exactly when it was supposed to.

She thought about the octopus.

She thought about the rain hitting the open window.

She thought about flooded houses and moldy walls and ripping wet insulation out beneath the Florida heat.

She remembered laughing while filthy and exhausted.

She remembered how naturally the godfather existed beside her, as though there had never been any reason to imagine that one day he wouldn’t.

Most of all, she remembered the day before.

His anger.

His face.

Her arms around him.

“I love you.”

Three ordinary words had unknowingly become a goodbye.

For a long time, Ophelia tortured herself with the mathematics of death.

If he had stayed with her five minutes longer.

If she had asked another question.

If Lana had found somewhere else for the RV.

If the hurricanes had never come.

If the house had never flooded.

If the breaker had been off.

If.

If.

If.

She could construct an entire universe out of that word.

None of those universes brought him back.

Afterward, Ophelia noticed insulation everywhere.

Pink fiberglass hanging from an opened wall could stop her in the middle of a job.

Before the godfather, she barely thought about what lived inside walls. A house simply stood. Drywall concealed everything required to keep the people inside protected from whatever existed outside.

Then the hurricanes came and tore that illusion apart.

Ophelia learned that walls had bodies.

Layers.

Hidden damage.

Rot could spread where nobody saw it.

Insulation could become soaked and hold water long after the surface appeared dry. Mold could grow behind a wall that looked perfectly fine from inside the room.

People were not so different.

Ophelia had spent years constructing herself in layers.

Discipline.

Beauty.

Food.

Work.

Men.

Fitness.

Strangeness.

Pride.

She packed them tightly around the frightened parts of herself and called the structure a person.

The godfather had somehow seen through it.

He ate the strange food.

He listened to the strange ideas.

He worked beside her.

He never required Ophelia to become ordinary before he could love her.

Maybe that was why losing him felt less like losing a friend and more like having a wall ripped open.

Everything hidden behind it became exposed.

Grief entered wherever it wanted.

But so did light.

The godfather had not saved Ophelia.

He had simply stood beside her during a short piece of her life when she finally felt safe enough to understand that she could survive.

Maybe that was what remained when someone died.

Not their ability to keep protecting you, but the strange realization that some piece of their protection had already become part of you.

Outside, rain began tapping against the house.

Ophelia listened.

For a moment, she could almost hear his fork touching the grooves of the glass plate.

She saw the dark vinyl floor.

The open window.

The ridiculous Spanish octopus she had spent hours cooking because somewhere in her strange mind she believed its tentacles might give them insight.

And his smile.

“I remember that.”

Now she understood those words differently.

Once, rain had meant flooding.

Then demolition.

Then work.

Then happiness.

Then him.

Now it meant all of those things at once.

Ophelia closed her eyes and listened without deciding whether the rain was beautiful or sad.

Some things were both.

The rain kept falling.

And somewhere inside the walls, unseen but still holding against the weather, was the insulation.