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I gave Susan the flashlight, took a candle and forced the door open. Outside it was so still that when I stopped walking the flame of the candle stood up straight. In the distance we could hear the storm everywhere.

The oak had come up by the roots and was leaning on the eaves. The windows were broken on the second floor and the beam of the flashlight gleamed wet inside the rooms, and across the bare beams of the roof. The only sign of the greenhouse was a lighter shade of the siding. We waded around the oak through twigs and pink insulation. Even without the light we would have seen that the roof had lifted from the barn. There stood the barn, black and square, a great leaky clapboard cistern.

"Jesus Christ."

Susan was shining the light into the orchard. The trees had unfolded from the middle, and their limbs and trunks were lying open like the petals of enormous lilies, stretching beyond the beam. We walked among them until one crown met another and blocked our path. Apples were lying everywhere. The air was sweet with split wood and the sweetness of the apples.

All summer she and I had fought about whether to get a new truck. We'd fought in the winter, and the summer before, and the winter before that. We'd disagreed about the source of condensation in the greenhouse, and whether to have gravel put on the driveway or do it ourselves. She said if I didn't throw out that junk in the barn she'd hire someone. I said that I thought our name ("Strawberry Fields") made people think we were flakes, and who wants to buy produce from flakes? She decided to sleep on the couch. I said that if she didn't bring in some serious pesticide she'd lose the whole damn orchard. Now she was shining the flashlight on the breaks of the trees, and the wood riddled with cavities.

"I guess you were right," she said.

We walked from tree to tree looking at the living worms and the yellow splinters of the wood.

"It doesn't matter," I said.

"No," she said. "It doesn't matter."

She turned and looked up at me then, smiling, and I didn't know why, but had to smile too. My God, I thought, she's young still! We were both still young, gray hair and liver spots and all. Maybe it was the candlelight, but when she smiled she looked like the wild happy girl I'd half forgotten.

There were lights in the north, a flashing on the horizon as of dry lightning, where the storm must have reached the island.

"Are you staying?" she said abruptly.

"What about you?"

"I asked first."

I took a breath. "I don't want to stay." I couldn't look at her. "I don't think I'm staying."

"No." She pointed the flashlight at the sky. "Look how clear!"

The sky was shimmering, a seafloor strewn with white pebbles. We strolled a little further through the trees. She was humming under her breath.

"I'm going to B.C.," she said. "I know I should have told you sooner. It's mostly arranged. But I-."

She fell silent, and between us hovered the conversation as it would have passed the day before, that very afternoon: the recrimations, the declarations, the explanations and the tears. How could her words be so casual? How could I be smiling like this?

"B.C.," I said. "What if I want to go to B.C.?" She laughed; and that was all. A whispering crossed the trees and snuffed out the candle.

I took her hand as we walked back. Her hands were always cool, even in summer, even when she was damp with sweat. The wind was assaulting the house from the front, and we stooped into it. Part of a sign, ields Far, lay sprawled across the driveway. There would be more destruction - let there be more! I thought. Let our work be wiped from the earth. At least nothing, I knew, would be as bad now as it had been before.