THE TIME IN BETWEEN, By David Bergen
Excerpt

The typhoon arrived that night. Ada woke to the sound of rain driving against the windows. Above them, on the rooftop, chairs fell and banged against the washstand. The corrugated tin on the stairwell roof worked loose and flapped for an hour before it broke free and fell like a whirling blade down onto the street. Ada was standing at the window watching the palm trees bend in the wind and she saw the tin roofing fly by and land on the tennis courts in the distance. The power went out and then flickered on and finally cut out completely. Ada woke Jon, her brother, who had returned while she was sleeping, and she held his hand and said, “I’m frightened.”

He sat up and said, “It’s a small storm. Don’t worry.”

She could smell sex on him; sometimes the smell was musty and bleachy but tonight it was sweat and the slightest hint of old saliva. That smell. She stood and walked across the room. “The boats are coming in,” she said. “They know something we ¬don’t. I’ve counted thirty already.”

The wind pulled at the hotel sign and threw it onto the street below.

“Get away from the window,” Jon said. “The glass could fall in.”

She sat at the edge of his bed and he held her hand and they listened. The wind arrived from out of the sky and from across the ocean and it seemed that it would never end, until it slid away, a deceptive and distant howl, and then returned just as quickly, banging against the trees and buildings, and everything loose was pulled into the maelstrom. She wanted it to stop. She began to shiver and even though Jon was beside her she felt very much alone.

“Look at us. We’re so stupid,” she said.

“Here,” Jon said, and he made her lie down and he covered her. He held his hands over her ears and put his thumbs against her eyes until the hollow core of the typhoon descended. And with that awful stillness came the everyday sounds: the clock on the bureau; something, perhaps a rat, moving about on the rooftop; the dry cough of the old man below them; the song of a woman calling again and again.

“It’s gone,” Ada said.

Jon said it would return. She said that the waiting frightened her more than the wind. She said she believed that their father was dead.

Jon was quiet. A siren sounded. The lights flashed across the dark sky and then disappeared.

Excerpted from The Time In Between byDavid Bergen Copyright © 2005 by David Bergen. Excerpted by permission of McClelland & Stewart. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.