Carin Clevidence is the author of the novel The House on Salt Hay Road. Her short stories have appeared in Story, the Indiana Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and FiveChapters.com, and her nonfiction in Grand Tour, Fiction Writers Review, and the Asahi Weekly of Japan. A recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, she has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, as well as residencies at Yaddo and the Hermitage. She lives in Massachusetts with her two children and is currently at work on her second novel.

They stepped out of the door and the wind howled around them with a sound like that of a train going past. Off the porch, to the west, the surf ran in a wide torrent, awash with wreckage from the houses on the dunes. Crouching low to the sand, they set off east, away from the new inlet. Clayton walked in the lead. The woman followed haltingly, carrying the boy on her back. As they scrambled over the hillocks of sand Clayton saw a flock of small birds, chipping sparrows he thought, huddled in the lee. The birds squatted close to the ground in a wedge-shaped formation, their beaks facing into the wind. As Clayton and the woman drew near, the birds rose in alarm, and the wind whisked them away like specks of dust.

The woman, burdened with her son, began to lag behind. Clayton forced himself to wait. He was anxious to get to the bay's edge and angry with himself for not insisting they leave the house earlier. The woman was struggling through the beach plum, which caught at her boots. Clayton went back and signaled that he could take the boy. But the child clung to his mother, his arms clamped around her neck.

"Just for a minute, Eddie," the woman pleaded, raising her voice. "So Mama can rest."

The child closed his eyes and held on with a death grip, shaking his head so violently it looked like he was having convulsions. The woman lowered her chin and struggled on with the boy on her back.

As they neared the bay, the bridge came fully into view. It was standing, Clayton saw with relief, though the span seemed to sway in the wind. But it looked farther away than he'd imagined. Beside him the woman had collapsed on her knees and was holding the boy in her arms now, sheltering him from the flying sand. Clayton looked back along the bay toward the Gilpin's house. It was still there, though part of the porch had disappeared. Behind it, where the Everitt's house had been, the ocean was running headlong into the bay. Between the inlet and where they stood, Clayton saw a dock, a small white rowboat tied on the leeward side. The boat would just fit the three of them, he thought. He pulled at the woman's shoulder and shouted, "This way."

As they approached the dock, Clayton saw it shudder. The rowboat was tied fore and aft, stretched out like a man on the rack. Clayton strained to pull the boat in by the painter and cleat it closer.

"Get in," he yelled to the woman. He helped her free herself from her son's arms. The boy screamed and writhed. "Hold on," Clayton shouted uselessly. "Just a minute."