by Lisa Wingate
I don’t say it, though. She won’t hear me anyway, and I’m so ragged right now, I don’t have any more energy for arguing. Instead, I take the phone outside so I can call Robert and tell him I’ve decided to stay for a hurricane.
I catch him in the office, and I know he’s busy or he wouldn’t be working on a Sunday. Aunt Sandy’s cordless-phone battery is low, so I should make it quick, but there’s a part of me that yearns for some form of normalcy, for a touchstone. I want to run through the list of kid issues: Micah’s calculus-teacher problem, Jessica’s cheerleader tiffs, signing up for another SAT test.
I want to talk. Just talk about all the normal concerns. Pretend there are no such things as storms and sad ends to troubling missing-persons cases.
“What’s up?” he asks. I’ve let the line hang too long.
“Well, there’s been a little hitch in my plans. . . .” I start into the saga of my aunt’s health concerns, my mother’s insistence on staying, and the fact that I’m afraid to leave them here alone. I downplay the hurricane reports, basically intimating that there’s no chance it will actually hit full force here. “Just a lot of rain and thunder, and maybe flooding in low-lying areas, but Sandy’s house is up high and fortified, so it shouldn’t be any problem.”
Robert is distracted but sympathetic. “Sounds like the O’Bannion commotion continues,” he says in a tone that indicates he doesn’t want the details or have time for them right now. Generally he tries to sidestep the family wrangles. “I have to travel early next week. Four days. A test track out in Arizona.”
“I’m sure we’ll be home by then.” I run some quick mental calculations. Next week is seven days away. With any luck, we’ll be through the storm and have convinced my aunt to make a doctor’s appointment by then.
“Be careful on the way back home.” This is Robert’s way of ending the conversation nicely, but also letting me know he has other things to attend to.
I feel issue-creep coming on, and before I can stop myself, I’m unloading a laundry list of questions. Really, I’m just not ready to let go of the lifeline yet. I want Robert to ask for a few more details about Aunt Sandy and the storm, help me make sure I’m doing the right thing by staying here. I want him to act like they miss me at home. “Did Jess get signed up for the SAT test again? You know, I was thinking that really both kids should go even though Micah’s last score was pretty good. Oh, and I think I forgot to tell you—Jess found a leak below her bathroom sink. I stuck a bowl under it, but we better get a plumber in before it springs loose and floods the second story . . .”
“Got it under control,” Robert bites out.
“I wasn’t trying to nag. I was just wondering. You know, I’m nine hundred miles from home, and I’m stuck in the middle of this stupid fight between my mom and my aunt. I’m not there to take care of things at home. I just want a couple minutes of your time to find out what’s going on there.” My voice trembles at the end, but I harden myself against it. There’s no room for a breakdown right now, but there’s a part of me that wants him to pick up on the emotion and ask what’s wrong. I want to tell him everything—the 911 call, Emily’s mother, the wasted minutes . . . everything.
That little girl on the news, I want to say. I took the call. I made assumptions. I botched it.
“If you’re going to leave me in charge, Elizabeth, then let me handle it,” he snaps, and I’m stung.
I stand there gritting my teeth, my lips tightening against the swell of emotion—anger, irritation, disappointment, sadness. Loneliness. When did we get to this point, always brushing by each other in a rush or taking our frustrations out on each other?
He hates his job. I hate what our lives have become. We’re both stretched so thin that neither one of us has a soft place to fall. I wonder again if he’s seeking solace somewhere else. He wouldn’t . . . would he? Robert is one of the most honest people I know, which is why some of the things going on at work drive him crazy. There’s a lot of cutting corners in the auto industry during these times of economic pressure.
“I’m sorry.” He sighs into the phone. “It’s just been a bad day here, and I wasn’t planning on being out of town next week. I’ll miss the homecoming game.”
“Homecoming,” I mutter. “I’d forgotten about homecoming. . . .”
“Are you okay?” This time he seems like he’s really asking. I realize I’ve been wiping my eyes and sniffling.
“Yes . . . yeah . . . fine.” He doesn’t need any extra pressure today. I know how he is when things aren’t going well at work. “I’d better sign off. I’m trying to help Aunt Sandy get the shop closed up before the storm. She’s hoping the water won’t come in this time.”
“Listen, keep in touch.” His note of concern gives me comfort. Then I tell him what Aunt Sandy said—communications could be spotty.
We finish the conversation, and I call into work, explain that I may be off a couple more days than I’d planned. Fortunately, no one else is on vacation right now, so it’s not a problem.
All the bases are covered by the time I go inside to help Aunt Sandy finish up. I do as I’ve been asked. It feels good to have something to occupy my hands, a manageable task. I can save these little glass hummingbirds. They are beautiful things, my aunt’s creations—hummingbirds and flower vines, captured in colored glass and leaded metal.
“There’s one extra.” I hold it up after I’ve filled the box of twenty-four. The straggler dangles from its green ribbon, suspended in flight.
Aunt Sandy smiles at me as she crosses the room. “Must be that one’s for you. We’ll take it home with us, and you can tuck it in your suitcase. Then when you hang him in your window, he’ll be a reminder of an ocean of possibilities.” She spreads her arms like she’s Vanna White offering up a prize package, then looks at the pile of goods in the center of the room and adds, “Although my ocean’s a little bit of a mess right now, sorry. I wish you could see this place on a regular day.”
“Me too.” I’m one half inch from saying, I’ll come visit again, maybe bring the kids after graduation, but I stop myself. We’re supposed to be persuading her to give this place up, after all.
So I follow her from the shop instead.
I help her work the hurricane shutter onto the front door and tap the sliding latches into the brackets with a small hammer. By the time it’s done, we’re both sweating and Aunt Sandy has called her husband an ugly name or two. Uncle George designed and built this special door covering after the last hurricane flooded and decimated the shop. He calls it the floodgate. It is weather-stripped to death around the lower edges, in hopes of preventing water from seeping into the building if it comes up that high. The guys from the surf shop helped Aunt Sandy install the ones on the back door after the hurricane party. It never occurred to her that she and I might test the limits of our strength to put the front floodgate in place today.
When we’re done, she pauses, braces both hands against the doorframe, and scares me half to death by dropping her head forward and wheezing huge breaths.
“Are you okay?” I touch her shoulder before I realize that she’s not having a heart attack. She’s praying.
I close my eyes and bow my head, and a couple things strike me in the darkness of my own mind. I realize how much my aunt loves this place. How much it means to her. Much more than twenty acres of farmland she never uses and probably doesn’t intend to. I’m also struck by the fact that, in the hours since I learned about little Emily, it hasn’t occurred to me to pray. There’s been nothing in my mind but grief and crazy rage. My last prayers went unanswered, after all. Emily didn’t run through the trees to a rescuer. She wasn’t delivered safely home.
I try to force myself to offer up words for her family, to plead that, in her last moments, she wasn’t terrified and alone and cold. But all I find myself doing is reliving what those last hours may have been like—a stranger speeding away with her in the car while I sent the first responders in the wrong direction.
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br /> “Let’s go.” Aunt Sandy is all business again. We return to the Jeep, and instead of going home, we make the rounds, as she calls it. We visit the other shopkeepers. We check on the homes of friends who have evacuated. We canvass neighborhoods and ensure that the elderly women from the Sunday school class have gone to relatives’ homes or that they at least have a caretaker staying with them.
We work our way through traffic, on the shoulder about half the time, to Fairhope, a little fishing village around a marina, where the boats are now bound and double-bound to the docks. I wonder how they will fare in the storm.
Inside Bink’s Market, the Fairhope locals are discussing the incoming storm. We listen as we nibble on crab-and-sausage balls and crab rangoons, which the owner, Bink, assures us are famous. Meanwhile, three men at a table swap stories about the last hurricane and the one before that and the famous Ash Wednesday nor’easter that tore a hole through the island, bisecting it.
I wonder again where these people get their fortitude. The weather hasn’t ruined their appetites. As customers rush in and out, buying the last of the water, the bread, and the canned food, the fishermen play cards at a table in the corner and enjoy some of Bink’s shrimp po’boy sandwiches. We buy some to take home.
“George and I love the food at this place,” my aunt remarks as Geneva Bink wraps up our sandwiches.
I check out the size of the homemade bun and think of Aunt Sandy’s diabetes. Clearly she’s in denial if it’s as bad as Mom said.
Before leaving Fairhope, we pull into the driveway of a giant Victorian house. With its three-story turret, wide front porch, and wraparound veranda, it makes me think of the graceful, quiet life of days gone by. Dressed in faded paint and crumbling gingerbread trims, it looks like a bride who has fallen asleep beneath the live oaks and forgotten to wake up, her wedding gown weatherworn now.
“Pppfff!” A disgusted sound escapes Aunt Sandy as she looks at the house. “Well, at least she’s had someone put up the hurricane shutters for her, but I’ll bet she’s here. She sure doesn’t need to be. Ninety-one years old and still determined to ride out the hurricane. Ridiculous.”
I survey the place as we walk up the steps and knock on the door. “Ninety-one and she lives here? Alone?”
The reply is a frown of genuine concern. “One of my longtime customers. I don’t think she has any family. Haven’t ever heard her mention anyone for as long as I’ve known her.”
I try to imagine a ninety-one-year-old woman going through a hurricane, all by herself in this enormous house. “That’s terrible.” Having lived on the family compound as long as I can remember, I can’t fathom not being surrounded by relatives, not having someone to take care of me if I needed it. It occurs to me that I’ve never been as grateful for that as I should’ve been.
“Well, Iola Anne Poole is a woman of the Banks, through and through.” Aunt Sandy says it like that explains everything. “This place gets in your blood.”
The little woman who opens the door looks like a native. Her skin is a deep olive color, wrinkled and leathery in the way of things that have lived long by the sea. But her silvery-blue eyes are bright. She’s tiny, stooped over, and thin, yet she seems strangely capable as she assures my aunt that she has made all the proper preparations for the storm. “Oh, you know, this old house and I have been through quite a few.”
“I understand that, Iola Anne.” My aunt touches the little woman’s shoulder tenderly. “But I just wanted to check and see if you won’t consider coming and staying over with me, or if there is anything you need. I could run to the store for you or . . .”
“No, no, no. Now don’t bother about me. I don’t want to trouble anyone.” A pat of my aunt’s hand and a shrug seem to assure that this slip of a woman has everything under control, though the general condition of the house says otherwise.
She catches me checking out the porch, asks who I am, and quick introductions are made. I shake her hand, which is cold, the skin as thin as parchment over bone, yet her grip is surprisingly strong.
My fingers stay trapped between hers for a moment as she turns back to my aunt. “I’ll be just fine.” A scrappy black cat with a damaged ear slips past her feet and skitters out the door, skirting us warily. “You’d better hurry back, Mr. Muggins!” she calls after him, letting go of my hand. “You’ll end up with Dorothy and Toto in Oz.”
The three of us laugh, and Aunt Sandy promises to check on her after the storm. Iola Anne Poole assures her it’s not necessary. “You know how it is. The storms come and it’s water and wind as far as the eye can see for a bit. But winds calm and the waters drain. We find our feet again, and the ground under us sprouts a new crop of seed. That is always the way of it. I don’t suppose this storm will be any different.”
At my aunt’s insistence, Iola promises to at least call after the storm and let us know everything is okay in the big white house. We offer to fold the shutters over the door for her, and after calling Mr. Muggins in from the overgrown flower bed, she allows us to do it. She waves from behind the leaded glass as the hinges groan and we close her into darkness before hurrying back to the driveway. We’ve almost pushed our luck too far, I can tell. The weather’s coming in now.
The wind buffets the Jeep as we travel back down the island. By the time we reach home and drive the Jeep onto one of the flatbed trailers Uncle George cleverly uses to keep the vehicles and various machinery above the reach of low-level floodwater, I can feel the storm arriving in earnest. So can my mother. She’s a nervous wreck.
I don’t blame her. I feel pretty much the same way myself.
CHAPTER 7
The storm has been raging for hours now. It’s worse than was predicted. It’s hitting Hatteras pretty hard as it lumbers by, the eye staying out at sea. We’ve pulled the mattresses and one of the sofas into Aunt Sandy’s dining room to camp out away from the exterior walls. From time to time, I’m sure the roof will go any minute.
Outside, the hurricane shutters rattle, and the house sways in gust after gust of wind. The rain flows in ribbons, stronger as each band of the storm bears down, but even the ebb is incredibly intense. I’ve never heard rain like this. The sound on the roof of Aunt Sandy’s little saltbox house is deafening.
The storm wants to push its way inside. It’s like a demon. Determined. Relentless. Seeking out the faintest cracks to breach our fortress and find its way past the walls. During the ebbs, we hurry through the house, replacing the towels and bedsheets we’ve stuffed in the wet spots around the windows and door stoops. Weather stripping is no match for the fury of this beast.
I have to give my mother and Aunt Sandy credit. They are an efficient team. Two commanding generals who have temporarily joined forces to fight a greater enemy. There is no arguing about whether or not we should have stayed.
During an ebb, we hear a rhythmic clang, clang, clang below the house.
Aunt Sandy pinches the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes. I notice for the first time how flushed she looks. “Water’s coming up. The boat’s floating off its trailer down there.”
The noise suddenly makes sense. There’s a little aluminum johnboat outside. Before the rain started, we unhooked the straps binding it to the trailer and tied it to the piers of the house instead. Now I understand why.
She seems matter-of-fact about it, but I know this is not good. For the water to float that boat, it must be a couple feet high already. The weather radio has been belching out flood reports for a while, and our hiding place has become an island.
“No way out but through the storm now.” Aunt Sandy sits down beside me on the sofa and pats my knee. She meets my gaze purposefully, as if she knows there’s a deeper meaning that can be taken there and wants me to grasp it. “I’ll bet about now you’re wishing you had beaten it toward home while you still could.”
“Nope,” I lie.
I expect her to ask about why she found me having a breakdown on the dunes earlier, but she doesn’t. Instead, she curl
s an arm over me and pulls my head onto her shoulder.
“No way out but through the storm,” she whispers again. “We’re not alone.” She combs her fingers through my hair, and I close my eyes, relaxing against her. “We’re never alone.”
I know what she’s referring to. She’s a woman of great faith. I don’t confirm what she’s said or refute it. I just drift away with the boat downstairs ringing like a church bell, her words the last ones on my mind.
There’s peace for a little while, and then I’m in the woods again. I’m forcing my way through briars, ignoring the sting as they claw at my skin, slice through my clothing. I hear something in the distance. Music. People singing. A choir.
Pushing back vines, I move toward the sound, stumble through the trees until I see light ahead. There must be a clearing. The singing is so loud now, it eclipses everything.
And then I’m in the hollow, standing outside a funeral tent. There’s a tiny white casket. A gasp steals from me, and I throw my hand over my mouth. All the mourners turn my way accusingly.
Emily’s mother motions toward the grave, her eyes still fixed on me. And then I’m standing at the edge of the hole, looking down on the casket, and it isn’t Emily in there, but Jessica. My daughter, lying on white satin, only four or five years old, her face soft and chubby-cheeked and pale. Lifeless.
The mourners begin throwing in handfuls of dirt. A scream tears from me, and I try to shield Jessica from the spray, but they hold me back.
Men begin adding soil by the shovelful. I scream again, and then Aunt Sandy is shaking me awake.
I come to consciousness lying on the sofa, trying to fight my way out of a quilt.
It’s a moment before I realize that the storm sounds different.
“The eye went past, out at sea. The wind’s hooking around the other way now, which means it’s going to pull the water up on the sound side even more. The weather radio is full of overwash reports on both sides of the island,” Aunt Sandy explains. She looks like she’s been dozing herself. On one of the mattresses, my mother is sitting up, watching me. I realize I’ve awakened everybody.