Troubles in Paradise

by Elin Hilderbrand

  Sadie bends down and gives Maia a hug goodbye. “I bet you didn’t know your family had so many secrets, did you?”

  Huck calls from the living room, “Sadie, you ready?”

  Sadie disappears with a blown kiss and a wave, leaving Maia in the empty kitchen.

  Secrets? Maia thinks. My family? Never!

  Margaret Quinn

  In the four years since Margaret Quinn retired as the anchor of the CBS Evening News, she hasn’t felt a single pang of regret or experienced one moment of FOMO. She has been quite content to get her news like everyone else—online. Gracing her inbox every morning are the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Skimm, the BBC, the Hollywood Reporter, and Refinery 29. She follows New York magazine and People on Instagram. She still has Time and Vogue delivered to the house. She watches the six o’clock news on CBS, but not every night—because she’s busy!

  Her daughter, Ava, and Ava’s husband, Potter, and their twins, Maggie and Homer, live in the city, but Ava keeps threatening to move to New Canaan (the lawns! the schools!), so Margaret wants to spend as much time as she can with them while they’re still just across the park. Margaret and her husband, Dr. Drake Carroll, travel to Boston to see Margaret’s son Patrick, his wife, Jennifer, and their three teenage boys, and then often they take the ferry over to Nantucket to visit Margaret’s son Kevin, his wife, Isabelle, and their children, Genevieve, Kelley, and baby Arnaud.

  Just this past year, Drake has cut back his surgery schedule at the hospital in anticipation of full-on retirement, so he and Margaret have been able to travel. They took a Viking River cruise down the Rhine and the Rhône; they trekked Milford Sound in New Zealand. It’s been a long time since Margaret has been able to travel for pleasure. While she was working, the network sent her places like Kosovo, Tel Aviv, Fallujah, Medellín, Lagos, Haiti, and, once—a happy lark—to London to cover William and Kate’s wedding.

  Margaret sits on the boards of three charities—one hospital, one museum, one homeless shelter. She emcees each of these organization’s major benefits; she plays in celebrity softball games; she has been approached by Dancing with the Stars (she said no); and she’s been toying with teaching at the Columbia School of Journalism.

  She’s been asked to write her memoirs but she’s nowhere near ready for that—too much living yet to do.

  She’d like to write a book describing the magic of being a grandmother, but Leslie Stahl beat her to it.

  When Margaret’s phone rings on the third of September and she sees it’s her former boss Lee Kramer, head of the studio, she thinks he’s calling to make an elaborate excuse for why he and his wife, Ginny (editor in chief of Vogue), can’t attend the hospital benefit three weeks hence. That’s fine, Margaret thinks. There are so many worthy causes in this city and you can’t go to everything, though Margaret plans to hit Lee up for fifty thousand at least.

  “Don’t say no.”

  This isn’t the greeting Margaret was expecting. “Good morning, Lee. How are you?”

  “Please just hear me out.”

  “How are Ginny and the kids? How does Evie like Cornell?”

  “I’d like you to come back for one assignment.”

  “Thanks for calling,” Margaret says. “Bye.”

  “You don’t even know what it is.”

  “No, but I know how this works. I say yes to one assignment, then another assignment comes along, then Sixty Minutes offers me a ten-segment deal, then you offer me my own half-hour show aimed at baby boomers, and the next thing you know, my grandchildren are seeing me more on TV than they are in person.”

  “This is one assignment and it’s your favorite kind of story…”

  Margaret’s favorite kind of story is military moms and dads who come back and surprise their children at school. Margaret cries every time. But she knows Lee wouldn’t ask her back for that reason. “What is it, Lee?”

  “The weather.”

  Ahhh, right. Margaret does love a good weather story.

  “Hurricane Inga, down in the Caribbean, is shaping up to be an event. It’s aimed at Antigua and Barbuda right now and will likely hit the Virgin Islands after that. St. Thomas, St. John, Tortola, Virgin Gorda. This is a hundred-year storm, Margaret.”

  “Like Katrina?”

  “Like Katrina, yes.”

  Margaret experiences a surge of excitement so powerful, it’s almost sexual. “What about Dougie? He already fancies himself the next Jim Cantore, and I don’t want to steal his thunder…so to speak. Send Dougie.”

  “Dougie won’t go,” Lee says. “His wife is due to have their first baby tomorrow. So he’s going to man the anchor desk on this coverage, and when I asked him who he thought I should send down in his place…”

  “He said me?”

  “He said you.”

  “Even though I retired four years ago.”

  “He said you.”

  Margaret inhales, exhales, looks at herself in the mirror. They’re sending her into a war zone, essentially, so there won’t be any hair or makeup, which means the entire country will become acutely aware that Margaret is rapidly closing in on sixty-five. It’s flattering; hell, it’s an honor—not only for Margaret but for every woman of a certain age—to be chosen to cover this. Just being asked makes Margaret realize she does miss it.

  “When do I leave?” she asks.

  “When can you be ready?”

  Margaret calls Drake at the hospital from her car service to Teterboro. CBS is sparing no expense—she has her driver, Raoul, back, and she’s flying down on the CBS jet because commercial flights have been canceled.

  Drake isn’t happy. “I thought this part of our lives was over.”

  “So did I,” Margaret says. She realizes she sounds giddy.

  “Please be safe, Margaret,” Drake says. “I need you.”

  Four hours later, Margaret lands at the Cyril E. King Airport in St. Thomas. The weather is surprisingly clear and sunny, and the island pops with all the bright colors that one expects from the tropics—emerald green, turquoise, coral, and near-blinding white. Margaret didn’t tell Lee or Drake this but she has been to the Virgin Islands before. She and her first husband, Kelley Quinn, came for a week’s vacation back when Patrick was three years old and Kevin just a baby. They stayed at the Maho Bay campground in a “cabin” with a canvas roof. Kelley filled a dark rubber bladder with water from the pump and left it in the sun to warm up for a “sun shower.” It had been rustic, funky, unbearably hot, even more unbearably buggy—Kevin’s pale, chubby baby body had been an all-you-can-eat buffet for the mosquitoes—but Margaret had loved every minute of it. Even when they found a scorpion in Kelley’s shoe. Even when they got lost on a hike to Ram Head in the scorching heat with Kevin strapped to Margaret’s chest. They spent luxurious afternoons lying under a cluster of palm trees on Trunk Bay, where Kelley rented one mask and snorkel and the two of them took turns marveling at the manta rays and the schools of brilliant fish.

  When Margaret’s marriage to Kelley hit the skids, she’d suggested a getaway to revive the romance. She went so far as to book a week at Caneel Bay—but they never made it.

  Margaret has always wanted to come back. Now, here she is.

  The crew from the CBS affiliate picks Margaret up, and although they’ve reserved her a room at the Ritz-Carlton on St. Thomas, the storm is predicted to be so fierce that the Ritz is no longer deemed safe. Plan B is an emergency shelter in the basement of the CBS studio building. It has cinder-block walls, a buffet “catering spread” that includes Kind bars and packages of ramen noodles. They have a generator. There’s a men’s room and a ladies’ room on the first floor but no shower. Margaret is shown a cot. She thinks longingly of the Ritz-Carlton. She thinks even more longingly of the king bed in her apartment on the Upper West Side overlooking Central Park, where the leaves are just hinting at fall.

  “We should get our outdoor shots now,” the producer, Rhonda, says. “We’ll take footage on Sapphire Bea
ch first—”

  “And then we’ll go over to St. John?” Margaret asks.

  “Yes, we’ll shoot from the dock in Cruz Bay,” Rhonda says. “Then we’ll come back here and hunker down.”

  Good afternoon, Dougie. I’m reporting from the Sapphire Beach Resort in St. Thomas, where, right now, the water looks pretty inviting. However, by this time tomorrow, the scene will be quite different…

  Good evening, Dougie. I’m reporting from Cruz Bay on the island of St. John, where both locals and visitors are preparing for what will very likely be a direct hit from Hurricane Inga…

  Rhonda hurries Margaret into the boat. The waves are much choppier on the way back to St. Thomas; the wind has picked up and there’s a line of gray clouds on the horizon. Is that the hurricane? No, not yet, Rhonda says. Tomorrow afternoon. If the weather is clement tomorrow morning, they might do one more live report from St. Thomas.

  “Let’s get you a proper dinner,” Rhonda says. “How do you feel about goat?”

  Maybe she’s kidding. Maybe she’s trying to see how tough Margaret is. Well, Margaret drank cow’s blood in Nigeria; she ate rattlesnake in China. She’s tough.

  “Love it!” Margaret says.

  That night from her cot, Margaret tracks the storm. It’s now 215 miles to the east and has sustained winds of 155 knots. This is going to be devastating. Maybe Margaret isn’t so tough after all. She’s sixty-four years old and the grandmother of eight. What is she doing here? Has she lost her mind?

  Both Rhonda and the camerawoman, Linda, are sleeping in the studio basement with her. Margaret bids them good night, and from her little corner, she calls Drake, then she calls her kids in order of age. Patrick is spending the weekend taking his oldest, Barrett, up to look at Colgate, Hamilton, and Skidmore; he doesn’t seem to know there’s a hurricane coming and Margaret decides not to mention where she is. He’s bringing Barrett to the city the following weekend to look at NYU and Columbia. Margaret says, “Can’t wait to see you!” then hangs up, hoping she makes it home in one piece—hoping she makes it home, period. Kevin is consumed with the closing weekend of Quinn’s Surfside Beach Shack. He sounds harried; Arnaud is teething and Genevieve is starting kindergarten. I can’t believe she’s going to school already, Kevin says. It feels like she was just born. Yes, Margaret knows the feeling only too well. Kevin was once that chubby baby who was such a delicacy for the island’s mosquitoes. The years—where do they go?

  Finally, Margaret calls Ava, who says, “I stopped by your apartment today, and Drake told me you’re in the Virgin Islands covering that monster hurricane. What were you thinking, Mom?”

  The next day dawns calm and still. Rhonda makes a big pot of coffee and produces a beautiful tropical-fruit platter and a bakery box filled with muffins and bagels.

  “The café down the street saw you on TV last night,” Rhonda says, “and insisted on sending these.”

  They head out to do one more live spot for Dougie back in New York. The wind is picking up. The outer wall of the hurricane will be arriving in a matter of hours.

  “Stay safe,” Dougie says. “We’ll see you on the other side.”

  Margaret, Rhonda, and Linda go back down to the studio basement.

  Margaret traces the storm on her laptop. It’s coming. She hears the wind screaming like a woman in labor (it must be the situation with Dougie’s wife that puts this image in her mind). Then the lights flicker, and the power goes out; the studio’s generator comes on, but the lights in the basement are low and there’s no longer any air-conditioning. Things outside the studio crash, smash, shatter. Margaret can’t see what’s making the noise because the windows are shuttered. Dear Lord, she thinks, please don’t let the windows break. Don’t let the roof blow off. Don’t let the place flood. Please don’t let anyone die. But as the minutes pass and then the hours, as the wind gets so loud that Margaret can’t hear her own voice praying, as her cell signal cuts out, as she lies on her back unable to even read the book she brought, she marvels at how profound the weather is, how mighty, how inexplicable and unpredictable.

  Life on these islands is changing right now, right this second, she thinks. Maybe forever.

  St. John

  After Inga left us—as definitively as someone leaving a room and slamming the door behind her—we picked up our heads and looked around.

  Let’s start with Cruz Bay, our “downtown.” It was…ruined. Wharfside Village lost its roof; the Beach Bar’s dance floor was buried under two-foot drifts of sand; the palm trees along Frank Bay were snapped in half, reminding us of gruesomely broken bones. Someone’s boat, Nell, landed upside down on the deck of High Tide, where so many of us had enjoyed rum punches during happy hour. The Lumberyard building—home to the Barefoot Cowboy, Driftwood Dave’s, the barbershop, and Jake’s—looked like the proverbial cake that someone had left out in the rain; the building simply caved in on itself. Homes were violently torn apart, their contents thrown out into the yard, the street. Who could tell what had been a ceiling or a wall or a bathroom door? There was plaster, glass, metal in heaps and piles everywhere. It looked like a bomb had detonated; the damage was…atomic, nuclear.

  Word started rolling in from the North Shore Road, Chocolate Hole, Gifft Hill. One family of six survived by hiding in their laundry room. One man crouched behind a table on its side for three hours as the sliding glass door across the room bowed in and out as though it were breathing. Multiple witnesses saw telephone poles flying through the air like missiles. Cars were flipped. A couch ended up in the neighbor’s front yard; a refrigerator ended up in the bedroom; a hot-tub cover was caught in the high branches of a tree.

  What about beyond the stone gates at Caneel Bay? This was, perhaps, what most took us by surprise. The genteel, elegant resort had been ravaged—roofs ripped off, trees uprooted, buildings flooded and filled with sand, the entire place simply annihilated.

  The Centerline Road was impassable due to downed trees. The hillside between Maho and Leicester Bays looked like a winter landscape; all of the trees were stripped bare, broken, left a burned-looking brown.

  Eventually, we heard from our friends on the “other side of the world,” in Coral Bay. Shipwreck Landing, one of our favorite places to order coconut shrimp and listen to live music, had been decimated. Concordia, which had such delicious breakfasts, was blown away. Boats were dashed against the rocks, or they capsized and sank. The carnage in Hurricane Hole turned our stomachs.

  Few of us realized that tornadoes are a common phenomenon when a hurricane hits land. The friction between open ocean and hills can cause spin, especially when the feeder bands roll through. The spot on St. John that saw the most tornado activity was the East End because it has elevation and because it’s so exposed. There were thirteen tornadoes recorded on the East End alone. Unlike a hurricane, a tornado’s path is unpredictable. One villa remains untouched while the villa next door is turned into kindling.

  The compound belonging to Duncan Huntley was pulverized. When his closest neighbor saw the damage, he said, “It seemed like Inga had a personal vendetta against the place.” A cast-iron planter that must have weighed seventy pounds had smashed through the roof of Dunk’s garage and crushed Dunk’s G-wagon. Every building lost its roof; the 140-inch screen from the home theater ended up in the swimming pool. Nothing was salvageable. The neighbor said that even if Dunk lost his shirt in Vegas, he was still a lucky man. “If he’d stayed in the villa,” the neighbor said, “he’d surely be dead.”

  Imagine our relief when, the morning after the hurricane ended, the Singing Dog came sailing into the harbor. Captains Stephen and Kelly had successfully outrun the storm—and not only that, they had a working satellite radio that allowed many of us to contact our relatives back in the States to let them know we were still alive.

  At first, that’s all we could claim: We were upright and breathing.

  The satellite radio also brought news that help was coming; the National Guard and the U.S. Navy wer
e on their way.

  There was no power, no water. Never mind rebuilding it; just cleaning it all up would require a Herculean effort.

  Someone discovered that if you stood on the third-floor balcony of the Dolphin Market building downtown, you could get a very weak cell signal. Hey, it was better than nothing, and before we knew it, that balcony was as crowded as the bar at Skinny Legs after the Eight Tuff Miles race. A line started to form because someone wisely pointed out that the balcony would hold only so much weight and the last thing we wanted was for someone who’d survived the hurricane to plunge to his or her death trying to call Cousin Randy in Baltimore.

  The balcony and the line to get to the balcony became the place where we connected not only with the outside world but also with each other. Nestor from Pine Peace Market let everyone know that he would open the store. The owners of the Longboard would cook a community dinner, everyone welcome. There would be stir-fry and Chinese noodles over at 420 to Center.

  Someone declared that what he really wanted was Candi’s barbecue—but, alas, Candi’s didn’t survive.

  Those who had generators and gas offered assistance to those who didn’t. Other items we needed included chain saws, bottled water, shovels, and insect repellent—because the heavy, still, hot weather that arrived in Inga’s wake brought all the familiar bugs as well as larger, flashier, meaner bugs that looked like they’d escaped from some exotic tropical zoo. Because money had no immediate value, people bartered. Overall, there was a spirit of gratitude and compassion for our fellow islanders, even those we had previously disliked. The hurricane had happened to all of us—West Indian, white, Latinx, Catholic, Episcopalian, evangelical, Cruz Bay, Coral Bay.