by Joe McKinney
The thought sent Eleanor even deeper into her own head. She had talked with Jim an awful lot lately about how fast Madison was growing up. Her thirteenth birthday was only two months away, but the changes had already started. She and Madison had had the talk about the lady time, and it had been a lot harder, a lot more embarrassing, than Eleanor had expected it to be. But in a way that talk had prepared her to think of her daughter as a woman, something that Jim was having a much harder time doing. Perhaps it was Madison’s smile, that giggly little smile of hers that so perfectly recalled the way she looked as a toddler. Or perhaps it was just Jim’s stubborn streak. Eleanor wasn’t sure. But whatever the reason, he seemed determined to avoid the issue. He still called Madison his little girl, and in fact had started using the phrase more and more in recent months, which indicated to Eleanor that he knew the truth, at least on some level, but was unwilling to face it.
She couldn’t blame him. Not really. There were times—plenty of times, in fact—that she didn’t want to face it, either.
Jim’s electric drill had gone silent as he moved to a new window. The wind, too, quieted for a moment. And in that lull, Eleanor heard the sound of arguing from across the street. She craned her head out the window, and what she saw there made her chest tighten with both pity and rage.
Ms. Hester was standing in the front yard, looking smaller and even frailer than she had earlier that day, when Eleanor had passed her on her way into work. The wind was billowing her housedress out to one side, and her arms were crossed over her chest in a gesture that made her look completely helpless. Rain rings formed chain-mail patterns in the water at her feet. Standing at the edge of her lawn, next to a beat-to-hell red pickup, was her grandson, Bobby.
When the guys at work mentioned meth heads, Bobby Hester was the image that flared up in Eleanor’s mind. He was tall and lanky, so skinny his clothes fit him like a potato sack on a flagpole. He wore his filthy blond hair down to his shoulders, and there were tattoos all up and down his arms, where the veins stood out like electrical cords beneath his skin.
He was the one Eleanor had heard yelling, and as she watched he opened the passenger door of his truck and put Ms. Hester’s TV inside.
That manipulative, thieving little bastard, she thought.
Though she couldn’t hear what Ms. Hester was saying, she could figure it out without any real difficulty. Ms. Hester was scared. She wanted him to stay with her during the storm. She was probably begging him to stay.
But Bobby Hester would never agree to something like that.
He had miraculously reappeared in her life about two years ago, at the same time she started slipping a little from the Alzheimer’s. To Eleanor it was no coincidence. He was a wolf sensing an easy meal, nothing more. Certainly not the long-lost grandson he no doubt claimed to be. Eleanor had tried to say as much, but Ms. Hester wouldn’t listen to a word of it. She adamantly refused to see Bobby as bad news. She welcomed him into her home. And he repaid her kindness by robbing her blind.
Now he was telling her to stop her whining. That he’d be back. That he just wanted to take her electronic stuff someplace safe. She wasn’t holding back, was she? There wasn’t a TV someplace she hadn’t told him about?
The fucking bastard is gonna pawn everything she owns so he can get cash for his meth, Eleanor thought, and suddenly the image of her putting a bullet in his brain was very strong, and more than a little satisfying.
A knock on the window made her jump. It was Jim, looking in on her, his knuckles still poised at the glass.
She undid the latch and opened the window.
“You’re seeing this, right?” he said.
“Yeah.” Her pistol was upstairs in her backpack, and she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d be able to hit Bobby from here. One good head shot would be all it’d take. “That man’s a slime ball.”
“That’s true,” Jim said. “You want me to go over there and tell her to stay with us?”
“I tried that this morning. She kept saying Bobby was going to stay with her tonight. That’s all she would say. ‘Bobby’s coming. I’ll be okay, Bobby’s comin’ over.’ ”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” she snapped, and then instantly wanted to pull the words back. “Sorry.”
He nodded. “It makes me angry, too.”
“Yeah.”
He had a hand on the windowsill. He was filthy from putting up the plywood screens and cleaning up the stuff from the yard that might blow around during the storm and cause damage, but she didn’t care. It was good to be home with him. She put her own hand on top of his and squeezed.
He looked past her to the kitchen. “Where’s Maddie?”
“Upstairs. We’re gonna need you to carry the food boxes.”
“Sure.”
In the distance, lightning flashed across the sky. A roll of thunder followed along close on its heels. The air smelled ominous, heavy with the scent of salt and sea.
“You can smell it, can’t you?” he said. “The storm’s getting close.”
“Yeah.”
Across the street, Bobby’s pickup fired up with a loud snarl, and he sped off, leaving Ms. Hester standing in her front yard. Ms. Hester watched him go, obviously frightened, then slowly turned and went back inside her house.
“What do you want to do about that?” Jim asked.
“She’s family. We’ll take her in. As soon as we’re done loading all this stuff upstairs I’ll go over there and get her.”
“And if she won’t come? You can’t make her leave if she doesn’t want to.”
“She’s family, Jim. I won’t let her ride this thing out alone.”
“Okay,” he said, and with that they closed the window and Jim dropped the last sheet of plywood into place over top of it.
The first heavy band of rain came about thirty minutes later. It slammed into the side of the Nortons’ house in enormous wind-driven blasts, beating against the roof and the exterior walls, roaring like a passing freight train. It lasted less than two minutes, and then slackened off to a steady, needling patter.
They were in the game room upstairs. Madison’s room was next door, but they had tacitly decided that the whole family would sleep here. Now father and daughter were rolling out sleeping bags, the two of them laughing over some stupid thing Jim had said. They seemed to be having a pretty good time of it, Eleanor noticed. She hadn’t heard Madison laughing like this in a long while. Not even the wind and the rain outside seemed to bother her, at least not yet. She had her daddy with her, the two of them too absorbed in being goofy to be afraid of a little wind and rain. Jim was treating this like a big adventure, at least in front of Madison, and Eleanor was glad for that. It would help Madison to remain calm when things got really bad here in another few hours, and perhaps it would also help Jim to hold on to his little girl for a little while longer. A crisis like this, it would be terrible for the great wide world outside their house; but here, inside, the Norton family was in a good place.
Eleanor and Jim had met fourteen years before, back when she was a brand-new patrolwoman working every extra job she could find just to make the rent on a rattrap apartment on Houston’s lower east side.
She was working security at a Flogging Molly concert the night he came into her life. He was with a group of his friends from his college days. He was cute, she thought. A little nerdy, maybe—certainly more of a nerd than the cops she was used to hanging out with—but cute. He kept coming up to her, using really weak excuses to strike up a conversation; and as much as her cop training told her to disengage so she could watch the crowd as she was being paid to do, there was a very human part of her that liked the attention.
During a break between songs he worked up the nerve to ask for her number.
“No way,” she said. “Not while I’m working.”
“Not while you’re working? What does that mean?”
“It means
I don’t give out my number to strange men while I’m working.”
“I’m not strange.”
“You know what I mean,” she said, smiling despite herself.
“You can trust me,” he said. “I’m a good guy. Come on, I don’t bite.”
Her gaze shifted from the crowd back to him. He was leaning against a wall next to a dartboard, trying to look cool, but only managing a barely contained nervousness. He was cute, though. She couldn’t deny that.
“I’ll tell you what. How about you give me your number, and I’ll think about it?”
His smile grew even wider. He hurriedly scribbled down his number on the back of his business card and handed it to her.
“I usually get off around six,” he said.
“I’ll think about it,” she answered.
And she had thought about it. For two days she thought about it. She hadn’t realized it going into the job, but dating options for a female cop are few. She could date other cops, and a lot of girls did, but there wasn’t a sewing circle anywhere that could gossip like a bunch of cops, and the girls who did date their fellow officers quickly developed reputations as sluts, or bitches, or psychos, or whatever, whether it was deserved or not.
The other option, dating a guy from outside the department, a civilian, was harder than it sounded. Most of the men she met came into her sphere because they were in the process of committing some kind of crime. And even if they weren’t doing something illegal, finding time to go out with them around the demands of a rotating police schedule was nearly impossible. Plus (and this wasn’t obvious, but it was something that nearly every female officer she knew had experienced) most men who weren’t cops were intimidated by a girl who walked around with a gun in her purse . . . and who knew how to use it.
But Jim Norton wasn’t that way. He didn’t seem intimidated by her at all. He’d made her feel special from the first moment he’d tried his dorky lines on her, and in the end, she’d called and asked him out. They were married eight months later.
Memories of those early days together always made her smile, but unfortunately her reverie didn’t last long, for just then the shutters started to rattle. Another blast of rain and wind swept over the house, carrying with it a train wreck sound and the horrible feeling that God’s shadow was passing overhead.
“I need to go get her,” Eleanor said.
Jim, who had rocked back on his haunches, a corner of Madison’s sleeping bag still in his hand, nodded.
“Wait for this one to pass first,” he said.
“Mom.”
Eleanor looked at her daughter. The smile and the giggle were gone. For the first time there was fear in the girl’s eyes. The knowledge that something big and angry had them in its sights was finally starting to sink in.
Eleanor crossed the room and put her arms around her. “I’m gonna bring Ms. Hester here with us,” Eleanor said.
“Mom, you can’t go out in that.”
“Sweetie, we can’t leave her to face that alone. It’ll stop in a second. I won’t be gone long.”
“Promise?”
Eleanor pulled her daughter close. “I promise.”
Five days earlier, a Category Three hurricane named Gabriella had zeroed in on Matagorda Bay, just south down the coast from Houston. Houston was expected to get the dirty side of the storm, and all the newscasters prophesied a Katrina-like disaster. A massive evacuation was ordered. Nearly four million people fled the Houston area, turning the highways that led to San Antonio and Dallas into parking lots. For two days, the city of Houston turned into a ghost town.
But Gabriella didn’t cooperate.
She fizzled to a weak tropical storm while still at sea, and when she made landfall, all she’d been able to muster was a good soaking for the grass and a couple of broken windows along the coastline.
Houstonians returned home, resentful of the ordered evacuation. It was why so many had ignored the current order to evacuate now that Hector was on the way.
In the back of her mind, Eleanor had hoped that Hector would blow itself out the same way Gabriella had, but when she stepped out her front door, all hope of that disappeared from her mind. Even the biggest trees were tossing wildly back and forth. Trash and leaves filled the air. Ocean-scented rain moved across the lawn in silvery, wind-blown curtains. A rainbow-colored canopy from a child’s backyard swing set tumbled down her sidewalk.
On the other side of the street, the pecan trees that surrounded Ms. Hester’s house were slamming against her kitchen wall, stray limbs raking across the roof, kicking up shingles and sending them airborne on the wind like playing cards.
“You stay here,” Jim said. “I’ll go get her.”
“No,” Eleanor said, barely aware that she was using the harsh, clipped tone of her cop’s voice. “Let me. You stay with Madison.”
He looked indecisive, as though he was torn between his male instincts to take the risk and his knowledge that she was the one trained for this kind of thing.
“I’ll be okay,” she assured him, but without softening her tone. It was best not to give him a chance to finish the debate, so that he wouldn’t talk himself into doing something stupid. There was no time for that. “You stay with Madison. Keep her calm.”
And with that she ducked her head and stepped off the porch and into the wind.
The rain needled at her skin. Standing upright was harder than she expected. She had to tense the muscles in her thighs just to keep her balance. The ground was spongy beneath her feet. An inch of water stood on the ground, and everywhere she looked she saw the crawfish that had washed up from Bays Bayou scurrying through the grass.
To the south was a bank of black clouds that stretched across the horizon like an angry, roiling cliff. Charleston Street stretched a good half mile out in front of her before curving out of sight. Beyond the curve was the flat greenish-black surface of Bays Bayou, now flooding the areas adjacent to its banks, and beyond the water was an industrial park of concrete and glass buildings. From where she stood she could just see a line of those buildings disappearing beneath the bottom of the storm wall. To Eleanor, it looked like they were being eaten.
She was too stunned to move. She stood there, mouth open in awe, watching the approaching monster.
A loud crack to her right snapped her out of the moment and she turned just in time to see a large limb from one of Ms. Hester’s pecan trees come crashing down on the corner of the house. It twisted in the wind, sagged, then scraped down the side of house, ripping the plywood covers Jim had put over her windows from their brackets. The glass behind the plywood exploded with a series of muffled pops.
But the tree didn’t stop moving. Its dense cluster of leaves caught the wind like a sail and pulled it down the length of the house, tearing down a section of the wall as it tumbled away from the approaching storm.
“Oh my God,” she said.
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. In a crazy, terrible, unreal way, it looked like the house was being zippered open by an old-style can opener, the pecan tree shredding the wooden siding with unbelievable speed.
“No!” she shouted.
The tree tore free of the house and sailed down the street as though it were being dragged behind an invisible truck.
Eleanor watched it go, then ran to the house.
She pounded on the front door, kicked it with everything she had, even threw her shoulder into it. “Ms. Hester! Betty Jo! Open the door. It’s me, Eleanor.”
Nothing.
She threw her shoulder at it one more time, then ran for a damaged section of the wall, shielding her face from the wind with her arm as she searched for a way inside.
The gash left by the pecan tree had torn the kitchen wall in half. Shredded electrical wires extruded from the lath, their jagged ends reaching for her like dangerous fingers. The wind was roaring in her ears. The air around her smelled of musty insulation and ocean rain and crushed vegetation.
“Ms. Hester?”
she called out. “Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
She was really scared now. Her face hurt from the pelting rain. You gotta get inside right now, she thought. There’s no time. Go, go, go!
Eleanor climbed over the jagged fragment of kitchen wall. Inside, the house was a mess. Water was already pooling on the living room floor and dripping down the walls. Debris was strewn everywhere. A large recliner was upside down against the back wall of the living room, papers and pictures swirling around it.
Eleanor ran for the hall closet. Back in May, when all the literature about hurricanes had first started appearing in the papers, Eleanor had told Ms. Hester to take shelter there if she was trapped at her house during a hurricane. She threw open the door, but the closet was empty.
A sudden surge in the wind threw her against the wall, yanking the doorknob out of her hand.
“Ms. Hester?”
Her only answer was the wind ripping into the house, tearing the walls apart.
From somewhere behind her she heard a loud snap, followed by the sound of walls breaking apart.
No, she thought, shaking her head. That is not possible.
But it was happening. The house was buckling, the timber inside the walls snapping like bones as the floor shuddered beneath her feet.
Where are you, Betty Jo? Come on, damn it.
And then a memory surfaced in her mind. In the Academy they taught young police officers how to handle calls for missing toddlers. Abducted children, her instructors had told her, are rare outside of the movies. You get a call for a missing four-year-old, the first place you look is under the beds. The parents will tell you they’ve looked everywhere, but they’re too scared to focus on the obvious. Chances are you’ll find the kid there, under the parents’ bed, playing, hiding, maybe even sleeping.
A small table along the hall wall began to sway and dance. All the pictures along the wall fell to the floor. A few blankets floated on the air, buoyed by the wind. Everything happened so fast all she could do was stand still and gawk at the destruction.