by Ali Standish
“Ethan!”
I take a step forward.
Then another.
Then I’m navigating the rocks as quickly as I can. When I reach the edge, I lie down on my stomach.
“Grab my hand!” I shout, thrusting my arm toward her.
But she doesn’t move the hand that’s across her soaking hoodie pocket, and she can’t let go of the rocks with her other hand.
“Coralee, grab it!”
“I can’t!” she shouts.
I army-crawl closer to the edge and lean down even farther so that my hand can grasp her forearm.
“I’m going to pull you up!”
Coralee nods, sputtering through a mouthful of seawater.
I take hold of her arm and pull. She lets go of the rock and wraps her hand around my wrist.
Her full weight rests at the end of my arm. She doesn’t weigh much, but she’s drenched, and it takes all my force to pull her up. She is almost high enough to rest her elbow on the rock, which will allow me to grab her and haul her up the rest of the way.
That’s when the biggest swell yet rushes through the inlet. It sucks the water out so powerfully that Coralee drops back down, and I’m only holding on to her three middle fingers.
“CORALEE!”
She’s going to slip from my grasp. I’m going to lose her.
Suddenly, I feel a weight on my right side, and it’s not just the wind or the rain. Another person is beside me, larger than I am, lying half on me and half on the rocks. The person shoots an arm out and grabs Coralee below her elbow.
“PULL!” yells a woman’s voice.
We pull together. Coralee winces in pain as she struggles to raise herself up.
“Grab her waist!” the woman commands, but I’ve already taken hold of Coralee just below her rib cage. I feel something squirm next to my hand.
Together, we hoist her up onto the rocks, where she collapses and begins coughing out seawater.
“We have to move,” the woman says to me. “This’ll all be underwater in a minute.”
I find a foothold between two rocks, and together we lift Coralee up underneath her arms. As we raise her, she murmurs something I can’t hear. Together, the three of us lurch and stumble across the rocks and into the grove of trees, which has taken on more water in the past five minutes.
We pause to take a breath, and I look up to see who our mysterious rescuer is.
Even through the rain and the unnatural dark, I can tell it’s her. The woman we saw in the Blackwood house. The thief.
“It’s you,” I say.
“Come on,” the woman yells. “Let’s get her to Mack’s.”
I hoist Coralee up again, grabbing her around the waist. Then I feel something wet lick my palm and pull it away instinctively.
That’s when I look down and see the furry black nose poking out from Coralee’s soaked hoodie pocket.
Saving Coralee
THE NOSE IS QUICKLY followed by two still-shut eyes and two flopping triangle ears. Even though it can’t see, the creature seems to realize that it’s now on land, because it begins scrambling to free itself from Coralee’s pocket. Coralee is too weak to stop it, and I grab the animal just as it slips out.
Sharp claws meet the skin on my forearm as I take hold of the wriggling wolf pup and try to stuff it in my pocket as quickly as possible. No sooner have I gotten it in and gotten my pocket zipped almost all the way up than I see another pup crawling from Coralee’s hoodie, and I start the process over again.
Above the roar of the storm, I hear Coralee yell in my ear, “Don’t let them go!”
“I won’t!” I shout, zipping the second pup into my left pocket.
The mysterious woman watches me with bulging eyes, like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. But there’s no time for her to ask me questions. Even in the past two minutes, the water level has risen, and it takes all my effort to wade through the grove while supporting half of Coralee’s weight on my shoulder.
When we reach the edge of the road again, the wind coming off the bay hits us so fiercely that we instantly topple over into the water, Coralee on top of the woman, me on top of Coralee. I lift myself to a kneeling position and reach my hand out to Coralee to help her, too. She raises one hand, still keeping the other stubbornly over her pocket. There must be other pups still inside.
“Watch out!” I hear the woman scream.
I whip around just in time to see a street sign, pole and all, come flying straight toward me. I duck, and I feel it whisk through the air just above my head.
The woman yells something else, but I can’t hear it. She points to Mack’s, the closest building to us. It’s less than half a block away, yet it seems impossibly far.
I try to stand and quickly realize that it’s a bad idea. The wind will just knock me over again. The water is too deep to crawl. So I straighten my legs and hunch my back. I’m just low enough that I can still power through the wind.
Our rescuer helps Coralee adopt a similar position, and together we make our way slowly toward Mack’s. When we reach the sidewalk, which is raised from the street, it’s easier. Still, every couple of steps I wince as I feel something clawing at my stomach.
I actually shout with joy when we reach Mack’s door. But then I try to open it.
It’s locked.
I pound with my fists as hard as I can, thinking there’s no way Mack will ever hear us. It’ll just sound like another gust of wind or piece of debris caught in her doorway.
But miraculously, almost the second I start knocking, Mack appears on the other side and opens the door a crack. And almost the second it opens a crack, it flies open, knocking me off my feet again.
Mack stands in the doorway wearing rubber boots and overalls. The wind whips her dreadlocks back from her face. She moves to help me to my feet, but I point to Coralee, who looks like she’s going to topple over again and float away any second. Together, Mack and the woman lift her into the store. Then the woman gets a strong grip under my shoulder and heaves me to my knees, allowing me to crawl across the doorway, which is flooding more with every second the door stays open.
I climb to my feet. Mack tries to close the door, but it’s no use. One of the hinges is broken, and there’s no way we can pull it shut in this gale.
I limp to the back of the dark store, past the lawn mowers and weed killer and screwdrivers, to where I know Mack keeps the plywood. I drag two boards out to the door and then go back for nails and a hammer.
It takes the three of us, me and the woman pressing as hard as we can against the wood, and Mack hammering, to nail the plywood onto the frame, and even then, it’s bowing like it’s going to snap.
“Can you stay here, Ethan?” Mack yells. Even inside, it’s almost too loud to hear each other. “Stand with your back against it, and press as hard as you can!”
I nod and watch as she and the other woman move to the metal shelf that holds the paints. Mack stands on one side, the woman on the other, and they slide it across the floor toward the doorway. I jump out of the way when they reach me and shift to the other side of the shelf to help them push it back against the plywood.
“It’s the best we can do!” bellows Mack.
Then she points to the door that leads to the library. “It’ll be safest!”
Coralee is slumped in a corner by the cash register, her eyes fluttering open and shut like butterfly wings trying to take flight for the last time.
I run to her. “Coralee? Are you all right?” She seemed okay when we were helping her through the grove. Weak, but okay. But maybe she’s not. Maybe she has some internal injury I can’t see.
Kneeling by her side, I grab her hand, and she opens her eyes and looks into mine. “Are you okay?” I ask again. “Does anything hurt?”
She opens her mouth to answer, but it turns into a limp smile. She puts her arms around my shoulders.
“You came,” she croaks in my ear. “You saved my life.”
The Library, Ag
ain
I HOIST CORALEE UP. I want to carry her, but I can’t crush the precious cargo in my rain jacket pockets, so I settle for wrapping my arms around her waist and limping together with her toward the library.
The woman grabs a milk crate from one of the shelves and follows us.
Mack shuts the door to the store behind us, and Coralee and I collapse on the couch beside each other. Mack hands us each a giant beach towel, which we wrap around our shoulders. The only light in the room comes from a few candles on the coffee table.
The woman places the milk crate at our feet. “Here,” she says. “For the critters.”
Mack takes a seat in the armchair across from us and watches in awe as I unzip my pockets and pull the two wolf pups out, placing them gently in the crate. Coralee reaches into her pocket and pulls out two more, handing them to me. The pups’ fur is soaked and matted, and their tiny paws tremble with fear.
I hear something hiss, and turn my head to see Zora and Zelda glaring out at us from under Mack’s desk. Their sour faces, eyes narrowed and noses turned up, remind me of Suzanne and Maisie. They stare at the milk crate but don’t move from their hideout.
Mack looks from the wolf pups to me and Coralee, and then to our rescuer, who has taken the other armchair.
“Your families have any idea where you are?” Mack says, settling her gaze on me and Coralee.
I move my head back and forth, and I know Coralee is doing the same.
Mack clucks her teeth. “Nothing we can do about it now,” she says. “Phone lines have been down for about an hour. We just have to pray they don’t keel over from worrying about y’all.”
I suddenly wish I had thought to leave a note explaining where I was going. Would they discover I was gone, or would they just assume I was sleeping in my room? Would they try to follow me if they realized I wasn’t there? No. They couldn’t make it past the porch if they tried.
I look down. The pups are scratching against the plastic of the milk crate unhappily. I unwind the towel from my shoulders and set it down in the crate.
All four pups climb onto it and begin scratching, burrowing, and walking in tiny clumsy circles over the fabric.
I glance up to see that everyone else in the room is transfixed by the pups too. When all four of them have settled into sleeping balls of wet fur, Mack slaps her knees.
“Well,” she says, “I think everyone here has some explaining to do. Who wants to go first?”
An Explanation
I TEAR MY EYES from the pups to glare at the strange woman.
“I’m not explaining anything until she tells us who she is and you tell us why you’ve been hiding her here,” I say, crossing my arms in a show of defiance.
The woman exchanges a glance with Mack. Her hair coils in short wet curls, and in the candlelight her eyes look tired, like the weight of her long lashes is too heavy for them to hold up.
She returns my gaze but doesn’t reply to me. Mack speaks first. “Coralee, do you know who this is?”
Coralee shakes her head. She stares down at the pups.
Mack purses her lips. “Do you think you have an idea who this might be?” she tries.
Coralee starts to shake her head again and hesitates. Then, to my surprise, she gives a single sharp nod.
“You’re my mother,” she croaks, lifting her eyes to the woman in the armchair. “Aren’t you?”
The woman’s lips begin to tremble. She lifts a hand to her mouth and squeezes her eyes shut a couple of times. “That’s right, Coralee,” she says, her words thick. “I’m Nima. I’m your mama.”
Coralee stares at her without blinking. I have a million questions, but I know that Coralee needs hers answered first. So I move my hand silently over and place it on her arm.
I want her to know that I’m here for her now; that no matter what lies she’s told, I know she never meant to hurt me. I want her to know I’m sorry.
So I squeeze her arm. Then I look down at my knees, wreathed in scrapes and bruises, and I listen.
“I didn’t even know if you were alive. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. Why are you here?” Coralee says.
“I—I wanted to meet you. I wanted to see my baby again. I wanted to make things right.”
“By standing outside my window at night? By stealing a bunch of jewelry?”
“The jewelry—it’s not what you think. I didn’t steal it.”
“Then where’d it come from?” Coralee presses.
“Do you remember that I used to work for Mrs. Blackwood?” asks Nima. “I took care of her, and I used to bring you with me when you were just a little thing. You used to play dress-up with Mrs. Blackwood’s jewelry. You’d march around the house in her pearls like you were the queen of Palm Knot. She thought you were so funny.”
Coralee shakes her head, her mouth slightly ajar in surprise. “I don’t remember,” she says. But at least that explains how she knew so much about the house.
“Well, one day Mrs. Blackwood told me she wanted to give me something. She handed me a velvet box with a few pieces of her jewelry inside. I told her there was no way I could accept it, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She said she had all this stuff and no children of her own to give it to, so I should have it to give to you when you were older.”
“But then you left,” whispers Coralee.
Nima closes her eyes for a long second, and when she opens them, they shine with tears. “I was desperate,” she says. “So unhappy in this town. I took the jewelry with me when I left, thinking I could sell it and use the money to make a new life for myself. But I couldn’t. Every time I looked at that box, all I could see was you prancing around in those pearls, and I was so ashamed that I had taken them.”
“Then what did you do?” asks Coralee.
“It wasn’t easy. I didn’t have a lot. But I finally got a job, and then a better one. And every night, I would come home, look at those jewels, and think about you.”
Now Coralee’s eyes are shining, too. “If you thought about me so much, why didn’t you just come back?”
“I left you, Coralee,” Nima says. “I left my baby. I hurt my family. And that was shameful. But I wasn’t ready yet to be the mother you needed. And I knew I couldn’t show my face here again until I was someone you could count on. Who could take care of you.”
Coralee’s shoulders tremble, and I give her arm another little squeeze.
“Why go to the Blackwood house first?” she says. “Why hide out here? Why not come straight to us?”
“Oh, Coralee.” Nima sighs. “I have a lot of apologizing to do. I thought it would be easier to start with Mrs. Blackwood. I wanted to tell her I was sorry for leaving, show her the jewelry so she would know I had kept it for you. I didn’t know she had died. When I knocked and no one answered, I used the spare key for the back door. It was in the same place Mrs. Blackwood always kept it. You walked in after I’d been there just five minutes.
“And when you saw me outside your window—I didn’t mean for you to see me. I was trying to get up the courage to knock on the door, but I couldn’t. So I hid here, with Mack.”
“And you knew about this?” Coralee says, turning her gaze to Mack.
“Yes, baby, I knew,” Mack replies, raising her voice over the noise of the storm. “Your mama was always a favorite student of mine. She had so much potential, so much spark. She showed up here on her first night back in town, and I told her she could stay with me until everything got sorted. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when you brought me that jewelry, but it wasn’t my place to tell you what was going on. Not until your mama was ready.”
Something heavy-sounding bangs into the wall outside, and everyone flinches. We listen for a few minutes with strained expressions as the wind picks up in a scream and seems to spiral round and round the building. One of the pups lifts its head up, its floppy ears moving forward in alarm.
I wonder if they miss their mother the way Coralee must have missed hers all th
ese years.
I wonder if they know she won’t be coming back for them again, like Kacey won’t be coming back for me.
“Your turn,” Mack yells over the wind. “Why were you out in the storm? And what are all these animals doing in my house?”
Coralee tries to clear her throat, but this sends her into another fit of coughing.
“It was on the news,” I bellow. “About the red wolf that escaped from the preserve. They found her body by the Fish House, but they didn’t find her pups. So Coralee figured out where they were and went to save them.”
The steaks gnawed to the bone, the emptied foil knots. The mother wolf must have sniffed out the Fish House’s Dumpster and brought the food back to the cove. She couldn’t know there would be rat poison in them. And the holes on the beach weren’t dug by someone looking for treasure. They were made by her, kicking up sand, trying to make a den. What had Suzanne said in her presentation? Red wolves like to make their dens by a stream bank, or somewhere dark and confined.
Somewhere like the storm drain tunnel.
“That true?” Mack asks Coralee.
“Yes,” Coralee says, struggling to speak loud enough to be heard. “I couldn’t leave them out there on their own without a mother.” From the corner of my eye, I see Nima flinch. “Somebody had to help them, and I knew no one else would.”
“And you went to save Coralee?” Mack asks me.
I nod.
“But how did you know where we were?” I yell at Nima.
The wind and rain are indistinguishable now, like waves are crashing right against the wall, one after another.
“I was closing the shutters,” she yells back. “And I could just barely make out the shape of a kid ducking into those trees, and I know that’s where y’all like to play.”
Nima jumps in alarm when we hear a deafening boom somewhere outside. Coralee grabs my hand and tries to sink deeper into the couch. Even Mack’s forehead is pinched with worry, but she keeps her lips in a tightly controlled line.
It’s too loud to speak anymore. It’s even too loud to think.
And maybe that’s a good thing.