Storm Blown

by Nick Courage

  “I’m okay,” he said, his voice ragged as his pulse pounded in his temples.

  Even with his eyes closed, he could feel his sister staring at him.

  Worrying.

  “It’s not you,” he sighed, breaking the silence. “Mom’s just scared, is all.”

  Emily didn’t answer.

  They both knew it was an understatement.

  You didn’t have to be a genius to see that their mom was so scared that she wasn’t herself anymore. Even half-conscious on his bed, Elliot could sense the change in the apartment. The stress. He told himself that once their dad came back, everything would be different. That their mom would be able to put down the Purell and relax again. Until then, though, it was up to Elliot to help his little sister get through the weirdness.

  “I’m gonna be okay,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  Emily shrugged.

  “I just wish things were normal again,” she whispered. “You know?”

  It was easier for him, Elliot realized, sleeping in his room all day. Waited on hand and foot while his sister tiptoed around the house. Dealing with their mother. He watched Emily jump at the sound of the television from the living room and sighed. “Normal is boring,” he finally said. “When I get better, I’m never gonna be bored again.”

  Emily smiled, which only made her look sadder.

  “Seriously,” Elliot said. “When I get out of this bed, I’m not getting back in it. Even when Dad’s here and everything’s back to normal. I’ll camp out in the park if I have to. You can come visit me on that little island, with the birds.”

  Emily smiled again, with her eyes this time.

  The island in Audubon Park was a small, ragged clump of cattails and goose poop in the middle of a shallow lagoon. It was only sixty feet out from shore, but neither Emily nor Elliot had ever been there. To get to it, you’d have to wade through the muck and mud—in front of everyone—and there wasn’t any reason to do that, even though they’d talked about it since they were little.

  “Emily!”

  Elliot watched his sister cringe as their mom shouted from down the hall. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” he said, squeezing her wrist before she slouched back into the living room—the weight of the world on her shoulders. Before she could close the door behind her, he heard his mother reprimanding her.

  “You can’t be in there,” she said, her voice high and sharp. “You know that.”

  Elliot took a deep breath, filling his lungs.

  Feeling his stitches stretch and pull.

  He didn’t like the way his mom was acting. That she was making his sister so sad. But his eyelids were heavy. So heavy. And there was nothing he could do about it, not before their dad came home. The sound of the television and the traffic on the avenue blurred together and receded into the distance as Elliot drifted back to sleep, the smell of hand sanitizer and antiseptic wipes hanging like a fog above his clouded head.

  It had been hours since Padrino Nando had clocked out.

  He’d driven his salt-rusted yellow truck back to La Perla, windshield wipers cranking against the rain as he raced home to shutter his windows before the storm. But Alejo was still at the San Juan Pilastro Resort and Casino. Not wanting to miss the excitement, he had waved goodbye as Nando pulled out of the mostly empty garage—then raced back inside, where the hotel staff had gathered. Tropical Storm Valerie was coming, and the televisions in the resort’s marble-tiled lobby were saying that she could be la tormenta del siglo.

  The storm of the century.

  They’d watched the news reports—frozen in front of the television screens—until the Pilastro’s manager blew in from the back deck, tucking her windswept hair behind her ears. She’d called an emergency meeting—right there, in the lobby—to run through a preparedness checklist. Afterward, Alejo sprinted from room to room, helping the last remaining guests pull their thick blue curtains closed. This was necessary, the manager had explained, to protect the guests from broken glass, should Valerie come knocking at their windows.

  Everyone was laughing and breathless, giddy at the thought of danger.

  To the guests, it was like a fire drill…without the annoying alarms.

  “It’s nothing,” Alejo had said over and over again, in countless identical rooms.

  But in between suites, the hallways felt eerily abandoned.

  The hotel had more or less emptied at the first sign of danger. Eighty percent of its occupants had packed up their suitcases to brave the crowds at Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, but the San Juan Pilastro was a sprawling resort. Dozens of guests were still huddled around their televisions, their complimentary-breakfast trays sitting like distress signals on the thick turquoise carpeting in front of their rooms.

  Those were the doors Alejo had to knock on.

  Those were the guests he’d been asked to reassure.

  Over time he developed a system, like a game.

  “It’s nothing.” He would smile as he pulled the curtains closed. “It really is nothing,” he would repeat, and the guests—all foreigners trapped on vacation—would smile weakly back at him, wishing they had left while they still could. Then Alejo would hold up his hands, apologizing for the inconvenience. “In San Juan,” he would say, “this happens every year, all the time—and we’re still here!”

  The manager had told them to say this, and it worked. Most of the remaining guests called down for their complimentary cocktails before he even left their rooms, laughing at their own bad luck. The hotel bar made so many Dark ’n’ Stormies that they ran out of rum halfway through Alejo’s rounds, switching to something they were calling a Frozen Valerie. It was sweet and cold and green, and they were making it by the bucket in the kitchen.

  “We have to keep them calm,” his manager had said, her hands on her hips, a general addressing her troops. “Valerie we can live through, but bad reviews…”

  She left her sentence hanging, as if it were too unthinkable to even finish.

  Alejo bounced on the balls of his feet, vibrating with nervous energy.

  He loved his summers at the Pilastro.

  He loved the pool and the beach and tagging along with his padrino, who gave Alejo an allowance for helping out. Alejo would have helped for the fun of it, but he liked the extra money in his pocket and he liked the hotel staff, too. They had started to feel like family, so Alejo tried to do a good job when he talked to the guests. To keep them happy, so they’d ignore the terrible weather and come back to the Pilastro again and again. Still, as Alejo pulled the curtains closed, he couldn’t help but frown at the darkening sky. With every room he cleared, his worry grew. Not for himself, because the resort was safe—a fortress on the sea—but for Padrino Nando.

  Nando lived in a modest house on the beach next to what had once been a bright pink apartment building. Now it was sun-bleached and crumbling slowly into the sand, along with the rest of La Perla, but Alejo knew it must have been nice when it was first built, when Nando started living there.

  Everything was better when it was new.

  Before reality set in.

  Back then, Alejo’s mother had been a little girl and Nando still had hair on his weathered head. It would be years before she grew up and moved to New York City for university and then graduate school, promising her uncle Nando that she’d be back for Alejo as soon as she could make a new start for them. That their lives would be so much better on the mainland, once she had settled into a good career and could stop working two jobs to make rent.

  Even that felt like a lifetime ago.

  Alejo sometimes heard Padrino Nando worrying about it on the phone with his mother. But he didn’t mind. He’d been living with Nando for so long that it felt normal…and he was happy in La Perla. He would never tell her—especially not now, when she was so close to making her
dreams come true—but Alejo almost dreaded moving to the mainland. He liked sleeping on Nando’s faded tweed couch next to the television set, floral curtains blowing in the breeze. The streets always smelled like fried rice and tostones, and there was music in the air.

  As he busied himself around the resort, Alejo wondered what his padrino was doing at home. If he was still watching the skies or if he was reading the newspaper and drinking cold coffee from the morning, a scratchy radio station blaring from the hallway. Alejo scanned the horizon, remembering what Nando had said about the birds…

  But he didn’t see anything.

  Just gathering clouds and palm trees whipping in the wind.

  La tormenta del siglo—the storm of the century.

  Alejo told himself that Padrino Nando would know to return to the hotel if it got really bad. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but whatever happened…

  They would be safe at the San Juan Pilastro Resort and Casino.

  “I’ll be back in a bit, okay?” Emily said, more to Elliot’s closed door than to her mother, who nodded wordlessly as Emily pulled the heavy apartment door closed behind her. Muffling the television. The afternoon sun filled the hallway, bouncing against the chipped white walls, heating the air like a greenhouse. Emily’s arms glistened with sweat as soon as she stepped into the light, but she felt instantly better. She jumped down the scuffed stairs two at a time, toward the noise from the street outside: cars honking, people laughing on their phones, the streetcar rumbling down the avenue.

  The sounds of life.

  As usual, the front door stuck in its frame, warped by heat and rain.

  Emily kicked it open with a thunk, then—blinking at the sun—second-guessed herself. She had lived in New Orleans her whole life and still wasn’t used to the summers. It was so hot the air shimmered, and she could barely breathe—but anything was better than going back upstairs, to the sadness and the dark.

  Emily wiped the sweat from her eyes and jumped down the last remaining stairs.

  * * *

  —

  It was cooler once she reached the park, beneath the sprawling canopy of the ancient oaks, but not much cooler. Emily sat on a bench nestled at the base of an especially gnarled old tree, watching squirrels spiral up the trunk into the upper branches. Someone had hung wind chimes from the boughs—enormous, eight-foot-tall tubes—and she peered into the leaves, waiting for a breeze that never came.

  It was only when Emily stretched, massaging the crick from her neck, that she noticed the reflection of the sky in the dirty lagoon that anchored the park. It was still and strange, like the world was holding its breath. No clouds danced across the muddy green water, and the feathers that littered its surface floated without movement: curling white castaways from the tiny island where birds nested throughout the year, growing fat off stale bread and minnows.

  It had been a long time since Emily had sat in the park like this.

  Just thinking.

  She was usually on an adventure with Elliot.

  Climbing trees or searching for eggs in the reeds by the murky water.

  Right before he’d gotten sick, they’d followed the whooping calls of gibbons to the far side of the park, by the river, where a chain-link fence separated the soccer fields from the adjoining zoo. Creeping along the perimeter, they’d peered into empty animal pens until they stumbled across a small hole in the fence by a maintenance shed. Elliot had tried to convince her to sneak in even though they had a membership at the zoo and could have gotten in for free…but she’d lost her nerve after he tore his shirt on the rusted wire.

  In the distance, a gibbon whooped.

  Emily sighed and stared at Elliot’s island.

  Its trees were ragged with Spanish moss, and even though its banks were only sixty feet from shore, it was easy to overlook the birds if you didn’t know what to look for. The trick was to let your eyes adjust to the soft, dappled light until their feathers and beaks emerged—like an optical illusion—from the mud and bark. After that, it was hard not to see them: the herons and cattle egrets perched on low-hanging branches, the shadows filled with grebes and cormorants and whistling ducks with tangerine feet.

  The little island was so brimming with life that it seemed to be breathing.

  As if it could feel Emily staring, the island exploded into a low flying arc of gulls and ducks. They circled the treetops twice before returning to their roosts. As they settled back down onto the crowded branches, a hot wind rose, rippling through the lagoon as thick clouds raced across the sky. Leaves rustled above Emily’s head and the giant wind chimes finally stirred, so quietly that Emily could barely hear them. She rubbed the goose bumps from her arms and wondered if Elliot was okay.

  If she should run home.

  Instead, Emily picked up her book.

  “Any good?”

  A red-faced woman in neon shorts jogged in place, checking her pulse. Behind her, a parade of hungry ducks trailed after a little girl at full waddle. The girl laughed, waving a piece of bread over her head as her father jogged to catch up.

  “I have two boys about your age.”

  The woman smiled as she stretched, her ponytail dripping with sweat.

  “I just wish I could get them to be more like you—nose in a book, right?”

  Emily nodded blankly, but the jogger had already started running again. Her shoes chewed through the narrow dirt path, spitting out tiny clouds of dust as the little girl screeched in her wake. Emily was too old to feed the ducks now, but she rubbed her hand where a goose had bitten her years ago. It hadn’t hurt, but Emily had cried because it startled her. As she watched the little girl pushing her way through the scrum of beaks and feathers—laughing, her bread clenched tightly in her fist—Emily decided to be braver.

  For Elliot.

  There were still a few more hours of light in the day, and she knew exactly what Elliot would want to do if he were with her—but never in a million years would he actually expect Emily to do it. Emily hadn’t even been able to sneak into the zoo, and this was so much bigger.

  She smiled as she stood up and walked to the lagoon’s edge.

  Looking to see that no one was watching, Emily inched her foot into the water…then took a deep breath and stepped in. Her shoes squished into the soft muck at the bottom. She could see the toes of her sneakers just beneath the surface, behind the clouds and her own grinning reflection. Her socks were wet and her shoes felt heavy—but the water wasn’t so very deep, and with the haze from the heat, the trees on the little island looked a little like smudges of paint.

  Emily slipped her phone from her pocket and held it at arm’s length, but she wasn’t far enough into the lagoon for photographic proof. To convince Elliot that she’d really walked to the tiny island, she’d take a selfie when she was at least halfway there. And maybe a few pictures from the island itself—looking back at the rest of the park from the muddy banks, with the roosting ducks over her shoulders. Emily laughed as she stepped farther into the water, picturing Elliot checking his messages as she centered her face on the screen.

  The lights flickered as wind buffeted the San Juan Pilastro Resort and Casino. The televisions flickered, too, the newscasters fading to black and then crackling back to life midsentence. A reporter with bleached hair and a red blazer said Valerie was on her way to becoming a hurricane and that an evacuation was already under way for the more lower-lying coastal areas. If you lived on the water, she said, it was important to get out. The gusts were faster now—sixty miles an hour over the ocean—and with the wind came waves.

  Surges.

  The more Alejo watched the televisions, the more he worried about Padrino Nando. While the evening staff bustled back and forth across the marble tiles, preparing for the storm, the news played footage of the beaches on the east side of the island. They were already underwater, fo
r the most part, with whitecapped waves crashing over piers and lapping into the streets. And the worst of Valerie was still over a hundred miles away, they said, churning over the Atlantic.

  Picking up speed.

  She would hit San Juan sometime during the night or in the early morning, and there was already gridlock on the highway: people driving inland to the mountains, honking through the rain as they inched toward Barranquitas and Orocovis. Alejo watched the broadcasts from an oversized couch across from the revolving glass doors, waiting for his padrino to spin into the lobby.

  He wouldn’t have a choice, if the storm was as bad as they said it would be.

  Nando would have to come back to the Pilastro.

  His house was on the high side of the island…technically—but La Perla was nestled outside the city walls and sloping into the sea. Vulnerable. Alejo had tried to call Nando twice from the telephone at the check-in desk, but he wasn’t picking up. Alejo chewed his thumb, wondering if he should try to brave the weather and find him. The birds had told them that San Juan would be fine, but Alejo had more information now.

  He was only twelve, but even he knew that it was good to get a second opinion.

  “Todos, everyone!” his manager shouted. “Kitchen, now!”

  Despite Alejo’s worry and the startling images on the televisions, the atmosphere at the San Juan Pilastro Resort and Casino still seemed celebratory. The last remaining guests were all tucked into their rooms with a hundred reassurances and—even with the flickering lights—everyone smiled as they gathered in the stainless-steel kitchen. The manager smiled, too, winking at Alejo as she announced that there was no need to be scared.

  “And why not?” she asked, standing in front of the walk-in refrigerator.