Storm Blown

by Nick Courage

  A ghost town.

  He had never seen the city so empty.

  With everyone gone, the narrow streets felt almost spacious, as if they’d expanded to fill the void. It made Alejo feel lonely, like he was driving through a cemetery. He rubbed the chill from his arms as the rain picked up, battering against the windows so loudly it drowned out the hum of the engine. Stepping on the gas, Alejo nosed the van toward La Perla with wide eyes. He made it less than a block before the windshield fogged up for the hundredth time.

  “Come on,” Alejo muttered, stretching to wipe the glass with the tips of two fingers. The clear smudge fogged over almost immediately, but not before he saw a metal trash can jump the curb in front of the van, spilling paper plates and wet napkins as it tumbled across the street.

  Alejo stomped on the brake, his heart pounding….

  But even with the pedal pushed all the way to the floor, the van didn’t stop.

  Not entirely.

  Alejo’s stomach clenched as the rear wheels fishtailed behind him, skidding on wet cobblestones until the van was finally caught in the arms of a fruiting calabash tree.

  No airbags deployed.

  No alarms sounded.

  And there was nobody to run to the scene of the accident to see if Alejo was hurt. Outside the fogged windows, it continued to rain as if nothing had happened. Alejo cursed, quietly at first and then so loudly it would have drawn attention…if there had been anyone in Old San Juan to hear him. His breath was rapid and shallow as he turned in his seat to survey the damage. A hairline fracture ran through one of the rear windows and the roof buckled under the weight of a low-hanging branch.

  But he was fine.

  Everything was fine.

  The adrenaline receded as quickly as it had come.

  Alejo slumped behind the wheel and turned the radio off, his foot still on the brake. It wasn’t a regular plastic trash can. That would have actually been fine. This one belonged to the city, one of the heavy steel cans planted on every other corner—indestructible by design. Alejo’s breath caught in his throat as he rubbed the shivers from his arms. He could still hear it crashing down the empty street, chipping away at the cobblestones and curbs.

  Picking up speed.

  The cameraman was right; it was too dangerous to be out.

  But there was no turning back now.

  The roof of the van popped back into place as Alejo tapped the gas, the branches of the twisted tree clawing against the paint and steel. He cringed at the sound of it, at the squeals and the scratches. The cameraman wouldn’t like the damage, but there was nothing Alejo could do about that. His only choice was to keep moving. He was so close to Padrino Nando’s little house. He just needed to follow the curve of the street toward the sound of the breaking surf.

  And to watch out for trash cans.

  Alejo rolled the windows down and let the wind and rain in.

  It was the only way he could see the road.

  Just ahead of him was Castillo San Cristóbal, the old Spanish fort next to La Perla. Alejo had played there a thousand times, running in its courtyards and hiding in its tunnels. There was a legend that the spirits of the sea gathered at its crumbling walls. They said you could hear them whispering on darker nights. That some of the soldiers who stood guard at the turret closest to the waves had even disappeared, never to be seen again.

  La Garita del Diablo, they called it.

  The Devil’s Turret.

  Alejo hadn’t believed the stories, but there was a weathered plaque to commemorate the soldiers who had lost their lives. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Padrino Nando had made a point of showing him. As Alejo drove toward San Cristóbal with the wind in his hair, he couldn’t help but think of his padrino and the Devil’s Turret. The night was dark, and even from a distance, he imagined he could hear the spirits whispering.

  In fact, they were practically screaming.

  He turned the radio up and flipped through the stations, drowning the diablos out while traffic lights swung precariously overhead. Creaking on their cables. Alejo turned the radio up even louder—as loud as it would go—as he navigated the heavy van down the last short stretch of road before Padrino Nando’s house. Calle Norzagaray. The narrow street ran along the top of the old city wall, overlooking the Atlantic—separating Old San Juan from the sea.

  La Perla was on the wrong side of the wall.

  Neither city nor sea, it sat perched on the sloping beach between the two.

  Despite the ocean views, no tourists went to La Perla.

  Nobody went to La Perla unless they lived there, not even the police.

  That was the saying, anyway, and it was true—La Perla wasn’t in any of the glossy travel brochures they kept behind the front desk at the San Pilastro. But for Alejo, it was home. It hadn’t always been easy, but he’d been happy to live there with his padrino ever since his mother had left for the States. And until she was able to make a life for them up north, La Perla was the only home he had.

  Alejo stepped on the gas.

  The roads to La Perla were meandering. They skirted the water, looping back and forth across the length of the beach before feeding down to the shore. Alejo had often driven these roads with Padrino Nando, who cranked the windows down in his rusted yellow truck to take in the sea breeze. To catch up with friends and neighbors. Even without the small talk, the roads were the slowest way down to their little yellow house.

  The fastest way into La Perla was by foot.

  Alejo pulled off Calle Norzagaray, bumping over the curb onto the grass of a small park. The song on the radio crackled as it spiraled into a falsetto chorus, the heavy rhythms mixing with the crashing waves as Alejo drove down a short sidewalk that was well worn by his own footsteps. Set into the top of the ancient wall, unmarked except for a few hasty graffiti tags, was the entrance to a set of concrete stairs. Alejo put the van in park just in front of the stairs, on the precipice of the wall, and waited for the song to finish.

  Hesitating.

  All the lights in La Perla were out—the first victims of the storm—but he could hear Valerie’s waves slamming against the beach just a few hundred feet away. He rubbed his hands in front of the heater vents, gathering his strength. There was no predicting what he would find at the bottom of the stairs once he made his way down to the sea, and with wind moaning and the water rising, it was harder than he thought it would be to open the door and walk into the storm.

  I’ll be quick, Alejo told himself, remembering the sparkling lights of the San Juan Pilastro. For a long moment, he wished he were back in the cloakroom, curled up on soft velvet settee beneath a fluffy white comforter. Once he found Nando, they’d go back. They had to. Everyone would be worried sick about them—and even if they knew it was Alejo who took the van, Ms. Ana would understand.

  It was a state of emergency.

  They hadn’t given him a choice.

  Just as Alejo was about to run into the rain, he remembered the ponchos and stopped himself. Crawling to the second row of seats, Alejo pulled one of the clear plastic ponchos over his head, then ripped open the waterproof garbage bags, digging into the backpacks inside. Taking stock. He found mostly dry clothes, dry socks. Dry shoes. A few books and some chargers. Alejo held the shoes up to his own bare feet, but they were all too big. There was nothing he could use—and besides, he was going home.

  Climbing back into the front seat, Alejo opened the glove compartment.

  He rifled through it, looking for a flashlight.

  Instead, he found a small black phone. It was heavy-duty, with orange rubber reinforcements. Not a phone, Alejo realized. A walkie-talkie. Just one, which meant that somebody, somewhere, had its mate. Alejo pressed the trigger and held his breath—but all he heard was static.

  He decided to take it anyway.

  Ju
st in case.

  As soon as Alejo pushed the door open, the rain filled the van, carried by the wind. He struggled to slam the door shut again, then ran across the top of the wall without bothering to lock it. His poncho fanned out behind him in gusts so strong he thought he might fly off into the sea, so he scuttled on his bottom, sliding through the grass and the mud to the relative safety of the sheltered stairs. He slipped down the first few in a panic, then rested against a cracked cement wall—finally in La Perla.

  Alejo exhaled, spitting rain from his lips.

  The houses were built so close together, and the stairways so serpentine, that the wind broke before it reached him. A small silver lining on a hundred black clouds. He cleared the water from his ears with his pinkies and popped his jaw. The sirens were louder than at the San Juan Pilastro. Their rusted speakers—built into the parapets of the old wall—modulated high, then low, piercing through the din of the crashing surf.

  Warning Alejo of the danger he was heading straight into.

  Alejo could tell from the sound of the waves—from the closeness of them—that the beach was flooded, like at the Pilastro. Unlike the Pilastro, the beach was narrow in La Perla. On a good day, high tides swept tangled seaweed halfway to the houses that were closest to the waves. And on a bad day? Valerie had helped double the reach of the sea. The lower houses were already flooded with salt water and sand, their inhabitants long gone. Driven to the rural inland mountains, to Barranquitas and Orocovis.

  Escorted to safety by the National Guard.

  A mandatory evacuation.

  Alejo prayed that his padrino hadn’t been among them—that he wasn’t truly alone in the storm—but he could feel the panic rising in his chest as he pulled the wet hood of his poncho tightly around his head. There was no way of knowing until he checked, so he clutched the walkie-talkie in a trembling fist as he made his way down the rest of the stairs to the little house he had grown to love. Most of the windows he passed were tacked shut with warped wood, repurposed from shipping crates and skateboard ramps. But in some of the windows, through the slats of closed shutters, Alejo could see the warm flicker of candles, and as the sirens faded out and then in again, he heard muffled voices behind closed doors.

  Voices and music, even.

  Neighbors.

  Like Alejo, they refused to be scared off.

  Rain streamed down Alejo’s face as he grinned into the night. It ran into the neck of his poncho and worked its way back down to the ground, soaking him from head to toe. Alejo didn’t mind. He wasn’t totally alone. Padrino Nando’s yellow truck was still parked on the asphalt in front of his matching yellow house, and Alejo rapped its hood with his knuckles before jumping the last few feet onto the porch.

  “Nando!” he shouted.

  He tried knocking twice, then a third time, his smile fading when nobody came to the door. He would have peeked through the window, but the shutters were all firmly closed, so—finally—he turned the knob. It wasn’t locked. The door opened noiselessly into Padrino Nando’s house, which was twice as black as the night outside. Alejo stumbled blindly into the living room, shrouded in darkness.

  “Anyone home?”

  He felt his way around the couch and the coffee table, his knees knocking into chairs and corners as his bare feet slapped wetly against the wooden floors. “It’s me, Alejo,” he called out, his voice cracking as he felt his way through the empty rooms. It didn’t take long. Padrino Nando’s house was neat but small. There was a bathroom and a kitchen, a bedroom—and the futon where Alejo slept, beneath the windows overlooking the sea.

  Alejo sat on his futon, in the dark, cradling the walkie-talkie in his lap as the wind whistled and moaned overhead. La Perla was slipping into the waves and the National Guard had swept through the streets of Old San Juan until it was a lifeless shadow of itself…but Alejo had heard his neighbors eating and drinking and waiting out the storm. He hadn’t imagined that—he’d seen the lights through their shutters with his own eyes.

  Not everyone had evacuated.

  But Padrino Nando was nowhere to be found.

  Emily rolled in bed, kicking the sheets from her dirty legs.

  The air in her room felt stale, the pillow flat and hot beneath her cheeks. Outside her bedroom door, she could hear her mother talking in low and serious tones. As always, the television was blaring. It chimed with another breaking update as Emily wiped the drool from her chin with the back of her wrist. “He’s not home yet,” her mother murmured, pacing toward Emily’s door and then turning back to the living room. “But he’ll be okay—they shut the rig down last night, just to be safe.”

  Emily groaned, reaching for her phone.

  It was seven-thirty in the morning.

  She closed her eyes and did the math.

  She’d only been in bed for five hours and the sun was already so bright that she could see it through her eyelids. There was no way she was getting back to sleep, so—awake and exhausted—Emily thumbed through her feeds instead, looking for signs of the storm that was cutting Katie’s beach vacation short. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but everything seemed normal. Except for Katie—whose wide orthodontic smile was missing in action—her friends were all sharing pictures of their super-fun summers: selfies in front of sparkling lakes and late-afternoon ice cream cones.

  Emily thought about posting the pictures she’d taken from her perch on the tiny island, but even with her favorite filters, they were too weird and murky. She barely recognized her own face beneath her tangled hair and she was out of focus in every shot, so she sent them to Elliot instead, grinning with expectation as she waited for his reply.

  Chewing her lip as seconds turned into minutes.

  And minutes stretched to fill the morning.

  When her battery symbol flashed red, Emily let her phone slip into the folds of her sheets and sighed. The rest of the apartment still smelled like lemon and vinegar, but Emily’s room had grown thick with clutter—notebooks and magazines and stuffed animals floating on mounds of unwashed laundry. Her charger was somewhere beneath the mess, and she wished she’d had the heart to find it the night before.

  After her midnight escape from Audubon Park.

  Looking back on it from the safety of her sunlit bed, Emily felt almost invincible.

  Her goose had refused to follow her when she’d crept out past the trees….He’d flapped his good wing in protest, honking as she jogged beneath the streetlights. Making a ruckus. Waking up the neighborhood. But by some miracle, Emily had managed to sneak her turtle all the way home without getting grounded for life. She’d eased the door open and shut it quietly behind her, kicking off her muddy shoes before climbing the stairs.

  Tiptoeing past her mother, who’d been curled up on the couch.

  As usual.

  It had taken the last of her energy to change into a wrinkled pair of old pajamas and toss her still-wet clothes beneath her desk. Expertly filling the last clear spot on the floor. “Ten points to Gryffindor,” she’d mumbled, collapsing back onto her pillows, her eyes heavy with sleep. At some point in the night, her turtle had crawled beneath the damp pile—drawn by the familiar scent of duckweed. He stayed there through morning—his head and tail hidden from view, unmoving until Emily stirred. As she stretched awake, he slowly emerged from his shell, his eyes wide as he tracked the dust motes floating through the soft morning light. The air was thick with them, and the turtle snapped back into his shell as Emily sneezed into the crook of her elbow.

  She sneezed again, and again, her face red and crumpled from the effort.

  As she rubbed her nose with the hem of her pajamas, the footsteps in the hallway stopped, then slowly turned back again. The weather forecast spilled into her room as her mother knocked twice on the door, then opened it without waiting for an answer. “One second, Lil,” she said, muffling the receiver as she
peeked at Emily from the shadows.

  “You’re not getting sick, are you?”

  From the hallway, her phone voice had sounded normal.

  Happy, even.

  But as her mother stood in Emily’s doorframe, her face looked drawn and pale. Like she’d been crying. Her red-rimmed eyes locked on Emily as if Emily had the plague and her nose flared at a smell she couldn’t quite place. “You can’t be around Elliot if you’re sick,” she said matter-of-factly. “You know that, right?”

  Emily stared at her mom from beneath knitted brows.

  She didn’t know what to say.

  It was like her mother had forgotten their shared nights in the hospital, falling asleep on hard plastic seats. Eating stale pretzels from the vending machine and trying not to lose hope. Emily wasn’t stupid. She’d been in the room when the doctor sat them down and explained how their lives would change when they brought Elliot home. How everything would be fine, if…The doctor had listed everything they needed to do—all the precautions they had to take—while her mom quietly sobbed with exhaustion and relief.

  Everything’s going to be fine, Emily had whispered.

  Squeezing her mother’s small, cold hands.

  Everything’s going to be fine.

  Emily remembered all of it, every aching minute.

  But she didn’t say any of that.

  Instead, she tried as hard as she could not to roll her eyes.

  “I’m not around Elliot,” she said, her words cutting through the morning like broken glass. Sharp and jagged. “I’m barely allowed to see him.” She wished it hadn’t come out that way, so confrontational, but it wasn’t fair. They were supposed to be in this together, Emily and her mom—not turning on each other while they wasted their summer in front of the television, spraying so much Lysol they could taste it at the back of their throats. Not hiding from the world as if their bodies had given up on them, too.