by Nick Courage
Tiptoeing around the fountain, Emily peered into the whispering leaves above her head for signs of life—but there were only branches, waving in the wind. She wondered if her goose was gone too. If he could manage to fly with his injured wing or if he was stuck in the park with no place to go.
Like Emily.
The girl on the swing started crying.
Emily didn’t blame her.
As the wind picked up, blowing swirls of fine pollen across the tall grass, Emily wiped her nose and sniffled at the horizon. Beyond the tree line and the streetcar tracks and the cathedral spires, the perfect blue sky had started to curdle. Emily felt the change more than saw it. From where she was standing, Hurricane Valerie was just a smudge of gray working its way across the Gulf of Mexico—barely visible to the naked eye, even if you knew what to look for.
Emily rubbed the goose bumps from her arms.
She didn’t know what to look for.
It was obvious that the city was in for more than just a little rain, like her mother absentmindedly predicted—like she hoped, despite all signs to the contrary. But Emily was used to summer thunderstorms. If she hadn’t been kicked out of her own room, she would have looked forward to the sound of raindrops running down her windows while she read, safe and dry on her cluttered bed. And if she had known just how hard the rain was going to fall, Emily would have sprinted home and dragged her mom and brother down the stairs, into their waiting car.
Germs or no germs.
They’d be halfway to higher ground by now.
Instead, Emily jumped from the lip of the fountain, landing noisily in its basin. The fountain was dry, shut off in anticipation of the coming storm, and she kicked her way through a thick layer of green pennies and shiny dimes as she waited for a sneeze that never came. Wishing coins. She thought about picking through them for quarters, but it felt like bad luck to take wishes from the fountain. It wasn’t so long ago that Emily had thrown penny after penny into the dark green water herself, praying for a miracle.
And she’d gotten one, more or less.
Elliot was going to be okay.
Emily just hoped that she was going to be okay, too.
The giant wind chimes hummed ominously in the distance as the father—sensing rain—carried his daughter to their car. She screeched and squealed, fat tears rolling down her cheeks, and Emily sighed, remembering her mother’s book. It was bad enough that she had left it in the park overnight, but if it turned into a pulpy mess, too, that would be just her luck. The strawberry milk and cherry pie settled uncertainly in Emily’s stomach as she climbed out of the fountain.
It wasn’t hard to retrace her steps.
She knew exactly where she’d hidden from the boys with the cigarettes.
When she closed her eyes, she could almost perfectly picture the cluster of clovers she’d sat in. The grass blurred underfoot as she jogged toward the empty track and then crossed it, her untied laces trailing behind her. It felt good to run, and as she neared the water, her heart lightened. Everything’s going to be okay, she thought, feeling suddenly like her old self. She didn’t know why or how, but she trusted the feeling: everything’s going to be okay. When Emily reached the clovers, though—the same flowering clovers she could picture so perfectly—her book was nowhere to be found.
Instead, she was greeted by her old friend: the Canada goose.
He untucked his beak from his chest and blinked at Emily as she wrinkled her nose.
“Hi,” she said, kneeling to look him in the eye. The two of them were alone on the banks of the lagoon, she realized. The rest of the geese had sensed the storm and fled, but Emily’s goose, with his twisted wing, had been left to fend for himself.
He ruffled his feathers reproachfully and Emily found herself apologizing.
“I had to leave,” she said. “But I can’t be with my family now, either.”
The goose shifted his weight, ignoring her.
As he settled into the grass, Emily saw something flash beneath his snowy undercarriage. She reached out slowly—carefully—and pressed against the goose, pushing him gently from his roost. His feathers were stiff and unyielding—not soft at all, like she’d thought they’d be—and he preened them back into place as he shuffled toward the muddy banks and back, clucking unhappily. Emily laughed out loud when she saw what he’d been sitting on.
It was streaked with mud and rimmed with feathers…
But her mother’s book was right where Emily had left it.
Her goose had kept it safe for her.
Sort of.
She wiped the cover on her shorts as the first drops of rain began to fall. Shielding her eyes, Emily looked up in time to see a rogue cloud speeding overhead. It wasn’t alone. Two or three others joined it—gray smears against the otherwise cloudless sky. Across the lagoon, the tiny island danced in the wind while Emily considered her options.
She couldn’t go home, not yet.
Not with her mom so worked up about Elliot.
But she couldn’t stay in the park, either. Not if there was going to be a thunderstorm. She sat heavily on the dew-wet grass, sliding her backpack onto her lap as Spanish moss fluttered in the branches. The turtle blinked mournfully when she pulled him out of her bag, replacing him with her goose-warmed copy of My Side of the Mountain.
She slipped it into the padded computer pouch, for extra safety.
“You can go home if you want to,” Emily said, feeling guilty about keeping her turtle from his turtle friends. She was sad that her brother hadn’t met him, but considering everything, it was probably for the best. She turned the turtle’s shell so he faced the lagoon and watched him take one tentative step toward the water…then turn around. He stared at Emily as the goose leaned into her lap and rested his algae-encrusted beak against her dirty knees. But Emily was too distracted to notice. Another cloud was passing overhead and she’d craned her neck skyward to track it. The turtle crawled slowly into her bag as she shielded her eyes from the rain.
Emily smiled and ripped a handful of clovers from the ground.
She tossed them into her backpack, like confetti, then checked her phone as thunder rumbled in the distance. Her battery was down to three percent, but for once in her life, Emily had messages. Two voice mails from her mother and five missed calls. Also from her mother. Emily’s finger hovered over the little red notifications, but she didn’t want to listen to them. She couldn’t make herself, and she didn’t have to—she already knew why her mom was freaking out: she’d finally called Katie’s parents and found out that Emily wasn’t with them.
That Emily wasn’t with anybody.
She texted Elliot instead of returning the calls.
“Is everything okay at home?” she asked, typing with one thumb as she chewed the nail of the other. Her phone started ringing almost as soon as she sent the message.
It was her brother.
“Hey,” he said, sounding breathless and rushed. “Where are you?”
Emily shrugged, ignoring the question.
“Is Mom still crying or is she angry now?”
“She’s not happy, but, Em—”
“Tell her not to worry about me,” Emily said.
She pet the goose’s head as it nuzzled against her shorts.
“I’m in the park with some new friends and we’re having fun, okay?”
“Wait,” Elliot interrupted. “Emily, this is important.”
They both stopped talking long enough for Emily to hear her mom arguing with someone over the television in the background. She couldn’t tell who she was shouting at—if it was her dad or her aunt or some other poor soul on the other end of the line. And she couldn’t tell what they’d done to upset her. But Emily was sure of one thing: for the first time that day, she was glad she wasn’t home to witness it.
“You have to come back,” Elliot said. “You have to—”
Emily waited for him to finish, but her phone had died.
“She doesn’t want me back,” Emily said, staring at her own bedraggled face in the mirrored black screen. “Not really.” A raindrop splattered on her reflection and she was tempted to cry, but she took a deep breath instead. The trees grew thickly on the tiny island—so thickly she thought she might wait out the rain beneath them.
At least for a little while.
She didn’t have anywhere else to go…and she had no idea what was coming.
But Emily knew that it wouldn’t hurt to have her mom worry about her for a change, so she took off her shoes and stood up straight, slinging her backpack over her shoulder as she strode toward the rippling banks of the lagoon. The water was warm on her bare feet, but she trembled as she sank into the silt—the thick mud filling the gaps between her toes. Elsewhere in the city, families loaded their minivans and businesses nailed sheets of plywood across their storefronts, readying for what the local newscasters were expecting to be the biggest hurricane to hit the Gulf Coast in at last a century.
It was so big, they weren’t even calling it a hurricane anymore.
They were calling it Megastorm Valerie.
“This is as close as we can get without landing!” the helicopter pilot yelled.
His hair whipped in the cross-breeze as he twisted to face the cabin, but nobody looked up. They were too busy staring out the open doors, transfixed by the wreckage below. The pilot shook his head, then turned back to the cockpit. Warning lights flashed orange and yellow across the dashboard and the needle on the altimeter seemed to be stuck at zero….
But they were still airborne.
The pilot tapped the glass gauge of the altimeter with a gloved knuckle.
When the needle refused to budge, he cursed beneath his breath.
It was the pressure systems throwing everything off—he knew that, but there was no avoiding it. Even though conditions inside the eye of the storm were crisp and clear, he was flying blind, and there was no way he’d be able to punch the helicopter through Megastorm Valerie. The bowl of the storm had only grown more defined since they’d taken off, and even if he could somehow weave his way through the updrafts without crashing, the wind shear alone would rip them apart. The pilot craned his neck, scanning the horizon for an exit that didn’t exist. The sloped walls stretched into the upper atmosphere, thinning but never quite disappearing.
Unbreachable.
He’d have to tie down back at the base and evacuate with the rest of them.
If they still had time to evacuate.
The pilot watched the cameraman strain against his webbed shoulder straps in the rearview mirror. He was hanging halfway out of the helicopter, his video camera wedged into the crook of his shoulder as he filmed the ragged coast. The pilot shook his head, then cranked the volume on his monitors. “You want me to try to put us down or what?” he asked, his amplified voice crackling loudly in their headsets. “We have ten, maybe fifteen minutes before drop-dead go time.”
The cameraman shook his head, his camera still trained on the ground below. His eyes were watering from the wind as he squinted through the viewfinder into the waves, his vision blurred. From so high up, La Perla was just a grid of rooftops. Islands in a gently frothing sea. It looked kind of pretty. Like Venice, the cameraman thought. But without the gondolas.
Up close, it would be another story….
A story they wouldn’t be able to tell.
Not yet, anyway.
The helicopter weighed at least five thousand pounds, not counting cargo, and there was no telling what kind of structural damage the houses below had already sustained. To the pilot, they might look like a hundred little landing pads spread out beneath them, but the cameraman had seen enough disaster areas to know that any one of them could crumble under their combined weight.
The cameraman wasn’t willing to take that chance.
Every heli and medevac in a hundred-mile radius was already working overtime—and even with an entire fleet running twenty-four hours a day, the first responders wouldn’t be able to save everyone in Valerie’s path. The numbers just didn’t add up, and the last thing the cameraman wanted was to become another person who needed to be saved.
His job was to report the news—not become it.
Besides, he didn’t have time to get into any trouble.
The network had arranged for their crew to catch a ride to the mainland with a military transport plane. It was already gassed up and waiting for them at the army garrison at Fort Buchanan, just inland of Old San Juan. The plan was to stay just inches ahead of the whipping, southern tail of the storm. In five hours, they’d be waiting on the banks of the Mississippi River—cameras at the ready. When Valerie came raging through the Gulf of Mexico, tearing her way through the cypress swamps, they’d be there to meet her.
That was the network’s plan, anyway.
The cameraman’s plan was to do everything the executives wanted and to stay alive while he was doing it.
He kept his eyes peeled for the white van.
He wasn’t stupid.
He knew the boy had taken it, and he had known where the boy was headed, too. Even if the cameraman’s phone hadn’t been synched with the van’s GPS, he had a feeling he’d find the boy in La Perla. He just didn’t know where in La Perla. The cameraman clenched his teeth as he leaned a little farther over the waves. Tiny whitecaps crested over the upturned belly of a rusted yellow truck. The cameraman didn’t like to admit it to himself, but there was a good chance the white van had met a similar fate.
If that was the case, he hoped the boy wasn’t with it.
The rest of the crew shifted in their seats as turbulence shook the helicopter. They listed left and then right before the pilot was able to pull them back into an unsteady hover. Whatever happened, they couldn’t stay much longer—the cameraman knew that. He told himself that the boy would be fine if they weren’t able to find him. That the boy was resourceful.
He’d driven away with their van, after all.
He’d slipped right past them, beneath their noses.
But he was running out of places to run. The San Juan Pilastro had taken on at least three feet of water since the flooding started. The cameraman had seen a school of grunts and snappers swimming through the lobby with his own eyes, right before they’d packed up their gear and headed out.
And La Perla…
Looking down into what was left of the neighborhood, he found it hard to imagine that more was on the way—but the second half of Valerie was expected to be three times more powerful than the first. The NCRC had sent so many alerts about the growing storm that he’d had to turn off his phone to save the battery. And still, with all that warning—with the mandatory evacuations and the National Guard—the boy from the Pilastro was stranded somewhere below them, trapped between the waves.
The cameraman couldn’t help but think that he was partly to blame.
If he hadn’t brushed him off…
If he had just taken a minute to talk with him, the boy might have stayed at the resort and evacuated with the rest of the staff.
But he hadn’t, so the cameraman had to at least try to find him.
He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t.
To buy some time, he told the rest of the crew that he wanted some extra footage anyway. That they could make a story out of it when they found the boy. “A human-interest segment,” he’d explained. “The boy who danced for the cameras, to break up the gloom.”
The reporter hadn’t been convinced, but the reporter wasn’t with them.
He was already on the plane, typing his own name into the browser on his phone. They were the only crew in Puerto Rico when the storm hit, and his broadcasts had bee
n syndicated internationally. His face had been flashed across all the major channels, and he was anxious to know if he was famous yet. The reporter was disappointed to see that nobody was talking about him specifically, but he still had half a hurricane to go. And that wasn’t counting the aftermath: the trash-strewn beaches, the crying children.
The reporter took a long tug from a silver flask and smiled as he settled into his seat.
He was going to be on every television set in the world before this was over.
Meanwhile, the cameraman raised a walkie-talkie to his lips, hoping the boy had been smart enough to pull its mate from the van’s dashboard.
That he hadn’t been swept off the low cliff into the sea.
“Breaker one-nine!” the cameraman shouted into the receiver. “Do you copy?”
While he waited for the boy to answer, he scanned the wall of clouds surrounding the island. Surrounding him. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. They were thick, and moving so quickly they seemed to be writhing. Lightning flashed from deep within the storm—bolt after crackling bolt. From a distance, they looked like fireflies wrapped beneath a suffocating gauze. He stared at the flashing lights, transfixed—tapping his foot on the helicopter’s grated floor.
A nervous tic.
A metal floor.
As he stared into the walls of the storm, it occurred to him that the entire helicopter was metal: a tiny lightning rod, bobbing uncertainly in the wind.
Tempting fate.
The cameraman shivered.
No matter what happened, they couldn’t spend all day waiting for the boy. Their evacuation window was shrinking—and if they weren’t on the tarmac and ready to go in thirty minutes, the plane’s pilot wouldn’t think twice about leaving without them. Thunder cracked from within the clouds and the air shimmered with anticipation as it unrolled across the sky, booming so loudly the cameraman’s shoulder shook.