by Nick Courage
“Can you set down there?” the girl’s father shouted, pointing to a light green patch beyond the empty windshield. The pilot nodded as the girl helped her father transfer him into the captain’s chair, but the turtle was too busy chewing to notice.
“Do we have enough gas?”
“Barely,” the pilot said, sucking his teeth as the girl positioned his muddy shoes on the pedals beneath the dash. Tailwinds had pushed them upward and out of danger, but the helicopter wouldn’t fly without fuel…and it had quickly become clear that the injured pilot was the only person who could set them down safely. He puffed his cheeks out as he wrapped his ashen hands around the controls.
“Here goes nothing,” he whispered, his voice cracking in the wind.
With the pilot back where he belonged, the girl was free to search the cabin for her runaway turtle. She checked beneath the seats and in the emptied cargo holds behind the legs of her sleeping friends. The turtle, happily munching on the corners of his book, was oblivious. It wasn’t until the girl strapped herself in between her mother and the boy with the broken wrist that she finally lifted her backpack onto her lap. She squeezed it to her chest as the helicopter began its jerking descent.
“There you are,” she said, grinning as she reached to pet his knobby head.
The turtle opened his beak, startled by the shift in pressure.
But he didn’t snap at the girl’s fingers.
He closed his eyes instead, nuzzling against her open palm as the helicopter jumped down through the clouds.
The entire cabin shook as the pilot wrestled the wind with the last of his fading strength. He’d managed to slow their approach, but just barely. The helicopter was falling too fast to settle down in a gentle hover, and the rotors screamed overhead—overworked and running on fumes. Alejo bit into the thick weave of his shoulder strap as they hurtled toward a small patch of mottled green, losing altitude so quickly that he felt his stomach pushing at the back of his throat.
After everything they’d been through, it didn’t seem fair that they could crash.
Please, he thought, clenching his teeth.
Thinking of his mother and Padrino Nando.
Please let us live through this.
Emily’s mom wrapped her arm around his shoulders and clutched him alongside her own son, shouting wordlessly into their ears as the cabin lights blinked off and on again. For a second, Alejo felt weightless. But just for a second. He watched the orange life vests float upward, tapping the roof of the helicopter before slamming back down to the floor.
It was faster to fall than to land, he realized….
But not in time to brace himself before their narrow skids connected with the earth. The seat belt dug into his shoulder, his arms and legs flailing as the shock from the impact rippled through the helicopter’s thin metal frame. Alejo could hear it crumple as it bounced. He could feel it twisting and tearing as the helicopter’s nose tapped down into the dirt, bucking him against his harness while it slid to a scraping stop.
Emily gripped Alejo’s swollen hand, squeezing it tightly in her trembling fingers.
For once, Alejo didn’t flinch.
The pain didn’t even register.
Back on terra firma, the helicopter continued to shake, its engine buckling, its blades angled dangerously close to the ground. Alejo stared at their spinning shadows on the grass outside the broken windows. Too stunned to move. Somebody coughed, and the pilot collapsed in the captain’s chair as Alejo finally unclipped his seat belt. He staggered toward the door, his good hand pressed against his temple as he stepped into a bright summer evening. Behind him, the rest of the cabin began to stir. The cameraman untangled himself from the nylon webbing and Joy tapped her broken headset, praying for a signal. Even Emily’s backpack jostled in her lap, her turtle stretching through the open flap.
Blinking at the wreckage.
But Alejo didn’t look back—only forward.
The sky was bright pink and periwinkle blue, clear enough that he could see the moon starting to shine above him even as the sun melted into the horizon. Clusters of streetlamps hung from wrought-iron poles, casting the lower limbs of budding crepe myrtle trees in a soft amber glow. Alejo spun in a slow circle, his heart still pounding in his chest as he checked for storm clouds.
“Alejo!” the cameraman shouted, limping out of the helicopter.
Alejo squinted into the sunset.
They’d crash-landed in the middle of a university, and not a small one.
The grounds were well mowed and manicured, surrounded on all sides by stately redbrick buildings topped with bright white spires. A loose circle of college students had gathered around the helicopter. They slouched beneath the weight of their backpacks, their fruit smoothies and Frisbees long forgotten as they held up their phones to film Alejo and the blades that were still spinning….
Alejo closed his eyes.
His blood pounded in his ears and his knees shook, even though he was on firm ground again. It wasn’t until the cameraman joined him, resting his arm heavily on the top of his head, that the world seemed to snap back into focus. The whir of the helicopter’s engine had turned into a ratcheting clank and the circle of students had widened—jumping back onto the sidewalk as Alejo’s new friends helped their dad carry the injured pilot to the grass. In the distance, sirens cut through the soft blanket of the settling twilight.
“Hey,” one of the students said. “Are you okay?”
Alejo shook his head clear as the cameraman squeezed his shoulder, then sat cross-legged at his feet. “We’re okay,” the cameraman said, rolling back onto the grass and laughing—rough and wild, his arms stretched wide in either direction. A knot on his head bulged above his muddy beard, blue and yellow and sickly green.
“Kid, we made it—we’re okay!”
Alejo nodded, gesturing to borrow the young woman’s phone.
It was still filming, and Alejo smiled weakly into the lens as she handed it to him. “Just for a second,” he said, reaching into his pocket for the folded note his padrino had left him back in La Perla. The paper was torn, the ink smudged from the rain, but Alejo smoothed its creases as he broke through the buzzing circle of students—rubbing the postscript with the pad of his thumb as he walked beneath the trees and the glowing streetlamps.
Dialing the phone number Padrino Nando had scrawled in the margins.
In case we get separated, the old man had written.
Alejo recognized the number, but it didn’t belong to his padrino.
There had been no point to call it before, while he was running from the storm. But now, with the helicopter smoldering on the lawn behind him, Alejo held the student’s phone to his ear. He took a deep breath as fire engines roared onto the campus and the red, flashing lights of three ambulances danced against the trees.
Covering his ears, he stared down at his shoes—waiting for the phone to ring.
“Hi,” Alejo said. “Mamá?”
Padrino Nando picked his way through the wreckage, sipping a hot café con leche out of a wax paper cup, the morning’s newspaper folded beneath his arm. He’d caught an early bus down to the city to check on La Perla and was happy to see that it hadn’t been washed out to sea like the newscasters said—not completely, anyway.
But it wasn’t home anymore.
His little yellow house was roofless and covered in a thin layer of silt.
He could see it from the top of the wall and had wanted to get closer, to inspect the damage, but the concrete stairs leading down into the neighborhood were impassable. At least for him. There were footprints in the mud where some of his neighbors had slid through the rubble, but Nando was content to let his house sit in the sun and dry without him.
At least for a while.
The beach had calmed since the last time he’d seen it.
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The water was glassy, the sky so bright it hurt his eyes.
Drawn to a crew of workers and their portable radio, he stepped carefully over a downed power line—giving a wide berth to emergency trailers and white FEMA tents as he took the scenic route to the sun-dazzled waves. The salty breeze cooled his coffee as he walked, his flip-flops sinking into the sand while the workers tossed driftwood and frayed nets onto mounds of beach trash. Children shouted, chasing each other through the cleanup as a local jazz station mingled with the soft wash of surf.
Reminding Padrino Nando of Alejo.
He sat on an overturned shopping cart and smiled.
The boy would be back sooner or later, visiting with his mother—and Padrino Nando was determined for his house to be rebuilt and waiting for them, ready for whenever they returned. He set his drink in the sand and snapped the newspaper open across his lap, scanning the headlines. They were all sad, of course.
It broke Nando’s heart to read them.
Valerie had done her worst from San Juan all the way to St. Louis, Missouri (MISSISSIPPI RIVER JUMPS BANKS). People were hurt (HUNDREDS INJURED IN BRIDGE COLLAPSE) and people were stranded (MEGASTORM LEAVES THOUSANDS HOMELESS). It was hard to imagine a time when the world would be healed again.
But Padrino Nando has hopeful.
Like the workers on the beach, there were people helping everywhere he looked. They were giving time and food, and money when they could. They were rebuilding what the storm had taken. Nando folded the newspaper shut and dropped it at his side, sipping his coffee as the gulls circled overhead. It wasn’t until he’d finished that he heard the little bird chirping at his feet.
Nando’s joints creaked as he leaned over to investigate.
Beneath his newspaper, wrapped tightly in a tattered plastic bag, was a little storm-worn petrel half buried in the sand. His beady eyes darted left and right as Nando dug him free, cradling the half-drowned bird in his wrinkled hands. But when he set the bird down in front of him, untangled and free to fly away, the bird didn’t move.
It just stared at him.
Padrino Nando patted his pockets, feeling for the tin of fish he’d been saving for lunch. Anchovies in mustard. The bird cocked his head as he peeled the tin open, wiping the spicy mustard from the fish on his pants and tossing the first anchovy into the sand.
“Hola, amigo,” Nando said, feeding the little bird another piece of fish, and another, until the tin was empty. A thin metal band on the little bird’s leg flashed in the morning light as Nando took out his new cell phone—a necessity, he had decided, in these troubling times. While the petrel pecked at the mustard in the empty tin, he took a picture to send to Alejo’s mom.
To show Alejo that the birds were back.
Just like he’d promised they would be.
“He’s a lucky one,” Padrino Nando typed. “He made it through the storm.”
Realizing there were no more fish, the petrel stretched and stumbled toward the sea. By the time Padrino’s message reached Alejo and his mother, the little bird was airborne, circling with the gulls overhead as the sun dipped behind a passing cloud. A new song came on the radio and the beach workers turned up the volume as Nando squinted at the petrel’s silhouette. Behind him, on the mainland, he could hear trucks backing up and hammers banging. It hadn’t been a week and already La Perla was starting to rise up around him, like a phoenix from the watery ashes.
He watched the little bird swoop down to the surface of the ocean.
He skimmed the waves with his long black legs—so happy to be alive that he could barely contain himself—then soared back up above the clouds. Padrino Nando stood up and shielded his eyes, smiling as the petrel flew into the sunrise. He kept staring even after the little bird disappeared, an unexpected tear running down his weathered face as he noticed that the clouds on the horizon weren’t silver-lined, like the saying said.
They were golden.
According to the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an average of thirteen tropical storms and hurricanes make their way through the Atlantic Ocean every year. As I’m writing this note, the NOAA is predicting up to sixteen named storms (storms big enough to warrant a name, like Valerie) and as many as four major hurricanes during the 2018 season.
There’s a tropical storm headed for New Orleans right now.
It’s working its way up into the Gulf of Mexico from the Caribbean, ruining a long summer weekend with storm surge warnings and flash flood advisories. I know because my mom called to tell me that her plans had been rained out—but other than that, she didn’t sound too worried about the storm. They’re so frequent on the Gulf Coast that they’re easy to ignore.
At least, until they aren’t.
My mother isn’t originally from New Orleans, but she moved to Louisiana from Miami, where having a gas-powered oven was a point of pride in her big Italian family (so they could cook hurricane feasts midstorm, even if the power went out). As a first-generation New Orleanian, I grew up not far from Audubon Park. And growing up in New Orleans means growing up with hurricanes. I’m not sure if it was simpler times or if the storms were just weaker then, but I remember playing in the floodwater in the calm eye of a hurricane with the rest of the kids in my neighborhood and standing in high winds, my arms spread wide as gray clouds raced across a strange green and yellow sky.
I moved away from New Orleans before my senior year of high school, and for the next ten years I lived all over the place, from Florida to Indonesia, Boston, Colonial Williamsburg (in Virginia), and Brooklyn, New York. While I was away, Hurricane Katrina hit my hometown—a hurricane so catastrophic it ended up costing over $160 billion in damage. I was with friends from home when it happened, friends who ended up living with me while the story unfolded. The phone lines were overloaded, so we watched the news—and as the months wore on, we watched the news coverage shift to the next breaking stories.
There’s always something new to report.
But my mother’s house was still a wreck, and even now—over a decade later—New Orleans feels different somehow. The population never fully bounced back after the evacuations, and even though the city has started to look more like its old self, there are still houses that are boarded up in neighborhoods overgrown with vines.
According to researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), storms are only getting stronger and more frequent, so it was a shock—but it wasn’t a surprise, after I shared an early draft of this book with my agent—to see the news about a major hurricane making landfall in Puerto Rico. The fictional megastorm Valerie passed through San Juan for a reason: it’s a major city on an island situated squarely in Hurricane Alley, a section of the Atlantic Ocean (and the Caribbean Sea) where atmospheric conditions are perfect for hurricanes.
It made sense, meteorologically.
I read the news with a sinking feeling.
We often only hear about natural disasters when they affect “us” directly. When a hurricane approaches our shores, it makes national news, but we rarely hear about what happens before that same hurricane is within striking distance (except, on occasion, to predict how bad a storm is going to be by the time it reaches our front doors). That’s the reason I wanted to write about a hurricane from start to finish, and on a human scale: to really think about the many ways people (and animals!) are affected and connected by these types of storms, despite invisible borders and geographical boundaries. As I followed the news in the days and weeks after the most recent hurricane, I felt that connection so clearly, it was like a flashback. The aftermath in the Caribbean was all too familiar: devastation and heartbreak and the kind of helplessness you feel when a problem is so big it seems impossible to solve. There were calls for charity and governmental intervention; there were heroic first responders and official statements by politicians w
ho felt pressure to weigh in.
And then the news cycle moved inevitably onward.
In its wake, as always, were the people unlucky enough to have been at the mercy of a storm. People like my mom, who found the courage and determination to rebuild their communities from the ground up long after the rest of the world had moved on. Just knowing that it can take months or even years for a region to recover from a natural disaster can feel overwhelming for those of us watching from afar, and it can be hard to know how to help…or even where to start. But whether you’re a kid or an adult, you can always make a difference in the lives of people affected by a storm.
And you can do it from anywhere.
In fact, unless you’re a trained first responder or registered volunteer, it’s actually better not to show up unannounced in the wake of a natural disaster. In the days and weeks after a hurricane, first responders have their hands full with time-sensitive recovery efforts, so one of the best ways to help is to visit the websites of the local and national relief organizations that are already hard at work in the affected areas, like the American Red Cross or the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster. (Adults can register to volunteer after a natural disaster through the National VOAD website.) Sometimes these organizations will list specific items that are needed, like diapers or baby food—but more often than not, they’ll ask you not to send care packages, which can actually slow down recovery efforts. (It might seem like a good idea to mail blankets and canned goods to people in need, but warehouses filled with unmarked boxes can mean a lot of extra work for busy first responders.) Instead, consider organizing a fund-raiser at your school or in your community. In addition to raising awareness about people in need, you’ll be making a much-appreciated financial donation.