Andrea saw that her mother had fared about the same as the living room, and the house. Her hair shot out in all directions at once, and the carefully applied makeup Andrea was so used to had feathered out and melted. It made her mother’s eyes look like large bruises. There were real bruises too, ugly blue-black lines that crossed over her mother’s lips and another on her chin. There was also the small cut by her eye. Somewhere a Band-Aid had been found and applied.
Memory surfaced with sudden clarity, and Andrea remembered the window bursting inward, the awful howl of the wind as it invaded their kitchen, and the edge of the kitchen door she’d been able to make out from her father’s arms. That door must have hit hard to leave the bruises she now saw, and a small twinge of pain caught in Andrea’s heart. She leaned in close and gave her mother a gentle hug.
The silence, however, was still more than this. It was the lack of the radio. The war was gone. The burning hulk of a ship attacked by the U-boats was gone. Even reports of the storm would not reach them now. The sounds she heard were those of this particular place on the earth, and those who were there. There was nothing more, or less, than that.
Andrea stood and turned toward the hall that led to where her bedroom and the bathroom had been. It was funny to think of it that way, but she didn’t really know, did she? The rooms might be there, or they might not. There were walls missing, windows shattered, and great patches of roofing had been yanked out by the nails and cast into the storm as it passed. Beyond the room they sat in there might be nothing left at all.
“It’s okay, honey,” her mother spoke. They were the first clear words Andrea had heard since the storm, and they sounded odd, too loud and somehow detached from reality.
Her father said, “The hallway and your room are fine. They’re in the middle of the house. The bathroom is there too. It doesn’t flush—there’s no water.”
Thomas Jamieson fell silent at this. They all held that silence for a long moment, and then, without warning, her mother burst into laughter. It rang out loud and tinny and wrong, just for a second. Then her father was laughing too, and as she realized why, Andrea joined in, leaning on the battered wall for support. Here they were, stranded in the middle of more water than they ever hoped to see again, with it lapping at the supports of their home and rolling over and around the shattered trunks of trees that had been tall and beautiful only a few hours earlier, and they couldn’t flush the toilet.
“It will be fine,” her father told her. “I’ll lower a bucket and fill it with sea water. The pipe isn’t backed up, so I guess it washed away in the storm, or broke. If we pour water down the pipe fast enough, it will clear.”
Andrea didn’t care at that moment. Her body was screaming at her in a hundred different voices, demanding a hundred neglected things be taken care of, and she knew she was going to have to start answering soon. She stepped carefully around the corner and disappeared into the hall beyond. She heard her parents’ voices behind her, still laughing, and a weight lifted from her heart.
It was going to be okay, she thought. The storm had battered their home, but it still stood. The storm had battered them, as well, but they were alive and able to laugh. The water would eventually slide back into the ocean. It had crawled out at first, hungry and seeking, and then it had rushed out, overflowing the beach and roaring to pound at the foundations and tear away trees that were already gripped in the impossible strength of the wind, but it would have to go back to the ocean. Floods receded. Andrea had never seen a flood before, but she’d read about them, and she remembered that word clearly. What floodwaters did was recede, and these would have to do that eventually.
She closed the bathroom door behind herself and pressed the round wall switch that controlled the light. Nothing happened. She stood for a moment, looking at the switch, then burst out laughing again. She turned away from the door and the house groaned. Nothing moved, but that sound sliced through her like a hot knife. What was it? Was the house going to collapse?
Suddenly, being alone in the unlighted room was too much for her. Andrea quietly opened the door, just a crack, and finished as quickly as she could.
Before returning to the living room, she turned left and made the short walk to her own room in the center of the house. Her door was still open. She slipped in, fumbled around in the shadows for a moment, and came up with her notebook, her crayons, and a pen. With these treasures clutched tightly in her hands she hurried back to the living room. She sat on the floor beside the couch, leaned against the cushions at her mother’s knee, and spread her notebook out on the floor.
She wanted to draw. She didn’t know what exactly. The picture she’d been working on when the storm hit stared up at her from the page. The colors were stark and vivid. The blood red sky, the angry waves, all of these brought memories to the surface of her mind and she pushed them away. She did not want to draw those things again. She didn’t even want to think about them, though it was hard not to when she was sitting in the middle of her living room in a patch of sunshine that wouldn’t be there if the storm hadn’t ripped a hole in the roof.
She flipped to the next blank page and stared down at it. She grabbed the pen and placed the tip on the paper, but she couldn’t decide what to do with it. She could write something, or she could draw. The problem was that all of the things filling her head, the images she could most easily transfer to the paper, were bad ones. She wanted something else.
Then her mother cried out. “Oh, Thomas, look!”
Andrea’s father turned to stare out through the shattered window where his wife pointed, and then he stood very suddenly. Andrea stood as well, forgetting the paper and crayons for the moment, to see what had caught her parents’ attention.
It was a boat. It wasn’t a big boat, and there was no motor. It was the short, flat kind, wooden and half-full of water. One of the oars still hung over the edge, like a long broken insect’s leg. The waterlogged craft rolled with the up-and-down motion of the waves, not more than a yard or two away from the wall of their house.
With her knees on the couch, Andrea was able to get a better look at their situation, as well. The water came about nine steps up the fifteen on their stairs. It had not reached the floor of the house, though waves had crashed up and around them. It was possible, she thought, that it had already dropped some, though it showed no sign of it at that moment.
“I’m going after it,” Thomas Jamieson said quickly. He was moving then, taking off his shoes and socks and pulling his shirt over his head. “Lilian, see if you can find me some dry clothes, and bring me the nylon rope from the cupboard, if it’s still there—you know, the one we bought for the clothesline?”
“Tom,” Andrea’s mother started to speak, but she bit the words off mid-sentence. She knew he wasn’t going to listen to her, if she asked him not to go, and he was probably right. They needed the boat. They needed something.
Lilian rose and headed to the kitchen. Andrea stared at her father, then leaned out the window to watch the boat. It had floated off to the left of the house and out toward the ocean, moving more quickly than she thought it should, and suddenly she thought about current. She knew that rivers had them, and she knew that the ocean did too. What if the water wasn’t done with them? What if it was just using that old boat as a lure, like catching a fish? What if it just wanted her daddy to dive in so it could grab him, yank him down, and drag him away?
Her mother stepped back into the room with a long coil of thin nylon rope in her hand. Andrea’s father took the rope, hugged his wife quickly and snapped a comical salute at Andrea before heading back to the kitchen and the door.
He was excited, and his exhaustion of a few moments before seemed to have dropped away completely. Andrea could tell he wanted to do this almost as much as she didn’t want him to. Thomas Jamieson was a man of action. He’d picked that up in the navy and he’d never let it go. He rose early, went to bed late, drank too much coffee, and he got things done.
And
rea walked into the kitchen behind him and stood to the side as he opened the door. The porch outside was still there. He reached out with one foot and pressed down on the wood flooring. There was no give. He stood there in the sunlight, wearing only his pants for a moment, then he turned, took the rope from Andrea’s mother and started around the corner of the house, keeping up against the wall as he followed the winding porch that skirted most of their home. Four steps and he’d rounded the corner.
Andrea and her mother hurried back to the living room. They wouldn’t be able to see him until he neared the boat. To Andrea’s dismay, it was even further away than before and it showed no sign of slowing its progress. It was probably fifteen yards off.
They heard a splash, and in a few moments her father’s head bobbed into view. He was a good swimmer, and the current was in his favor. He had the rope tied around his arm and trailing off behind him, and Andrea saw that he must have tied it off to one of the rail supports on the porch. She hoped it would hold if he needed it.
He reached the boat pretty quickly and threw a hand over the side of it, gripping tightly. Andrea could see he was straining against the pull of the current. He fumbled in the water, splashing and thrashing as he tried to find a way to wrap and tie the line to the boat with one hand. It wasn’t working. Though he had a firm hold on the line, and on the boat, he was losing ground. The nylon rope slid slowly through his grip, and the boat floated steadily out to sea.
The rope was still looped around his shoulder, but he was running out of line too quickly, and the current threatened to drag him free of the safety of the line completely. Andrea gripped the back of the couch and watched with her eyes wide, biting her bottom lip. Her mother stood beside her, not moving. Andrea did not look up to see her mother’s expression. She wanted her mother to be brave, to be certain her father was going to be back with them, dripping wet and laughing in a few more minutes, but she was afraid that was not the face she would find. Her mother was too still, her arms and her back too stiff, for bravery.
Then, with a sudden lurch, her father swung one leg up and over the side of the old wooden boat. It dipped a little lower in the water, canted to the side and shuddered. In the next instant, her father was inside the boat. It rode lower, filled almost to its top with water, but he had a hand free. Andrea couldn’t see what he was doing for sure, but in a moment, both his hands were loose from the rope, and it grew taut as the weight of the boat and its one-man crew squared off in a bizarre tug-of-war with the porch rail.
Thomas grabbed the one limp oar and tried to turn the boat so its nose pointed at the house, but it was too heavy. The water weighed it down and made it sluggish and clumsy. Andrea saw the strain, saw her father’s frustration as he yanked the oar from the water and tucked it back into the boat.
Then, to her amazement, her father grabbed one side of the boat, turned, and placed his feet against the other side. With a heave he threw himself backward, and the boat rose, slowly at first and then gaining speed. Water sluiced off over the sides and out the ends. The hull lifted, held, balanced for just a second, and then it flopped over, upside down in the water, and her father disappeared into the waves.
Lilian leaned out the window then, with a gasp, and Andrea wrapped her arms around her mother’s legs.
“Thomas,” Lilian cried. “Oh Thomas, no . . .” The word trailed off, and Andrea felt the tension drain from her mother’s body, felt the strength ebb. The two of them teetered, off balance like the boat had been, but Andrea planted her feet and held her mother upright.
In the next moment they saw him. First a hand, then the other, followed by an arm, appeared over the side of he old boat. Her father clung there for a moment, rested, and then, with a tremendous effort, he flipped the boat again, righting it, and clambered back over the side.
Without the load of water it had been carrying the boat bobbed like a cork in the sunlight. After only a moment of rest, Thomas took the line in his hand and pulled it back to the house, hand over hand. The boat moved slowly at first, but once he had a rhythm, it went more quickly. The current still tugged him in the opposite direction, but with the resistance cut back to normal, the water had lost its hold, and the distance between boat and house dwindled rapidly.
Andrea and her mother left the window and went to the kitchen. Lilian sat at the table and placed her hand on the radio, as if she could give it life by the laying on of her hands and get a promise from the young man so far away that her husband was okay and that this nightmare would end. She wanted to be told they would be safe again, somewhere far from this ocean, and this beach.
Andrea slipped out the door. Her mother called after her, but she paid no attention. The porch had held her father. It had held up against the drag of the boat, and it would hold her. She made her way carefully around the corner of the house, sticking close to the wall as she’d seen her father do, and in moments she’d reached the stairs.
Her father was just stepping from the boat onto the bottom stair. He saw her, smiled, dripping wet and obviously very tired.
“Hey, princess,” he said, “I got it.”
Thomas told Andrea to step back, and he dragged the old boat up the few remaining steps above the waterline and onto the bare floor of the porch. He wanted to tie it into place and to go over it, inch by inch, looking for holes and making repairs.
“I don’t know if we’ll need this to get out of here,” he said. “The water could drop away as fast as it came in, or they might send rescue squads out from town, or from the Coast Guard. It’s good to have it here, just in case.”
Andrea nodded, but secretly she thought it was much more important that he was back with them. She wanted to explain to him what she knew of floodwaters, and how they recede, but she just hugged him, dripping and wet, and followed him back toward the kitchen.
Before they rounded the corner, a sound caught her attention. It wasn’t loud, but it was familiar somehow. She put her hand to her forehead and scanned the waves.
In a moment she saw them. Muriel and Jake stood on the porch of their house. Muriel waved her arms frantically. It was Jake’s bark Andrea had heard. They were too far away to make out details, but it looked like the back half of Muriel’s home had collapsed.
“Daddy?” Andrea said, tugging at his arm.
“What is it?” he asked, turning.
She pointed, and he followed the line of her finger to the porch far out across the water. As he looked up, a large chunk of wall gave way, and the far end of Muriel’s porch dropped into the water.
This time when Jake barked, they both heard him. And they heard Muriel scream.
Chapter Five
Andrea’s mother joined them on the porch when she heard her daughter cry out in fear. She wasn’t a particularly brave woman, but she wasn’t letting one more bad thing happen, particularly not to her daughter. Not if she could be there to prevent it. She stepped out of the kitchen and followed Thomas’ gaze across the water, over and through the broken, twisted remnants of treetops, to what remained of Muriel’s house.
It was difficult to make out details over such a distance, but it was clear that a large portion of the woman’s home was simply not there any longer. Muriel waved her arms and screamed to them, but only the faintest sound reached across the distance. Lilian, Thomas, and Andrea heard Jake barking clearly, his voice was deeper, and louder. Lilian’s heart fluttered.
Just for a moment she imagined herself in the other woman’s place, alone on that porch with the walls falling down around her, no one there to hold her, or to set things right. There was a loud screech of metal as the end of what they all knew was Muriel’s living room collapsed into the waves and tried to draw the rolled aluminum roof down with it. The torn metal dangled precariously and sent a huge shiver through the entire structure.
It wasn’t holding. Something was different about the way Muriel’s home had been built. Something in the foundation was weaker, or the materials that had been used. Maybe the ground b
eneath the support timbers wasn’t as solid. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that if something wasn’t done —and soon—Muriel would be gone. She would go the way of the trees and the road, drop into the water and be sucked out to sea, taking Jake along with her.
Thomas scanned the sky, hoping against hope to spot a helicopter, or that off on the skyline they’d see some sort of rescue boat chopping its way through the waves. There was nothing but the birds, and the sunshine. It was around noon, and the latter was bright and warm—mocking the cold terror of the moment.
“I have to try and help her,” Thomas said, turning toward Lilian. “You know we can’t just leave her there.”
“It’s too far,” Lilian said. Her voice started out weak, but as she spun toward Thomas her eyes flashed, and it grew stronger. “You barely got that boat back here to the house with a rope tied on,” she said. “How do you propose to make it all the way to her house with one paddle? We only have one rope, Thomas, and it isn’t long enough.”
“I have to try,” Thomas repeated. “There has to be a way.”
Andrea heard the soft crack in the back of her father’s voice. He was tired; maybe too tired to do whatever it was he was thinking about doing. Maybe he was too tired too think it through clearly. She stepped closer and hugged him again, and felt his still-wet pants leg against her cheek.
He stared out over the water, thinking. Every moment that they stood there, Muriel grew more frantic. Her voice must have grown hoarse, because though they could see her calling out to them, only Jake’s booming bark echoed across to them now, and even that seemed to have faded.
Mote in Andrea's Eye Page 4