by Amber Burns
By the time I got back into the house I was drenched from the rain, and when I came stumbling up the stairs in the wind Anna stood waiting for me with a towel. Armand was crouched on the couch behind a pile of scatter cushions, his little eyes nervous. In a flash of lightning the ocean was lit up, and we both gasped at the size of the swells. For the first time we heard the waves crash into the sand a few meters away. Annabelle raised her hands to her face.
"My house and my dad! I need to know he is okay. He will be awake, but I need to phone him.”
She lunged for my landline, but I stopped her.
“No! Use my cellular, and phone on his too, no landlines. They are dangerous in storms.”
She phoned, and was relieved when he told her he had put his shutters up that afternoon already, seeing the storm building. He told her he had put the ground level ones on her house too, but had not been able to do the upper floor.
“Stay safe daddy.”
She hung up and placed the phone on the coffee table. I exhaled a big sigh, it was very dark in the house, and I moved around fetching candles and matches to place in strategic places along with flash-lights. I also turned on the small radio I found in the pantry cupboard, and that’s when we heard the warning siren sound effect:
“WARNING, WARNING, Hurricane activity currently in progress over the Northern Coastline. If you are in Crystal Beach and surrounds, batten down the hatches, extremely vulnerable properties are urged to evacuate, WARNING, WARNING.”
“Oh God, I didn’t have any idea, I haven’t been listening to the weather at all. Usually there is more than enough advance warning.”
Anna paced his lounge floor, picking Armand up to cuddle him.
“We’ll be okay Anna, we are safe here, and I was actually just thinking about the fact that your dad is sheltered by your house. So don’t worry, everything will be okay.”
It was two AM, and we fetched blankets and pillows, getting comfortable in the lounge, which was more central, and as far as I could tell, probably safer than the bedroom. We fell asleep snuggling on the couch with the lamp still on, but were woken cruelly when the entire house was shaken violently by the loudest thunderclap yet. The lights flickered for a moment, and then everything went black. I held Annabelle tightly, and we simply stayed as we were till morning.
***
By seven in the morning the storm shutters were still being shaken by the wind. There was no power, and water came in from the drenching rain outside. The wind drove the rain diagonally across the porch and in through the gap between the wood of the door and the floor. When they stood with their faces close to the glass to look at what was going on outside, they saw the waves crashing to the beach only four meters from the house.
With absolute horror, Michel looked out to the wild water.
“Anna, if the water is this high your house will be flooded. You are much closer to the beach,” he said softly.
She shook against him, and he saw tears on her cheeks when he looked down at her.
“Hush, anything can be fixed love,” he said this as he pulled her tightly to his side.
She placed her head down onto his shoulder.
“It’s the memories in the sentimental items that wash away that hurt, not the material things. A house is a house anywhere, but that house is my home, and it’s where I spent my mother’s last days with her.”
She walked over to the radio and checked it.
“This can work with batteries too, don’t you have any?”
Michel walked to the pantry cupboard with a flash-light and came back with two packs of the C-sized batteries, inserted them in the radio, and turned it on. There was not much new, excepting news of devastation in the Bay, boats destroyed and a shelter set up at the local school for people who needed to flee their homes.
“I’d clean forgotten about the Mary Jane,” Michel gasped.
She stroked his back, “Let’s deal with one thing at a time, can we focus on something happy?
Where do you want to get married?”
He smiled, pleasantly distracted.
“On that note... Hold on.”
He jumped up from where she had pulled him down next to her on the couch and disappeared into the bedroom, coming back with a small suitcase, a Vintage-vanity bag of sorts.
“Excuse the change of luggage, but it’s neatly sorted and stacked for ease of use and access. I want you to have this to pay for the wedding expenses. That will make it part of a happy event, and make up for its origin.”
She looked at him curiously, and when she opened the bag things fell into place.
“How much is there?” She asked.
Michel shrugged.
“Seventy thousand Dollars? I think.”
He grabbed her shoulder when she blinked and nearly fainted.
“Dear God Michel, I have never had that much money in my life.”
He laughed.
“Neither have I, that’s why it’s easy to part with I guess.”
She closed the bag and put it aside, shaking her head.
“We will have an amazing wedding, I promise,” she said.
“I want to get married in a church, that’s my only input to what you do. Everything else you can do with as you wish, but the ceremony needs to be in a church.”
She nodded her agreement.
“Okay, we can get married in St. Benedict’s Catholic church in Galveston, it’s beautiful, and my mother was buried there.”
He had no idea how much their lives would change by the time they finally said ‘I do’.
They snuggled on the couch discussing these odd details, and she suddenly looked up at him.
“If you gave me my mother’s ring, my dad knows about this right?”
It was more a statement than a question, but he nodded anyway.
“I am old fashioned and I asked his blessing first, he knew how much it would mean to you to have your mother’s rings.”
She chuckled.
“No doubt that meant the world to him.”
The storm raged for days on end, and when it started calming toward the end Michel went out to open the steel shutters. Annabelle walked out onto the porch, acting as towel-bearer again, and was shocked by how badly eroded the beach was. She looked toward her end of the beach and her heart sank when she saw planking and roof struts washed into the surf. She asked Michel if they could take a walk in that direction later to survey the damage.
12
It still rained softly, and the wind blew in odd gusts across the soaked sand as we made our way toward Annabelle’s house. Debris was scattered far and wide across the landscape, and we had to pick our way across washed up undergrowth and dead fish. There was even a freezer lying in the shore-break, and timber from what looked like various roof structures. I held her hand and guided her across a roof beam.
“Looks like this wind and surf really packed a whopper on a few houses.”
She walked silently at my side, I knew she was freaking out about what state we were going to find her own house in. When we arrived at the section of beach in front of it, I could almost feel her panic and pain. The water had eaten the beach away, eroding the sand out from under the porch of the house. I wrapped her in my arms as she started sobbing. The front of the house had collapsed into the eroded space. It looked as though the whole structure had melted and slid sideways.
“Oh Anna, I am sorry baby.”
At that her dad came clambering over the rubble around the side of the house. He called to her from the shrubbery.
“Annabelle, angel, don’t come closer to the front of the house, everything is unstable here, if you want to come closer, come around the back by the road.”
She shook her head where it lay against my chest.
“It’s okay daddy,” she called. “I don’t really want to go closer.”
She collapsed back against me, and I waved to her dad.
“Are you okay Roy? Your house still standing?”
; “Yeah, I was sheltered by this one,” he gestured to the wreckage of Anna’s home. “Mine is perfectly fine.”
“Okay, that’s good, I am going to take Anna back to my place, we have some paperwork to do for this.”
I gestured to the wreckage before I turned her around to take her home. We slowly made our way back, and when we got into the house Anna reached for Armand and cuddled him to her chest. He lay purring in her arms and rubbed his head under her chin as she sank down into a little heap in front of the couch. I sat down behind her and placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Do you know off-hand who holds all the insurance policies for the house Anna?”
She looked up at me, her eyes huge, pools of deep turquoise tragedy but mildly blank from the anti-anxiety tablet she had taken from her purse.
“I do, um, it’s a firm in Galveston, I will phone my dad for their details. He has a folder with copies of everything important…”
She dropped her head, stroking Armand, who had turned over to curl up on her lap where she sat.
“Michel, I’ve just lost everything I own. What am I going to do?”
I didn’t know what to say without offending her, so I decided on an honest approach.
“I know what it feels like to lose everything, trust me, and you will get through this. Now, don’t take this as pity or charity, but I have the means to help you get back on your feet. Will you let me?”
She turned around, facing me cross-legged from the floor.
“Why would you want to do that? I don’t deserve your kindness.”
It was such a frank statement that it caught me off-guard.
“Anna, you’re going to be my wife, I am going to look after you when I need to, and this, this is simply a hiccup in life. I know it feels as if everything fell apart when you saw that house back there, but we will salvage what we can from your personal things, and we can replace the rest.”
She shook her head and then leaned forward to lay her forehead against my knees.
“Michel, thank you. It is just hard for me after Malcolm… You understand?”
“I do, but take things one day at a time, and let me help you.”
She nodded, and then added, “Please tell me tonight why you understand so well what loss feels like, and why you are so convinced your past is a dark and horrible thing.”
I tucked Annabelle into my bed for a nap, she was an absolute emotional wreck and fell asleep in no time at all snuggled up with the cat in her arms. I phoned her dad and got all the details needed, and then made the necessary calls to insurance brokers. Inspectors would be coming in the next few days to look things over and give us an idea of whether a rebuild was feasible, and if not, what she could do. Engineers would also be around to guide her through retrieving personal items from the wreckage, if that was possible. It was going to be a very big process, but she would be fine.
While she napped I started making spaghetti bolognaise for dinner, there was ground beef-mince that had defrosted when the power went out, and bolognaise was where my skills fell. If I was going to spill about my past I needed food first. I was busy uncorking a bottle of Bordeaux when Annabelle came stumbling through, her hair still sleep-mussed while she rubbed her eyes.
“Hey, that smells great, I’m actually hungry,” she mumbled.
“Good, maybe it will taste good if you are starving enough,” I said, reaching over to hug her.
Outside it had gotten dark and I looked at the clock.
“I can’t believe where the day has gone, it’s already nearly eight o’ clock.”
I reached for wine glasses and poured a glass for each of us, guiding her out to the porch. My fairy lights had been blown down and I looked in dismay at the tangle left hanging from the open beams.
“So much for those plans.”
“What plans?” she asked.
I smiled, and pointed to the lights.
“I was planning on surprising you and putting a nice outdoor day-bed under these lights where we could spend lazy afternoons, make love, drink wine…”
My mind ran away with me. She giggled.
“We can fix them, the spot is perfect, it is sheltered, faces the sea, and big enough for one of those round woven wicker-type day-beds.”
She took a sip of her wine and walked back inside.
“Let’s go relax inside.”
As we both sat down on the couch the power came back on, the lights that we had left on flickered and then burned brightly, and I heard the refrigerator and freezer hum back to life.
“Oh thank heavens,” she exhaled a huge sigh of relief, and jumped to her feet.
I watched as she walked to my Laptop and booted it up, switching on classical music.
“That’s better, the silence has been driving me insane, I hate silence,” she muttered.
She came back to sit next to me as Bach’s Cello suite no. 1 trilled to life in the background. She turned her back toward me and sank back to rest her head on my chest. I marveled at how much she was like a kitten, she loved physical contact, being touched, stroked and cuddled.
Once my dinner was ready I dished up enough for about six. When we sat down to eat, she folded her legs under her, sitting on the floor, and the moment I’d been dreading arrived.
“Tell me about your past Michel.”
My heart automatically started pounding, it was something I had been dreading, no matter how well I was aware of the fact that it was time I told her.
“Right, I do think you need to know about how I grew up and what my childhood and teenage years entailed. I never want you hearing things behind my back. I am terrified of how you’ll see me after I tell you though.”
“I grew up in Miami with my mother and father. School was a pain because I got bullied mercilessly. I ran away from home when I was thirteen, some friends I had were making money robbing local bottle-stores and twenty-four hour gas stations. When one of them got shot, I got much deeper into gangland Miami, and vanished all together from home presence. Where they could reach me before, they then couldn’t find me.”
We ate for a while in silence before I continued.
“I was fourteen when I stole a car, and at fifteen I shot a man who caught me trying to steal his. I was high at the time too. I am just glad I never got arrested. I don’t know if he died, that man, to this day, and I’m ashamed of that, trust me.”
I watched her face for the fearful reaction, for the hatred to take shape there, but I saw nothing but pity. Her brow furrowed.
“What went on in your home to make you run away Michel? What drives a child of thirteen to leave and to do things like that?” She asked as she placed her half eaten food aside.
I shook my head.
“My parents were not happy, they fought, always. My father cheated on my mother, and when he was home, he abused her. When he got tired of hitting her he’d come looking for me. I got over it, and eventually I left. I found a home with those gangs, and they made me feel safer and more loved than I ever had at home.”
I sat forward with my elbows on my knees.
“There was never violence at the houses where we stayed, no matter what happened on the street, that’s where it stayed. We always had food, we always had happy homes.”
I paused again, taking a few more bites while I gathered my thoughts.
“My parents found me when I was fifteen, and they wrote me off. Those two hypocrites told me how disappointed they were in me, and what I’d become. I never heard from them again or tried to look for them either.” I looked at her. “My uncle, Andy, he kept writing to me no matter what I had done, and no matter who I associated with, he never judged me. He got me to go to high school, and he sorted me out. God only knows how he kept track of me, but he did. He kind of encouraged me to join the military, and I needed it.”
Annabelle crossed the piece of floor between us and knelt in front of me.
“Nobody has the right to judge you for what you went through or what you did because
of the house you grew up in Michel. You are a different person now, and that is what matters.”
She took my hands in hers and kissed them one at a time. I pulled her up onto my lap, holding her close.
“Very few people would be as un-judging as you Annabelle. The only other stuff in my past that’s bad is the shit that happened in Afghanistan, and the drug issues I had when I got home. I have been trying to stay away from anything like that for a while now, and managed well. Having you in my life helps me. You make me feel stronger.”