My father stuck his head in the door.
“I’m going down to the marina to see if that Graham boy wants to stay with us tonight. I can’t stand the thought of him sitting out there in that little boat in this kind of storm.”
He put on his raincoat and left. My mother and I busied ourselves making up the bed in the spare room, grateful for the distraction. Just as we finished tucking in the last corner, my father came in the back door—alone. Lee had appreciated the offer but declined it, saying he preferred to stay with Dove. I wondered if Suzette and Joliette were as frightened as Mike.
The lights flickered. Around six-thirty the power went out altogether. My mother lit a candle. My father clicked on our transistor radio. The three of us huddled in the living room and waited—for what, we weren’t sure. In a way, it was like sitting out tornado warnings back in Oklahoma, the waiting and listening to weather reports. The difference was that when tornado sirens sounded and we ran for shelter, we always felt safe once we were bunkered in the cellar. We’d sit wrapped in quilts, talking and playing cards by candlelight, certain that if a tornado touched down, we’d be protected. Here, in a house with only two solid walls and some flimsy shutters, there was no such sense of security.
After a couple of hours, the radio reported that the hurricane wasn’t likely to hit until early morning, so we went upstairs to bed. I coaxed Mike into curling up with me. He was asleep in an instant, his little chest softly rising and falling against mine. I lay awake listening to the storm’s sounds, my pulse battering the walls of my arteries in concert with the rain against the roof. Just as I started to doze off, my breathing finally attuned to Mike’s, my father woke me. His voice had the same urgent tension as the night of the fire.
“It’s sounding pretty bad out there. We’d better get back downstairs in case the roof blows off.”
I tucked my blanket and pillow under one arm, scooped Mike into the other and hurried downstairs, my bare feet drumming the wooden steps. My parents carried the dining table into the living room and pushed it against the cinder block wall.
“Get under here,” my father directed my mother and me. “You’ll at least have something over your heads if things start caving in.”
“Do you think that’ll happen?” My voice sounded feeble against the bluster and roar outside.
My mother slipped an arm around me, slender as string but strong in its intention. “Just a precaution, honey. But do what Daddy says.”
We both crawled under the table, and my father packed pillows around us. I called to Mike and held up a corner of the blanket I’d wrapped around myself. He darted under it and scrambled up my thigh and onto my lap like a mountaineer hell-bent on reaching a summit.
Outside, the rain was no longer just battering the roof, it was being driven sideways into the walls, slapping against the screens and shutters with tremendous whumps. Even louder were the crashes of trash cans, tree limbs, and anything else that wasn’t firmly attached being blown against buildings and parked cars. Something smashed into the shuttered wall behind the sofa with a splintering sound. I jumped; Mike spat; my father, sitting with his back against the cinder block wall, scooted closer to the table, reached for my mother’s hand, and gripped it tight. She bowed her head.
Was this the worst of it, or just the beginning? There was no way of knowing. My mind ran helter-skelter, inventing what-ifs more frightening than what we already were enduring. What if the louvered walls gave out and the rain and debris blew right into the house? There’d be no escaping in this cataclysm. What if the roof did blow off? I’d brought only Mike, my pillow and blanket downstairs. My pictures, diary, letters, clothes—all my possessions—were still in my room. With the upstairs exposed like the rooms of a dollhouse, all my things would be scattered, shattered, or soaked. Except for my memories, every trace of my existence on this island would be wiped out. That thought roiled my gut more than fear of physical harm.
I pictured Lee out in the marina and imagined how the wind and rain must be pummeling Dove. More awful images came to mind; I shook them away and focused instead on his courage. If he could face this storm in a twenty-four--foot boat being tossed and battered in the churning harbor, surely I, with a sturdy wall at my back and a table over my head, could weather the roaring, the whumping, the crashing, the splintering, the prospect of losing my most cherished possessions.
The hurricane raged on for hours, so strong at times our eardrums felt like we were on an airplane or high atop a mountain. Even when our ears weren’t about to burst, they were assaulted: more roars, whumps, and crashes. Would it ever end? Around 2:30 a.m., the radio went off the air (because the tower blew down, we later learned). From then on, we knew nothing about the storm’s progress, only that as of the last broadcast, the wind was already clocked at 100 miles per hour.
Could this be the test of fortitude I’d longed for? (And why, exactly, had I longed for it, I wondered now.) Or might this be only a warm-up for greater challenges ahead? There was no way of knowing. Strangely, though, once the radio died and we were alone with our thoughts, mine stopped running wild. I couldn’t know what was coming; I could only see this trial through and deal with difficulties as they came up, the way I imagined Lee would do.
Near dawn, the storm sounded less ferocious, and it seemed the worst was over. We all went back upstairs and slept for a few hours under a roof that had stood up to the wind and endured. When I awoke, the wind had stopped, and a light rain was falling. Everything would be all right now.
I sat up in bed. Gray mud covered my bedroom floor. Streaks of the same ashy silt ran down the inside of the louvers. I slopped across the room and onto the balcony, expecting to see rainbows or shafts of sunlight through retreating clouds.
The courtyard was flooded; some of the palm trees that lined the road had snapped in half like masts of shipwrecked schooners, others were stripped of fronds and left standing like telephone poles on some forlorn stretch of highway. Everything was fouled with the same dingy mud that invaded my room. Was the whole island such a mess? And if everything on solid land was so torn up, what about Lee in his little boat on the water? His bravery had gotten me through the night; had it been enough to see him through, too?
Moving automatically, the thinking part of my brain numbed, I dressed, slipped my feet into flip-flops, and summoned the nerve to stagger downstairs and out the back door. I had to wade across the yard to survey the rest of the neighborhood. The roof of a nearby apartment building had blown off and crash-landed on my father’s clinic; one hospital ward had lost part of its roof, too. A section of steel roofing the size of a desktop was embedded in one louvered wall of our living room like a knife in a corpse. That explained the splintering crash we’d heard.
I scanned the slope behind our apartment, where fales and shacks were in shambles, and drew a ragged breath at the sight of Fibber’s house—barely standing. All over the hillside, Samoans milled around, picking up scraps of wood, palm thatch, and metal roofing, looking as if they had no idea where to begin putting things back together. If I thought of scrambling up the mountain to help, as Fibber had scrambled down the night of the fire, that urge was swamped by a stronger desire.
Guided by some indefinable impulse, I walked toward the mountains that were the backdrop to my daily episodes and encounters—those icons of stability in my stormy world. In my intimate exchanges with them, I’d come to know their every curve and shading, the location of each coconut palm that stood sentry on their ridges. I surveyed the scene, searching for my favorite promontory and the single palm it wore like a plume in a courtier’s chapeau. The ridge now was battered and brown, the tree vanished.
Until that moment, the devastation had seemed so unfathomable I’d been unable to react, except by instinct. But seeing that particular patch of land ravaged, I felt a tide of grief rise in me, and with it a wave of tenderness.
Would Samoa ever be the same? There was no way of knowing, and in a way, it d
idn’t matter. I’d thought I loved the island for its perfect, perfumed beauty. But now, scarred as it was, with the underlying ugliness of its rocky slopes exposed and its flowers stripped from their stems, I wanted more than ever to embrace this place and its people.
Chapter 19—Waves
In traditional Polynesian belief, the soul at death leaves the body from a tear duct and begins a tentative, instinctive journey into the uplands for a time and then proceeds along the path of the spirits to the place on each island where the souls jump off into the land of the dead. If a soul expert feels the person should not have died, he or she can find the soul, “snatch” it between cupped hands, and reinsert it.
—Encyclopedia of Death and Dying: Polynesian Religions
Later that morning, I made my way to Val’s house, searching at every turn in the road for signs the storm had shown some mercy. But everywhere I looked, the landscape was a bleak skeleton of its former self, a leaf stripped to its veins by a ravenous insect. Palm fronds lay scattered, resembling lifeless soldiers on a battlefield; an uprooted tree blocked the stairway to my school’s front door; metal roofs were peeled back like banana skins. Even the ocean reeked with death smells. By the time I reached Centipede Row, I wanted only to hole up in Val’s room and escape the awful scene.
Val sat on her bed, her eyes like a statue’s, staring but not seeing.
“Pretty scary last night.” Her voice came out hoarse and whispery, as if the winds had scoured her vocal cords.
I crumpled onto the other bed. “Yeah. Worst hurricane to hit the island in thirty years, everyone’s saying.”
“Did Lee …”
“My dad checked on him—he’s okay.” How that was possible, given the clobbering the rest of the island had taken, was beyond me. Had spunk and skill saved him, or was there more to it than that?
“Have you looked around outside yet?” I asked Val.
She nodded slowly, and for perhaps the first time since we met, we could think of nothing else to say.
Val’s mother appeared in the doorway. I reflexively sat up straighter, certain we must be doing something wrong but not sure what it was that we were supposed to be doing.
“Don’t get too comfortable, girls,” Mrs. Puckett said. “We may have to head to higher ground in a hurry—there’s a tidal wave coming.”
“But how… I mean, where… “ I recalled my mother’s unease when I’d pointed out the lack of roads into the mountains.
“We can drive up the hill to the cable car station,” Mrs. Puckett said. “That should be high enough.” I wanted to ask how many people could crowd onto the little hilltop and how many vehicles the station’s small parking lot could hold, but Mrs. Puckett’s flinty expression stifled me. “Put on warm clothes; then you can help me get Rex and the other girls ready.”
Val waited until her mother left the room.
“Put on warm clothes? It’s a tidal wave, for godssake, not a blizzard!” Her acerbic tone was back, and she snorted out a little laugh.
I laughed too, but nervously. “C’mon, Val. If she comes back and finds us goofing around, she’ll knock us both across the room.”
Val, the embodiment of recalcitrance, slid off the bed and ducked into her closet. I heard her muffled voice: “Put on warm clothes. Put on warm clothes.”
She emerged a few minutes later with five cardigans layered over her blouse, a pair of long pants under her skirt, two knit scarves wound around her neck, and a stocking cap pulled over her eyes. Why she’d brought her Michigan woolens to Samoa I couldn’t imagine, but there they were. She looked like a toddler bundled up to build a snowman.
A stack of sweatshirts sailed toward me.
“Here—put on warm clothes!” Val plopped down beside me, and we fell back onto the bed, laughing. A tickle feathered through my ribcage; hula girls shimmied in my belly. Oh, the relief, the normalcy of laughing again, of being our goofy teenage selves instead of the grown-ups we’d had to emulate for the past twenty-four hours. We were still wriggling and convulsing when Val’s mother appeared at the door again. I jumped off the bed and stood rigid as a GI at a surprise inspection. Val, stuffed like a scarecrow, struggled to get up.
“We’re putting on warm clothes, Mom,” she mumbled through knitwear.
I drew in my breath and waited for Mrs. Puckett to detonate. To my complete astonishment, she broke into laughter.
“Oh, Val!” she said and turned to leave the room, shaking her head but still smiling.
By the time we were ready to evacuate, the tidal wave, too, had turned away, as if rebuffed by our laughter, and the warning was called off. It was hard to wrap our heads around such sudden turns of events: the night before, devastation; now, in the face of another disaster, reprieve. It was harder still to shake the lingering sense that we shouldn’t get too comfortable—another catastrophe might be about to hit.
The usual soundtrack of playful shouts, laughter, and snatches of music from open car windows was absent; the only sounds were the scuffle of feet on crushed coral and the rasp of tires on wet asphalt, as Val, Marnie, and I watched the passing procession on the thoroughfare just beyond Marnie’s living room windows. The house was so close to the road and path, you could sit in the front room and talk through the screens to people passing by. Usually that was fun, but now, the third day after the hurricane, people’s faces still bore imprints of shock and sadness, and observing them at such close range felt intrusive, like seeing them naked.
When three boys pulled up in a Toyota pickup, we welcomed the diversion. Wayne, his buddy Tau, and Tau’s visiting brother David were jammed into the cab, their surfboards lined up in the bed. Surely they weren’t going ahead with their surfing plans, were they? Then again, who could blame them for trying to carry on with life as usual?
Wayne, the flirt, leaned out the passenger-side window and wolf-whistled.
“Hey, ladies! We’re off to Nu’uuli—incredible waves out there. Better come with us. Surfer boys always need a few beach bunnies watching from shore.”
I’d seen Nu’uuli the day before, on a drive to Tafuna with my parents to pick up a parcel at the airport and survey the island’s damage. The waves were high, all right—scary high. The palm forest of Nu’uuli’s Coconut Point lay in splinters, and the battered shoreline hardly seemed the right setting for a beach party.
“In the movies, maybe, or your dreams,” Marnie shot back, smiling. “We’ve had enough excitement for a while. We’re staying right here.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing!” Wayne’s brown face crinkled, and his eyes disappeared behind mounds of cheekbone. As the truck sped away, Marnie laughed and called after it:
“So long, surfer boys.”
Sitting on the front porch of our apartment later that day, staring at broken palm trees across the road, I saw a familiar blue-and-white flowered shirt. Lee, laundry bag slung over shoulder, walked toward me, wearing that famous smile.
“Your father said I could use your washer and dryer,” he said when he reached the porch. “I hope I’m not imposing.”
“Are you kidding? We were all set to take you in the other night. We couldn’t believe you wanted to stay out on the boat. What was it like out there?”
Lee told me how he and Jud, along with the cats Suzette and Joliette, had spent the night in Dove’s cabin, whooping like rodeo cowboys as the boat bucked on the waves, watching through portholes as the tops of palm trees brushed the ground and lights blinked out from one end of town to the other. He made it sound like an amusement park ride. This kid was beyond gutsy.
“Boy, and I thought spending the night under a table was exciting,” I said. I didn’t tell Lee how I’d trembled in that pillow-lined shelter, steadied only by the thought of him riding out the storm. I didn’t ask if he, like me, had prayed for protection.
My father came to the door and invited Lee inside, but just as we turned to go in, shouts caught our attention. A gang of boys,
led by Pili, the Vampires’ drummer, and Poloka, the bass player, sprinted across the courtyard toward our apartment.
Out of breath, Pili panted between snatches of information. “Tau’s truck … just saw it … at the hospital … think someone’s hurt.”
My father rushed out the door and took off in a trot toward the hospital. The boys and I paced on the porch. I stroked my tortoise shell ring, twirling it slowly around my finger. The familiar fragrances of frangipani and ginger still clung to the air, but they were different now. Bruised. And instead of comforting me, the weighty, almost edible scents made my heart feel like it was trapped under heavy timbers. I kept seeing Wayne’s face grinning from the truck window and hearing Marnie’s dismissive sendoff: So long, surfer boys.
“Those waves were too big,” Pili said. “They shouldn’t have been out there.”
The kindest of the boys in our crowd, Pili had a gift for lightening tension and sadness. More than once, he’d cheered me up in study hall with jokes and silly stories when I was brooding over a chemistry test score or moping about the latest roadblock to my romance with Dick. But he was somber now.
“Maybe it’s nothing serious,” I ventured. “Maybe one of them just got scratched up on the coral.” I pictured bleeding knees and elbows in an attempt to deflect more frightening images. I scanned the boys’ faces for signs of agreement. They all looked away.
“Never should’ve gone out today,” Pili said.
I turned to Lee, who knew the ocean better than any of us. He’d defied waves and winds at their most fearsome; surely he wasn’t afraid for the surfers. But Lee wore an uncharacteristically stony face. He shook his head.
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