Chapter 4
Four
Sandy
“I THINK WE SHOULD GO up the hill and check on Sharon and her grandson —”
I nearly fell off my perch on the ladder, where I’d just finished nailing a sheet of plywood across the dining room window. “WHAT?! WHY?”
“We’re almost finished with our prep here!” Dad called up to me from his place on the lawn. “Sharon doesn’t have anyone to help except that boy — what was his name again?”
“Cole.” The name jostled against my senses just as perilously as the strong winds howling up the hill from the water.
“Cole — that’s right,” Dad agreed, reaching out to steady the ladder as I climbed down. “I think it would be neighborly of us to make sure that she has everything she needs.”
“But we’re not done yet —” I protested. “We still have to bring some things upstairs, and I have to tie my bike to the porch —”
“And all of that will only take a few minutes.” Dad clapped his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, son — it would do you good to talk to someone other than me once in a while.”
And that’s how I found myself trailing up the hill behind Dad less than twenty minutes later, cursing myself for failing to come up with a better excuse to get out of it. Like a sudden onset of galloping pneumonia. Or corrugated stomach. Or ebola. I could fake bleeding from the eyes, couldn’t I?
It was midmorning on October 29, and we were all bracing ourselves for a hit from Hurricane (Extratropical Cyclone?
Superstorm?) Sandy, a massive storm that was hulking just off the coast of New Jersey, waiting to smash us all into submission.
Dad had been tracking the storm obsessively all week, watching the weather models as they had become worse and worse, but by now it was pretty clear that we were all royally fucked.
Most of the low-lying areas of town had already been evacuated, and Route 36 had been tied up for hours yesterday as people left for points inland.
Our house was far enough uphill that we were considered to be out of range of the storm surge.
But the situation still looked pretty fucking dire to me.
All too soon, we were standing on the neat front porch of a tidy white bungalow, its windows already boarded up against the storm.
Dad knocked, and the door swung open to reveal a slim and elegant lady, barely more than five feet tall, her wavy silver hair cut into a short pixie, blue eyes shining intelligently from her elfin face.
“Dale, what a nice surprise! And Ezra! I haven’t seen you in a very long time —”
The last time I had talked to Cole’s grandmother had probably been at Mom’s funeral. I had caught a few glimpses of her since then, when I was riding past on my way to school, and she always waved at me, but I had never stopped to chat.
“We just wanted to check on you,” Dad was saying. “You know, see if there was anything you needed, anything we could do for you —”
“Oh, Cole and I worked all day yesterday!” she replied, ushering us into a dimly-lit living room. With the windows boarded up, the house was gloomy, the air hanging heavy with the promise of dread. “And we had a few neighbors stop by to help —”
They slipped into conversation about the oncoming storm, and I let my mind wander.
I was jittery, my knee shaking up and down of its own accord, palms sweating.
It had been two months since the start of school, and somehow I still hadn’t gotten over the odd, shivery feeling that came over me whenever Cole was close by.
We had barely spoken, except when we sparred occasionally during class discussions, so I couldn’t figure out why he was stuck in my head like a bad pop song, why I was shaking at the very thought that any minute, he just might —
A lithe figure vaulted over the back of the couch and landed heavily on the cushion next to me, making me jump nearly a mile. “Hey.”
“Oh, um — hi, Cole.” Up close, it hurt to look at him, like trying to stare directly into the sun, and my insides twisted. Maybe I really did have corrugated stomach.
“This is fucked, huh?” He was picking at a hole in his jeans, his eyes trained on his fingers.
“Huh? I mean — yeah, definitely.” Fucking great. Absolutely scintillating. I wondered if I could go outside and wave my arms and let the wind take me.
Across the room, Sharon was putting her hand on Dad’s arm.
“Dale, maybe you and Ezra should stay up here through the storm. We’re on higher ground, and I promised dear Linda I would keep an eye on you both.
I know she would haunt me for the rest of my days if anything ever happened to the two of you —”
Dad put his head to the side, considering this. “I don’t know, Sharon. We’re out of the evacuation zone so we should be okay. And I wouldn’t want to put you out —”
“Oh, it’s no trouble! It would do us some good to have your company, and I think I would feel better if we were all under one roof, just in case something goes wrong.”
“Well —” Dad looked over at me, and I widened my eyes, trying to jerk my head no in a way that he would understand, but that Cole and Sharon would miss. “You know, you’re right. Ezra, let’s go back down to the house and close the place up and get a few things. We’ll be back in a few hours.”
Fuck. Fucking fucking fuck.
***
“I’m, uh — really sorry about this.”
I stood in the doorway of Cole’s room, fidgeting with the strap of my overnight bag.
The dormer window hadn’t been boarded up, and so the room was softly lit by the outside gloom.
It didn’t really look like the bedroom of a teenage boy as much as the guestroom of a fussy elderly lady, down to the worn pastel coverlet on the double bed and the basket of decorative soaps shaped like seashells on the dresser.
Cole was hovering near the bed, watching me warily, but when he spoke, he flashed me a smile.
“It’s not your fault, right? Besides, I think Gram might be right — I’m not necessarily sorry to have somebody to talk to. You know, a distraction.”
“Yeah, I guess.” I cast my eyes around the small room. “I brought a sleeping bag with me. Do you want me to put it there on the rug, or should I —”
“Come on, don’t be ridiculous.” Cole threw himself down on top of the coverlet. “The bed is plenty big enough for both of us — that is, if you don’t mind sharing.”
“I guess not.” I crossed the room, putting down my bag and sitting rather gingerly on the edge of the mattress. Then, not wanting to seem too stiff, I slipped off my sneakers and lay down, clasping my hands together over my belly as I stared up at the ceiling.
Beside me, Cole shifted, rolling on the bed so that we were shoulder to shoulder, both gazing upwards, and I didn’t know if he was as aware of me as I was of him, but I felt like we were both holding our breath, as charged as the heavy air outside. Finally, he spoke.
“Gram says she was really good friends with your mom.”
I chanced a glance over at him, and he was closer than I thought he would be, his blue eyes tracing the side of my face. “Yeah. Mom used to come up here to have tea with her maybe once a week. You know, before — before it got too hard for her to leave the house.”
“I’m really fucking sorry, dude,” he said urgently.
“That’s okay,” I deflected, because I was used to this — people offering platitudes in the face of nameless darkness, trying to put Band-Aids on the jagged edges of a wound that I was pretty sure would never close. But then he spoke again.
“No, I mean — that sounds fucking stupid. It’s not enough. We’re way too fucking young to have to deal with shit like that. I mean, I’m pretty sure my parents don’t like me, and that’s a different kind of problem, but — Fuck, dude. I’m fucking this up.”
“You’re not, actually.” I decided to risk turning my head entirely, even if looking at him was almost too much to bear. “That was — well, real. Thanks for being real.”
His smile was unexpectedly soft. “I always want to be real with you.”
***
“Ah, yes — my dears, I do believe I have rummy!”
Sharon fanned her cards out on the table — four queens and three sevens — and we all groaned.
“That’s — how do you always win?” Cole spluttered, but he was grinning.
“Years of practice, I’m afraid.” Sharon laid her hand on top of Cole’s, and he turned his own palm upwards so that he could give her a squeeze.
Across the table, Dad shifted in his chair. “Do you think we should all think about turning in? We need to make sure we’re well rested, because the next couple of days might be rough.”
It was a little after ten, and we were sitting around the table in Sharon’s kitchen, candlelight flickering across our faces.
The storm had been buffeting the house since a little after what would have been sunset, rain lashing against the siding and the wind sending the wooden structure creaking and shuddering to its very foundations.
We’d lost power a few hours before, and had done our best to fill the time since then.
There had been several games of Scrabble, a few of Scattergories, and round after round of gin rummy (Cole was right — Sharon was scarily good at it).
But none of it was making me feel any better, and I could tell I wasn’t the only one.
Sharon gathered the cards into a neat pile and then slid them back into the box. “I think that’s a fine idea. Should we each take a candle?”
We were a solemn party making our way upstairs. When we reached the landing, Sharon headed off to her room at the back of the house, and Dad crossed the hall to the small guestroom beside it. That left Cole and me.
“Well, come on — I’m not going to bite.” Cole led the way to his room, crossing quickly to the closet. “If you need to get changed or anything, I won’t look at you.”