The Love Haters

Twenty-Four

SO I DID.

I packed up, took Rue’s car, and hit the Overseas Highway. But I hadn’t even made it to the mainland—or stopped thinking about that kiss for one second—when Rue called.

“Have you left yet?” Rue asked.

I was on Islamorada. “I’m on the road,” I said. “What’s going on?”

Rue hesitated, like she wasn’t sure if she should tell me.

“Rue?” I asked. “What is it?”

Rue let out a sigh. “I just got a call from Lieutenant Alonso.”

My first thought was Hutch. “Is everything okay?”

“Looks like he had some trouble with George Bailey.”

George Bailey. Not Hutch. Okay. “What does that mean— trouble ?”

“When he went to Hutch’s place, he couldn’t get George Bailey to come with him.”

“You mean—”

“Apparently the rain had started already, and the thunder…”

Oh, god.

“And Lieutenant Alonso had six other pets in his minivan—plus his wife and kids.”

“And so he just left him ?”

“I’m not sure they had much choice. That dog weighs a hundred and sixty pounds. You can’t force him to go anywhere he doesn’t want to.”

“So what you’re saying is… George Bailey is alone on the Rue the Day right now?”

“Do you know anyone who’s still in town?”

I didn’t. My mind was churning. “Does Hutch have a hidden key somewhere?”

“The lieutenant left the door unlocked.”

Then she seemed to intuit what I was thinking. “But not you,” Rue said. “You’re not going yourself. There’s no time to turn back. The traffic’s only going to get worse—and the last place you want to be when a hurricane hits is on a seven-mile bridge out over the ocean. Just get to the mainland. I’ll find somebody.”

“Okay,” I said. “I hear you. I’m sure we’ll find someone.”

But we wouldn’t. Right? We wouldn’t find anyone. Everybody was either gone or going. And if Lieutenant Alonso—tough as nails with a tattoo of Poseidon on his shoulder—couldn’t get George Bailey off the boat, what chance did a mere mortal have?

That dog couldn’t be forced.

He could only be cajoled .

And the only person I knew of besides Hutch who could cajole George Bailey… was me.

I thought of George Bailey on a boat, during a hurricane, endlessly trembling and all alone… and then I did what was doubtless, without question, hands-down, one million percent the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I U-turned without braking from the packed northbound side of the highway to the utterly deserted southbound side. With a screech.

And then I hauled ass back to Key West.

Would a Great Dane even fit in a Mini Cooper?

We were about to find out.

I MADE IT back to Key West in an hour and fifteen minutes, which is thirty minutes faster than Google thought possible. That’s the upside of going against a mass evacuation, I guess. My side of the highway was totally empty, and the cops had other things to do.

I sped, and I ran red lights, and, to be honest, I called Cole.

“Ace Hutcheson,” he said when he answered.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I knew it was you. But I’m trying it out.”

“I think you should go with Boots and Saddles.”

“You were eavesdropping!”

“Of course I was. We all were.”

“I told you Hutch was going to beat me up.”

“You wanted him to beat you up.”

Cole thought about it. “Maybe that’s true.”

“I hope you got it out of your system.”

“I think, actually, maybe I did.”

I was getting close to the marina. I needed to get to the point. “Listen,” I said. “Did you say something weird to Hutch that night?”

“Define weird .”

“Did you talk to him about me?”

“I thought you said you were eavesdropping.”

“I missed the end because I was helping Sullivan throw up.”

Cole paused. “Yes. At the end, he asked me about you. He wanted to know what you could possibly have been thinking to go along with all my lies.”

I felt my core clench up. “What did you tell him?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell him it was for Rue’s sake—because he still doesn’t know about Rue.”

“I repeat: What did you tell him?”

“I told him it was all to save your job.”

“My job ?”

“Yeah. So you could do the ‘Day in the Life,’ and impress Sullivan, and not get fired.”

“But we’d already done the filming by then!”

“I told him you were afraid he’d revoke his permission.”

“You—what?”

“It was the best I could do. I was thinking fast, okay?”

“But I wasn’t even going to upload it anyway.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

“So Hutch thinks that you and I—evilly, deceitfully —planned this whole thing from the beginning for nothing more important than not getting fired?”

I could sense Cole shrugging on the other end. “Maybe?”

All that wondering I’d done over why he wasn’t taking my calls?

Guess we’d cleared that up.

“Cole! You lied to him! He detests me now. He won’t even look at me. You can’t just leave him thinking that!”

“I can’t expose Rue. She hasn’t even told him she’s sick.”

“Rue should tell him the truth now! You both should! About everything!”

“I agree. There’s only one problem: he’s not answering his phone. And he’s probably a little busy right now. But I’ll keep trying, okay? I’ll find him, and so will Rue, and we’ll set all the records straight—okay?”

What else was there to say? “Okay.”

“By the way,” Cole said. “We’re all good with Sullivan now.”

“What do you mean, all good ?”

“I mean, she knows you and I aren’t dating, and she’s fine with it.”

“Why would she be fine with it? I thought she was going to blackball you and destroy your career.”

“That was before we spent the night together.”

“What!”

“Remember when you kicked me out?”

“Yeah?”

“She took me in. Enthusiastically.”

“Please tell me you didn’t take advantage of our boss that night! She was so drunk! She vomited up two bottles of prosecco!”

“I did not take advantage of Sullivan that night,” Cole said.

“Thank you.”

“It was the next morning.”

“Oh, my god, Cole. Why do you always have to make everything worse?”

“Pretty sure I made things a whole lot better.”

“You slept with Sullivan ?”

“Yep. Except now I call her Sully.”

“Now she’s really going to fire you.”

“Nope.”

“Nope?”

“Nope. Because we fell in love.”

“Well, that was fast.”

“When it’s right, it’s right.”

“You’re dating Sullivan now? That’s happening?”

“Yes,” Cole said. “And guess who she likes me better than?”

“Hutch?” I asked, just as Cole answered at the exact same time: “Hutch.”

“This must be very healing for you,” I said.

“It’s very healing for both of us.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “Now go call your brother and confess.”

IT WAS SHEETING down rain by the time I parked at the marina. The sky was dark and brooding—even though it was four in the afternoon. All the parking lot lamps were off, and so were all the lights on all the marina boats, and I wondered if the power had gone out.

I left everything in Rue’s car except my phone, thinking I might need it for a flashlight—and then I ran down the wooden dock toward the boat, my sneakers smacking the drenched wood. But when I stumbled in through the boat door, expecting, I guess, for George Bailey to knock me down as usual… he was nowhere to be found.

“George Bailey?” I called.

Nothing. The boat was dark and quiet.

Had Carlos come back for him? Or had Rue enlisted someone else, after all?

“George Bailey!” I called again, shining my phone light around.

When I reached a bank of light switches, I flipped them all—but nothing.

The boat felt quiet as a tomb, rising and falling on the water and bumping against the dock. He’s definitely not here , I thought, as I looked around, anyway. Where could he have gone?

Then, just as I got close to the closet by Hutch’s bed, I heard a whimper.

“George Bailey?” I asked, peering into the closet.

There, below the hanging shirts and pants, I saw two shining eyes.

“Hey, buddy!” I said, squatting down and trying to convince us both with my voice that we were just having a pleasant get-together. “I found you!”

I could hear George Bailey panting. I put my hand on the closet floor near him, not sure how freaked out he would be. Would he be like one of those panicked animals that bites anything that comes near it?

No. I didn’t get bitten. He was a gentle giant to the core.

As soon as I put my hand near him, though, I got licked —wrist to elbow.

That felt like a good sign. “Hello, friend,” I said, reaching in farther to pet his back and feeling his whole body trembling in a way that made me so glad I’d come back for him.

I made pleasant, newscaster-like chitchat. “I know you’re not a big fan of thunder,” I said. “You don’t enjoy thunder, and I don’t enjoy power outages, or darkened boats, or hurricanes. So… what do you say to the idea of getting out of here?”

Then, like the most trustworthy person who ever lived, I opened the closet door wide, patted the thighs of my jeans, and said, “Come on. Come on, pal. Let’s go jump into Rue’s Mini Cooper and blow this popsicle stand.”

At the sound of Rue’s name, George Bailey ooched forward.

That’s when I remembered that he did speak a little English.

“Hey, George Bailey,” I said. “ Hutch told me you might want to go on a walk .”

At the word walk his ears shifted forward and his tail started thumping the inside of the closet.

“Do you want to go on a walk ?” I asked again, standing up.

When I stood, George Bailey stood.

“A walk !” I said. “Where is your leash ?”

At leash , he stepped out and followed me. We walked around, flashing the phone light and looking. “Where does Hutch keep your leash ?” I asked over and over, just to keep the conversation going.

Then I spotted it hanging from a hook near the door.

Is this going to be easy? I wondered.

But I should have known better than to have thoughts like that. George Bailey was totally with me as I got him leashed up… until I opened the door to the rain. That’s when I noticed how much darker the sky had become, and how much the water in the marina was churning.

And that’s when the thunder decided to do its thing.

At the sound, George Bailey planted all four of his feet and sat down.

He did have a point.

“Come on, buddy,” I said, walking confidently toward the door.

But as I reached the threshold, I hit the end of the leash line.

George Bailey wasn’t budging.

I gestured out at the pouring rain like it was fun. “Don’t you want to go for a walk ?”

Not that much, apparently.

“Hey, friend,” I said, hoping maybe I could explain it to him logically. “There’s a hurricane coming. A big one. We need to get out of here.”

George Bailey was, quite literally, unmoved.

Next, I tried a bunch of other tactics—from luring him with snacks, to tossing his armadillo squeaky toy out the door, to explaining that Hutch was waiting for him at a big dog party in Miami, to attempting actual brute force —and none of it budged him even one inch.

I only succeeded in slipping—twice—on the wet entryway floor… and landing on my tailbone both times.

As time wore on, I resorted more and more to trying to explain things .

Breathless and wet, I kept up a running monologue that George Bailey fully ignored, as I moved around him—pushing from behind, then pulling from the front, desperately trying to set him in motion: “Look, I know you have concerns about all that weather out there, and I get it. I know it seems scarier outside than it does inside right now… but we’ve got a life-threatening storm on our hands. I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this, but a houseboat is literally the last place on earth you want to be during a hurricane. A Category Four hurricane, by the way, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale! This guy Saffir-Simpson is not kidding around. We could really die. Every single person— and dog! —in the keys is evacuating right now. The entire Overseas Highway is one long string of taillights. Come on, buddy! Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Through it all, George Bailey watched me like some kind of jaded law school professor who was pretty sure I was going to fail his class—just waiting for me to say something, anything, persuasive.

The whole thing was pretty much the definition of a bad idea.

As the thunder got louder, and the rain got harsher, and the houseboat bobbed more and more urgently on the waves, knocking against the rickety dock, I googled how to move a large dog on my phone and scanned search results like: how to motivate a stubborn stallion , coaxing rituals for camels , and how to move a grand piano .

Turns out, this particular situation is a tough one to crowdsource.

I tried calling Hutch for tips, but as it rang, I heard a faint sound coming from the bedroom.

A phone ringing.

I followed the sound, George Bailey trailing equally curious behind me, until I found Hutch’s phone, which had fallen behind his mattress and through the bed slats.

Oh, shit. Was this why he hadn’t texted me back?

I tried to retrieve it, but the bed was on a frame attached to the floor, and the slats were too narrow to get my arm through.

Oh, well. That would be something to solve later.

Back at the door, I was explaining how courage worked to George Bailey—insisting that facing his demons now would ultimately help him reach his personal best—when I felt an eerie pulse of electricity waver through the air.

Then I heard a hissing sound behind me, and then a crack louder than anything I’d ever heard in my life, just as the room lit up in a flash and then went dark again. The sound was beyond full volume: so loud, it seemed to rip the air like fabric. So loud, my unbudgeable friend George Bailey disappeared in a flash and scrambled back into Hutch’s closet, leash and all. The light was so bright, it left a green afterimage in my eyes. One of the windows shattered. Then the searing sound retreated, followed by pops and cracks and the whole sky lighting up, and then rolling thunder.

A lightning strike.

Not on the boat itself, but not far away.

Like, feet away.

Had it hit a sailboat mast? A cell tower? An antenna?

Whatever it was, in the wake of it, I watched in horror through the hole where the shattered window had just been as the wooden dock we were moored to responded to the lightning strike by collapsing in slow motion into the water.

It was almost as if the whole dock just… fainted .

And then it was gone.

And we weren’t moored to anything anymore.

“Oh, shit,” I said out loud—feeling an urgency like now we really had to get out of here.

But, of course, now there was nowhere to go.

Next, I felt an urge to call Hutch again. But there was no way to do that, either.

We were, apparently, completely screwed.

I stared through the window, trying to make it make sense.

The dock that I’d just been trying to cajole George Bailey out onto… was gone.

“George Bailey,” I said out loud, in case this wasn’t already abundantly clear. “We have a problem.”

LOOK, I’M NOT a boat person. I didn’t grow up sailing. I’m from Dallas, Texas ! We’re as landlocked as it gets. I was the last person on earth you’d pick to captain an unmoored houseboat during a hurricane . I didn’t know how to work a maritime radio, and I didn’t know anything about boat safety, and up until three weeks ago, I couldn’t even swim.

There was probably some way to radio for help in that situation.

But I couldn’t work a boat radio even on a normal day in full sunshine.

I commanded myself to think . But then I just thought about how thinking about thinking didn’t help.

I’m not really a fast processor. For any big decision, I prefer forty-eight hours or so to hem and haw, and make lists of pros and cons, and call Beanie and discuss. Like I’d done, in fact, just hours beforehand, in a different lifetime.

I’d driven along on dry land in a Mini Cooper with heated seats—taking all my safety and comfort for granted as I endlessly yammered to Beanie about how simultaneously passionate and dismissive that goodbye kiss with Hutch had been. How manly yet vulnerable, how angry yet tender, how lost yet found. The astonishing way it felt exactly like a beginning and an ending at the same time.

I mean, that was my whole evacuation journey from earlier today: me summoning pairs of opposite words to try to capture the vibes of that life-ruining kiss while fleeing a hurricane on the Overseas Highway—as Beanie, folding laundry a thousand miles away, validated all my interpretations with ever-more-emphatic Mmmm-hmmm s.

Maybe I should have been listening to the radio.

A little weather information might have come in handy.

And now here I was. Alone with George Bailey, on a handmade pontoon houseboat tethered to absolutely nothing, adrift in the ocean, during a hurricane.

Fuuuuuuuuck.

Should I call Beanie?

But she was worse in emergencies than I was. She’d panic, and then she’d cry, and then I’d end up consoling her. All that would do was waste time.

Instead, I pulled out my cell phone and called 911.

A dispatcher picked up right away. “911. What’s your emergency?”

“Hi there!” I said. “I’m so sorry, but I’m on a houseboat called Rue the Day at the Sunshine Marina on Key West, and the dock we were moored to just got struck by lightning—and it collapsed into the water.”

Yes, the name of the boat had a sudden new irony.

“Your location is the Sunshine Marina?”

“Yes—but not for long. We are adrift.”

“I’m making a note of your distress call and your location,” the dispatcher said then.

Wait—what? Why wasn’t she dispatching someone to come help?

“Um,” I said then. “Can you guys come and get me?” I asked next. Then I added, as if it might help my case, “I have a large dog with me who’s afraid of thunder.”

A pause that might have been sarcastic. Then: “I’m sorry, ma’am. We’re in the middle of an active hurricane.”

“Yeah! I know! I’m drifting loose in it!”

“No rescues are happening at this time. All personnel are sheltering in place.”

Did her voice sound a little irritated? “Are you saying,” I asked then, “that you’re just going to leave me here? In the ocean? During a Category Four hurricane?”

“The hurricane has been downgraded to a Category Two.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Wind speeds for Cat Twos top out at ninety-five miles per hour.”

“Why is that not comforting?”

“I apologize, ma’am. But anyone who ignored the evac order will just have to ride this one out.”

Hold on. Did she think I had just flouted the evac order?

Of course she did. She probably dealt with people like that all the time.

“I didn’t ignore it!” I said. “My dog did! And he’s not even my dog! I was just trying to help him because he’s a rescue dog from a puppy mill, and he has thunder-phobia, or whatever it’s called, and his life has been hard enough.” Then, to stress that I was a nice person who deserved to not die in the ocean , I added: “I was evacuating! I had already made it to Islamorada! But then I turned around! To save a very frightened dog! But then I couldn’t get him off the boat! He literally weighs more than I do!”

Silence on the other end. Was she checking her Instagram?

“Hello?” I went on. “I’m not a—a— non-evacuator ! The dog is!” I said, my voice shifting into a different octave.

Her voice was unmoved. “I’m sorry, ma’am. All personnel are unavailable.”

“Look,” I said, hoping maybe I could access some general sense of first-responder camaraderie. “This houseboat belongs to a US Coast Guard rescue swimmer—and so does the dog! He got dispatched to Miami to wait out the storm.”

“Then I’m sure he’ll be the first one back on scene to rescue you once it’s safe to fly,” the dispatcher said.

“But—” I protested, my voice lifting higher with panic as I pushed We could be long dead by then out of my mind and said instead: “Tell me what to do! How do I survive the night?”

The dispatcher sighed. “If that boat you’re on really belongs to a rescue swimmer, it’ll be well-equipped with safety gear. Find a life jacket and put it on. Turn off your phone to save power, put it in a plastic bag, and keep it with you. Find someplace secure and hunker down. And if it’s a choice between you and the dog? This time, save yourself first.”

WAS THE RUE the Day well-equipped with safety gear?

I’ll let the full storage tub of flashlights answer that question.

Hutch, it turned out, had several first-aid kits, fresh drinking water, multiple fire extinguishers, and a battery-powered radio that was older than he was. Not to mention a snorkel, flippers, and mask. And a flare gun.

Wait! Don’t call them flippers.

A snorkel, fins , and a mask.

Add to that, a whole closet with life jackets stashed away inside—including, God bless Hutch, a dog-shaped one for George Bailey.

Docile and perhaps slightly catatonic with fear now, he let me zip him into it. Then I did the same for myself.

Next, I found a freezer bag in the kitchenette to waterproof my phone.

Then I turned on a battery-powered lantern.

Then I started to holster the flare gun in the waistband of my jeans before deciding I was more likely to shoot myself with it than do any good—and I put it back in its case.

What next?

Try to figure out the radio? Try to turn on the boat and steer it somehow? Call 911 again? Cry?

Yes. Yes to all those things. At once.

I’m embarrassed to admit how panicked I was. But I wasn’t a crisis person. I wasn’t a woman of action. I wasn’t the dashing hero of the story. I was a mid-level employee at a commercial video-production company!

I didn’t want to have adventures: I wanted to be the person in the background filming the person having adventure s—or, better yet, a person asking a subject to reminisce about long-past adventures .

Who could I appeal to for a do-over?

Adrift in a houseboat with a thunder-phobic dog during a hurricane might be a bad fit for anyone—but it was the full-on worst for me.

Meanwhile, George Bailey was staring at me like I was in charge.

I flipped some switches on the radio until I could hear broadcasts and interchanges, but, honestly, it was mostly jargon. People talking about knots and lat and long and saying random numbers. Suitable mostly for background noise. I tried to leave it on for the voices—but then, as the frantic Maydays started coming in, I turned it off.

The shore was receding, and I could only tell because part of the marina was now on fire. Was it a boat? The boathouse? I couldn’t see well enough to know. But the flames were a point of reference, even as they receded into the distance—or we did.

I suddenly felt colder.

And the waves seemed bigger and sharper.

I felt my first rise of nausea, though if it was seasickness or fear, I wasn’t sure.

It’s possible at this point that George Bailey was starting to regret his choices. As I moved around the cabin, frantically trying to do something , he stayed with me like Velcro.

The end of the boat with the shattered window now had a wet floor—in addition to glass shards—one inch of water sliding side to side with the waves.

We stayed at the other end.

Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I scolded George Bailey a little.

“I hate to say this is all your fault,” I said, “but it totally is. If you’d just gone with Lieutenant Alonso, you’d be in Miami by now, all dry and warm and bedded down for the night. And so would I! But now we’ll both die in a watery grave. So thanks for that.”

Then, as if George Bailey had responded with, You’re the one who decided to come back for me , I went on: “What choice did I have? Honestly. I wasn’t leaving you here alone. Not after all you’ve been through. I just wish you had trusted me a little more, you know? Never choose fear, okay? Choose love. Choose trust! When a good person shows up to rescue you, choose that person!”

What was I even saying now?

I wasn’t even listening to myself at this point.

Meanwhile, my brain kindly, frantically, tried to generate some hope.

Maybe we’d be okay. Maybe the winds would push us away from the worst of the storm. Or maybe there was a soft, sandy shore just out of sight that we could wash up on. Or maybe Robert’s vintage, handmade pontoon houseboat would astonish us all by bobbing pleasantly over the waves all night, rubber-ducky style.

It was possible, anyway.

The world was full of bad luck—but it was full of good luck, too.

Maybe we’d used up all our bad luck for the day.

Or the year.

What would Hutch have done in this situation? Would he have jumped overboard with George Bailey right after the strike and tried to swim to land? Should I have done that? Never mind that if a solid dock had been a tough sell for this dog—a cold black ocean would’ve been impossible. Or maybe it was better that we’d stayed on the boat. Maybe that post-lightning water was full of electricity? How did physics even work?

Dammit.

All those years of school, and I didn’t know anything that could save my life.

No one was coming for us. At least I knew that much.

Hutch wasn’t going to steal a helicopter and come get us in a hurricane.

We were on our own. With nothing else to do but ride out the storm.