Chapter 2
The roof goes at eleven that night.
Not the bathroom roof — the bathroom is concrete block and marble tile, built like a bunker by an architect who understood bathrooms and nothing else.
The roof above the main living area gives first. I hear it happen from behind the sealed door: a sound like a giant tearing cloth, followed by a crash that shakes the walls hard enough to knock loose tiles off the bathroom floor.
Rain floods in, hitting carpet, hitting furniture, hitting whatever the living room used to be.
I am sitting in the bathtub. It seemed like the safest place — low, porcelain, surrounded by tile.
I have wedged myself between the walls of the tub with my bag pressed against my stomach and my injured arm wrapped in a towel I found in the linen closet.
The towel was white. It is not white anymore.
The gash along my left forearm has stopped bleeding in the way that deep cuts stop bleeding — not because they have healed, but because they have run out of urgency.
The edges are ragged and need stitches and I press the towel against them and I do not think about infection because thinking about infection will not help me and the only thing that will help me is staying alive until morning.
The wind does not sound like wind anymore.
It sounds like freight trains. Like a jet engine pressed against the building.
The walls flex in their frames, moving in the beam of my phone flashlight, the drywall bowing inward with each gust and then settling back, breathing like a living thing.
My phone has twelve percent battery. I turn off the flashlight and sit in the dark and I listen to the world disassemble itself outside.
I think about Weston. I think about his face through the conference room glass — the smile, the five fingers, the warm certainty that everything was handled.
I think about Sabrina’s list. I think about Nash asking if I was good and me saying fine and him nodding and walking toward the dock.
I think about every person on that boat sitting in some safe room on the mainland right now, and none of them knowing I am here, and the specific, devastating arithmetic of that: eighteen people evacuated, and not one of them counted me.
I do not cry. Crying would use water I need to keep inside my body. This is the kind of thinking the hurricane has taught me in four hours — the thinking of an animal that is conserving resources. I press my back against the tub, pull my knees to my chest, and I wait.
The storm passes sometime before dawn. I know because the sound changes — the roar contracts, pulls away, becomes wind again instead of violence. Rain still falls but it falls straight down now, no longer driven sideways. The building has stopped breathing.
I try the bathroom door. It still does not open.
I slam my good shoulder into it — the right one is a deep purple bruise from my earlier attempts, a pain that radiates down to my fingertips.
Nothing. I kick it. Nothing. The frame is intact, the latch still seized, and the marble wall beside the door has a hole in it from the debris that cut my arm, but the hole is too small to squeeze through and the edges are jagged with exposed framing nails.
I look at the window. The frosted glass is cracked from my attempts to break it, a web of fracture lines that has weakened it.
I take the toilet tank lid, heavy ceramic, maybe eight pounds, and swing it at the center of the web.
The glass shatters outward. Humid air and rain and the smell of destruction pour in.
The window frame is small — maybe fourteen inches wide, maybe twenty tall — but I am lean and I have spent six years fitting into spaces that were not designed for me. This one, at least, I can force.
I push my bag through first. Then I grip the frame, ignoring the glass fragments that bite into my palms, and I pull myself up and through.
My hips catch. I twist, scraping my side against the frame, and then I am through and falling and I land on wet ground in a pile of broken glass and debris and I lie there on my back and I look up at a sky that is gray and low and weeping, and I laugh.
It is not a sane laugh. But I am outside, and I am alive, and for right now that is enough.
The resort does not exist anymore. Not in the way it existed two days ago.
The main building has lost most of its roof and one exterior wall.
The terrace where I sketched the pergola is buried under a tangle of fallen palm trunks and shredded tiki torches.
The pergola itself — the overbuilt, badly engineered pergola — is the only structure still standing at its full height, which is the kind of irony that would make me laugh if I had not already used up my one insane laugh for the day.
I walk through the ruins with my bag on my good shoulder and my injured arm cradled against my chest. Glass, debris, splintered wood, sections of roofing material.
The pool is full of brown water and tree branches.
The dock where the boats departed is gone — not damaged, gone, the pilings snapped at the waterline.
The beach is covered in seaweed and sand pushed up from the ocean floor, a thick layer of organic matter that smells like salt and rot.
There is no power. There is no cell signal.
The resort’s satellite phone, which I saw mounted in the conference room, is somewhere under the collapsed roof.
I am alone on an island in the Caribbean after a Category 4 hurricane and the nearest other human being is on a boat or a mainland or a different life entirely, and none of them are coming for me because they do not know I am here.
I find water in the resort kitchen. The building took damage — ceiling partially caved, one wall buckled — but the walk-in refrigerator is intact, a steel box built to commercial specifications.
Inside, the emergency lighting still works on battery backup.
Cases of bottled water. Produce going soft in the rising heat.
Bread. I drink two bottles of water without stopping, the liquid hitting my empty stomach like a fist, and then I eat bread and some cheese that is still cold and I sit on an overturned crate in the blue LED light of the walk-in fridge and I tend my arm.
The gash is ugly. Four inches long, running from below my elbow toward my wrist, the edges ragged where the debris tore rather than cut.
It needs stitches. I do not have stitches.
I have bottled water and a first-aid kit I find mounted on the kitchen wall — the red cross on the front is dusty but the contents are sealed.
Butterfly bandages. Gauze. Antiseptic wipes that sting enough to make me gasp.
Antibiotic ointment. I clean the wound with water and antiseptic, close it with butterfly bandages as best I can, and wrap it in gauze.
My hands are steady. I am an architect. My hands are always steady when there is a problem with a clear solution.
The first night alone is the worst.
I make a shelter in the least damaged villa — not ours, one of the smaller guest units at the resort’s edge.
It still has most of its roof and two intact walls.
I drag a mattress from the bedroom to the interior hallway, the safest space, and I build a nest of blankets and towels pulled from the linen closet.
I have water and food from the kitchen. I have the first-aid kit.
I have my phone, now dead, a black rectangle of glass that represents the entire world I cannot reach.
The dark is absolute. No power on the island, no lights from neighboring islands, no glow from a mainland city across the water.
Just the darkness and the sound of the ocean, still churning from the storm, waves hitting the shore with a heavy, irregular rhythm that sounds like something breathing.
I lie on the mattress and I stare at the ceiling I cannot see and I think about the people who are not here.
Weston knows by now. He has to know. He got to the mainland and someone counted heads and someone said where is your wife and the floor fell out from under him.
I picture his face — the blue eyes going flat, the jaw locking, the way his body goes still when something is wrong that he cannot control.
He knows, and he cannot reach me, and the man who manages everything is managing nothing, and I hate that even now, trapped on this island, I am imagining his reaction instead of my own survival.
This is the problem with loving someone inside a machine. The machine is so loud that even when it is gone — even when you are alone and bleeding on an island — you can still hear it running.
I sleep in short bursts. The wind wakes me. Then the silence wakes me. Then my arm wakes me, the gash throbbing under the gauze, a hot pulse that matches my heartbeat. I drink water. I check the dressing. I lie back down and I stare at the dark and I make a list of things I know:
I am alive. I am injured but functional. I have water and food for several days. Someone will come. My husband did not check.
The last fact sits on the list like a stone in a shoe. I cannot take it out. I cannot walk without feeling it.
Morning. I eat canned peaches from the kitchen and change my dressing and walk the island.
It takes ninety minutes to circle the perimeter — the island is small, maybe half a mile across, a teardrop of sand and rock that existed before the Crenshaws decided to turn it into money.
The damage is everywhere and total. Trees stripped bare, root systems ripped from the sand, the landscape scraped clean by wind and surge.
The island looks the way I feel — functional in outline but stripped of everything that made it recognizable.