CHAPTER FOUR
HAZEL
Morse Cay rises out of the dark in pieces.
A long dock, lit. A white bulk of buildings behind it, lit.
Palm trees thrashing in the wind, not lit, just implied.
The tender wallows into the lee of the island and the worst of the rolling stops, and a voice from the dock shouts something, and crew move along the aisle opening the hatch, and the smell that comes in is rain and diesel and, underneath it, flowers.
Some landscaped bed of something tropical, getting murdered by the storm and perfuming the whole arrival.
“Welcome to Morse Cay,” the crewman says to the boat at large, and there is a ragged, exhausted cheer, and I find myself crying, which I don’t permit for long, because Maren is awake again and needs a clean diaper and a feed and her mother functional.
The resort receives us as it was built to: efficiently, dryly, and with snacks.
I have to hand it to my husband, standing dripping in a lobby the size of an airport while staff in Morse Oceanic polos move families through check-in with clipboards and flashlights.
The power is on. The lights don’t flicker.
There’s a medical station set up off the lobby with actual nurses, a water station with stacked pallets of bottles, cots being made up for people whose rooms aren’t ready, and over the whole scene the deep, distant hum of generators doing their job.
The windows are floor to ceiling and the rain is assaulting them and the rain is losing.
Ninety minutes ago I handed my baby down a ladder into a lifeboat. Now a woman in a polo is offering me a towel and a warm bottle of water and apologizing that the full kitchen isn’t operational.
“I’ve had worse welcomes at actual resorts,” I tell her, and she laughs, startled, and I like her immediately.
The elderly couple from the theater come through check-in behind us, still holding hands, their life jackets surrendered to a bin by the door.
The woman catches my eye and gives me a thumbs-up so fierce it wobbles at the edges.
Her husband is arguing gently with a nurse that he does not need the medical station, he needs a chair, and the nurse is winning, because nurses always win.
Somewhere a man is asking whether the resort can charge his phone, and the answer is yes, sir, and he says thank God and cries a little, unembarrassed, phone pressed to his chest.
The ship’s passengers are washing up here one tenderload at a time, and the island absorbs us, efficient, dry, lit, and I think: he was right. Whatever else is coming, whatever I saw in his face on the balcony, he was right to send us here.
Our room is in the main building, third floor, storm-rated everything.
It’s a resort room wearing its emergency clothes, half the furniture pushed to the walls, a cot added, a crate of supplies on the dresser: water, diapers in three sizes, formula, a battery lantern.
Somebody assembled this. Somebody stood in a supply room and thought about what a mother with an infant would need at the end of the world, and packed it, and I don’t know if it was Christian’s instruction or Christian’s culture and right now I don’t care.
I feed Maren, change her, and lay her in the crib the staff brought up, and she sleeps the deep sleep of a baby who has decided the apocalypse is adequately catered.
Then I stand at the window and watch the storm work the island over and wait for my husband to call.
Down the corridor, doors keep opening. Voices.
A child crying somewhere and being soothed.
I end up in the hallway because the room feels airtight and the hallway has people in it, and that’s where I meet Dana, sitting on the floor outside her room with a baby boy on her lap and the rigid, wide-eyed stillness of someone holding themselves together with both hands.
“He won’t stop,” she says, before hello. The baby is hiccupping more than crying, that furious post-cry stutter. “He was fine on the ship and now he won’t stop and I can’t—” She stops herself. Starts again. “My husband stayed. He’s crew. He stayed on the ship.”
“So did mine,” I say.
She looks at me properly then. Takes in the room number on the door behind me, the lanyard I didn’t even realize a staff member had hung around my neck at check-in, with MORSE printed on it in the company’s discreet, expensive font.
I watch her do the math and I watch her decide not to do anything with it, and I could hug her.
“Hazel,” I say, and sit down on the floor opposite her.
“Dana. This is Oscar.” Oscar hiccups. “He’s four months.”
“Mine’s five. Maren. Currently unconscious. She slept through the lifeboat.” I don’t mention the part where I kept my fingers on her pulse. Nobody needs my ghosts. “He’ll stop. They cry it out of their systems and then they sleep like it’s a job. Give him twenty minutes.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. But I’ve had five months of being wrong about what she’ll do, and the odds are with me.” I dig in the diaper bag and come up with the crumpled packet of teething biscuits I never go anywhere without. “Trade you. One biscuit for whatever your room has that mine doesn’t.”
It works. She laughs. Oscar, sensing his mother come down off the ledge, subsides into exhausted snuffling.
“He does this,” Dana says, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“Sounds like the end of the world, then passes out mid-scream. His father’s the same, minus the screaming.
On the ship he does engine maintenance, which means right now he’s—” She stops.
Recalculates. “He’s fine. He’s crew. They train for this. ”
“They drill for it constantly,” I say. “Christian made them drill until they complained about it. Then he made them drill more.”
“You know him well?”
“I’m married to him.”
Dana stares at me. Then at the lanyard. Then at me. “Oh, God, I complained about the lifeboat ride to the owner’s wife.”
“I complained about the lifeboat ride to the owner’s wife too. We can be appalling together.”
She laughs again, properly this time, and Oscar startles, glares at both of us, and goes back to his hiccups.
We sit on the corridor floor of a storm-battered island resort while a hurricane-adjacent monster rearranges the sea outside, two mothers on a carpet that cost more per yard than my first car, and for twenty minutes it’s almost nice.
The satellite phone rings a little after two in the morning.
I’m back in the room, dozing in the armchair with Maren on my chest because the crib stopped feeling close enough. The phone is a chunky gray brick the staff delivered with the supplies, in case of emergency, use this. It rings with a sound like an angry appliance and I fumble it to my ear.
“Tell me you’re inside.” Christian’s voice, broken into pieces by the satellite, reassembled wrong, but him.
“I’m inside.”
“Then breathe.”
I look at the rain hammering the reinforced glass. It hits in sheets and runs down in rivers and the glass doesn’t care, doesn’t flex, doesn’t leak, engineering over weather, money over water. “I’ll breathe when you get here.”
Static eats his answer. I catch “—ship is stable, everyone’s off the lower decks, we’re—” and then more static, and then him again, distant: “—end of it, Hazel, and then I’m coming to you.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Tomorrow, maybe the next day. The tender routes—” Static. “—are closed until the sea settles.”
“Christian, Maren’s fine. She’s asleep. She slept through the lifeboat.”
The silence on the line has a different texture then, and when he speaks again his voice has cracked at the edges and been nailed back together. “Tell her I’m sorry I missed it. Tell her—”
A voice in the background on his end, a woman’s voice, close to a microphone, clear even through the satellite mush. “Christian, we need you.”
I know that voice. I’ve been hearing it for years, in boardrooms and on docks and through half-closed office doors, always at the exact moment my husband is mine and about to stop being.
“I have to go,” he says. “The island is the safest place you could possibly be. Safer than here. I love you. Tell Maren—”
The line dies. I sit in the dark with the gray brick against my ear, listening to nothing, Maren warm and breathing against my chest.
“I love you too,” I tell the dead phone, because I do, and that’s the whole problem in one sentence.
The first failure happens at dawn.
I’m at the window with instant coffee, watching the palm trees survive by bending, when the lights in the room go out.
Just ours. The corridor stays lit, and I open the door to find a staff member already moving room to room with a flashlight, all apologies.
A circuit, a surge, they’re on it. But an hour later, down in the lobby, I see the island manager, a broad sun-creased man named Doyle, standing at the dock door with two engineers, and none of them are looking at the lobby lights.
They’re looking out at the water, at the dock itself, and their body language is a whole press release nobody’s written.
I go over. I’m good at going over.
“Mrs. Morse.” Doyle straightens. “Everything all right in your room?”
“The dock,” I say.
He glances at the engineers. Decides, correctly, that the boss’s wife is going to stand here until he answers. “The service dock took damage overnight. Wave strike on the pilings. The main tender dock is fine.”
“Can boats still get in?”
“The main dock is fine,” he repeats, which is not the question I asked.
“If it stops being fine, do we evacuate?”
“This island was built for exactly this, Mrs. Morse. Your husband’s own specifications. Reinforced structures, redundant power, supplies for weeks.”
“So was the ship,” I say.
Doyle has no answer for that, or has too much discipline to give it, and I walk away before I can become the wife who makes scenes in lobbies.
Behind me I hear one of the engineers say, low, “—the generator housing took spray all night, and if the main unit goes—” and then the door closes and the storm swallows the rest.
At noon the power fails across half the resort.
Emergency lighting comes up, that same institutional orange I met on the ship, and the lobby fills with the hum of people adjusting to a new normal they didn’t book.
Doyle’s staff put out a notice: a generator fault, backup systems functioning, no cause for concern.
No cause for concern. The deck chairs of Morse Cay.
I take Maren back to the room and stand at the reinforced glass. The sea beyond the dock is a white mess. The service dock, the one Doyle said was only the service dock, is visibly shorter than it was at dawn, pilings gone, decking scattered along the shore in wet gray pieces.
I pick up the satellite phone to call Christian and tell him the island he promised me is coming apart at its edges.
There’s no dial tone. The display says NO SIGNAL, and under it, smaller, like an apology: searching.
I try again in ten minutes. Same word, same patient little apology.
I try the room phone and get a fast busy tone, then the front desk’s extension, then nothing.
Somewhere below me the emergency generators hum on, and the building holds, and the rain comes down, and every system my husband paid to overbuild is working except the one I need.
I stand there a long time, holding my sleeping daughter, watching the search go on.