CHAPTER EIGHT
HAZEL
“Mrs. Morse. Everyone up, please. We’re moving to the high building.”
I know the voice. The refrigerator-sized man from the embarkation deck on the ship, the one who held the hatch.
He’s on the island’s staff now, or he was crew who evacuated with us; the categories have blurred.
He’s soaked, and behind him the corridor is filling with staff knocking on doors in both directions, and down the stairwell I can hear water.
Not rain. Water. Inside.
“How bad?” I ask, already pulling on shoes.
“Surge came over the seawall an hour ago and it’s still coming. Ground floor’s flooding. We’re moving everyone to the conference center, it’s on the rise behind the main building.” He’s already turning to the next door. “Bring your supplies. Leave what’s heavy.”
Supplies. I look at the room with a flood’s eyes: diaper bag, cooler, the satellite brick, water bottles, Maren’s documents in their waterproof pouch.
I pack in ninety seconds with the efficiency of a woman who did this in a life jacket two nights ago, and I wrap Maren in the yellow sleep suit and a rain jacket of mine folded down to her size, and she’s awake and alarmed and I talk to her the whole time, low and steady, because my voice is the only shelter I can guarantee.
“Adventure,” I tell her. “We’re very good at these now.”
In the corridor I fall in with Anna and Poppy, and without discussing it we become a unit.
I take the medication cooler, she takes both my water bottles clipped to her bag, and Poppy, half-asleep on her mother’s shoulder, reaches out and pats Maren’s head as we walk, a solemn little benediction.
“Baby,” she pronounces, the first word she’s said all night, and her mother laughs and cries in one breath.
The big crewman sees the cooler in my hands and starts to object, protocols about guests carrying supplies, and I give him a look I learned from Soryn and he un-objects instantly. “Yes, ma’am,” he says, and takes the stairs ahead of us to clear the way.
Behind us, the water takes another step.
The corridor is a parade of ghosts in emergency orange.
Families carrying children and coolers, an elderly couple moving at the speed of her hip, Anna with Poppy on her hip and the medication cooler clutched to her chest, crew hauling cots.
Water gleams at the bottom of the stairwell, black, rising one visible step while I watch, and the stairwell lights are out and somebody is passing a flashlight beam up from below to light the way and the beam keeps shaking.
“Steady,” the big man calls. “One at a time on the stairs, hold the rail, don’t rush the person in front of you.”
We go up and over, across a covered walkway where the rain lashes in sideways through every gap, and the wind has a freight-train voice now.
Between the main building and the conference center there’s a stretch of open path, maybe forty yards, and staff have strung a rope line along it, and we go along it hand over hand while the storm tries to take us off our feet.
Maren is screaming inside her cocoon of jacket.
I have her carrier strapped across my chest and both arms locked around it and I am nothing but a wall around my daughter, walking.
Halfway along the rope, the elderly woman in front of me goes down.
She doesn’t cry out. She just folds, her hip or her knee or the wind, one minute upright and the next on the path with the rain hammering her, and her husband goes down beside her trying to catch her, and the line behind us stops dead, and the storm doesn’t stop, the storm doesn’t care about the line at all.
I look ahead at the conference center, at the door with light behind it, twenty yards away, safety measured in steps.
I look down at the woman on the ground. And I do the thing that will play behind my eyes for months: I find Dana in the line, three people back, and I hold my whole world out to her.
“Take Maren. Inside. Don’t wait for me.”
Dana takes her, white-faced, one arm already around Oscar’s sling, and goes, and my arms are empty for the first time in days, and the emptiness is a scream louder than the wind.
I get down in the rain and get my shoulder under the old woman’s arm.
Her name, I will learn later, is Ruth. Right now she’s weight and pain and a wet sleeve, and her husband is trying to lift from the other side and he’s eighty if he’s a day, and the big crewman fights back along the rope against the press of people, and between the three of us we get her up, and the line starts moving again, and the twenty yards take the rest of my life.
At the door I turn to count and there they are, Dana and the babies, already inside, Maren’s yellow suit visible under the lights, and my legs nearly go out from under me with the relief, and I hate that relief, because I chose it, I chose a stranger’s grandmother over holding my own child for the length of a path, and it was right, and I would do it again, and I will never forgive the arithmetic that put me on that path.
Inside, the conference center is a barn of a room built for weddings, now filling with wet people and cots and the smell of two hundred drenched strangers.
The rain finds its way in anyway, through a seam in the roof over the east wall, a steady silver thread of it, staff arraying trash cans and towels beneath it in a losing little formation.
I take Maren back from Dana and hold her against my heartbeat until she stops crying, or I do, whichever of us was making the sound.
A hotel worker is stacking chairs near me, a local guy, eighteen maybe, island staff. He watches the roof seam weep for a moment, then looks around to see who’s listening, and says to me, low, off to the side, out of the reports, the way people say true things now:
“We’re not getting boats in here tonight. Dock’s nearly gone, surge is over the seawall, and there’s another band coming.” He goes back to stacking chairs. “Just so you know it’s not the radio being slow. It’s the sea saying no.”
“Thank you,” I say, and mean it, this kid giving me the respect of the real number.
I check on Ruth and her husband, installed on adjacent cots near the west wall, her leg propped on a stack of life jackets, Soryn kneeling beside her with an ice pack that is, I notice, from our medical cooler, the chain of my afternoon’s work ending up against an old woman’s bruised hip. Ruth grips my hand when I crouch down.
“You put your baby down for me,” she says. She’s been crying, or the rain did it for her. “I saw. You handed her away and came back for me.”
“You’re welcome,” I say, because anything truer would undo us both.
“Forty-seven years,” her husband says, out of nowhere. He’s holding her hand, same coordinated grip as the theater, as the lifeboat. “She’s never once let go of my hand first. Tonight I let go of hers.” He looks at his own palm with vast suspicion, a man betrayed by his own grip strength.
“You didn’t let go,” Ruth says. “I fell. There’s a difference, and I’ve had forty-seven years of you not knowing it.”
They bicker gently while Soryn finishes, and I stand there with Maren and think about Christian’s hands on the rail of his first ferry, teaching me the knots, and how certain I was that hands like that never let go.
The satellite brick has one bar. I stand in the corner with my back to the wall and type it fast, before the bar changes its mind:
We are flooding. Dock nearly gone. Christian, please come.
Send. The little wheel turns. The bar holds. SENT, the screen says, and I stare at the word like it’s a handhold.
No answer comes.
There is work, at least, which is the only mercy this night offers.
The conference center needs what the lobby needed, rebuilt from scratch at 3 a.m. in a room with a leaking roof.
Dana and I re-establish the infant station along the dry west wall while Oscar and Maren sleep back to back in a nest of resort towels, two small survivors of the apocalypse.
Soryn re-ices the medication. The retired pharmacist checks in without being asked.
We are getting good at this, all of us, and I hate how good we’re getting, the speed with which extraordinary circumstances develop a routine, cots and coolers and ration cards where a wedding buffet should be.
Doyle comes through at four with his radio and his destroyed posture, doing headcounts. He stops at our station.
“Mrs. Morse. You’re all right?”
“We’re all right. How long can the center hold everyone?”
“The building’s fine,” he says, and I must make a face, because he adds, quickly, “It is. Built to the same spec. But the kitchens are in the main building and the main building’s ground floor is under two feet of water, so food service is going to be creative.
” He rubs his face. “I’ve requested evacuation assets again.
Again and again, actually.” He says the last part like a confession.
“There was a helicopter assessment scheduled for us at some point. It went to a fishing vessel taking on water instead. I can’t even be angry about it. That’s the hell of it.”
“And?”
“And everything that floats is committed to people with no walls.” He says it plainly, no defense in it. He’s stopped defending it. That’s almost worse. “Mainland knows we’re here, Mrs. Morse. They know. Knowing isn’t the same as coming.”
I watch him move on down the row of cots, counting his guests in the dark, and I check the brick again, and the screen says SENT, and nothing else.
An hour later, or three, time having given up all structure, the room’s one battery-powered television flickers to life on a rolling news channel, and a crowd forms around it, drawn and silent.
The storm coverage. The rescues. And then the footage everyone in the room already knew was coming, the footage I’d been dreading for hours without knowing I was.
Christian. On a dock, on the mainland, rain plastering his hair down, that yellow slicker, his arm around a sobbing trawler captain’s wife. And beside him, composed, elegant even in emergency gear, one hand briefly at his back as they move through the cameras, Aubriella.
The anchor’s voice is hushed with admiration. Morse Oceanic’s chairman has personally overseen the rescue of hundreds, refusing to leave the disaster zone. Alongside operations chief Aubriella Pacheco, he’s become the face of the largest maritime rescue in a decade.
Someone near the TV, a woman from the ship, recognizes me in the crowd’s edge and touches my arm, beaming. “Your husband looks like a hero.”
“He is,” I say.
Maren sleeps against my shoulder, her third evacuation-cot sleep of her short life.
I look at the screen, at my husband’s rain-dark face, at Aubriella standing in the frame where a wife would stand, and I think of the message glowing SENT in my pocket, unanswered, and the seawall under the water, and the boats that are not coming tonight.
“Just not here,” I add, so quiet nobody hears it but me and the baby.
The TV cuts to weather. Another band is coming. The room settles onto its cots to wait for it, two hundred people and one marriage, all of us riding out the same storm.