CHAPTER NINE
HAZEL
The surge eases by morning, and what it leaves behind is worse than the water.
The main building stands, but its ground floor is a lagoon.
The service dock is a memory. The main dock exists, technically, a stub of pilings and decking with a crane lying toppled across it, discarded by the wind.
The kitchens are flooded, so breakfast is crackers and bottled water.
The generator engineers worked all night and bought us back some lights and no refrigeration.
The rain has dropped to a steady gray drizzle, the eye of the system somewhere else now, tormenting somebody else’s roof.
The sea, though. The sea hasn’t gotten the memo that the storm moved on. It stands up in gray walls beyond the ruined dock and falls over and stands up again, and nothing is going to cross it today, and everyone knows it, and nobody says it.
Maren is hot and out of sorts and keeps twisting away from feeds, which terrifies me more than the water did.
Soryn checks her and pronounces her fine, warm but fine, keep her hydrated, keep her cool, and I nod and hold my daughter and think about the date on the formula tins and the melting ice and the slow arithmetic of a small body in a big emergency.
Morning in the wedding barn is a grim little pageant of improvisation.
Staff serve crackers on cocktail trays, because the trays survived and the kitchens didn’t.
Someone has found a box of those tiny jars of jam from the room fridges, and the sight of two hundred adults being handed wedding-favor jam for breakfast does more for morale than any announcement could.
Ruth holds court from her cot, dispensing opinions.
The teenage runner ferries ice. Poppy colors.
Dana sits with me while I try to feed Maren, who takes half her bottle and twists away, hot and furious.
“She did this yesterday too,” Dana says. “Oscar did the same when we moved him. They hate the heat more than we do and they can’t say so.”
“She needs to eat.”
“She will. Watch.” She takes Maren, who knows her now, who is starting to have people, this small town of a disaster, and walks her along the cool side of the room near the shuttered windows, and within five minutes Maren is feeding.
Dana brings her back with the satisfied air of a woman who has performed a miracle and intends to be humble about it for the rest of the day.
“It’s the walking. Motion feeds them. You were holding still and spiraling. ”
“I don’t spiral.”
“You spiral standing up, it’s very impressive.” She sits beside me. “My sister-in-law got a text through. She says the news found out the owner’s wife and baby are on the island. She says there are people asking why you’re still here.”
The question hangs there. Why is she still here.
The woman who could, in theory, summon a private navy with a phone call, sitting out a storm on crackers and wedding jam.
I think about the answer, about queues and rankings and consolidation, about the amber dot on a command-center wall, about my husband’s voice saying a rescue asset is being arranged, with the flat cadence of a man reading aloud a letter someone else wrote him.
“Tell her we’re in line,” I say.
Dana studies me. “You’re not in line, though. Are you.”
It’s not really a question, so I don’t answer it, and we sit together in the good company of women who’ve stopped pretending, and watch the sea stand up and fall down beyond the glass.
I go looking for Doyle and find him at the radio room, which is what used to be the resort’s dive shop, and I don’t knock.
“I want to see the request log,” I say.
“Mrs. Morse—”
“I’m not asking as a guest. I’m asking as a shareholder’s wife, a disaster victim, and the person who reorganized your supply chain, in ascending order of legal standing.” I sit down across from him. “Show me what the island has asked for and what the answers were.”
He shows me. To his credit, or his exhaustion, he just turns the log around.
The requests are there, timestamped, polite and professional and increasingly desperate. Generator repair support: queued. Medical resupply: queued. Helicopter assessment: reassigned. Evacuation support: deferred pending offshore cases. Priority flag: NONE, ISLAND SHELTERED, per consolidation.
“Who wrote ‘per consolidation’?”
“That’s the command desk’s notation.” Doyle rubs his eyes.
“Our requests go up. They come back ranked. I’ve been on eleven calls and every one ends the same way: they acknowledge us, they express sympathy, and they rank us below whatever’s currently in the water.
” He looks at me. “Your husband’s company is very good at saving people, Mrs. Morse.
The system just doesn’t have a box for people who are merely miserable, hot, and running out of medicine. ”
“Medical evacuation for Poppy, at minimum. A six-year-old with a heart condition in a building with failing refrigeration isn’t ‘miserable.’”
“I know,” he says. “I’ve said so. I’m told a pediatric transfer is being reviewed.”
“Reviewed.”
“Reviewed.”
I sit with that a moment, in the dive shop, under a wall of buoyancy compensators hanging like a row of empty torsos. “Keep pushing on Poppy. And I want word the second the sea drops enough for any hull, Doyle. Any hull.”
“You’ll know before I do,” he says, which is a joke, and we both almost smile, which is a small victory for the human race.
On my way back I stop at the medical station, rebuilt in the conference center’s driest corner. Soryn has the cooler open and is doing her thermometer ritual, and her face when she closes the lid is a weather front.
“How long?” I ask.
“The cardiac medication has a margin. At this temperature, the margin ends tonight.” She aligns the thermometer with the cooler’s edge, a tiny act of tidiness in a collapsing world.
“After that it’s a coin flip whether it still works, and I don’t like flipping coins with six-year-olds.
Doyle says a pediatric transfer is being reviewed.
I’ve been a nurse for nineteen years and I have never heard ‘reviewed’ applied to a sick child before this week. ”
“Keep the margin alive. Ice rotation, coldest corner, whatever you need. Take my room’s share.”
“Your room doesn’t have a share anymore, Mrs. Morse. Nothing’s making ice.” She looks at me, glasses flashing in the emergency light. “You’re very good at this. I hope someone is writing it down.”
“Nobody writes anything down in a disaster. That’s why the reports all sound so calm.”
She laughs, one syllable, and goes back to her cooler, and I go back to my corner, and the morning grinds on, and the sea beyond the ruined dock keeps making and unmaking its gray walls, indifferent to margins.
The satellite brick rings at noon, and this time it’s Christian himself, real-time, his voice clear as glass because the mainland has all the towers and the island has a brick with one bar and a dream.
“Hazel. I got your message. Tell me what the flooding situation is now.”
“Now?” I’m standing in the corridor outside the dive shop, and I can see, through the glass doors, the rainwater pooling in the lobby of the main building, sunlight finally breaking through and lighting it up like a hotel feature gone wrong.
“The ground floor is a swimming pool nobody wanted. We slept in the wedding barn. Your daughter’s formula has a shelf life and the fridge keeping a six-year-old’s heart medicine alive is being out-lasted by a bag of ice.
How many times do I have to tell you this isn’t safe? ”
“I know it’s bad—”
“Bad is not the same as safe. You taught me that. You said it to me on a dock when we were twenty-five, the difference between bad weather and dangerous weather, you made me memorize it.” Maren fusses on my shoulder and I start walking, pacing the corridor, because my body needs to be doing something.
“You promised me this island was the safest place you could put us. Present tense, Christian. Promise, present tense.”
“The buildings are standing. Nobody’s been hurt—”
“Poppy’s medicine is in a cooler. That’s a thing I just said out loud about my life.” My voice cracks and I stop walking and make it stop cracking, because two hundred people are in earshot through a doorway and I will not be the owner’s wife having a scene. “Where are you?”
A pause. Not a static pause. A choosing pause.
“I’m at the mainland command center. Port coordination, the remaining offshore—”
“You left the islands.”
“The offshore rescue required command authority I couldn’t exercise from—”
“You left the islands.” I say it again, slower, letting the satellite carry every word.
“Your daughter slept in a flooded building last night. I handed her to a stranger in a storm surge so I could pull an old woman off a path. And you left. You got in a car or a boat or a helicopter and you went further away.”
“There were people in open water, Hazel. A vessel with two hundred aboard, steering gone. I made the only call there was—”
“There’s always a bigger number. Do you hear that?
There will always, always be a bigger number.
” I’m shaking now, and Maren feels it and starts to cry, and I rock her while I end my marriage’s last defense, standing in a hallway in a disaster.
“You left your baby in a storm because somebody gave you a bigger number.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“Tell me what happened, then.”
“There were people in open water,” he says again, because it’s all he has, because it’s true, because truth is his whole armor.
“And now there are people here with no dock, no proper power, and no way out.” I press my lips to Maren’s hair and lower my voice, because she doesn’t deserve the decibels even if her father does.
“I asked you to evacuate us yesterday. Direct ask. Your wife, your daughter, your overbuilt island, requesting evacuation. And the answer was a bigger number.”
“A rescue asset is being arranged. I flagged the island to interrupt me the moment anything changed—”
“Anything changed, Christian. It’s been changing for two days. It just kept changing in ways that didn’t drown anyone fast enough to outrank the ocean.”
The line crackles. Somewhere behind him I hear the command center, radios and voices and the purposeful noise of an emergency being run well, and layered under it, faint, a woman’s voice saying something operational, and I don’t even have the energy for her anymore.
Aubriella is not the villain of this phone call.
The villain of this phone call is arithmetic.
“Come get us,” I say. One last time, plainly, no sarcasm, no argument. “Come get your daughter.”
“I hear you. Hazel. I hear you, and I’m—”
The call drops.
The brick’s screen blinks NO SIGNAL with its little air of apology, and I stand in the corridor holding my crying daughter and my dead phone, and down at the end of the hall, through the glass, the sea stands up and falls over and stands up again, patient as a verdict.
I don’t know if he finished the sentence. I don’t know what the end of it was going to be.
Dana finds me there. She doesn’t ask about the call. She takes Maren, who settles against her shoulder mid-sob, worn out by her own outrage, and she stands with me while I put my face back together with my hands.
“In line,” she says gently, quoting me back to myself.
“In line,” I agree.
We both look through the glass at the dock stub and the fallen crane and the unbuildable, unboatable sea.
Somewhere out there is my husband, saving people, being a chyron, meaning every word he says.
Meaning it has turned out to be worth absolutely nothing.
That’s the discovery I make in the corridor, the one I’ll carry home in my pocket: that a man can love you with his whole chest and still leave you in a flooding building, and call it love, and be right about the love, and wrong about everything else.
I find that I no longer care how the sentence ended, and that is the most frightening thing that has happened to me all week.