Chapter 35
Chapter
Thirty-Five
It turns out the thing I am genuinely good at — the actual gift, under the armor, the one I’d spent all summer using as a weapon — is moving a great many moving parts toward a single deadline without dropping any of them.
A hurricane is, from a purely logistical standpoint, a deadline.
The largest one I have ever been handed.
And for the first time all summer, nobody on the island was going to get hurt by my being good at it.
But I could not run it the way I run things.
That was the lesson Reuben taught me in about ninety minutes flat, faster and harder than the island had managed in three months.
I sat down the first evening with a legal pad and started building the response like I’d build anything — a master list, roles, a command structure, me at the top of it — and I got about four lines in before I understood that I did not know a single thing the list required.
I did not know who couldn’t drive. I did not know whose oxygen ran on electricity, whose roof had gone last time, who would say they were fine and mean the opposite, who lived alone at the end of a road that floods.
I had spent a summer routing around the only people who carried that information in their heads, and now the storm needed exactly that information, and I had priced it out of my own building.
So I did the thing I had been unable to do for eleven counted minutes in a parked car. I drove to the bait shop, and this time the storm was at my back, and there was no time to build a plan to soften it, and I walked up the steps with nothing in my hands at all.
The porch went quiet when I came up it. Not hostile.
Islanders aren’t hostile; they’re worse, they’re waiting.
Earl was there, the Pruetts, Boone, Odette on her bucket, old Hutchins in the doorway — and they all looked at the woman who’d made them move out, standing on the steps with empty hands and a storm coming, and waited to see what she’d brought.
I’d brought nothing. That was the whole point, and it was the hardest thing I’d done since I got off the ferry.
“I don’t know who needs help,” I said. It came out plain, which is not my native register; my native register has slides.
“I’ve been here all summer, and I don’t know one single thing that matters right now.
I don’t know who can’t drive, whose roof goes, or who’s going to say they’re fine.
You all know. It’s all in this room, it’s been in this room the whole time, and I spent the summer acting like it was inefficiency.
” I made myself keep my eyes up, which cost me.
“I’m not here with a plan. I’m here to be told what to do by the people who actually know, and to do it, and to not improve a single thing while I do.
If you’ll have me. I’d understand if you’d rather I just drove to Brunswick and got out of the way. ”
There was a silence with weather in it.
Then Odette stood up off her bucket, seventy-three years old, and looked at me the way she’d looked at me the morning she folded her apron, except that the judgment in it had softened a degree.
“Well,” she said. “She can be taught.” She picked up Pearl’s address book off the coffee urn — Pearl’s book, the real one, the infrastructure — and held it out to me, not letting go of it yet.
“You want to be useful? You can dial. I’ll tell you who, you write down what they say, and you do not, Brooke, you do not editorialize.
We’ve got about two hundred people and a day and a half. Sit down.”
I sat down on a bait-shop step and dialed a phone for six hours, and it was, without one single close competitor, the best work I did all summer.
Odette ran me like a switchboard, and I let her, which was its own small healing.
She’d say a name and a fact — Carl Wescott, won’t leave his dogs, tell him the Pruetts are taking dogs — and I’d dial and relay it and write down what came back, and somewhere in the third hour the names stopped being names on a list I’d never been given and started being people.
I learned that the Tillmans on Cedar had a generator but no gas, and the Hendersons had gas but no generator, and I put them in a car together, and that was the first thing all summer I’d matched up that didn’t have a margin in it.
I called a man named Sutter who said he was fine four separate times in a voice that meant the precise opposite, exactly as I’d been warned some of them would, and I learned to hear it, and I sent Boone, because Boone could go get a proud man without it costing the man anything.
And at some point I dialed a number Odette gave me without a comment, and it was Dot Mathers, and there was a silence when she heard my voice, and then she told me, stiffly, that she had a ride with her nephew and did not require a milkshake — and then, just before she hung up, she said, “You’re doing the phones?
” and I said yes, and she said, “Hm. Good,” and that Hm did more for me than the entire record month.
I had been so busy being the most necessary woman on the coast that I’d forgotten there’s a kind of useful that costs the other person nothing, and a bait-shop step in a rising wind was where I finally learned to tell them apart.
Sophie called at midnight, and the empty-nest wound I’d been nursing all summer turned itself inside out in the space of one phone call, because now she was the one who couldn’t stand that I wouldn’t be managed.
“Mom. Mom. You’re on an island in a mandatory evacuation zone, and you’re telling me you’re staying — no. No. Get in the car. I’m looking at the cone of the storm right now, you’re in the middle of it, I will drive down there and physically?—”
“Sophie.” I was, I realized, smiling, in a way that probably wasn’t appropriate to the conversation. “Listen to yourself.”
A pause on the line. “...What.”
“You’re trying to manage me. You’ve got a plan for me and a cone you’re staring at, and you cannot stand that I won’t get in the car.
” I felt the whole summer turn over gently in my chest. “It’s the worst feeling in the world, isn’t it.
Watching somebody you love refuse to be saved on your schedule. ”
A longer pause. “Oh, you witch,” my daughter said, with enormous love. “You’re using my own hurricane against me.”
“I’m staying because there are two hundred people here and I’m good at exactly the kind of problem this is, and for once being good at it won’t cost anybody anything.
That’s — Sophie, that’s the only useful thing I’ve figured out all summer, and I’m not going to drive away from the one place it finally fits.
” I heard her start to cry, the way you cry when someone you love is being brave at you.
“I’ll be in the parlor. It’s the highest dry floor on the boardwalk.
I’ll call you on the far side. I promise.
Now go be useless about it somewhere safe, baby, you’re so good at it, you’ll be fine. ”
“I hate you,” Sophie wept, meaning the opposite, the way the whole island says everything. “Call me the second it passes. The second.”
I promised. Then I went back to the phone tree, because Mrs. Vesey on Tabby Lane ran her oxygen off the wall and had nowhere to go, and that, it turned out, was a thing I could actually fix.