Chapter 37
Chapter
Thirty-Seven
Reuben came ashore a little after two in the morning, and I found out that a hurricane does not sound like wind. It sounds like a train that has decided to stay.
I had braced for a storm. I had not braced for the duration of it, the way it simply arrived and then kept arriving, hour after hour, with no crescendo and no relief, a single enormous sustained roar that got into your teeth and your chest, that stopped being a sound you heard and became a thing you were inside of.
The boarded windows breathed. The whole building leaned and held — leaned and held, like the cone, like the thing Boone had spent fifty years trying to teach me — and I stood in the middle of a hundred and ten people in a soft-serve parlor turned ark and ran the only thing I had any control over, which was the inside of that room.
And the room, God love it, held too. That was the thing I will carry out of that night for the rest of my life.
The island did not panic, because the island had done this before, would do it again, and had long ago decided that the correct response to the end of the world is to make sure everybody’s had something to eat.
Tansy ran a propane burner and fed people shrimp at three in the morning.
Earl told the same four hurricane stories he’d told through every storm since Camille, and the Pruetts corrected him on the details, and the correcting was the comfort, the bickering a kind of hymn.
Hutchins slept through the worst of it in his cot by the wall, ninety-one and entirely unbothered, a man who has outlived enough that a hurricane is just weather.
Somebody started a card game. Somebody’s baby cried, and four grandmothers materialized.
I kept the generator fed, the cots accounted for, the walk-in cold, and I was, for once, exactly enough and not one ounce too much.
It tested us once, hard, around three. A gust came through that was different from the others — you learn the difference fast, in a storm; there is ordinary catastrophe and then there is the kind that has singled you out — and the whole front of the building shrieked, and one of the plywood sheets Dani had screwed over the big window let go at a top corner with a sound like a gunshot and began to peel, and through the gap the storm showed itself, white and sideways and personal.
The room went still. A child started to wail.
And I did not freeze, because this was the one kind of moment I was built for: I had Dani and a drill and two of the high-school boys on it before I’d finished deciding to move, Dani driving new screws by feel while I put my whole weight on the sheet and the boys braced the frame, the four of us holding a piece of wood against a Category Three by main strength and stubbornness, and it held.
We got it back. Dani put six more screws in it than it needed and patted it once, the way she pats things she’s beaten, and the room let its breath back out, and somebody laughed the high cracked laugh of relief, and the card game resumed.
That was the part of the night I could do.
That was the part I’d been training for my whole life without knowing the exam was a hurricane.
I was magnificent, frankly. I want to say that plainly, because of what was happening underneath it.
Underneath it, I was coming apart over a man on a boat.
He had not come back. That was the arithmetic running under all the other arithmetic, the sum I could not make balance, exactly as Greer had said.
Hollis had gone out before midnight to bring the Aldermans’ boat round, back before the front edge, and the front edge had come and gone and become the whole storm, and there was no Hollis, and there was no way to know, because the radios were nothing but the storm talking to itself and a phone was a joke and nobody, nobody, was going out onto that water to check.
I did my job. I want that understood. I did not abandon a hundred and ten people to stand at a boarded window and weep, because I am not built that way and because they needed the walk-in cold more than I needed to fall apart.
But every time I passed the front of the building I looked at the black plywood where the marina would be, and I did the sum again, and it would not balance.
Somewhere around four in the morning I stopped being able to pretend to myself that this was concern for a neighbor.
Greer found me in the walk-in, where I had gone on a transparently invented errand to be alone for ninety seconds with the thing in my chest.
“Say it,” she said. She’d followed me in.
She shut the door on the roar, and in the sudden cold quiet, her voice was very gentle.
“You’re going to be no use to anybody until you say it once out loud, so say it to me, in here, where it doesn’t cost you anything, and then go back out there and be magnificent some more. ”
“I don’t have the right,” I said. My voice was not under management. “I told him no, Greer. I built a fence around a field he never — I handed him a contract. You don’t get to do that and then stand in a walk-in at four in the morning and?—”
“Brooke.” Greer took my face in both cold hands, the way you do a child, like nobody had done in forty years.
“Caring about him isn’t a thing you have to earn the right to.
That’s the whole mistake, hon. That’s the mistake under all the other mistakes.
You think love is something you’re allowed only if you’ve been useful enough to deserve it.
You’ve thought it your whole life. And it’s not true, it has never once been true, and you are standing in a freezer in a hurricane finding out the hard way that you’d grieve that man whether you’ve got the right to or not. ” She let go. “So. Say it.”
“I want him to come back,” I said, and it came out of me like something breaking, the first completely unguarded sentence I had said out loud in I could not tell you how many years.
“I want him to walk through that door and I want to be allowed to want it, and I’m so scared, Greer, I’m so scared and I can’t fix it and I can’t schedule it and there’s not one single thing on any list that brings a boat back, and I have never in my life been this far past the end of what I can control, and I think — I think this is what everybody feels all the time, and I think I’ve spent my whole life making sure I never had to. ”
“Yeah,” Greer said softly. “That’s the one.
Welcome to being a person. It’s terrible.
Come on.” She opened the walk-in door, and the roar came back in, and the storm went on exactly as before, indifferent to the fact that a woman had just, at long last, in a freezer, become one.
“He’ll come or he won’t. You can’t change it from in here.
But you said it. That’s the part that was yours to do, and you did it.
Now go feed the generator. And Brooke—” she paused, the cold at our backs, the train still passing overhead “—when there’s a lull, and there will be a lull, it always lulls — you’ll know it’s the eye and not the end.
Don’t let anybody go outside. People always think the eye is over.
It’s just the storm taking a breath before it comes back the other way. ”