Chapter 38
Chapter
Thirty-Eight
The eye came a little before six, the way Greer said it would, and it did not feel like relief. It felt like the world holding its breath, which is exactly what it was.
The roar that had been the floor and ceiling of my whole night simply stopped.
Not faded — stopped all at once, like a machine cutting out, into a silence so total it had its own pressure.
The building, which had leaned and held for four hours, came upright and stood there ringing.
People lifted their heads. Somebody moved toward the door, as somebody always does, and three islanders said “no” in the same flat unison, because the island knows the eye is the most dangerous part precisely because it feels like mercy.
It’s just the storm taking a breath before it comes back the other way.
I stood in the middle of the held breath of the world and counted my hundred and ten people.
They were all there. And one person who was not on my list at all walked through the door.
He was soaked to the bone, and he had a gash over one eyebrow that had bled and dried and bled again, and he was moving the way he always moves, unhurried, asking the world’s permission for nothing, as if he had not just ridden out the front wall of a Category Three on dark water alone.
Hollis. He came through the door of the shelter into the ringing quiet and his eyes went around the room once, fast, counting — because of course he counts too, he just counts different things — and they found me, and they stopped.
I did not run to him. I want that on the record, because it is the whole of what I learned that summer.
I did not run to him, and I did not run from him.
I had done both, on a dock, in July, and they were the same motion.
I just stood where I was, in the eye of a hurricane, and let myself be a person he was looking at.
“You’re bleeding,” I said. It is not what I meant to say. It is, apparently, the closest my mouth could get on short notice to I have been dying in a freezer all night.
“Boat came round fine.” He crossed the room, slow, leaving wet bootprints on Greer’s floor.
“Rode out the front half in the lee of the point. Knew the eye’d give me a window to walk in.
” He stopped in front of me. Up close, the gash was worse, and the exhaustion was bone-deep and entirely unadmitted. “You didn’t come after me.”
“I wanted to.” My voice did the unmanaged thing again, and this time I let it.
“I wanted to so badly I couldn’t feel my hands all night.
Greer had to take me into the walk-in and make me say it out loud.
I wanted to run down to that marina and forbid you the entire ocean.
” I made myself keep my eyes up, which cost me everything it had cost me on the bait-shop steps and more.
“And I didn’t, because you don’t need rescuing, Hollis.
You read that storm better than the storm did.
You were never the one in trouble out there. I was. In here. The whole time.”
He didn’t say anything. Hollis lets a person get all the way to the end of their worst sentence, same as Greer, which is probably why they’re the two people on this island I could not get around.
So I said the rest of it. In the eye, with the storm coming back any minute, with a hundred and ten islanders very loudly pretending not to listen, I set down every last thing I’d been carrying and walked up to the man with nothing in my hands at all.
“I gave you a contract,” I said. “On the dock. I took the one thing all summer that came without a schedule, and I tried to put it on a schedule, because wanting you scared me more than losing you, and I have spent my entire life choosing the fear I can manage over the one I can’t.
And it cost me the best thing I found down here, and I knew it the second I did it, and I did it anyway, because that’s what I do — I optimize the thing I’m afraid to lose until it’s safe and dead and gone.
” I was crying, I think, though it’s hard to cry with any dignity in the eye of a hurricane, and I had long since stopped trying for dignity.
“I don’t have a plan for this. That’s the only thing I’ve got to offer you that’s worth anything.
No terms. No Labor Day. No projections. I want you, and I don’t know what happens after, and for the first time in my whole life I’m not going to build something to make the not-knowing stop.
I’m just going to stand here and want it out loud, with my whole chest, like a person, and find out what happens.
Cam told me to. I should have listened in July. ”
“Who’s Cam?” asked Hollis.
A laugh came out of me that was eighty percent sob, which is the most honest ratio I have ever achieved. “She’s going to love you,” I said. “That’s the worst part. She’s going to be insufferable about it.”
He reached up and tucked a piece of soaked hair behind my ear, the small unhurried gesture of a man who has all the time in the world even when he demonstrably does not, and he looked at me with the gash bleeding over his eye and the storm gathering itself outside to come back the other way, and he said the thing I will hear in my head for the rest of my life.
“I never wanted you managed, Brooke.” His thumb stayed at my jaw.
“I wanted you here. This. The one in the freezer who can’t feel her hands.
I’ve been waiting on her since June. Took a hurricane.
” He almost smiled, the weathered unbothered thing finally, fully unguarded. “You island people are slow.”
“I’m not island people.”
“You are now.” Then the light changed at the edges of the boarded windows.
The pressure shifted in everybody’s ears at once, and Greer’s voice cut across the room — here it comes, back inside, away from the glass.
The eye closed over us, the storm came back the other way, and Hollis took my hand in his cold, wet, ruined one.
We turned, together, to go meet the second half of it.
It was, by every measure I have ever owned and several I had just that night been issued, the worst night of my life.
I would not trade one hour of it. I had finally, at thirty-nine, in a soft-serve parlor full of people I’d wronged and won back, run all the way out of plan — and found, where the plan ended, the entire rest of my life, waiting, the way the island waits for everything, with no receipt, no hurry, and both hands open.