Chapter 39
Chapter
Thirty-Nine
The back half of a hurricane is worse than the front, which nobody tells you, because the front softened everything up and the back comes through to finish it, and it comes from the opposite direction so that everything braced one way gets hit the other.
We met it together, the hundred and ten of us and the one wet captain, and it was the longest two hours of my life, and I was not, for one minute of it, alone in them.
That was the whole difference. The front half I had fought from inside a private terror, doing the sum that wouldn’t balance.
The back half I fought with Hollis’s ruined hand finding mine in the dark every time the building groaned, with Greer across the room running her half of it, with Odette keeping the old folks calm by the simple authority of refusing to be impressed by the weather.
The wind screamed the other way. Dani’s roof held, exactly as she’d staked her life it would, and I made a private note to tell her she’d been right, because I had spent a summer being wrong about everything and had developed a new respect for people who knew their one thing all the way to the bottom.
The power had gone hours before. We ran on Greer’s generator and the walk-in’s cold and the particular light a room makes for itself when everyone in it has decided not to be afraid out loud.
Somewhere in the worst of the back wall, when the whole building shuddered, and a child started to cry, old Hutchins — who had slept through the front half — woke up, took stock of the end of the world, and said, to nobody, in the dark, “Pearl rode out worse than this in a tin-roof church with no generator and forty Baptists. We’re fine.
” And the room laughed, the helpless grateful laugh of people who needed permission, and the wind could not do one single thing about the laughing, and that, I think, is the closest I have ever come to understanding what holds an island together when the weather is trying to take it apart.
Hollis worked beside me the whole back half, which is its own kind of love letter from a man who does not write them.
He didn’t hover, and he didn’t fuss; he just appeared at whatever I was doing — wrestling a cot, rationing the lantern batteries, holding a flashlight while Greer counted heads — and did the next part of it without being asked, like two people who actually fit doing a job, no words, no friction.
Once, in a gap between gusts, he handed me a cup of Tansy’s coffee I hadn’t known I needed, and our hands met around it in the dark, and neither of us said anything, and it was the single most married I have ever felt in my life, including the eighteen years I was.
I had spent a whole summer afraid that wanting him would cost me the control I’d built my life on.
It turned out wanting him cost me nothing but the control, and the control had been the thing breaking me the entire time.
It ended the way it began, which is to say, without ceremony.
The roar that had been the world for six hours did not climax.
It simply thinned, hour by hour, into something you could hear over, then talk over, then — at last, near dawn — into rain, ordinary rain, the kind that falls on places nothing has happened to.
Nobody slept in the last hour. We just waited, in the thinning dark, for it to be over enough to be sure, the way you wait by a bed.
And when Boone finally went to the door — Boone, because Boone has earned the right to be the first man to look at the damage — and pulled back one corner of the plywood and looked out at the gray, the whole room held its breath behind him.
“Well,” Boone said to the morning. “Cone’s still up.”
It should not have been the thing that broke me, after a night that had offered so many worthier candidates.
But I stood in the back of a soft-serve parlor full of people I had wronged and then helped keep alive, on the far side of the worst night of my life, and Boone said cone’s still up, and I put my hand over my mouth and cried — for the cone, the ridiculous fourteen-foot leaning cone I had spent eleven hundred dollars and a public humiliation trying to straighten, which had taken a Category Three from two directions and leaned and held, exactly as it had leaned and held through every storm since 1979, exactly as Boone had promised me it would, exactly as I had been too busy being right to believe.
The thing that leans is worth more than the thing that stands because nothing ever tested it. I had finally been tested from both directions. And I was, against every projection I had ever run, still up.
We opened the doors at first light onto an island that had been rearranged.
Trees down across the bridge road. The Sandbar’s deck peeled back like a lid.
Boats where boats don’t go. The boardwalk was strewn with the guts of a season — a beach chair in a tree, somebody’s cooler in the marsh, a great deal of sand exactly where the ocean had decided to put it.
But the bones of the place stood. The houses that had stood for a hundred years stood for another night.
The church stood. The bait shop stood, because of course the bait shop stood; the bait shop will outlive us all.
And the people stood, counted and accounted for, every name on Pearl’s list checked off in Odette’s hand, not one soul lost on Sugarberry Island the night Reuben came through — because an island that knows everybody’s name, it turns out, does not misplace a single one of them in the dark.
The infrastructure I had spent a summer calling inefficiency had just brought a whole town through a hurricane without dropping one person, and I had been allowed, at the very end, after everything, to help.
And then, before anyone had so much as had a cup of coffee, the island turned around and started taking care of itself, and I got to watch the thing happen that I had spent three months trying to replace with a system.
Nobody called a meeting. Nobody made a list — except me, and for once I made it at someone else’s instruction.
Boone simply said, to the room, “Vesey place is lowest, let’s start there,” and four men I’d watched disapprove of me all summer picked up chainsaws and went, and the question of who needed help first was answered as it had always been answered here, by the oldest knowledge in the building, which is the knowledge of exactly where the water goes and exactly who can’t bail it.
Tansy had a pot of something going on the propane burner before the rain had fully stopped, because a town runs on being fed and Tansy is its furnace.
The teenagers were dispatched to the shut-ins.
Somebody’s truck became everybody’s truck.
And it was fast — that was the part that humbled the last of the arrogance out of me — it was efficient, breathtakingly so, a whole town reorganizing itself for a disaster in the time it would have taken me to schedule the kickoff call, except that the efficiency had no chart and no manager and no metric, it ran on nothing but fifty years of people knowing each other’s names and troubles and never once mixing up which was which.
And they handed me a piece of it. That is the thing I will keep until I die.
Odette, of all people, looked around the wrecked bright morning, found me standing there with my hands wanting a job, and said, “You. Brunswick run. We need water, tarps, a generator if the hardware’s open, and you’re the one of us with a card that’ll clear and a car that’s not under a tree.
” She did not say it kindly. She said it the way you give a competent person a task because they are competent and the task needs doing, which is the only form of belonging I have ever fully trusted, and the first time all summer the island had asked me for the one thing I actually had to give instead of bracing against the things I kept giving that nobody wanted.
I went to Brunswick. I came back with a truck bed full. It was the proudest errand of my life.
Later, with the truck unloaded and the first frantic wave of it handled, I walked back out onto the wet boardwalk, Hollis beside me, and looked at the rearranged island, the standing cone, the wreckage of a great many things — and I felt, for the first time in longer than I could name, completely, exhaustedly, unmanageably at peace.
Then I looked down the boardwalk toward the marina, where my powder-blue cart had been, and saw what the storm had done to the part of the summer that was mine, and I started, despite everything, to laugh.