9
W hen Dillon emerged from his cell that next morning, he discovered all the remaining families were on the move. Only Olivia still slumbered in her pallet. The family with the portrait left a thank-you poster pinned to her blanket. The twins had decorated the page with a lady holding a camera and huge smile. Dillon used the shower, ate another plate of overcooked eggs, wished the families a safe journey, and left the station.
The sky was heavy with swirling gray clouds. There was no wind and the air tasted damp, laden with coming rain. He walked to the café, doctored his coffee, and headed down Ocean Avenue. The sidewalks were almost empty, and those people he passed walked with the sleepy haste of locals on their way to starting another day. Everyone he saw, including those talking on phones and texting, cast worried glances toward the sky.
The light was not so much dim as tainted. Even so, it felt good to be out alone, walking the streets of his childhood. He had been woken that morning by the same image that had carried him to sleep. He could not say precisely why candles in a home’s every window would impact him as they did. Lying in his pallet in the windowless cell, Dillon had felt both comforted and unsettled by the memory.
But the dream that had pushed him from sleep and hastened his departure had been something else entirely. In it, he stood in front of that same darkened house. A hard rain fell, pushed in all directions by a blustery wind. But there he stood, untouched by the storm. The window glowed with the light of just one candle, so brilliant it turned the raindrops molten and gold.
Then the dream shifted.
First the window vanished. Then the house. The candle remained there, poised in the dark. The storm blew harder still, but it could not touch either of them. Not the night, not the rain.
When he woke, he had the strongest sense that the candle came with him. Out of his dream, into the jail.
As he continued down Ocean Avenue, he remained filled with the night’s conflicting emotions. Comfort and tumult both. A peace and an unsettled urge to rise up and do something.
There was hardly any mystery to that particular desire. His answer to every childhood hardship had been the same. It formed some of his earliest and finest memories. Work had bound him to his silent grandparents and sheltered him from his permanently stoned father. He had been far from the most intelligent student, not in school or university or business school. But he worked with passion. With a genuine sense of satisfaction in getting it right, finding the answer, moving on. The loss of his business and all his future dreams had been made far worse by having no place to go. No new work, nothing to salve the wounds.
Dillon reached the turning onto the oceanfront road, and froze at the sight.
Police tape sealed off the main parking lot. The far edge had crumbled and fallen into the sea. The ocean was still, slick, gray as the sky. Pilings and trees floated in the quiet waters. The ocean walk was shattered in places. The tall pillars meant to hold the connecting bridge-walks dangled empty and forlorn.
Then he saw the people.
Dozens of locals walked the beach and road both, hefting timber and carrying it to neat piles. A couple of dozers cleared drives leading to the shuttered motels. People walked behind and to either side, shoveling what the dozers did not clear. There was a cheerful air to the scene, despite the task at hand.
Dillon watched them for a time, then turned around and started back uphill.
There had to be something he could do.