TWENTY-NINE A Raising
B y noon, I think all of Bluster was at the Sea-Mist.
Well, that’s a gross exaggeration, but it was like a hundred people. Mayor Holt was there. Even kids from Bonfire Night showed up, some of them still in their camp pajamas. Hell, Finn Nyberg, the cranky lighthouse guy, showed up—and immediately grabbed a big bin of flood trash and dumped it in the back of the truck somebody had designated as the refuse receptacle (I hoped it was Stan, the truck’s owner).
Not only did all those people show up, but they all came prepared. Everybody wore waders, or Wellies, or just good boots. They had gloves and goggles. They brought shovels and huge plastic trash bins and bags. They brought tools and generators and wet vacs. Dominica Alvarez, who’d been the meanest mean girl in our high school class, brought her four boys and three girls from where all they now lived in Samoa, on the peninsula in Humboldt Bay.
Samoa was fifty miles away. Apparently, Catherine’s word stretched that far.
Catherine, Bailey, and three servers from the diner had set up three long, folding banquet tables as a buffet line, and two other tables behind them for food prep. Catherine had even brought a generator, so she had two big table-top griddles going, plus a Foreman-style grill. First there were pancakes, fake sausage and bacon, yogurt and fruit, juices, coffee, tea, a huge cooler of ice water. Then they served lunch of her famous grilled cheese (ciabatta bread, brown butter, gruyere, gouda, and cheddar cheese—it will change your life), sweet potato chips, and fresh veggies. Killian Shelley, who owned Bluster Fizz, an artisanal soda company, showed up with a truck full of cases of his fancy flavors.
All those people, breaking their backs for me. Getting filthy, growing weary, but chatting and laughing all the way through it. At some point Jessie even got something like a line dance going, with everybody working on the yard doing what I think was the Cha Cha Slide, with their shovels, while they sang a song that was popular enough to be familiar to me.
It might actually have been the ‘Cha Cha Slide.’ That’s a song, right?
You know about barn raisings? I’d only ever heard of them in books, movies, and musicals. Until that day, my broken faith in human nature had not allowed me to believe that a barn raising had ever been a real thing, that people would come together and work so hard for somebody else just because the need was there.
As a child I’d lived in Bluster without ever seeing this aspect of the people around me. My neighbors. My community. If there had been similar moments back then, my mother had, either by intention or personality, kept them from me. But the day after somebody tried to wash me away, I saw Bluster clearly for the first time. And my faith in human nature grew like the Grinch’s heart.
Maybe my own heart grew three sizes as well.
Because my mother would never have allowed anyone to help her in such a way, I hadn’t known it was possible. Somehow, even in the twenty years I’d lived without her, I’d never seen it to be true. Mutually suffering people coming together, sure. Certain people volunteering in a catastrophe, yes. But a whole town dropping everything on a sunny Saturday to dig my life out of a swamp? No, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t watched it happen.
I’d been afraid the people of Bluster would hate me when I came home. I’d expected condemnation and contempt. Torches and pitchforks. Instead, I got shovels and wet vacs. Freshly made breakfast and fancy soda. The Cha Cha Slide. Laughter and support. Community.
Standing in the wreckage of the property we lived on, I discovered home.
For the first time I could remember, I felt something like sympathy for my mother. What a lonely life she’d led, keeping the world at a distance. Help and support had been right outside the door, but she’d kept it locked. She’d been so angry, so bitter, so full of hate. What that really meant, I finally saw: she’d been miserable and alone.
Something must have made her the way she was.
Just like something had made me the way I was.
I felt a hand on the small of my back and smiled over my shoulder at Roman.
“Hey,” he said, handing me a fresh bottle of Blueberry Ginger soda (it’s surprisingly yummy—I was skeptical at first, too). “You look better.”
“I feel better. I think I feel ... hopeful. Like this isn’t destroyed.”
“It’s not. It’s a lot of work, and it sucks we have to do it, but it’ll get done.”
I nodded. Then I turned and buried myself against his chest, hugging him as tightly as I could. “I love you.”
He kissed my head and held on. “Querida,” he whispered.
ABOUT AN HOUR LATER , while I was pushing a wheelbarrow full of ruined carpeting, I happened to look over and see Roman in a seemingly agitated conversation with the cranky lighthouse guy.
(It occurred to me right about then that he’d been helping all day, and, being a quite large, strong man, he’d been given proportional tasks. He’d worked hard, and he didn’t even like me. So I figured I should probably stop thinking of him as the cranky lighthouse guy.)
I saw Roman and Finn Nyberg in what seemed maybe like an argument. They were looking at Roman’s phone. Suddenly, Finn stepped back, still talking. Roman nodded, and Finn turned sharply and headed toward his truck, his head down and his stride long, like he had serious business to attend to. Or like he was pissed and done with helping.
I took a couple of steps toward Roman, intending to ask what that was about, when Daddy Ned started yelling for his dead wife. He’d last been with Jessie, and I wasn’t sure where Erin was, so I changed course and hurried to help her dad—who was the closest I’d ever had to one myself.
By the time I had Daddy Ned corralled, we’d located Erin pulling ruined drapes down in Cottage 3, and I’d talked her down from finding Jessie and chewing her out for abandoning her Ned-watching duties, I’d forgotten about Finn Nyberg.
I REMEMBERED ABOUT Finn much later that afternoon, when he returned and came straight for me.
By then, the headcount of helpers had about halved, mainly because the great bulk of the work that could be done by amateurs was done. That huge crew of townspeople had cleaned out every cottage, the space around the cottages, and our cabin. Something like a dozen truckloads of trash had been hauled to the county dump/recycling center. Thick rope had been strung from cottage to cottage, and all the rugs, drapes, and linens that had a hope of salvage were hanging to dry.
As a place to live, the Sea-Mist wouldn’t be fit again for months. I hadn’t allowed myself to think yet about where Wyatt and I would live in the meanwhile. But really, I don’t think I was all that worried—even a flooded, uninhabitable mess, the Sea- Mist was still a home. Our home. Because Bluster and its people had made it so.
When Finn came up to me, I was standing with Wyatt and Roman at the buffet tables, filling a plate with Catherine’s dinner offerings: zucchini burgers, apple-spinach salad, mac-n-cheese, carrot cupcakes, and tortellini salad.
He came up so quickly, and he looked so angry, that I first thought his anger was directed at me. I cringed away from him, nearly tipping my plate onto my shirt. Roman must have sensed aggression from Finn as well; he took a sidestep and put himself between us.
“Finn,” he said, calmly. “You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Finn said, sounding perfectly reasonable. That man had the Premium Label version of Resting Asshole Face. “Uh, Miss ... Leo?”
“Leo is fine,” I said.
“I need to show you something. Come with me.” He turned at once and started walking away, like he actually thought I’d go with so little information.
Not sure what the fuck was going on, I looked to Roman. “What the fuck?”
Finn had stopped about twenty feet away. Now he was looking back at us, his beefy arms crossed. Frustrated that we hadn’t rushed after him, I guess.
“We should go with him.” Roman set his plate down. Then he took mine from me and set it next to his. “Wy, will you make sure nobody swipes our plates?”
“Sure,” Wyatt said and moved to the side of the table. “What’s goin’ on?”
“We’re about to find out,” Roman answered and took my hand.
As soon as he saw us finally following, Finn turned and resumed his journey—back to his truck, apparently.
“Do you know what this is about?” I asked Roman, remembering that odd exchange between them earlier in the day.
“I think so. But I don’t want to say yet.”
“Well, that’s cryptic.”
“Sorry. It might be good. I just don’t want to get that brain of yours spinning unless there’s really something.”
That sounded like criticism, and I stopped short. We were holding hands, so Roman pulled up about one step later.
“ That brain of mine ? What’s that supposed to mean?”
I was working up a mad, and I know that was obvious in my tone—I’d intentionally made it obvious—but Roman chuckled and came back to me. He hooked his free hand over the back of my neck and bent down to touch his forehead to mine. “I love that brain of yours. It’s smart and funny and strong. But you start spinning out doomsday scenarios at the first hint of trouble. Am I wrong?”
He wasn’t wrong. Positivity did not come naturally, and certainly not easily, to me. I gave all I had to Wyatt, and that left me alone in my head with all the nasties. Micah had been a ‘positive thinker’ and a ‘manifester,’ so he’d had no patience for my darker thoughts. I was young enough when we’d met that it hadn’t occurred to me that I shouldn’t keep my worries to myself and be the Leo he wanted me to be. To manifest happy Leo.
I think that version of me was about seventy percent fa?ade.
Since Micah’s passing and the turmoil Wyatt and I had lived through, Dark Leo had gotten a lot more air, I guess. And Roman had been with me while I fought the biggest battles of my return to Bluster, so he was getting the real me, too overwhelmed to pretend I was anything else.
That was, just then, dawning on me—and it felt good to be truly seen by him. Not a romanticized version but the real, messy me. So I set my hand on his chest and murmured, “Okay. Not wrong.” Then I focused on something else he’d just said. “But is this trouble?”
“I don’t think so. Let’s go see.”
Again, Finn had stopped and waited with obvious impatience for us to follow. This time, he stood there until he caught up with us. I don’t think he trusted us to make the rest of the trip unless he kept his eye on us.
“What is it you want to show us?” I asked when I reached him.
“Roman said you didn’t recognize the boy in the video. The one whose face you can see.”
I looked over at Roman, asking with my eyes if he’d been showing that video around. I had a defensive feeling, like my dirty laundry was hanging for all to see.
Which was actually, literally true that day—there were clotheslines strung all over the place.
Roman gave me a calming look. “I wanted to see if anybody else might know him, so I showed it around.”
Now I returned my attention to Finn. “Do you know him?”
We’d arrived at his truck—a big gunmetal-grey Ford. He went to the bed, reached over, grabbed something, and lifted it so the top part cleared the side of the truck, and we could see what he wanted us to see.
A man. Finn had reached into the bed of his truck and pulled a human being to a sitting position.
The man was bound, wrists and ankles, with white, medium-gauge marine rope. A piece of yellow hi-vis duct tape covered his mouth. He wore dark jeans, battered Nikes, and a faded t-shirt from the Boat House Grill in Crescent City.
He was also blond, bearded, and blue-eyed. The skin around his left eye was swollen and discolored. Blood crusted his nose.
I was ninety-eight-percent sure he was the guy in the video. One of the assholes who’d tried to destroy my home.
But I couldn’t say that. My capacity for speech had been fried by my utter shock that Finn had beaten and kidnapped somebody and brought them to my home. I could only stare at Finn, and then his captive, and then Finn again. I think my mouth had come completely unhinged.
“This is Chad Howard. You recognize him?”
My brain was spinning, but it wasn’t gaining any purchase. “Uh ...”
Dissatisfied with that response, Finn ripped the tape from Chad Howard’s mouth. A significant amount of beard came away with the tape, and he howled. Red spots began to emerge around his mouth and cheek, growing larger as the blood began to seep out.
Finn shook Chad brusquely. “I think you’ve got something to say to Miss Leo here. Say it.”
“I’m ... I’m sorry! We were here last night. We fucked up your place.”
“We?” Roman said. He took an aggressive step forward, and Chad cringed.
“Yeah, we—but I don’t know the other guys! I just ... I answered ... it’s a thing. It’s like ... It’s like TaskRabbit, but for ... I don’t know! For shit you’re not supposed to do, I guess! Some guy hired us, told us what he wanted, gave us half the cash up front, half when we finished.”
“What guy?” Roman asked.
“I don’t know his name. Some fat old asshole with a crewcut. We didn’t share names. That’s not how it works.”
‘Some fat old asshole with a crewcut’ narrowed it down nicely. I knew exactly one person who fit that description, and he fit it exactly. My buddy Darryl Manfred.
But there was a TaskRabbit for crime ? My words came back online. “Are you telling me you used an app to get a job to come and destroy my home?”
“It’s not an app,” Finn answered. “It’s a website. Dark web shit.”
“How do you know that?” I challenged Finn. “How do you know him ?”
“Same reason for both. My ex lives in Crescent City. She has a moron troublemaker for a brother. I bailed him out a handful of times—and this asshole was with him most of those times.”
“Didn’t bail me out,” Chad groused. Finn hit him hard enough that his head bounced off the side of the truck.
“OW!” Chad yelled. “Fuck, man! I came clean!”
“Not yet you didn’t.” Finn looked to me. “I’m gonna take him to the sheriff. Sorry I can’t help with the other three—but maybe the cops’ll be able to do something with the website.”
“Was one of the others your ex’s brother?” Roman asked.
We all looked at Chad, who stared sullenly back. If it was true, he obviously meant to protect his friend. For now, at least. Chad didn’t look like he’d hold up great under an actual interrogation.
I could think of only one thing to say: “Thank you, Finn.”
He nodded. “Wish I could do more.”
I laughed and set my hand on his arm. He seemed surprised by the contact, but he didn’t pull away. “I think you just did more than all the rest of us combined—but try not to hurt him anymore before you hand him over. I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble, too.”
I didn’t point out that he might already be in trouble—you know, for the assault and kidnapping.
“I’ll be fine,” Finn said. “I’m gonna go ahead and take this trash where it belongs.”
“Okay. Thank you,” I said again.
Looking uncomfortable, Finn only nodded. But when Roman offered his hand, he shook it willingly.
Finn slapped the tape back over Chad’s mouth and climbed in behind the wheel. Roman and I stepped back. Roman put his arm around me and we watched Finn pull out and away, like we were watching a kid leave for college.
When we turned around, we saw we had the attention of everyone still helping out at Sea-Mist Disaster Day.
Oh, we were going to fertilize the town grapevine for months .