The Storm
I didn’t even want to go to the beach that summer. Linus didn’t listen because he never listened, not to anything I had to say in any case, and besides, the Richardsons were going. If Harold Richardson did something, well then, by God, Linus Bailey was going to do it, too.
“Not about to sit and spend the entire goddamn fall listening to him brag to everyone at the hospital that he took his family down there while we sat on our asses here in Nashville, Beth-Anne.”
I hated how he said my name. Everyone else sort of slurred it together, pretty, like it was one word. Bethanne. But Linus always said it like two separate names.
Beth.
Anne.
It sounded like he was trying to bite something, his teeth clicking around the words.
So we went.
It was a long drive, long enough that we had to stop for the night and stay at a motel halfway there.
There were two separate beds in the room, and I’d been relieved to see it, but of course that hadn’t meant Linus left me alone.
Still, I’d been able to sleep without him there next to me, at least, and that had been enough.
I had hoped the room at the Shipwreck Inn might be the same, but it wasn’t.
I did like the room, though. It faced the ocean, and there were pretty lace curtains in the window.
The sheets were a little stiff from being dried in all that salt air, but the smell was worth it.
Every morning, after Linus had left to find coffee, I would linger a little longer, inhaling that fragrance that was nothing like Ajax detergent.
The inn itself was pretty, too. It was painted pink, something that had made Linus grunt when our car had finally pulled up in the sand-and-shell parking lot.
It wasn’t a good grunt, I knew that, and sure enough, a second later he said, “Wonder if Harold was playing a little joke when he suggested this place.”
I guess it’s kind of funny looking back. Linus hated women so much that even the color most associated with them offended him.
Wasn’t funny at the time, of course. It’s only now that he’s dead that I can find any of that time in my life amusing.
But I liked the pink. It reminded me of the inside of a seashell.
And there was a wide front porch where I could sit and feel the salt air move over my skin, watch the waves crash against the shore.
I would sit out there with my book and imagine that maybe I could just stay there forever, stop being Mrs. Dr. Linus Bailey.
Wasn’t that what little towns like this were for? Starting over?
I’d barely gotten started at all when I married Linus.
Just out of high school, not smart enough to go to college—or so my family said—not pretty enough or good enough at housework to land a real catch.
Linus had been a childhood friend of my daddy’s, but while Daddy had stayed in Ashburn, Linus had moved up in the world, going to college, then medical school, settling in Nashville.
He and Daddy still kept in touch, though, and when Linus’s first wife died, my daddy thought marriage to a doctor might be just the thing for me.
Linus needed a wife, I needed somewhere to go that wasn’t my parents’ house, and that was that.
I wasn’t forced into it, but I never remembered agreeing to it, either.
It was just something that happened, almost like I was sleepwalking.
I drifted down the aisle and drifted up over to Nashville and Linus’s comfortable house, and I drifted through every day in a kind of numbed fog, and I figured that one day, I just might drift myself down to Shelby Street Bridge and jump off.
He never hit me, never forced me in the marriage bed, but there are other ways for a man to be cruel.
Linus seemed to have studied all of them just as vigorously as he’d studied medicine.
Dinner was never quite right, but my daddy probably drank most of our food money away, so not too surprising that all I could seem to manage was opening cans.
My clothes weren’t right, either, but what could you expect from a girl who’d probably never been inside a department store until she was lucky enough to have married him?
Funny how the house never seemed as clean as it should, given that I didn’t do anything else all day. Of course, we hadn’t had nearly as much to clean when I was growing up, so that must be it.
And wasn’t Bernice Wilson looking slim these days?
How lucky for Dave, having such an attractive wife.
My genes, no doubt. Coming from Robertson County trash like I did, was it any wonder my body wanted to hold on to extra pounds?
Never mind that I was a doctor’s wife, my body clearly thought I might starve to death at any moment.
He always chuckled when he said that, especially when he said it in front of other people.
But that stay at the Shipwreck Inn was a bit of a reprieve.
St. Medard’s Bay was a small town, quiet, and there weren’t many people for Linus to try to impress.
The owners of the place, Mr. and Mrs. Chambers, were nice, too.
Mrs. Chambers always brought me a glass of lemonade when I’d settle on the porch, and she always asked about what I was reading and never made fun of it, never called it a “toilet roll someone made the mistake of binding into a book” the way that Linus did.
She was pregnant, her belly round beneath the pretty cotton shift dresses she wore, and it always reminded me how lucky I was that no matter how much Linus turned to me in the night, no baby had taken hold.
Mrs. Chambers was excited about her baby.
They already had one little boy, Adam. He was only about two, his hair sticking up in dark brown tufts.
If this baby was a girl, Mrs. Chambers said, she was going to name her Ellen, and if it was another boy, Thomas.
I thought those were real pretty names, and when I told her so, she looked so pleased that it made me want to smile and cry and blush all at the same time.
We were supposed to stay for two weeks, Linus’s entire vacation from the hospital, but we’d been there only five days when the weather turned.
I remember the way the air got heavier, the skies darker.
The water had been so calm when we first arrived, but in those days leading up to the Fourth of July, it was choppier, the waves higher.
I hadn’t been out in it since the first day of our vacation when Linus had shoved my face into the water, telling me that I’d never learn to swim if I didn’t get over my “prissiness,” but I liked watching it.
And even though the ocean scared me, I liked it even more the wilder it got.
I liked the way the wind started picking up, that salt scent getting stronger, mingling with another smell, something that reminded me of my mama frying fish on Fridays.
The clouds overhead looked swollen, bruised, and if I noticed Mr. and Mrs. Chambers getting more nervous, if I overheard their whispered conversations and the faint drone of a radio, a man’s voice crackling through the static, I didn’t pay it much mind.
I was a country girl. I knew storms, I thought. I’d seen lightning take down oak trees that had stood before Christopher Columbus showed up over here, and a tornado had once ripped through a field just a few miles away from our place.
I didn’t know to be scared until it was too late.
It went on like that for a whole day, rain pouring down, and everyone was disappointed.
The inn was full for the Fourth of July, and there had been big plans for the holiday.
Fireworks on the beach, grilling in the big courtyard between the two wings of the inn, and someone had brought big galvanized tubs to fill with ice and beer.
All that was canceled now, and Linus kept threatening to pack up and head home.
“Might want to wait until this weather clears, buddy,” Mr. Chambers told him, and I liked how even though he was smiling, his eyes were hard. Here was someone else who saw Linus for what he was and did not like it, no sir.
I liked it even better when Linus bristled at being called “buddy” like that.
But I should’ve known that that would only make Linus dig in harder, make him more determined to leave.
The power went out around noon that Fourth of July, and that, Linus said, was the last straw.
He started packing, throwing all his things into his suitcase with angry, jerky movements. “Waste of money,” he muttered, “and don’t think I won’t be telling Harold Richardson that.”
The next bit is still a blur. I know I packed my things because I have a vivid memory of watching the powder-blue suitcase my mama had ordered for me for my honeymoon float away in the rising waters later, but all I can remember is the numbness settling over me again.
I’d had five days in St. Medard’s Bay, and they had been some of the best of my life, but they were over now.
I think Mr. Chambers tried to stop us. I think he might have even called Linus a “stubborn bastard,” and there’s a memory in there of Mrs. Chambers standing in the doorway, one hand over her mouth, the other resting on her stomach, as she watched us leave.
I hoped her baby would be okay, that this storm wouldn’t be too stressful for her, and thinking that I’d never know if she had a Thomas or an Ellen made me so sad for some reason.
The wind was so strong we could barely open the car doors, and even once we were inside, the rain was so heavy, the windshield wipers of our Lincoln Continental were fighting a losing battle.
That was when the fear started. When I realized that all I could see outside the windows was water, water, water, everything gray, and the car slid underneath us, Linus’s hands clutching the wheel, sweat popping out on his bald head as he leaned forward and squinted.
And then we were weightless for a sickening moment, the tires losing contact with the road. I screamed, grabbed at the door handle, and even as Linus yelled for me to stop, I shoved the door as hard as I could, tumbling out into the road with a splash.
Whatever road had once stretched out before us had become a lake, and Linus got out of the car, too, then, yelling something at me, but it didn’t matter what he was saying.
Not when the wind was screaming, when the pine trees on the side of the road were bending, snapping, and the water on the road seemed to be getting deeper.
“Get back in the car, Beth-Anne!” he screamed, but I didn’t want to be trapped, didn’t want water rushing in as I sat in that burgundy leather tomb. Panic had ahold of me now, and the water was rising, rising, rising.
I remembered coming down this road on the way here, how close the ocean had been, how calm and serene as we’d driven past.
It wasn’t calm now. It was a force, pushing in, smelling like salt and sky and death, and my eyes darted around me even as the rain stung, the wind making it hard to stand.
The pines were still swaying, but there, across the road, was another, bigger tree. A magnolia, shivering in the wind but standing.
I ran toward it, and then, as the water moved up my thighs, I slowed down, swinging my arms, pushing myself forward until my hands were pressed against its bark.
I didn’t know how to cook, and I didn’t know how to dress, and I didn’t know how to take care of a house, but guess what?
I sure as shit knew how to climb a tree.
That same body that Linus made fun of, that “Robertson County trash” body, was strong. The bark hurt my hands, and rain meant I could barely open my eyes, but I hauled myself up branch by branch, the wind howling around me.
I didn’t know Linus had followed me until I felt his fingers curl around my ankles, and then I looked down to see him below me. The water was high now, already covering him up to the knees, and he’d lost his glasses somewhere in all of this.
For the first time ever, Linus looked afraid.
“Help me!” he screamed, and I hooked an arm around the nearest branch, reaching down, almost out of instinct.
Our fingers brushed, but I wobbled on my perch and jerked my hand back to steady myself.
“Help me!” he yelled again, and I wanted to yell back that I was trying.
His fingers tightened on my ankle—to hold on better, I thought, but then his nails dug in, breaking the skin.
“HELP ME, YOU STUPID COW!” he shouted, lips drawn back in a snarl.
It happened so quickly.
I jerked my foot back out of his grasp, nearly sending him back to the ground and that frothing, angry water.
And then, like I was watching myself from a distance, I saw my foot—my ugly foot, as Linus often reminded me, squat and square, probably why fancy high heels never looked quite right on me—land squarely in the middle of his face.
There was a crunch, and I felt his nose give, the blood shocking red in a world that had turned gray.
His arms pinwheeled, and it reminded me of a cartoon I saw once, Wile E. Coyote, I think, about to fall off a cliff.
Ooh, he’d hate that, I thought. Being told he looks that silly, and then he was falling, the dark waters below closing over him.
Linus bobbed back up a few times. Or at least I think he did. I’d turned my face back to the trunk of that magnolia tree, holding on tight, eyes closed.
So maybe it wasn’t him screaming. Maybe that gurgling, shrieking sound was just the storm.
But I don’t think so.
Twenty-three people died in that storm. That wasn’t that big of a number, really.
Just a few months later, Hurricane Greer killed something like seventy people in Louisiana.
But for a town as little as St. Medard’s Bay, it was a significant blow.
Luckily, everybody at the Shipwreck Inn had survived.
There was water damage, and nearly every window was broken out, but for whatever reason, she’d stayed safe.
That made me happy to hear.
Hurricane Delphine.
That’s what the storm was called, but I didn’t learn that until later when I was in the hospital.
I was fine for the most part, bruised and scraped up, and I’d broken three toes on my left foot, which the doctor said was probably from climbing the tree, or maybe when I lost my shoes as I ran across that road.
I told him that’s what I thought, too.