The Storm #2
But there was no irony now, no affected sophistication as the three of us linked arms and Ellen and I let Lo pull us back down the beach the way I’d come, veering off at the little nature preserve the town had set up for Earth Day back in ’72.
There wasn’t much to it. A bunch of pine trees, a half-finished boardwalk that meandered over sand, and then, as you got deeper in, marshlands.
There weren’t any alligators in the preserve, not then, but my dad had sworn he’d seen a bobcat once, so I wasn’t exactly thrilled when Lo led us to a spot just inside the trees and pointed at a dark green tent set up underneath some low pine branches.
“You didn’t mention camping,” Ellen said, frowning, but Lo waved her hand.
“It’s not camping. It’s the secret lair of our coven.”
“Looks like camping to me,” I replied, and Lo flipped me off while Ellen gave a nervous burst of laughter.
“Okay, fine, it’s a secret lair, but what if the weather does get bad?” she asked Lo.
“Then we go back to your place. Say Frieda came over, and the three of us decided to stay at the inn instead because you have a TV in your room.”
But the thing is, none of us really thought the weather would get bad.
We’d never lived through a hurricane, and maybe the twelve years after Delphine let our parents get a little softer.
Maybe they trusted the news too easily, maybe they forgot that yes, usually we can predict these things with reasonable accuracy.
Usually.
But hurricanes don’t listen to predictions about what they’re supposed to do, what the patterns seem to be suggesting.
So all that evening and into the night, while Lo and Ellen and I ate peanut butter sandwiches and came up with fake curses we’d put on various people at school and brewed up a “potion” of pine needles, Coke, and Jean Naté perfume, Audrey got hotter and faster and bigger and hooked hard to the right, St. Medard’s Bay in her sights.
We were asleep when it started.
The wind had been picking up before the three of us huddled in the tent to go to bed, but it wasn’t anything scary, really. If anything, it just made the tent seem cozier, and it was nice to get a break from the heat that had been squashing St. Medard’s Bay in the weeks before.
I’m never sure if it’s a real memory or some kind of trauma-induced hallucination, but the rising wind made its way into my dreams that night. I was falling out of a plane, and the engine was right by me, and it was so loud, I thought I’d be sucked in.
But it wasn’t the wind that woke me.
It was a crack, sharper than a rifle, louder than anything I’d ever heard, and followed by creaking, rustling, and then a powerful thwack as a nearby pine tree hit the ground, shaking the tent and sending the three of us scrambling out into the open.
It was pitch-black, and someone yelled about a flashlight, maybe Ellen, but I couldn’t be sure.
Everything that came after that is still a nightmarish blur.
The wind wasn’t shrieking or howling because those are sounds that are familiar, sounds you’d recognize, sounds that even humans can make.
This didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before, and I’ve never heard anything like it since. It sounded … ancient.
That’s what I remember telling someone later, how the only thing my brain could process about the sound was “People aren’t supposed to hear this.”
Like this was some elemental thing rising up out of the earth from a time long, long before Oreos and Tabs and Jean Naté. How could something like this even exist in our world?
It started raining, just a few heavy drops at first, then buckets all of a sudden, drenching us in seconds.
My Keds squelched on the muddy ground as the three of us once again linked arms, the tiny orb of Lo’s flashlight bobbing and weaving crazily in front of us, but I didn’t want to see because all there was was rain and wind and the noise and the terror—the sheer animal terror—coursing through my veins.
I’ll never know how we made it out that night.
I heard other trees falling, felt the rush of air when one fell just a few feet from us.
I was jabbering, praying maybe, or I could’ve been singing Olivia Newton-John, I truly don’t know.
I just know that it felt right to make my own noise in that cacophony, and I thought Lo and Ellen might have been shouting or singing, too.
It had to have been Ellen who led us out. Later, she and Lo would both say the same thing as me, that they didn’t remember much, only that the sand and dirt underfoot gave way to slick road, and we’d miraculously turned right instead of left, leading us onto the main road to the Shipwreck Inn.
It had to have been Ellen.
Lo had led us into the preserve from the beach side, and that would’ve been her instinct again, to go out the way we came and straight into the ocean.
That fucking ocean that we weren’t scared of because we were the Witches of St. Medard’s, and we protected this town.
We’re not witches, I thought, stumbling up the steps to the door of the Shipwreck Inn, my arms still looped through Lo’s and Ellen’s. We’re stupid little girls, and we almost died and we’re gonna be in so much trouble.
That still makes me want to laugh. Or cry, I don’t know.
I thought that was going to be the worst part—getting in trouble for lying about where we were.
We weren’t even all the way up the steps before the door was opening and hands were on us, pulling us inside. It was dim inside the inn, candles flickering on the check-in desk and the big steamer trunk Mrs. Chambers used as a coffee table in the lobby.
I sat down on the floor, took a blanket someone handed to me, and watched as Ellen was lifted off her feet by her dad, his face pale and ghoulish in the candlelight.
“Oh, thank you, God,” he kept saying. “Oh, thank you, Lord Jesus, thank you, thank you.”
Thank you, I thought alongside him. Thank you, God, or Jesus or Mother Mary or Olivia Newton-John, thank you, whoever let us not get killed tonight.
Audrey did her best to take down the Shipwreck Inn that night, but as always, she held.
We had to move to the second floor when water started sloshing over the hardwoods in the lobby, but the water didn’t rise much further; the sandbags Ellen’s dad had placed all around the inn in his own “abundance of caution” had served him well.
I fell asleep around dawn, sitting up in the second-floor hallway, Lo on one side, Ellen on the other.
I go back to that image so often, and my heart breaks for that girl sleeping between her two best friends, exhausted and traumatized and sore but not knowing that when the storm first turned in the wee hours of May 6, phones had started ringing. At Miss Beth-Anne’s. At the Shipwreck.
At Frieda Mason’s little yellow cottage with the metal awning over the door.
They’d been frantic, our parents, when it became clear that no one had any idea where we were.
Miss Beth-Anne had gone out on foot with a flashlight, headed for the big weeping willow that used to be our favorite hideout.
She’d gotten only a couple of blocks before downed power lines meant she had to retreat.
Ellen’s dad had called a friend in the National Guard in Mobile, asking for advice, only to be told the best he could do right now was wait and “hope the storm wasn’t that bad.”
And my parents had gotten in our station wagon, buckled Sam into his booster seat, and started searching the rain-soaked streets until they’d made a turn onto Cottonmouth Avenue—an ugly name for a street, I’d always thought—and felt their wheels leave the road beneath them, the current dragging the car inexorably toward the rising waters of Shelton Creek.
It was fast, at least.
Not instant. Drowning never was, just like Ellen and I had always known.
But fast.
Wouldn’t have even known what was happening, one of the Red Cross volunteers told me later. They would’ve been overwhelmed before they even knew it.
I want to believe that.
My mom’s sister, Rebekah, moved to St. Medard’s to take care of me.
She didn’t move into that yellow house with the metal awning, though.
That was washed away by the same waters that took my family, like we’d never even been a family at all.
No home, no evidence of the life we’d shared there.
Just me and Aunt Rebekah and a boring brown house on Shell Drive near Lo.
It wasn’t Lo’s fault, what happened to my family.
I know that. It was a freak of nature, literally, a hurricane that zigged when everyone thought it would zag, one that lingered too long in the Caribbean and picked up too much power, and this is the way it goes sometimes, this is the way the world works.
She hadn’t known, when she came up with her grand plan for the three of us to spend the night in the woods, that she was setting something in motion that would destroy my entire life.
But after that, every impulsive, reckless thing Lo did—and Jesus Christ, did she do a lot—wasn’t cool anymore. It wasn’t fun or exciting or a chance for adventure. It just felt … selfish. Careless.
Because that’s what Lo was. Selfish and careless and thoughtless.
There’s no malice in her, or at least I don’t think there is.
But when someone’s left as much destruction in their wake as she has, does it even matter that she doesn’t mean to?