The Storm
Landon always knew he had a destiny.
From a lot of people, that would probably sound pretentious, but when he said it, it just sounded like a fact.
I think it’s the way he was raised. His whole family was like that, all the Fitzroys. Big believers in signs and blessings and fate.
We Chamberses were a little more down to earth than all that. The only “destiny” I ever had was knowing that one day, the Shipwreck Inn would be mine.
Lo used to tell me how lucky that made me.
“You’re gonna be so fancy,” she’d say, which was Lo’s highest praise.
There was nothing better in this world than being fancy as far as Lo was concerned, but I’d been working beside my parents at the Rosalie since I was old enough to hand Daddy a wrench, and I knew there was nothing fancy about running an inn, not even one that was on the beach.
But then it was the inn that brought me Landon.
I was fifteen the first time he came to St. Medard’s Bay.
It was November, the offseason, my favorite time of year.
For one, it wasn’t hotter than Satan’s armpit like it was from April all the way to Halloween, and for another, that was the only time the inn ever really felt like a home, like our home.
When it was just me and my parents, with only the occasional guest to mar the illusion.
And I loved the beach in November. St. Medard’s Bay is famous for its clear water and white-sugar sand, but I liked it best when the sky was gray and looming, the water darker, whitecaps frothing.
I could walk for hours along the shore in November, the sleeves of my sweatshirt tugged over my hands, my feet bare and numb from the water, the wind blowing my hair back from my face.
Lo was the one with the flair for drama—she was always making up stories for us to act out, and God help you if you’d decided your Barbies should be going to prom when she thought they should be attending a royal wedding.
I mostly just went along with whatever she said because it was easier, and because, to be honest, her stories and ideas usually were better than anything I could come up with.
But out on that beach, my brain ran wild with my own stories.
I was a sailor’s wife anxiously scanning the horizon for her beloved, or a mermaid who’d been turned into a human against her will and now longed to go back to the sea.
I once spent so long imagining that I was a castaway shipwrecked on a deserted island that I ended up walking nearly two miles away without even realizing it.
Mom had to send Cap, the guy who did odd jobs around the inn, down the beach to find me.
I never acted these things out. Even when I was little, that kind of thing had been hard for me, shy as I was.
But in a way, I liked that, that no one looking at me had any idea of all of the things going on in my head.
To them, I just looked like Boring Ellen Chambers, the one who got great grades but never had much to say, the one who let “that little Bailey girl run right over her!”
But inside, there were worlds. Universes. And they were all mine.
Lo was one of the only people who got that about me, actually. Lo, and later, Landon.
Funny when you think about it.
Or awful.
Anyway, like I said, it was November, usually a dead time for the inn, but that year, 1980, we were busy. A group of men had booked a deep-sea fishing trip, and for whatever reason, they’d decided that our inn was the place to stay.
I don’t even remember how many of them there were.
When they checked in, it seemed like dozens and dozens, there were so many loud, deep voices emanating from the lobby, so many flashing watches on perpetually tanned wrists, so many Hawaiian shirts unbuttoned to reveal chest hair.
It was way too much testosterone for me, and I’d planned on mostly staying out of their way.
It would’ve been easy to do—I had school, and they’d be out on the boats all day.
But that year, the weather decided to remind us that hurricane season technically ran all the way past Thanksgiving, thank you very much, and just one day after that herd of men checked in to the Shipwreck, a nasty tropical storm out of the Caribbean started gathering strength and turning our way.
“Velma,” Lo announced the day before the storm hit, me, her, and Frieda in our normal spot at the end of the lunch table. It was turkey tetrazzini day, normally Frieda’s favorite lunch, but that afternoon, she just picked at it.
“That’s what they’re calling the storm,” Lo went on, pulling one leg up onto the bench next to her and swinging an arm around her knee.
As she did, the wide leg of her shorts sagged just enough to flash me and Frieda a glimpse of her bright pink underwear.
“Velma. Like in Scooby-Doo. Sooooo lame. The one that killed my daddy was called Delphine. Now that is a cool as shit name for a storm. Even Audrey was—”
“Hush,” I heard myself say, my eyes darting to Frieda.
We hardly ever talked about Audrey, about what had happened to Frieda’s family.
About how if we hadn’t lied—if we hadn’t gone along with Lo’s plan—they might never have been out in that storm looking for Frieda, and then they would still be alive.
To be honest, sometimes I could hardly bear to think about it.
But Frieda just shook her head and sighed. “She’s right, Velma is a stupid name. But this late in the year, I guess they didn’t have many choices left.”
“Zelda,” Lo offered up. She was in her Zelda Fitzgerald phase at the time. Lo had barely passed English, but that was just because she never turned things in. I knew she’d read The Great Gatsby at least three times just for fun, so I wasn’t surprised that was the name she picked.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” I asked, looking between the two of them. “How the storms that make landfall here are always named after women?”
“Females are deadlier than males!” Lo whooped, sending several heads turning in our direction, but as usual, Lo didn’t care if people stared.
She just smiled brightly at Tammy Turner, the girl sitting closest to us, then snapped her teeth open and shut hard, once, twice.
Like she was biting something’s head off.
“Y’all are weird,” Tammy muttered, but before Lo could say something that would probably get her another round of after-school detention, the intercom overhead rang out three shrill tones.
Our principal, Mr. McGinnis, came on, his nasally drawl letting us know that, due to the “potential for severe weather,” school would be dismissed early today, after fifth period, and that classes were canceled for the next two days, Thursday and Friday.
There were a few claps, a few half-hearted cheers, but Audrey had put the fear of storms back into all of us, and even the promise of a long weekend was nothing to celebrate if it meant St. Medard’s Bay was once again in the monster’s path.
When I got back to the inn that afternoon, I expected all the deep-sea fishing guys would have left. They’d gone out a few times already, before the weather had turned, and there definitely wouldn’t be any more fishing trips until Velma had passed.
But to my surprise, they were still there. Or at least some of them were.
Two were on the beach, filling up sandbags, and I saw another hauling gallon jugs of water around the corner of the porch.
A fourth guy was down near the prefab tin building we used as a toolshed, helping Daddy set up a couple of sawhorses.
Big slabs of plywood rested against the shed, ready to be sawed into the right size to cover the windows.
When I stepped into the lobby, there were two other men moving the green sofa away from the windows, joking and laughing as they did, their teeth very white in their sunburned faces.
When Mama caught sight of me, she pointed upstairs. “You know the drill!”
That meant filling the tubs with water. When Audrey hit, all of St. Medard’s had been without water for over a week.
Mama said when Delphine came through, it was nearly a month.
The jugs I’d seen that man bringing in would be for drinking, but the bathtubs would be for everything else, and as I walked into Room 202, I wondered if Frieda’s parents had filled their bathtubs before Audrey, and what was the point of doing that at all if the storm just killed you, or blew down your house and its bathtubs?
There was a good view of the beach from 202, and I glanced toward it as I closed the door behind me.
The sky was gray and cloudy, the water rough, but the awful wind that was seared into my memory from Audrey hadn’t picked up yet.
I was telling myself that maybe this one was going to just miss us, or at least not be as bad, when a sound from the bathroom nearly sent me jumping out of my skin.
It was the tub running, I realized, and I had a disorienting moment where I thought maybe I’d already done this room on autopilot and forgotten. But then a figure stepped into the doorway, backlit by the lights from the vanity behind him.
“Oh!” he said. “Um. Hi?”
He waved then, awkwardly, and laughed a little before shoving his hands into his back pockets. “Sorry, am I not supposed to be in here?”
Then he took another step forward, and the face that had been shrouded in darkness was suddenly fully visible.
Of the two of us, Landon was the one who believed in destinies, but in that moment, I think I believed in them, too, because my heart—my very soul—seemed to lurch inside me.
You’re going to say that it’s because I was fifteen, and here was the best-looking man I’d ever seen in my life smiling at me, almost a little sheepishly. That the frisson I felt, that sudden sense that I was waking up for the very first time, was nothing more than teenage hormones running amok.