The Storm
I learned my mama was a murderer after Hurricane Audrey.
Frieda would never believe me, but the guilt damn near ate me up inside after her family was killed.
That’s what it felt like, a hollowness in the center of my belly, a gnawing sickness that never went away.
If I hadn’t come up with that plan to camp out, to lie to all our parents, Frieda’s family wouldn’t have been out looking for her, wouldn’t have driven their car straight into rising waters.
I tried not to let it show, how bad I felt.
It sounds crazy, but I thought if I just acted like nothing was wrong, then maybe it wouldn’t be.
I think they call that “magical thinking,” and oh, Lord, I’ve engaged in a lot of that over the course of my life.
I used to tell myself that it was a good quality, the power of positivity and all that bullshit.
Now I see it for what it was. Hell, what it is, because I’m sixty fucking years old and still doing it—playing pretend.
Tell yourself the world is one way, and boom, presto chango, that’s reality.
Making yourself feel better with pretty, silly lies, like a little kid who has to be told that thunder is actually angels bowling.
I think if I make it out of this next storm, this Hurricane Lizzie bearing down on all of us right now, I’m gonna try to stop doing that. Maybe it’s time to see things clear-eyed for once, live out the next four or five decades (a girl can dream!) in a state of Maximum Reality.
Maybe that’s why I’m writing this for the book. The whole story, for the first time.
Crazy thing is, I bet August won’t even believe it.
He’ll think it’s another one of my “experiments in personal mythmaking.” That’s what he wrote in that little journal of his.
That every interview he tried to do with me failed to dig below the surface because, what?
I was too self-absorbed? Too obsessed with the image of Lo Bailey, Teenage Temptress?
What August doesn’t get is that it’s always been other people who made the myths. Even my own mother.
All I’ve ever wanted was the truth.
Maybe Mama understood that, or maybe she could just see how miserable I was after Hurricane Audrey because, good as I was at hiding things, you really can’t hide much from your mama.
It was six months after Audrey hit—six months after Frieda’s family drowned.
Mama and I were on the couch one night, watching the tail end of an episode of The Love Boat.
Mama was stroking my hair as I rested my head on her knee, and then she said, almost like it was nothing, “Your father wasn’t a very nice man. ”
Mama had hardly ever talked about Daddy, certainly never called him “your father,” so I’d perked up from my drowsy state at those words.
It came out slowly, the story of their disaster of a marriage, of his thousand cruelties, big and small, her unrelenting misery.
She told it all like she was talking about someone else, but pain still lined every word, like those fancy Bibles you see with the gold and bright colors swirling around the top of the page.
That’s how I learned that on the night Hurricane Delphine hit St. Medard’s Bay, Daddy wasn’t just unlucky. He made it into that tree after all, and Mama’s foot saw him right the fuck back out of it and into the nasty waters Delphine splashed everywhere.
And I’ll tell you what. After she told me, I wasn’t horrified or shocked or traumatized or whatever else you probably think I should’ve been.
I was … glad. Proud, even. I loved my mama, but until that night, she’d always seemed so boring to me, so simple in her wants and needs, so dull in her dreams.
Now I knew that all that might still be true, but deep inside her, there was something fierce and deadly and unexpected, just like the hurricane itself, and for the first time, I understood not just her but myself a little better.
That it lived inside me, too, that storm.
We never talked about it again. The only thing that changed in our little house was that the next morning, the few pictures of Daddy that Mama had kept on display had disappeared. It was a lie neither of us needed anymore.
And honestly—you’re not going to believe me, but like I said, we’re all about truth right now, baby—I never thought much about it after that.
Not until Hurricane Marie.
Not until the storm that lived inside me decided to break.
People don’t talk much about Marie herself anymore, the actual storm, and I think they’ve forgotten what an unusual one she was.
How fast she moved, how quickly she came in.
We’d been getting the warnings for days, but until that last afternoon, she was still just a Category 1, looking like she’d go overland in central Florida.
We expected rain, thought we’d probably lose power and all that, but no one knew that she’d swell up out of nowhere and make a hard left for St. Medard’s.
I wanted to say that at the trial. How could I have plotted to use the storm to cover up my crime when none of us even knew how bad the storm would be until after Landon was dead?
But of course, I couldn’t say that because it would only lead to questions about how I knew exactly when Landon died.
I’m getting ahead of myself, shoot.
Let me back up.
I think if he had chosen anyone else—anyone in St. Medard’s, anyone in the world—other than Ellen, I might have survived it.
I knew there were other girls occasionally.
Yes, yes, I lied to the cops when I insisted that Landon was faithful to me (well, in his fashion).
I said that I never suspected he was with anyone else besides his wife, but that wasn’t true.
I was nineteen and na?ve as all get-out, but I wasn’t stupid, and Landon wasn’t always careful.
There was the time I caught him talking on his car phone at two in the morning, parked outside the bungalow.
“International stuff,” he’d said, but I’d seen the way he’d been smiling in the dome light before he’d noticed me standing in front of the hood of the car.
And there were the random weeks of silence, the mysterious trips he was always vague about, even the clichéd lipstick on the collar once, a rich ruby red that was nothing like my hot pinks or Alison’s tasteful dusty rose.
I knew, and I ignored it because, like I said, I believed that I didn’t get to be jealous.
But Ellen …
Even now I’m shocked that he pulled it off for as long as he did, seeing us both.
More than that, I’m shocked that Ellen never gave it away.
Not with a guilty look or a teary moment as I waxed rhapsodic about Landon, not with an agonized confession over drinks at The Line.
Do you know, she even spent the night at the bungalow with me once when Landon wasn’t there, the two of us having a slumber party like we were still in seventh grade?
She lay next to me in the bed I shared with the man she was also in love with, and she slept like a goddamn baby.
Looking back on it now, I feel some of that same pride and admiration I felt when Mama first told me what she’d done to Daddy.
Sounds crazy, I know, but it must’ve been so hard keeping all that in, and she did it without flinching.
Maybe you’ll say that makes her a bad person, but I don’t see it that way.
I think it made her strong. Loyal, even.
I sure as hell couldn’t have done it.
She had him first, you see. In a way.
Years before he walked into The Line, he’d met little Ellen Chambers at the Rosalie, and they’d become friends.
Pen pals, you could say, writing back and forth.
And as she got older, the letters got longer, the yearning in them more explicit, but she was a good girl, the kind who felt guilty for simply being in love with a married man, so she’d ended it before it had ever really begun.
And then he found me, and that was good, I guess.
For a while.
He never stopped writing her, though. Not the entire time we were together.
That’s actually how I found out.
The prosecution were right about a few things. I did call Landon the day before Marie landed, telling him I wanted to talk to him. I had to leave a message with his secretary (always a huge bitch to me, but fair enough, Linda, fair enough). And I was upset when I made that phone call.
But you’d be upset, too, if you’d just found a letter from your best friend to your lover telling him that she regretted sleeping with him just a few months before, that it had been a “beautiful mistake, but a mistake all the same,” that she was moving on with her life, that she hoped he was happy—“with Lo or Alison or both or neither.”
Mama had wanted me to help out at the store, and I had, but that had taken us only until lunch, so after that, I’d gone to the bungalow with some half-assed idea of storm prepping only to realize I had no idea what to actually do.
I’d seen people board up windows, but where did you even get those boards? (Cut me some slack, I was nineteen.)
So instead of doing anything sensible, I started cleaning the place.
Shit you not. Making up the bed, washing the two wineglasses we’d left in the sink.
Outside, it had started to rain, and the wind was picking up, but it wasn’t anything scary, not yet.
I’d had the radio on, and I remember it was playing “Gloria” by Laura Branigan.
That was my song even though no one ever called me Gloria, and I was singing along as I scooped up the few things in the little bathroom hamper, just one of my negligees, a damp bathing suit, and a hopelessly wrinkled linen jacket of Landon’s.
I’ve thought about it a million times, how none of it would’ve happened if he hadn’t left that flimsy white jacket behind on his last visit. Or if I hadn’t gone to the bungalow, or just picked a different useless chore to do. So many tiny little things like that, our whole lives hinging on them.
But I did pick up the coat, and I could feel something in the inside pocket, paper crinkling slightly.
I wasn’t even suspicious, that’s what kills me. I reached into that jacket still singing along with Laura, just sort of mildly curious, wondering if it might be an envelope of cash since Landon always seemed to have twenties and hundreds flowing from his fingers, but instead, it was a letter.
There were no names on it. Not his—the letter was just addressed to “L”—and no signature.
But Ellen Chambers had been my best friend since kindergarten.
I had seen her handwriting in yearbooks, on raggedy pieces of notebook paper pushed secretly from hand to hand, on Frieda’s cast in eighth grade, on the letters she’d sent me that one summer her parents made her go to Bible Camp up near the Tennessee line.
And it was that same neat, looping handwriting now telling Landon that the night they’d shared was “lovely” but “could never happen again, for too many reasons to list.” That “seeing Lo every day is too hard because I want to tell her so much,” but “is the truth worth telling if all it can do is hurt someone you love?”
I’ve thought about that question so many times over the last forty years, and I still don’t know the answer.
But what I do know is that in that moment, the truth didn’t just hurt.
It obliterated.
Of course I hadn’t been enough for Landon. Of course I wasn’t special. Of course this wasn’t some grand love story. It was just two stupid teenage girls falling for the lies of an older man, a man who wasn’t content having every toy known to man but had to make people into toys, too.
So yeah. There’s some truth for you.
I decided to murder Landon Fitzroy right then and there, standing in the middle of the bungalow he’d bought for me, the little house just down the beach from the other other woman.
And there was no plot to use the storm to cover it up because, baby, I am not a planner, and to be honest, in that moment, I didn’t give a fuck if I got away with it or not.
The only thing I cared about was seeing his blood on my hands.
And baby, I got that in spades.