The Storm #3
“Enough, Lo,” Landon said again, but this time, there was more than just annoyance under it. There was something serious, something real, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“Lo,” I said, reaching for her, but Lo Bailey was never going to heed someone telling her “enough.”
There was no enough for Lo.
“You piece of shit,” she went on, venom dripping from every word.
“Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go to every paper I can think of, and I’m gonna tell them about all this.
About how the governor’s precious son is running around some trash beach town with not one but two girls, girls a lot younger than him, and hey!
He’s even knocked up one of them. And then you can kiss your career, and certainly your asshole daddy’s career, a very final goodb—”
He moved so fast I barely had time to register it before he was on Lo, his hands gripping her biceps so hard his knuckles went white.
“You are never gonna fucking learn, are you?” he shouted over the storm, and then he was pushing her against the porch railing, his face close to hers.
“You are nothing, you hear me? You’re a pretty girl in a cheap town, and there are millions just like you, Lo, trust me.
The idea that someone like you can hurt me? Fucking laughable, truly.”
“Let her go!” I yelled, tugging at the back of his suit jacket, but he gripped Lo even tighter, his face so close to hers I had the crazed thought he might bite her.
“You are nothing!” he shouted again, and Lo struggled in his grasp.
“Fuck you!” I heard her say, but her eyes were scared.
I’d known Lo almost all my life, and the only thing I’d ever seen scare her was a hurricane.
So maybe it was that, the fear in her eyes, the real terror as Landon screamed at her, or maybe it was him calling her “nothing,” and knowing, deep inside, that I was nothing to him, too.
A distraction, a fun way to pass time, and now, at last, the bearer of something he actually wanted, but me? Ellen?
Nothing.
I tugged at his jacket again, feeling something give, but he didn’t let her go, and I turned, my bare feet sliding on the wet porch, my eyes scanning for anything, anything I could think of that would make him let go of Lo.
There was this wooden pelican we kept outside the door, and that’s what I think I was reaching for. It was hollow, not that heavy, but it would have gotten his attention.
I reached blindly, panicked and forgetting that Mama had moved that silly statue that morning, my hands closing around something cold and metal and much heavier than the pelican, heavy enough that I almost lost my balance, and without thinking, I swung.
The sound is something I’ve never forgotten even though I have tried and tried and tried.
When I reached for that stupid bird, I grabbed the anchor for the inn’s rowboat. A twenty-pound anchor with sharp points and rust on its edges. Daddy had been meaning to replace its chain, and it had sat there by the back door for nearly a month as other chores took precedence.
Or maybe it was always meant to be there, waiting for me when I reached.
Destiny.
I think Lo screamed, or maybe it was me, and everything dissolved into a liquid horror.
Blood, spraying on Lo’s face, mixing with rain and tears.
Blood, running out of Landon’s dark hair like a river.
Blood, slicking my hands as I tugged the anchor free from his skull and watched as he staggered toward the steps before turning to me.
Landon’s eyes were wide, and his mouth was open, a string of saliva dripping from his lower lip as his mouth moved with no sounds.
A step backward, then another, and then he was falling into the sand at the bottom of the steps, his torso convulsing, rattling gasps in his chest, like a fish thrown onto the deck of a boat, and then Lo was moving past me, the anchor dangling heavily at her side as she lurched down the steps.
She rolled him over, I remember that, his face pressed into the wet sand, and then the anchor was coming down on the back of his head again, the sound heavier and thicker this time, and finally, Landon was still.
My legs went out from underneath me, my skin numb, and I sat down heavily on the top porch step, rainwater soaking into my nightgown.
Lo dropped the bloody anchor on the sand, the wind so strong now that she seemed to be staggering against it as she made her way up the steps to drop to her knees in front of me.
“It was both of us!” she yelled, pressing her palms to my cheeks.
Her hands were bloody, and the copper-penny smell made bile flood my mouth, but I reached up anyway, my fingers over hers.
“It was both of us,” she said again, and then lowered her forehead to mine. “Not just you, Ellen. Not you. Us.”
It was a gift, the greatest one anyone ever could have given me, but I couldn’t see that right then. All I could see was Landon’s body on the sand and the bloody anchor that I had wielded.
“Oh God,” I said weakly. “Oh God.”
I’d killed the first man—maybe the only man—I’d ever loved.
I’d killed my baby’s father.
I’d killed the governor’s son.
Big Yellow Mama, that’s what they called Alabama’s electric chair, and I knew that’s where I’d go, my arms and legs strapped to painted wood, a steel cap on my shaved head, and my baby … my daughter …
“Listen to me,” Lo said, her grip getting tighter like she knew where my thoughts were going. “You have to be strong a little longer. We have to get him to the water, okay?”
The water.
My eyes landed on the surging seas, and I nodded, making myself stand on trembling legs as rain and wind cocooned us both in this nightmare.
Landon was not a large man, but we were two teenage girls, one of whom was pregnant, the other maybe a hundred pounds on a good day.
We tried dragging him to the water, but he was too heavy, we were too weak, and the sand was too wet, Landon’s body sinking into it like it wanted to hold him there forever.
With a low moan, I dropped his arm and sank to the sand. “We can’t!” I shouted over the storm. “We can’t, we can’t, we can’t.”
Standing there in her David Bowie T-shirt and cutoff shorts, her hair wet and sticking to her face, Lo faced the ocean, her bloody hands on her hips.
“The storm!” she said, and when I only stared up at her in confusion, she said, “The storm. It’ll be here in just a few hours.”
“I don’t care,” I told her, but she shook her head, picking up the anchor.
“My daddy didn’t die in Hurricane Delphine, did you know that?”
“Yes, he did,” I replied, wondering if she’d lost her mind like I thought I might be doing.
“My mama killed him and let people think it was the storm,” she said, and I shook my head, the idea of Miss Beth-Anne killing anyone so impossible to believe that I was sure Lo had gone crazy.
But all I said to her was, “It won’t work, it’s not like that hurricane, it’s weak, and we’re…”
“We’re the Witches of St. Medard’s Bay,” she said, the look on her face both fierce and calm all at once. And as she stood there in the wind and rain, her red hands and her weapon—our weapon—at her side, I almost believed she was some kind of sorceress or ancient goddess.
She turned and walked toward the surf, and I followed, wading out after her until we were up to our thighs, the waves buffeting us, our feet sliding on the sandy bottom as Lo dragged the anchor through the dark water, Landon’s blood washing away.
Later, once Marie was over, the anchor would wash up onshore, but of course there was no sign of the wreckage it had wrought that night. Just another piece of storm debris.
That’s what I felt like myself, standing there in the water with Lo. Something sucked away by the tide, returned to shore battered and twisted.
I tipped my head back, rain in my face, stinging my eyes as I looked up at the black sky.
Lo’s hand found mine, our fingers intertwining, seawater and blood.
Were we witches?
I don’t know, but we sure as hell called a storm that night. What was supposed to be a Cat 1 that merely grazed us instead became a Cat 3 that roared directly over us, turning and getting stronger in a way that the meteorologists on TV the next day called “completely baffling.”
A once-in-a-lifetime storm, they said.
Sometimes I think the storm never ended.