15. Tessa
The trip home from Rock Hill should have taken forty minutes.
It took two hours and seventeen minutes, and Tessa spent every one of them with her hands wrapped around a coffee she had stopped drinking somewhere on the wrong side of Niceville.
As she fixed her gaze on a world that was steadily, mile by mile, getting worse, she tried to keep up with songs, baby finger books, and distractions when Olive wasn’t asleep.
They crossed the Mid-Bay Bridge behind a line of trucks that stretched south as far as she could see.
Peter had texted them a route of cleared streets from a deputy’s map of where it was safe to drive and where it was not.
Dusty followed it with focused patience even when the route was wrong, the detour was long, and Olive had to stop and go potty again.
The big black F-150 rolled them past one stripped subdivision after another.
Broken trees and scattered branches were everywhere.
Whole pines down across yards. Lanais collapsed into pools, screens hanging off frames like ripped curtains.
Traffic lights dark. Stop signs gone. A boat stuck in mangroves in Bluewater Bay that made Tessa gush with gratitude that Dusty had taken the time to get Good Time Girl in drydock.
“Don’t look,” Dusty said, more than once, kindly.
“I have to look.”
“Okay, but you don’t have to look at all of it.”
In her car seat in the back, Olive currently had Wingo in a headlock under one arm and an empty Goldfish bag in her lap, looking out the window quietly. Poor angel, Tessa thought. How upside-down can one little girl’s world be?
Once they got off 98, they threaded their way along a warren of side streets lined with condos and townhouses leading to the beach. Here, the damage ranged from not-so-bad to holy heck, they lost part of their roof.
Twice, Dusty had to back up and attempt another route, which was surprising, considering they were only trying to go about six blocks. Very few people were around, since only the hard-cores stayed and everyone else evacuated.
Without the benefit of Peter’s inside information, they’d still be an hour away from Miramar Beach like everyone else was.
Finally, they reached the beach road, which was technically called “Scenic Gulf Drive” but only to tourists. With each passing second, Tessa’s stomach tightened.
She could see the water mark now on every house—a sickening brown line two and a half, sometimes three feet up the stucco of each home.
The same mudline was on every fence, on every garage door, on the side of a delivery van somebody had abandoned in a yard. The line was…everything. Proof of how high the water had gotten during the worst of the storm surge.
Most of the water was nearly gone, drained back to the Gulf or down into the storm drains or pooled in low spots. But the line stayed, like the tide had marked itself on every vertical surface for half a mile.
Finally, they reached the little cul-de-sac of humble and overpriced houses that they had been so proud to call home.
There were six houses on their street, and Tessa knew most of the neighbors in the ones that weren’t short-term rentals.
The Bremers were two houses up—Mike and Millie?
Mark and Mary? Tessa didn’t remember their first names.
The young family with the twins next to them.
A retired couple from New Jersey who bought around the same time Dusty and Tessa did.
Two local guys who bought to flip and sell.
Every home on the street wore the line.
Standing water still lay in most of the street, not a lake, but several inches deep in some spots. Dusty rolled the truck through it slowly, the tires leaving a dirty wake behind them. Tessa watched a Tonka dump truck and a pink flip-flop and somebody’s plastic patio chair float aimlessly past.
The Bremers were out in their driveway. He was in waders and she wore a beach cover-up and soaked sneakers. They had already piled sodden furniture on the curb, enough that it looked like it could be the entirety of their downstairs.
Mr. Bremer raised one hand in a slow, tired wave. Dusty raised his back.
Next, the young father with the twins was walking the perimeter of his yard with a phone to his ear and a long stick poking at what Tessa hoped wasn’t a snake. Or…gator?
“Wingo see house?” Olive piped up from the back.
“We’re almost there, honey.”
“Okay.”
Dusty pulled the truck into the driveway and turned off the engine, but neither of them moved for a beat.
Their house stood, so that was a good thing.
The two stories of pale yellow siding and white trim that they had bought together a few months ago, the place she had thought of as theirs almost before the ink dried, was still right where they had left it.
The roof looked intact from the front. The windows they had boarded were still covered in wet plywood. Somebody else’s patio umbrella was lying across what used to be a bed of flowers in the front.
And along the first floor, there was the line, three feet from the ground, smooth and level and exact. The siding looked a little greener than it had when they closed on the place, like the chlorophyll from all the trees had stuck to it.
Tessa opened the window and was immediately sorry. The world smelled…bad.
“Okay,” Tessa said, mostly to herself.
“Hey.” Dusty’s hand found hers. “Whatever we find, we’ll fix it. We knew this could happen when we bought the place. We have insurance. Flood, wind, whatever.”
She nodded and swallowed. “I know.”
“So we go look. Don’t rush. Don’t climb, step on, or touch anything I haven’t inspected. You hold tight to Olive and make sure she knows that the storm ruined things, but we will fix it and it doesn’t affect her.”
“Okay.” She hoped the syllables could communicate her gratitude for his strength because she didn’t have any right then.
“You ready?”
Not really, but she smiled. “Yep. Let’s go in.”
The stench hit her before they even opened the front door.
It was the smell of low tide on a hot day, plus the particular thick wet-drywall odor she remembered from flooded staterooms when she worked in the cruise business.
With Olive on her hip and Wingo squashed between them, Tessa hung back as Dusty went first, with the powerful flashlight he had been wise enough to keep in the glovebox. There wouldn’t be electricity, so they were conserving phone batteries, and the house was going to be dim.
He opened the side door into what had been the laundry room, the one they joked that she had to share when she took the upstairs unit of this house and won the rooftop access. The one he promised to update right after the stairs.
Guess Norman did the updating.
The floor was a slick of fine brown silt.
The dryer had floated. It now sat at an awkward angle three feet from where it belonged, leaning into the half-open door of the laundry room.
The washer was where they had left it, but it was wearing the line, too, and a piece of something that looked like seaweed was stuck to its side.
“Oh,” Tessa said. “Oh.”
“Deep breath, Tess.”
She nodded and followed him through, taking every step carefully.
The downstairs was…indescribable. Everything was wet, every single wall, sofa, bookshelf, and lower cabinet had the line. Everything that could move had shifted and floated on water that had no right to be in her house, destroying all it touched.
The couch sat in a dent in the floor like a barge run aground. The flat-screen above the not-yet-installed mantel had survived, perched safely above the line, looking ridiculous on drywall that, below the line, buckled visibly.
And where there should have been a staircase up into Tessa’s old upstairs apartment, were the remnants of a renovation in progress.
The interior stairwell stood as it had for a few weeks—gaping and unfinished.
It was still all those things, just wet to the studs, filthy, rotting, and covered in muck and sand and a few dead things she didn’t want to think about.
“It’s uninhabitable down here,” she said, whispering the obvious. “Maybe we could move upstairs. It’s a full apartment, so—”
“No,” Dusty replied instantly. “Two and a half feet of saltwater soaked into every structural wall. We have no idea how sound the upstairs really is, even if it’s dry.”
“Can we go outside and upstairs to look? To dash in and get what we might need?”
He nodded, still processing the shock and gravity and potential danger.
“The outside stairs are independent of that framing,” he finally said.
“They’re anchored to the exterior. I want to walk around the perimeter first and look at the building from the outside.
If everything looks right, we’ll go up the outside once I test the stairs.
Why don’t you step out and get clean air? ”
“Of course. Olive shouldn’t breathe this.” She followed him out the way they’d come in and only then realized that the child in her arms hadn’t spoken the whole time. Not a word.
Back in the sunshine, she looked at Olive and made an exaggerated face. “Stinky and messy, huh?”
Olive’s eyes were wide and her face was pale. “Dirty. Everything dirty.”
“And we’re going to make it clean.” She had no idea how or when or what they’d do in the meantime, but she was confident in the promise.
“So clean and pretty. All new floors—we can get that nice oak I’ve been lusting after.
We’ll paint. And new furniture. Olive, we must see this as a shopping opportunity. ”
“Mm-kay.”
Her sweet agreement ripped at Tessa’s heart. “You’ll have your pretty home again,” Tessa said, as much to herself as Olive. “In fact, it’ll be prettier. It’ll just take time.” And money, patience, insurance, decisions, and so many months.
What would this do to the adoption?
The sudden, dark, horrifying thought squeezed her throat. What if this stopped everything? What if Lynda said, “no house, no go”?
No. She would never do that. Dusty and Tessa would live at the Summer House or find a rental or something. They weren’t going to be homeless, and neither would Olive.
A hurricane was not a moral failing. A flooded kitchen was not an unfit home. The renovation had been disclosed to the agency from the start, the timeline approved, the working plan in the file. They would clean up. They would remediate. They would rebuild. They would call—
“We’re good,” Dusty called, jogging back from the other side of the house.
“Structure seems solid, just wet. No visible cracking at the corners. The exterior stairs to your old unit are dry above the line and the railing’s firm.
We can go up. I still want a structural inspection, but for now, today, we can get into the upstairs from outside. ”
“Can we stay there?” Tessa asked.
“That might be pushing safety.”
She nodded in agreement and they climbed the outside steps that led to what once was a pricey rental before it had been Tessa’s home for a brief few weeks.
The little porch at the top was wet only in the places where rain had blown sideways. The door was dry. Tessa fished her key out of her bag with shaking fingers, put the key in the lock, and turned it.
The upstairs was untouched.
After a tour of the soaked, wet, ruined downstairs, the upstairs hit her like a clean breath. Her old living room. Her old kitchen. The rooftop deck slider beyond, still boarded, but the inside of the room exactly as it had been. The pictures on the wall. The plant, the blankets, the toys.
“Cat three,” Dusty murmured as they looked around. “A blessing. If it had been a five and a direct hit, this would be open air.”
Olive took in her home with cautious blinking.
“My room,” she said, hopefully, squiggling to get down and go there.
Tessa gave Dusty a questioning look and he held up a hand. “Let me make sure no window broke or leaked.” A few seconds later, he called, “Come on back, Olive!”
Tessa set her down and she ran on her tiny two-year-old legs, letting out an “Oh!” of relief at the sight of her untouched toddler bed, the row of stuffies, the shelves of books, the dollhouse and tea table and everything Tessa had given her to make her little-girl life wonderful.
She practically twirled with joy, making Tessa and Dusty share the first real smile either of them had felt all day.
Dusty’s hand came to the small of her back. “We’re going to be okay.”
“I know.”
She did know. Most of her knew. The downstairs would be rebuilt. The insurance would do whatever insurance did. They would find somewhere to stay—Eli would offer the Summer House the second they pulled up, she was certain. They would live their lives upstairs from a gut job as soon as it was safe.
One day, not soon but eventually, the new staircase would be finished, and Olive would clatter down it to a kitchen that smelled of breakfast and not of a flood.
It was just hard to fathom the road from here to there.
She packed several days’ worth of Olive’s clothes into a bag, and some for herself, and Olive’s favorite cup, and board books. Olive filled two tote bags with essential stuffed animals and toys.
Dusty had moved some of his clothes up to Tessa’s bedroom after their first, civil ceremony wedding. So he packed from that collection, using an old suitcase Tessa had in a closet.
Somehow, they gathered what they needed, and came back down the outside stairs into the hot, rain-washed afternoon with a little more hope in their hearts.
The Bremers were still in their driveway. Mr. Bremer raised his tired hand again.
After loading the back of the truck, Dusty went to chat with them while Tessa got Olive into her seat with Wingo and a giraffe who had tales to tell about surviving a storm. She looked like a queen flanked by ministers, happy and probably about to realize she needed food.
Please, God, let the Summer House be fine.
Dusty came back with a report of damage similar to theirs and started up the truck. “Summer House?”
“Where else?” Tessa laughed. “It’s the closest thing to a home we have.”
“We hope,” Dusty said. “Have you checked your phone? Any word from Kate?”
“Last I heard, they were stuck in traffic.” She pulled out her phone and tapped the screen just as Kate’s text landed.
Kate: NO DAMAGE! Generators are getting set up. Everything survived. How are you???
“Oh, thank God.” She showed the phone to Dusty. “Let’s go.”
While she texted back, Dusty put the truck in reverse and headed back into the mess of trees and traffic. It wasn’t the first time the Summer House was her sanctuary, and might not be the last.