The Nice Boxset

by Jasinda Wilder

  There’s a massive rubble pile already, just inside a four-foot high wall of sandbags keeping out the floodwaters. At the edge of the pile is a kind of staging area, a makeshift pavilion set up with a pair of folding tables underneath. A local deli has set up shop, providing free sandwiches, coffee, and water to volunteers and rescue workers, and there’s another pair of tables nearby, both piled high with cell phones, wallets, purses, and backpacks all watched over by a fit-looking middle-aged man in a wheelchair, missing his legs from midthigh.

  “Here to help out?” he asks me, seeing me eye the tables.

  I nod, and point at the building. “I’ve got a friend who lives in that building, so yeah, I guess so.”

  “Leave your shit here, and I’ll watch it.” He hands me a clipboard with a sheet of paper and a pen. “Write down what you’re leaving, and your name. Anybody wants to retrieve something, they check it out through me.”

  I set my box down on the table, and write my name a brief description of the box—Jonny Núñez, safety box, initials engraved on it: CSP.

  I join a crew of men picking at the rubble. Someone hands me a pair of grease-stained, well-worn work gloves, and I take them and offer my thanks, and I haul at the rubble. Cinderblocks, siding, rebar, I-beams, bits of plastic and twisted metal and chunks of wood and marble and laminate and tile and drop-tile ceiling pieces and machinery and electronics. Occasionally there’s a shout, and we all rush to the spot and haul like mad, and there will be a body underneath. Alive, dead, or in between.

  I remember growing up on the island of Providencia, a little tiny island off the coast of Nicaragua, owned by Columbia. Storms hit us pretty frequently, and homes would be knocked down and we’d all pitch in like this, hauling at the wreckage and pulling people out and rebuilding together. This isn’t new. I’ve been ground zero for a lot of hurricanes, more than I care to count, and I know how it goes.

  So I dig with a heavy heart.

  Chris is gone. I want him to be alive. I want to believe. But the pragmatic part of me, the part that knows the odds…? It’s hard.

  And Ava, now, too? That’s even harder to believe. A big, complicated building like this? So much weight, so much wreckage to move. I know the odds here, too.

  I dig.

  I move to a line of people hauling the rubble away from the building.

  I help move bodies and carry wounded survivors on stretchers to where teams of medics work in a makeshift facility.

  The sun goes down and diesel-powered generators rumble, providing light on the scene.

  I rest, eat a sandwich, drink some coffee, and go back to helping.

  Dawn comes, and then afternoon, and I rest, and go back to helping, and we’ve made progress and I’ve examined every body and every survivor, and none of them are Ava. I have her picture in the breast pocket of my shirt, a snapshot given to me by Chris.

  Two days. Three. With each hour, the odds of even finding her corpse plummet.

  Midmorning on the third day, a tin fishing boat propelled by a trolling motor drops off a woman, who climbs over the sandbags from the boat. She looks familiar, even though I know I’ve never met her before. She stands just inside the wall of sandbags, breathing heavily as if holding back tears. Shaking her head. I’m only a few feet away, working on a sandwich and a cup of coffee. I’m filthy, covered in dirt from head to toe.

  She’s just staring at the wreckage of the building. Then she sees me, and seems to need to say something to someone, anyone. “I don’t—I don’t understand how this happened.”

  “Hurricane.”

  She sniffles. “I know, but…how can a building just be…gone?”

  “You never been through one?” I ask. She shakes her head. “It ain’t just wind and rain. It’s like…God got angry. Scary shit.”

  “You were here?”

  I shake my head. “Not here, for this one. Others, lotsa times.” I nod at the building. “Looking for someone?”

  She shudders, crying, and then her head tips up and down shakily. “My—my sister. Ava. She lives—that was—is her building. My son and I were supposed to visit her, but then I heard about the storm and I left Alex with my parents, and Ava—god, Ava.”

  “Ava?” My suspicion meter rises. “Ava who?”

  She doesn’t answer right away. “Um. Martin. Ava Martin.” She frowns, rubs her face. “St. Pierre, I mean. Martin is her maiden name. My name. God, I’m sorry. I’m not making any sense.”

  “You’re looking for Ava St. Pierre?” I pull the snapshot from my pocket; it’s a candid shot, printed out from Chris’s cell phone, blurry, pixelated from being blown up. But it’s enough to recognize her. “This her?”

  The woman takes the photo from me, stares at it. “Y-yes. Why…how…I mean, I don’t understand.”

  I take it back and stuff it back into my pocket. “I’m a friend of Christian’s.”

  Her expression sours. “The bastard couldn’t make it here himself so he sent you?”

  “He was lost at sea. Same storm, I think. I came to find Ava and bring her some letters from him.”

  “He’s…dead?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know for sure.”

  “I’m sorry about your friend, but he didn’t treat my sister very well. I’m angry with him. I never liked him for her.”

  “It was a complicated situation, from what I know.” I try to be diplomatic.

  She sighs. “I suppose that’s true.”

  I finish the sandwich and the last of the coffee. “I should get back.” I gesture at the wreckage.

  She just stares. “How…um—is she…will she be okay?” She chokes back another sob. “Is she alive in there, do you think?”

  I shrug. “No way to know. I hope so. It is certainly possible, in my experience.”

  “How long has she—has she been in there?”

  “More than three days, now.”

  “Oh my god. Ava. God please, Ava.”

  “If she is in a place where she can breathe and she isn’t losing too much blood, and if she has water to drink, she might survive.” At my words, Ava’s sister can’t hold back the sob. “I’m sorry. I’ve been here for three days myself, working to find her. We all are. Not just her, but…” I gesture as a pair of men carry a man on a stretcher. “Many others.”

  “I’ll help.”

  I point out one of the police officers, who seems to have taken charge of organizing the rescue and dig-out process here. “Talk to him. I think he can help you find somewhere to pitch in.”

  “I have to find Ava.” She’s beginning to panic. “I can’t just make sandwiches and hand out coffee.” Anger tinges her voice.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I say, trying to placate her, calm her. “I just meant, helping everyone helps you find her. If she’s in there, we’ll find her.”

  “She’s in there. There’s nowhere else she’d be. I just talked to her before I drove here. She knew I was coming. Ava—god, she has to be okay. She has to be okay. We’re going to find her. Right?”

  Full-on panic, the sudden flow of babble stopping as abruptly as it started, tears streaming down her face. She’s having trouble breathing. Gasping. Waving her hands in front of her face, wheezing, sobbing.

  I don’t know what to do. Panicking women are outside my range of expertise, but she’s staring at me like I can do something, and I have to try. So I grab her arms and pull her close. It’s like an instinct, you know? A woman is crying, you hold her. Maybe that’s just me. My mom would cry, when I was a kid, and I’d hug her through it. Or my older sister, after her piece of shit husband ran off on her, leaving her with four kids under five—she’d cry, in the middle of the night, and I’d go to her and hold her through it. I was just a kid, but it was the only thing I knew how to do. And as a man, sometimes afterward, a girl and I would be talking and she’d start in on something or other and I’d listen and suddenly she’d be crying, and the only thing I knew how to do was grab her and pull her close and hold her.
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  So this woman, a complete stranger, but someone to whom I’m connected via Christian, she’s sobbing hysterically, panicked, scared, worried, upset and confused, and she’s grabbing at me like I’m a lifeline and she’s drowning. So I hold her against my chest.

  And I mutter to her in Spanish. Hey, hey. It is going to be okay. Do not cry, little girl, do not cry. The little girl, part, in Spanish it’s a term of endearment. Translated into English, it just sounds condescending, but I promise it doesn’t sound that way in Spanish.

  After a few minutes, she backs out of my hold, wiping at her face. “I’m sorry. God, I’m—that’s embarrassing. I’m sorry.”

  She has mascara running down her cheeks. I can’t help but wipe it away with my thumb, which only smears it worse. “No worries. Don’t apologize, please.”

  “What were you saying?” she asks.

  I shrug. “The same kind of automatic nonsense anyone says to comfort a crying person. Just…en Español.”

  “Oh.” She’s eying me oddly. Intently. Scrutinizing.

  Almost as if she felt the same thing I did, while I was holding her, comforting her.

  Almost like I’d done it before. Held her. Comforted her. Whispered to her in Spanish. It was familiar, too familiar, that way the top of her head fit just under my chin, just so. It’s creeping me out, throwing me for a loop. All those English slang phrases, they all fit.

  She looks like Ava, in the face. Medium height, on the slimmer side of average build. North of thirty, south of forty, by my estimate. Her hair is a messy mass of raven-black locks, a handful of strands pulled back around the top and front to keep it out of her eyes, the rest left loose. Blue eyes, crazy-intense blue eyes. Lots of mascara, too much. Lots of makeup overall. More than she needs. It’s all coming off, and I want to smear it away to see what she looks like without it.

  She’s wearing too-short shorts, tight khaki shorts that hug her hips and cup a tight ass, which is barely held in and covered. A thin, tight purple tank top, tiny barely there straps. McCall’s is written in glittery, sparkly, cursive on the front, right across her breasts, which are propped up by what seems to be a hell of a push-up bra, which she really doesn’t need. The tank top is tied in a knot just under her breasts, baring her belly and navel, revealing faint and faded childbirth stretch marks; it’s the kind of outfit a waitress would wear at a Hooter’s style bar. A name tag affixed just above her left breast confirms my estimation of her employment, and announces her name as Delta. Or at least, that’s what the tag says.

  She notices my quick once-over. “I left to drive here straight from work.” She notices her name tag, and unpins it. “It’s a…well, McCall’s is a shithole. Cross between Denny’s and Deja Vú. Only, we don’t have to actually take our clothes off—we just don’t wear much to begin with.” She stuffs the name tag in her pocket, and shifts uncomfortably. “I fucking hate it, but it pays the bills. It’s actually a step up from my last job, though. We worked in bikinis. At least at McCall’s I get to wear shorts and a shirt.”

  I hold out my hand, amused despite the way she tends to blurt out more information than I’d expect to hear from a stranger. “I’m Jonny Núñez.”

  She shakes, and our hands remain in contact longer than is necessary. “Delta Martin.”

  “Nice to meet you.” I gesture. “Not under the circumstances, maybe, but it’s good to meet you.”

  “You too.”

  Someone calls my name, and I wave at her, and then trot over to where a group of rescue workers is clustered. Deep under the wreckage, in what used to be the ground floor, facing the sea. Can’t tell what the room used to be, since everything is smashed. They’re pulling at pieces of ceiling and wall, frantic. Aggressive. You only work that hard for a survivor.

  I join the effort. I hear faint thumps, regular, consistent. Someone desperately but exhaustedly trying to alert rescuers as to their presence. Whoever is down there must hear us.

  “Hold on! We’re coming!” someone shouts.

  Delta is beside me. Pulling at a piece of drywall. “It’s hard to be sure, but this seems about where Ava and Chris’s condo is.”

  She’s got long fingernails, fake nails painted bright cherry red. I take off the gloves and give them to her, and she puts them on, but not before I notice she’s broken several already. One was torn off, it looks like. She works furiously, as do we all; the thumps are fading in consistency and frequency.

  “Ava?” Delta calls out. “We’re coming, baby. Hold on, okay? Hold on!”

  A giant metal beam lies across a chunk of drywall. It takes six of us to heave the beam aside, and then we have to clear rubble off and away from around the sides. A bathtub, and whoever is here, is trapped in the tub. The drywall is still pinned down by something, the wall itself, I think, having caved in sideways.

  A guy wearing a hardhat and the orange vest of a construction worker shows up with a battery-powered circular saw. He thumps on the drywall near one end of the tub. “Scoot up this way!” he shouts. “We’re cutting through!”

  There’s a thump on the underside, right near where he’d thumped.

  The saw buzzes and whines, and then zips and snarls angrily as he cuts through the drywall. He frees a section covering one end of the tub, and rips it away. Inside is a pair of feet, bare. A few inches of dirty water. Bare female legs curled up into a tight ball on the other end of the tub. The toes are painted baby blue; it’s an odd detail to notice.

  “Ava?” Delta chokes. “Is that you?”

  A low, ragged moan. I reach in, along with the guy who’d been running the saw, and we haul her toward us. Reach down, lift her free, and I cup dirty white-dust speckled damp black hair to protect her head from bumping into anything, and she’s limp. Alive, but barely. She’s clutching a pink reusable water bottle in one hand, hand curled tight around it, clutching it for dear life. It’s how she survived, probably, that bottle of water. Otherwise, she’d have died of thirst by now, most likely.

  We have her out of the tub and the two of us are carrying her gingerly but quickly out from the wreckage and Delta is following, sobbing.

  It’s Ava.

  Her eyes open, just a sliver, and fix on Delta. She glances at me, and then moans.

  “Chris?” A wordless moan of pain, exhaustion. “Chris?”

  “He’s coming,” I murmur. “I’m Jonny. He’s coming, okay?”

  It’s a lie.

  But it’s what she needs to hear. And it just slipped out.

  Delta is holding on to me as we settle Ava onto a makeshift stretcher and carry her to the medical tent.

  Her hands don’t let go of me.

  I don’t think I’ll be joining Dominic and Dane anytime soon.

  SNEAK PEEK

  A preview of WHERE THE HEART IS

  WHERE THE HEART IS

  Chapter 1

  I tingled.

  There’s never been a tingle before.

  Even that day almost six years ago when I conceived Alex—which to date still stands as the hottest day of my life and one which I do not regret even slightly despite the fact that the man in question turned out to be a rat bastard and a coward and a piece of shit. Since then my life has been all messed up and screwed over and irredeemably fucked except for two factors: that I got Alex of out of it, and his conception entailed some seriously hot sex. Even then, I didn’t tingle.

  But I have tingles right now.

  For real. Tom—Alex’s sperm donor—he knew what he was doing. There was screaming, there was a lot of me calling on god, and there were at least four orgasms—for him. Eight for me. In a little under four hours, which included three smoke breaks and four bottles of wine, and one large pizza.

  I never saw Tom again after that—although that’s kind of a lie. I saw him once more, for five seconds. I was six months pregnant, and had spent the preceding six months hunting his ass down to inform him of our little “oops.”

  Or, his oops. He’d assured me he was “fixed.” I was thi
rty-two at the time, and managing a restaurant…okay, well, fine, managing a titty bar. Managing, mind you, not dancing at, or waitressing at. I’d done my time carrying trays in New York, then LA, and then Nashville, and then Chicago, in my pursuit of a career as a musician. Which had gone belly up. Or, rather, never really got off the ground. I was told over and over and over and over again that I had talent, that I had the looks, but the timing just wasn’t right, or some similar excuse. It just meant the years whiled away little by little, and suddenly I was thirty-two with a couple songs I’d written playing on the radio, performed by another artist, for which I got paid dick in a basket, and the only real work experience I had was waitressing, and I was going nowhere, and when I got offered a job managing a strip bar, I took it because it meant a steady paycheck rather than relying on tips.

  And then I’d met Tom at the gym, and we slept together a few times, and then a few more, and then we met at his hotel room downtown and had a magical afternoon…and I ended up pregnant.

  Guess what the strip bar didn’t offer? Health insurance.

  Guess who hadn’t ever bothered to get Medicaid because I was never sick, and thus never needed it? Me.

  Also, did you know you can’t get covered for pregnancy coverage after you’re already pregnant? Yeah, you can’t.

  So guess who ended up stuck with a massive hospital bill?

  And guess which strip bar didn’t take kindly to me needing a few weeks off after having a baby?

  There went that job.

  And wouldn’t you know…by the time I was able to go back to work, they’d filled the position, and only had slots open for dancers and waitresses, and the waitresses were more or less just extra strippers who would also bring food and booze out from the kitchen. So no. I had a little pride, after all.