Beach House

by Mary Monroe

  “The eggs. Cara, the turtle eggs!”

  “Yes, okay. I’ll get them.”

  She looked over the bed at the swirling black water, poised to step off. For a crazed moment she wondered about getting electrocuted and snakes. She thought back to Brett’s warning. Yes, thank heavens she’d remembered to turn the electricity off at the main switch. As for the rest…well, she couldn’t do anything about it.

  “Be careful, Cara.”

  She nodded, then, taking a deep breath, she stepped into the black.

  The water was blood warm. It reached high over her ankles, halfway to her knees, swirling with a strong current.

  “Wait here,” she told her mother as she faced the bedroom door. Visions of opening a door to a tidal wave made her knees watery but she said a quick prayer and, holding her breath, yanked it open. She felt a rush of water around her calves but thankfully, no wave. The hall was a tunnel of watery darkness. As she waded through, she felt as if she were in some horrible amusement park waiting for something slimy and creepy to jump out at her at any moment. She almost wept with relief when she reached the rope to the trap door. She pulled down the ladder, then went back for her mother.

  They huddled together in the stifling, cramped crawl space. Beside them on the dirty plywood flooring was the red bucket of turtle eggs, a battery-operated radio, a pile of dry clothing, the green plastic bin of papers, her tools and a first aid kit—all she could carry up before the water hit her knees. Above them, the wind shrieked like a madwoman, plucking and tearing at their roof. Below, the black water rose like a menacing beast.

  As she stared down into the black water, she prayed simply for another chance to enjoy a sunrise. To walk along the beach. To listen to Toy and her mother chatter about marinades. To laugh with Emmi. To lie in Brett’s arms. She prayed for the chance to enjoy all the simple pleasures of the Here and Now that she’d taken for granted. Just one more chance.

  The nurse was real nice, Toy thought as she sipped hot, sweet tea from a foam cup. She was lying on a gurney in the hall of the hospital’s emergency level. They’d had to bring everyone down to the shelter during the worst of the storm but the nurse told her in a cheery voice that they’d soon be able to bring everyone back upstairs. Then she’d get a real bed to lie in and something to eat. All the nurses were running back and forth between the patients like crazy. There weren’t enough of them to go around since a lot of women had had babies tonight. Something to do with barometric pressure.

  Toy wasn’t complaining. She felt a strange new peace inside, though not as powerful a relief as she’d felt after the baby finally slipped out of her body. Lordy, she doubted she’d ever feel anything like that incredible, bone deep sense of Ahhh again. This was a quieter peace, like the way she felt when she was looking out at the ocean, only much deeper still. She’d felt it the moment she looked at her daughter’s face and the feeling lingered. Toy knew that this feeling would last the rest of her life.

  And her baby girl was really something special. A girl—not the boy she’d been so sure it was. She was wrong about a lot of things, she’d realized. When they first put her baby in her arms, she was all pink faced and screaming as if she were mad at having to leave such a nice, warm place. But she didn’t keep bawling like the other babies around them. Her little girl just opened her eyes real wide and blinked slow and heavy, like she wanted to get a good look at this new place she was in.

  Toy was smiling just remembering it when she spied Darryl walking down the hall past a long line of gurneys and people sitting in chairs. His face was pale and his hair was flattened to one side. He looked as if he’d been sleeping on the floor, which he probably had. When he drew closer, she felt a ping in her heart seeing the worry in his eyes.

  “Hey darlin’,” he said, coming closer. He leaned against the gurney to give her a kiss, but jumped back when it started to roll. “Whoa!”

  She giggled. “They didn’t put us in real beds yet.”

  He recouped, putting his hands in his back pockets. His arms stuck out, thin and gangly.

  “Did you see her?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “The baby, silly!”

  “Oh, yeah. I mean, no. No, I didn’t.”

  “She’s so beautiful. She has soft, yellow, fuzzy hair like a baby chick and big, wide eyes. I think she has your nose. We have to give her a name.”

  “Name her whatever you want.”

  “Don’t you want to give me some ideas?”

  “It don’t matter to me.” He turned his head to look down the hall and jerked his shoulder, like a man about to run. When he faced her again he seemed impatient. “Look, how long do you think they’ll keep you in here? It’s hotter’n Hades.”

  “I don’t know. Not long. I’ve got to rest a little bit. They put in these stitches. You know, down there. They itch something fierce.”

  “But when can we leave? The weathermen gave the all-clear sign. Folks are going home.”

  Home. She heard the word and clung to it. “I’d like that, Darryl. The doctor’s checking the baby now. As soon as they say she’s fine we can—”

  “Why do we have to wait around? Won’t somebody, you know, come for it? A social worker or something?”

  She felt a panic rising up in her at hearing him call the baby it. “Darryl, just go look at her. Take a peek.”

  “What for?”

  “Go on. Please. When you see her you’ll love her.”

  “Drop it, okay?”

  “Darryl, look at her!” she shouted.

  “I don’t want to look at her!” he shouted back.

  The women in the gurneys next to her looked at them nervously and a nurse rushed over from around the corner.

  “We can’t have any of that,” she said, her stern look traveling from Darryl to Toy, then back to Darryl.

  “We won’t let it happen again, ma’am,” he said. “We’re a bit wore out is all.”

  Toy could see the woman’s anger melt at the power of Darryl’s smile.

  “All right, then. Just keep it down.” The nurse walked away, too busy to deal with this minor problem any longer.

  When Darryl faced her again, she expected him to be angry or frustrated. He surprised her by being contrite.

  “I’m sorry, Toy, but I don’t want to see the baby.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin and paced the few feet of space they had between the gurneys. Then he came closer so that he could talk soft so the other ladies couldn’t hear him.

  “I told you,” he said in a pleading voice. “A thousand times. I’m not ready to be anybody’s daddy.”

  “You really will leave her? Without a single look?”

  “If I look at her I might not want to leave. And I’ve gotta go. This is my big chance to make it. You know how hard I’ve worked for this. How long I’ve waited. If I don’t go now I’ll always wonder what might have been. And that’s a woeful place to spend the rest of your life.”

  Her mind slowly spun into focus as she opened her eyes and saw an amalgamation of pipe dreams unravel and dissipate like smoke. Toy opened her mouth. She felt her tongue move to touch her teeth, her lips move and the air expel. “Then go.”

  He hesitated. “You’re not coming with me? How can you tell me this now?”

  She closed her eyes and felt the hot tears leak around the corners and down her cheeks. “Darryl, I can’t make this turn out the way I dreamed it would. All the time I was lying here waiting for you I was having this conversation in my mind, imagining all the things you’d say when you came. You’d tell me how you’d seen our baby and fallen instantly in love with her. How you wanted to be a loving husband and father and take us home to be a family.” She opened her eyes and saw Darryl’s drawn and weary face a few inches from her own.

  “I had that dream a lot, but I knew when I saw your face today that you were never going to say those things. I shouldn’t have expected you to. You were always straight with me about the way you felt. It was me who was l
ying all along—to you, to Cara and Miss Lovie and to myself. I guess I was lying to my baby, too. But do you want to know something amazing, Darryl? I see things real clear now. When I held my baby in my arms I knew for sure and certain what was really true. I’m her mama now and I’ll never abandon her. She means everything to me. I’ve depended on other people all my life but no more. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to give my child a good life. She might not have a lot of things, and she won’t even have a daddy, but she’ll have me and I’ll have her. And that’ll be enough.”

  By 2:00 a.m. the radio reported that the storm had skirted the South Carolina coast and was heading north toward Wilmington, North Carolina. By dawn, the water had receded from the house and they could come down.

  Cara led her mother across the soggy flooring to the living room. They were exhausted, wet and chilled despite the soaring heat. Cara was desperate to get some fresh air and light in the stuffy, sour-smelling house. She settled her mother on one of the dining room chairs, then hurried to the front door, pushed away the barricade, unlocked the bolts and swung it wide.

  The air still felt stormy and the pewter ocean still pounded the shore with huge steely waves, but the screaming wind had at last quieted. A few birds ventured out to chirp and the palmetto trees stood straight again, ragged but intact. A pale-pink light pierced the ethereal, gray morning.

  The storm was past.

  But Hurricane Brendan had done his damage. Lying on the front dune, twisted with canes of roses and bits of roofing, was the pergola. The deck stairs were damaged, the screens shredded as though ripped by thousands of razors and the screen door was halfway to Flo’s house. The cars below were flooded. But it could have been a lot worse. The beach house was sound, and more importantly, they’d survived without harm.

  Lovie tottered up beside her, pale and worn to the bone. Yet her eyes were glowing with gratitude at seeing another dawn. She reached out to take Cara’s hand in hers, lifted her face to the sky and, in a clear voice that rang with exuberance, gave thanks with a psalm.

  “For lo the winter is past; the rain is over and gone;

  The flowers appear on the earth;

  The time of the singing of birds is come,

  And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.”

  After the storm, Cara’s chief concern was her mother. She didn’t like the pallor of Lovie’s skin or the shallowness of her breathing. Sitting slump shouldered and wan on the rocker, Lovie seemed to be sliding downhill very fast and Cara felt a panic, wanting somehow to stop the inevitable, knowing she could not.

  Exhaustion cloaked her like a heavy winter coat in the warm sun, but there was more work to do than she could shake a fist at. Everything was wet or soggy, inside and out. She dragged herself out of the chair, stretched her arms high over her head, yawned loudly, then rolled up her sleeves.

  First Cara pried the plywood off the windows, opened them wide and let the fresh air circulate through the beach house again. Then she scrubbed Lovie’s bedroom and bed with oil soap and the water she had carefully saved in the bathtubs before the storm. She swept up the broken glass from the bathroom window, washed the sheets and hung them to dry. The bed was an old mahogany four-poster that stood so high off the ground Lovie used a small, embroidered footstool to climb into it. This was a blessing because her mattress had escaped the water. After a few hours Lovie’s room was almost free of the mustiness that permeated the rest of the house. At last Cara could settle her mother in a comfortable spot. Lovie took mincing steps and needed help climbing into the bed. As Cara tucked her mother under the sheet and smoothed her wispy, fine white hair across the pillow, she was amazed at how small she appeared, as slender and delicate as a child. And as vulnerable.

  The sun cooperated, coming out midmorning to dry the earth, the house and all the sheets and pillows she’d hung on a makeshift clothesline between two palms. She pulled the wool carpets off the floor and hung them over the porch railings, then scrubbed the filth off the heart pine floors, but it would take quite a lot of time for them to not feel squishy as she walked across them. She didn’t do much to clear mud from below the house after she spotted a water moccasin slink out from under the car. There was a dead dog at the end of the road and a cat meowed piteously on a neighbor’s porch. She brought it some canned tuna to eat, careful to keep her distance, but sure enough, the sweet-looking calico followed her home.

  She was sweeping wrack off the porch when she heard car wheels skid to a halt in the gravel in the back of the house, the slam of a car door and a man’s voice urgently calling her name.

  “Cara! Caretta Rutledge!”

  She recognized Brett’s voice and her own leaped from her throat. “Here!”

  He came tearing around the corner, took the stairs two at a time. Before she could sputter a hello he swept her into his arms, kissing her soundly. She went limp with surprise, clutching one of his shoulders with one hand, the broom handle with the other as she tilted on one foot. He kissed her until she dropped the broom and wrapped her arms around his neck, kissed her until she kissed him back just as hard.

  When he pulled away his expression was fierce. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again. Last night I called your motel and they told me you hadn’t checked in. You weren’t to be found at any motel or shelter in a fifty-mile radius. I know because I called or went to every damn one of them!”

  His face was haggard with fatigue and covered with dark stubble. His tawny hair was tousled and his clothes lived in. He looked as if he hadn’t slept a wink. Cara smiled, realizing she probably looked just the same.

  “I couldn’t reach you,” she replied simply. “I couldn’t get in touch with anyone.” Then, in a soft voice she added, “I was scared.”

  “You should have been. You risked your life.” His voice lowered and she saw worry, relief and something else she was afraid to put a name to in his eyes as he hungrily studied each feature of her face. “You risked my life, too. Don’t you know that yet? Damn this craziness. Cara, we don’t have to get married. I’ll move to Chicago. I don’t care. That’s just geography. But last night was the longest night of my life, wondering if you were okay, if I’d see you again or hold you in my arms again. I love you, Cara. I don’t want to live without you.”

  “I love you, too,” she blurted out.

  His big arms held her close and at last she felt she could let go. She felt safe in his arms, secure against any danger that might come howling at her threshold.

  When he pulled back, he was smiling. “I’ve brought someone to see you.”

  “Flo?”

  “Wait here.”

  He released her and went back down the stairs and around the corner. She heard again the slam of a car door, then the crunching of gravel and the soft murmur of voices. She bent to pick up the broom. After leaning it against the wall, she slapped the sand from her hands and lifted her head in time to see Toy round the corner. In her arms she carried an infant.

  Cara blamed it on her fatigue, the stress of the hurricane and the worry about her mother. She’d been as strong and stalwart as she could be for hours—weeks, months, really. Whatever her excuse, she brought her hands to her face and began to sob. Great, heaving sobs that were embarrassing in front of people she wanted to be strong for. But she couldn’t stop herself.

  Toy and Brett came around her, murmuring words of affection and comfort. She felt arms around her shoulders, and through the blur of tears, she saw Toy’s smiling face and the peaceful face of a sleeping, beautiful baby.

  Then a horn honked in the driveway.

  The baby startled and commenced wailing. Cara sniffed and burst out laughing. She wiped her face with her palms as a grin stretched from ear to ear at seeing Flo and Miranda trudge up the stairs. They swooped down on Toy and the baby with squeals of joy and surprise. A minute later, Lovie appeared on the porch, tottering and weak but her eyes were as bright as a sparrow’s at all the commotion. When Toy saw her she hur
ried with the baby to rush into Lovie’s outstretched arms. The baby continued squawking at all the noise and fuss but the women only laughed and exclaimed how utterly adorable she was.

  “Come everybody, sit down,” Cara said, ushering them toward the porch chairs. “Y’ all must be exhausted. We’ll have to sit on the porch, I’m afraid. The inside is all soggy and dank. Come, Toy, here’s a rocker for you, Little Mama.” Then, taking hold of Lovie’s arm, she guided her to the rocker beside Toy. “I guess that makes you Big Mama, now,” she said with a laugh that masked her worry at seeing her mother more frail than Miranda. Brett hustled to pull out chairs for Miranda and Flo.

  “Just a few minutes to chat, then the two mamas have to get back to bed,” Cara announced.

  “Absolutely,” Flo replied, picking up the cue. “We need to open up our house, too. It doesn’t look too bad from the outside. A few shingles are gone.”

  “I’ll help you ladies,” Brett offered. “We don’t want any injuries after the storm.”

  “Oh, Brett,” Lovie said mournfully. “The pergola…”

  “I saw,” he replied. “I can always build another. You and Cara are safe. And Flo and Miranda. And Toy and the baby. Hey, we’re all fine. That’s all that matters.”

  “Amen to that,” Flo agreed. “I about had a heart attack last night when you two didn’t show up at the motel.”

  “And the nest?” asked Miranda. “Is it all right?”

  They all chuckled at the older woman’s one-track mind.

  “It’s safe and sound,” Lovie replied gently, reaching out to pat Miranda’s hand. Then she looked at Cara anxiously. “We’ve got to get the eggs back into the sand. As soon as possible.”

  “Back into the sand?” Flo asked, brows raised.

  “Don’t ask,” Cara replied, holding up her hand. Then to Lovie, “I’ll take care of it. You don’t have to worry.”