Hurricane Season

by Lauren K. Denton

  Jenna pulled her face away from the camera and shrugged. “I’m just playing around.”

  “Not what it looks like to me.”

  Since then, they met every month or so at the gardens and other places around town to take photos together and discuss her “creative future,” as he called it. They always went somewhere the kids could come, which limited their excursions to an hour, tops. They’d met at the downtown library a few times. At the top of the atrium stairs, they used Addie and Walsh as their models, capturing the flood of light from the windows on their faces. Old enough to be her father, Max had become her friend, and their excursions were her sole creative outlet.

  Three months ago, he’d blown in the door of Full Cup, marched to the counter, and slapped a flyer down in front of her as she counted money in the register. He stared at her until she looked up.

  “You made me lose count,” she told him.

  “This is more important.” He jabbed the flyer with his finger. “You need to do this.”

  She stuck the money back in the register, closed the drawer, and glanced down at the piece of paper.

  HALCYON ARTIST RETREAT IS A CALM REFUGE HIDDEN

  IN THE PRISTINE AND PROTECTED SINGER CREEK

  NATURE PRESERVE NEAR THE GULF COAST OF FLORIDA.

  WE OFFER THE GIFT OF TIME, SPACE, AND BEAUTY TO

  PURSUE THE ART THAT MAKES YOU FEEL ALIVE.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?” He arched a thick gray eyebrow, his mouth set in a straight line.

  “I’d never get in.”

  “Lucky for you, I’m on the advisory committee. But you won’t need my help—your work will speak for itself.” She held up her hand but he continued. “Before you ask, they offer scholarships, and being on the committee means I have input regarding who gets them.” He tapped his finger on the flyer. “This is a great opportunity for you.”

  She glanced back down at the flyer. The bold print at the bottom said artists could stay as long as they wished—as briefly as two weeks all the way up to the full eight weeks. Eight weeks of solitude? Too heavenly—too terrifying—to even consider. Not to mention impossible.

  “You’ve been looking for a way to get back into your photography, and this is a solid chunk of time of nothing but that. Plus you’d have a photography mentor there. I know him. He’s good. Little rough around the edges, but that might not bother you.”

  “This sounds amazing, but if you remember, I have two small people to take care of. What would I do with them for even one week?”

  “Details.” He waved his hand in the air. “We can work all that out. Look, just go to the website, read what people say about Halcyon. It doesn’t get better than this. And you have to drive through Alabama to get there—isn’t that where your sister lives?”

  Jenna nodded absentmindedly. One photo on the flyer showed a lake at dusk, cabins in the distance, a ring of people sitting around a small campfire. Sparks like fireflies shooting up in the air. Dark trees reaching toward the sky. Another showed a woman standing before a huge canvas set against a backdrop of thick oaks dripping with Spanish moss. It all reminded her of another life. But that was a lifetime ago.

  “I don’t think so.” She pushed the piece of paper back across the counter.

  He stared at her without taking it. “Jenna, you have the best, most natural untaught talent I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. It’s time to get back to it. Drawing hearts in milk foam doesn’t count as art.”

  A loud horn from behind jolted her from her thoughts. In her rearview mirror, she caught the rude gesture from the driver behind her and held her hand up in apology. Her speedometer told her she was going thirty in a fifty, annoying everyone around her. She sped up and shook her head to clear away Max and his insane ideas. Just before turning onto her street, she heard a ding, her car’s polite way of telling her she was low on gas.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she murmured.

  She’d had to pay for the girls’ summer extended-day programs this pay period and her next paycheck wasn’t until Friday. She dragged her free hand through her hair. She felt like one of those hamsters on a spinning wheel, going faster and faster but never actually going anywhere. No fancy art retreat would fix that.

  At home Jenna opened the front door expecting Walsh’s thirty pounds to careen around the corner and into her arms as she did every day, but today it was quiet. Kendal sat on the couch, wiping her nose, her eyes still red and puffy as pillows, her cell pressed to her ear. Pull yourself together, she wanted to tell the poor girl.

  “Kendal?”

  Kendal jumped up. “Oh, Miss Sawyer, I didn’t hear you.” To her boyfriend, she said, “I gotta go. I guess I’ll just see you around.” Ex-boyfriend, apparently.

  As Kendal gathered her things, Jenna dropped her purse on the table and found Addie on the floor in her bedroom surrounded by a pile of pink and purple Legos.

  “Mommy! Will you help me put this castle together?”

  “In a minute. Where’s your sister?”

  Addie shrugged. “She was in here but she left to find more Legos.”

  Jenna’s heartbeat picked up as she went room to room looking for Walsh. She pulled back the shower curtain and peeked behind the couch, checking all the normal hiding places. In her tiny house, it only took a few seconds to realize Walsh wasn’t inside.

  “Kendal, where’s Walsh?”

  “I— She’s not with Addie?”

  “No. When’s the last time you saw her?” Jenna tried to keep her voice from rising.

  “I don’t know,” Kendal said, panic creeping into her own voice. “It’s been a little while. I thought they were both in Addie’s room.”

  “I’ve told you, you have to know where Walsh is all the time.”

  “Mommy, what’s wrong?” Addie stood in the doorway to the kitchen, her brow scrunched in worry, a familiar sight on her older daughter’s sweet, sensitive face.

  Jenna crossed the room and threw open the front door, calling Walsh’s name. Again. Again. She checked the bushes around the side of the house where Walsh liked to look for ladybugs and the tree next door that she liked to pretend she could climb. After a few minutes, she was walking up and down the sidewalk yelling Walsh’s name. Finally, she heard Walsh’s voice.

  “Mommy!”

  Jenna whirled around to see Walsh running toward her. Delores was walking with her, trying to keep up as well as she could with her bad hip. Walsh ran straight into Jenna’s legs.

  Jenna knelt so she was eye to eye with her youngest. “Where have you been?”

  “Playing with the puppy,” she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  Jenna’s pulse thudded in her ears. Delores held up her hand and jogged toward them, out of breath. “I’m so sorry, Jenna. I was making my dinner when I saw her out on my patio playing with Greta. I was going to call, but I figured I’d just bring her back over before you started to worry.”

  Jenna swiped at a tear at the corner of her eye.

  “Oh dear,” Delores said. “I suppose I’m a little too late.”

  Jenna held Walsh to her chest and tried to slow her breathing.

  There were times when she wished Addie and Walsh had been lucky enough to be born to someone else, someone with a more solid, together life—a happy, All-American, dog-in-the-backyard, cookies-in-the-oven family. Sometimes she longed for that life for herself, missed it as though it was something she’d once had and let slip through her fingers.

  Other times she wished she was still Jenna Sawyer, girl on the run. An old boyfriend had called her that once. Never sticking around too long, always chasing the next bright, shiny possibility. Things were different now, though there were times—like this one—when she wished she could still run. Leave before it started to hurt.

  But the reality of Jenna’s world, in all its terror and beauty, stared back at her on the sidewalk. She brushed Walsh’s hair back from he
r face and kissed her forehead.

  That night, after a dinner of pancakes and scrambled eggs, a serious talk with Walsh about not leaving the house by herself, and four bedtime stories, the girls were finally asleep. Jenna stood by the stove finishing the cold eggs. She was exhausted and still rattled from the afternoon. Even though Kendal should have been more responsible, Jenna felt the weight of it on her own shoulders.

  She pulled a bottle of red off the counter and poured a few inches in two wineglasses, then settled down on the couch to wait. A few minutes after eight, Delores gave her customary three soft knocks and let herself in. “Hey there.” She closed the door behind her. “Girls to sleep okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Haven’t even heard a peep from Walsh.”

  Delores laughed as she sat on the other end of the couch. “That little girl’s gonna run you ragged. Good thing she’s so cute.”

  “It’s always something. The daycare hours change, the babysitter has boyfriend problems, customers think their skinny latte is the most important thing in my life. Then Walsh goes missing.”

  Delores patted Jenna’s knee. “She wasn’t missing. She was just at my house. It’s a familiar place for her. She probably didn’t realize she was doing anything wrong.”

  “I know. You’re right. But not knowing where she was? It was terrifying. All I could think about was some guy in a wife-beater cruising the street in a van with dark windows.” Jenna rubbed her eyes.

  “Well, you can’t let yourself go there. Walsh is fine, safe and sound in bed, and all is well. It was just a little hiccup.” Delores reached for the wineglass on the coffee table. “Don’t mind if I do. Doctor says a little bit is good for my heart.”

  Jenna smiled. Delores said the same thing every night.

  “Did that cute boy come to see you today?”

  “As always.”

  “It tells me something that he comes to see you every morning on his way to work.”

  “Tells me something too. He has too much time on his hands.”

  Delores shook her head. “That’s not it and you know it. Why won’t you let him—?”

  “It won’t work.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because . . . he’s just not my type.”

  Delores narrowed her eyes over the top of her wineglass. “And what does that mean?”

  “He’s too . . . innocent. And he’s smart—he’s probably never made a bad decision in his life.”

  “Honey, everyone makes bad decisions and he’s no different. Plus, you’re too young and too smart to shut down all romantic interests before they even get off the ground.”

  Jenna shifted on the couch and settled deeper into the soft pillows behind her back. As she did she glanced at her friend. Delores had been “popping over for a quick visit” almost every night now for months. She usually stayed just long enough to have a glass of wine. And long enough, Jenna suspected, to ward off some of the loneliness that crept in at night.

  Her husband, Willard, died a year ago, a day after their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Jenna’s love life was always a hot topic of conversation when Delores visited. But they talked about other things too—the best way to make a perfect cup of coffee, Delores’s dismal attempts to fit in with the “Silver Sneakers” crowd at the local gym, Jenna’s once-promising photography dreams.

  As if reading her mind, Delores nodded toward the wall across from the couch. “I love those photos, you know.”

  Jenna nodded. “Me too. But I was such a mess then.”

  “All new mothers are.”

  She’d taken the series of photos soon after Walsh was born. Jenna had been a postpartum wreck—trying to keep a two-year-old alive on her own while nursing an infant who wanted to nurse round the clock, breasts like hot rocks in her chest, her brain a sleepless blur. In her fog, she’d pulled her camera from the back of the closet, popped in some film, and started shooting.

  Walsh, with her olive skin and head full of dark hair, was asleep, temporarily paused in her constant quest for more milk, her eyelashes hints of color on her pale cheeks. Addie sat on the floor with a basket of wooden blocks, her blonde hair hanging in perfect round ringlets. Jenna took photo after photo, not knowing how they would turn out, but not really caring either. What mattered was that her fingers had found freedom, her hands and legs moving in familiar motions as she twisted to focus, kneeling to capture the light on Walsh’s cheek, bending to catch the whirl of hair at the back of Addie’s perfect head.

  Even now she could still remember how the fog had lifted, the cobwebs cleared. Her fatigue—an almost tangible beast in the room with her at all times—crept off into a corner and gave her a few minutes of peace and clarity. Behind the camera, she hid herself from reality and escaped to a place where at the click of a shutter, she could make everything perfect.

  When she met Max, their monthly excursions were a breath of fresh air, but not the same as diving full into that creative river and letting it flow without thought or care, trusting the current would take her to just the right shots.

  “Do you remember that artist retreat I mentioned a while back?” Jenna turned to Delores. “The one Max wanted me to attend?”

  Delores nodded. “You told me you didn’t think you were going to apply.”

  “I didn’t plan to, but then I did, even though I knew there was no way I could afford it, much less take time for the trip. It was mostly to get Max to stop hounding me.”

  “And?”

  “I found out today I got in. And it’s paid for.”

  Delores sat up. “So you’re going?”

  “I don’t know.” As she said the words, she knew what she wanted the answer to be. But even if she was able to take time away from work, kids, the house, laundry, babysitters, all the things that kept her away from that creative river inside her—which was more like a trickle these days—would it all come back?

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Seems like it was just handed to you. You tell them yes.”

  “What would I do with the girls?”

  Delores tapped her fingernail against the edge of her glass. “Well, you know they love coming to my house.” She smiled.

  “Delores, I can’t leave my rowdy kids with you for a week. They’d wear you out.”

  “I can handle kids, my dear. I have four of them.”

  “But they’re grown adults. When’s the last time you bathed a squirming three-year-old or made dinner for a picky five-year-old?”

  “True. What about family?” Delores already knew about Jenna’s parents. Her mom had died six years ago, and her dad, never all that involved in the child-raising aspect of parenthood, became even less so after his wife’s death. He was still in Birmingham, intent on working until he was too old to hold his arms up before his orchestra, poised and ready for action. “Your sister?”

  Jenna shrugged, but the truth was, she’d already thought about Betsy. The idea made her nervous though. It had been a little while since they talked—really talked—and telling Betsy she wanted to go off and do nothing but take photos for two weeks would come out of left field.

  “They live on a farm, right? Do they have kids?”

  “Nope. Little sister gets the kids. Big sister gets the perfect husband.”

  “That man is not perfect, I guarantee it. The question is, would your sister and her imperfect husband be willing to keep the girls while you go?”

  Jenna drained the rest of the wine in her glass, then set the glass back on the table. “I don’t know. Maybe? But seriously, how could I do this? Even if she did keep them, I can’t take time off from my life and go do something like this. It’s too much.”

  Even as she spoke, she thought of the savings account she’d set up after Walsh was born. She’d been tucking money into it each month with the intention of planning a surprise vacation for the three of them. Maybe a couple of weeks at the farm could be like a vacation for the girls. It wasn’t Disney or riding horses on the beach in Georgia, but s
he wouldn’t have been able to afford something like that anyway.

  Delores shifted in her seat so she faced Jenna. “You know about the oxygen masks on airplanes, right?”

  Jenna stifled a smile. “Yes, I’ve heard of them.”

  “They always tell passengers if the masks come down, put the mask on yourself before you try to put it on anyone else. It’s the same with kids, honey. You have to take care of yourself so you can go and take care of your kids. I see how you are over here. I know it’s hard.”

  “They’re good kids. I can’t just—”

  “Of course they’re good.” Delores put her hand on Jenna’s knee. “They’re good because of you.” Jenna shook her head but Delores continued. “You need to be good to yourself too. Look, I wasn’t a single parent like you, but with Willard’s work schedule, I was on my own a lot. More than I thought I would be. I loved those kids, still do, but there were times I wanted to turn left instead of right into our neighborhood. Just drive off into the sunset—not forever, just for a little while. Just to breathe without four other little people taking all my air. Maybe this would be a chance for you to breathe for a little while. On your own.”

  Delores glanced at her watch and rose from the couch amid a chorus of protests from her ankle and knee joints. “It’s almost my bedtime. I’ll keep an eye on my back patio tomorrow in case Walsh comes over for more playtime.” At the door she paused. “You need to do this, Jenna. Call your friend and say yes.”

  After Delores left, Jenna remained on the couch, her mind running through possible scenarios. The logistics made her head hurt, but part of her wanted to jump in the car and be free of it all. To pretend, just for a little while, that she was like she used to be—on her own, untethered. That she wasn’t living with two beautiful, innocent consequences of a failed relationship and mistakes. That at twenty-eight, she wasn’t a woman who had put her own desires and goals on the back burner to be drop-kicked into single, working motherhood.

  Her eyes were growing heavy, but she pulled her old laptop out of the drawer in the coffee table and turned it on. On her bank’s website, she entered her password to be directed to her accounts. Her checking account was perilously low—that was to be expected this close to payday—but the total in her savings account filled her with a delicate hope. It wasn’t a gold mine, but it could cover bills and rent for a short time.