Andrea rolled carefully out of her bed and stepped to her door. There was no light anywhere, and she heard a roaring sound, like she was standing too close to the railroad tracks. Wind slammed into the wall and windows in a violent gust. The walls hummed with the effort of holding it back and the floor shifted just slightly beneath Andrea’s feet. She cried out, stumbled into the hall, and crashed painfully against the wall.
Hurried footsteps sounded from the direction of the kitchen, and she heard her mother’s voice. It was soft, almost a whisper. Andrea stared into the shadows and tried to make out her mother’s form. As her eyes grew accustomed to the lack of light, she saw that it wasn’t absolutely dark. There were shades of gray, and she saw the door at the far end of the hall leading into the living room.
Andrea stood and was suddenly scooped up into her mother’s arms. She was getting too big for this, but in that shivering, shaking darkness with the voice of the wind crashing against their walls like a nightmare version of The Big Bad Wolf, Andrea clung to her mother’s shoulders, wrapping her arms and legs so tightly and suddenly that Lilian staggered slightly under the onslaught.
They hurried down the hall toward the living room. It was dark in that room as well, but as they slipped out of the hallway, Andrea caught the flicker of candlelight from the kitchen. Long shadows flickered and rippled across the wall where the windows should be. That space was dark. How could it be so black? How could it be so dark?
As her mother turned toward the kitchen and carried her through and out of the room, Andrea kept her gaze locked on that wall, and on the windows. In a flash, images of the night before—the waves creeping and gurgling up the beach to drown the outcropping of stone—the brilliant, almost blinding flash of fire over the water and then the smaller flame, burning in the distance—the crash that had not really been thunder—filled her mind. All of it was gone, as if the rocks, the beach, and the ocean itself had been erased, swept away and left as blank space.
Andrea slid to the floor in the doorway of the kitchen and turned. Her daddy sat, his hands wrapped around a coffee cup, staring into the flame of a single candle on the table. The windows in the kitchen were dark too, but with the dim light Andrea could make out more detail. She saw a hint of wood grain through the glass, and again memories shifted into place. She was wide awake now, and she remembered the pounding, the hammering that had ushered her into her dreams. Wood covered every inch of glass. Wind pounded at the plywood and pressed it inward, shaking the walls again and again.
Andrea glanced up at her mother and saw the fear etched deep and hard into that familiar face. She saw it, and the darkness encroached on her own heart. She felt a chill, as if the wind had penetrated the window and the walls, bringing its icy breath to blow down the back of her neck and whisper to her that the water was out there, gurgling and growing, clawing at the base of her home, and it was hungry. She stepped to the table and laid her hand on her father’s knee.
When he looked up, he smiled. Andrea weighed that smile and all that it meant against the fear in her mother’s eyes.
“Morning, princess,” he said. “I was wondering if you were ever going to wake up.”
Andrea looked around at the shadows. How could it be morning? How could there be a day without a sunrise she could watch from the beach? She had seen rain, even been through some bad, windy storms, but this was different. Everything had shifted. The house shook again; she clutched her father tightly and buried her head in his chest, working her way up into his lap and staying there. It was even darker with her face pressed into his shirt, but the warmth and the familiar scents softened the edges.
Her mother slid into the seat across the table. The radio, for once, was silent. There was no power, no way for electricity to reach them. No way to know how bad the storm was going to be, how long before things would go back to normal, or how their neighbors were doing. Closed in the box prison that had been their home, the three of them huddled together quietly.
When she couldn’t stand the silence any longer, Andrea asked, “When will it stop?”
She didn’t direct the question at either parent in particular. If the radio had answered her, she would have been happy to hear it. She would have been happy to hear about Nazis and U-boats, or to hear Benny Goodman playing on his clarinet. Anything would be better than the horrible silence in the room and the awful roaring and crashing from outside.
“I don’t know, princess,” her father said, placing his hand protectively on her head. “I just don’t know.”
Then, very suddenly, the entire house was gripped and shaken. Andrea screamed, her mother cried out and fell to the side. Her chair toppled loudly, and everything tilted away from the beach. The candle slid toward the edge of the table and somehow, thinking calmly even in the midst of sudden tumult, Thomas Jamieson reached out and caught it, preventing it from falling.
There was a horrible groaning sound, and Andrea heard the rush of water, the crash of surf, and behind it, always there, the screaming of the wind, blended now with her mother’s screams.
The house thrummed like a violin string that had been plucked hard and left to resonate, waiting for the next time the finger would draw it back and release. With a sudden wrench, one of the boards across the living room window facing the beach lurched outward, and then ripped away in the wind. Gray light streamed in. Andrea was nearly blinded by it, even though it was not bright, and she couldn’t focus.
Her mother had risen from where the she’d fallen. Blood streamed down her cheek from a cut beside her eye, but she paid no attention to it. She stared out through the doorway into the living room, and beyond. Andrea watched her as she stepped away from the table and closer to the doorway. Her eyes were dull and glazed.
“Lilian,” Andrea’s father called out. “Get away from there.”
Andrea’s mother didn’t hear him, or if she did, she ignored him. She stepped full into the door’s frame and stood like a statue, gazing out through the water-streaked glass.
With a curse, Thomas Jamieson moved. He stood quickly, reached out and pinched the candle’s flame dead between his thumb and forefinger. He grabbed the candle then and tucked it between himself and Andrea, whom he held tightly and easily with one arm.
Something tore loose on the roof. Andrea heard it, like the sound of a saw when you bend it back and forth, and then something whipped into the gloom. Some part of what had been the roof was not there any more, and the wind clawed the hole, worrying at the shingles and board around that spot. The sound of running water beneath their feet was joined by a steady pouring splatter from the corner. Andrea turned and saw that water had found its way in from above, somehow. There was no light—no hole to the sky—but there was enough of an opening to let the water in and it was dripping down the wall toward the floor, making a dark stripe against the bright, cheerful white paint.
Her mother turned at this new sound, this new invasion of her home. She saw the water, and moved without a word to her cabinets. Andrea’s father stepped forward, as if to stop her, and then held back. It didn’t matter, and if this small act of defense helped her to cope with the moment, he wasn’t going to take that from her. At least she wasn’t standing unprotected in the doorway.
Lilian Jamieson dropped to one knee and placed a large saucepan beneath the dripping water. Some of it slipped down the wall behind the pan and reached the linoleum anyway, but the simple act of fighting back energized her. She bustled about the room and gathered all the pans she could find, pulled towels out of drawers and placed them near the leak to cut off the water from the rest of the room.
Andrea and her father watched in silence for a moment and then resumed their seat. The chair they were in was turned with its back to the short section of wall beside the doorway to the living room. Andrea’s mother was behind that door on the other side, reaching into one of the upper cabinets. Something sucked the air from the room, and Andrea brought her hands up to cover her ears. The floor gave another shiver
and then, with incredible force, the window in the living room burst inward. The wind screamed and howled and followed the glittering shards of glass. It crashed through the kitchen doorway and slammed into the wall beyond with incredible force.
Andrea’s father wrapped her tightly in his arms and leaned toward the wall, shielding her with his back. They were all screaming, and the house groaned again, leaning one way, then shivering back the other as the foundation held, and new waves of water and air sliced over and around them. Everything moved at once. Curtains ripped from their rods and whipped through the doorway like giant bats. Lamps and dishes, anything not attached solidly to a wall or a floor, tumbled and spun, lifted into the air and smashed into the far wall of the kitchen.
Andrea tried to turn her head to see her mother, but her father gripped her too tightly. In the periphery of her vision she saw the edge of the door. It had swung inward and tight back against the counter where her mother had stood moments before, but there was no way to know how hard it had hit, or where her mother was now.
The shrieking of the wind didn’t let up. Andrea screamed and screamed into her father’s chest, but the words were caught in the grip of rushing air and torn away before they could reach her ears. She didn’t know if her father screamed. She’d heard him, just once, then nothing but the wind, and the bits and pieces of their home, and their lives, flashing through the doorway into the kitchen and hammering against the wall, leaving chinks and cuts, battering the plaster into dust.
Then her father moved. At first Andrea was afraid the wind was ripping him away from her, and she clung more tightly, but he gripped her firmly and pressed her into the corner. That space was like a dead spot in the air, and this was more frightening still. It felt like the pressure was building to the point where it would blend with the howling wind and suck them into the maelstrom of water, debris, and destruction.
Her father placed her on the floor and leaned in very close. He put his lips to her ear and screamed so she could hear him.
“I’m going to get mommy,” he said.
Andrea’s eyes were very wide, and she wanted to reach out and clutch his arm, his legs, anything that would keep him from letting go of her and leaving her in that quiet pocket in the corner—anything that would keep him from placing himself in that doorway, or beyond it. Numbly, she nodded, and he was up. She saw his back as he pulled his way to the edge of the doorway, then he dove across the gap toward the cabinets and the sink beyond.
Andrea watched him, her eyes wide and her arms wrapped so tightly around her legs that her joints felt as if they might stretch, or snap from the effort. For a second Thomas Jamieson was caught in the wind, and he staggered. Midway in the span of the doorway, he took the full brunt of the wind; a wind they would later learn was just over a hundred miles per hour with gusts up to nearly a hundred and ten miles per hour. He slipped, slid a foot toward the back wall, and then another, fighting to press through to the relative safety on the far side of the door. Andrea screamed again.
She clamped her eyes closed tightly and rocked back and forth. She pressed the small of her back into the wall and felt the vibration throb through her. She didn’t want to think about her father, caught in that wind and slammed against the wall, or walking through a sudden spray of glass and debris. She didn’t want to think about his body slumped just out of reach of anyone who might help him. She didn’t want to think about her own position, pressed against a wall that shook and vibrated like it was about to be ripped from the ground without his strong arms wrapped around her.
Tears streamed from the corners of her eyes and dried instantly on her skin. She shook so hard that the strength left her arms and her legs, but she still held tight to her knees, and she did not look. Not until something touched her leg, and she screamed and tried to scoot across the floor. She had nowhere to go; she was trapped in the corner.
Then she saw it was her father. He had her mother beside him, her arm over his shoulder, and he pressed them through the whipping air in the doorway and down to the floor. Andrea’s mother slid down the wall to sit numbly by her daughter, and the two of them hugged tightly.
Thomas Jamieson was not done. He grabbed the kitchen table by one corner and dragged it closer, then dropped to the floor beside his wife and daughter. He used the table’s legs to drag it closer still. They ducked down and he pulled it to the wall in the corner, using the tabletop as a shield in case anything ricocheted off the ceiling, or the wall.
The back wall had taken a horrible beating. As the three watched in stupefied amazement, it gave way. The plaster peeled from the boards and crumbled, spraying outward and busting through the wood and shingle surface of the outer wall. They could see the deck, and the stairs out back clearly, and Andrea saw the world beyond their home again. The screams she’d finally gotten control of burst free again.
Trees lined the road, tall trees, but now these were bent nearly double. She saw them rock down, slip back up, then rock down again as the winds pounded and buffeted the upper branches. Some of the trees were already gone, and others fell as they watched. One moment they were there, and the next would follow a huge, violent crack, and the tree was simply gone.
But that wasn’t the scary thing. The scary thing was—when the trees fell, they never hit the ground. There was no ground. Where their driveway and the road should have been, there was nothing but water. Their car was either gone, or submerged. The trees that soared above the road were not so tall anymore, and the porch, which looked down its fifteen long stairs to the ground, was only slightly above the level of that water.
Dark shapes moved in the water, floating things, bobbing things, trees from their yard and from places Andrea could only imagine, danced madly among white-capped waves, beaten to a wild froth by the wind.
Without the back wall to build the pressure, the wind roared through their home, each gust taking away another bit of wood, or plaster, peeling back more shingles and plywood from the roof. The kitchen table, which had seemed an almost silly precaution, helped to block the worst of the rain.
It went on and on. Andrea needed something to drink, and she was hungry. She needed to use the bathroom, but she didn’t move. She curled into her mother’s arms, her legs across her daddy’s lap, and the three of them clung to one another as if that contact could prevent the wind from tearing any of them away, or dropping them into the surf that slapped over and over again at the foundations of their house. As if their closeness could be stronger than the trunk of a two-hundred-year-old oak tree and prevent them from cracking, falling, and bobbing away in the waves.
Hours later, maybe only a few, maybe more, Andrea slipped into blackness. She was cold, wet, shivering with exhaustion and hunger, and she simply let it slide away and drew a more familiar darkness over her mind, like blinds across a window where the sun beating in was too bright.
When she woke, the sun shone right in through the roof, and she was alone, lying on the floor of the kitchen with that bright light blocked by the yellow Formica topped table. She was wrapped in a warm blanket, and her head lay on a soft pillow.
She lifted her head and heard the sound of softly lapping water. Her head pounded, and she suddenly understood what her mother meant when she said she had a headache. She felt drained, and she ached from needing to use the bathroom, and from thirst. She couldn’t decide which thing was worse—which thing she needed to do more.
And she wanted her parents. Rising slowly and carefully, Andrea slipped out from under the kitchen table and stood in the wreckage that had been the kitchen. She heard voices from the direction of the living room, and she followed them, moving slowly and holding the wall tightly with one hand.
The voices came from the living room, and she moved toward them. As she stepped into the doorway and saw the devastation, the water stretching out in all directions and her mother leaning on her father’s shoulder, seated on what was left of their couch, crying softly, it all hit her. All of it, the wind, the noise, the imag
es of her father being swept away in the wind. Andrea took a step toward her parents, opened her mouth to speak, and found that her lips and tongue were too dry to form the words.
Her mother lifted her head and reached out a hand, but things whirled, and Andrea slumped to the floor and back to the darkness. From a great distance, she heard someone calling her name; it faded into whirling emptiness, and was gone.
Chapter Four
This time Andrea was only unconscious for a few moments. She woke in her mother’s arms, seated between her parents on the old couch. Lilian had covered it with towels, which had soaked up much of the moisture in the cushions. The sun streamed in through the shattered window and the brilliant rays had dried it further. Andrea shook her head from side to side slowly and blinked, trying to bring the room into focus.
She knew she was in her living room, but so much was broken, stained, and damaged that it was hard to believe it was the same room she’d sat in the night before with her notebook and her crayons, watching the water lick its way slowly up the side of the rock on the beach. It was hard to imagine the faraway explosion and the way it had shaken the windows and the walls, but only enough that you knew it was there—enough to drag your eyes to the window and the ocean beyond. That explosion had been on the outside. This destruction, this invasion of her home was inside as well.
The walls were streaked and stained from the rain. Jagged holes had been torn in the plaster, the siding, and the roof. Furniture was overturned, broken, or just missing. And there was the silence.
It wasn’t that there was nothing to hear. Andrea heard birds. She heard the lapping of water, a sound she’d heard countless times among the rocks on the beach, but never so close to her home, and never beneath her feet as they rested on the floor of her living room.
The silence, she realized, was the lack of voices. Her parents were not talking. They watched her and waited to make sure she was okay. Her father’s face was etched with deep lines of concern, and staring into his eyes she saw that he was very tired. She wondered if he’d slept at all, and thought it was not likely. He was protecting them, and there had been no way to do that and to sleep, so he’d chosen to stay awake beyond the bounds of what was normal, or even safe.
Mote in Andrea's Eye Page 3
