by Wendy Wax
Maddie lay in an odd state of fear-fueled exhaustion in the tension-filled silence. The only one talking was the meteorologist and nothing he was saying was anything Maddie wanted to hear.
She lay awake worrying for a long time, wishing Steve and Andrew were here—or at least on their way—their life repaired, her family intact. She must have fallen asleep because she woke to a distant siren and Kyra’s hands on her arm. “The right front quadrant of the hurricane is close to shore but hasn’t hit land yet. Do you hear that siren and the beeping from the TV? There’s a tornado warning in the area. They’re telling everyone to go into a small interior room.”
Kyra’s voice caught slightly in fear, and Maddie sat up and pulled her into a hug. “I think I read once that you’re supposed to sit in the bathtub.” Kyra’s voice quivered. “Should we wake everybody up?”
Groggy, the five of them filed into the bathroom. Without asking, Maddie helped Kyra into the tub, propping her up against her pillow, handing her another one to put over her head just in case though she was careful not to add in case of what. Avery was selected to crawl in with her because she was the only one with any chance of fitting.
Deirdre sat on the toilet lid while Maddie and Nicole folded their bedspreads into piles on either end of the tub then sat on them with their backs against the wall. The tiny jalousie window on the exterior wall had a big X of tape across it, which was presumably meant to stop pieces of glass from spraying into the room, but didn’t prevent it from rattling. The sound on the TV was up as far as it would go, but Maddie could only pick out every fourth or fifth word; none of them were reassuring.
“What is it with us and bathrooms?” Nicole asked. “Have you noticed how many of them we’ve been stuck in together?”
Deirdre and Kyra managed smiles.
“I’ve noticed. I had a damned period because of it,” Maddie said, trying for another smile. “Nobody’s carrying, are they? No tampons or Kotex or anything?”
“Mother!” Kyra said and for a moment her embarrassment seemed to cancel out her fear. Which felt like a victory of sorts to Madeline.
Nikki laughed and some of the tension dissipated. But Avery seemed to be looking for something to think about beside the approaching storm. “Where did you go? And why did you come back?” she asked Nicole.
Outside the wind kicked up a notch. The little window rattled more insistently. The warning beep on the TV grew louder, which seemed unnecessary; could there possibly be anyone left who didn’t know a hurricane was coming?
“I’d been trying to find Malcolm for a long time.” Nicole considered them all. “He contacted me on the fourth. When you asked me to leave I went to where he was.”
Avery’s “aha” died mid-syllable.
“I was going to talk him into turning himself in. At least that was my plan.”
“And what actually happened?” Deirdre asked.
“I offered him my third of Bella Flora to turn himself in, so that you and everyone else would get at least some part of your money back,” Nicole said. She shifted uncomfortably on the floor. “He took the deed I’d had drawn up, but it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to turn himself in.” She hesitated; their gazes were locked on her like an infrared target. “He asked me to get some cash for him that he’d managed to put in our mother’s name and which apparently passed on to me.”
“So you weren’t really broke,” Avery said.
“That money could have saved me from ruin. If I’d known anything about it. But that was the first I’d heard of it,” Nikki replied. “And he only told me about it because he’d set it up so that I could access it when he couldn’t. And because he assumed I’d run to the bank for him, retrieve the money, and then hand it over.”
“And did you?’ Deirdre asked.
Nicole looked away, which wasn’t easy in such a small space crammed with so many people. “I’d always put him first no matter what he did. I guess it never occurred to him that could change. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.”
“But why?” Maddie asked, not understanding the sheer one-sidedness of it. “Why would he think that?”
“Because Malcolm and I were raised in what you’d call abject poverty. Our dad died working on the docks and our mother—she had maybe a seventh-grade education—worked two jobs to try to support Malcolm and me. One was nights at a bar. She worked days cleaning hotel rooms, although I don’t think she ever worked in a hotel as nice as this.”
Nicole tried to smile, but her face was stark in the bathroom’s harsh lighting. Her voice matched her face. It was odd how little you could really tell about people.
“Anyway,” Nikki continued when no one interrupted her. “I’m six years older than Malcolm and our mother was always working or trying to sleep enough to go back to work, so I was pretty much in charge of us. We had a pact that we’d work our way out of poverty. I put us both through college and helped fund Malcolm’s first investment firm. It’s crazy, but we both achieved our goals.” She sighed and her shoulders sagged. “I didn’t realize Malcolm built his fortune by stealing from others. I didn’t know. And then when I did know, I just kept trying not to believe it. But the other day at the park, I couldn’t pretend anymore. I knew I had to do something.” Her eyes were bleak. “I turned him in.”
“Who did you turn him in to?” Avery was still skeptical. Madeline wondered if she was going to demand a name and phone number.
“Giraldi.”
“Your friend Joe?”
“My FBI agent Joe,” Nikki corrected. “I called him and told him where to find Malcolm.” She swallowed. “I imagine they’ve taken him into custody by now. I haven’t seen anything on the news. I headed right for Bella Flora when I saw the hurricane warning for Pass-a-Grille.”
Maddie didn’t know whether Avery was as floored by Nikki’s revelations as she was, but she didn’t press for more detail. The blonde’s gaze slid from Nicole to the rattling window where she could just make out the shadows of what might be a stand of palm trees—or some triple-headed monster—swaying madly in the wind.
The lights flickered and snapped off. The air-conditioning shuddered to a halt and the blare of the TV went off in midbeep. It grew deadly calm outside.
No one spoke. Or moved. Until Kyra lifted her cell phone up and pressed a key creating a small glow of light. The others followed suit.
“This is when you’re not supposed to go outside,” Kyra whispered in the same kind of voice one might use to tell spooky stories around a campfire. “It’s either the wind changing direction or maybe part of the eye passing over us. You go out thinking it’s over and get trampled by the rest of the hurricane.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Maddie said. “And neither is anyone else.”
“I couldn’t get out of this bathtub if I wanted to,” Avery said. “Not without a crowbar.”
“I hope Bella Flora is okay.” Kyra still whispered. Maddie reached over and slipped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders.
“She has to be. I refuse to believe fate, or nature, or whatever is at work could ignore how much we poured into her,” Maddie said.
“Do you really think it works that way?” Deirdre asked. “That hard work is rewarded and evil gets punished? Where have you been living—in never-never land?”
Maddie flushed with anger. They were cowering in a moldy bathroom; how many other harsh realities did they have to face?
“Call it whatever you want, but where I come from we don’t abandon our children.”
Avery went very still and Maddie feared she’d somehow managed to offend both mother and daughter. “I’m sorry, that was . . .”
“No, don’t apologize,” Avery said. “I’d really like to hear what Deirdre has to say to that.”
They all turned to Deirdre, who looked slightly less regal on her toilet throne. “I’ll say what I’ve been trying to say all along,” Deirdre began.
Avery’s tone was taunting, but even in the muted glow of t
heir cell phones, Maddie could see that her eyes were sad. “You mean before we found out you were just using us to get your career back on track or after? Before you exposed Kyra and us to the paparazzi and the foul-mouthed Tonja Kay or after? Before you . . .”
“That’s enough!” Deirdre snapped. She stood and began to pace, but of course there was nowhere to go in the tiny and too-full space. In a certain kind of film, she’d go running out into the eye of the storm trying to outrun her daughter’s censure and never be heard from again. Maddie smiled at her flight of fancy. They were jammed into a really crappy hotel bathroom in a hurricane, not a Nicholas Sparks movie.
Deirdre stopped and leaned against the bathroom wall. “I’m sorry that being here has helped my career. I know that’s the worst possible insult to you, Avery. But that isn’t why I came.”
“Right.”
“Oh, I did come because my career was in the toilet. Just like you did,” she said. “But that was because there was no longer anything holding me there. I was out of excuses. I couldn’t pretend I was too busy to find you and try to make amends.”
If there had been anywhere else to go, Maddie would have led Kyra and Nikki out of the bathroom, but they were a captive audience. She remained still, wishing she could don Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, but she wasn’t sure it mattered. Deirdre seemed far too intent on getting through to Avery to worry about them.
“Do you really think that before I came I knew about the merry band that would be assembled? Or that one of them would be a filmmaker with Internet savvy? That she’d happen to be pregnant by the husband of a Hollywood celebrity? You give me far too much credit, Avery. I’m a shitty mother, but even I am not that Machiavellian.”
They sat in the near dark listening to the wind whip back up again. The trees outlined in the window no longer swayed, they jitterbugged.
“Bottom line,” Deirdre continued, ignoring everything but the daughter who refused to look at her, “my career sucked. The thing I’d put before everything else had simply shriveled up and died. I heard you were in trouble and I hoped I could help enough that you’d want me around. That was my big plan.”
Avery made no comment. But Maddie could feel how intently she was listening.
“I married your father because he was a wonderful man and he loved me more than anybody ever had. Certainly more than my parents did.”
Deirdre’s smile was rueful, her tone almost wistful. “I told him that I wasn’t ready to settle down—I was barely twenty-one—and that I didn’t feel the same way he did, that I wanted to go to Hollywood and have a design career. Oh, I was brutally honest.
“I told him I didn’t want to be a mother; my mother was appalling at it. I didn’t even know how one was supposed to behave. But he thought that the way he felt about me trumped all that. ‘It’ll all work out,’ he said. ‘I love enough for both of us.’ That’s what he said.”
Deirdre looked down at her hands, which were clasped around her phone. For the first time since Maddie had met her she didn’t look remotely “together,” and it had nothing to do with the hurricane or the dim glow from their cell phones. “But it doesn’t work like that. Not even when you want it to. It has to be equal. Or at least somewhere close.”
She blinked back tears. “I was too young and far too messed up to handle things as I should have. And it didn’t help that I got pregnant on our honeymoon. When you were born I loved you more than I’d ever loved anything. And you scared me to death. I was so afraid I’d screw everything up, that I’d screw you up.”
She paused, searching Avery’s face for something. All Maddie saw on it was horror and dislike.
“I stayed because you were mine and I loved you. I did my best to settle in and make things work. But I never loved your father to the exclusion of everything else, like he wanted. And I just didn’t know how to be a mother.”
Deirdre paused and the silence in the bathroom was in stark contrast to the howl of nature outside. Sirens blared. There was a crash of something large onto metal. None of them moved.
“Your father was born to be a parent,” Deirdre said, staring into Avery’s no-longer-averted eyes. “Your parent. I just got out of the way.” She sighed. “And, of course, by the time I realized I’d done the absolute wrong thing and desperately wanted to beg your forgiveness, you wouldn’t have anything to do with me.” She paused for a moment, her voice barely more than a whisper. “I’m so sorry, Avery. I’m so very, very sorry.”
Maddie drew her knees up to her chest and rested her forehead on them. She felt Deirdre’s pain and Avery’s deep down into her skin. Although she felt as if they’d been intruding, she was glad Kyra had heard Deirdre’s story. She hoped that Avery would find it in her heart if not to forgive, then at least to forge some sort of . . . something. The reality was, they were all each other had.
Forty
A little later came what sounded—and felt—like all hell breaking loose. The wind whipped and howled and the rain pounded down. Unseen things collided. As they cowered in the bathroom, Avery’s emotions kept pace with the storm. She felt as if someone had grabbed hold of everything inside her, shaken it around for a while, and then tried to wrench it out of her. Deirdre was self-centered and she had used their desperation to her advantage. But she was not completely unthinking or unfeeling and her apology had seemed stunningly sincere. The fabric of Avery’s hurt and anger had been ripped into tiny shreds and brutally rearranged—still there but unrecognizable. Her last coherent thought before her eyes fluttered shut was that it was so much easier and cleaner to hate from afar.
Avery roused about five A.M. when the electricity finally flickered on. She’d fallen asleep with her knees folded up against her chest, Kyra’s head on her shoulder, and her cell phone clutched in one hand. When they emerged from the bathroom a short time later, they discovered how lucky they were. The parking lot was strewn with debris. A tree on one edge had fallen across the roof of a small SUV and another had smashed into a unit at the opposite end. But Maddie’s van was undamaged. All of them were rattled but unharmed.
Inside, the TV stations were filled with reports that large sections of the Tampa Bay area were without electricity and would be for some time. The beaches had been hard hit as Charlene, erratic to the end, skimmed up the west coast of Florida then skittered westward.
“Can we get back onto St. Pete Beach?” Maddie asked as they watched the images on the TV screen.
“Go to one of the local channels and see if they’ve got that info posted.”
Maddie passed the remote to Kyra and the channel surfing, with intent, began.
“Charlene is headed toward the Mississippi coast. They think she may make landfall there.”
“Jesus,” Deirdre said. “That’s the last thing they need up there after Katrina and the oil spill.”
“They’re reporting torrential rain up and down the western half of Florida,” Kyra said. “Which could be impacting anyone trying to drive down from Georgia or North Carolina.” She looked at her mother. “That means Dad and Andrew might have trouble getting down here.”
“If they’re coming,” Maddie said.
“Mom, you know they’ll come.”
Maddie didn’t comment. Avery couldn’t help remembering how certain Kyra had been that Daniel Deranian would come and take her away. She’d been half right.
“That could mean the Hardins might be having trouble getting back, too,” Kyra said moments after Avery had thought it.
“If Chase were here, we could maybe go by boat and take a look from the water.” Avery wished he were here right now, though she wasn’t about to admit it. She felt someone’s gaze on her and looked up to see Deirdre watching her. Avery looked away, hoping Deirdre hadn’t been able to read her thoughts.
“I can’t even imagine what the bay and Gulf are like right now. I don’t think I’d want to be out in a boat at the moment, even if it were possible,” Maddie said.
“Have you tried to reach him?
” Deirdre asked. “Or heard anything at all from the Hardins?”
Avery looked down at her phone. “No bars.” She lifted it to her ear. Nothing. “Has anybody got a cell phone signal?”
No one did.
“The land line doesn’t work, either.” Nikki held the receiver to her ear. “No dial tone.”
They looked at each other.
“I need to see Bella Flora,” Avery said. “I need to make sure she’s still there and intact.” Her pulse quickened at the thought of the abuse that must have been heaped on her.
“Why don’t we see if we can get something to eat first?” Deirdre suggested. “Now that my heart’s not in my stomach anymore, it’s feeling kind of empty. Hopefully by then there’ll be more information.”
“Deirdre’s right,” Maddie said, surprising them all. “Nikki, can you talk to your friend at the desk and see if there’s anything close enough to walk to and where the closest gas stations are?”
“I’m on it.”
A few minutes later they were at a Waffle House two streets over. Only the cook and one waitress had made it in that morning, but there was electricity and that meant food. They wolfed down their breakfasts as other customers trickled in. There was a TV mounted nearby and as they ate they learned that five people had died and twelve were unaccounted for. Reports about which beaches had been hardest hit and who did and did not have electricity continued to pour in, but those reports seemed conflicting.
A photo of Malcolm Dyer flashed on the screen for a few brief seconds along with the caption “Financial Schemer Captured,” and Avery let out a whoop. They all stopped eating to watch footage of Dyer being led toward a police car in handcuffs while a knot of people wearing FBI windbreakers looked on.
