When she gets back to Eli, she finds him not at the roulette table where she left him but twenty feet away, standing before a huge spinning wheel. In one hand, he holds his glow stick like a lantern. Leaving the bag under the roulette table, she goes to him, arriving just as he’s spinning again. “Any luck?” he asks.
She nods. “And then some. What’s this?”
Eli shrugs. “Just checking to see if I’m a billionaire.”
The wheel slows, and Max can read what’s written inside each pie-shaped section as it buzzes past. Most of the big ones are two or five dollars, but there’s a thin slice with fifty dollars and even one with a hundred dollars. “The house always wins,” she says. “All these things are rigged.”
“Those are the odds,” he agrees. “But sometimes you get lucky.”
Together they watch the wheel slow. The red pointer clacks along the metal pins circling the rim, gradually coming to a full stop in one of the many slots marked TRY AGAIN!
“Not this time,” Max says.
Eli waves his hand at it. “Just a game. You and me, we got other odds to think on.”
Max says, “Well, they got a little better just now. Come on.”
She leads him back to the roulette table and shows off the life jackets she’s retrieved. “All right,” Eli says, sliding his arms through one and fastening the straps.
Max gets back into the one she swiped from Sportsman’s Castle. “Now we’re officially all ready not to drown.” Eli chuckles a bit, and Max pulls out the canvas bag, the size of a small suitcase.
“What you got there?” Eli asks, eyebrows spiked in curiosity.
“It’s a major prize,” she tells him. “Everyone’s a winner.”
Using both hands, she hoists the bag up onto the roulette table, then borrows Eli’s glow stick and holds it with hers, creating a ball of yellow-green light. “Here now,” she says, illuminating the label she saw earlier. She reads EMERGENCY INFLATABLE FLOTATION UNIT.
Eli looks at her with his one good eye. “I’ll be damned,” he says. “My dad told me about these things. They’ve got them out on the oil platforms, federal regulations, crazy expensive. They’re near impossible to sink.”
“But it’s just a raft, right? Once we’re back out in that storm, who knows where it’ll go?”
“Not being able to steer is a considerable disadvantage. But I can’t quite believe this casino boat’s got much life left to give.”
Above them, a great ripping sound draws their eyes up. All the chandeliers shiver a bit, like there’d just been a tremor. Max imagines the roof peeling back, but the ceiling stays where it is. She says, “Just how long is a hurricane like this supposed to last?”
Eli scratches the back of his neck. “We got no way of knowing what’s happened with the storm. Figure she made landfall just after the storm surge. If she’s skirting the coast and we’re in an outer edge—which would be really lucky—she might start dying down soon. But if she’s passing straight overhead, we could be looking at hours of this.”
Along the far wall, a few of the slot machines topple over, crashing to the ground. Max says, “This boat’s not going to be here for hours.”
“I’m with you on that, though I don’t want to take our chances out there any longer than we need to. That’s asking for it.” Eli leans in close, so his face is side by side with Max’s in the brightness from the glow stick.
They read the short list of instructions printed on the outside of the bag. When she finishes, Max says, “So we split our bets. You stay put. I’m going to tie this thing off and inflate it. It’ll be ready for a quick escape if we need it. Like a getaway car.”
Eli shrugs. “Best plan we got.”
“That seems to be our motto.”
“Better I come with you, though. I doubt you got any knots in Jersey like the one you’ll need.”
She knows it’s not worth protesting, so each of them grabs a strap, and together they tug the heavy bag back into the storm. Outside, they each kneel down, tucking their faces against the onslaught of rain, and hook an elbow around the railing as an anchor. Waves crest over the deck now, splashing water across their feet. Max unzips the bag and, hand over hand, tugs out a rope that becomes a tail of sorts. Eli loops it around an intersection of the rails, forming an X, then curls it into itself several times, finally forming an intricate bow.
Max unzips the rest of the bag, then peels down its sides like she’s unwrapping a Christmas present. She exposes a bright orange bundle of plastic fabric and locates a rip cord with a wrist strap. She eases her hand through it, rolls her wrist a few times to increase her purchase, then motions to Eli for them to lift the bundle together. They heave it up on the top of the railing and dump it over the side, though it has only a few feet to fall till it plops into the ocean. A wave nearly washes it back over the railing, but then it drifts away, drawing out both the leash tied to the railing and the rip cord. When it goes tight, Max wastes no time, snapping her end hard.
Almost instantly, the bundle begins to unfurl. It reminds her of some kind of stop-motion animation, the jerky rapid motion, like a flower bulb blooming in mere moments. One edge flops open, then the other, and the boat takes shape as a twelve-foot octagon. Like their life vests, it is bright orange and puffy. The lifeboat bobs along the surface, snapping and tugging against the rope like a living thing straining to escape. It’s secure for now.
Back inside the casino, Max retrieves the backpack, and the two of them settle into a corner just inside the door, wanting to be close in case they need to make a break for it. They sit on the floor side by side.
For a while, they say nothing, and Max thinks of asking Eli about his sister again, or getting back to the worst thing she ever did. She can see his tilted head dipping toward his chest, and even his one good eye is half-closed. Still, she can’t help but ask the question that’s loudest in her mind. “Eli, you think we’ll die out here?”
He rights his head, swallows, and blinks. “We might not. Crazier things have happened.” He forces a smile.
“Coming here,” Max says out of the blue. She lifts the backpack, heavy with her father’s urn. “Stealing this.”
“What now?” Eli asks.
“Back in the truck. You wanted to know the worst thing I ever did. That was it. My dad loved Angie and she loved him back. Now she’s got no way to do what she needs to do. I was stupid and selfish.” She doesn’t say, Just like my mom, but the words drive into her mind like spikes. For years, she’s viewed her father’s second marriage as an echo of her mother’s betrayal, that her dad was unfaithful to the family. Now it suddenly seems clear to Max that in fact, she’s the one who was untrue. Like her mom, Max took off when she was needed. The tears come quick and hard, and before Max can stop it, she’s sobbing.
She buries her face in both hands, trembling and shaking. When she feels Eli’s arm settle over her shoulder and his gentle squeeze, she shrugs and brushes it off. But he persists, and they huddle into each other on the floor. “All you can do is try to make it right,” he says. “Try to fix whatever is broke.”
Max imagines Angie, a pregnant widow dressed in black, her shattered face hidden behind a veil.
“No point beating yourself up like this,” Eli tells her. “Everybody screws up.”
Max shakes her head. “Not like I did.”
A chandelier crashes to the floor, rattling them both, and they clutch tighter. When they ease up, Eli says, “No, not like you did. Some folks do even worse.”
Max lifts her face to look at his. “Come again?”
“My sister,” he says. “She didn’t fall.” His expression is flat, numb. “What happened up the lighthouse wasn’t no accident. She wanted to be done, and I watched her do it. I didn’t try to stop her.”
“She jumped?” Max asks, instantly regretting the dumb question.
Eli nods his head slightly, staring across the tilted casino floor. “That’s why she’s sticking around all this time. ’Caus
e she’s mad.”
“Mad for what?”
“Mad that I didn’t do more.”
Now Max straightens, kneeling up next to the sitting Eli. “What more do you expect she wanted you to do? Weren’t you just a boy?”
He meets her eyes with his. “I was her brother,” he says. “That means I was supposed to protect her.”
Max realizes she’s stopped crying at the same time she sees that Eli’s cheeks are beginning to glisten. She says, “You can’t protect somebody from themselves. Look at Mother Evangeline. Celeste is the one that made her decision. Not you.”
Eli looks away. “I guess.”
“No need to guess,” Max says, repeating Eli’s line. “I’m telling you how it is.”
This makes him smile. They are quiet for a bit while Max’s mind works something over. “So she saw you there and still jumped? She knew you’d see her do it?”
“Yeah,” Eli says.
“That’s pretty messed up. She had to know it would get in your head. Your sister, she must’ve been in a damn dark place.”
“She was. More than I understood. I knew the real Celeste, full of love and light.”
“Yeah,” Max repeats. “Love and light.”
“What?” Eli asks.
Max hesitates. “Nothing. It’s just—well, if what you say is true and she was all full of sweetness and cuddles, how come her ghost is such a bitch?”
Eli’s face goes expressionless. He looks at Max but makes no reply.
“Really,” Max presses, “what’s with the world’s best sister always putting you down like you were saying? How does that even start to make sense?”
“What’s your point?” he asks.
“No point. Just putting a question out there.”
She can tell this is unsettling Eli, and he withdraws the arm he had draped over her shoulder. He curls away from her, into the corner, and closes his good eye, letting his chin settle down onto his chest. “You’re just making my head hurt more. Lay off, all right?”
Max feels bad and considers apologizing, but instead of saying anything else, she slides over alongside him. She presses into his back and stretches one arm across him. He doesn’t pull away. She feels his chest rise and fall, and she wonders if he’s slipped back asleep. Outside, the wind shrieks and the waves thunder. The Capricornia’s floor beneath her quakes, and the chandeliers overhead tremble. Her mind floats elsewhere, to Charity and Sabine, and she tries to picture them inside Sweeney’s fortified ranger station. Charity hangs both arms over Sabine, who hugs Jasper to her chest. And that ugly cat curls in a ball next to them all. Then Max imagines Angie back home in Wayne. Has she called off the search for her maniac stepdaughter? Is she packing up her father’s clothes to donate to Goodwill, where Max’s coworkers will pick through the remnants of his life? And what of his other belongings—will she throw out the pictures of their trip to Louisiana? What will she keep to show the child waiting to be born into the world, fatherless?
A great wave slams the boat’s far side as the wind whistles like an incoming bombshell. Another chandelier crashes from the ceiling ten feet away, shattering in a cascade of glass. But Eli doesn’t shift. Max looks at his chest—expanding and contracting, laboriously—yet he seems so deep asleep. It gives her some comfort, the idea that he is resting, and she wonders if he might find relief in dreams. She sets one hand gently on his and does not squeeze because just feeling his heat is enough. It’s a silly notion, and she recognizes it as such, but Max thinks about Sabine’s claim that she could slip into other people’s dreams. She closes her eyes and wishes she could fall asleep and somehow join Eli in his troubled dreaming.
FROM WAY OUT IN THE DARKNESS, SOMEBODY’S HOLLERING my name. A lady or a girl, I can’t quite tell. It’s not my mom calling me for dinner, or my sister yelling that it’s time we finished up our hike and head home. But whoever she is, she’s insistent, demanding. As I get to waking, I realize she’s rattling my shoulders pretty hard, and Mother Evangeline’s face floats past me, then Sabine’s. But when I open my eyes, it’s Max kneeling over me, her face lit up by the greenish shine of a glow stick. She shouts, “Eli, the boat! The boat!”
I feel foggy and drunk, unable to make sense of all I’m seeing. The mirrored ceiling above bleeds water, streaming down through cracks and fractures. The floor’s gone tilted so hard that it’s a hill now, and nearly all the slot machines have collapsed. Two more just above us tumble over and slide right by. They rocket past the blackjack tables and splash into a dark pool of gulf water thirty feet below us. I shake my head, barely aware of Max’s screaming. She tugs me to my feet, and now I hear her words, “Time to go!”
“Hell yes,” I tell her, finally coming around. “Evacuate.”
We hold on to each other as we climb the floor, sloped away from the exit. It’s a little like the beginning of the end of that goofy Titanic movie when the mighty ship splits in two and the floor becomes a wall. Clearly, the Capricornia’s lost her final battle with Hurricane Celeste.
The wind is having its way with the double doors, blowing them inward and then sucking them out, like we’re inside a huge lung. They strain and rattle against their hinges. “Look out!” Max shouts, holding up an elbow to protect her face as we get near. With her other hand, she’s pulling me closer. She reaches for the near door, trying to steady it as it flaps like mad, but I tug her back.
“Don’t be a fool!” I yell.
“Little late for that, don’t you think?” she says, snapping her wrist free of my grip.
When she goes again to grab the swing door, there’s a great ripping sound, like a tree cracking in a thunderstorm, and the door is yanked from the frame, sucked spinning out into the hurricane sky. We move quick through the opening left behind. The rain is thicker than ever, heavy sheets swamping us both. The slicing wind drives us to the railing. If not for it, we’d be flung over the ocean like that door. At first, we both just hold on, lucky we don’t go airborne, but then the deck buckles beneath us and the whole boat lurches. I can’t be sure, but could be we’re starting to spin.
Hand over hand, we drag ourselves up the inclined deck, mountain-climbing along the railing. Only reason I know Max is ahead of me is the weak light of her glow stick, which I make out when I lift my face into the biting wind. Finally, that glow quits moving in the deluge, and I catch up to her. I look out into the ocean for our escape raft but see only tumbling waves, ten feet tall.
“Here,” she shouts, leaning back so I can see what’s ahead of her. There’s the rope, just exactly as I tied it, secured to the railing. But instead of leading out and down into the water, it leads up onto the roof of the casino boat, taut as a fishing line that’s snagged something mean.
We each reach out and take hold of the rope, tug down hard with all our weight to try to flip the raft back down. It doesn’t even notice. The wind’s beating it back, or maybe it’s got hooked on something up there. “Climb up?” I yell.
Max gives me a look, and this time, she’s got a point. If either one of us releases our grip on the rope, sure as sin we’d get blown out to sea. Inside my curled fingers, the rope chews the skin. But I don’t let go, and neither does Max. Ahead of us, a chunk of the deck just lifts away, weightless, and corkscrews up, vanishing in the rain. We clutch the rope together, side by side, and I’m thinking we’ve somehow found ourselves ready for last words, if they’re to be spoke. “Max!” I holler, and she turns to face me. “I’m real damn sorry.” I mean for her to know how much I regret that I was ugly to her when we first met, that I failed to get her to safety by the dumb choices I made.
Who knows if she gets any of that, but she smiles and yells, “Sorry for nothing. We gave this a good fight.”
The boat bucks again, like a bronco trying to shake its rider, and the rope rips itself from our grasp. Both of us drop flat to the deck. I roll quick into Max and wrap my arms around her, and we tumble to the side, nearly sliding into the ocean. Right on the edge, Max has grabbed
some bit of railing, anchoring us.
When I gaze up, something now hovers in the storm, right above us. Max sees it too, and she yells, “That the raft?”
The big orange inflatable isn’t flying away. It’s just twirling madly in the wind, like a battered windsock. Celeste’s trying to steal the only way out we got left. The crazy image of us climbing the rope straight up flashes in my mind. Instead, we watch it dip down, then strain up, flip around again, all the while tugging to free itself. It’s like a tethered bird that’s too stupid to know it’s not going anywhere. This show goes on for a few minutes, long enough that we finally just tuck our faces into each other and huddle, focused only on not letting go of the railing.
Then the sky collapses.
At least that’s what it feels like. The raft flops down on top of us, heavy and wet. It cuts off the rain and quiets the wind some, but it also smothers us. I look over for Max in the dark, worried she’s crushed or suffocated. “Ya’ll right?” I yell, and she yells back, “Still kicking.”
We belly crawl out from under the raft, scrambling for air. I’m surprised we’re not even trapped by the weight, which is spongy and soft. Stranger still, though, is that out in the open, the wind’s not so strong as it was, and the rain’s suddenly about what you’d get during any old thunderstorm. We get to our feet, shaky, and look out over the ocean, where the waves are still fat and high, but the sharp mountain peaks are gone. They look more like rolling hills.
“Just me or is this dying down?” Max asks, putting to words the same question I had.
I shrug and grin. “Guess so. Could be we don’t die today.”
She spins into me, and we wrap arms around each other. Maybe she starts crying and maybe she doesn’t. In just a few minutes, the clouds are breaking overhead, and impossibly, a circle of night sky opens above us. We can see the stars and even the half-moon’s bony light. I hear Max curse and turn to see what caught her attention. With the light, I can see the back half of the Capricornia, a hundred yards away and on its side. “The storm ripped her in two,” I say. “Lucky we didn’t roll over.”
Into the Hurricane Page 16
