Hurricane Kiss

by Deborah Blumenthal

  “I left the car, I tried to go after you, but I got caught in the storm. I wanted to help. To save you,” he says. “But it got worse so fast.”

  “It’s over, it doesn’t matter now.”

  “It does matter,” he insists. “I couldn’t lose everything again …”

  “You mean after Mom?”

  “After you were taken away, in detention. And then with the storm coming. I tried to protect you, but I drove you away. I couldn’t admit I was wrong. I turned my own son into the enemy for God’s sake.” A deep wail breaks from his throat.

  “I’m here, Dad, please.”

  He looks up at me, meeting my gaze, and I hear something I’ve never heard him say before.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, son.”

  I look away. All the feelings I didn’t know were inside me, that I didn’t know existed at all, pour out uncontrollably.

  My dad comes home a week later. We sit down and I tell him everything that happened with Briggs. He doesn’t say a word; he just listens. But it’s more than listening. I see something in his eyes I’ve never seen before. Compassion. In my entire life I’ve never seen that in him. He takes three months off from work after that.

  “We’ll get Briggs put away,” he says, “and clear your name. No matter what it takes.” I see the marine in him again. The strength, the focus. The dedication to getting the job done. For the first time in my life, I like that.

  That same week I get a text from Ryan: My dad died during the storm.

  He’s on his own now, orphaned overnight. No mom, no dad, just an aunt and uncle living in another part of the state.

  Ryan and I meet and talk about everything that happened during the storm—and before, with Briggs.

  “I tried to get into the school,” he says. “I tried the key, but it didn’t work, then I pounded on the door in case someone was inside, but it was useless.” He held his hands out helplessly. “So I drove to a friend’s house—a brick house—and we stayed there. But my dad was so scared and so shaken up he died of a heart attack.”

  Now I knew what the lights we saw were. But the noise of the hurricane blocked out their voices and the sound of him pounding on the door. If only we knew. I still have my dad, but his is gone and Ryan is more alone than ever.

  “We have to stop Briggs,” I say.

  “It’s going to be hard,” he says, looking away. “Talking about it, telling everybody. I don’t know if …”

  “It’s harder keeping it inside, torturing ourselves, acting like it didn’t happen.”

  He stares off and then turns back to me finally. “I’m with you. I’ll do whatever I have to.”

  “We’ll get through it, no matter what, Ryan.”

  “Yeah,” he says, his eyes filling with tears. I grab him and hug him, holding him while he leans against me crying.

  SIX WEEKS LATER

  Together with my dad and Jillian’s mom, we go to the school authorities. And then the District Attorney. They ask us a million questions and tape our stories. We tell them everything we know and everything we found. They promise to be in touch.

  “There will be a long investigation,” Jillian’s mom says. “They’ll contact the schools Briggs worked in before. But in the meantime, the school is forcing him to take a leave. The paper will stay on top of it,” she says, “until we get him locked up.”

  Once people start asking questions, word begins to spread. One morning before school starts, Jillian’s mom gets a call at home. It’s someone who works in the school. Someone who won’t give her name. But she’s someone who can’t stand by and do nothing while the truth gets buried.

  “We were cleaning up after the storm and we found files,” the woman told her. “They were inside the burned-out file cabinets in Briggs’s office. There were a lot of damaged files, but we were able to piece together some of the papers, and we saw the records Briggs was keeping on all the players. We knew he crossed the line. There were photographs of one of the players in a car with another boy. Pictures like that have no place in the office of a football coach,” she said. “It set off alarm bells.”

  “My mom’s meeting with the woman in a restaurant out of town,” Jillian tells me. “My mom convinced her to bring copies of the files with her, so she’ll have the evidence firsthand.”

  A few days after the meeting, her mom called the principal. He agreed to sit down and talk with her.

  “I guess he was ambushed,” I say. “There’s no way he can be in denial any longer.”

  After their meeting, we hear that the principal met with the school board and they agreed to cooperate.

  One of the gym teachers has taken over as coach. For the first time in over a year, I feel a sense of hope.

  I leave my job and after my shoulder starts to heal, I spend my time fixing up our house. There’s an endless amount of work to do, but the workers are happy to have an extra guy and they’re willing to teach me. Building is therapeutic, and it beats shelving groceries.

  Our house has damage inside and out and when I’m not working on it, I help the guys fixing Jillian’s. Their roof has to be replaced, and there’s lots of damage to the outside walls. But at least we both have homes. They’re still standing.

  The local paper runs a story about all the dogs left homeless by the storm. I leave it on the kitchen table that morning.

  “Go down there,” my dad says. That’s it. I don’t need any more encouragement.

  “How do we even start?” Jillian says, walking up and down the aisles of what looks more like a concrete bunker than a shelter, looking at dog after dog, every one of them anxious and scared, their loud, desperate barking ricocheting off the walls to command our attention.

  “Find the one that looks the most pathetic,” I say. It doesn’t take long.

  I stop in front of a cage and see a dog at the far end, huddled against the windowless back wall, as close as she can get, her head drooping, fixed on the floor. She’s a ball of tangled, matted black fur, maybe fifty pounds. Lab mixed with something. Terrier maybe. Her whole body is quaking with fear. I recognize things in her I see in myself: pain, hurt, resignation, isolation. I kneel down and wait outside the bars of the cage. I know she senses that I’m there, but she doesn’t move.

  “Can you take this one out?” I call to a guy who works there. “Can I walk her?” He comes over and unlocks the cage door and reaches in and puts a collar around her neck. “Sad case,” he says.

  We take her for a walk and after a few minutes she stops and looks up at me, her chocolate eyes sizing me up, unsure. I kneel down and rub her head and talk to her softly. I feed her a biscuit, then another one. She leans against me, pushing as close to me now as she was to the concrete wall of her cage. That’s it. She’s not homeless anymore.

  She has a home now. Mine.

  We name her Dawn.

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  JILLIAN

  We go back to school three months after the storm. The school board set up off-site classrooms. Some of my friends made it through Danielle. Some didn’t.

  Kelly and her family disappeared, like they never existed. Something like that doesn’t seem possible. It’s something I can’t begin to process. There’s no information yet on what happened to them. We don’t know what happened to her family’s car. All we have are questions. Are their bodies out near the highway somewhere? Did their car get swept someplace else?

  So many bodies haven’t been identified yet. The cleanup is far from over. Corpses still turn up floating in the sewage-clogged water. It’s so savage. So unthinkable. It will take months, maybe years to find all the missing. To track down the dead. Or maybe we’ll never know.

  I can’t accept it. I can’t and never will. I want to ask Kelly things. I want to go to her for advice. I want to hang out with her and go places, do fun things, stupid things. I st
ill anticipate the way she would answer the questions I would ask, that sure-of-herself style—no matter what the topic, as if she knew everything, dressed in the latest fad stuff, “too cool for school.”

  Kelly never worried about stuff that scared the rest of us. Failing tests. Getting into college. Getting guys to like you. And especially really scary things—like hurricanes.

  She was my best friend, and now I don’t have her. She’s not anywhere and that just makes no sense to me. It’s stupid, I know, but I keep dialing her cell number, waiting for her to pick up on the other end.

  And her picture.

  The one of her in her pink bikini and floppy hat, the one that I took in Galveston when the surf was calm, and I captured one of life’s rare and perfect moments. I stare at it hard as though in some way—wherever she is now—my thoughts can reach her and she’ll know I’m thinking about her and everything we shared. I need to keep doing that. To hold on to that. To remind me that’s what life really is, odd collages of those isolated, perfect, beautiful shared moments with people you love. That’s the best you can hope for. That’s all we have to hold on to, to keep inside ourselves, no matter what.

  “I keep telling myself that up until the end, she probably never allowed herself to think it was over,” I say to Sari. “I doubt it ever occurred to her there was nothing she could do to stop Danielle. She probably never realized it was her time to go, never allowed for the possibility.”

  “She was all about living,” Sari says. “Every day, every crazy minute. She was a hundred percent alive, a hundred percent with you.”

  Only now she’s not. She’s gone, reduced to a memory.

  We talk about her less and less because it’s too hard to look back. Her dad, a surgeon at Memorial, her mom, a pediatric nurse, two brothers, Mike and Quinn. All of them gone now like they were never born, like so many of the people on that highway who stayed where they were because they thought there was literally nowhere to turn. I can’t come to terms with it. I doubt I ever will. All I know is the pain and the sadness, as I relive the memories of what happened during the storm and after, again and again and it rubs me raw inside.

  So many of the after-effects of the storm are buried within us.

  A psychiatrist on TV called it post-traumatic stress disorder. I never went to war, I never pulled the trigger of a gun, but I imagine this is what soldiers go through because none of us can get over seeing so much death around us.

  I try to focus on moving on. I don’t talk to Aidan anymore. He knows I’m seeing River. He also knows what he did, helping Lexie get River’s combination. Maybe he didn’t know how bad it was. Maybe he didn’t know what he was paving the way for. But he did it, and I don’t think he cared how badly it could hurt River. Aidan was like that. Single-minded. About basketball. About everything.

  I think of all the things that were missing between us, but what I see most now is the emptiness.

  Lexie got punished by the storm too, but what she lost was something she could get past. She and her parents survived, but their home was totally destroyed. They were forced to move in with her aunt in a house in a suburb of Dallas. No one knows if she’s ever coming back. She tried to call River a few times, he told me. She left messages saying she was frantic to know how he was. He ignored the calls.

  River and I run together three times a week. I can now go between three or four miles without getting winded, but he goes ten. We also do laps in our pool. He has weights and he’s put me on a weight-lifting program.

  “So you’ll be able to outrun the next category five hurricane,” he says, his smirky smile on his face more days than not.

  When I look at him now, I can’t help thinking of a quote I read: “Sometimes you put up walls not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.”

  That’s the first entry in my new diary, the one I bought for my post-Danielle life. This one doesn’t include the “suckworthy dad” section. He’s not mentioned at all. I’m working on letting go of the anger because I won’t be a victim to it anymore. That’s a decision that’s mine to make, I realize now.

  I read a quote about forgiveness being an evolution of the heart. It makes me stop and think of how living through Danielle and surviving it changed me inside. The death and destruction from the storm was everywhere, but at some point you need to focus more on rebuilding and moving forward than on looking back. It’s your choice to be a victim of the past. Or not to be.

  And that gives me a new direction.

  I want to be the person who breaks down walls and gets to the truth. If I can find a newspaper to hire me after I finish college, that’s what I want to do.

  River’s moving on too. He’s seeing a new therapist now, someone he says he can really talk to.

  “The guy spends his nights playing in a band,” River says, smirking. “I saw them on YouTube; they’re not bad.”

  And for the first time, River’s thinking about what he wants to do with his life too, looking forward more than back. My mom is convinced we can get his record expunged, clearing the way for him to finish his last year and a half of high school and then go to college.

  Because of all the water damage around the house, we have cartons and cartons of books and files to sort through. One night River and I are looking through a stack of books from a bookcase in the den in my house. Some of them were damaged by dampness, but most of them are OK. There’s an art book with a section on Japanese art and a tradition called kintsugi, a way of repairing broken pottery, usually with gold.

  “I love this,” I say. “You fix the damage, you refine it, but you don’t hide it.”

  “Never heard of it,” he says.

  I look at a before-and-after picture of a cup with a deep crack in it. In the after picture, the crack is outlined in gold. It looks like a design element, not an attempt at repairing it.

  “You use lacquer dusted with gold, silver, or platinum to repair the cracks,” I read. “The damage isn’t hidden, it’s enhanced, giving the piece more character.”

  I look at River and think of all he’s gone through, and what he’s still going through. None of that will ever disappear or be forgotten. But maybe he’ll grow better for it in some way—using it to reach out and help others. Or creating art by drawing on the damage inside him, not pretending it doesn’t exist anymore.

  I don’t say any of that, but he looks at me. He gets it.

  “Cool,” he says.

  Eventually we go outside to the pool, dangling our feet in the water. The air is still, perfumed by jasmine. There’s a full moon and a sprinkling of stars in the sky.

  The fence between our houses was torn up, most of the bushes uprooted. Eventually we’ll get around to replacing the boxwoods and putting in a new fence, but in the meantime, there’s no divide between River’s backyard and mine anymore.

  “No fences between us,” he says, slipping his arm around my waist. “I like it this way.”

  I stare back at him, his blond-brown curls nearly reaching his tanned shoulders, his eyes glinting again with laughter. My heart beats harder, the love at category five now.

  “So do I,” I answer.

  Author’s Note

  Hurricane Kiss was inspired by a real-life encounter with a terrifying storm that threatened coastal Texas in September 2005. As Hurricane Rita barreled in, I was living in Houston with my husband, Ralph, and fifteen-year-old daughter, Sophie. Ralph, a reporter, was staying behind to cover the storm for the New York Times, while I was rushing to evacuate with Sophie, our dog and cat, and several hundred thousand other Houstonians.

  We had reason to panic—less than a month before, Katrina had flooded New Orleans, killing close to 2,000 people. My husband had been one of the first reporters on the scene to witness the devastation.

  Would Rita be another Katrina? Would it hit us dead on? We weren’t waiting to find o
ut. We hastily boarded up our windows with plywood. I packed the car with essentials and joined the exodus, heading for an inland town near Austin where we thought we’d be safe.

  But like River and Jillian, we didn’t get far—poor planning had gridlocked the escape routes. It took us close to seven hours to crawl less than twenty miles, and the traffic jam we were trapped in extended for a hundred miles. If the hurricane hit at that moment, I thought, we’d all be killed in our cars. I made a risky call: the highway back to Houston was empty. Surely we could find safety somewhere. I spun the car around and headed back.

  We spent the night with hundreds of other evacuees and their dogs and cats in the ballroom of a downtown Houston hotel that welcomed pets. Then overnight, a miracle! Rita had veered off. The city had gotten a slap of wind and rain but escaped a knockout punch. A day later we headed home. Our house had been spared.

  But I was haunted by what could have been. Fate spared us, unlike the victims of Katrina. That’s why this book is dedicated to them.

  About the Author

  Deborah Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and nutritionist, and the author of seventeen books for children and adults. She has been a regular contributor to the New York Times (including four years as the New York Times Magazine beauty columnist), and a home design columnist for Long Island Newsday. She lives in New York City.

  Special thanks to Tom Krause for his guidance on protecting student-athletes from time demands of overzealous coaches.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.