by Jane Heller
“I’ll let you know if I hear from her,” I told Suzanne, “Where are you going to be during the storm?”
“I’m going to—”
I didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. The line went dead. At the same instant, the power in the house went off. I was now standing in the kitchen in total darkness. The lights were out and the windows were boarded up and the air-conditioning was off and I felt as if I were in a coffin.
I foraged in the kitchen drawer for the flashlight and let it guide me out of the room.
“Okay, Pete. We’re outta here,” I said, realizing that I didn’t have as much time to evacuate as I thought I did, and that there was no way to predict what this hurricane would do.
Pete bounded over to me, wagging his tail excitedly.
“I know. I know. We’ll take an umbrella,” I said, reaching down to pet him.
I was about to pick up my suitcase and head for the door when I suddenly heard the surge. The surge of the ocean. I couldn’t see out the windows or the sliding-glass doors, but I couldn’t help hearing the roar of the sea as the waves began to slam against the shore, just underneath the house. From the sound of it, which reminded me of a Mack truck going eighty miles an hour, the ocean had swelled to monstrous proportions. I knew what that meant. I’d seen surges that had struck houses and high-rise buildings with the force of a battering ram. I’d even seen surges that swallowed buildings whole. I knew there was a chance that I’d never see my house again, and the thought made it difficult to breathe.
“Come on, Pete. We’ve got to get out,” I said tightly, moving once again toward the door, my flashlight leading the way.
And then I stopped.
The rain suddenly began to pound so hard against the roof that I thought it might collapse—if the wind, which was now thrashing against the house, didn’t blow it off first.
“What’s going on?” I said out loud. “We’re not supposed to feel the brunt of the storm for hours yet.”
I opened the front door just a crack and saw, to my horror, that Seacrest Way was totally flooded, impassable, a veritable river of water. There wasn’t a car in sight.
My throat closed. In that split second, I knew I was trapped…that Pete and I would have to stay in the house for better or worse. There was no way to evacuate now.
And then came the first crash.
Something had slammed into the house. A roof tile? A tree limb? What?
Before I could investigate, there was another loud noise. A bang. Something had broken or been ripped off the side of the house. But there was no way I could tell what it was.
I ran to the phone to call Ben, to tell him I couldn’t get there. And then I would call the police, to ask them to come and help me. But I couldn’t, I realized, when I didn’t hear a dial tone. My phone was dead.
Use the cell phone, I told myself, and reached into my handbag for it. I punched in Ben’s number and then listened for a ring or a busy signal or some sign of life. But there wasn’t any. Obviously, Ben’s phone was dead too.
I called the police, thinking they could send a boat for me and I could sail out of Seacrest Way to safety, but the 911 operator said they were swamped with calls and that I should try to stay calm and sit tight.
Maybe that’s the ticket, I thought. I’ll have a few belts and get tight.
“What do you say, Pete old boy? Wanna get drunk?” I asked him.
He answered by wrapping himself around my legs.
Dog by my side and flashlight in hand, I made my way back into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine, then downed it in one long swallow. Feeling a little more fortified, I flipped on the small transistor radio I’d bought in the hardware store that morning and listened to our local station babble on about the storm. But I didn’t need them to tell me about it. I could hear it. The wind and rain were growing even stronger, more violent, and the ocean was whipping the shit out of my deck. Hurricane Frances was not going to be a pussycat, that I knew, but I had done all I could to protect myself and my house. I would just have to follow the 911 operator’s advice when she’d said: try to stay calm and sit tight.
The question was: where to sit tight?
From past experience I knew that it was wise to pick an interior room in the house, away from windows and doors and flying debris. I decided on the master bathroom. It was windowless, the Jacuzzi was full of water in case I got thirsty, and the acoustics were great in case a good song came on the radio and I felt like singing along.
I gathered everything I would need over the long haul—radio, flashlight, canned food, can opener, utensils, already-opened bottle of Merlot and a wineglass—and arranged them carefully in a gallon-sized plastic garbage bag. Then, fully provisioned, Pete and I went off to the bathroom.
Pete hunkered down next to the bidet. I staked out the rim of the tub as my territory.
“Well, buddy. It’s just you and me now,” I told the dog, trying to sound chipper. The truth was, I was terrified. Being the object of the devil’s wrath wasn’t my idea of a day at the beach.
I was about to close the bathroom door to seal Pete and me off from the rest of the house, when there was a loud banging by the front door. Pete jumped up and started barking.
“Quiet!” I said. “It sounds like a tree fell on the house!”
I crept out of the bathroom, through the bedroom, into the hallway, and listened, Pete at my heels.
There was another bang! Three bangs, in fact!
It’s someone knocking, I realized, panic-stricken, as Pete barked and jumped and ran around in circles.
I froze as I pictured Frances standing at my door, the devil in her eyes, evil seeping from every pore. Yes, Satan was out there knocking, waiting for me to let him in, waiting to punish me as he had punished David, Mike Cook, and the emus. It had to be Satan. Who else could it be? No normal person would be out in a hurricane.
There was more knocking—pounding was more like it—and then a voice that was barely audible over the roar of the storm and Pete’s barking.
“Hey! Open up! Don’t make me stand here soakin’ wet. Give a guy a break, huh, BS?”
It was Jeremy! But how—
I grabbed the flashlight, ran to the front door, and pulled it open, which wasn’t easy, given the force of the wind.
“Trick or treat,” he said and winked at me.
Pete calmed down while I shined the flashlight on our unexpected guest. He was soaking wet, every inch of him, and, judging by the assorted leaves and twigs that had nested in his thick red hair, he’d been tossed around by the wind, too.
“What on earth are you doing here?” I asked, and closed the door behind him.
“How about a hello?” he said, stepping out of his fishing boots and foul weather gear and laying them on the floor of the foyer.
“Sorry. Hello,” I said sheepishly. “It’s just that I wasn’t expecting…Now will you tell me what you’re doing here?”
“Ben said you didn’t make it over to his house and didn’t call to say you were okay,” Jeremy explained as he marched past me into the house, shaking his wet head the way Pete did after a bath. “He was worried about you.”
“What about you?” I asked, arching an eyebrow.
“What about me?”
“Were you worried about me?”
“Yeah, sure. Why do you think I waded through three feet of water?”
“You walked here?”
“I walked part of the way here. I drove until I got to Seacrest Way. When I saw how bad the street was flooded out, I parked the truck on higher ground and did the rest on foot. What’s a little standing water to a fisherman, ya know?”
I shook my head. The man may not have been normal but he wasn’t timid, I had to give him that.
“’Course, I just had the damn pickup fixed. Put in a new thermostat after it overheated last night. Now the engine will probably be flooded.”
“Jeremy, you really didn’t have to come here and check on me. What a
bout your father? He’s the one who needs you.”
“He’s got the doctors and nurses to take care of him. The hospital’s probably the place to be right now.”
“But just a few hours ago, you said you didn’t want to risk his life by helping me,” I pointed out. “You said you couldn’t afford to piss the devil off.”
“I can’t,” he said, not elaborating.
I didn’t press him. I was just glad he had come. And flattered. I wasn’t used to having men take risks on my behalf.
“Has there been any improvement in your father’s condition?” I asked.
“Nope. But he’s hangin’ on. That’s about the best I can say about it.”
“What about your boat? And your house?”
“I went down to the marina first thing this morning. Tied up the Hatteras as best as I could. The house? Well, who knows? It’s up a little higher than yours. Maybe that’ll make a difference and maybe it won’t.”
“You must be as exhausted as I—”
I was interrupted by a loud bang, this time from the back of the house. It sounded as if a section of the deck had broken off.
“Jeremy!” I cried. “The house is falling apart!”
He shook his head. “Nothin’ you can do until the storm’s over. Now, where were you plannin’ to sit this thing out?”
“In there,” I said, nodding in the direction of the master bathroom.
“Well, what are we waitin’ for?”
Chapter 25
“Now this is cozy, isn’t it,” said Jeremy as he hoisted himself up onto the vanity and sat next to the sink, his legs dangling against the vanity doors.
“A little too cozy,” I said. “I’ve never been the communal type, unlike Ben, who’d think it was normal for two people and a dog to spend hours in a bathroom together.”
“Aw, cheer up, BS. It could be a lot worse. You could be standin’ out there in the storm, gettin’ blown to Cuba. Instead, you’re sittin’ in a fancy bathroom that’s bigger than most people’s living rooms.”
“I know. It’s just that I’m worried about the house. The place is falling apart. Listen.”
We listened. There was no mistaking the sounds of destruction, even from our cocoonlike shelter in the bathroom, and it was hard to focus on anything else. There was constant banging and crashing and creaking. I guessed that the wind had now reached over a hundred miles an hour and that the surge from the ocean was threatening to demolish the deck. That could only mean one thing: 666 Seacrest Way was in danger of going under—and so were we.
“I’m scared,” I announced.
Pete barked.
“You too, Pete?” I said.
He yawned.
“I guess not.”
“Look, BS. It’s stupid to sit here worryin’,” said Jeremy. “I say we have some of that good-lookin’ wine you’ve got there.” He pointed at the Merlot. “A couple of glasses of that and we won’t care about anything.”
“I only have one glass,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting company.”
“You keep the glass. I’ll drink out of the bottle.”
I smiled as I pictured the red wine dribbling down Jeremy’s chin, onto his white Cook’s Charters T-shirt. The man probably spent a fortune on Spray ’n Wash.
He filled my glass and then took a couple of swigs out of the bottle.
“Hmmm,” he said. “Kinda makes you feel warm all over. Taste it.”
I sipped the wine.
Then I heard a thunderous crash.
“What was that?” I said, jumping up off the rim of the bathtub.
“Shh,” Jeremy quieted me. “Drink the wine.”
“But—”
“Sit down. It doesn’t matter.”
He was right, of course. It didn’t matter what was going on outside our little fort. The house was falling down around us, but, for now, there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.
I sat back down and drank more wine and forced myself to listen to Jeremy tell stories. There was the one about the time he and his father went tarpon fishing in the Keys…the one about the time his mother caught her first fish…the one about the time he sang for an executive from a record company and was so nervous he couldn’t hit a note. They were charming stories and Jeremy told them well and I found myself beginning to relax, to make up my mind to let the devil do whatever he was going to do to us. The next time I heard a crash, I flinched but didn’t jump off the tub. And the time after that, I didn’t even flinch. Was it the alcohol I was surrendering to? Or was it Jeremy?
“What do you say we change radio stations?” he asked during a lull in his storytelling. The transistor had been set to the local news station, which was broadcasting nothing but updates on Hurricane Frances.
“You think we’ll find another station with decent reception and decent music? In this storm?” I said.
“Only one way to find out.”
He took another swig from the wine bottle, draining it down to the last drop, reached for the radio, and fiddled with the dial. At first, all he got was static. And then, as if by magic, he lit on a song.
“Hey, remember this one?” he asked me, his expression heavy with nostalgia.
I nodded. It was Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” Jeremy and I were sophomores in high school when it came out and it was sort of an anthem then—a slow, lazy, poignant song about the hope of finding love before it was too late. Back in high school, who wasn’t searching for a heart of gold? We were all looking for that one person who would accept and love us as we were. Some of us were still looking.
“How about a dance, BS?” Jeremy asked.
“A dance? In here?” I said. My bathroom was bigger than most people’s living rooms, but it wasn’t exactly a disco.
“Sure. Why not?” He hopped off the vanity and turned the volume up on the radio. Then he stood in front of me, his arms outstretched.
“But I…Well, it’s kind of a strange—”
I glanced over at Pete, as if to ask his permission, as if he were our chaperone, but the dog stayed right where he was, sprawled out next to the bidet looking totally unconcerned.
Jeremy turned the volume up even louder. The music reverberated across the bathroom tiles and I felt as if I were in an echo chamber.
“You won’t hear the storm now,” he said, his arms still waiting to encircle me.
I gulped suddenly, unsure of precisely what I was afraid of. Was it the hurricane? The devil’s wrath? The thought of losing my home? Or was it touching Jeremy that had me trembling? The anticipation of intimate physical contact with a man I’d known virtually all my life but never known at all? The possibility that I would enjoy being held by him, while he would be thinking of the woman who still claimed his heart, the one whose identity he wouldn’t divulge?
“Barbara?” he asked, holding out his hand to me.
He had never called me by my name—well, not in years—and the sound of it on his lips made my cheeks flush.
It’s the wine, I told myself, and the threat of danger from the storm.
“If you don’t hurry up and dance with me, the song’ll be over,” he said. “It only lasts about three minutes.”
“I know,” I said. “I remember.”
I slid off the edge of the bathtub and stepped into Jeremy’s arms. His body was warm against mine, soft, but not unpleasantly so. There was something oddly sexual about his stockiness, particularly after Mitchell’s wiriness. I even found his protruding, middle-aged gut appealing and suddenly wondered why everybody was so obsessed with toning and firming and pumping up. I liked the way we fit together, liked how it felt.
Since the dance floor, such as it was, was small, our movements were compact. We didn’t so much dance as take tiny steps in time with the music. Jeremy held me closely, tightly, pressing his bearded cheek against mine. When he began to hum along with Neil Young, I hummed along with both of them.
Funny, I thought as we moved. Funny how I would never have dreamed that I�
�d be dancing with Jeremy Cook and enjoying it. Funny how it sometimes took a life-threatening situation to bring people together, to create unlikely partners out of near-strangers.
We danced right through till the end of the song and then danced through two or three more. We danced through the wind and the rain and the surge of the ocean. We danced through the crashes and the bangs and the violence of the storm. We were dancing to the sound of the Beatles’ “Something in the Way She Moves” when Jeremy pulled away, but only slightly, his strong hands still on my back, our bodies continuing to sway to the music.
“Hey,” he said, so softly I barely heard him.
“Did you say something?” I asked.
“Uh, yeah. I did,” he said awkwardly.
“What?” I said.
He cleared his throat. “I wanna tell you about—” He stopped.
“About?” I said.
“About the girl from high school. The one you asked me about the other day. The one I’m still in love with.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to hear about the woman Jeremy loved. Not now. Not when I was the one in his arms.
But part of me—just a tiny part—wondered if the woman might be me.
I held my breath as I waited for him to continue.
“Remember I told you that love is kinda like catchin’ a fish?” he said.
I smiled. “Your Cookism,” I said.
“My Cookism,” he acknowledged. “I told you that they both take plenty of patience and persistence and a sense of timing. In other words, you can’t rush either of ’em.”
“I remember,” I said, eager to know where all this was leading.
“Well, ya see, BS—Barbara—I think the time is right now,” he said, seeming to be urging himself on. “The wine is probably helpin’ me out here, but what I’m tryin’ to say is we’re stuck in this bathroom together and we don’t know what’s goin’ on outside and we might not have homes when this storm is all over. Hell, if a tornado hits the way they predict, we might not make it outta here at all. And then there’s the devil thing. Who knows where all that’s headed? Ya know what I mean?”
