by Jane Heller
I nodded tentatively.
“So there’s nothin’ to lose now,” he said. “No reason for me not to just let it rip. Ya see what I’m sayin’?”
I nodded again. I got the distinct feeling that Jeremy was waiting for me to guess what he wanted to tell me.
“So anyway,” he pressed on when I didn’t, “before I say any more, I want you to know that this has nothing to do with the hair and the boobs.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Well, I mean, I was in love with you before all that. Since tenth grade, if you really wanna know.”
I pulled away from Jeremy so I could get a better look at him. I wanted to see his face, make sure he wasn’t smirking or jeering or mocking me as he often did. But his expression was as earnest and solemn as a choirboy’s.
“Say something, would ya, BS?” he pleaded. “I know this bathroom isn’t the kind of romantic setting you women dream about, but it’s the best I could do in a hurricane.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was flooded with a jumble of emotions—confusion, gratitude, excitement, even a little melancholy. The very idea that Jeremy Cook had loved me all those years and never told me made me sad. Sad for him, sad for me. But he was right about love: you couldn’t hurry it, couldn’t force it, couldn’t even recognize it until the time was right. And the time wouldn’t have been right either twenty years ago or twenty days ago. I didn’t see Jeremy as anything other than Ben’s redneck buddy, the type of man I’d been raised to disdain. I was too busy ministering to my husband, Mr. Armani suit.
“You think I’m a lunatic, right?” he said.
“Of course not,” I said. “It’s just that this comes as kind of a shock to me. I had no idea how you felt. Not really.”
He reached out to stroke my cheek. The gesture was so exquisitely tender, so contrary to my old image of him.
“You don’t have to love me back, ya know,” he said. “Or even tell me how you feel about me. I know I’m not your idea of Mr. Right. I’m not a fancy dresser and I don’t talk like a college professor and I’m never gonna make a million dollars. I don’t expect you to jump up and down with excitement about my little speech. But I love you anyway. Always have, always will. Gray hair, blond hair, it doesn’t matter to me. I’ll admit, the darksider business threw me. I mean, it’s not every day that the girl you love tells you she’s been taken over by the devil. But hey, love is love. Nobody’s perfect, huh?”
“No, nobody is,” I smiled.
“The main thing was to get it off my chest. In case anything happens to us. I wanted you to know before it was too late.”
Tears filled my eyes and Jeremy wiped them away. I tried to talk but the lump in my throat wouldn’t let me.
“Nothin’ to cry about, BS,” he said. “Hopefully the storm won’t do as much damage as they’re sayin’.”
“It’s not the storm that’s making me cry,” I said. “It’s you.”
“Gee, thanks,” he laughed.
“No, I mean, it’s what you said about loving me no matter what. About accepting me no matter what. No one has ever said anything like that to me.”
“No one?”
I shook my head. “Until now.”
The tears continued to fall, despite my attempts to stop them. I was incredibly moved by Jeremy’s declaration, and yet I couldn’t tell him I loved him back. I didn’t know how I felt. It was too soon, too sudden.
He must have sensed my ambivalence because he took me in his arms and said, “Just know that I love you.” He gave me a squeeze to emphasize the point.
“Jeremy, I—”
“I told you. You don’t have to say anything back.”
He drew his face close to mine. My heart thumped wildly in my chest as I closed my eyes in anticipation of our first kiss.
And then came a thump of another sort—a thunderous, earsplitting crash that neither of us, no matter how amorous we were feeling, could ignore. Even Pete, who had slept through the whole romantic scene, sprang up from the floor next to the bidet and began to bark.
“What do you think happened?” I asked Jeremy, who quickly reached out to turn off the radio.
Before he could reply, there was another crash as the door to the bathroom was suddenly forced open by an onslaught of water! I screamed as it poured into the small space where we had taken cover, carrying with it various household items that were now bobbing like buoys in the ocean.
“Jesus,” Jeremy said. “A wave must’ve smashed clear through the sliders in the living room.”
“What do we do?” I said, trying unsuccessfully not to panic. “The whole house is filling up with water!”
“Here. Give me your hand,” Jeremy commanded. “You’re gonna climb up on this vanity and stay there until the water recedes. We all are.”
Good thing Mitchell insisted on putting in a double vanity, I thought, as Jeremy helped me up onto it.
“Now it’s Pete’s turn,” he said. “Come on, boy.” He slapped his thigh as he called for Pete to come to him.
“You want him on the vanity too?” I said. “A dog his size will never stay put. The minute you get him up here he’ll jump right down.”
“Pete’s not your average dog,” Jeremy reminded me. “He may not feel like campin’ out in your sink, but he knows it’s better than sittin’ in water up to his ears.”
Jeremy picked Pete up in his arms and deposited him on top of the vanity. The dog not only stayed there but licked Jeremy’s face in a gesture of thanks.
His two charges taken care of, Jeremy joined us on the vanity. The three of us watched in horror as the water continued to rush into the bathroom, spreading across the floor and flooding the small space. I didn’t have to wonder what the rest of the house looked like. I knew that the carpet, the furniture, the electrical wiring, everything would be ruined.
“I don’t think I can just sit here and watch this,” I said. “I’ve got to do something.”
“How about listenin’ to some more of my bad stories while we wait this out?” Jeremy suggested, feigning a cheerfulness I was sure he didn’t feel. He was just as scared as I was, I knew, and just as helpless. “I’ve got enough of ’em to outlast a dozen storms.”
“I’m sure you do,” I smiled.
He took my hand.
“Okay, now I’m gonna tell you about the time I took Teddy Kennedy dolphin fishing…” Jeremy began.
I can’t recall what he said, only that I tried to stay focused on the sound of his voice, not on the sight of the rising water.
Just think about the fact that he loves you, I told myself as Jeremy talked. Focus on how that feels.
The water continued to rise, reaching at least two feet up the vanity, but Jeremy never stopped trying to distract me. Midway through his umpteenth tale, I noticed that the water had not only stopped rising but appeared to be receding. The wind, too, seemed to have died down.
“Jeremy,” I interrupted. “Look.”
I pointed to the water as it was moving back out of the the bathroom, almost as if something were sucking it out.
“There must’ve been a shift in the wind,” he said. “The water’s goin’ back out the way it came. That happens when there’s a wind shift. The ocean surge recedes and the water seeks its own level. It looks like the devil’s givin’ us a break for some reason.”
“But why would he do that?” I said. “He could just as easily have let us drown.”
Jeremy grinned. “Remember all that stuff you were givin’ me in the hospital last night? About love bein’ the key to gettin’ Satan out of town and out of our hair?”
I nodded.
“Well, there was a lot of love in this room today. Maybe he got an earful and couldn’t take it anymore.”
Pete barked in what was clearly a response to Jeremy’s theory. And then he lifted his right front paw, just as he had done in my living room the night he told us about Frances.
“Look!” I pointed when I realized that the dog was
scratching little markings into the Formica top of the vanity.
“Sweet Jesus. He’s doin’ it again,” said Jeremy as the two of us hovered around Pete, our eyes wide with amazement.
“He’s writing something,” I whispered. “He’s actually carving a message to us on the countertop! With his nails!”
Pete barked again and kept writing. When he was finished, he jumped off the vanity, into the slowly receding water, to give us room to read what he had written. His penmanship wasn’t the greatest, and his tone was pretty lofty for a dog, and I would certainly have to replace the scratched Formica at some point (or, rather, Mitchell would), but here is what he wrote:
“Satan is powerless in the face of love.”
Chapter 26
I was one of the lucky ones. My house was still standing after Hurricane Frances. Most of the deck had broken off and been swept into the ocean; the sliders had been shattered, leaving shards of glass all over the furniture; and the salt water that had poured into the house with each surge of the sea had destroyed much of the electrical wiring, but it was all fixable. And, given the fact that Mitchell owned the house and was planning to install himself and his mistress there after our divorce, the thousands of dollars in repairs were his responsibility, not mine.
Jeremy’s house, too, had been rendered temporarily unlivable. But there were people in town who would never live in their houses again, because their houses were no longer there. They had either been demolished by the storm, literally flattened into a heap of debris, or had gone up in flames as a result of a gas explosion.
The real estate market, too, was devastated by the hurricane. Never mind that there were no longer a variety of houses in good enough shape to show to customers. There weren’t any customers, period. Local buyers were too busy cleaning up after the storm to go house shopping. And out-of-state customers were having second thoughts about buying in hurricane-riddled South Florida, where insurance companies had all but stopped writing policies, especially for properties on the water.
The good news was that Jeremy’s boat survived the storm with very little damage, which meant that he had a place to stay while his house was being repaired. And Ben’s cabin, which was several miles west of the storm’s eye, was virtually untouched, which meant that Pete and I had a place to stay, too.
Of course, Ben’s cabin looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. Never the neatest person on the planet, Ben was now aided and abetted in his sloppiness by his housemates, Janice and Denise, whose idea of “cleaning up” was winning at poker, which the three of them played nearly every night. When I suggested to Ben that he should spend his nights trying to figure out how he was going to earn a living now that his emu business was kaput, he said I should mind my own business. So I did. I left Ben to his women and his poker and spent my evenings with Jeremy.
We visited his father in the hospital, where Mike Cook continued to hover between life and death. The doctors were puzzled by his condition, which, they said, wasn’t typical for someone who had suffered a heart attack. Jeremy and I did not tell them that it was Satan who was manipulating Mike’s health and that modern medicine would be of no use whatsoever.
In fact, we didn’t tell anyone what we knew about the devil. Not Ben, not the police, not any of my fellow agents at Home Sweet Home—all of whom were still wondering where Frances was. She had not come into the office or even called in since the night of our fateful dinner at her house. Charlotte suggested that she might have left town just before the storm hit and neglected to tell anyone, but Jeremy and I knew the truth. We knew that the devil was behind her disappearance. What we didn’t know was where and how he would strike next.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Jeremy one night, about two weeks after the hurricane. We were sitting next to each other on the front steps of Ben’s cabin. The air was dense and damp, a thunderstorm imminent.
“About what?” I asked.
“About how to chase Satan out of town,” he said.
“Tell me,” I said eagerly, hooking my arm through his. I was touching Jeremy with increasing regularity now, ever since our dance in the bathroom, but I had yet to kiss him. We’d come close a few times, but one of us always pulled back. I supposed that Jeremy didn’t want to appear as if he were rushing me, given his Cookism about love and fishing. For my part, I was just plain scared to kiss him. I was growing to like him, very much in fact, but a kiss? Well, a kiss—a long, slow, groin-stirring kiss—would take things to another level, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. Not with memories of Mitchell’s treachery and David’s tail still dancing in my head.
“If Pete’s right,” said Jeremy, “and the devil loses his power when he comes face-to-face with love—”
“If Pete’s right,” I interrupted. “Have you given any thought to how a dog would know what makes the devil lose his power?”
Jeremy shrugged. “I just figure he’s a magic dog or something. You’ve got that darksider power, don’t you? You know stuff no normal person would know. It’s the same with Pete, I guess.”
“But where did he come from? And why was he sent to my door?”
“Look, I don’t have a clue. Now do you wanna hear my idea or don’t you?”
“I do,” I smiled.
“Okay. Banyan Beach is in bad shape now, right?”
“Right.”
“Some of our neighbors are homeless. Some have lost their homes temporarily. Some have lost their businesses—all thanks to the hurricane. So we’re gonna do something. We’re gonna pull this town back together, lift the morale, help the people who need help, promote a spirit of community,” he announced.
“That’s a lovely idea, Jeremy, but how do you propose to do it?”
“By puttin’ on a townwide Fire Ants concert. Right smack in the middle of Main Street,” he said, becoming more and more animated. “Ya know, like those shows they put on to benefit the farmers or the rain forest or whatever. The difference is, we’re not gonna ask anybody to pay to get in. We don’t want people’s money. We want their show of support. We want them to agree to pitch in and help their neighbors, whether that means offerin’ homeless people a place to stay while their houses are bein’ rebuilt or rollin’ up their sleeves and doin’ some manual labor, cleanin’ up debris and stuff like that. If people turn out for this, BS, and show their goodwill, it’ll not only bring the town together and lift the morale here—it’ll send Satan packin’ once and for all.”
“How do we know he won’t try to disrupt the concert?” I said. “Don’t forget what he did at the River Princess party.”
“That was different,” said Jeremy. “Greed was the motivatin’ force that day. Love will be the motivatin’ force on the day of the concert. And love is exactly what’s gonna drive the devil out of here.”
I considered Jeremy’s argument. “It might just work,” I said. “If Satan sees that the people of Banyan Beach are good, decent, loving people who offer their help to those in need, maybe his power will be diminished and he’ll be foiled. He’ll be forced to leave town and I’ll be restored to my old self! Oh, Jeremy, it’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
“We’ve got nothin’ to lose,” he said. “That exorcism on Frances didn’t get him out of town. So now we’re gonna show him that the town doesn’t want him.”
“Yes,” I said, my excitement growing. “When do you think we could start organizing the concert?”
Jeremy stood up and held out his hand.
“Right now,” he said and led me inside the cabin.
The concert proved remarkably easy to arrange. Once Jeremy contacted the other members of The Fire Ants and got their okay, we spoke to Mayor Kineally, to the head of Banyan Beach’s Recreation Department, to the news directors at the local television stations, and to the publisher of the Banyan Beach Gazette, who agreed to advertise the event gratis. Before long, everybody in town—young and old, newcomers and longtime residents—was talking about the concert, planning for it, looking forwa
rd to it. It became a sort of beacon of hope for people, a respite from their troubles and their chores, a couple of hours of rock ’n’ roll to lift their spirits.
Ben was in charge of the volunteer program we were organizing to coincide with the concert. People were being asked to pitch in and help their neighbors in any way they could: by donating food and clothing and even room and board to those stranded by the storm; by offering tools and manpower to rebuild homes and businesses; by providing comfort and companionship to the elderly victims of the storm; by contributing whatever money they could to the establishment of a special Hurricane Relief Fund.
“You’re doing a great job,” I told my brother when he reported that one of the local developers he’d spoken to had pledged $10,000 to the relief fund.
“This is more rewarding than raising emus,” he said with a straight face.
The weather on the day of the concert was overcast, gloomy. The forecasters (including Chrissy) had predicted rain, and a slight mist had been falling throughout the morning, but the gray skies didn’t deter the more than six thousand people who showed up at the village green, just off Main Street, and spread their blankets and beach chairs across the lawn. There was a carnival atmosphere as Banyan Beachers greeted their neighbors, introduced themselves to people they didn’t know, and acted as if they were just glad to be alive.
Mayor Kineally, never one to miss a photo op, stepped up to the microphone and thanked everybody for coming, then went on and on about the hardships we’d all suffered, how resilient we were, how it would take more than a hurricane to keep us down, blah blah blah. He was in the middle of a sentence when the crowd began to clap in a not-very-subtle attempt to get him off the stage.
“Okay. Okay. I can take a hint,” he laughed, waving his arms in surrender. He introduced The Fire Ants, to thunderous applause, and made way for the members of the band.
My heart did a little flip as Jeremy came into view. I was standing to the right of the stage, next to Suzanne, close enough to see him wink at me.
