Paul glanced sideways, his lips curving into a patient smile, barely readable in the dim porch light. “I wouldn’t have said anything if it were a problem to talk about. We crammed a lot into the eight years we had. We didn’t come up with a cure for cancer, but we saw a lot of places, looked at a lot of alternative therapies. That’s one of the things I learned from Julia —the most important thing, I think. You can’t run from your past. You have to take it for what it is and realize that it’s part of you. The disease was part of who she was, but she wasn’t going to let it control her. She made it the thing that reminded us we didn’t have time to waste. Some of the best things in your life come out of the worst. It’ll be that way for Zoey, too. Just give her time. She’s a smart young lady. She’s just trying to figure out who to be.”
“I hope so. I’m worried that she’ll do something like this while I’m gone to work.” My mind was spinning ahead. “I can’t watch her 24-7.”
“So you found a job. J.T. mentioned that you’d been looking for one.” I gave him a surprised look, and he added, “Well, it was in reference to turtle camp. He saw the brochure in class, and he was talking about whether or not you’d still be here during nesting season. He said it hinged on finding employment.”
“I’m working down in Hatteras Village right now, doing water-damage repair and drywall at Sandy’s Seashell Shop. I just sort of . . . stumbled into it, actually. Right place. Right time. I’ve had some experience with that kind of thing.”
“I know the Seashell Shop crowd. They’re good people.” Paul didn’t seem at all surprised that I was doing drywall work, nor did he question whether I could actually handle the job. “And if you’re open to doing light carpentry and whatnot, I know quite a few older folks who could use some help with that sort of thing. For some of them, it’s as simple as replacing lightbulbs or climbing a ladder to take down window screens or fixing storm damage on hurricane shutters and brackets. Actually, the neighbor who’s got my tall ladder right now shouldn’t be climbing it, if you want to know the truth. Anyway, if you’re interested, let me know. I’ll spread your name around.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I had that feeling again. The feeling that, against the odds, all of this might work out after all.
Overhead, the clouds parted, this storm moving on like the last one. Paul pointed toward the blanket of night sky in the gap. “North Star,” he said quietly, and I tried to follow the trajectory of his finger.
“Which one?” I thought of the compass rose in the Hatteras library and my desperate wish that I could finally find true north in life.
“Right there.” He leaned closer to me, baby-fine razor stubble ruffling my hair. “In the summertime, you can just find the Big Dipper and go straight up from the side of the bowl, but in the wintertime, it’s down too low —behind the trees. This time of the year, you need to look for Cassiopeia. See the sort of sideways W right there?” He traced it with his finger, and I followed along.
“Oh, okay. Yes, I see it.”
“Now track from the middle of the W. Down this way, see?” His hand moved, his arm brushing my shoulder. “And there’s Polaris, the North Star. It always sits over the North Pole. That’s why sailors used it to navigate. The rest of the constellations around it —the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia —they’re transpolar. They move around as the months of the year change, but the North Star never moves. It’s constant.”
I saw it then. The North Star. True north. Not so impossible to find, once someone showed you where to look.
CHAPTER 17
THE FLASH OF LIGHT WOKE ME. I dragged my head off the pillow, groaning. After three days of working in Iola’s house and going to the Seashell Shop, every muscle in my body ached. Over-the-counter ibuprofen was no match for it, but strangely enough, the pain felt good. It was evidence of something. A life. A completely new, wide-awake life.
Thunder rattled the cottage, and I sat upright, blinking the room into focus. In the glow from the hallway night-light, the furniture took on strange shapes. I watched the reflections in the arched dresser mirror as water dripped from the tin roof, playing a soft melody in the overgrown gardens.
It was a good thing that Paul had come by to do the mowing last evening and cleaned the gutters while he was here. He’d brought crawfish, held it forward in a bucket when he’d knocked on the door, then smiled at me and lifted an eyebrow. “I haven’t got time to cook this stuff tonight if I’m gonna get the mowing done before the storms come in.”
“Been seining again?” I teased, smoothing a hand over the hair flying out of my ponytail. I was a mess, sawdust all over me and bits of insulation in my hair from my slowly progressing wall rebuild at Sandy’s. Paul didn’t seem to notice.
“Well, actually these came from the fish market. I brought Mrs. Meeks some plants for her water garden, and she wouldn’t let me out the door until I took something with me.”
J.T. jumped up from the sofa, leaving his homework behind to see what was in the bucket. He’d been spending a lot of time in the living room the last couple days. Since Zoey’s crazy walk to the pier, she’d taken over J.T.’s room and his video game —a distraction, I guessed. She was heartbroken that Rowdy seemed to have dumped her completely, which meant that her new crowd of school friends had ditched her too.
J.T. peeked into the bucket. “Whoa, awesome! Are those for us?”
“Yeah, if you can talk your mama into getting out a boiling pot, there’s some good eatin’ in here.” Paul set it on the ground so J.T. could investigate further. “J.T., you think you can run over to Bink’s and pick up the stuff for a crawfish boil if I give you some money? Just ask Geneva what you need. She’ll help you out.” Paul glanced at me then. “That is, if you guys haven’t eaten yet?”
A few minutes later, J.T. was bolting through the yard with twenty dollars to buy the necessities. I didn’t argue. The longer we were here, the more relaxed I felt about it. I’d even let J.T. go to the church ice cream party with kids his age. Fairhope was starting to feel like home now. Our old lives seemed a million miles away.
I was glad that Paul had come by with the crawfish. Zoey had even emerged from the bedroom for a little while. It was a nice evening, just peaceful. I’d gone to bed feeling good about things, hoping the storms would pass over again.
Now the thunder and lightning outside proved that they hadn’t. The rain thickened to a downpour, quickening my thoughts and stealing them away from the crawfish boil and the memory of Paul’s lawn mower whirling through the yard. A waterfall was rushing off the eaves between my bedroom and the front porch.
The clock on the nightstand read 1 a.m. How long had it been raining? How much water? I’d gone to bed early, taking a shower and falling onto the mattress just after Paul left at nine.
The buckets in Iola’s house. What if they had filled up, spilled over?
My body creaked and groaned in harmony with the cottage floorboards as I stood and moved to the window. A flash of lightning illuminated the towering white house next door, the blowing trees, the water running off the turret roof in a sheet, shimmering and strangely beautiful, diaphanous like the veil tumbling from the conical hat of a fairy-tale princess. If only a knight in shining armor would ride in on a white horse and empty the drip buckets. I really didn’t want to go over there in the dark, in the rain, with lightning streaking and the smell of the sea close in the air, but there was no prince to rescue the bucket-emptying handywoman. No suave Rhett Butler to kiss me on the forehead and say, Return to bed, Scarlett, dah-ling. That storm is no place for a lady.
The cold crept up my legs, and I shivered as I slipped on sweats, tennis shoes, and the one jacket I’d brought from Texas, then grabbed J.T.’s mini lantern from the kitchen table, along with the keys. I didn’t have an umbrella, but thanks to Brother Guilbeau, there were plenty of trash bags, so I ripped a peephole in one and pulled it over my head. The picture was funny even at one in the morning, if you didn’t think about the possibility of being struck by lightning or flattened by a falling tree branch and later found dead, looking like a giant, armless SpongeBob SquarePants.
The rain soaked me from the knees down on the trip through the grass, and water ran in rivers from my new Halloween costume as I dashed onto the porch and skinned off the bag, tucking it behind a rocking chair. Kicking off my soggy shoes and socks, I hunched against the blowing mist, grumbling at the old lock’s stubbornness and the dim light of the mini lantern.