The Hurricane

10

“I guess my mom called you?”

Daniel sat in the front seat of the squad car. He faced the side window as he spoke to keep his beer breath from puffing over toward the cop. Zola sat in the back, snapping her phone’s keyboard open and shut, over and over.

“I’m friends with your dad,” the cop said. “We had calls from quite a few concerned parents, actually, so I was heading this way anyhow.”

“You know my dad?” Daniel asked. He somehow doubted that, unless fingerprinting had been involved.

“Stepdad. Sorry.” The cop glanced over at him. Daniel saw it in the reflection of the window. “Carlton and I went to school together.”

“Why won’t my phone work?” Zola asked. Daniel turned and saw her leaning forward, her fingers wrapped around the open window of the Plexiglas barrier rising up from behind the seat.

“One of the towers lost power, and there’s too much demand—” The officer glanced back at Zola. “There’s a ton of people trying to make calls all at once. Don’t worry, they’re working on it.”

“So the storm’s heading this way?”

Daniel peered through the windshield at the dimly lit trees bending on the sides of the road. Branches and leaves were already scattered along the shoulder and on the pavement ahead. It looked like any one of the dozen tropical storms and near-misses he’d seen while growing up in Beaufort. The city hadn’t had a direct hit since the fifties, hadn’t had a major pass since Hugo. This was supposed to be just another windy weekend in an unusually banal hurricane season. Downed trees and lots of rain and excellent surf—

“It looks like it’s heading right for us,” the officer said. “As soon as I drop you two off, I’m hunkering down with my family. Lots of folk are trying to evacuate, but it’s too late to do that safely. The interstate is jammed.”

“Evacuate? I thought Anna was heading for Florida.”

The officer turned on his blinker and swerved into Daniel’s neighborhood. “This morning, it was looking more like Georgia. Then this low pressure north of us pulled it more our way. It’s been churning in the Gulf Stream for half a day and picking up steam. They’re saying it might be a category three or four when it lands.”

Zola stuck her face by the window in the Plexiglas. “I still can’t reach anyone,” she said.

Daniel spun around in his seat. “Forget about your phone,” he said. “Who’re you calling after ten anyway?”

“I wanna make sure Monica got home okay.”

“We’re going to make sure everyone gets home, don’t worry.” The officer steered into their driveway and hit his siren for half a second, sending out a high-pitched bleep. Lights came on in the foyer, spilled out around the front door, and then their mom was down the stoop, her blazer flapping in the wind.

Daniel popped out the door and walked her way. Zola cried out at not being able to open the doors. The officer consoled her through the window as he stepped back to let her out.

“Are you okay?” Daniel’s mom asked. She grabbed his shoulder and studied his face.

“I’m fine, Mom. It’s not like anything’s happened yet. It’s just a storm.”

“Have you been drinking?”

Carlton joined them on the stoop. He hurried down to speak with the officer.

“I had a sip of someone else’s,” Daniel lied. “Just to taste it.”

“Get in the house,” his mother said sternly.

“Are either of your phones working?” Zola asked as she stormed up after them.

Their mother shook her head.

“Where’s Hunter?” Daniel asked. He filed inside the house as his mom waved them along.

“He’s staying at his girlfriend’s. I told him I didn’t want him driving in this.”

“It’s just a little wind,” Daniel complained. He kicked off his shoes and plopped onto the sofa as Carlton came back inside, shutting the door hard against the wind.

“Is that it?” Zola asked.

Daniel followed her wide eyes and looked toward the TV. It was the weather channel, the word “MUTE” in green letters across the bottom. It showed a satellite image of Anna overlaid with the standard oblong, concentric circles of varying colors. A chart on the side gave wind speed. Daniel ignored all of that. All he saw was the size and shape of the thing. Anna was the size of Georgia and South Carolina put together. As the time lapse went back twelve hours and ticked forward, he watched it grow before his very eyes. It went from a disorganized patch of white with the barest hint of an eye to a killer buzzsaw with a perfect circle in the center.

“Turn it up,” he said as Zola grabbed the remote.

The experts at the hurricane center rattled off all the reasons the storm was changing and moving, and some of the excuses for why they hadn’t seen it coming. They repeated what the officer had said about the Gulf Stream. They showed similar storms from previous years, even one that crossed Florida twice, stopping in the Gulf and inexplicably reversing directions. “These things happen,” they said. “It’s an inexact science.”

When they went back to satellite shots of Anna, her clouds ticking through the last half day of movement, Daniel could see it deflect northward, riding the warm and upward flow of that giant mid-ocean river off the East coast. A meteorologist drew in the lines of a cold front with a digital marker, showing how it was sucking the storm northward. There was a lot of talk about Charleston and “another Hugo,” even though the current track lines had it running right through Beaufort.

“They’re worried it’s gonna brush Charleston,” Zola said.

“But it’s gonna slam into us,” Daniel muttered.

“Zola, help me round up the candles.” Their mom hurried off toward the utility room. Zola dropped the remote and went to the mantle to grab the fancy ones.

“What can I do?” Daniel asked, not taking his eyes off the TV.

“I’ve got the tubs filling with water,” Carlton said. How about you filling some containers with some more. Tupperware, buckets, anything you can find.”

“For drinking?”

“I’m not drinking out of the bathtub!” Zola yelled from the dining room. She stuck her head around the corner, a bundle of red candlesticks in her arms.

“Nobody’s drinking out of the bathtub,” Carlton said. “It’s for flushing the toilet and whatever else we might need it for. If we lose power, we won’t have the well pump.”

Daniel followed Carlton into the kitchen and started rummaging around in the cabinets for pitchers and containers with lids. He noticed a few flashlights and a ton of loose batteries on the island counter.

“So the worst that can happen is that we lose power for a while?” He topped up a pitcher with water and set it on the counter. Carlton fit the lid inside the pitcher and rotated it closed. He slid it to the side and frowned at Daniel as he began filling the largest Tupperware.

“The worst is that we lose the house or someone gets hurt.”

Daniel saw that he was serious. “Were you here for Hugo?” he asked. Some things lived in his brain as legend, or historical curiosity. For him, Hugo was nothing more than before and after pictures in Charleston area restaurants. It was commemorated lines on the sides of buildings showing how high the tide got. It was the news clips of boats in trees that they used to scare people into evacuating, convincing families to get on the interstate and sit for twelve hours on what should be a two hour jaunt. In his neck of the woods, Hugo had become the name of the prototypical storm, even though he was sure there’d never be another like it. It was the bogeyman of meteorology. It lived in the weather closet, and parents used it to terrify kids.

“I was in Charlotte for Hugo,” Carlton finally said. His eyes seemed to focus far away, his lips pressed together. When he returned his attention to Daniel’s face, he must’ve seen the relief there, for Carlton’s guise hardened further.

“It was still an amazing storm, even that far inland. Tornados were spun off every which way. You’ve never seen so many trees down or houses demolished. Nobody had power for days, most for weeks.”

Daniel felt water spill over the lip of the full container. He sloshed a little more out so it could be handled and passed it to Carlton. He grabbed the next one as the window over the sink rattled in the wind, absorbing its fury and shivering with it.

“What do we do next?” Daniel asked. He looked out at the fluttering leaves and the twisting trees in the back yard. He remembered, as a kid once, helping his father put plywood over every door and window when Floyd looked like it might be the next Hugo. It became a category five, the worst sort of storm, but never made landfall. They had done all that work for nothing. And now they had done nothing in preparation, and already the wind outside seemed dangerous.

“Now you should go get some sleep. Take a flashlight with you. Your mom and I will wake you up if it gets bad.”

Daniel handed him the last container and shut off the water. Carlton squeezed his shoulder. In that instant, and for the first time, Daniel realized Carlton was his own person. It seemed obvious in retrospect, but the thought had never hit him before. This man who had stumbled into their lives, and then their home, had existed before he did either of those things. He had lived somewhere else. He had been through other storms. He had been a kid just like Daniel. These were alien thoughts.

“Try and get some sleep,” Carlton said.

Daniel patted his stepdad on the arm, even though he felt like doing more. He was just so used to doing less. He grabbed a flashlight, clicked it on and off to make sure it had juice, then ran off toward the stairs. He stomped up them, rounded the bannister at the top, and headed for his room. As he passed his sister’s room, he saw the door had been propped open with a chair. She was inside, sitting up in her bed, holding her nonworking phone toward the window and grumbling at it.

Daniel laughed at her as he changed into sleep pants and a clean t-shirt. He placed the flashlight on his side table, turned off the light, and rolled over to gaze out the darkened window. Outside, shadows shivered. Trees waved their arms like ghouls, and leaves threw themselves flat against the glass, peeked inside for a moment, then raced off to some hurried elsewhere.