Usually.
But hurricanes don’t listen to predictions about what they’re supposed to do, what the patterns seem to be suggesting.
So all that evening and into the night, while Lo and Ellen and I ate peanut butter sandwiches and came up with fake curses we’d put on various people at school and brewed up a “potion” of pine needles, Coke, and Jean Naté perfume, Audrey got hotter and faster and bigger and hooked hard to the right, St. Medard’s Bay in her sights.
We were asleep when it started.
The wind had been picking up before the three of us huddled in the tent to go to bed, but it wasn’t anything scary, really. If anything, it just made the tent seem cozier, and it was nice to get a break from the heat that had been squashing St. Medard’s Bay in the weeks before.
I’m never sure if it’s a real memory or some kind of trauma-induced hallucination, but the rising wind made its way into my dreams that night. I was falling out of a plane, and the engine was right by me, and it was so loud, I thought I’d be sucked in.
But it wasn’t the wind that woke me.
It was a crack, sharper than a rifle, louder than anything I’d ever heard, and followed by creaking, rustling, and then a powerfulthwackas a nearby pine tree hit the ground, shaking the tent and sending the three of us scrambling out into the open.
It was pitch-black, and someone yelled about a flashlight, maybe Ellen, but I couldn’t be sure.
Everything that came after that is still a nightmarish blur.
The wind wasn’t shrieking or howling because those are sounds that are familiar, sounds you’d recognize, sounds that even humans can make.
This didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before, and I’ve never heard anything like it since. It sounded… ancient.
That’s what I remember telling someone later, how the only thing my brain could process about the sound was “People aren’t supposed to hear this.”
Like this was some elemental thing rising up out of the earth from a time long, long before Oreos and Tabs and Jean Naté. How could something like this even exist in our world?
It started raining, just a few heavy drops at first, then buckets all of a sudden, drenching us in seconds. My Keds squelched on the muddy ground as the three of us once again linked arms, the tiny orb of Lo’s flashlight bobbing and weaving crazily in front of us, but I didn’t want to see because all there was was rain and wind and the noise and the terror—the sheer animalterror—coursing through my veins.
I’ll never know how we made it out that night. I heard other trees falling, felt the rush of air when one fell just a few feet from us. I was jabbering, praying maybe, or I could’ve been singing Olivia Newton-John, I truly don’t know. I just know that it felt right to make my own noise in that cacophony, and I thought Lo and Ellen might have been shouting or singing, too.
It had to have been Ellen who led us out. Later, she and Lo would both say the same thing as me, that they didn’t remember much, only that the sand and dirt underfoot gave way to slick road, and we’dmiraculously turned right instead of left, leading us onto the main road to the Shipwreck Inn.
It had to have been Ellen.
Lo had led us into the preserve from the beach side, and that would’ve been her instinct again, to go out the way we came and straight into the ocean.
That fucking ocean that we weren’t scared of because we were the Witches of St. Medard’s, and we protected this town.
We’re not witches, I thought, stumbling up the steps to the door of the Shipwreck Inn, my arms still looped through Lo’s and Ellen’s.We’re stupid little girls, and we almost died and we’re gonna be in so much trouble.
That still makes me want to laugh. Or cry, I don’t know.
I thought that was going to be the worst part—getting in trouble for lying about where we were.
We weren’t even all the way up the steps before the door was opening and hands were on us, pulling us inside. It was dim inside the inn, candles flickering on the check-in desk and the big steamer trunk Mrs. Chambers used as a coffee table in the lobby.
I sat down on the floor, took a blanket someone handed to me, and watched as Ellen was lifted off her feet by her dad, his face pale and ghoulish in the candlelight.
“Oh, thank you, God,” he kept saying. “Oh, thank you, Lord Jesus, thank you, thank you.”
Thank you, I thought alongside him.Thank you, God, or Jesus or Mother Mary or Olivia Newton-John, thank you, whoever let us not get killed tonight.
Audrey did her best to take down the Shipwreck Inn that night, but as always, she held. We had to move to the second floor when water started sloshing over the hardwoods in the lobby, but the water didn’t rise much further; the sandbags Ellen’s dad had placed all around the inn in his own “abundance of caution” had served him well.
I fell asleep around dawn, sitting up in the second-floor hallway, Lo on one side, Ellen on the other.
I go back to that image so often, and my heart breaks for that girlsleeping between her two best friends, exhausted and traumatized and sore but not knowing that when the storm first turned in the wee hours of May 6, phones had started ringing. At Miss Beth-Anne’s. At the Shipwreck.
