Lo was one of the only people who got that about me, actually. Lo, and later, Landon.
Funny when you think about it.
Or awful.
Anyway, like I said, it was November, usually a dead time for the inn, but that year, 1980, we were busy. A group of men had booked a deep-sea fishing trip, and for whatever reason, they’d decided that our inn was the place to stay.
I don’t even remember how many of them there were. When they checked in, it seemed like dozens and dozens, there were so many loud, deep voices emanating from the lobby, so many flashing watches on perpetually tanned wrists, so many Hawaiian shirts unbuttoned to reveal chest hair. It was way too much testosterone for me, and I’d planned on mostly staying out of their way. It would’ve been easy to do—I had school, and they’d be out on the boats all day.
But that year, the weather decided to remind us that hurricane season technically ran all the way past Thanksgiving, thank you very much, and just one day after that herd of men checked in to theShipwreck, a nasty tropical storm out of the Caribbean started gathering strength and turning our way.
“Velma,” Lo announced the day before the storm hit, me, her, and Frieda in our normal spot at the end of the lunch table. It was turkey tetrazzini day, normally Frieda’s favorite lunch, but that afternoon, she just picked at it.
“That’s what they’re calling the storm,” Lo went on, pulling one leg up onto the bench next to her and swinging an arm around her knee. As she did, the wide leg of her shorts sagged just enough to flash me and Frieda a glimpse of her bright pink underwear. “Velma. Like inScooby-Doo. Sooooo lame. The one that killed my daddy was called Delphine. Nowthatis a cool as shit name for a storm. Even Audrey was—”
“Hush,” I heard myself say, my eyes darting to Frieda.
We hardly ever talked about Audrey, about what had happened to Frieda’s family.
About how if we hadn’t lied—if we hadn’t gone along with Lo’s plan—they might never have been out in that storm looking for Frieda, and then they would still be alive.
To be honest, sometimes I could hardly bear to think about it.
But Frieda just shook her head and sighed. “She’s right, Velma is a stupid name. But this late in the year, I guess they didn’t have many choices left.”
“Zelda,” Lo offered up. She was in her Zelda Fitzgerald phase at the time. Lo had barely passed English, but that was just because she never turned things in. I knew she’d readThe Great Gatsbyat least three times just for fun, so I wasn’t surprised that was the name she picked.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” I asked, looking between the two of them. “How the storms that make landfall here are always named after women?”
“Females are deadlier than males!” Lo whooped, sending several heads turning in our direction, but as usual, Lo didn’t care if people stared. She just smiled brightly at Tammy Turner, the girl sitting closestto us, then snapped her teeth open and shut hard, once, twice. Like she was biting something’s head off.
“Y’all are weird,” Tammy muttered, but before Lo could say something that would probably get her another round of after-school detention, the intercom overhead rang out three shrill tones.
Our principal, Mr. McGinnis, came on, his nasally drawl letting us know that, due to the “potential for severe weather,” school would be dismissed early today, after fifth period, and that classes were canceled for the next two days, Thursday and Friday.
There were a few claps, a few half-hearted cheers, but Audrey had put the fear of storms back into all of us, and even the promise of a long weekend was nothing to celebrate if it meant St. Medard’s Bay was once again in the monster’s path.
When I got back to the inn that afternoon, I expected all the deep-sea fishing guys would have left. They’d gone out a few times already, before the weather had turned, and there definitely wouldn’t be any more fishing trips until Velma had passed.
But to my surprise, they were still there. Or at least some of them were.
Two were on the beach, filling up sandbags, and I saw another hauling gallon jugs of water around the corner of the porch. A fourth guy was down near the prefab tin building we used as a toolshed, helping Daddy set up a couple of sawhorses. Big slabs of plywood rested against the shed, ready to be sawed into the right size to cover the windows.
When I stepped into the lobby, there were two other men moving the green sofa away from the windows, joking and laughing as they did, their teeth very white in their sunburned faces.
When Mama caught sight of me, she pointed upstairs. “You know the drill!”
That meant filling the tubs with water. When Audrey hit, all of St. Medard’s had been without water for over a week. Mama said when Delphine came through, it was nearly a month. The jugs I’d seen that man bringing in would be for drinking, but the bathtubs would be for everything else, and as I walked into Room 202, I wondered ifFrieda’s parents had filled their bathtubs before Audrey, and what was the point of doing that at all if the storm just killed you, or blew down your houseandits bathtubs?
There was a good view of the beach from 202, and I glanced toward it as I closed the door behind me. The sky was gray and cloudy, the water rough, but the awful wind that was seared into my memory from Audrey hadn’t picked up yet. I was telling myself that maybe this one was going to just miss us, or at least not be as bad, when a sound from the bathroom nearly sent me jumping out of my skin.
It was the tub running, I realized, and I had a disorienting moment where I thought maybe I’d already done this room on autopilot and forgotten. But then a figure stepped into the doorway, backlit by the lights from the vanity behind him.
“Oh!” he said. “Um. Hi?”
He waved then, awkwardly, and laughed a little before shoving his hands into his back pockets. “Sorry, am I not supposed to be in here?”
Then he took another step forward, and the face that had been shrouded in darkness was suddenly fully visible.
