The resort’s guests have evacuated, but six of the staff have chosen to ride out the storm in the resort’s grocery store. The concrete building, a hundred yards inland from La Belle Creole, is sturdier than their rickety homes. They sit on the checkout counter and frozen food cabinets.
With no windows and the sliding glass entrance covered by a steel storm door, it is utterly dark inside when the power goes out. Paul reaches to Lily Ana on his right, pats her leg for reassurance, then turns to Zuzu on his left. Zuzu jumps when he lays his hand on her leg. She grabs his arm and pulls him closer. He can feel her trembling, her silent sobs.
Lily strikes a Bic lighter, as blinding as a camera’s flash. From her raincoat pocket, she pulls out a handful of the squat little mood candles used on the tables at the restaurant. Everyone applauds.
The wind outside moans ever louder until it is like being in the stomach of a roaring monster. Metal roofs from surrounding cabins clang against the walls. Zuzu jumps with each crash, burying her face in Paul’s shoulder. Candlelight flickers on the circle of faces, lips stretched tight and eyes tilted to the roof. Will it hold?
Lily Ana calmly thumbs her rosary. “Thank God the kids are not here.”
“Pray for us, Lily,” someone yells above the clamor.
“I’m not a priest. Pray for yourselves. Ask for absolution, in case it is our time.”
Zuzu mumbles against Paul’s chest, as if sending her prayers through him. Her tense muscles begin to soften. The storm subsides slowly at first and then all is quiet except for the ringing in the ears that comes after sustained noise.
“Open the door,” someone says.
“No,” a frightened voice answers.
“It’s over. Let’s see what’s left.”
Paul slides the glass door open, unlatches the storm door, opens it a crack. He thinks of Noah sending out the dove, wishes he had a dove to shove out the door. When he looks out, nothing is where it should be, as if the little store had been blown to a different island. Slate clouds billow above but the rain has ended, the wind only a gentle breeze. He steps out and the others tentatively follow, gasping at what they see.
Lily charges out and takes a quick look. “Zuzu, go to the cabins. See what’s left. Meet me at the restaurant. Paul, see if the car will run. You need to check on Bella if you can get there. It might have been worse for them.”
Paul starts toward the parking lot.
“Paul.”
He turns, ready for her next instruction, surprised to see her confused, indecisive, as if she has something to say but cannot remember the words in English.
“Be careful, Paul.”
He turns again toward the car.
“God loves you,” she calls after him.
≈≈≈
Paul stops and looks out through the spiderweb of fractured windshield at the pavement dipping beneath the floodwaters. Just another mile to Bella’s house. So far, he has not confronted any debris he couldn’t coax the Land Rover over or around, but ahead is the low-lying stretch beside the salt pond behind Grand Case. Once he starts down this there will be no room to turn around between the storefronts on one side of the road and the drainage ditch on the other.
An image flashes in Paul’s mind of Bella on the roof of her bungalow, Jonah clinging to her, hiding his eyes against her chest from what he does not understand. Below, giant waves crash through the rear door into their living quarters.
He had tried to make her leave with him yesterday, ride out the storm at Orient, but Jonah was afraid of cars. When she finally gave up on coaxing Jonah into the Land Rover, she ushered him back to the house and turned on the stoop, waving with the backs of her hands for Paul to leave.
“No,” he mouthed, shaking his head.
She pointed at Jonah and herself, made her sign for Mars, and then shut the door behind them. Jesus would protect them.
Not that Orient would have been any safer, but he is the only one who can communicate with them. She had not even known a hurricane was coming until he came for her. The image in his head of her house changes; the walls have collapsed. Bella is nowhere to be seen. His heart races. He should not have left them.
It had been eighteen years since he felt this level of panic—tied up in traffic on this same stretch of road. A call from André’s cell phone, but André didn’t speak when Paul answered. He remembers the frustration of yelling into the phone with nobody talking back, and then the meaning of the call flooding over him. Bella had managed to call with Andre’s phone but could not talk. André was dead.
Since that day, Paul has traveled the five kilometers between Orient and Grand Case twice a day transporting Bella and her novelties to and from work and buying supplies for the restaurant at the warehouses along the way. The Land Rover has memorized each pothole and speed bump by the feel under its tires. He can judge the center of the road by his proximity to the buildings. Unless a light pole has blown across the road, he can make it.
“God loves me,” he whispers as he inches forward.
≈≈≈
Maria, hands on her hips, stands at the corner of Boulevard de Grand Case frowning back at the collapsed roof of her coffee shop’s gazebo. Paul cranks down his window.
“Come stai, Maria?” His greeting in her native Italian usually brings a smile, but not today. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, yes. No worse than the last hurricane. Is everyone safe at Orient? Much destruction?”
“I don’t know yet. I wanted to come here first.”
She looks up the street at her neighbors milling about, pointing damage out to each other. “It’s always the same, but this time without the flooding. I should be standing in knee-deep water. And look…” She points to a royal palm at the roadside stripped bare except for a single fluttering frond. “The wind has changed directions.”
“Maybe it’s not over.”
Her head jerks to face him, eyes wide. Paul thinks this had been in her mind also.
“You are going to check on Bella? You should go now. Something is not right. Go!” She demands, waving him forward with her arms. “Bella and Jonah are safe, you’ll see. But you need to get off the street before…”
Paul releases the clutch and eases away.
“God bless you,” she yells.
Twice blessed, Paul thinks. Nothing bad can happen now.
Renewed gusts buffet the vehicle. A sheet of tin roofing, crumpled like foil, clatters across the road in front of the Land Rover’s hood. Has the storm turned around for another swipe? No way of knowing, no time to think about it. He is committed now anyway.
When he pulls off Ave du Cimetiere in front of Bella’s house, he is relieved to see it still standing, and then chides himself for being so worried. The house is basically a concrete pillbox. Even the roof is reinforced concrete. He had never appreciated its austere robustness until now. When he walks past the side of the house, he can see the bay. Rather than swollen waves battering Bella’s foundation as he expected, the waterline is even farther away from the house than at low tide. Did the storm suck the water out of the bay?
Jonah, no shirt, barefoot, his usual canvas trousers, is wading in the surf. When he sees Paul, he laughs, wide-mouthed and toothless, waving both arms. He points to the deck, blown into a splintered pile of lumber below the rear door, laughs again as he bends down and slaps his knees.
The rear door that had opened onto the deck is now ten feet above the sand. Beside it the shutters of the kitchen window are open and Bella leans out beating a ladle against the outside wall to get their attention with one hand and pointing out into the bay with the other. He and Jonah both turn to follow her point. Somewhere beyond the scud of clouds is Anguilla, but he cannot see it. The layer of clouds just above the water is the blackest and it seems to be moving their way. He glances back to Bella, still jabbing her finger toward Anguilla. When he turns back, the black cloud has turned into a wave, a giant wave, a wall of water growing increasingly taller. Paul tries to throttle his panic, think rationally what can be done in the seconds before it hits. Nothing can be done.
≈≈≈
Paul is found the following day lying between elevated crypts in the cemetery under debris washed out of the town when the wave receded. The boys who find him, taking him for dead, drag him by the arms to the side of the road for a rescue crew to pick up. This is where Bella discovers him. She too thinks Paul is dead and manhandles him into a wheelbarrow she had pirated from the rubble, wheels him inside her blown-out front doorway before continuing her search for Jonah.
When she returns at dusk, Paul’s eyes are partially open. The pupils are not the same size. Just to double-check that he is dead, she finds a shard of glass in her yard, polishes the mud away on her dress and holds it under his nose. The faint fogging brings a smile to her mud-smeared face.
She wheels Paul through ankle-deep water from one room to the other searching for some dry place to lay him. The sofa and beds are mangled into soppy piles. In the kitchen, she rights the dining table and stretches his limp body on top. A half-way dry curtain jerked from the window over the sink is used to cover him; a potholder from the wall above the stove is his pillow.
In the night Paul wakes screaming, his only memory is of being swallowed. Unseen arms rock him back and forth against a warm bosom, the perfect succor for a frightened baby.
≈≈≈