The whole thing happened so quickly, Tom O’Byrne thought to himself as the basement window burst open and the bay began to pour in; there wasn’t even time to say good-bye.
Everyone knew a heavyweight of a storm was coming in. But there had been a lot of storms before, and nothing had caused more than a nuisance of flooding. Midland Beach was the kind of place where you not only knew everyone on the block, but likely knew their parents too. And their parents. Houses were passed down for generations, where married children still lived with their parents: construction workers, Con Ed supervisors, cops and firemen. These were people who were used to downed trees and flooded basements. Storms had come and gone. They’d all been there before.
What they weren’t used to and didn’t fully understand, Tom included, was that the streets they’d grown up on, played on, drove back and forth on every day, lived out their lives on, were in a bowl. A topographic bowl, dipping a few feet below sea level from Father Capodonna along the bay all the way up to Hylan. So they stayed, even though it was designated as a group one evacuation area. They stayed because they’d always stayed, and nothing had happened before.
By 2:00 A.M. the winds were ripping off the bay. A few trees were down, power lines; it was battering the clapboard houses pretty good. But no one was prepared for the swell, which by midnight had swept through the bungalows along the beach and over Father Cap Boulevard.
It took only minutes for Midland Beach to become part of New York Bay.
Tom knew it was time to get the family out a little before eleven. He’d spent his entire life in this old blue Victorian. It was his father’s, and you didn’t just run away. He got their son, Rich, to take his mom to the Bonanos, who lived on higher ground up on Todt Hill. Tom waved them off, saying he just wanted to grab a few documents out of the basement, just in case, and he’d be right behind. While he was down there, stuffing his will and his deed into a briefcase, the fifty-foot oak in their yard came crashing down into the house, slicing a ten-foot gash in the sunroom that faced the bay. By the time Tom tried to come back up, the first floor was under three feet of water.
He went back down and called Sheila on her cell, as water burst through the storm window under the porch and into the basement. It was too small to crawl through and the water was beginning to come in. He tried the stairs one more time, but the current was so powerful it knocked him back down. He called 911, but it wouldn’t go through. They must be overrun. He called his wife again and left a message she didn’t receive until much later. “Hon, this isn’t looking so good.”
By 2:00 the wind and tide had carried away their back porch and the first floor of their once proud home had become part of New York Bay. It knifed through the creaking eighty-year-old planks, engulfing every memento of their once happy lives. Four hours later it receded, like a dark thief, taking everything the O’Byrnes had accumulated in their lives back out to sea.
It took the armoire his wife’s grandmother had brought over from Trieste. Her collection of antique ceramic boxes, and her filigreed old frames with the early photos of their grandparents and her parents’ wedding. It took the pictures of Rich’s graduation from the fire academy, guaranteed to bring a tear to Tom’s eyes.
It took the oil painting of the Verrazano Sheila’s brother had completed just a week before he passed. From lung disease, which he’d contracted as a first responder on 9/11. Tom’s antique filigreed cigar box. The boxing shorts Muhammad Ali had worn when he knocked out Leon Spinks.
It washed away every memory. Every celebration.
And days later, Tom laid to rest, as Sheila walked through the gutted remains, shuffling through the mud and shattered glass and rotted wood that was now all that was left of their lives, she discovered something else the storm had taken: the hand-painted lacquer box that held the baby hair and photos of their daughter, Deirdre, the things closest to Sheila’s heart.
Along with something else of their daughter’s they kept inside it. Something they hadn’t looked at in a long time, but that now, though it wasn’t clear right then, would turn out to be the most valuable possession in their lives.