First the roll of thunder, then rain like buckshot hitting the roof.
June vaulted out of bed toward the window. The roofers must have known it might rain. A blue tarp was fastened onto the exposed roof, but the corners flapped wildly in the wind.
She thought to call Jameson. To say what? She didn’t know. The bungalow seemed to belong to him. He had been its truest, most loving caretaker since her grandparents died.
June pulled her robe over her peach pajamas, hurried downstairs to the living room, and turned on the TV. It was 3:42 a.m. A weather alert ran along the bottom of the screen. Forty-mile-an-hour winds, gusts up to sixty-five, with possible flash floods. June had lived through storms her entire life, and this one was mild by comparison. The battering of wind and rain, the groans of trees, an enormous crack that might follow when one snapped in half. She was used to landslides and sinkholes and flooding that could shut down Highway 101 within minutes. So why did she feel such crippling fear as she sat alone in her living room with a half-assed storm picking up all around her? Why did she feel as if she were hiding beneath that blanket in the Infirmary of Innocents again? Hiding even when she knew it would offer her no more safety than standing up and taking Claire’s place might have done.
A thundering boom, the house went dark, and June pulled her knees to her chest and clutched her robe. She thought of the glass of chocolate milk on the table that day, the swirl of cocoa and fresh, toothy-yellow milk, that offering, that swallow of tangy and bitter and sweet, that moment of waiting to be told her father was gone forever. Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral. Her skin felt bristly, as if infested with mites, and she scratched her arms and legs, backed up on the sofa, turned sideways, and dug her heels into the cushions. And now she held her fists to her eyes and screamed to drown out the sounds inside her head, to drive away the images that followed.