Sunday evening
Around nightfall, as his last acts of preparation, Ace moves his car out to the main road and parks it, then parks J’nelle’s in an open area as far from the house and trees as possible.
They return to the main room of the house and turn on the weather channel while they prepare supper. Weather newscasters pass the broadcast in breathless frenzy from the smartly dressed duo in the TV studio to others on the coast in flapping rain gear, leaning into the wind to keep their balance. A young woman reporter hunkers, like a dough boy in a foxhole, behind a grass-covered dune a mile down the beach from Ace’s house. She clutches at the hood of her L.L. Bean storm jacket and shouts over wind static to explain how tide movement will affect wave height and storm surge. “Let’s take a look,” she says, and stretches her neck to peek over the dune toward the beach where the waves smack like cannon shot and hurl strings of slobber-like spray. She turns and slides back down the dune to safety.
“Well, you can see what we are facing. And that surf will be twice to three times as high by two a.m. We are in for a long night. Back to you, Leslie.”
Leslie, in her bright red dress and winged black hair, grabs the baton and runs with it: Freya’s intensity will increase over the warm water near shore and probably hit as at least a Category 4. The station cuts to the governor, surrounded by law enforcement officers and emergency responders, as he issues dire warnings. The officers and responders step forward one at a time to drive the warnings home and speak personally to the laggards who have failed to heed the evacuation order: stay away from the beach, do not try to drive, seek refuge at shelters such as schools and churches.
“You know,” Ace says, “our cell phones aren’t going to work in that bunker. We could still leave. They haven’t closed Highway 16.”
“We could,” she says.
They sit down to baked red snapper, spinach sautéed in olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and feta, and a bottle of not-bad Malbec from the island grocery. The news continues on the TV, switching back and forth from regular coverage to the storm, and then entirely to the storm. J’nelle asks hesitant, half-stated questions about what it was like the night before when Ace was caught in the riptide, his feelings, his fears, how he managed his escape. He answers like a junior high student, caught in questions on a book he did not understand. “I don’t know,” he says, “I don’t know.” And then suddenly he hears himself say:
“It was all mixed up, swirling around me in the storm—images of people, voices, you and Pam, my kids and grandkids, friends. You were all there, and then, one by one the images faded, all except you and Pam. Or maybe it was more like I faded from them.”
He feels her gaze on him as he slowly shakes his head.
“The two of you stayed very close by, and I shouldn’t say this, but you seemed to distill into one being that spoke with two voices. You were calling on me to live; she was giving me the strength to die.”
He pauses and looks at her, caught in the puzzlement of what he has just said.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to compare you to Pam. I just…”
He feels his face widen in desperation.
“That’s it, though, isn’t it?” he says. “That’s where I’m stuck in my ripening old age: between the yearn to live and the need for courage to die.”
“Most of us are,” she says, “but it’s not either/or.”
“It can be a lonely place,” he says.
“Yes.”
He goes to the sink and pours out the last of his wine. In the window over the sink, he can see the reflection of her sitting at the table in the glow of a single candle left over from the night before. She is in another variation of that prayerful pose, her fingers splayed at the base of her wine glass, turning it gently on the table surface.
“Maybe by morning,” he says, “the storm will have made the whole thing moot. But meanwhile, let’s make a run for the bunker.”