The Hurricane

He got the dial moving, the digital numbers ticking down, while he put one earbud in. Carlton patted his shoulder and pointed to the floor. Daniel sat, and Carlton sat down beside him, reaching for the other dangling earbud.

“You mind?” he asked.

Daniel waved his hand.

“That’s gross,” Zola said, as Carlton leaned close and popped the loose bud into his ear.

Daniel was getting nothing but static. He dialed into the NPR frequency, and there was something there, but it was too faint to make out. He started tapping through the numbers, one decimal at a time, while Zola and his mom dug out bottles of water and passed them around.

“I shoulda charged this thing up,” Daniel said, noting the quarter charge on the battery.

“Wait. Go back,” Carlton said.

Daniel went up two decimal points. There was a voice behind a curtain of static.

“I think that’s a Charleston station,” Carlton said, pointing toward Daniel’s display.

“Everyone be quiet,” Daniel said.

He and Carlton strained to hear.

••••

“What did they say?”

Zola dug into a box of cheerios and crammed a few into her mouth. Daniel took a swig of water. Now that he knew the house was open to the elements, the sound of the wind upstairs seemed closer and more potent.

“It’s all they’re talking about, of course.” Daniel looked to Carlton. “Did they say winds up to a hundred forty?”

“That’s what it sounded like to me.” His stepdad bore a grave expression.

“Where’s the storm centered?” his mom asked.

“It was all in relation to Charleston,” Daniel said. He wrapped the buds around the Zune and tucked it into his pocket, saving the battery.

“I think it’s going to hit just south of us. Maybe right on top of us,” Carlton said. “They were saying sixty miles south of Charleston.”

“How far away? Is the worst over?”

“It had made landfall,” Daniel said, “so it can’t be much longer.”

“It could get worse before it gets better,” Carlton cautioned.

“When can I go see my room?” Zola asked. “Oh my god, my new laptop is up there! We’re responsible for those!”

“Nobody’s going upstairs,” their mom said. “And the school will get you a new laptop if anything happens to that one.”

Zola looked nearly in tears. She dropped the fistful of cheerios in her hand back into the box and shoved the box away from herself.

“How long will that radio last?” Daniel’s mom asked.

“I dunno. A few hours or so. I’ve never run it all the way down.”

“If there’s nothing else we can do, or if you guys don’t need to use the bathroom, we should probably get some sleep.” Their mom flipped open her cellphone and glanced at the screen. “It’s almost four, so the sun won’t be up for another two hours. I don’t want anyone moving around or exploring before then.”

“What will we do if another tree comes through here? Or if the house falls down around us?” Daniel thought about images of demolished homes on the weather channel, the piles of jumbled building material and furniture that nobody could live through. He wondered what it would be like to crawl their way outside in this mess only to search frantically for some place to wait out the storm. Would they have to lie down in a ditch? Or was that for tornados? Would they bang on a neighbor’s door like refugees, begging to be let in? What if someone else all of a sudden banged on their door and said their house had been knocked over and now they had to find room for them and share food and water?

“This is the safest place to be right now,” his mom said. She blew out one of the candles Carlton had just lit and rubbed her hand over Daniel’s head. “You should try and get some sleep. It’ll make it go by faster.”

Daniel nodded, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep at all. His heart was pounding from the adventure upstairs. The noise from the wind and rain had him anxious—he felt like a thing constantly under assault and from all directions. But he knew his mom was right. If they were sailors at sea, riding out a terrible storm, they couldn’t survive if all of them stayed up for nothing. In shifts and whenever they could, they needed to get some sleep. He moved back by Zola, who had lain down on her side, facing the wall, and had arranged one of the many pillows now piled up on the crowded bathroom floor. Carlton adjusted the extra blanket and pillows he’d grabbed from the bedroom, and their mom blew out the last candle.

Daniel lowered his head. He could feel the cool wetness in his jeans from the water that had spit through his cracked window. He ran a catalog of his stuff through his head—the things in his room that could get ruined if they got wet. For once, he was glad his parents kept the home computer down in the nook attached to the kitchen. All their pictures, documents, emails, home movies, everything was on that computer. He had an idea to go out and grab the tower and bring it into the bathroom with them. He was imagining curling up to the unit, keeping it safe, when exhaustion and the late hour won their battle over his racing heart.

14

A great noise had startled Daniel awake the first time—an eerie silence pulled him from his slumber hours later. Daniel sat up and saw that his mom and Carlton were gone, their blankets folded back away from their dented pillows. Zola was making sleep sounds beside him. He rubbed his face to remove the fog from his brain and got up quietly to go search for his parents.

The first thing he noticed was that it was light out, the pale glow of dawn filtering through the windows. Daniel went around the corner and saw that the front door was wide open. He crossed the living room and stepped outside into a different world.

“Holy shit,” he whispered, which drew looks from his mom and Carlton. They stood together on the front stoop, her arm around his back, him clutching her shoulders. They had been looking toward the massive tree leaning askance across the front of the house.

Out in the front yard, it was a tangle of limbs. Piles of broken branches formed vast dunes and disjointed heaps of greenery. What was odd was the lack of sound. Not even the birds chirped; there didn’t seem to be any fluttering about. Daniel hurried down the steps to look back at the house. The tree that had gone through the roof was one of the biggest in the yard. Three people couldn’t have reached around it holding hands.

“Don’t go far,” his mom said. “In fact, I’d rather you stay in the house.”

“Why?” Daniel looked around, his arms raised. “It’s over, right? Man, we’re gonna be picking up limbs for ages. And how do you get a tree like that off your roof?”

“It’s not over,” Carlton said. He shielded his eyes and looked up at the brilliant blue patch of sky overhead. Gray clouds stood in the distance. “I’m pretty sure this is the eye. Storms don’t end this suddenly. There’s just as much wind and rain on the back side of the storm, if not more.”

Daniel looked up at the sky. He could see clouds off in one direction, but the house blocked the other. It didn’t look like the solid wall of a hurricane’s eye like he imagined it should, but then, the woods hid the entire lower half. He was just seeing the dark tops of the storm.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Pretty sure,” Carlton said.

“The worst part was the last hour,” his mom added. “It sounded like the house was gonna blow over. And then it just went dead quiet.” She snapped her fingers.

Daniel spun around and took in the utter destruction of their front yard. He heard a cat mew pathetically in the distance. He couldn’t see past the tall walls of fallen limbs to see how bad off the rest of the neighborhood was.

“How long do we have?” he asked.