Before the Storm (2 page)

diane chamberlain

“Your shirt’s inside out,” I said.

“I know. What did the girl say?”

“That her name’s Layla.” I looked over at where Layla was

still talking to the man with the glasses. Keith was gone, and

I stared at Layla. Just looking at her made my body feel funny.

It was like the time I had to take medicine for a cold and

couldn’t sleep all night long. I felt like bugs were crawling

inside my muscles. Mom promised me that was impossible, but

it still felt that way.

“Did she say anything else?” Emily asked.

Before I could answer, a really loud, deep, rumbling noise,

like thunder, filled my ears. Everyone stopped and looked

around like someone had said Freeze! I thought maybe it was

a tsunami because we were so close to the beach. I was really

afraid of tsunamis. I saw one on TV. They swallowed up people.

Sometimes I’d stare out my bedroom window and watch the

water in the sound, looking for the big wave that would

swallow me up. I wanted to get out of the church and run, but

nobody moved.

Like magic, the stained-glass windows lit up. I saw Mary and

baby Jesus and angels and a half-bald man in a long dress

holding a bird on his hand. The window colors were on everybody’s face and Emily’s hair looked like a rainbow.

“Fire!” someone yelled from the other end of the church,

and then a bunch of people started yelling, “Fire! Fire!”

Everyone screamed, running past me and Emily, pushing us

all over the place.

I didn’t see any fire, so me and Emily just stood there getting

pushed around, waiting for an adult to tell us what to do. I was

pretty sure then that there wasn’t a tsunami. That made me

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feel better, even though somebody’s elbow knocked into my

side and somebody else stepped on my toes. Emily backed up

against the wall so nobody could touch her as they rushed past.

I looked where Layla had been talking with the man, but she

was gone.

“The doors are blocked by fire!” someone shouted.

I looked at Emily.“Where’s your mom?” I had to yell because

it was so noisy. Emily’s mother was one of the adults at the

lock-in, which was the only reason Mom let me go.

“I don’t know.” Emily bit the side of her finger the way she

did when she was nervous.

“Don’t bite yourself.” I pulled her hand away from her face

and she glared at me with her good eye.

All of a sudden I smelled the fire. It crackled like a bonfire

on the beach. Emily pointed to the ceiling where curlicues of

smoke swirled around the beams.

“We got to hide!” she said.

I shook my head. Mom told me you can’t hide from a fire.

You had to escape. I had a special ladder under my bed I could

put out the window to climb down, but there were no special

ladders in the church that I could see.

Everything was moving very fast. Some boys lifted up one

of the long church seats. They counted one two three and ran

toward the big window that had the half-bald man on it. The

long seat hit the man, breaking the window into a zillion

pieces, and then I saw the fire outside. It was a bigger fire than

I’d ever seen in my life. Like a monster, it rushed through the

window and swallowed the boys and the long seat in one big

gulp. The boys screamed, and they ran around with fire coming

off them.

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I shouted as loud as I could, “Stop! Drop! Roll!”

Emily looked amazed to hear me tell the boys what to do.

I didn’t think the boys heard me, but then some of them
did

stop, drop and roll, so maybe they did. They were still burning,

and the air in the church had filled up with so much smoke, I

couldn’t see the altar anymore.

Emily started coughing. “Mama!” she croaked.

I was coughing, too, and I knew me and Emily were in

trouble. I couldn’t see her mother anywhere, and the other

adults were screaming their heads off just like the kids. I was

thinking, thinking, thinking. Mom always told me, in an emergency, use your head. This was my first real emergency ever.

Emily suddenly grabbed my arm. “We got to hide!” she said

again. She had to be really scared because she’d never touched

me before on purpose.

I knew she was wrong about hiding, but now the floor was

on fire, the flames coming toward us.

“Think!” I said out loud, though I was only talking to myself.

I hit the side of my head with my hand. “Brain, you gotta kick

in!”

Emily pressed her face against my shoulder, whimpering like

a puppy, and the fire rose around us like a forest of golden

trees.

MY FATHER WAS KILLED BY A WHALE.

I hardly ever told people how he died because they’d think I

was making it up. Then I’d have to go into the whole story and

watch their eyes pop and their skin break out in goose bumps.

They’d talk about Ahab and Jonah,and I would know that Daddy’s

death had morphed into their entertainment. When I was a little

girl, he was my whole world—my best friend and protector. He

was awesome. He was a minister who built a chapel for his tiny

congregation with his own hands. When people turned him into

a character in a story, one they’d tell their friends and family over

pizza or ice cream, I had to walk away. So, it was easier not to

talk about it in the first place.If someone asked me how my father

died, I’d just say “heart.” That was the truth, anyway.

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The night Andy went to the lock-in, I knew I had to visit

my father—or at least try to visit him. It didn’t always work.

Out of my thirty or forty tries, I only made contact with him

three times. That made the visits even more meaningful to me.

I’d never stop trying.

I called Mom to let her know the lock-in had been moved

from Drury Memorial’s youth building to the church itself, so

she’d know where to pick Andy up in the morning. Then I said

I was going over to Amber Donnelly’s, which was a total

crock. I hadn’t hung out with Amber in months, though we

sometimes still studied together. Hanging out with Amber

required listening to her talk nonstop about her boyfriend,

Travis Hardy. “Me and Travis this,” and “me and Travis that,”

until I wanted to scream. Amber was in AP classes like me,

but you wouldn’t know it from her grammar. Plus, she was

such a poser, totally caught up in her looks and who she hung

out with. I never realized it until this year.

So instead of going to Amber’s, I drove to the northern end

of the island, which, on a midweek night in late March, felt

like the end of the universe. In fourteen miles, I saw only two

other cars on the road, both heading south, and few of the

houses had lights on inside. The moon was so full and bright

that weird shadows of shrubs and mailboxes were on the road

in front of me. I thought I was seeing dogs or deer in the road

and I kept braking for nothing. I was relieved when I spotted

the row of cottages on the beach.

That end of the island was always getting chewed up by

storms, and the six oceanfront cottages along New River Inlet

Road were, every single one of them, condemned. Between

the cottages and the street was another row of houses, all

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waiting for their turn to become oceanfront. I thought that

would happen long ago; we had to abandon our house after

Hurricane Fran, when I was five. But the condemned houses

still stood empty, and I hoped they’d remain that way for the

rest of my life.

Our tiny cottage was round, and it leaned ever so slightly to

the left on long exposed pilings. The outdoor shower and

storage closet that used to make up the ground floor had slipped

into the sea along with the septic tank. The wood siding had

been bleached so pale by decades under the sun that it looked

like frosted glass in the moonlight. The cottage had a name—

The Sea Tender—given to it by my Grandpa Lockwood. Long

before I was born, Grandpa burned that name into a board and

hung it above the front door, but the sign blew away a couple

of years ago and even though I searched for it in the sand, I never

found it.

The wind blew my hair across my face as I got out of the car,

and the waves sounded like nonstop thunder. Topsail Island

was so narrow that we could hear the ocean from our house on

Stump Sound, but this was different. My feet vibrated from the

pounding of the waves on the beach, and I knew the sea was

wild tonight.

I had a flashlight, but I didn’t need it as I walked along the

skinny boardwalk between two of the front-row houses to

reach our old cottage. The bottom step used to sit on the

sand, but now it was up to my waist. I moved the cinder block

from behind one of the pilings into place below the steps,

stood on top of it, then boosted myself onto the bottom step

and climbed up to the deck. A long board nailed across the

front door read
Condemned,
and I could just manage to squeeze

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diane chamberlain

my key beneath it into the lock. Mom was a pack rat, and I

found the key in her desk drawer two years earlier, when I first

decided to go to the cottage. I ducked below the sign and

walked into the living room, my sandals grinding on the gritty

floor.

I knew the inside of the cottage as well as I knew our house

on Stump Sound. I walked through the dark living room to the

kitchen, dodging some of our old furniture, which had been

too ratty and disgusting to save even ten years ago. I turned on

my flashlight and put it on the counter so the light hit the

cabinet above the stove. I opened the cabinet, which was empty

except for a plastic bag of marijuana, a few rolled joints and

some boxes of matches. My hands shook as I lit one of the

joints, breathing the smoke deep into my lungs. I held my

breath until the top of my head tingled. I craved that out-ofbody feeling tonight.

Opening the back door, I was slammed by the roar of the

waves. My hair was long and way too wavy and it sucked

moisture from the air like a sponge. It blew all over the place

and I tucked it beneath the collar of my jacket as I stepped onto

the narrow deck. I used to take a shower when I got home from

the cottage, the way some kids showered to wash away the

scent of cigarettes. I thought Mom would take one sniff and

know where I’d been. I deserved to feel guilty, because it

wasn’t just the hope of being with Daddy that drew me to the

cottage. I wasn’t all that innocent.

I sat on the edge of the deck, my legs dangling in the air, and

stared out at the long sliver of moonlight on the water. I rested

my elbows on the lower rung of the railing. Saltwater mist wet

my cheeks, and when I licked my lips, I tasted my childhood.

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I took another hit from the joint and tried to still my mind.

When I was fifteen, I got my level-one driver’s license and

was allowed to drive with an adult in the car. One night I had

this crazy urge to go to the cottage. I couldn’t say why, but one

minute, I was studying for a history exam, and the next I was

sneaking out the front door while Mom and Andy slept. There

was no moon at all that night and I was scared shitless. It was

December and dark and I barely knew how to steer, much less

use the gas and the brake, but I made it the seven miles to the

cottage. I sat on the deck, shivering with the cold. That was

the first time I felt Daddy. He was right next to me, rising up

from the sea in a cloud of mist, wrapping his arms around me

so tightly that I felt warm enough to take off my sweater. I cried

from the joy of having him close. I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t believe

in ghosts or premonitions or even in heaven and hell. But I

believed Daddy was there in a way I can’t explain. I just knew

it was true.

I felt like Daddy was with me a couple more times since

then, but tonight I had trouble stilling my mind enough to let

him in. I read on the Internet about making contact with

people who’d died. Every Web site had different advice, but

they all said that stilling your mind was the first thing you

needed to do. My mind was racing, though, the weed not mellowing me the way it usually did.

“Daddy,” I whispered into the wind, “I really need you

tonight.” Squeezing my eyes more tightly closed, I tried to

picture his wavy dark hair. The smile he always wore when he

looked at me.

Then I started thinking about telling Mom I wouldn’t be

valedictorian when I graduated in a couple of months, like she

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diane chamberlain

expected. What would she say? I was an honors student all

through school until this semester. I hoped she’d say it was no

big thing, since I was already accepted at UNC in Wilmington. Which started me thinking about leaving home. How