Before the Storm (11 page)

bleachers laugh, but either there was less laughter today or I

couldn’t hear it through the fog in my head. I shouted encouragement to my kids without really thinking about what I was

saying.

I got through their event—they lost every match and that

was probably my fault—but they didn’t care. I hugged every

one of their cold, wet little bodies as they came out of the pool

and told them they did great. I was so glad it was over. I pulled

my shorts on over my bathing suit and headed for the bleachbefore the storm

93

ers. Ben passed me as his team came together at the end of the

pool.

“They’re getting better,” he said.

I almost laughed. “Yeah, sure.”

I climbed the bleachers to sit next to my mother. “You’re

so good with those kids,” she said, as usual. “I love watching

you.”

“Thanks.”

I looked for Andy at the end of the pool and found him right

away. Even though he was on a team with kids his age, he was

a little shrimp and easy to pick out. He was jabbering to a

couple of kids who were, most likely, tuning him out. Ben put

his hand on Andy’s shoulder and steered him to the edge of

the pool in front of lane five.

Andy’s burn was so much better. I looked at him lined up

with the other high schoolers. I would have felt sorry for him

if I didn’t know his skill. His tininess always faked out the other

teams. He was ninety pounds of muscle. He had asthma, but

as long as he used his inhaler before a meet, no one would ever

guess. I watched him at the edge of the pool, coiled up as tight

as a jack-in-the-box. Ben called him his team’s secret weapon.

I smiled, watching him lean forward, waiting for the whistle.

Next to me, my mother tensed. I thought we were both

holding our breath.

A whistle lasts maybe a second and a half, but Andy always

seemed to hear the very first nanosecond of the sound and he

was off. This time was no different. He leaped through the air

like he’d been shot from a gun. In the water, he worked his

arms and legs like a machine. I used to think his hearing was

more sensitive than the other kids’, that he could hear the

94

diane chamberlain

sound of the whistle before they could. Then Mom told me

about the startle reflex, how babies have it and outgrow it, but

how kids with fetal alcohol syndrome sometimes keep it until

their teens. Andy still had it. At home, if I walked around the

corner from the living room to the kitchen and surprised him,

he’d jump a foot in the air. But in the pool, his startle reflex

was a good thing. Ben’s secret weapon.

Mom laughed as she watched the race, her hands in fists

beneath her chin. I didn’t know how she could laugh at anything

so soon after the fire. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to laugh again.

“Hey, Mags.” Uncle Marcus suddenly showed up on the

bleachers. He squeezed onto the bench between me and the

father of one of the kids on Ben’s team.

“Hey.” I moved closer to Mom to give him room. “I didn’t

know you were here.”

“Just got here,” he said. “Sorry I missed your team. How’d

they do?”

“The usual,” I said.

“Looks like Andy’s doing the usual, too.” Uncle Marcus

looked toward the water, where my brother was a couple of

lengths ahead of everyone else. “Hey, Laurel.” He leaned past

me to look at my mother.

“Hi, Marcus,” Mom said, not taking her eyes off Andy,

which could just be a mother-not-wanting-to-look-awayfrom-her-son kind of thing, but I knew it was more than that.

My mother was always weird about Uncle Marcus. Cold.

Always giving him short answers, the way you’d act with

someone you were tired of talking to, hoping they’d get the

hint. I asked her about it once and she said it was my imagination, that she didn’t treat him differently than anyone else,

before the storm

95

but that was a total crock. I thought it had to do with the fact

that Uncle Marcus survived the whale while Daddy didn’t.

Uncle Marcus was always nice to her, pretending he didn’t

notice how bitchy she acted. A few years ago, I started thinking

of how cool it would be if Mom and Uncle Marcus got

together, but Mom didn’t seem interested in dating anyone,

much less her brother-in-law. Sometimes she and Sara went

to a movie or to dinner, but that was it for my mother’s social

life. I thought her memory of my father was so perfect she

couldn’t picture being with another man.

The older I got, the more I thought she should have something more in her life than her part-time school nurse job, her

every single day jogs, and her full-time job—Andy. I said that

to her once and she turned the tables on me.“You’re a fine one

to talk,” she said. “Why don’t
you
date?” I told her I wanted to

focus on studying and coaching, that I had plenty of time to

date in college. I shut up then. Less said on that topic, the

better. If Mom knew how my grades had tanked this year, she’d

realize I wasn’t studying at all. That was the good thing about

having a mother who only paid attention to one of her kids.

The race was down to the last lap and I stood up along with

everyone else on the bleachers. I spotted Dawn Reynolds in

the first row near the end of the pool. She had no kids on the

swim team; she was there to watch Ben. I followed her gaze

to him. Ben had on his yellow jams with the orange palm tree

print. His chest was bare, with some dark hair across it. He

was tall and a little overweight, but you could see muscles

moving beneath the tanned skin of his arms and legs.

“Go, Pirates!” Dawn yelled, her hands a megaphone around

her mouth, but she wasn’t even looking at the swimmers. She

96

diane chamberlain

was so obvious that I felt embarrassed watching her. It was like

watching someone do something very personal, like inserting

a tampon. I imagined climbing down the bleachers when the

race was over to sit next to her. I could ask her how the fund

was doing. I could ask if there was a way I could help. I wanted

to in the worst way. I knew Mom put in three thousand, and

I gave five hundred from the money I was saving for extra

college expenses, although I told Mom I only gave a hundred.

Andy gave thirty from his bank account. Money was not

enough. I needed to do more. I watched Dawn cheer on Ben’s

team, imagining the conversation I’d never have with her.

The race was almost over. Andy was in the lead. Surprise,

surprise. “Come on, Andy!” I yelled. Mom raised her fists in

the air, waiting for the moment of victory, and Uncle Marcus

let out one of his ear-piercing whistles.

Andy slapped the end of the pool, and the applause

exploded for him, like it had two days before in the Assembly

Building, but he just turned and kept swimming at the same

insane pace. Mom laughed and I groaned. He’d never understood about ending a race. At the end of Andy’s next lap, Ben

leaned over, grabbed him by his arms and lifted him out of the

pool. I saw him mouth the words
You won!
to Andy, and something else that looked like
You can stop swimming now.

We all sat down again. Andy looked at us, grinning and

waving as he walked to the bench.

Uncle Marcus leaned forward again.“I’ve got something for

you, Laurel,” he said.

My mother had to break down and look at him then.“What?”

Uncle Marcus pulled a small folded newspaper article from

his shirt pocket and reached across me to hand it to her.

before the storm

97

“One of the guys was up in Maryland and saw this in the

Washington Post.
”

I looked over my mother’s shoulder to read the headline:

Disabled N.C. Boy Saves Friends.

Mom shook her head with a laugh.“Don’t they have enough

of their own news up there?” She looked at Uncle Marcus. “I

can keep this?”

“It’s yours.”

“Thanks.”

Uncle Marcus took in a long breath, stretching his arms

above his head as he let it out. Then he sniffed my shoulder.

“You wear chlorine the way other women wear perfume,

Mags,” he teased.

He was not the first guy to tell me that. I liked that he said

“women” and not “girls.”

The pool had been my home away from home since it was

built when I was eleven. Before that, I could only swim during

the summer in the sound or the ocean.

Daddy taught Andy and me how to swim. “Kids who live

on the water better be good swimmers,” he’d said. He taught

me first of course, before Andy even lived with us. One of my

earliest memories was of a calm day in the ocean. It was

nothing major. Nothing special. We just paddled around. He

held me on his knees, tossed me in the air, swung me around

until I practically choked on my laughter. Total bliss.

When I was a little older, Andy joined us in the water and

he took to it the same as I did. Daddy’d told me that Andy

probably wouldn’t be able to swim as well as I could, but Andy

surprised him.

I couldn’t remember ever playing in the water with my

98

diane chamberlain

mother. In my early memories, Mom was like a shadow. When

I pictured anything from when I was a little girl, she was on

the edge of the memory, so wispy I couldn’t be sure she was

there or not. I didn’t think she ever held me. It was always

Daddy’s arms around me that I remembered.

“How’s Ben’s head?” Uncle Marcus asked.

“Better,” I said, “though he’s still taking pain meds.”

“You know who he reminds me of?”

“Who?”

“Your father.” He said this quietly, like he didn’t want Mom

to hear.

“Really?” I tried to picture Ben and Daddy standing next to

each other.

“Not sure why, exactly.” Uncle Marcus put his elbows on his

knees as he stared at Ben.“His build. His size, maybe. Jamie was

about the same height. Brown eyes. Same dark, wavy hair. Face

is different, of course. But it’s that…brawniness or something.

All Ben needs is an empathy tattoo on his arm and…” He

shrugged.

I liked when he talked about my father. I liked when anyone,

except Reverend Bill, talked about Daddy.

I was probably five or six when I asked Daddy what the word

“empathy” meant. We were sitting on the deck of The Sea

Tender, our legs dangling over the edge, looking for dolphins.

I ran my fingers over the letters in the tattoo.

“It means feeling what other people are feeling,” he said.

“You know how you kissed the boo-boo on my finger yesterday when I hit it with a hammer?”

“Uh-huh.” He’d been repairing the stairs down to the beach

and said, “Goddamn it!” I’d never heard him say that before.

before the storm

99

“You felt sad for me that I hurt my finger, right?”

I nodded.

“That’s empathy. And I had it tattooed on my arm to remind

me to think about other people’s feelings.” He looked at the

ocean for a long minute or two and I figured that was the end

of the conversation. But then he added,“If you’re a person with

a lot of empathy, it can hurt more to watch a person you care

about suffer than to suffer yourself.”

Even at five or six, I knew what he meant. That was how I

felt when something happened to Andy. When he fell because

his little legs weren’t steady enough yet, or the time he pinched

his fingers in the screen door. I cried so hard that Mom

couldn’t figure out which of us was hurt at first.

When I heard that Andy might be trapped by the fire—that

any
of those children might be trapped—the panic I felt might

as well have been theirs.

“I was worried about him,” Uncle Marcus said.

I dragged my foggy brain back to our conversation. “About

who?” I asked. “Daddy or Ben?”

“Ben,” Uncle Marcus said. “He had some problems in the department at first and I didn’t think he’d last. Claustrophobia. Big

guy like that, you wouldn’t think he’d be afraid of anything. But

after the fire at Drury—”he shook his head“—I realized I’d been

wrong about him. He really proved himself. All he needed was

the fire.”

And right then I knew it wasn’t fog messing up my brain.

It was smoke.

EXCELLENT DAY FOR THE WATER, AND the boaters knew it.

From the front steps of Laurel’s house, I stopped to look at

Stump Sound. Sailboats, kayaks, pontoon boats. I was jealous.

I had a kayak and a small motorboat. I used the kayak for

exercise and fished from the runabout. Or on those rare occasions I had a date, I’d take the boat for a sunset spin on the

Intracoastal. I had this fantasy of taking Andy out with me

someday.
Never happen,
I told myself.
Give it up.

I rang Laurel’s doorbell.

Nearly every Sunday that I wasn’t scheduled to work, I did

something with Andy. Ball game. Skating rink. Fishing from

the pier. Maggie used to come, too, but by the time she reached

Andy’s age, she had better things to do. I got it. I was fifteen

before the storm