Before the Storm (7 page)

crumpled insurance card and got out.

The Hells Angel parked his motorcycle a couple of spaces

up the street from my car.

“Does it run okay?” I asked, hugging my arms again as I approached. It wasn’t cold, but my body was trembling all over.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Your car took the brunt of it.”

“No,
you
did.” I looked again at the shredded leather on his

arm. “I wish you’d…
yell
at me or something.You’re way too

calm.”

He laughed. “Did you cut me off on purpose?”

“No.”

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59

“I can tell you already feel like crap about it,” he said. “Why

should I make you feel worse?” He looked past me to the shops

along the street. “Let’s get a cup of coffee while we do the insurance bit,” he said, pointing to the café down the block.

“You’re in no shape to drive right now, anyway.”

He was right. I was still shivering as I stood next to him in

line at the coffee shop. My knees buckled, and I leaned heavily

against the counter as we ordered.

“Decaf for you.” He grinned. He was a good ten inches

taller than me. At least six-three. “Find us a table, why don’t

you?”

I sat down at a table near the window. My heart still

pounded against my rib cage, but I was filled with relief. My

car was basically okay, I hadn’t killed anyone, and the Hells

Angel was the forgiving type. I’d really lucked out. I put my

insurance card on the table and smoothed it with my fingers.

I studied the width of the Angel’s shoulders beneath the

expanse of leather as he picked up our mugs of coffee. His body

reminded me of a well-padded football player, but when he

took off his jacket, draping it over the spare chair at our table,

I saw that his size had nothing to do with padding. He wore a

navy-blue T-shirt that read Topsail Island across the front in

white, and while he was not fat, he was not particularly toned

either.
Burly.Robust.
The words floated through my mind and,

although I was a virgin, having miserably plodded my way

through high school as a social loser, I wondered what it would

be like to have sex with him. Could he hold his weight off me?

“Are you doin’ all right?” Curiosity filled his brown eyes,

and I wondered if the fantasy was written on my face. I felt

my cheeks burn.

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“I’m better,” I said. “Still a little shaky.”

“Your first accident?”

“My last, too, I hope.You’ve had others?”

“Just a couple. But I’ve got a few years on you.”

“How old are you?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t a rude

question.

“Twenty-three. And you’re about eighteen, I figure.”

I nodded.

“Freshman at UNC?”

“Yes.” I wrinkled my nose, thinking I must have
frosh
written

on my forehead.

He sipped his coffee, then nudged my untouched mug an

inch closer to me. “Have a major yet?” he asked.

“Nursing.” My mother had been a nurse. I wanted to follow

in her footsteps, even though she would never know it. “What

about you?” I opened a packet of sugar and stirred it into my

coffee. “Are you a Hells Angel?”

“Hell, no!” He laughed. “I’m a carpenter, although I
did

graduate from UNC a few years ago with a completely worthless degree in Religious Studies.”

“Why is it worthless?” I asked, though I probably should have

changed the subject. I hoped he wasn’t going to try to save me,

preaching the way some religious people did. I was beholden

to him and would have had to listen, at least for a while.

“Well, I thought I’d go to seminary,” he said. “Become a

minister. But the more I studied theology, the less I liked the

idea of being tied to one religion like it’s the only way. So I’m

still playing with what I want to be when I grow up.” He

reached toward the seat next to him, his hand diving into the

pocket of his leather jacket and coming out with a pen and his

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61

insurance card. On his biceps, I saw a tattooed banner, the

word
empathy
written inside it. As sexually excited as I’d felt

five minutes ago, now I felt his fingertips touch my heart, hold

it gently in his hand.

“Listen,” he said, his eyes on the card. “Your car runs okay,

right? It’s mostly cosmetic?”

I nodded.

“Don’t go through your insurance company, then. It’ll just

cost you in the long run. Get an estimate and I’ll take care of it

for you.”

“You can’t do that!” I said. “It was my fault.”

“It was an easy mistake to make.”

“I was careless.” I stared at him.“And I don’t understand why

you’re not angry about it. I almost killed you.”

“Oh, I was angry at first. I said lots of cuss words while I

was f lying through the air.” He smiled. “Anger’s poison,

though. I don’t want it in me. When I changed the focus from

how I was feeling to how
you
were feeling, it went away.”

“The tattoo…” I pointed to his arm.

“I put it there to remind me,” he said. “It’s not always that

easy to remember.”

He turned the insurance card over and clicked the pen.

“I don’t even know your name,” he said.

“Laurel Patrick.”

“Nice name.” He wrote it down, then reached across the

table to shake my hand. “I’m Jamie Lockwood.”

We started going out together, to events on campus or the

movies and once, on a picnic. I felt young with him, but never

patronized. I was drawn to his kindness and the warmth of his

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eyes. He told me that he was initially attracted to my looks,

proving that he was not a completely atypical guy after all.

“You were so pretty when you got out of your car that day,”

he said. “Your cheeks were red and your little pointed chin

trembled and your long black hair was kind of messy and

sexy.” He coiled a lock of my stick-straight hair around his

finger. “I thought the accident must have been fate.”

Later, he said, it was my sweetness that attracted him. My

innocence.

We kissed often during the first couple of weeks we saw one

another, but nothing more than that. I experienced my first

ever orgasm with him, even though he was not touching me

at the time. We were on his bike and he shifted into a gear that

suddenly lit a fire between my legs. I barely knew what was

happening. It was startling, quick and stunning. I tightened my

arms around him as the spasms coursed through my body, and

he patted my hands with one of his, as though he thought I

might be afraid of how fast we were going. It would be a while

before I told him that I would always think of his bike as my

first lover.

We talked about our families. I’d lived in North Carolina

until I was twelve, when my parents died. Then I went to

Ohio to live with my social-climbing aunt and uncle who were

ill-prepared to take on a child of any sort, much less a grief-

stricken preadolescent. There’d been a “Southerners are

dumb” sort of prejudice among my classmates and a couple of

my teachers. I fed right into that prejudice in the beginning,

unable to focus on my studies and backsliding in every subject.

I missed my parents and cried in bed every night until I figured

out how to keep from thinking about them as I struggled to

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63

fall asleep: I’d count backward from one thousand, picturing

the numbers on a hillside, like the
Hollywood
sign. It worked.

I started sleeping better, which led to studying better. My

teachers had to revise their “dumb Southerner” assessment of

me as my grades picked up. Even my aunt and uncle seemed

surprised. When it came time to apply to colleges, though, I

picked all Southern schools, hungry to return to my roots.

Jamie was struck by the loss of my parents.

“Both your parents died when you were twelve?” he asked,

incredulous. “At the same time?”

“Yes, but I don’t think about it much.”

“Maybe you
should
think about it,” he said.

“It’s all in the past.” I’d healed from that loss and saw no point

in revisiting it.

“Things like that can come back to bite you later,” he said.

“Were they in an accident?”

“You’re awfully pushy.” I laughed, but he didn’t crack a

smile.

“Seriously,” he said.

I sighed then and told him about the fire on the cruise ship

that killed fifty-two people, my parents included.

“Fire on a cruise ship.” He shook his head. “Rock and a hard

place.”

“Some people jumped.”

“Your parents?”

“No. I wish they had.” Before I’d perfected my counting-

backward-from-one-thousand technique, vivid fiery images

of my parents had filled my head whenever I tried to go to

sleep.

Jamie read my mind. “The smoke got them first, you can

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bet on it,” he said.“They were probably unconscious before the

fire reached them.”

Although I hadn’t wanted to talk about it, I still took

comfort from that thought. Jamie knew about fire, since he

was a volunteer firefighter in Wilmington. For days after he’d

fight a fire, I could smell smoke on him. He’d shower and scrub

his long hair and still the smell would linger, seeping out of his

pores. It was a smell I began to equate with him, a smell I began

to like.

He took me to meet his family after we’d been seeing each

other for three weeks. Even though they lived in Wilmington,

I was to meet them at their beach cottage on Topsail Island

where they spent most weekends. I’d probably been to Topsail

as a child, but had no memory of it. Jamie teased me that my

mispronunciation of the island—I said
Topsale
instead of

Topsul
—was a dead giveaway.

By that time, he’d bought me my own black leather jacket

and white helmet, and I was accustomed to riding with him.

My arms were wrapped around him as we started across the

high-rise bridge. Far below us, I saw a huge maze of tiny rectangular islands.

“What
is
that down there?” I shouted.

Jamie steered the bike to the side of the bridge, even though

ours was the only vehicle on the road. I climbed off and peered

over the railing. The grid of little islands ran along the shoreline

of the Intracoastal Waterway for as far as I could see. Miniature

fir trees and other vegetation grew on the irregular rectangles

of land, the afternoon sun lighting the water between them

with a golden glow.“It looks like a little village for elves,” I said.

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65

Jamie stood next to me, our arms touching through layers

of leather.“It’s marshland,” he said,“but it does have a mystical

quality to it, especially this time of day.”

We studied the marshland a while longer, then got back on

the bike.

I knew Jamie’s parents owned a lot of land on the island, especially in the northernmost area called West Onslow Beach.

After World War II, his father had worked in a secret missile

testing program on Topsail Island called Operation Bumblebee. He’d fallen in love with the area and used what money he

had to buy land that mushroomed in value over the decades.

As we rode along the beach road, Jamie pointed out property

after property belonging to his family. Many parcels had mobile

homes parked on them, some of the trailers old and rusting,

though the parcels themselves were worth plenty. There were

several well-kept houses with rental signs in front of them and

even a couple of the old f lat-roofed, three-story concrete

viewing towers that had been used during Operation Bumblebee. I was staggered to realize the wealth Jamie had grown up

with.

“We don’t live rich, though,” Jamie had said when he told

me about his father’s smart investments. “Daddy says that the

whole point of having a lot of money is to give you the freedom

to live like you don’t need it.”

I admired that. My aunt and uncle were exactly the

opposite.

All the Lockwood houses had names burned into signs

hanging above their front doors. The Loggerhead and Osprey

Oasis and Hurricane Haven. We came to the last row of houses

on the Island and I began to perspire inside the leather jacket.

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diane chamberlain

I knew one of them belonged to his family and that I’d meet

them in a few minutes. Jamie drove slowly past the cottages.

“Daddy actually owns these last five houses,” he said, turning

his head so I could hear him.

“Terrier?” I read the name above one of the doors.

“Right, that’s where we’re headed, but I’m taking us on a

little detour first. The next house is Talos. Terrier and Talos

were the names of the first supersonic missiles tested here.”

Those two houses were mirror images of each other: tall,

narrow two-story cottages sitting high on stilts to protect

them from the sea.

“I love
that
one!” I pointed to the last house in the row, next

to Talos. The one-story cottage was round. Like all the other