The Beach Club (38 page)

Lacey put her cool hands on his face. “What you must realize, Mack, dear, is that I will love you whatever you decide. That’s the definition of love.” She picked up a candle and teetered off down the dark hall. Mack stayed to make sure she reached her bedroom door safely. Before she opened it, she turned to him. The candle lit up her smile.

“You’re my boy,” she said.

When Mack returned to the lobby, it was nearly eleven. Freida shook the hotel like a gambler shaking a cup of dice, as if she were trying to lift the hotel off its foundation. Mack pulled an extra pillow and blanket out of the utility closet and drifted to sleep lying on the floor behind the front desk. A loud crash woke him. He shined his flashlight around the walls of the lobby. Then he heard another crash. He walked out to the middle of the room and listened. Another crash, rhythmic crashing. Waves.

There was a knock on the back door of the lobby. Norris Williams, room 3.

“There’s water on the decks,” he said. He was wearing his white hotel robe; his hair was soaking wet, as though he’d just stepped out of the shower. “I can hear the waves crashing.”

“Is there water coming into your room?” Mack asked. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Where could the guests go? To Bill and Therese’s? To Lacey’s?

“Not yet,” Mr. Williams said. He was the bookish type, with soft hands, an estate-planning lawyer. The type that wasn’t good with emergencies of the physical kind. “My wife and I would like to come into the lobby, if you don’t mind. We’d feel safer.”

“That’s fine,” Mack said. No sooner had Mr. Williams left than there was another knock at the back door. Mrs. Frammer, from Denmark, room 6.

“The water’s coming in. The carpet by the front door is wet,” she said. “Are we supposed to stay on this ship until it goes down? I saw
Titanic
. We all did.”

“You can come into the lobby,” Mack said. He zipped up his jacket. Rain pelleted through the open door like machinegun fire. Mrs. Frammer scooted past him inside and Mack dashed into the rain and pounded on back doors. “Come into the lobby!” he cried out.

The guests grabbed jackets and their flashlights and ran past Mack toward the lobby. Mack knocked on every door, and all the guests got ready to leave immediately, except for Clarissa Ford. She came to the back door, saw everyone running, and said, “God help us.”

“I’m not kidding around this time, Clarissa. It’s time to get out.”

“I already told you, Mack, I’m not going anywhere.”

Mack nudged past Clarissa into her room. A window was cracked. Mack grabbed the knob of the front door with both hands and yanked it open.

The waves crashed over the steps of the front decks. A wave ran right over Mack’s feet onto the green carpet. But the carpet might be the least of their worries. The Gold Coast could break off and wash away altogether. Mack slammed the door shut and dead-bolted it. He jammed two bath towels into the crack at the bottom of the door.

He took Clarissa by the arm. “We have to get out of here,” he said.

She pulled her arm away; Mack thought of Maribel. “I already said, I’m not going.”

In the distance, over the screaming wind, Mack heard sirens.

“Fine,” he said.

A fire engine and two vans pulled up on North Beach Road. The parking lot was so clogged with sand that they couldn’t pull in. But it didn’t matter; Mack was relieved to see help of any kind.

Four men in fluorescent orange coats entered the side door of the lobby. “Someone called on a cell phone and said you needed evacuation,” one of the officers said. He was block shouldered and capable looking, the type who flourished in physical emergencies. “So we’re here to take everybody to the high school. They have a generator running. They have food, water, and bedding.”

“I was the one who called,” Norris Williams said, brandishing his phone as though it were a winning lottery ticket. He was still in his bathrobe. “I’m ready to go. Lead the way.”

Mack stationed himself at the side door and ushered the guests outside, handed them off to the block-shouldered officer, who helped them climb over the dunes to the vans. Mack counted heads. Mr. Sikahama from Hawaii, room 14, said he wasn’t paying six hundred dollars to spend the night in the hallway outside of geometry class, and he hoped he was getting a full refund. Mrs. Frammer kissed Mack on the cheek, as though she expected never to see him again. After everyone was delivered to the van, the officer came back to Mack. “Is that everybody?”

“Just about,” Mack said. “I’m staying here.”

“And is there anyone else?”

Mack saw the beam of a flashlight coming from Bill and Therese’s doorway. “Wait a minute,” he said. The beam bounced and jiggled, and then Mack saw Therese, wearing Cecily’s Middlesex Field Hockey windbreaker over her nightgown. Bare feet.

“I’m going with those people,” she said. “I think someone should go with them, and Bill refuses to leave.”

“Okay,” he said. “Go.”

“Lacey’s already in the van?” Therese asked.

“Lacey,” Mack said. He ran for Lacey’s cottage, flung open the door and charged down the hall to her bedroom. He knocked on her door.

“Gardner?”

He heard a muffled noise, a grizzled breathing. He cracked the door. Lacey was asleep, snoring softly. “Gardner,” Mack said. “Wake up.”

Lacey’s face was ghostly white in the beam of his flashlight. Mack toggled her shoulder. “Lacey, it’s me.”

Her eyelids fluttered. “Max?” She blinked.

“We’re evacuating the hotel, Lacey,” he said. “It’s time to go.”

“I knew it would be soon,” she said. “But I’m not ready.”

“Lacey, we’re going to the high school. The firemen are here.”

She opened her eyes. Blue eyes, sharply focused. “High school?”

“Water’s hitting the decks. It’s time to get everybody out.”

“It’ll take more than a little water to move me,” Lacey said. “Are you going to the high school?”

“No,” he said. “I’m staying here.”

“Me, too,” she said. “If we drown, we drown.” She sank her head deeper into her feather pillow. “Wake me when it’s morning, if you please. If you please.”

The sand in the parking lot was sculpted into dunes, some of which held water. The wind thrummed and shrieked. Mack clambered over hills of sand to the lobby porch. He positioned himself behind one of the porch columns to keep out of the blowing sand. He shined his flashlight onto the beach.

The waves crashed over the pavilion as though it weren’t there, and broke about ten feet shy of the lobby—ten feet, the length of a compact car. Mack was paralyzed, watching Nantucket Sound gone berserk. Attacking.

Mack heard someone call his name and he saw the beacon of a flashlight from Bill’s doorway. Mack spotted Bill climbing over the sand dunes, around puddles the size of a child’s swimming pool. He clenched a yellow slicker at the neck; underneath, he wore pajamas and a pair of galoshes.

“What’s happening?” Bill yelled.

Mack couldn’t speak; he was furious.
What’s happening?
Mack pointed his flashlight at the beach.
What’s happening is called a hurricane. A natural disaster. A state of fucking emergency
.

What Mack said was, “Everyone’s out except for Clarissa and Lacey.”

“How bad’s the water?” Bill asked.

“It’s pretty bad,” Mack said. As angry as Mack was, he didn’t want to have to break the news: water in the rooms, Bill’s ship going down.

Bill switched off his flashlight and Mack did the same. They stood together in darkness. All Mack could see was the white foam getting closer and closer to the lobby.

Bill took Mack’s hand and held it.

He’s terrified
, Mack thought.
First he loses me
,
then his daughter
,
then his hotel
. Mack wasn’t sure what he’d do if Bill started to cry. Mack sneaked a sideways look at him. Bill was smiling.
The guy’s lost his mind
, Mack thought.
He’s gone insane
.

“I’m selling it,” Bill said.

“What?” Mack said.

“I’m selling the hotel for twenty-five million dollars. I have a buyer, and I’ve decided to sell it.”

Mack switched on his flashlight and aimed it at the water’s edge. A wave crested and broke and the white foam danced up the beach.

“I don’t believe you,” Mack said.

“What’s not to believe?” Bill said. “Cecily’s gone, you’re leaving, my baby son is dead. For me the hotel was never just the building, Mack. It was the people inside the building.”

Mack kept his flashlight on the water, mentally marking the water line. He marked wave after wave after wave, until he fell into a kind of stupor. The waves kept rolling and crashing, Mack’s eyelids drooped. In his standing dream-sleep, each wave that washed over him had a name. David Pringle,
If you’re going to stick it out there in the East
; Vance and his snarling lip; Maribel in a sheen of sweat, begging, pleading,
Why did she always want?
Lacey wearing pink fuzzy slippers,
You’re my boy
. Andrea and James, with their matching green-gray eyes. Therese, a dead-child white streak in her hair. Too-handsome Jem, Mr. November, running out the lobby door with his embarrassed happiness. Cecily crying into the phone,
I love you
,
Gabriel
,
I really love you
. Mack’s parents, in Oblivion. As if none of this mattered. The waves lulled Mack back to May, to before May, before Andrea and How-Baby and David Pringle’s phone call, back when things were normal, when things were easy. What had made him happy? The hotel—the front desk, the ringing phone, the beach. The guests, the staff. Bill, Therese, Cecily, Lacey. The Beach Club made him happy. Of course the hotel was more than just a building. For Mack it was a way of life. Even in the middle of a raging hurricane, this was where he wanted to be. Right here.

Mack snapped to attention; his legs were numb. The wind howled like a woman giving birth, but the water wasn’t getting any closer. Mack looked to his right; he was surprised to see Bill still standing there, his lips moving. Reciting poetry. Praying.

“You can’t sell the hotel,” Mack said. “You’ve put your whole life into it.”

“I can start a new life,” Bill said. “Take Therese and move to Hawaii, or Saipan, wherever that is.”

“Bill, you can’t sell the hotel. I won’t let you.”

“You can’t stop me,” Bill said.

“I can stop you,” Mack said.

“How?”

“I can stay.”

Bill nodded slowly.

“Am I right?” Mack said. “Will that stop you?”

“Will you stay?”

“Will that stop you?”

Bill turned to him. “Is it you who’s been writing me letters?” he asked. “Are
you
S.B.T.?”

“No,” Mack said.

Bill shook his head. “No,” he said. “I didn’t think so.”

“I’ll stay,” Mack said.

“Okay,” Bill said. He shined his flashlight over the parking lot and Mack followed the beam—a Toyota 4-Runner was up to the tops of its tires in sand, and the bikes in the bicycle rack were buried to their handlebars. The wind wasn’t letting up.

Then Mack heard a noise, a voice. The voice.
Home. Home
. It was the hum, loud and distinct over the scream of the wind.
Home
. Mack reached for Bill’s arm. “Do you hear that?”

“What?” Bill said.

“That voice. The voice saying ‘Home.’ Do you hear it? Please tell me you hear it. Do you? There—there it is again. Home. Just tell me you hear it.”

Bill climbed over a mound of sand, headed for the safety of his house. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

What woke Mack up first was the smell of coffee, and the promise of light. Mack feared opening his eyes; he didn’t want to be disappointed. Then he heard whispers—giggles, laughing. Mack let himself rise to the surface of his sleep, enough to realize that his back ached, his arms ached, his feet ached. He opened his eyes. Vance and Love stood over him. Vance held two cartons of Hostess doughnuts and Love carried a cardboard tray of coffees.

Mack raised his head an inch. “Is it over?”

“It’s over,” Vance said. “But it’s not pretty. Get up and see for yourself.”

Mack managed to sit up on his own and with a hand from Vance, he stood. Light peeked in around the shutters all over the lobby.

“I can’t believe it,” Mack said. “That looks like sun.”

“Maybe you’d better wait a while before you look outside,” Vance said. “I’ll give you a hint. I had to park the Datsun a quarter-mile up North Beach Road.”

“We walked over the sand,” Love said. “Thanks to my cross-country skiing experience, I got the coffee here without spilling a drop.”

Vance threw his arm around Love’s neck and kissed her. “That’s my girl.”

Mack thought of Maribel. Suddenly, more than his body ached. “Anybody seen Jem?” he asked hopefully. “Or my Jeep?”

Vance and Love shook their heads; Love looked at the ground.

“Have some coffee,” Vance said. He handed Mack a cup. “Were you up all night?”

“Just about,” Mack said. “Do we have power?”

“Not yet,” Vance said.

“We evacuated all the guests,” Mack said. “The fire trucks took everyone to the high school. I didn’t want to leave the hotel.”

“You’re so loyal,” Love said.

“He’s crazy,” Vance said. “You sure you’re ready to go outside? Brace yourself, man. I’m warning you.”

“I’m ready,” Mack said. “It was pretty bad last night.”

“Let’s go,” Vance said. “I want to see your face.”

Mack and Vance walked out the side door. What struck Mack first was this: it was a beautiful day. The heat and humidity of the previous weeks were gone. It was crisp, and the sky was a brilliant, spectacular blue.

The Beach Club looked like the Sahara Desert. The sand in the parking lot was chest high in places. The front porch of the lobby where Bill and Mack stood the night before was buried—there were drifts of sand halfway up the lobby doors. The pavilion was entirely buried, with the exception of the peaked roof, which stuck out—a head with no body. The beach was strewn with seaweed, dead seagulls, rocks.