Into the Hurricane

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOR BETH,

  AGAIN AND ALWAYS,

  WITH A NOD TO THE MANY STORMS

  WE’VE WEATHERED TOGETHER

  MAXINE FONTENOT CONSIDERS THE FRAMED SIGN HUNG ON the wall in the main office of the Clayborne Funeral Parlor. WE HONOR THE DEAD BY SERVING THE LIVING. Just above the sign, there’s an imperfection in the wall, a tiny raised patch where some lazy painter spackled an old nail hole but didn’t sand it down. Max runs a finger over the shoddy work. The fact is, she’s bothered by just about everything about this place—the cheesy harp music drifting down from ceiling speakers, the tacky carpet, and most of all the sterile smell, which reminds her of the hospital room over at Wayne Osteopathic.

  Max turns to the funeral home director, a pudgy man sitting awkwardly behind his oversized mahogany desk. She can tell that she makes him uncomfortable, the way he keeps trying not to gawk at the metal stud popping from each nostril or her spiky green hair. She cocks her head at the sign. “So what’s that supposed to mean?”

  The director clears his throat. “It means mourning is a process. The dead are gone to us. In truth, we can do little for them. Our real obligation lies with those left behind to grieve. The, uh, the survivors.”

  “Sounds like a load of crap to me,” Max says. “But I guess the dead aren’t writing you any checks, right?” She walks to the chair across from Clayborne and drops into it, then slides one long leg over the other. Thin slits rip across her black jeans, exposing pale skin.

  Clayborne sticks two fingers inside his shirt collar and tugs it away from his neck. “As I thought I’d made clear when you called, this isn’t my affair. It’s a matter for the family to discuss. Really, Ms. Fontenot, you need to talk to your mother.”

  “You don’t say the last t,” Max snaps. Everybody in Jersey makes this mistake. “It’s Font-a-no. As for my mom, I haven’t seen her in ten years.” Her mother ran off to Canada with a musician she met in New York. She left no note, never even said good-bye. One morning she was simply gone. “That lady out there with the black veil just happened to marry my dad. I’ve talked to her about all I need to.” Max thinks of the new dress, black and sleek, that Angie bought her for today. Right now, it’s crumpled on the floor in a basement bedroom at the Gonzalezes’.

  Max leans forward. “Look, I was there at the end. Only me and nobody else. I’m the one who heard my dad’s dying wish.” This is a lie, but it’s a lie she hopes might serve her purpose. Max allows a few tears to slip from her eyes, smearing her black mascara. “You’re so eager to serve the living?” she continues. “Let me have that can.”

  Clayborne gulps and blinks. With some effort, he rises and shuffles around the desk, past a window where an air conditioner struggles. Through the window next to it, Max sees cars sliding by in the parking lot. Clayborne crosses behind her, and the double doors to his office squeak when he shuts them. As he returns to his chair, he offers her a flowery box of tissues, which she waves away.

  “We call it an urn, Ms. Fontenot,” Clayborne says, now pronouncing her name correctly. “I know this is a most difficult time for you and your family. The loss of a loved one is always accompanied by great pain and confusion. This isn’t a day for hasty decisions you may regret later.”

  Max stands up, but Clayborne raises a silencing hand. “Allow me to finish, please. Your mother—pardon me, stepmother—has been named executrix of the estate. I can’t possibly release the remains to you without her consent, and her intentions on that matter are unequivocally clear. Also, if I might add a personal observation, she seems to have other matters complicating her situation.”

  Max ignores this last line and decides to double down on her lie. “But this isn’t what he wanted.”

  From his inside jacket pocket, Clayborne tugs an immaculate white handkerchief and dabs at his forehead. “We’ll start shortly. Then, after the service, we’ll bring your father’s remains to his final resting place. It’s quite lovely and not far from your church.”

  “Not my church,” Max says under her breath. This was another new element Angie brought into her father’s life, another change that cut her out.

  “Be that as it may,” Clayborne tells her, “all these things, they’ve been arranged, you see. Whatever the source of this dispute, I have no place in it. Please. You’re placing me in a horribly awkward position.”

  Max drops back into the cushions of the large chair. “Well, hell, I wouldn’t want you to feel awkward.”

  Clayborne bristles. “We’re talking about professional codes of conduct. Legal obligations.”

  “But me and my dad,” Max says, “we had a deal.” Her mind slides to a distant past, pure and true: the drone of the highway, the crappy fast food and the cheap hotel rooms they stayed in on that long road trip to Louisiana, where her father was raised. In the wake of her mother’s betrayal, they’d retreated there for nearly two weeks, trying to salvage what they could from the wreckage of their lives, making promises they swore they’d always keep. Just us.

  Clayborne doesn’t respond, just tucks the handkerchief away. They sit in silence for a time. He folds his meaty fingers together and holds them on the desk. Finally, Max decides it’s time for Plan B. She says, “Okay. Okay. I get it. I’m sorry I yelled before. I know this is your job, and you’re doing what you think is right.”

  Clayborne’s tense expression eases, and he nods.

  “But before we go out there and get on with things, could I have a minute alone with him? Not out there with all those people but just here, privately?”

  The director studies her face for a moment. “It’s highly irregular, but I don’t see the harm. I’m happy to do what I can to help those in mourning.” Quietly, he exits the room.

  Alone, Max remembers the best memory of all from that trip south, she and her dad alone at that strange lighthouse, the wide sky above them, the gulf spreading out before them like glass, his arms around her. How special she felt then. Now she glances at her wrist and the broken Hello Kitty watch, something she swiped from the Goodwill where she works part-time. Roaming the aisles, she examines the items people discard, the winter coats and toys and books that once were prized. Every now and then, Max tucks an item into her pocket—a pink wallet, a heart-shaped pendant—just because she can’t bear to leave it alone on the shelf, unwanted.

  When Clayborne returns, he’s holding what looks to Max like a small silver trophy, the kind her basketball team won in junior high a few years back, coached by her dad. With great reverence, Clayborne sets the urn on his desk. Max understands what’s inside the central chamber, but still, she grips for the lid. Clayborne raises a hand and says, “At this point, it’s best to leave the urn sealed. But your father, he is in there.”

  She says, “Okay, then. Could I be alone with him like we talked about?” For effect, she sniffles and plucks a tissue from the box.

  “Certainly,” Clayborne says. He leaves again, closing the double doors.

  At the instant the latch clicks, Max drops her tissue, grabs the urn by a silver handle, and heads for the window. In her pocket are the keys to her dad’s Jeep, wh
ere she’s already stashed the knapsack she stuffed earlier at the Gonzalezes’.

  The window next to the dying air conditioner slides up easily. Outside, the August air is like a hot breath. Max wonders for an instant what Clayborne will do when he returns and finds his office empty. But then the stray thought is gone, and so too is Max, heading south, carrying her father in one hand, determined to keep her lighthouse promise.

  DOWN HERE IN THE SHACKS, WE DON’T BURY OUR DEAD. WE can’t. Dig too deep and you hit water. Don’t dig deep enough, and the earth’ll reject that coffin, spit it out with the first good rain. So our coffins need to sit on top of the ground, each encased in its own concrete box. Left like this, some say the dead can’t really rest in peace, which is one reason folks figure Louisiana’s got so many ghost stories. Every parish has a haunted plantation house with slave souls on the prowl, plus there’s pirates still searching for lost treasure along our coast, ancient Acadian settlers wandering our swamps, even original natives like the Coushatta, the Choctaw, or the Chitimacha, all floating free between the living and the dead. Out here on Shackles Island, there’s a dozen good ghost tales, even enough to draw some whacked-out tourists across the iron bridge now and again. But there’s one spirit nobody comes looking for, one that haunts me and me alone, and that’s my big sister, Celeste. She’s been dead going on six years, but from time to time, she visits me still.

  Even right now in this dusty workshop garage, the place where I probably feel safest and most at home, I can tell she’s nearby, watching. I just came out to get some nails—I’ve been boarding windows for an hour—but my projects distracted me. Looks like I’ll never get a chance to repair Mr. Harry’s weed trimmer, or Big Ned’s chain saw. Without her TV/VCR, Ms. June won’t be able to watch her old home movies. I clear some space off my worktable and get everything up off the ground, to at least give the machines a fighting chance when the waters come.

  Of all the jobs I won’t finish, the one that gets me most is Dr. Wood’s antique brass clock. It kept perfect time for decades so long as he wound it regular, and then it just gave out. Over the summer, I’ve spent hours studying the clock’s mechanical guts. And now, once again, I cradle it in two hands. The brass is cool to the touch, and the white face, circled by Roman numerals, has yellowed some with age. But the best part’s inside. I set it facedown and unscrew the back plate, exposing the miraculous gears. Here now is the central ratchet wheel, the delicate cogs and anchors, the tiny coiled springs. I’ve removed each piece, inspected it, replaced it. Everything is how it ought to be. The clock just doesn’t work.

  Oh, give it up, Eli.

  The voice sounds only in my head, but I turn. Celeste is sitting on the motorcycle I resurrected from the salvage yard in Hackberry last year, an ancient Ducati nobody thought I could make run again. Same as always, she’s dressed in a plain white T-shirt and cutoff blue jeans, like she was the last time I saw her alive. Only her blue jeans aren’t blue at all but gray, the same way her strawberry-blond hair is just sort of soft white. She looks like a life-sized charcoal sketch, not the cruddy ones I draw but like a Leonardo da Vinci sketch—a perfect copy, right down to the almond-shaped eyes. Right now, she squints at me with that look of disappointment I know so well.

  Quit wasting your time.

  In real life, Celeste was a gentle spirit. She was a bit fragile and prone to crying, but she read to me at night from her history books, taught me to fight back against the kids who picked on me for being short and skinny, took me on nature hikes where we’d wander the woods or scan the beach for perfect seashells. She was a good big sister. As a ghost, she’s mostly a jerk. Maybe death does that to you.

  Especially an ugly death.

  I know better than to ask her forgiveness. Celeste never answers me when I try to talk to her. So I reach for the nails I came in here for in the first place, grab my hammer, and brush past her, out onto the hard dirt of our yard. The air feels tense and charged, and again I sense what’s coming, a hurricane that shares my sister’s name. As soon as I saw the list for this year’s storms, there she was, right behind Hurricane Arturo, which fizzled out, and Hurricane Bertrand, which raged a while and threatened the Georgia coast before spinning back into the Atlantic. But Hurricane Celeste, she’s not screwing around.

  I climb the wooden stairs onto the porch and approach the final piece of plywood. All the other windows are boarded up good. I lift the last one into place and focus on pounding each nail into place. Each bang pops like a gunshot. When I finish, everything is silent.

  Inside the house, the phone rings. I hustle into a living room with all the lights off and the windows completely darkened. It feels like a tomb. Guided by the ringing and the dull green glow of the handset, I get to the phone by the fifth ring, but when I see the Galveston number of my aunt’s house, I don’t reach for the receiver. In the blackness, I wait for the phone to stop, then imagine my mom talking. Soon enough, the red message light gets to blinking.

  The wind picks up, whistling high through the tight spaces between the plywood boards and the windows. The sound is sharp and piercing, like a red-winged blackbird’s cry. I feel for the coffee table, set down the hammer, and grope around for the remote control. Moments later, the Weather Channel flashes to life, making the walls of the living room glow blue. They’re showing aerial footage of when Hurricane Celeste smashed through the southern tip of Florida a few days back, leveling half a county. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to splintered timber, as if a giant had taken a club to the mobile homes and mansions. Seventy-five are dead in her wake. The image shifts to a satellite shot, a surging mass of swirling clouds, spinning like a buzz saw toward the exposed Louisiana coast.

  The TV cuts back to the control room, where there’s a whole gang of giddy meteorologists falling over one another with dire predictions, grinning with delight at doom and disaster. “Storm of the new century,” they say. “Destruction on a massive scale!” They make it sound like we’re facing the end of the world.

  And, hey, that’d be okay by me.

  I return to the phone, punch the button. My mom’s recorded voice says, “Eli, I’m praying this means you’re not there, that you’re already on the road. You were supposed to call before you left. I wish you’d called. This thing is only getting worse—it’s coming much quicker than they said—and the highways are crazy. If for some reason you’re hearing this, sweet Jesus, get out of there. But, please, just call me first and let me know you’re okay.”

  I feel about a billion miles from okay, but my mom doesn’t want to hear that. Far as I know, everybody in the Shacks has packed up and fled north to higher ground. My parents bailed two whole days ago, steering their boat, the Celestial Girl, west along the coast down past the Sabine Pass. I guess they weren’t going to lose her twice.

  On the TV, they switch to footage of I-10, packed bumper to bumper in both directions. Folks don’t know if they should head west for Houston or east to Baton Rouge. As for me, I have no impulse to run. I kind of like the idea of being alone on the island. For reasons I don’t fully understand and can’t explain, I just don’t feel like that storm’s the biggest threat in my world. One thing I’ve figured out in the six years since Celeste’s death: It’s damn near impossible to evacuate from yourself.

  I’m surprised to see them cut to a satellite image of the Shacks. From high above, the east end and the west, each about three miles long, really do seem separate. Fact of the matter is it’s all one island, shaped sort of like a figure eight or an hourglass. The name came from pirates who looked at the two linked masses on the maps and saw shackles.

  A blond commentator, perky and smiling, says, “Residents of the region are complying with the governor’s mandatory evacuation order.”

  I guess that makes it official. I’m the sole living citizen left on Shackles Island. I listen for Celeste and don’t hear her, but I’m sure she hasn’t gone far. For years I told nobody about my sister’s ghost, how from time to time she’d sho
w up—at my eighth-grade graduation, at my fourteenth birthday party. But the pressure of her presence built up inside me till my secret slipped out a couple summers ago. Late one night down on Holly Beach, I built a little driftwood fire under the stars, and this girl Sandra huddled inside my arm and everything felt right and good. She turned her face to mine, and I realized this would be it, my first kiss, and I closed my eyes and moved my lips to hers. That’s when I heard Spare me!

  I yanked my head back and saw Celeste, etched in black and white, shaking her head. Sandra blinked for a few seconds, then asked me what was wrong.

  “It’s Celeste,” I answered without thinking. “Sometimes I see her.”

  Sandra pulled back and looked at me. “But Celeste is dead.” Everybody on the island knows about the lighthouse.

  I pointed at my sister and said, “Tell her that.”

  After Sandra glanced over her shoulder and saw nothing, she stood up and dusted the sand from her legs. She said, “Eli, you’re a sweet guy and all, really. But you need some way serious help. Something ain’t right in you.”

  Sandra’s words landed hard, mostly because I’d come to that same conclusion. I guess she held her tongue for as long as she could, but by Halloween, kids at school were asking me if I’d seen any ghosts. When my parents heard the rumor, the two of them nearly bust. They’d each sort of fallen apart after Celeste’s death, and they drove me over to Father Arceneaux at St. Jude’s for what turned out to be an intervention, one with plenty of praying and crying. The charcoaled ghost of Celeste watched, giggling at my ordeal from the back pew. After Father Arceneaux couldn’t exorcise her spirit, my mom drove me up to Lake Charles every Friday afternoon for a few months, where I sat in a room that smelled like mint and “talked it out” with a doctor who specialized in head cases. Dr. Jody asked lots of questions about how I felt, and I kept mostly quiet. One afternoon she casually asked, “Eli, have you ever thought about hurting yourself?”

  Since that night with Sandra on the beach, I’d had a few weird notions, sure. In art class when I was cutting with an X-Acto knife, I found myself contemplating the blade’s tip and the blue pathways of the veins on my wrist. And when we passed over the I-10 bridge in Lake Charles, tall enough for ships to pass beneath, I imagined what it’d be like to feel the wind, have the water rush up to meet me. But in Dr. Jody’s office, I forced a smile and said, “Why would I do that?”