Before the Storm

“If your arm is all better, then you can.”

“It’s better enough!” I wanted to show her my arm, but I punched it out too hard and hit my glass of milk. The glass flew across the table and crashed to the floor. It broke in a million pieces and milk was all over. Even in the spinach.

Mom and Maggie stared at me with their mouths open. I saw a piece of chewed chicken in Maggie’s mouth. I knew I did an inappropriate thing. My arm did.

“I’m sorry!” I stood up real fast. “I’ll clean it up!”

Maggie catched me with her hand.

“Sit down, Panda,” she said. “I’ll do it. You might cut yourself.”

“I’ll get it.” Mom was already at the counter pulling off paper towels.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “My arm went faster than I thought.”

“It was an accident,” Mom said.

Maggie helped her pick up the pieces of glass. Mom put paper towels all over the milk on the floor.

“My arm did it because it’s so strong and healed,” I said.

Mom was scrunched on the floor cleaning milk. Sometimes when I talk, she looks like she’s going to laugh but doesn’t. This was one of those times.

I put my napkin on top of the spinach to clean off the milk.

“Andy,” Maggie said, while she got five or maybe six more paper towels. “I know you’re upset that you might not be able to swim, but you’ve got to think before you react.” She sounded exactly like Mom.

“I do,” I said. That was sort of a lie. I try to think before I act, but sometimes I forget.

Mom stood up. “We’ll check your arm again in the morning.” She threw away the milky paper towels. “If it still looks good and you feel up to it, you can swim.”

“I’ll feel up to it, Mom,” I said. I had to be there. I was the secret weapon, Ben told me. I was the magic bullet.

The pool was the only place where my start button was a very good thing.

Chapter Eight

Maggie

I WAS SPACED-OUT AS I LINED UP MY TEAM of ten little Pirates at the end of the indoor pool. Aidan Barber pranced around like he had to pee and I hoped that wasn’t the case.

“Stop dancing, Aidan,” I called to him, “and find your mark.”

He obeyed, but then Lucy Posner actually sat down on the edge of the pool and started picking at her toenails.

“Lucy! Stand up! The whistle’s going to blow any minute.”

Lucy looked surprised and jumped to her feet. I usually loved these kids. I was good with them. Incredibly patient. That’s what the parents always told me. You’re so much more patient with them than I am, Maggie, they’d say. Now that I was floating through this meet like I was in a weird dream, I had no patience at all. I wanted it to be over.

People talked about canceling the meet, since it was only a week since the fire. It was like Mom had called me to say the church was on fire minutes ago instead of days; I was still that shaken up. I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing flames and smoke pouring out of the church and was afraid of what I’d dream if I shut my eyes.

Since I coached the little kids’ team, I had some say about if we should hold today’s meet between our team, the Pirates, and the Jacksonville team, the Sounders. I voted for canceling. I told Ben, who coached Andy’s team, that it was totally insensitive to hold it, but mostly I didn’t think I could concentrate. Ben wasn’t much in the mood for a meet either. He still had a bandage over the gash on his forehead, and he was on pain meds for his headache.

One of the girls who was in the burn center at UNC was on Ben’s team, though, and her parents wanted us to have the meet. The kids need it, her mother said. They need the normalcy. They persuaded Ben, and I didn’t have much choice but to go along.

The whistle blew and my kids were off, paddling furiously through the water in a way that usually made the people in the 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 bleachers. 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 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-away-from-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, 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 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.

“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 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.

“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.

Chapter Nine

Marcus

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 once myself. I liked the time alone with Andy, anyway. He needed a man in his life. Father figure.

My beautiful niece opened the door and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I’d dated a woman a while back who turned out to be too artsy-fartsy for my taste, but I did learn a few things from her. We were standing in the National Gallery in Washington one time, in a room full of paintings of women. Most of the women had thick wavy hair and big, heavy-lidded eyes. They looked like they were made of air. You could lift any one of them up with a finger.

“These paintings remind me of my niece,” I told my date.

“Really?” she asked. “She has a Pre-Raphaelite look to her?”

Whatever, I thought.

“I’d like to meet her,” my date said.

We broke up before she could meet Maggie, but since then, whenever I saw my niece, the term Pre-Raphaelite popped into my mind even though I didn’t know what it meant. I would have given my right arm—both my arms—for Jamie to have the chance to see the long-haired, heavy-lidded beauty his daughter had become.

“What are you up to today, Mags?” I asked.

“Studying at Amber’s,” she said. “I have some exams this week.”

I sat down on the stairs that led to the second story. “You can see that ol’ light at the end of the tunnel now, huh?”

She nodded. “You better have my graduation on your calendar.”

“Can’t imagine you gone next year,” I said.

“I’ll only be in Wilmington.”

“It’s more than geography, kiddo,” I said.

She looked up the stairs, then lowered her voice. “How’s Mom gonna manage Andy without me?” she asked.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m not going anywhere. All your mom has to do is say the word and I’m here.”

“I know.”

“You decide on a major yet?”

She shook her head. “Still between psych and business.”

I couldn’t see a Pre-Raphaelite woman in one of those stiff, pin-striped business suits. Her choice, though. I’d keep my trap shut.

“You’ve got plenty of time to decide,” I said.

Maggie swung her backpack over her shoulder. “Do they know what caused the fire yet?” she asked.

I shrugged. “We’re still waiting on results from the lab.”

“You’re in charge, aren’t you?” she asked.

“On the local side, yeah. But once there are fatals…” I shook my head. “The State Bureau of Investigation and ATF are involved now.”

“Oh, right. That guy who talked to Andy at the hospital.”

“Right.” I got to my feet. “Your brother upstairs?”

“Yeah.” She smiled. “Wait till you see his room. It looks like a Hallmark store. Oh, and Mom said don’t mention anything about him writing a book. She hopes he’ll forget about it.”

“He’s still talking about that?”

“Every once in a while.” She clipped her iPod to her lowrise jeans.

“Your mom home?”

“Went for a run.” She popped in the earbuds. “Later,” she said, pulling open the door.

Maggie wasn’t kidding about the Hallmark store, I thought as I walked into Andy’s room. Greeting cards were propped up on his desk and dresser and the windowsills. Tacked to the cork wall he used as his bulletin board, clustered around the charts Laurel had made to keep him organized. What I Do Before Going to Bed on a School Night: 1. Brush teeth 2. Wash face 3. Put completed homework in backpack. 4. Pick out clothes to wear to school. And on and on and on. Laurel was a very patient woman.

Andy was at his computer and he swiveled his chair around to face me.

“What’s with the cards?” I asked.

“They’re thank-yous.” He stood up and handed me one. The front was a picture of an artificially elongated dachshund. Inside it read, I want to extend my thanks. Then a handwritten note: Andy, you don’t know me, but I live in Rocky Mount and heard about what you did at the fire and just want you to know I’d want you around any time I needed help!

He handed me a few others.

“Some are from people I know,” he said as I glanced through them. “And some are from people I don’t know. And some girls sent me their pictures.” He grinned, handing me a photograph he had propped up next to his computer. “Look at this one.”

I did. Yowks. She had to be at least twenty. Long blond hair and wispy bangs that hung to her eyelashes. She wore a sultry look and little else. Well, all right, she had on some kind of skimpy top, but it didn’t cover much. I looked up at Andy and caught the gleam in his eye. He scared me these days. He used to see girls as friends, like his little skew-eyed pal, Emily. Now, he was getting into fights over girls. When did that happen? His voice was starting to change, too, jarring me every once in a while with a sudden drop in pitch. Sometimes standing next to him, I smelled the faint aroma of a man. I bought him a stick of deodorant, but he told me Laurel’d already gotten him one. That was part of the problem. If Laurel would just talk to me about Andy, we wouldn’t be buying him two sticks of deodorant. It had to scare her, too, the changes in him. The temptations he could fall victim to because he wanted to be one of the guys. By the time I was Andy’s age, I’d been having sex for two years and drank booze nearly every day. I didn’t have a disability and I still managed to screw myself up. What chance did Andy have of surviving his teens?

“How about we fly your kite on the beach today?” I suggested.

“Cool!” Andy never turned me down.

Laurel suddenly appeared in the doorway. She had on her running shorts and a Save the Loggerheads T-shirt. Her cheeks were a bright pink. She leaned against the jamb, arms folded, a white sheet of paper dangling from her hand. “What are y’all going to do today?” she asked.

“We’re going to fly my kite,” Andy said.

“That’ll be fun,” she said. “Why don’t you go get it? It’s in the garage on the workbench.”

“I can get it when we leave,” Andy said.

“Get it now, sweetie,” Laurel said. “We should check it and make sure it’s all in one piece. It’s been a while since you flew it.”

“Okay.” Andy walked past her and down the stairs.

So Laurel wanted to talk to me without Andy there. A rarity. I tried to look behind the half smile on her face.

“You won’t believe the e-mail I got this morning,” she said.

“Try me.” I was stoked she wanted to share something with me. Who cared what it was? She looked down at the paper instead of at me. With her head tipped low like that, I could see that the line of her jaw was starting to lose its sharpness. To me, she’d always be that pretty eighteen-year-old girl Jamie brought home so long ago. The girl who played Fur Elise on my electric piano and who took me seriously when I said I wanted to play in a band. Who never made me feel second-best.

“It’s from a woman at the Today show,” she said, handing me the paper. “They want Andy and me to fly to New York to be on the show.”

“You’re kidding.” I took the paper from her and read the short e-mail. She was supposed to call the show Monday to make arrangements. Would appearing on TV be good for Andy or not? “Do you want to do it?” I asked.

“I think I’d like to,” she said. “It’s a chance to educate people. Make them aware they can’t drink while they’re pregnant. And that kids with FASD aren’t all bad and out of control and violent and…you know.”

Once you got Laurel started on FASD, it was hard to reel her in.

“Those bits they do are short.” I didn’t want her to get her hopes up. “They might just want to hear about Andy and the fire and not give you a chance to—”

“I’ll get my two cents in,” she said. “You know I will.”

“Yeah.” I smiled. “You will.” I looked around the room at the cards. Swept my arm through the air. “It’s bound to generate more of this stuff.” I picked up the photograph of the blond from Andy’s desk. “Did you see this one?”