Hugh Howey - The Shell Collector

I leave the dishes and head toward the breezeway that leads off toward Ness’s room. I have no idea what I’ll do in there if she lets me go. Sit in a chair and look at an empty fireplace or gaze out at the rain.

But she doesn’t let me go. The ultimate threat for Holly is that she’ll be left alone, that I won’t beg her to play with me, which is what I suspect she’s used to.

“Wait,” she says. And I turn back to her.

“We can beat the rain,” she tells me in a conspiratorial whisper. “But it won’t be easy. And we’ll have to work together.”

“I’m starting to think the saran wrap isn’t a good idea,” I say.

“Turn around one more time.” Holly has me spinning in the kitchen as she holds a spool of plastic wrap sideways. I still have the robe on, and the clear cocoon forming around me is causing me to sweat inside it.

“I can’t move my arms,” I say. “And how exactly am I going to breathe if you wrap my head up?”

“Good point. Reverse.” Holly makes a spinny gesture with her finger. I twirl the other way, and she gathers all the plastic in a ball. I don’t dare tell her that I’m not really interested in getting to a book I read years ago, or that I would be fine running out there in that crazy storm and just getting drenched again—because now it’s a mission for us to get from A to B without getting a single drop of water on us.

“I’ve got an idea,” Holly says. “Better than this one.” She gives me a serious look when I raise an eyebrow at her. “My ideas just get better with time. I think you should know this about me.”

I laugh and follow her down the north breezeway. We pass the utility room, where my clothes and the two towels are drying, and go past the guest bedrooms and Holly’s room, which she showed me after we got the clothes going. At the far end of the house, we go up a flight of stairs and through a door into the garage.

Holly hits the lights. “Yes!” she says. She dances through the empty space where Ness’s red gas-guzzler had been the other day and scoops up the bundled car cover from the ground. “It’s rain-proof. Because normal people don’t use these in their garages.”

I almost point out that the cover keeps the dust off as well, but I agree with her: it’s a bit much for a car kept in a garage. My car sits in the New York sun and the New York snow and the New York floods and mostly gets driven only to move it from street to street so the sweepers can get through.

“Grab the edge,” Holly says. “Meet me in the middle.”

We lift the car cover over us and paw at the ceiling as we work our way into the middle. Neither of us can see a thing. I think about the lazy summer days when my sister and I would make forts out of furniture, sheets, and sofa cushions. Holly is giggling. I can feel her breathing on my arm. We jostle and spin and laugh in the darkness together.

“We’ll stay dry,” I say, my words swallowed by the fabric and the deep shadows. “But we’ll never see how to get there.”

“We’ll feel along the rails. But through the tarp.”

“Won’t we get lost?” I ask.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I can get around that boardwalk with my eyes closed.”

I remember Ness’s story. But his daughter sounds so much braver than he made her out to be. I wonder how many years ago that was. Five? Six? Probably feels like ages to her.

“What about our feet?” I ask. “Won’t they get wet?”

“I’ve got just the thing.”

Holly extricates herself from the folds, leaving me in there alone. I work myself free as well. She has disappeared back into the house, returns with a pair of pink galoshes, then rummages around one of the other garage bays and brings out a pair of rubber hip waders that fishermen use.

“No rain shall touch us,” she says.

“Let’s just hope it hasn’t stopped raining by the time we put this to the test.”

We haul the gear to the living room, which gives us the shortest run down to the guest house, and I become quite possibly the first person in history to don rubber hip waders over a terrycloth bathrobe. My reflection in the living room door is of someone you would commit to an institution. Holly, meanwhile, looks downright adorable with her pink galoshes pulled over her blue jeans.

“No fair that you get to look normal,” I tell her.

“You look like you sleep with fishes,” Holly says.

“Let’s hope not. You ready?”

She nods, and the two of us crawl under the car cover. Rain hisses across the glass door and windows, and it thunders against the roof. “I’ve got the doorknob,” Holly says. “Hard to turn it through the fabric. It keeps slipping.”

“I’ll close it behind us when we get out,” I tell her. “But we have to make sure the cover doesn’t get caught.”

What I don’t tell her is that this is going to be an unmitigated disaster. No way we come out of this anything other than soaked and tangled in knots, but probably laughing hysterically. A gust of wind passes, and Holly yells “Now!” I hear the door open, the first of the rain spitting against the cover, popping it like a thunderstorm hitting a camping tent, and then we are outside, shuffling our feet, the wind whipping the car cover all around us.

The cover clings to our ankles, presses against our bodies. I nearly topple from the force of a gust, and it takes some fumbling and both of us working together to get the door pulled shut against the storm.

Holly is already laughing. It isn’t quite pitch black under the cover now that we’re outside—just a dismal, deep shade of gray. “This way,” she says, full of confidence. We stay huddled together, hands fumbling through the fabric to stay in communion with the wooden rail, the cold of the wind and rain penetrating through our shroud, but so far, no moisture getting through to us. I take up a fold of fabric in front of me to keep from tripping, leaving our boots exposed to the driving rain and the wet deck.

“Steps!” Holly cries. “Twelve of them!”

Halfway down the flight of steps, buffeted by the storm, this begins to feel like a very bad idea. Our legs could get tangled; we could have a nasty fall; and suddenly I see myself driving Ness’s daughter to the hospital with a broken arm, her crying hysterically in the passenger seat, me in the emergency room in hip waders and a robe trying to explain to Ness what in the hell I was thinking.

We reach the bottom of the flight of stairs, but there are two more to go. And long lengths of boardwalk between.

“Maybe we should ditch the cover and just make a run for it,” I suggest, my voice muffled.

“Not a drop shall touch us!” Holly cries. She has one arm around my waist, and I have an arm draped over her shoulder. We shuffle as one, like we’re running a three-legged race where our feet don’t go in the same sack, our entire bodies do.

The fabric no longer whips around as angrily as before, thank goodness. The rain is soaking it and weighing it down. It trails behind us like a leaden wedding dress. We lean into the wind and stagger down the second flight of stairs, Holly seeming to know where she is going, then we tackle the last flight.

“Almost there,” she tells me. And I feel like a climber who can see the crown of some inhospitable peak just a few steps away. One great push. So close—

We bang into the glass like birds. My forehead cracks against a window, and it sounds like Holly strikes her knee. The rain is no longer pelting us. We are pressed against the side of the guest house. I can’t believe we made it this far. And suddenly, this is an adventure the way simple challenges with made-up rules are life-or-death scenarios for kids with their active imaginations. Suddenly, this is important. And fun.