Hugh Howey - The Hurricane

The rope finally went slack, and Carlton waved. Even their mother was smiling as she looked back at the house with its one busted eye. The other kids in the car were cheering and hollering, and Daniel joined in. He squeezed Anna, who didn’t seem to mind that he was covered in bark and roof gravel and damp with sweat. They all poured out of the car to go and look. Carlton and their mom steered them away from the tree, as if it still posed some unsteady threat. Daniel gasped at the sight of the gaping hole in the roof, the interior of the house visible and open to the sky above. It was a wound, sure, a nasty shiner, but at least the offending blow had finally been removed.

Things didn’t go back to normal; they went back to the way they were. The power company showed up a day later apologizing for the delays, explaining the hundreds of thousands who had been without power across the Low Country. They estimated it would be another week, at least, before the neighborhood had power.

Cell phone service was restored soon after that visit. Zola said she could go without a hot shower for the rest of her life, if only those bars remained. She and her friends wrote books to each other, one little line at a time, detailing their adventures from Hurricane Anna and her aftermath.

Chen’s parents got in touch almost immediately after service returned. They made their way down from Columbia with a list of supplies relayed by Daniel’s mom. They also brought an incredible buffet of fast food with them, a welcomed luxury. Edward and Anna came over to enjoy the feast. Hunter left with Chen and her parents to help out at their house. It didn’t seem like he was going far now that he was again a phone call away. Their mother cried anyway.

Six days after the storm, Carlton finally got in touch with the mechanics and was able to get his car back, giving the family enough mobility to pick up supplies. Power was restored a day later to the grocery store; several of the convenience stores reopened soon after. Daniel’s mom spent many hours on the phone with State Farm, mostly on hold, as they tried to find a rental and figure out when an adjuster could come see the car. The agent explained that they were as busy as they’d ever been and that it could take some time. She didn’t even mention the house to them.

Daniel spent the next week on the roof with his father. His dad had rounded up some materials and supplies from old contractors he had worked for; the lines at Lowe’s and Home Depot were too outrageous to consider. Houses everywhere wore bandages of blue tarps and plywood. Chainsaws and generators could not be had at any price. There were rumors of gouging as entrepreneurs from out of state came through with trailers full of both, selling them for twice the retail price. News trucks roamed Beaufort looking for such tidbits, reporting from ground zero, the point of impact, landfall .

Daniel felt removed from and above it all. He was too busy learning how to peel back shingles; cut sheathing with a handsaw; scab in rafters, which often meant hammering at awkward angles. He learned how to measure and cut plywood to fit, how to frame out a dormer, how to lay tar paper and tack it in place with roofing nails. A few times a day, Anna would come over to gauge their progress from the ground. Daniel would beam down at her, rattling off the day’s work or holding his arms in a ta-da pose. She would laugh and bring water up the ladder and smile at him with all the promises of more moonlight strolls through the neighborhood, holding hands and talking, enjoying the dead silence of the powerless world, laughing and kissing.

It was a momentous day when one of his father’s friends came through with a brand new window. They were laying shingles down when he pulled up in his truck and called out jovial insults to Daniel’s father, dropping his tailgate with a bang. It took a few shims to get the fit right, but the window went in with little effort. A handful of nails locked it in place. A piece of damaged siding salvaged off the back of the house was cut to cover the house wrap. The last of the shingles went on, and from the exterior, at least, the house was healed over.

On that last day, after Daniel had climbed down the ladder with a load of tools and supplies, his father had remained on the roof. Daniel looked up from the ground and saw him resting on one of the toe-boards, that two-by-four he had helped nail into place over a week ago. His father looked over the new dormer—a seamless copy of the original on the other side of the roof. He turned from it and gazed out over the yard, and Daniel didn’t ask or intrude into his thoughts. He went off to wash his hands and track down the smells from the kitchen, leaving his father to contemplate broken homes and what it took to mend them.

The next day, their father found a ride to Columbia, where there was plenty of work patching roofs. Daniel knew there was plenty more work even closer by, but didn’t challenge the decision. He figured his dad wanted to leave while he was still wanted—or needed, at least—rather than after he’d made things worse. Or possibly, it was getting too hard to take for him: being around the family he left, feeling a stranger in the house he’d built. Rather than wait at the cul-de-sac for his friend to arrive, he had gathered his meager belongings, said his goodbyes, and walked to the end of the neighborhood to wait. He was to the end of the driveway when Daniel realized he’d left the chainsaw behind.

Meanwhile, there remained a lot of work to be done on the inside of the house. The damage from the storm, like much damage, was more than skin deep. Zola’s room was a wreck; they took plenty of pictures, cataloged the damage, and slowly went to work. Bags and piles of sheetrock, strips of carpet, and mourned possessions went out. New insulation went in, covered by scraps of sheetrock it took half a day at Lowe’s to secure. After mudding and painting, putting down more carpet, moving Hunter’s bed into Zola’s room, it almost looked like a room again, like someone could live there.

And then there was Anna.

It was unusual for a first named storm to form so late in the season, even more unusual for it to become such a perfect storm and do such damage. Nobody could remember an “A” storm having such an impact. All the same could be said of Daniel’s Anna. From four houses down, she had come out of nowhere. She was as electronically unpopular as he, and Daniel found in their long walks and talks the sort of company he had been hunting for in the digital wilderness. In the two weeks he was out of school, and the neighborhood was without power, they hardly moved beyond holding hands, kissing, and lingering embraces. For Daniel, it was an inconceivable enough. He had gone from emotionally and romantically stunted to just right.

As he returned to school, and Anna continued her studies at home, Daniel found that he was moving into the world as an adult, despite his virginity. That last was now something he treasured and savored, rather than something he meant to destroy and conquer. He moved into the world as an adult with a secret, a man with a silly love in his heart, a girlfriend down the street that hardly any of his friends knew—and Daniel figured it was their loss.

••••

“Dude!”

Roby waved from across the courtyard, a goofy grin on his face. Daniel dug his thumbs into the straps of his backpack and hurried over to meet him.

“I’ve been trying to call you for two days, man.” Roby threw his arms around Daniel and slapped his backpack.

“I’ve had my phone off,” Daniel said.

“What for?”

Daniel shrugged. “I got kinda used to not being reached at any time by whoever,” he said. He left out that the “whoever” was usually his mom trying to get him to come home from Anna’s house. “How’ve you been? Did you guys get much damage?”