Hurricane Kiss (17 page)

Chapter 31

THREE WEEKS LATER

RIVER

The National Guard was called in. Volunteers from across the country came to help put life back together. The bodies are being buried. There are funerals. Every day.

My dad survived. Turned out that the marine corps sticker on his car helped save his life. After sitting in gridlock for hours after we left, he got off the highway. He came looking for us, but the storm got worse and he had to give up. He searched frantically for shelter, going to building after building, and finally, after pounding on the side of a warehouse door where he heard sounds, someone answered. The guy inside was a former marine too, and he took my dad in.

After it was over though, he spent a couple of weeks in an overcrowded, understaffed hospital. Dehydration, broken ribs, and some weird blood infection that nearly killed him. All the names of hospital patients were listed on a registry they printed in the newspaper. I went to see him three weeks after we left the school.

I open the door to his hospital room and stand still.

“Go ahead,” says a nurse passing by. “It's fine.”

I'm not sure it is. I nod to her and take a step in. He's sharing the room with two other men. One of the beds has gauzy white curtains drawn around it. A second holds a man with an IV in his arm. I figure my dad is in the bed near the window, only his face is turned away, so I can't see it.

I feel off balance, like the earth is vibrating under my feet. I need something to hold on to. I hate hospitals, everything about them—the smells, the staff people who don't meet your eyes, the look of the place—all of it, ever since …

I walk over to his bed and grab the cold handrail to steady myself. He's sleeping. He's almost yellow, his eyes sunken, the creases across his forehead deeper than I remember. His lips are dried, cracked. He looks broken down, almost lifeless.

“Dad?” I whisper.

After a few seconds, his eyes flicker and then open. He turns to me, a look of shock on his face.

“River!”

I can't make out his expression. Disbelief? Despair? I see a sudden flash of anger in his eyes.

“You just ran …” he says, and then as quickly the anger vanishes. “But you made it.” He shakes his head. “You outran it.”

I never thought I'd see my dad break down. I drop to my knees, still gripping the railing. “It's OK, Dad, don't cry.”

“I didn't know what to think. What could have happened. You just ran and …” His voice breaks.

I reach over and put my hand over his. He grabs it and holds it tightly. I look at him, not knowing what else to say. I think about all the conversations we never had. All the memories I should have, but don't, and it scares me because so many years have gone by like this. There's only this emptiness to look back on. We never talk about anything important. Anything real. Part of me feels like I'm looking at a stranger.

“I left the car, I tried to go after you, but I got caught in the storm. I wanted to help. To save you,” he says. “But it got worse so fast.”

“It's over, it doesn't matter now.”

“It does matter,” he insists. “I couldn't lose everything again …”

“You mean after Mom?”

“After you were taken away, in detention. And then with the storm coming. I tried to protect you, but I drove you away. I couldn't admit I was wrong. I turned my own son into the enemy for God's sake.” A deep wail breaks from his throat.

“I'm here, Dad, please.”

He looks up at me, meeting my gaze, and I hear something I've never heard him say before.

“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, son.”

I look away. All the feelings I didn't know were inside me, that I didn't know existed at all, pour out uncontrollably.

My dad comes home a week later. We sit down and I tell him everything that happened with Briggs. He doesn't say a word; he just listens. But it's more than listening. I see something in his eyes I've never seen before. Compassion. In my entire life I've never seen that in him. He takes three months off from work after that.

“We'll get Briggs put away,” he says, “and clear your name. No matter what it takes.” I see the marine in him again. The strength, the focus. The dedication to getting the job done. For the first time in my life, I like that.

That same week I get a text from Ryan:
My dad died during the storm.


He's on his own now, orphaned overnight. No mom, no dad, just an aunt and uncle living in another part of the state.

Ryan and I meet and talk about everything that happened during the storm—and before, with Briggs.

“I tried to get into the school,” he says. “I tried the key, but it didn't work, then I pounded on the door in case someone was inside, but it was useless.” He held his hands out helplessly. “So I drove to a friend's house—a brick house—and we stayed there. But my dad was so scared and so shaken up he died of a heart attack.”

Now I knew what the lights we saw were. But the noise of the hurricane blocked out their voices and the sound of him pounding on the door. If only we knew. I still have my dad, but his is gone and Ryan is more alone than ever.

“We have to stop Briggs,” I say.

“It's going to be hard,” he says, looking away. “Talking about it, telling everybody. I don't know if …”

“It's harder keeping it inside, torturing ourselves, acting like it didn't happen.”

He stares off and then turns back to me finally. “I'm with you. I'll do whatever I have to.”

“We'll get through it, no matter what, Ryan.”

“Yeah,” he says, his eyes filling with tears. I grab him and hug him, holding him while he leans against me crying.

SIX WEEKS LATER

Together with my dad and Jillian's mom, we go to the school authorities. And then the District Attorney. They ask us a million questions and tape our stories. We tell them everything we know and everything we found. They promise to be in touch.

“There will be a long investigation,” Jillian's mom says. “They'll contact the schools Briggs worked in before. But in the meantime, the school is forcing him to take a leave. The paper will stay on top of it,” she says, “until we get him locked up.”

Once people start asking questions, word begins to spread. One morning before school starts, Jillian's mom gets a call at home. It's someone who works in the school. Someone who won't give her name. But she's someone who can't stand by and do nothing while the truth gets buried.

“We were cleaning up after the storm and we found files,” the woman told her. “They were inside the burned-out file cabinets in Briggs's office. There were a lot of damaged files, but we were able to piece together some of the papers, and we saw the records Briggs was keeping on all the players. We knew he crossed the line. There were photographs of one of the players in a car with another boy. Pictures like that have no place in the office of a football coach,” she said. “It set off alarm bells.”

“My mom's meeting with the woman in a restaurant out of town,” Jillian tells me. “My mom convinced her to bring copies of the files with her, so she'll have the evidence firsthand.”

A few days after the meeting, her mom called the principal. He agreed to sit down and talk with her.

“I guess he was ambushed,” I say. “There's no way he can be in denial any longer.”

After their meeting, we hear that the principal met with the school board and they agreed to cooperate.

One of the gym teachers has taken over as coach. For the first time in over a year, I feel a sense of hope.

I leave my job and after my shoulder starts to heal, I spend my time fixing up our house. There's an endless amount of work to do, but the workers are happy to have an extra guy and they're willing to teach me. Building is therapeutic, and it beats shelving groceries.

Our house has damage inside and out and when I'm not working on it, I help the guys fixing Jillian's. Their roof has to be replaced, and there's lots of damage to the outside walls. But at least we both have homes. They're still standing.

The local paper runs a story about all the dogs left homeless by the storm. I leave it on the kitchen table that morning.

“Go down there,” my dad says. That's it. I don't need any more encouragement.

“How do we even start?” Jillian says, walking up and down the aisles of what looks more like a concrete bunker than a shelter, looking at dog after dog, every one of them anxious and scared, their loud, desperate barking ricocheting off the walls to command our attention.

“Find the one that looks the most pathetic,” I say. It doesn't take long.

I stop in front of a cage and see a dog at the far end, huddled against the windowless back wall, as close as she can get, her head drooping, fixed on the floor. She's a ball of tangled, matted black fur, maybe fifty pounds. Lab mixed with something. Terrier maybe. Her whole body is quaking with fear. I recognize things in her I see in myself: pain, hurt, resignation, isolation. I kneel down and wait outside the bars of the cage. I know she senses that I'm there, but she doesn't move.

“Can you take this one out?” I call to a guy who works there. “Can I walk her?” He comes over and unlocks the cage door and reaches in and puts a collar around her neck. “Sad case,” he says.

We take her for a walk and after a few minutes she stops and looks up at me, her chocolate eyes sizing me up, unsure. I kneel down and rub her head and talk to her softly. I feed her a biscuit, then another one. She leans against me, pushing as close to me now as she was to the concrete wall of her cage. That's it. She's not homeless anymore.

She has a home now. Mine.

We name her Dawn.

THREE MONTHS LATER

JILLIAN

We go back to school three months after the storm. The school board set up off-site classrooms. Some of my friends made it through Danielle. Some didn't.

Kelly and her family disappeared, like they never existed. Something like that doesn't seem possible. It's something I can't begin to process. There's no information yet on what happened to them. We don't know what happened to her family's car. All we have are questions. Are their bodies out near the highway somewhere? Did their car get swept someplace else?

So many bodies haven't been identified yet. The cleanup is far from over. Corpses still turn up floating in the sewage-clogged water. It's so savage. So unthinkable. It will take months, maybe years to find all the missing. To track down the dead. Or maybe we'll never know.

I can't accept it. I can't and never will. I want to ask Kelly things. I want to go to her for advice. I want to hang out with her and go places, do fun things, stupid things. I still anticipate the way she would answer the questions I would ask, that sure-of-herself style—no matter what the topic, as if she knew everything, dressed in the latest fad stuff, “too cool for school.”

Kelly never worried about stuff that scared the rest of us. Failing tests. Getting into college. Getting guys to like you. And especially really scary things—like hurricanes.

She was my best friend, and now I don't have her. She's not anywhere and that just makes no sense to me. It's stupid, I know, but I keep dialing her cell number, waiting for her to pick up on the other end.

And her picture.

The one of her in her pink bikini and floppy hat, the one that I took in Galveston when the surf was calm, and I captured one of life's rare and perfect moments. I stare at it hard as though in some way—wherever she is now—my thoughts can reach her and she'll know I'm thinking about her and everything we shared. I need to keep doing that. To hold on to that. To remind me that's what life really is, odd collages of those isolated, perfect, beautiful shared moments with people you love. That's the best you can hope for. That's all we have to hold on to, to keep inside ourselves, no matter what.

“I keep telling myself that up until the end, she probably never allowed herself to think it was over,” I say to Sari. “I doubt it ever occurred to her there was nothing she could do to stop Danielle. She probably never realized it was her time to go, never allowed for the possibility.”

“She was all about living,” Sari says. “Every day, every crazy minute. She was a hundred percent alive, a hundred percent with you.”

Only now she's not. She's gone, reduced to a memory.

We talk about her less and less because it's too hard to look back. Her dad, a surgeon at Memorial, her mom, a pediatric nurse, two brothers, Mike and Quinn. All of them gone now like they were never born, like so many of the people on that highway who stayed where they were because they thought there was literally nowhere to turn. I can't come to terms with it. I doubt I ever will. All I know is the pain and the sadness, as I relive the memories of what happened during the storm and after, again and again and it rubs me raw inside.

So many of the after-effects of the storm are buried within us.

A psychiatrist on TV called it post-traumatic stress disorder. I never went to war, I never pulled the trigger of a gun, but I imagine this is what soldiers go through because none of us can get over seeing so much death around us.

I try to focus on moving on. I don't talk to Aidan anymore. He knows I'm seeing River. He also knows what he did, helping Lexie get River's combination. Maybe he didn't know how bad it was. Maybe he didn't know what he was paving the way for. But he did it, and I don't think he cared how badly it could hurt River. Aidan was like that. Single-minded. About basketball. About everything.

I think of all the things that were missing between us, but what I see most now is the emptiness.

Lexie got punished by the storm too, but what she lost was something she could get past. She and her parents survived, but their home was totally destroyed. They were forced to move in with her aunt in a house in a suburb of Dallas. No one knows if she's ever coming back. She tried to call River a few times, he told me. She left messages saying she was frantic to know how he was. He ignored the calls.