“This is the outreach center.”
“And what is that, exactly?”
He cocks his head to one side, smiling faintly. “The idea is to provide an encounter space. People from the church, people from the surrounding community, all coming together to talk. Not just about religion, but life. Everything under the sun.”
“I thought it was more of a homeless shelter.”
One of the others, a friendly, broad-chested man of about thirty-five, with sunken eyes and a wooden cross around his neck, steps forward to join us, chuckling at what I’ve just said.
“A homeless shelter would probably be of more use these days, but what can I say?” He shrugs in an outsized, eloquent way. “This is the vision God gave me. ‘If you build it, they will come.’ ”
“Do they?”
He seesaws his hand in the air. “We host some book clubs that are pretty popular.”
“There’s a lot of that going around,” I say, remembering the women gathered at the Morgan St. Café. I pat Robb on the bicep and turn to go.
“Oh, wait,” he says, digging in his back pocket. He removes his wallet, shuffles through a wad of folded receipts, and finally produces a folded photograph. “Here you go.”
I hold the picture up to the light. Hannah, radiant in the camera’s flash, smiles invitingly, her hand thrown lazily around the shoulder of another girl, her face half concealed behind a lump of matte black hair, a bad dye job maybe, her one visible eye rimmed thickly in dark liner. Evey Dyer raises two fingers to the lens, her nails painted black. Whoever snapped the photo probably assumed this was a peace sign, but from my Anglophile ex-partner, I know the gesture she’s flashing is rude.
“Thanks,” I tell him, tucking the picture away. “So you took your youth group to this place for their summer trip?”
Robb nods. “We helped fix the place up, went out in the community to get the word out, hosted a couple of get-acquainted parties.”
“And it was much appreciated,” the other man says. “I’m Murray Abernathy, by the way.” His handshake has a lot of power behind it. “Resident dreamer.”
The three of us stand there in the quickening wind, my jacket whipping around my hips. The sky rumbles overhead, prompting us all to look up momentarily.
“You met Hannah Mayhew, Mr. Abernathy? And her friend Evan-geline Dyer?”
“Hard to miss those two,” he says, still gazing overhead. “They really helped out a lot here. It’s a terrible thing, what’s happened to Hannah. We’re praying she gets home safe.”
“Evey ran away,” Robb says under his breath, causing the other man to deflate.
As I turn to go, the first fat drops of rain start to fall. One breaks cool against my neck. Robb knits his eyebrows as another splashes the bridge of his nose. Within seconds the clouds open and the rain drills down on us. Everyone in the yard moves closer to the building, sheltering under the eaves.
Everyone but me.
I reach my car door, glancing back in time to see Robb, his hair plastered against his scalp, ascending the ladder again, rain-battered, his face pointing heavenward.
CHAPTER 23
The dream ends with a crash. I sit up, peeling the damp sheets off my skin, unable to remember a thing. On the nightstand, the glowing numbers on the clock face have disappeared. The fan overhead whirs to a stop. Uncertain whether the collision happened in real life or my head, I move to the window, peering through the rain-washed pane. It’s black outside, some shadows darker than others. The sky’s accustomed glow – an effect produced by light reflected on the clouds, producing a faint nightlong radiance – is extinguished.
Wind whistles past the house, slapping branches against the walls. I see nothing, and I’m too dog-tired to go out and look. I lie back down on top of the sheets, cocooned in a womb of white noise, and try to get some sleep. My mind races with the last images I saw on television before hitting the sack, newscasters down in Galveston knocked flat on their backsides and skyscrapers downtown popping their windows left and right.
A steady banging starts up not long after. At first I ignore it, but as my head clears and I awaken fully, the sound takes on a panicked intensity. Feeling around in the dark, I grab my flashlight, a tiny Fenix that puts my old Maglite to shame, and head down the stairs. The pounding comes from the kitchen door. As soon as I open it, Tommy pushes through, half-dressed and a little crazy, rivers of water sluicing off him.
“Hey, man,” he says, breathless. “You’re not gonna believe your eyes, I’m telling you. It’s, like, unreal up there.”
The door swings wide, propelled by the wind, slamming against a breakfast table chair. I shoulder it closed, then turn to check on him, running the light up and down his chest. His jeans, soaked through, puddle around his bare feet, the cuffs ragged.
“You all right?”
“Nothing hit me, I don’t think. But you gotta go look, man. It’s like tv.”
His mouth twists into a maniacal grin, like he’s just bungee-jumped for the first time and is ready to go again. I shine the light along his head, making sure it’s water plastering his hair down and not blood and brain tissue.
“What happened to you?”
“You gotta come see,” he says, starting for the door. He stops, finger lifted, remembering something. “Oh, yeah. Hey, do you have any plastic bags – you know, like trash bags or something? I need to cover some stuff so it doesn’t get any wetter than it already is. I don’t know, maybe we should try to carry some things down.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask, not waiting for a reply. I bolt through the door, lighting a path up the garage stairs. Everything looks normal to me. He follows me up, panting with excitement. I pass through the door and into the living room, noting nothing.
He leads the way into the bedroom. “In here.”
The moment I cross the threshold, my breath catches. My face is a foot away from a shimmering oak branch. Gazing upward, I see the jagged hole in the roof, another thick branch halfway in, and a torrent of rainwater blasting through the opening. A wad of shingles lies on top of Tommy’s bed.
At first, I can’t say anything. We look at each other, and his manic thrill jumps the divide, setting off a tingle along my spine.
“Cool, huh?” he says.
“You were in bed when this happened?”
His head shakes. “I heard this loud crack – must have been the trunk snapping or something – and my body just took over. I reached the door right when it hit.”
I run the light over him again, hardly believing he came through this unscathed, but there’s not a scratch on him. He starts jogging in place, like he’s cold, or maybe brimming with nervous energy.
“Let’s move what we can move,” I say, “then you can spend the 286 rest of the night in the house.”
“Maybe I’ll sack out on the couch. I kind of don’t want to leave.”
“You’re leaving,” I say. “Don’t even think about staying up here.”
We leave the furniture in place – the bed and dresser – just taking the drawers out. Everything from the closet ends up on the living room couch. When we’re finished, I go outside for a look at the damage. The tree came from next door, smashing the far side of the garage, which is why I couldn’t see anything from my bedroom window.
Seeing a tree like that upended, a hundred years thick, its earth-clotted roots naked to the rain, at first I can’t take my eyes off it. It didn’t break so much as it was uprooted, leaving a muddy crater rimmed with St. Augustine grass, super green in the Fenix light, as if the storm brought all its chlorophyll to the surface, the way grass might look if it could blush.
Through the roots and down the length of the trunk the whole tree seems intact. Severed power lines crisscross the horizontal canopy as if, once it began to teeter, the tree reached out and tried to steady itself, grabbing hold of the fragile cables, bringing them down with it. I’ve seen branches break off in high wind and even trunks split by lightning, but never anything like this. One of the lines lies dormant in the neighbor’s yard. Another snakes across the garage roof. I’m happy all the sudden that the power’s out.