“I guess we’d both better go back in, Virginia. Ginny?”
“It used to be Ginny, long ago. I used to despise the name. Now it sounds sort of good. But probably too young for me. Oh, there I go again. That sounds like I was fishing, I wasn’t.”
He opened the car door and stepped out into water that came over his shoe tops. He looked and saw that the water, unnoticed, had crept to the bottom of the three steps to the door of the house.
He leaned close and shouted, “Better take off your sandals and roll up those dungarees. Water’s coming up faster. I’d carry you, but I couldn’t be sure of my balance in the wind.”
She slipped off her sandals and rolled up the dungarees. He held her by the arm and hurried her to the shelter of the house. She stepped heavily on a sharp stone and winced. In the relative shelter of the house, he put his lips close to her ear and said, “It’s going to get a lot rougher. When it does, I’ll be near. Stay close to those kids. I’m going to stay out here a minute and see if I can measure how fast this water is coming in.” He dipped some up and tasted it, spat it out. “Brine. This is coming right up from the Gulf.”
She turned to go in, and he caught her arm. “Can you swim well?” She hesitated, nodded. “Good. See that stand of trees there? If... if the house should go, and the water was six feet deep, think you could swim over to there with one of the kids? The little girl? Those trees won’t go over and they look easy to climb.”
He watched her closely. She moistened her lips and looked carefully at the distance. She didn’t panic. “I could do that.”
“You probably won’t have to.”
“I can do it if I have to.”
She went in. The water had reached the piling at the corner of the house. He estimated and made three marks with a stone, about an inch apart. He leaned his back against the house and waited. He could feel the trembling of the house as the wind pawed it. He thought about the Sherrel woman. Damned bad guess. Thought her as empty as all the others. Good-looking woman. Strong shoulders and good hips and legs. Carries herself well. Dorothy used to walk with that look of proudness. Looks right at you. So did Dorothy. Thought it was an affectation, but maybe that’s the way she really is. It’s a good look. It closes out the rest of the world.
He waited and thought about her, and he knew it had been a very long time since he had thought about a woman in that way. He wondered how bad the storm would get and wondered how she would react. He worried about her. He hoped she’d come through it okay.
And then a slow expression of wonder spread itself across his face. In some odd way in the last few minutes they had talked, she had become important to him. He wanted to see her after this was all over. He wanted to be in some quiet place with her where they could talk of many things and not have to shout over the wind — a quiet place with a soft light on her face.
He applied the test he had used on others. Would Dorothy have had her for a friend? This one — yes.
Virginia Sherrel passed that test quickly and easily.
The marks were obscured. He checked the time on his waterproof watch and was shocked to see how quickly it had happened. One and a half steps were under water.
Chapter 8
A half hour later the water was two feet deep in the first floor of the house and rising rapidly. They had all moved upstairs. It was much darker. And noisier. Only three of the four small bedrooms could be used. The wind had ripped the shutters away from the single window in one bedroom. An instant later, the dusty glass had been exploded into the room. Malden had shut the door to the hall against the thrust of the wind. It creaked and protested, and the latch chattered.
The Dorns, Virginia and Malden were in one tiny room. The Hollis couple were in another. Flagan sat alone in the third.
Jean Dorn listened to the wind. It had changed in character. It was steadier, less intermittent and the sound had moved up the scale another half-octave. Within the constant screaming, she could hear various soft, lost sounds — thumpings and crashings and flappings, as though there was some great sad tethered animal outside which fought dully for release. The tumult of the hurricane had quieted the children. They stayed very close to her. Stevie’s eyes were wide and round, and his body was tense within her encircling arm. Conversation was impossible.
Jean watched Hal. He sat with lowered head, a silhouette against the faint light that came through the window. He had not spoken since they had come upstairs. He waited with a dull patience that was not at all like him. She watched him and was sick at heart.
Malden got up and left the room. Jean guessed that he was going down the stairway to check the water level. Hal did not seem to notice his departure. Jean felt a twinge of exasperation. In that moment Hal’s withdrawal seemed not so much dramatic and understandable as childish. He seemed to her to be sulking. And she found that she resented the unfairness of it. She was left to comfort the children alone, and his strange manner added to the children’s fear and complicated her own task. She felt for the first time that Hal was indulging himself in this passive mood of defeat.
Bunny and Betty Hollis sat closely, side by side in the small bedroom. It was becoming incredibly noisy. A puff of wind inside the house had blown their door shut, and it had not seemed necessary to open it again. The shutters were a better fit in this room, and it was so dark that Betty could barely make out the paler area of his face when she turned inside his arm to look up at him.
Ever since Bunny had come back in from the exploratory hike with Malden, he had acted strangely. Betty could not adjust to his new mood. She could not decide whether she liked it or not. It did not make her more insecure, but it puzzled her. There was a solemnity about him. He did not want to talk. At first she thought her heart would break, because it seemed this was the first step she had anticipated, the first move toward his inevitable denial of her. But he seemed to want to be close to her, to touch her, to hold her hand, to have his arm around her.
The solemnity baffled her. He had never been like this. He had been gay, bantering, never completely serious. Sometimes she had resented his lightness of mood because it seemed to place a lower value on her love. But she had learned to play their game on his terms, and when she needed the indulgence of tears, she turned them away with a joke in his pattern.
The next prolonged push of the wind was so strong that the house seemed to move, to shift slightly and to take on a barely perceptible but ominous tilt. She felt his arm tighten around her and then slowly, cautiously, relax.
He put his lips close to her ear.
“...tell you something.”
“What?”
“...fair not to. And it’s hard to tell you. I don’t know what will happen. Stay close to me. I want to help if things get bad. I... might not be able to.”
“What’s wrong?” she cried. “What’s wrong, darling?”
His lips touched her ear when he spoke. “Never been very good about storms. Scared when I was a kid. Ashamed of it. Used to hide it. Figured I was over it. All over it. Then when I went out with him... Malden... I went all to pieces. Scared out of my wits. He had to cuff me out of it. No damn good to him or anybody. Glad it’s dark here, or I couldn’t even tell you. I want you to think I’m the greatest guy in the world. But I guess I’m not. You married a stinker, honey.” In his last words there was a quavering attempt to regain the tone of banter.
She turned her face up and kissed the corner of his mouth and did not answer him.
“...have to tell you a lot of things. Maybe to start cleaner. It was the money. You know that.”
She nodded, knowing that if he could not see in the gloom, he could feel the motion of her head. She could not trust herself to speak.