“You can come into the lobby,” Mack said. He zipped up his jacket. Rain pelleted through the open door like machinegun fire. Mrs. Frammer scooted past him inside and Mack dashed into the rain and pounded on back doors. “Come into the lobby!” he cried out.
The guests grabbed jackets and their flashlights and ran past Mack toward the lobby. Mack knocked on every door, and all the guests got ready to leave immediately, except for Clarissa Ford. She came to the back door, saw everyone running, and said, “God help us.”
“I’m not kidding around this time, Clarissa. It’s time to get out.”
“I already told you, Mack, I’m not going anywhere.”
Mack nudged past Clarissa into her room. A window was cracked. Mack grabbed the knob of the front door with both hands and yanked it open.
The waves crashed over the steps of the front decks. A wave ran right over Mack’s feet onto the green carpet. But the carpet might be the least of their worries. The Gold Coast could break off and wash away altogether. Mack slammed the door shut and dead-bolted it. He jammed two bath towels into the crack at the bottom of the door.
He took Clarissa by the arm. “We have to get out of here,” he said.
She pulled her arm away; Mack thought of Maribel. “I already said, I’m not going.”
In the distance, over the screaming wind, Mack heard sirens.
“Fine,” he said.
A fire engine and two vans pulled up on North Beach Road. The parking lot was so clogged with sand that they couldn’t pull in. But it didn’t matter; Mack was relieved to see help of any kind.
Four men in fluorescent orange coats entered the side door of the lobby. “Someone called on a cell phone and said you needed evacuation,” one of the officers said. He was block shouldered and capable looking, the type who flourished in physical emergencies. “So we’re here to take everybody to the high school. They have a generator running. They have food, water, and bedding.”
“I was the one who called,” Norris Williams said, brandishing his phone as though it were a winning lottery ticket. He was still in his bathrobe. “I’m ready to go. Lead the way.”
Mack stationed himself at the side door and ushered the guests outside, handed them off to the block-shouldered officer, who helped them climb over the dunes to the vans. Mack counted heads. Mr. Sikahama from Hawaii, room 14, said he wasn’t paying six hundred dollars to spend the night in the hallway outside of geometry class, and he hoped he was getting a full refund. Mrs. Frammer kissed Mack on the cheek, as though she expected never to see him again. After everyone was delivered to the van, the officer came back to Mack. “Is that everybody?”
“Just about,” Mack said. “I’m staying here.”
“And is there anyone else?”
Mack saw the beam of a flashlight coming from Bill and Therese’s doorway. “Wait a minute,” he said. The beam bounced and jiggled, and then Mack saw Therese, wearing Cecily’s Middlesex Field Hockey windbreaker over her nightgown. Bare feet.
“I’m going with those people,” she said. “I think someone should go with them, and Bill refuses to leave.”
“Okay,” he said. “Go.”
“Lacey’s already in the van?” Therese asked.
“Lacey,” Mack said. He ran for Lacey’s cottage, flung open the door and charged down the hall to her bedroom. He knocked on her door.
“Gardner?”
He heard a muffled noise, a grizzled breathing. He cracked the door. Lacey was asleep, snoring softly. “Gardner,” Mack said. “Wake up.”
Lacey’s face was ghostly white in the beam of his flashlight. Mack toggled her shoulder. “Lacey, it’s me.”
Her eyelids fluttered. “Max?” She blinked.
“We’re evacuating the hotel, Lacey,” he said. “It’s time to go.”
“I knew it would be soon,” she said. “But I’m not ready.”
“Lacey, we’re going to the high school. The firemen are here.”
She opened her eyes. Blue eyes, sharply focused. “High school?”
“Water’s hitting the decks. It’s time to get everybody out.”
“It’ll take more than a little water to move me,” Lacey said. “Are you going to the high school?”
“No,” he said. “I’m staying here.”
“Me, too,” she said. “If we drown, we drown.” She sank her head deeper into her feather pillow. “Wake me when it’s morning, if you please. If you please.”
The sand in the parking lot was sculpted into dunes, some of which held water. The wind thrummed and shrieked. Mack clambered over hills of sand to the lobby porch. He positioned himself behind one of the porch columns to keep out of the blowing sand. He shined his flashlight onto the beach.
The waves crashed over the pavilion as though it weren’t there, and broke about ten feet shy of the lobby-ten feet, the length of a compact car. Mack was paralyzed, watching Nantucket Sound gone berserk. Attacking.
Mack heard someone call his name and he saw the beacon of a flashlight from Bill’s doorway. Mack spotted Bill climbing over the sand dunes, around puddles the size of a child’s swimming pool. He clenched a yellow slicker at the neck; underneath, he wore pajamas and a pair of galoshes.
“What’s happening?” Bill yelled.
Mack couldn’t speak; he was furious. What’s happening? Mack pointed his flashlight at the beach. What’s happening is called a hurricane. A natural disaster. A state of fucking emergency.
What Mack said was, “Everyone’s out except for Clarissa and Lacey.”
“How bad’s the water?” Bill asked.
“It’s pretty bad,” Mack said. As angry as Mack was, he didn’t want to have to break the news: water in the rooms, Bill’s ship going down.
Bill switched off his flashlight and Mack did the same. They stood together in darkness. All Mack could see was the white foam getting closer and closer to the lobby.
Bill took Mack’s hand and held it.
He’s terrified, Mack thought. First he loses me, then his daughter, then his hotel. Mack wasn’t sure what he’d do if Bill started to cry. Mack sneaked a sideways look at him. Bill was smiling. The guy’s lost his mind, Mack thought. He’s gone insane.
“I’m selling it,” Bill said.
“What?” Mack said.
“I’m selling the hotel for twenty-five million dollars. I have a buyer, and I’ve decided to sell it.”
Mack switched on his flashlight and aimed it at the water’s edge. A wave crested and broke and the white foam danced up the beach.
“I don’t believe you,” Mack said.
“What’s not to believe?” Bill said. “Cecily’s gone, you’re leaving, my baby son is dead. For me the hotel was never just the building, Mack. It was the people inside the building.”
Mack kept his flashlight on the water, mentally marking the water line. He marked wave after wave after wave, until he fell into a kind of stupor. The waves kept rolling and crashing, Mack’s eyelids drooped. In his standing dream-sleep, each wave that washed over him had a name. David Pringle, If you’re going to stick it out there in the East; Vance and his snarling lip; Maribel in a sheen of sweat, begging, pleading, Why did she always want? Lacey wearing pink fuzzy slippers, You’re my boy. Andrea and James, with their matching green-gray eyes. Therese, a dead-child white streak in her hair. Too-handsome Jem, Mr. November, running out the lobby door with his embarrassed happiness. Cecily crying into the phone, I love you, Gabriel, I really love you. Mack’s parents, in Oblivion. As if none of this mattered. The waves lulled Mack back to May, to before May, before Andrea and How-Baby and David Pringle’s phone call, back when things were normal, when things were easy. What had made him happy? The hotel-the front desk, the ringing phone, the beach. The guests, the staff. Bill, Therese, Cecily, Lacey. The Beach Club made him happy. Of course the hotel was more than just a building. For Mack it was a way of life. Even in the middle of a raging hurricane, this was where he wanted to be. Right here.