“My Zune,” he said, shrugging off his backpack and setting it down on the floor.
“Is the house okay?” his mom asked.
“It’s holding up the tree, but I’d say the worst of the impact is long over.” Carlton paused. “The damage from the rain isn’t going to be good.”
“The insurance is up to date. I remember writing that check just a few weeks ago. This wouldn’t qualify as flood damage would it?”
“I don’t think so,” Carlton said. “I’m not sure.”
Daniel dug in his bag for his Zune. It was yet another humiliation in his life. All his friends had iPods, and every connector to everything in the universe seemed to be designed for Apple’s ubiquitous device. His aunt’s car even had an iPod dock, even though she didn’t own one. She had bought him the Zune for Christmas, then asked him to plug it into her car and play some of his favorite music. Daniel had to weasel his way out of telling her she’d bought the wrong thing and had done his best to sound grateful for the gift. He didn’t even like pulling it out in public and had bought some white earbuds so it would look like an iPod if he kept it in his pocket.
But it did have an FM tuner, something many of the iPods didn’t. Daniel had never used it before. He powered it up while Zola begged Carlton for more details about her room. Their mom had to tell her that she was most definitely not going up there to see for herself.
“Does anyone know any FM stations?” Daniel asked. He couldn’t personally name a single one. The rare times he listened to music in the car, he just tapped the search button from one commercial to the next until he found an actual tune.
“NPR is ninety five point seven,” Carlton said. “I think one of the AM stations has a duplicate signal on the FM range somewhere.”
Daniel struggled to figure out how to adjust the frequency. If it was an iPod, he thought to himself, it would be intuitive.
He got the dial moving, the digital numbers ticking down, while he put one earbud in. Carlton patted his shoulder and pointed to the floor. Daniel sat, and Carlton sat down beside him, reaching for the other dangling earbud.
“You mind?” he asked.
Daniel waved his hand.
“That’s gross,” Zola said, as Carlton leaned close and popped the loose bud into his ear.
Daniel was getting nothing but static. He dialed into the NPR frequency, and there was something there, but it was too faint to make out. He started tapping through the numbers, one decimal at a time, while Zola and his mom dug out bottles of water and passed them around.
“I shoulda charged this thing up,” Daniel said, noting the quarter charge on the battery.
“Wait. Go back,” Carlton said.
Daniel went up two decimal points. There was a voice behind a curtain of static.
“I think that’s a Charleston station,” Carlton said, pointing toward Daniel’s display.
“Everyone be quiet,” Daniel said.
He and Carlton strained to hear.
••••
“What did they say?”
Zola dug into a box of cheerios and crammed a few into her mouth. Daniel took a swig of water. Now that he knew the house was open to the elements, the sound of the wind upstairs seemed closer and more potent.
“It’s all they’re talking about, of course.” Daniel looked to Carlton. “Did they say winds up to a hundred forty?”
“That’s what it sounded like to me.” His stepdad bore a grave expression.
“Where’s the storm centered?” his mom asked.
“It was all in relation to Charleston,” Daniel said. He wrapped the buds around the Zune and tucked it into his pocket, saving the battery.
“I think it’s going to hit just south of us. Maybe right on top of us,” Carlton said. “They were saying sixty miles south of Charleston.”
“How far away? Is the worst over?”
“It had made landfall,” Daniel said, “so it can’t be much longer.”
“It could get worse before it gets better,” Carlton cautioned.
“When can I go see my room?” Zola asked. “Oh my god, my new laptop is up there! We’re responsible for those!”
“Nobody’s going upstairs,” their mom said. “And the school will get you a new laptop if anything happens to that one.”
Zola looked nearly in tears. She dropped the fistful of cheerios in her hand back into the box and shoved the box away from herself.
“How long will that radio last?” Daniel’s mom asked.
“I dunno. A few hours or so. I’ve never run it all the way down.”
“If there’s nothing else we can do, or if you guys don’t need to use the bathroom, we should probably get some sleep.” Their mom flipped open her cellphone and glanced at the screen. “It’s almost four, so the sun won’t be up for another two hours. I don’t want anyone moving around or exploring before then.”
“What will we do if another tree comes through here? Or if the house falls down around us?” Daniel thought about images of demolished homes on the weather channel, the piles of jumbled building material and furniture that nobody could live through. He wondered what it would be like to crawl their way outside in this mess only to search frantically for some place to wait out the storm. Would they have to lie down in a ditch? Or was that for tornados? Would they bang on a neighbor’s door like refugees, begging to be let in? What if someone else all of a sudden banged on their door and said their house had been knocked over and now they had to find room for them and share food and water?
“This is the safest place to be right now,” his mom said. She blew out one of the candles Carlton had just lit and rubbed her hand over Daniel’s head. “You should try and get some sleep. It’ll make it go by faster.”
Daniel nodded, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep at all. His heart was pounding from the adventure upstairs. The noise from the wind and rain had him anxious—he felt like a thing constantly under assault and from all directions. But he knew his mom was right. If they were sailors at sea, riding out a terrible storm, they couldn’t survive if all of them stayed up for nothing. In shifts and whenever they could, they needed to get some sleep. He moved back by Zola, who had lain down on her side, facing the wall, and had arranged one of the many pillows now piled up on the crowded bathroom floor. Carlton adjusted the extra blanket and pillows he’d grabbed from the bedroom, and their mom blew out the last candle.
Daniel lowered his head. He could feel the cool wetness in his jeans from the water that had spit through his cracked window. He ran a catalog of his stuff through his head—the things in his room that could get ruined if they got wet. For once, he was glad his parents kept the home computer down in the nook attached to the kitchen. All their pictures, documents, emails, home movies, everything was on that computer. He had an idea to go out and grab the tower and bring it into the bathroom with them. He was imagining curling up to the unit, keeping it safe, when exhaustion and the late hour won their battle over his racing heart.
14
A great noise had startled Daniel awake the first time—an eerie silence pulled him from his slumber hours later. Daniel sat up and saw that his mom and Carlton were gone, their blankets folded back away from their dented pillows. Zola was making sleep sounds beside him. He rubbed his face to remove the fog from his brain and got up quietly to go search for his parents.
The first thing he noticed was that it was light out, the pale glow of dawn filtering through the windows. Daniel went around the corner and saw that the front door was wide open. He crossed the living room and stepped outside into a different world.