“We should have left,” she said. “It’s my fault.”
Cooked looked up sharply at her, but she ignored him.
“The other resort would have been no different,” Dex said.
“The other resort is steel-fortified,” Loren said. “It can easily withstand a hurricane. Plenty of food, medicine, boats there.”
“What’s the safety plan here?” Richard asked.
“If the storm surge floods the island much more, the buildings will go. You don’t want to get hit by debris. Put your life jackets on and head for the boat.”
The stack of neglected yellow life vests sat piled in the corner. Ann did not mention the obvious — that there had been no boat since that morning.
A storm went on so long into the night that intermittent sleep finally overcame their fear. The sole light came from a battery-operated lantern, which threw attenuated, spooky shadows on the ceiling. Alternating from prayers that sounded more like plea bargains to self-recriminations (why hadn’t they gone to Alsace?), Ann fell asleep on the floor and woke to the startling sensation of sitting in water. She whimpered.
“I hate storms,” she said.
“I know,” Richard whispered, and wrapped his arms around her, forming a Richard blanket.
It was true — Richard was the one person in the world who knew she preferred earth tones, that she liked anchovies on her Caesar salad, that she absolutely detested and loathed thunderstorms. How had she forgotten all this?
“I’m sorry,” Ann said. “For everything.”
“I’m not sorry for a minute of it,” Richard said, and kissed her hair.
Minutes later, the water pooled up to the undersides of the rush-bottomed chairs. They would literally drown in the Pacific, their leaky life raft of an island sinking beneath them.
And then the waters retreated. Within ten minutes, the floor was no longer underwater. The force of the hurricane passed to the west.
“I’ve never been so hungry in my life,” Wende said.
“Food,” Richard agreed.
* * *
Although it was still raining hard, the howling had subsided the slightest degree in intensity. Celebratory after two close calls, feeling very much alive, they shoved the wet table and chairs into the kitchen. Richard cooked a large pot of linguine frutti di mare and served family-style.
At Richard’s insistence, Titi and Cooked joined the table for the first time to eat with them. Something had been settled between the two. They only had eyes for each other and the food, which they ate with gusto. At the beach, after the near-drowning, they’d had a passionate, seawater-sputtering reunion when Cooked staggered back to solid land.
“Today I saw my life passing by,” Dex said. “It’s good to be back.”
“You were only one hundred meters out.”
“I was already checked out here.” Dex tapped his ear, which in his case might indeed have been the seat of all desire. “I’m taking it as a sign.”
“It’s only a sign,” Loren said, “that Cooked is an imbecile.”
Through this exchange, a subdued Wende sat silent. Ann had been the only witness to her act.
“What does it mean?” she muttered, but so softly they could pretend not to hear her.
“The boat sinking was a gift,” Titi said.
“Of course. No guilt, no remorse at all,” Loren said bitterly. “It would be different if the boat was yours.”
Cooked dropped Titi’s hand. “Yes, it would be different. But it isn’t.”
The table fell into a funky silence.
Richard broke the impasse by serving a huge platter of cheeses and fruit. “‘A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.’”
“Whoa, I like that,” Dex said. “Did you just make that up?”
“That’s the master — Brillat-Savarin.”
“Cool. I think I’ll use it.”
Wende looked on the verge of crying. “I almost died out there. No one cares!”
Dex put his arm around her. “Clumsy honey bunny, you fell overboard. We had you covered.”
Wende was about to blurt out a confession she was not ready to make and they were not ready to hear — or, rather, that Ann was not ready for them to hear, with the likely outcome that the camaraderie would again be broken. Everyone would want to leave as soon as they could. The table slumped back into inaction. So quiet that they could hear outside.
“Listen,” Ann said.
Silence.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly.”
They tumbled outside into the darkness. The island was holding them up again. The clouds had cleared away. The night sky was newly scrubbed, moon-brilliant, star-punctured.
Around them on the beach were scattered bits of rock and coral. Glistening bodies of sea life lay stranded. Fish and eels fluttered in small pools, and the guys grabbed them and threw them back into the water. The farthest fare, vacant, had disappeared off its finger of sand as if it never was, washed away. A lesson, Loren thought.
“We’re marooned. At least till the hotel sends out another boat,” Richard said.
The idea of actually being marooned sent a tingle down Ann’s spine. Her fantasy was taking a majestic turn toward the real.
“It feels like the beginning of the world,” Dex said. “If only you could record this feeling.”
Loren yawned. “Good night, lovely people. Enough excitement for tonight,” he said, and went off.
Ann felt the urge to lay out something precious before the others, to seal the evening as extraordinary. Besides, her secret had been burning a hole in her pocket for a week now. “You can record it.”
* * *
They scampered through the glittering night like trick-or-treaters, kids playing hooky, whispering and giggling, sneaking kisses and gropes, tripping and falling in the sand. It was like a happy return to childhood. The beach was littered with palm fronds, and in the dark, Wende stumbled over one. Dex fell on top of her, and they rolled away, laughing.
“Knock it off,” Ann said, a taskmaster. “Hurry.” Her heart beat a staccato of excitement.
No reason to hurry. They had basically forever, but she wanted to create proper awe for the unveiling. The hurry also obscured the tiniest feeling of unease at betraying Loren.
The path along the island’s edge was deceptively longer at night. Shouldn’t they have already passed it? Richard was drinking straight out of a bottle of red wine and singing Italian opera, of all things, though he didn’t even speak Italian. Dex and Wende passed a bottle of champagne back and forth. Everyone was enjoying the journey far too much for Ann’s taste.
They didn’t pass anything remotely familiar at the point Ann thought the camera should be. Had the storm washed it away? They went farther. Farther still. Ann walked ahead, squinting into the darkness past the feeble cone of light from her flashlight, unconfident of her landmarks. Behind her, the troops were grumbling. Richard stopped to take a leak behind a palm. Wende complained she was tired.
“There it is!” Ann shouted.
In the middle of a stretch of washed beach was her webcam. As each of them came up to it, there was an unimpressed silence.
Finally Ann said, “Here it is.”
“Hmmph.”
“What is it?”
“A remote webcam.”
“What?”
“It films this stretch of beach twenty-four hours a day.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
“Why?”
That was the question that Ann had been pondering all those mornings alone, sitting behind the camera, watching it as it watched the beach. Why do it? Who would watch it? Undoubtedly the same people who would like to be there in person but couldn’t be, for one reason or another. But that didn’t entirely make sense either. While the scene was lovely, so were many others, and a live scene surely trumped a videoed one any day. Were people so jaded that live experience wasn’t adequate any longer?