Andrew

IT TAKES A DAY AND A HALF for the flooding to fully recede. By that time the high school and its inhabitants have grown ripe in the November heat. Thanks for being your hot, humid self, Florida.

Daphne says the Keys rarely get hit by storms like this, but when it does happen, it’s particularly destructive. She’s right. The devastation outside the school is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The roads are cracked, large chunks sunken or pulled away entirely. Trees are bare or broken, and the bushes and shrubs are crushed beneath debris. Some buildings still stand, but many look like the half of the school that collapsed.

There’s no real order to the day anymore because the portion of the Committee that’s here is still trying to contact the other Keys. The last we heard, the folks on Key Largo are trying to regroup with their supplies, but there hasn’t been any response from the group that sheltered at the naval base yet.

It’s all overwhelming. There’s so much to do but no one seems to know where to start. I know where I need to start, though. I just want to get clean. It’s the only thing I feel like I can control right now.

I ask Daphne and Kelly if they’ll be okay watching the seven remaining kids for a bit and they tell me to go ahead. I find Jamie and Cara talking near the flooded school buses in the school’s parking lot.

“I’m going to wash up,” I tell Jamie. “Do you want to come with me?”

He looks surprised that I’d even ask, which, yeah, fine. I get it. But of course I’d ask him. If nothing else, the hurricane and brush with death put a pin in our argument for a bit.

“Yeah.” He turns to Cara as if he’s about to ask if she wants to come, too, but I highly doubt the showers set up by the ocean are still standing, and I doubt even more that Cara wants to see either of us in the buff on the beach—title of my Jimmy Buffett cover album.

Thankfully before he says anything she tells us to go ahead.

“What were you two gossiping about?” I ask, trying to keep my tone playful. I need some kind of normalcy again even if that means ignoring whatever issues Jamie and I have.

“The boat.”

Or, yeah, sure, let’s talk about what drove a wedge between us in the first place.

“She talked with Hickey and Daria, and they’re going to check the damage later today.”

“You can go with them if you want.” Not that I need to give him permission. I genuinely don’t know why I said that. Probably because I didn’t want to say, Guess we didn’t need to have that argument about you quitting the boat after all. Especially because that would be reductive. It’s very clear our issues are deeper than him thinking for a moment that he didn’t want to be on the boat without me.

“I don’t know.” He nods at the row of houses to our left. They’re all crushed against each other and half-buried in sand and silt. Also, I’m fairly certain they used to be on our right. “If the boat’s still there, I doubt it’s seaworthy.”

I groan.

“What?” he asks.

I can’t hold it in anymore. “I hate this entire conversation,” I say, stopping in the middle of the road. “I hate every single thing about this boring fucking conversation because we almost died and all I want is some fraction of a millisecond of normalcy but I can’t be normal around you because we just wasted the last two weeks and some odd days bickering—”

He smirks at me. “We?”

“Don’t interrupt with your salient points, I’m on a roll here. We spent weeks bickering and arguing about what we want when all I want is you and me and being normal.”

Jamie takes a step toward me, putting his hands on my arms. “That’s all I want, too.”

“Then I’m calling a truce. An armistice. I don’t want to talk about Henri, or the boat, or this place, or anything else. Just for today. Okay? I want to pretend . . .”

My voice trails off because I legit almost said pretend we’re back in the cabin, just the two of us. And that would violate the cease-fire I just declared. But my desire for the quietness of the cabin is only due to the chaos of our life right now. I forgot what that chaos felt like. It was like that on the road—every day a terrifying and unknown future. But we were together, and we could make the decisions for ourselves.

“Pretend things are normal?” Jamie helps.

I sigh. “Yes. I want that.” Whatever “normal” is without worrying about Taylor crying over Frank. Or the Kid going completely silent. Or Daphne trying so hard to smile even as her eyes betray her heartbreak. I don’t want to think about Liz and the kids who died, just for a few hours. Because I’m going to be thinking of them forever.

Jamie steps closer and pulls my chin so I’m looking up at him. He kisses me gently, slipping a hand around to my lower back and pulling me against him.

The world goes quiet and all I hear is my heartbeat in my ears. I imagine it keeping time with his.

When he pulls away, he keeps his forehead against mine, our noses touching.

“It isn’t abnormal for us to disagree about something. Couples disagree all the time.”

They disagree about what to eat and where to go, not how to rebuild a family.

“Then I just want to ignore one aspect of our normal relationship for the day,” I say.

“C’mon.” He takes my hand and continues walking. “When my mom came home after a particularly bad day at the hospital, she’d call me down to the kitchen. And we’d sit at the kitchen table and go back and forth naming one thing we were happy to have in our lives. It was never the days when the ER was just busy. It was the days when she lost more patients than she knew how to handle. This was all before the superflu, I mean. When that hit, the game stopped working.”

“Repressing our emotions doesn’t feel very healthy.”

“It depends how long we repress them. If we do it for only one day, then it’s just taking a break from the more intense emotions. Giving us time to rest.”

I’m not sure if that’s enough to make me feel better about all the people who died in the storm—so far they’ve counted 273 people missing on that side of the school. But it’s enough to feel a little better about everything else. About Jamie not wanting to stay here and live a safe life—though maybe he was right, given the events of the last few days.

Shit. I do need this game. But I also need him to get me started.

“So what are you grateful for?”

He takes a second to think, then looks up at the afternoon sky. “The sunshine.”

“Starting broad.”

“I find it’s best to think macro when things look like . . .” He gestures to the destroyed road before us, leading me around a fallen magnolia tree.

“Noted. My turn? I’m grateful for . . .” I take the time to look around, trying to find something. “I guess I’m grateful climate change will be slowed now that there are fewer people to destroy the earth.”

“Flag on the play.”

“I don’t understand sports metaphors, sweetie.”

“Use your context clues. You can’t be grateful for something that requires cynicism. Find something else.”

“Fine, I’m grateful for cynicism.” He glares at me. “Okay! Okay. I’m grateful . . . Can it be something I’m going to be grateful for?”

“Sure.”

“I’m grateful I won’t smell bad soon.” I pull my T-shirt up to my nose and pretend to retch.

“I’m actually grateful for that, too.”

I nudge him. “You love my musk.”

“That’s not musk, it’s murk.”

I laugh and remind him it’s his turn.

“I’m . . .” He pauses as we reach the beach. The sand is packed down and debris-ridden from the storm. We walk halfway to the shore, then sit down in the sand and take off our shoes and socks. “I’m grateful that we’re here.”

I look over at him, wondering if he means alive or in the Keys. Maybe he’s had a change of heart. But I don’t want to ask because it’s breaking our rule. We’re ignoring our real problems today and finding what we’re grateful for.

He leans over and kisses me, putting his hand gently on my jaw.

“I’m grateful that I have my favorite person in the world,” he says.

I’m not sure if it’s the kiss or just the way he’s looking at me—or maybe this really is working—but my heart feels lighter. Like there isn’t a billion pounds of emotional weight shoved into every muscle in my body.

“I’m grateful that you know how to make me feel grateful again,” I tell him.

He kisses me. “C’mon. Let’s get cleaned up.”

We leave our dirty, sweaty clothes on the shore and wade into the surf. As we use sand and salt water to scrub our bodies, we continue the game. And it does help. By the time we’ve washed and laid our clothes out to dry, I am very glad we’re safe and still here.

It reminds me why I love Jamie.

And that makes me feel pretty damn grateful.