Chapter 10 - The Calm Water
The storm hit Mobile Bay at eight o'clock that evening with sixty-mile-an-hour gusts that stripped the dead fronds from the palm trees and sent the plastic lawn furniture tumbling across the manicured lawns of Daphne like tumbleweeds.
The power went out at eight-fifteen.
In the darkness, the big house felt different. Without the hum of the air handlers, without the roar of the television, without the bright, clinical glare of the recessed LED fixtures, the rooms contracted.
Ryan had found half a dozen hurricane lamps in the garage, and their yellow, flickering light cast long, dancing shadows across the heart pine table and the limestone walls.
We didn't leave the dining room.
The caterers had long since gone, leaving the kitchen spotless, but the fourteen of us stayed around the long table. The food had been cleared, replaced by three pots of black coffee brewed on the gas range and a bottle of Grandpa Walter’s favorite bourbon—cheap, sour mash in a square bottle that Sarah had previously kept hidden behind the artisanal gin.
Luke sat on the floor near my chair, his knees pulled up to his chest, listening.
Not to his own voice. To Walter’s.
The old man had come alive in the dark. With the wind howling against the glass and the house groaning under the gusts, Walter’s stroke-slowed tongue seemed to find its old tracks. He told stories he hadn't told in forty years: the bar crossings at Tillamook in forty-four-foot motor lifeboats, the way the green water would break over the open bridge until you had to breathe through your teeth to keep from swallowing foam, the men who had stayed down in the engine compartments with three feet of water around their knees, keeping the diesels coughing while the world turned upside down.
"We didn't have no radar altimeters then," Walter said, his voice dry and rhythmic, his fingers tapping the table in time with the wind gusts. "You knew you were fifty feet off the water because the spray smelled like dead kelp instead of rain. If it smelled like kelp, you pulled the throttles back and prayed the surf didn't drop you on the rocks."
Dad sat beside him, his arm resting over the back of Walter’s chair, his head bowed, listening with the rapt, silent attention he had once reserved for coaches and bankers.
"And Claire," Walter said, his pale eyes turning toward me in the yellow lamp light. "Tell 'em about the ice."
"Grandpa," I said, smiling. "They don't want to hear about Alaska."
"Tell 'em," the old man commanded softly.
So I told them.
I didn't tell them the heroic parts—the medals, the citations from the Commandant, the commendation letters that sat in a manila folder in my footlocker at Mobile. I told them about the cold. I told them about the sound the rotors make when ice begins to shed off the tips, like someone firing a twelve-gauge shotgun into the bottom of the fuselage every four seconds. I told them about the smell of burned turbine oil and wet neoprene, about the silence in the cockpit when the radio goes dead fifty miles off the coast and you realize that between your feet and five thousand feet of black water there is only a quarter-inch of aluminum and the skill of the nineteen-year-old mechanic sitting behind you with a grease gun.
Luke didn't move. His chin was rested on his forearms, his eyes wide and dark in the lantern light, drinking it in.
"Aunt Claire?" he asked, during a pause between gusts.
"Yes, Luke?"
"Does it... does it ever stop being scary?"
I looked at him. I looked at his father, who was leaning forward on his elbows, his eyes fixed on me with an intensity I hadn't seen since we were children waiting for the school bus in the rain.
"No," I said. "If it stops being scary, Luke, you turn in your wings. The fear isn't your enemy. It’s your altimeter. It tells you exactly how close to the bottom you really are."
Walter tapped his knuckles twice against the wood.
*There.*
At ten o'clock, my phone vibrated against the table.
The screen lit up with an unlisted number from the 251 area code: *SECTOR MOBILE - COMMAND CADRE.*
The room went dead silent again. Even the wind seemed to pause for a second as the vibration buzzed against the reclaimed pine.
I picked it up.
"Bennett," I said.
The voice on the other end was Major Halloway, the night operations officer. His voice was brisk, professional, but carrying that slight, sharp edge that meant the Gulf was misbehaving.
*"Commander, sorry to bother you on the holiday. We’ve got an EPIRB hit eighteen miles south of Fort Morgan. Shrimper out of Bayou La Batre. Three souls aboard. They’ve lost their rudder and they're taking water over the stern. Sector Mobile is launching the 6034, but Captain Vance wants an experienced stick in the left seat to supervise the night hoist in this front. Can you make the air station by twenty-three hundred?"*
I looked at my watch. It was ten-oh-two.
"I'm in Daphne, Major," I said. My voice was level, calm, rhythmic. "I can be on the flight line in forty minutes."
*"Copy that, Commander. We’ll have the bird spun up and on the pad when you arrive. Weather at the field is three hundred overcast, wind one-seven-zero at thirty-five gusting forty-eight."*
"Understood," I said. "Have the crew brief without me. I’ll step directly into the cockpit."
I hung up.
The fourteen people around the table didn't move. They looked at me as I stood up, smoothed the front of my cardigan, and picked up my leather overnight bag from the foyer bench.
"Claire," Mom said, her voice small.
"It’s my job, Mom," I said, leaning down to kiss her cheek. It was cool, soft, and slightly damp from her tears. "I’ll be back for breakfast on Saturday."
Dad walked me to the front door.
He didn't say anything about the weather. He didn't tell me to be careful. He took my bag from my hand, carried it out to the dirty Subaru through the howling rain, and set it carefully in the passenger seat.
He held the umbrella over my head as I reached for the door handle.
"Claire," he said, the rain beating a furious tattoo against the black fabric above us.
"Yes, Dad?"
He reached out, his hand steady now, and touched the collar of my sweater, right where my gold leaf would have been if I had been wearing my blouse.
"Keep it steady," he said.
I looked at him through the darkness and the driving rain.
"Always do, Dad."
I started the engine. The old four-cylinder coughed, caught, and settled into its familiar, tinny idle.
As I backed down the long, curving driveway of the big house in Daphne, I glanced up at the great room windows.
The hurricane lamps cast a warm, amber glow against the dark glass. Standing there, silhouetted against the light, were three figures: Ryan, with his arm around his son Luke’s shoulders; and between them, sitting tall in his high-backed chair with his face pressed close to the storm, Walter Bennett.
May you like
The old man didn't wave.
He just sat there, watching the red taillights of my little car disappear into the dark, wet woods, heading down toward the bay where the cold water was waiting.
