Servants of the Storm (2 page)

“Come on! We have to get out of here!”

“Daddy?” Carly says, her voice all wrong. Instead of moving away from the tree, from the hole in the attic, from a furious sky vomiting rain and lightning, she moves toward it. I step closer and see blood trickling from a big gash on her head.

“Carly! Let’s go!”

But she doesn’t hear me. The branch must have hit her pretty hard. I pick my way over the jagged timbers and weak spots of insulation, but she’s almost to the edge of the hole. A board snaps under my foot, and I lurch sideways, almost fall through the ceiling. She sets a bare, bleeding foot onto the tree trunk.

“You can’t go outside, fool,” I say. “Come back in. It’ll be over soon. We’ll get you to the hospital.”

“Daddy’s outside, Dovey,” she says in a weird, childlike voice. “Daddy, and your nana. Waiting.”

“It’s a goddamn storm, girl. Snap out of it!”

I grab her hand and yank, but her skin is wet with sweat and blood and the rain that won’t stop pounding down on us through the place where the roof used to be. She slips out of my grasp and sits on the ragged tree trunk like it’s a slide. I grab for her again, but she pushes off, letting herself fall. I reach for her hand, but she’s gone. The last thing I see of my best friend is her dark skin and bright pink fingernails swallowed up by the swollen river running down the street we grew up on. The water is up to the window below, churning grayish brown. I scream and search for Carly. Swirling along with the water, I see cars, bikes, children’s toys, tree branches, bloated hairy things. But no Carly.

I stand there so long that I can’t feel my hands. I stand there, looking for my best friend—first for her alive and swimming, and then dead and floating. At some point I drag myself deeper into the attic and hide under an old rug that smells like cat piss. I stay there, shivering and crying, until the storm is over and I hear Carly’s mom calling her name.

I AM NINE DAYS AND
a Thousand Years Older, and I am numb.

I sit, feeling nothing. I stare without taking anything in. It’s just like it was in the attic, watching Carly fall. But instead of rain on my face, it’s tears. And instead of being alone, I’m surrounded by people dressed in black. This is the third service today, and mourners are still walking across the hall from the last one, a junior I didn’t know. The preacher is hoarse, and the funeral home’s potpourri can’t quite cover up the stench of death and rot. I don’t understand why the casket is open. I don’t understand it at all.

“You okay, Dovey?”

I don’t know how long Baker has been sitting next to me while I’ve been watching people sift in and out of the room like shadows. His knee jumps up and down beside mine, his hand
twitching against his pant leg like he’s playing one of his video games. My head swivels slowly toward him. I’ve known him almost as long as I’ve known Carly, but right now he looks like a stranger, one of the few white faces in a sea of tan and brown. He gulps and takes off his glasses, cleans them on his dad’s tie like he needs an excuse not to look at me. I can always tell when he’s been crying; the redness of his eyes today makes the blue stand out like the overbright skies we’ve had since Hurricane Josephine ended. His dark hair looks like he tried to slick it down and failed. I have no idea what my hair is doing, and one hand goes up to find it pulled back tightly into a bun, where it can’t embarrass anyone.

A loud sob grabs my attention, and I realize that it’s Carly’s mom. Miz Ray is huddled over the coffin, her long nails freshly painted and digging into the velvet. My mom’s arm is around her shoulders as she wails, and my dad stands beside them, looking lost. My mom searches the sea of cheap black dresses and white folding chairs, and her gaze settles on me. Her brows draw down, and she jerks her head at me. I rise, too numb to rebel.

“What are you doing?” Baker asks.

“Paying my respects,” I mumble.

He follows me, scooting past countless knees. I slip past people without offering the usual polite apologies, surprised at how many strangers are in the crowd. Their faces carry an unsettling reverence, and I feel relief as I escape them, pushing past the chairs and down front to where my best friend—our best
friend—lies in a shiny white coffin surrounded by flowers.

People speak to me, but I don’t hear words, don’t recognize faces. My arms are by my sides, my feet still sore in my mom’s old heels. I vaguely recall someone picking glass out from between my toes with tweezers, but my memories are fuzzy.

“Hey, man,” Baker says. He has stopped to talk to someone else and is no longer close behind me. I hear a stranger’s low voice, and Baker answers, “Yeah, that’s Billie Dove Greenwood,” and the stranger says, “They were best friends, weren’t they?” I turn to look and vaguely recognize a senior, his dark eyes urgent and distraught as he stares at me. I turn away. I can’t take his pity.

Sucking in a deep, desperate breath, I step close to the coffin, close enough to smell the stale cigarette smoke that clings to Carly’s mom and everything in their house—or did before the flood. My stomach wrenches.

“My baby, my baby girl,” Miz Ray croons in between sobs. “I should never have left you alone. I should have been there. I could have stopped it.”

“Hush now.” Carly’s ancient grandmother, Gigi, puts a wrinkled hand on Miz Ray’s shoulder. Her voice is an echo of Carly’s, firm and sure. “Can’t nobody stop such things, sugar.”

My parents move around to my other side as Carly’s mama dissolves into sobs between me and Gigi. Everyone’s touching, hands on shoulders and arms and fingers dark against the white coffin’s edge.

I put a hand on Carly’s mama’s shoulder, and she turns to
me, her eyes a fathomless pool of pain the same muddy brown as the water that swallowed her daughter. I can tell what she’s thinking—that it should have been me. That it’s unfair. That my golden skin is smooth and tan and unbroken, while Carly’s dark skin is held together with tape and glue and mismatched makeup that can’t quite cover up all the damage that the swollen river did to her for the week that she was lost. That I’ve always been luckier than Carly in every way. And that Carly was stronger than I can ever be.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and the words die in my throat.

“They sure made her up pretty, didn’t they, Dovey?” The words are oddly, fiercely proud.

I step closer and look inside, my hands on the edge next to Miz Ray’s, the mascara-stained tissue twisted in her fingers brushing the back of my wrist.

And then I start screaming.

I HAVE BEEN NUMB EVERY
day for the past Year.

I’m pretty sure it’s because of the meds, and that’s why I’m in the kitchen holding today’s dose on my palm, while my mom is still asleep. The pill looks so innocent and perfect that I almost hate to crush it. Round and smooth and unmarked, as pure and white as a blanket of snow. Or what I imagine a blanket of snow would look like, since I’ve never actually seen more than a few dingy flakes. Carly and I tried to catch some on our tongues when we were seven, but Savannah’s stingy excuse for snowflakes melted before we could taste them. I was so disappointed that she bought me an Icee after church with her last dollar from the tooth fairy.

I felt like a fool then, and I feel like a fool now. But I’ve thought it over, I’ve made a plan, and for the first time in a long time, I’m following through with it. I can’t just throw my meds in the trash
or spit them down the disposal, like I did yesterday’s pill. It has to be final. And it has to leave no evidence.

I tuck the tablet into a sandwich bag with the rest of the bottle’s contents. Dozens and dozens of pretty white pills. I pause to listen for noises down the hall. My mom’s awake now. Drawers open and close like usual, and the shower makes trickling noises in the new pipes. I have at least ten minutes before she comes into the kitchen to check on me. Time to hurry.

I have to hunt for the rolling pin. It used to nestle comfortably in the mess of the bottom drawer, the deepest one. But after the kitchen flooded during Josephine, that drawer of old junk and phone books got ripped out along with everything else, was replaced with new cabinets that are all the same and still squeaky. It’s in the middle drawer now, nice and neat.

I take the rolling pin and pills to my bathroom and twist the door’s sticky old lock. Cautiously, quietly, I roll the baggie up in a towel and crush the pills to powder. It looks like a baggie of cocaine from a TV crime drama. I dump it all down the toilet and flush. “Cheers, Carly,” I say as the dust swirls into the water and disappears forever into the Savannah sewers.

The rolling pin goes right back into its drawer, the Ziploc baggie gets rinsed out and buried in the trash. And the brown glass bottle of pills goes back to its place in the kitchen cabinet, right where my mother expects it to be. Except now it holds sixty-three white aspirin. I even counted them out, just to make sure no one would suspect anything.

When I decided to dump my meds, I did some Internet research on the effects of quitting antipsychotics. Everything I read said it would be better if I took an entire month to wean myself off the pills, gradually lowering the dose and paying careful attention to my symptoms. But I don’t want to wait that long. I’m sick of the side effects. Sick of the headaches and holes in my memory. Sick of the sucky sleep and weird dreams. But most of all I’m sick of feeling comatose, like I’m walking through a fog. A numb fuzz. I need to be sharp again, because I saw something last week that changed everything.

I saw Carly.

And I know it’s impossible, because she’s dead. I watched her get sucked down by the floodwaters, stood over her body in the coffin. When I looked up from my book in the Paper Moon Coffee Shop last Thursday and saw her standing there, silhouetted in the back door of our favorite study spot, my first thought was that I might be crazy.

But I can’t be crazy. Because of the meds. When you’re on antipsychotics, you can’t be psychotic, right? And that’s why I had to destroy the pills. Because I need to know the truth.

When I hear my mom’s footsteps in the hall, I open the cabinet and take down the brown bottle of pills as if for the first time today. My daily dose has to be taken at the same time every morning in front of one of my parents, usually my mom. When she walks into the room, I show her the pill and gulp it down with a glass of orange juice.

“How are you feeling today, Dovey?” she asks, just like every day.

The orange juice and aspirin are bitter in my mouth. I give her a dull smile, thinking that if she has to ask, she isn’t looking hard enough.

I’ve been on antipsychotics, Mama. How do you think I feel?

But I just say, “I’m fine,” because that’s what she expects.

“How’s school?” she asks.

“Fine.”

“How are rehearsals for the play going?”

Jesus, it’s like she’s reading off a script. She moves to stand behind me, and I stiffen.

“Good,” I say. “Today’s the first dress rehearsal at the Liberty downtown.”

“That’ll be nice,” she says. “You’ve always loved that old theater.”

Her hand sweeps my messy hair to the side and lands on my shoulder in a cloud of her perfume. It’s one of my constants, that smell, one of the things that still find a response in me, even through the numbness. After all that’s happened, she still wears the same perfume. She even wore it at Carly’s funeral. My stomach twists at the memory, and I feel the orange juice rise in my throat. I swallow it back down, but I can still taste the tiny grains of aspirin powder on my tongue.

It’s amazing how different I feel, just twenty-four hours after my first missed dose.

For the first time in a long time, the fog breaks wide and memories rush in. I smell brackish water and rotting wood and
the pushy reek of death that clung to the neighborhood, to my house, for months after the flooding. With the downstairs renovation came new smells, new everything. Except for that perfume.

They put me on antipsychotics to keep the past at bay. They wanted me to forget Hurricane Josephine, and what came after. Forgetting was better than the panic attacks. I welcomed the numbness like a cozy blanket to keep out the cold and bad dreams.

And I did forget. Mostly.

Didn’t I?

My mom’s hand leaves my shoulder, and she gets one of the weight loss shakes she doesn’t actually need out of the fridge, popping the top carefully so she won’t ruin her nails. I turn to watch her drink it in her power suit and walking shoes, her hair pulled back tightly into a puff that resembles a bun. I wish my hair were as wild as hers, instead of a frizzy, tan hybrid of her black curls and dad’s white-blond wisps. She catches me watching, and her eyes narrow.

“You sure you’re okay, Dovey?”

I sigh and nod dully. I have to act like I’m still sleepwalking. But really I’m waking up.

“You’ll drive straight home after play rehearsal, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s my girl. Have a good day. And be careful.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Reciting the words to our script makes it easier to lie to her. She’ll never know it, since she doesn’t leave her attorney’s office until
six on the nose, but I have somewhere to go after rehearsal today.

I have a date with the Paper Moon Coffee Shop.

When I saw Carly there last week, I was daydreaming, lost in the numb fog and staring into space. It was her, my best friend, exactly as she’d looked the day she’d died, hair in beaded braids, pockets poking out the bottom of her jean shorts, and orange corduroy jacket slung over her tank top. I don’t even know why I looked up, but I did, and there she was. Just standing there, frozen. And I jumped up, my chair slamming to the ground behind me.

“Carly?”

She turned and ran through the back door into the alley behind the Paper Moon Coffee Shop. I crashed through the door after her, my heart beating, pounding, screaming for the first time in months. But my body couldn’t catch up, and Carly disappeared into the darkness of the back alleys of Savannah before I could stop her, before I could even touch her.

I stood there, stupid and confused. When I moved again, my foot slipped on something. I reached down, expecting a piece of gravel or alley trash. But it was a plastic bead. Pink, the same shade as the ones Carly wore in her hair. It’s in my pocket now, and I roll it between my fingers as I step onto the sidewalk.