The album filled with pictures from her
childhood had to be somewhere handy. She would always bring it out when her
children visited and now it was nowhere to be seen. She looked for it beneath
the sofa, inside very shelf and drawer and even on the small and cramped space
above the house that people called an attic but it was not as big as she
thought an attic should be. She had to bring out a stick to bring down the
stairs and at her age it was not an easy thing to do.
Liz was her name and she had never been too
fond of her name. Her mother had named her after Queen Elizabeth and her father
had agreed. She would always ask her dad why he had let that happened and he
never thought she was speaking seriously. The truth was that Liz didn’t feel
anything like a queen, specially living in such a secluded place, when most
people didn’t even care about such things. She would have wanted a simpler
name, a more normal one in a way.
Finally, she found the album behind a big
chair near the curtain. It was right then when the wind broke the glass and she
was forced to duck down, scared a big piece would cut her face or any part of
her body. After all, Liz was all alone in that house and the only way to get to
a shelter was to go down the road towards the town, where a big sports venue
had been built more to shelter people when hurricanes happened than for hosting
sporting events, rare in the island.
When she realized the glass had fallen far
from her body, Liz stood up and decided it was time to get into the car. The
keys were on the dining table, next to her jacket. It was a bright yellow
jacket, which came with a hat of the same color. Her niece had bought it for
her in a big fancy store in New York and she had to accept it in order not to
make her sad. The truth was that Liz had never liked yellow but with that rain,
the jacket had finally become pertinent in her small world.
Before heading outside, she stood up in the
middle of her living room, looking around, trying to remember if she had left
something. There was a backpack with some clothes in the car, along with Jim,
an orange cat that had accompanied her for the last three years. Besides that,
she had her album beneath the jacket, to protect it from the water, and she was
closing her right hand around the car keys. She then realized that, maybe; she
would never see her home ever again. That realization sunk her heart a bit but
her feet suddenly moved.
Moments later, she was shaking her gray her in
the car and Jim was meowing like crazy. He was sitting in the copilot’s seat
and he seemed to be a bit scared of the storm. Honestly, it was much stronger
that what Liz had predicted. The wind was moving the car, so it felt as if she
was in the middle of an earthquake. On the windshield, lots of water was pouring
down. It was impossible to see beyond the car’s hood. The lights of the town
were nowhere to be seen and the sun had been lost.
Nevertheless, Liz turned on the ignition and
started moving her car very slowly down the road. It had been a great idea by her
son Richard to pave the road all the way down to the village. They had made a
big garage sale and with the money they had managed to fix the access to the
house. It was one of those things George had always hated about living right
there, far from his beloved ocean. But the properties down there could only be
afford by the wealthy and they weren’t any of that.
It had been George who had discovered the
island, in a way. He had been there while doing business and he had fallen in
love with birds and the ocean and the lush green soft hills all over the place.
When he visited, the island only had a couple hundred people living in it. His
insurance business could do great with things like hurricanes. Liz laughed when
remembering that, she thought the irony of him never seen such a storm living
there having insured the whole island was just too funny.
Maybe too funny indeed because it was right
then when she accidentally stepped on the accelerator and the car when downhill
fast for a few meters before she could react properly and hit the breaks. When
the car stopped, Liz was very scared and Jim was meowing even more than before.
But she wasn’t afraid of the storm. She had lived through others after her
husband had died. The thing was that she was certain to have seen a man
outside, through the windshield, before pushing the brakes.
It was getting darker outside and Liz didn’t
dare to step outside the car and check if everything was right, if it was her
eyes that were creating mirages in front of her or if something had actually
happened. Jim fell silent and that for Liz was louder than an alarm. She put on
her hat again and opened the door, letting in lots of water and wind into the
car. Jim didn’t say anything; he seemed to be too preoccupied for that. Liz was
about to close the car door when she felt something on the pavement. She
screamed the moment a hand grabbed her left ankle.
But it wasn’t a zombie or anything of the
sort. It was a man, a black skinned man, much younger than her. He was very
weak and his hand soon fell to the floor from her ankle. Liz kneeled in front
of him and touched his face. He was very cold and it was obvious he had been
outside for too long. Maybe he was extremely sick. There was no one near and
screaming didn’t help at all. The wind was howling much too hard for anyone to
notice her, even if they were close.
Liz grabbed the man’s face again and she
gently patted her cheeks. Seeing nothing happened, she slapped him harder. The
man opened his eyes and he started mumbling but nothing made sense. There was
no reason for him been there, unless he had gotten lost in the storm. Maybe he
had left his house after the rest of his family and then he had just lost track
of them in the storm. No one, not even the youngest person, could ever see a
thing or two with all that rain, haze and wind.
The older woman decided to do the only thing
that made sense. She opened one of the back doors or her car and then grabbed
the man by the armpits. She pulled as much as she could. It took her a while to
get him close to the door. Then she slapped him again and managed to make him
help her, by raising his waist a little bit. That was enough to get him in the
car. She pushed his body gently by closing the door and then she hopped on the
vehicle, all wet. Liz had lost her hat and she hadn’t realized.
It was easier to go up that road backwards,
than moving down. She knows that at full speed, she would be back home in less
than a minute. Liz stopped the car right before she hit her house. Jim had
jumped to the back seat and had helped by keeping the man awake, although he
kept trying to talk, as if he was in the middle of a very deep dream. Urged by
the situation, Liz grabbed the man by an arm and took him to the house. Jim
followed, unbothered by the rain. The car had been left open.
Liz left the man in the small room beneath the
stairs. He would be safe there. She would hide in a tiny cellar that her
husband had built beneath the kitchen to keep his wine bottles cold. She took
the bottles out and snuggled with Jim in the cramped space.
Few minutes had passed when she heard a
horrible noise, as if a tree had been pulled out of the ground. It was awful.
She closed her eyes in horror. But instead of remembering something comforting,
she reminded herself of the album she had left in the car. Her memories were
gone.