Servants of the Storm

  3

  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.

  Either she’s still alive or I’m so crazy that even antipsychotics can’t touch me.

  I won’t quit looking for
her until I know the truth.

  4

  SCHOOL IS SCHOOL. IT’S A numb fuzz with or without pills. Moving from one class to another like a robot. Taking notes. Staring at the blackboard. The teachers mostly ignore me, thanks to a few choice panic attacks last year, after Carly died and before the pills kicked in. I remember it—just a little. Mainly me freaking out and people carrying me out of the room. Now the teachers know it’s better to just skip me when polling for answers. My grades went from As and Bs to Fs after the hurricane, but the meds have kept me hovering in the middle Cs. Just good enough to get by.

  The fuzz lifts, bit by bit. I start to take an interest in things, look at people again, notice how many kids are missing, compared to before Josephine. At lunch I’m standing in line for pizza, pretty much daydreaming. As Mrs. Lowery puts the plasticky slice on my tray with a spatula, something catches my eye. She’s been behind the counter of the caf since my freshman year, and most days I don’t even see her. But today something ripples across my field of vision. Something under her apron.

  I stop to stare. It’s like she has something wiggly hidden in her bra, and I can’t figure out what it could possibly be. Is she smuggling a kitten? I can’t concentrate enough to make sense of it.

  “Is there a problem, Miss Greenwood?” she growls.

  “No, ma’am,” I say, looking up. She’s glaring at me, her eyes dark and angry, and I suddenly want nothing more than to be out of the cramped lunch line and away from her. I push my tray along so fast that I forget to get a drink. As I choke down the thick, doughy pizza, I keep thinking about that movie where the aliens explode out of peoples’ chests. By the time the bell rings for my next class, I can’t remember what upset me so much.

  In seventh-period English the fog lifts again. We’re talking about Heart of Darkness, and I remember watching the movie with my dad a long time ago, some guy’s face in the dark talking about the horror. My desk is suddenly unbearable, cold and constricting. I put on my jacket and rock back and forth, trying to wake up my butt. I don’t notice Baker until he leans over to talk to me. I’d completely forgotten that I sit next to him.

  “Yo, Dovey. Can I hitch a ride to rehearsal?”

  I blink to focus, and for just a second I see a younger version of Baker instead of a high school junior. This high school boy is no longer the pudgy, pale kid in glasses with a hopeful smile and striped shirt, forever following Carly and me all over the neighborhood. At first we put up NO BOYS ALLOWED signs and refused to answer the door no matter how long he knocked, but then he brought us Fudgsicles, a book of knock, knock jokes, and one of his cat’s kittens, and we were all best friends from then on. So much about him is the same—unruly dark hair, pale skin, blue eyes. But now he’s got contacts, he’s taller, and he has traded his stripes for non-ironic plaid. After Carly’s funeral we stayed unofficial buds, but in a drifting, foggy way. Like two rowboats lost on the same lake, occasionally bumping into each other.

  “I have to do something afterward,” I whisper.

  “Cool. I’ll come with.”

  Mild irritation edges into the numb fuzz, raises my voice.

  “That’s not what—”

  “Did you want to read, Billie Dove?”

  My head jerks up. Mr. Christopher is staring at me with a mixture of annoyance and pity. I guess it’s easier to ignore me when I’m not shouting.

  “We’re on page one fifteen,” he says. “If you’re ready to join us.”

  I look at my closed book. It’s new, since most of our books were water damaged. I haven’t even cracked the spine. I’ll read it, eventually.

  “I’ll do it, Mr. Christopher,” Baker says, and he begins reading loudly and with unnecessary intensity, as if the entire book were written with the caps lock on. He reads like he’s fighting the book and thrashing around in the words. But he’s smirking.

  Luckily, the bell rings just then, and his personal assault on Joseph Conrad cuts off midsentence. He follows me to my locker, and it’s like one of those cheesy movie scenes where everyone is moving really fast except for the main characters. Like Baker and I are walking underwater while the other people buzz around us like hummingbirds. There are a few other kids like us, kids who have lost best friends or siblings. We’re the ones who move slowly, heavily. But we try not to look at each other, our eyes sliding away, afraid of small talk that will bring back unwelcome memories. We’re a family of strangers in pain.

  I open my locker, and it’s plastered with pictures of me and Carly. A photo of us riding bikes, another one we took at a slumber party with Tamika and Nikki, a few with our arms wrapped around Baker’s shoulders, all of us laughing. I unstick an old one and pull it out to look more closely. It’s Carly and me standing together in church dresses with our grandmothers on either side of us. Nana and Gigi look more alike than Carly and me, but you can see the pride in both of their smiles. That was the day Carly won a good citizen award in second grade for saving a cat that had fallen down the storm drain. I helped a little, but it had been her idea to put a branch down there as a ladder, and she had been the one who’d carried the exhausted, dripping cat back to the address on his tag.

  The family had offered her a reward, but in typical Carly fashion she’d just put a hand on her hip and told them to spend it on tuna and a trip to the vet, because the poor cat was half chewed-up and skinnier than he should have been. I catch myself smiling in my locker mirror. God, that girl had a sassy mouth.

  I trade my books, load up my backpack, and fight the hall traffic to the student parking lot. I’m lucky to have a car at all, even if it’s my dead grandmother’s 1997 Buick Skylark. One look at the cars around it tells you plainly that we don’t live in those fancy row houses and historic mansions you see in the movies. There’s not a car here fewer than ten years old, and that includes the teachers’. That’s the thing about Savannah. What the tourists see? What they show in the movie theater? None of that is real.

  The natives use different roads to avoid tourists in minivans with out-of-town plates. We take a lonely expressway to tired neighborhoods the vacationers will never see. Everything here is broken down a little, languishing in age with less grandeur than the charmingly crooked porches that get photographed on the horse-drawn carriage tours. The city cleaned those areas up fast after Josephine, to get the tourists back. They’re pretty again, and retirees can buy their taffy and take their ghost tours and stand in line for overpriced fried chicken.

  What most people know of Savannah is a dream. But this is real life.

  I find my car and open the door, pulling up with the little hitch that keeps it from squeaking too badly. I slide in, the seat creaking underneath me on bad springs, and lean over to open the passenger door for Baker.

  “You ready for dress rehearsal?” I ask.

  “Course I am,” he answers with a lopsided grin. “I’m freaking Caliban. This part was made for me. Are you ready?”

  “Course I am,” I say. “I’ve barely got any lines.”

  There’s an awkward pause. Meds or no meds, the bitterness is sharp in my voice.

  He looks out the window, his fingers tapping patterns on the faded dash. I know him well enough to know it’s probably some complex cheat code for Xbox.

  “Do you miss being the lead?” he asks.

  I start the car with a roar and back out too fast, nearly plowing into some kid I don’t even know. He calls me a bitch and slams his fist down on my trunk. The punch probably hurt him more than it hurt my old Buick. I give him the finger.

  I ease into the line and glance at Baker sideways as the car rumbles out of the lot. He just broke our unspoken rule, the one where we never, ever talk about the past. But something has changed for me. Maybe it’s that nagging, desperate hope that Carly’s out there somewhere. Maybe it’s a tiny chemical jolt from my second day off the meds. But I answer his question.

  “I miss it,” I admit. “A little.”

  And it’s definitely true. This time last year I woul
d have had my pick of the lead roles in The Tempest. I probably would have gone for Ariel, or maybe Miranda. I would have done a better job in that white-and-gold toga than Jasmine Pettigo, that’s for sure. Now I’m just another sprite, one of several made-up parts Mrs. Rosewater created by divvying up some of Ariel’s less important lines. With my emotions blunted and my mind dull, it was the best I could do. I have one scene with Baker, as Caliban, and then the whole play is a bunch of flitting around in a leotard and tutu.

  “You would have made a great Miranda,” he says, fingers still tapping as he says exactly what I was thinking. “You think you’ll ever . . . you know, get back into it?”

  I snort. He could mean competitive acting. Or he could mean life.

  “One day,” I say.

  Normally the play is the most important thing I have, but right now all I can think about is getting out of rehearsal and going to Paper Moon to look for Carly. The rest of the drive is silent, but I can tell he wants to say more.

  We roll into downtown, and I’m struck, as ever, at the change that has taken place. For a city that survived the Civil War, Savannah got a raw deal with Josephine. It’s like the winds came with chisels and the water brought a jackhammer to the streets. Bits of buildings are broken off, and half of the beautiful green oaks are gone, leaving holes in the canopy, where sun shines through cruelly, when it does shine. Thick swaths of Spanish moss drape from the swaybacked branches of the trees that survived, framing each street with lank, gray rags. Except for the tourist areas, everything is spooky, malevolent, just a little too dark, as if one more raindrop could shatter it all.

  Parking is always sketchy, but I manage to squeeze into a space in a back alley. My school puts on two plays a year, and since we don’t have a stage, we take over the old Liberty Theater downtown for a week of dress rehearsals and a weekend of shows. It’s pretty broken down, which is why they let a bunch of high school kids invade it with paint and makeup and glue guns. And the owner is this seriously grouchy old guy named Murph who is always yelling at us in the girls’ dressing room, trying to catch a peek during costume changes.