When Charley Came Calling, Judy Colella [color ebook reader .txt] 📗

In 2004, Florida was hit by four hurricanes. The first one, Charley, hit Central Florida at exactly nine o’clock at night, if I remember correctly. We’d been warned in plenty of time for me to make a concerted effort to have my family safe in time for the impact.

Or so I thought.

Okay, there’s nothing funny about a natural disaster, but when I tell you what happened with my children, you’ll understand why I…never mind. I’ll just continue.

I have three kids – two daughters and a son – who are all two years apart in age. In 2004, my oldest was 18, the middle daughter was 16 and my son was 14. Yup. Three teenagers living under the same roof. Joy.

They knew about the coming storm, of course, and my oldest went to visit a friend earlier in the day, claiming she’d have plenty of time to get back before things got crazy. The other two were with friends in the neighborhood. I was confident they’d be fine, so I went about my business securing doors and windows, offering condolences to the trees that probably wouldn’t survive, and making sure we had enough water and toilet paper to get us through the next couple of days in case the doom-and-gloomers were right about how awful the aftermath would be.

At eight o’clock, it was still fairly light outside (this was Florida in August, meaning it stayed light later than in the more northern states). I called my son’s friend’s mother and asked her to send him home because despite the daylight, some pretty horrifying clouds were creeping up from the south. My husband and I watched some news broadcasts for a while after that, hoping we’d hear that Charley had been kidding and wasn’t really going to hit us after all.

Right.

I then called my son’s friend’s mother back and asked where my son was, and she put him on the phone. I asked what he was doing and if he wouldn’t mind stopping at the house where his sister was to bring her home with him. I got a cheerful, “Sure, mom! Love you!” and a click as he hung up.

His oldest sister called soon after and said the weather was scaring her, so I told her to stay where she was, that it would be safer than trying to drive home.

By now, it was a few minutes before eight, and the sky had gone from half-scary to full-on OMG. I mean, the clouds were olive green! Then, at a few seconds before eight, the door opened and in scrambled my son and two of his friends. A second later, and before I could ask him where his sister was, the wind started.

It whistled through the bottoms of windows and doors, rattled the house, and soon the noise became a near-shriek.

“Where’s Lily?” I demanded.

“What – she isn’t here?” My son looked surprised. Oh, did I mention that it had already started to rain? Well, it had, he was soaked, and was preparing to take shower. Yeah, not sure how that works, but regardless, he was in nothing but his boxers.

“I told you to pick her up!”

“She wasn’t there.” He went toward the bathroom, and I headed into the garage to see what my husband was doing.

That’s when I heard the front door close. At first I thought it was Lily, but my Mom-sense (it’s like Peter Parker’s spider-sense, but for moms) told me something was wrong. I went to the front door and saw what looked like a street-level jet stream zooming away down the road.

“He went to look for Lily,” said my son’s friend, who had come up behind me at the door.

“What?!”

“He thinks she might be at the gas station.” The kid shrugged and went back to my son’s bedroom.

The gas station. That was out of the neighborhood and four blocks down a main road…crap, crap, and double crap.

Right then, I heard the booming, zapping crackle of first one, then another, then another electrical generator giving up the ghost, and the house went dark. So did all the streetlights and all the other houses.

Calling on my inner Dalai Lama, I got myself calm enough to go grab a hooded rain poncho, which I donned before heading out into the storm. I shouldn’t have bothered, since three seconds later I was so drenched, I might has well have been swimming with my clothes on. To make things worse, the wind was literally pushing me back as I tried to walk forward. And that green cloud-cover had developed a luminescence shaped like an oval directly overhead. What was

that? The Mother-Ship? Holy cow!

Since I obviously could only go in one direction at a time, and it would probably take me a week to get as far as the gas station, I decided to head the other way to search for my missing daughter. Leaning into the wind, half-blind, saturated and terrified, I started screaming her name. No idea why, really.

When I finally made it to the corner – a trip that normally takes less than a minute on foot – a good five minutes had passed. I saw nothing at first but what looked like several layers of translucent plastic sheeting. In other words, visibility was pretty much non-existent. But then, oddly, I saw three lights. They were dancing. One of them was going in a circle, and all were at different heights.

For one insane moment I thought I was suffering from hurricane-induced hallucinations. However, as the lights got closer, I began to make out shapes behind them. Human shapes. Silhouettes of cavorting people. With…. flashlights. Well, either I’d slipped a gear or there were three people dancing with flashlights in the middle of a hurricane.

And then one of these nut-jobs spoke. It said, “Mom! What are you doing out here!”

You know, they say that in nature, mother animals have been known to eat their young. I never really understood why until that moment. In lieu of snacking on Lily’s face, I reached out, grabbed her by the arm, pulled her close and shouted, “Get home this instant!”

I had to shout, you see, because the storm was ridiculously loud. On the other hand, I probably would have shouted anyway, considering the situation. My daughter apparently realized how much more danger she was in from me than from the storm, because she nodded and ran toward the house. Her friends – I still couldn’t see who they were – seemed to shrug (judging by the sudden upward jerk of their flashlights) and took off in the other direction.

By the time we were both standing on the front porch, dripping, out of breath, and wide-eyed for different reasons, I remembered about her brother’s precipitous foray into the storm, which was an heroic, if totally stupid, attempt to find his sister. I told her about it. She bit her lip. I scowled. She suggested that he might have gone back to his friend’s house. I pointed out that his friend was here.

“No he isn’t,” she said. “When you were yelling at me in the rain, he and what's-his-name ran by behind you, heading back to his house.”

Surreal. That was the only word that came to mind in that moment. “Great. Go inside and I’ll go get David.” My son, by the way.

When I got to the friend’s house, it was to find the front door open, my son’s friend and the other kid inside the dark abode, and both of them trying to convince the friend’s mother and little brother to come out of the hall closet.

“I hate the dark!” yelled the little brother.

“You’re an idiot, Adrian! It’s darker in there than it is out here!”

“Mom is afraid, too!”

“Of what?”

“The roof caving in on us.”

“If the roof caved in, you’d be just as squashed in there as you would be out here!”

And so it went. I gave up and headed home. Half a block later, a shivering, ghostly form in white boxers approached me. Before I could think anything goofy, it materialized into my son. Somehow, in what had to have been no more than twenty or so minutes, he’d run all the way to that gas station and back…

“Mom! Did you find Lily?”

“Yes! She’s home!” Yeppers, still had to shout.

When we finally got in the front door, it was to find my husband, wild-eyed, what was left of his hair sticking out in odd directions, standing there and not looking happy.

“Where the hell did you all go? I was in the garage nailing the side door shut, and when I came out, no one was here!”

“Er…”

“Then I found two kids in David’s room, and told them to go home!”

“Dad…”

“I probably shouldn’t have sent them out in the storm, but what the heck! And then I heard the front door and thought it was you, but by the time I got to it, no one was around!”

“It was Lily.”

“Lily! Where is she!”

“I went into my room, Dad. Geesh.” She had emerged a moment before and come up behind him.

“Aaahhh!” He threw his hands in the air (something a Zombie probably wouldn’t even want to try), stomped off into the bedroom, and slammed the door.

Well. Looked like everything was going to be fine, then, yes? I went to piano bench where I kept the emergency candles and lighter (it’s so hard to find candles in a drawer in the dark, you know?), lit them, and had the kids help me place them in spots around the house where nothing could catch fire.

After pointing out how their little adventures could have easily turned into something tragic, and lauding my son for caring so much about his sister’s safety, we waited out the storm with story-telling and prayers for those who wouldn’t come out of this mess so safely. Later, we found out that several of the houses in our neighborhood had been hit by falling trees; a few cars had also been destroyed, and debris was everywhere. Roads were blocked and the flooding in some areas was severe.

My other daughter came home around noon the next day, in time to help us gather fallen branches and whatnot from the front yard, and asked how everything had gone during the storm.

I dropped an armload of leafy twigs into the lawn bag and said, “Lily, David – you’re both grounded for a week. By the way. Feel free to tell your sister why.” I smiled at them all and went inside to make lunch.

Hurricane Charley was soon followed by Frances, Ivan and Jeanne. The most terrible hurricane season in recent Florida history, the deaths and devastation were no laughing matter. Somehow, though, my family managed to get through all of them with only minimal damage to the house and no injuries. We are all deeply grateful for this; the kids took their punishment with only half-hearted outrage, my husband eventually decided to talk to us again, and all three of my beloved offspring stayed inside for those other hurricanes. And after Lily went out onto the front porch during Isaac and nearly got taken out by a flying oak tree branch,