It takes me a few minutes to completely wake up, and when I finally do, it’s a hazy, groggy, troubled awareness. I moan, and the rough, scratchy sound of my voice tells me I’ve been asleep for quite awhile.

“He’s waking up.” A male voice, American accent. “Hey, can you hear me?”

I moan again. “Nnnngh.” It’s not a word so much as an attempt at a word. “Agua…por favor…”

“Sorry, man, I don’t speak Spanish.”

“Dude. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, that much at least has to be obvious.” This is a second voice, also male, much younger, and it’s not until now that I realize they’re speaking English and I used Spanish. “He’s thirsty. Agua? Aqua? Water? Duh.”

“I may be your brother, Dane, but I’m still the captain. Show a little respect.”

“Sorry, Dom.”

A silence, and then the first, older voice. “Well? Get him some water, dipshit.”

“Oh, right.”

I realize, at this point, that I haven’t opened my eyes yet. I’m in no hurry to do so, though, since everything hurts. My head is throbbing, my throat is on fire, my bones ache, my muscles are sore from head to toe, and I think there’s something broken in my left leg. I feel a hand slip under my head, and something plastic touches my lips.

“It’s a sport cap. You just gotta suck on it, okay, bro?”

“How do you know he understands English, Dane?”

“Oh, good point.” The second voice clears his throat. “Um. Agua, dude. I got some agua. El drinko, ese.”

“Dane, you idiot. None of that was Spanish except agua. I may not speak Spanish, but even I know ‘el drinko’ ain’t fuckin’ Spanish, moron.”

I would laugh, if it didn’t hurt. I try to lift my hand, but it’s too hard. I manage to wrap my lips around the cap and pull until ice-cold, pure, filtered water fills my mouth. As badly as I want to gulp it down greedily, I’ve been through enough shit to know better. Instead, I let the water sit in my mouth, let the dried-out tissue soak it up. Swish it around, let some trickle down my throat, and I could cry in relief.

“This guy knows what he’s doing, at least.” The first voice, in a lecturing tone. “Notice how he didn’t gulp it down? He let it sit in his mouth, and he’s swallowing it slowly. If you’ve gone without water for a long time, like you’re close to death by dehydration like he was, you gotta go slow or you could make yourself sick. Same thing with food.”

“Not…not my first rodeo,” I manage, my voice raspy and hoarse. “And I speak English. Better than the two of you, I think.”

A laugh from the first voice. “Probably true.”

I open my eyes. I’m in the cabin of a boat. Wood paneled walls, bare ceiling, pipes visible. Narrow, hard cot under me, thin pillow, scratchy green military issue wool blanket over my torso. Not much else in the cabin aside from a battered bureau attached to the wall on one side and a metal desk attached to the opposite wall. There are two men in the cabin with me, although “man” is a bit of a stretch for the one. The older man, Dom, is tall, well built, rugged looking, with a messy, curly, wild mass of jet-black hair bound back in a low knot at the back of his neck, and a long, well-groomed beard; he is midthirties, probably, with hard, intelligent gray eyes. The younger, Dane, is probably not even eighteen, and clearly the older man’s younger brother. Similar build but twenty years younger, less filled out. Same wild, curly black hair, and the beginnings of a beard, more of a straggly attempt than a real beard, same gray eyes but young and eager and excited.

I wiggle my toes and fingers, roll my head on my neck, shrug my shoulders, taking stock. My left leg throbs like a motherfucker, a deep, burning pain centered around my thigh, but I can move it and wiggle my toes, which tells me it probably isn’t a break but some other injury. Everything else seems to be fine.

“I wouldn’t move around too much,” Dom says. “You got pretty fucked up.”

“For real. Miracle you’re even alive,” Dane adds.

“My leg?” I ask.

Dom shifts closer, twitches the blanket aside to reveal thick white bandages wrapped around my thigh, low, near the knee. “Nasty gash to the quad. Took a good thirty stitches. You’ll be limping for a while.”

I eye him. “You do the stitches?”

He nods. “Did eight years in the Navy as a corpsman on a hospital ship. I can set bones and stitch shit up, basic triage stuff.”

I try to lift my hand again, and this time succeed. “Well, thanks.” He takes my hand and we shake. “Jonny Núñez.”

“Dominic Bathory, and this my brother, Dane.”

“How’d you find me?” I am trying like hell to remember, but things are foggy.

I remember the hurricane hitting, like the fist of God smashing in from nowhere. I remember the monster rogue wave knocking us flying, and Christian going overboard. He was just gone before I could even blink, before I could do a damn thing, just snatched by the sea. He had a life vest on, and the motherfucker can swim like a fish, and he’s one of the toughest bastards I’ve ever known, so if anyone can survive going overboard during a hurricane in the spring in the Atlantic, it’s him. But…the chances aren’t good.

After that, it’s all a blur. The storm raged for so long. It was all I could do to stay on the ship, to keep her from being flipped. I remember thinking I was going to drown while still on the damn boat. I remember…not much else. The ocean around me. Seawater in my mouth. Dark sky above, lightning. Struggling to breathe. Swimming.

Did I go overboard too?

“That was a bitch of a storm,” Dominic says. “Came out of fuckin’ nowhere. We were running ahead of it, but it overtook us. I thought for sure we were gonna flip, but we didn’t. That bitch blew for three damn days, man, and when she finally blew past us, we were so far off course it’s not even funny. Well, when I finally figured out where the hell we were, we’d been blown way the hell west, luckily for you. We took some damage, lost some nets, had a boom snap off, lost our radio antenna, so we gotta put in for repairs. Then yesterday, right around dawn, we came across a catamaran. Flipped, swamped. Surprising it was still afloat, but those cats are tough as hell to sink, right? And you were laying on the hull, passed the fuck out. You had a rope wrapped around your waist, and a metal box in your arms, in a damn death grip.” He shrugs. “So we took you aboard, I stitched up your leg, and hoped for the best. I don’t have an IV or fluids or I’d have pushed some fluids.”

A thought hits me. “The boat. She sank?”

He nods. “Sadly, yeah. No way to save her. Too bad, too. She looked like a gorgeous boat. I got you off, and we had to keep going. Saw her going under, though. Got you off in the nick of time, I’d say.”

“I owe you my life, then,” I say.

Dominic shrugs again. “Hey, something tells me you’d’ve done the same thing.”

“Sure, of course I would’ve. But you still did it. So thanks.”

“Buy me a beer or ten when we put in to port and we’ll call it even.”

I laugh. “I hope my life is worth more than ten beers, but you can count on that much, at least.” I peer around the room. “The box. You mentioned I had a box with me. Where is it?”

Dane crouches near the cot and reaches under it, coming up with Christian’s box. I take it from him and rest it on my lap, breathing a sigh of relief. I’ve got the key on my gold chain necklace, next to my crucifix. I have a vague memory of slipping that key onto my necklace when I realized I may not sail out of the storm; I also put Christian’s tiny little laptop into the box, so that much of him at least would survive, the letters and everything saved to his computer.

Dominic lifts his chin in the direction of the box. “Mind if I ask the importance of that?”

“The boat was my friend’s. He went overboard during the storm. The box has some letters for his wife, which I’m supposed to deliver in the event of my friend…” I shrug, not wanting to even say out loud the possibility.

I want to believe he’s still alive out there somewhere.

Dominic nods, his expression serious and grim. “Anything’s possible, but…”

I sigh. “I know.” I rub the back of my neck. “I wonder where Christian ended up, then?”

“Assuming he made it, there’s no way to tell. A body can get pushed a long-ass way.”

I feel a tightness in my chest. “He fuckin’ made it, okay? He had to.”

Dominic holds up his hands. “Hey, I hope he did. I’m just saying. You gotta know the odds.”

“Never tell me the odds!” Dane says, glancing as if to gauge our reactions.

I stare at him blankly, and Dominic huffs and shakes his head, giving his brother a playful shove. “He’s a Star Wars geek. Don’t mind him.”

I shrug. “Never seen it. Heard of it, though. Is that the one with the bald guy? Picard?”

Dane groans and slaps his forehead with his palm. “Oh my god. No. Picard is Star Trek. Totally different.”

“Oh. So Star Wars is the one with the big hairy monkey dude that makes the weird noises?”

“Chewy. Chewbacca. And he’s a wookie.”

I snort. “Okay, ese.”

Dane blushes scarlet. “I didn’t know you spoke English, okay?”

“Pro tip, buddy? Never call a Spanish speaker ese, okay? Just makes you sound stupid. Ninety-nine percent of us don’t even use that word, never have, and never will. I think only gangbangers in LA actually use it in what you might call a non-ironic sense.”

“Oh.”

I laugh. “You even know what non-ironic means?”

Dane shrugs. “Not exactly.”

Dominic chortles and smacks his brother on the back. “What’d I tell you, Dane? This cat speaks better English than either of us.”

“Yeah, well, I learned from you, so what’s that tell you?”

“It tells me I got saddled with the job of raising a ten-year-old brat by myself and at least you can read and write and count to twenty without taking off your shoes.”

“I wasn’t a brat.”

“No, you were a holy terror. You heard the phrase sleep with the fishes on TV and thought it sounded like fun. I had to jump in and rescue you from shark-infested waters of the South Atlantic in the middle of the night.”

“I fell in, you dumbfuck.”

“You were mumbling about wanting to sleep with the fishes.”

I’m watching their fast-paced, nonstop exchange like a tennis match, finding myself entertained, despite everything, and slowly sip water.

“I was sleepwalking! I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Yeah, and I had to lock your door from the outside every night for six months so you didn’t sleepwalk off the fuckin’ boat again.”

“And how is that my fault?”

“Too much TV?”

“Just because you’re a goddamn Luddite who wouldn’t use GPS or radar if you didn’t have to doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate quality cinema.”

“You watch Star Wars a dozen times a week.”

“Because it’s one of a dozen DVDs on this godforsaken bucket of bolts.”

“Well I’m sorry I can’t afford to supply you with a wider variety of quality cinema, Dane. I am trying to keep you fed and clothed and halfway educated, none of which is exactly easy when my job keeps me out in the middle of the ocean.”

“That wouldn’t be a problem if you’d just take us back to New England. You could lobster and I could live with Bobby and Bo.”

“I hate lobstering, and Bobby and Bo are lazy potheads. You’d never leave the couch except to go on munchie runs.”

“They both work full-time jobs!”

“At Pizza Hut and McDonald's.”

“Work is work.”

“Wrong. A job is a job, but you’re smart and you’re a talented mechanic. You could go to college, or trade school. You can have a meaningful career. Those jackasses will work dead-end hourly wage jobs for the rest of their lives, and then they’ll be fat and unemployed alcoholics just like their piece of shit old man is now. No, Dane. Even if we did go back to Gloucester, you would NOT be living with goddamn Bobby and Bo.”

“At least I’d have a home that didn’t fuckin’ float! There’s something to be said for dry fuckin’ land, Dom.”

“Yeah, there’s something to be said for dry land: it sucks. You know why? Because PEOPLE live on dry land, and people fuckin’ suck.”

Dane snorts. “Like I said, you’re a Luddite and an antisocial recluse.”

“I’m not a Luddite.”

“You have GPS navigation, but you still chart courses by hand.”

“Yeah, and if the GPS goes down, I won’t be lost, because I have charts and I know how to use them.”

“You don’t have a cell phone, a laptop, an iPad, or even a CD player. Who the hell doesn’t have a CD player? I mean most people, nowadays, actually, since they have a cell phone and listen to internet radio and buy music on iTunes like civilized human beings.”

“I like things simple.”

“Yeah, simple like you.”

I can’t help a laugh. “You guys fight like this all the time?”

Dominic kicks open the door to the cabin, picks Dane up bodily, and tosses him out of the cabin, then closes the door behind him. “Yes, we do. He’s difficult and stubborn and hates everything.”

“So…a teenage male?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Thanks again for…” I shrug. “Everything, I guess.”

“It’s what anyone would do.” He eyes me. “So. Where are you headed?”

I touch the cold metal of Christian’s box. “Ft. Lauderdale, I guess.”

“That’s home?”

I shake my head. “Nah. That’s where my friend’s wife lives. I was supposed to give her this—” I tap the box, “if Chris didn’t…if he doesn’t…you know.”

“Should I contact the Coast Guard? Get search-and-rescue going?”

“He went overboard in the first few hours of the storm, and it’s been days.” I blow out a conflicted breath. “I mean, for the sake of my conscience, I have to at least have them look, right? But…like you said, we both know the odds of him having survived.”

“You gotta file a report at least. You know? Have them search a grid around the coordinates where he went missing.”

“I only know the general area. It hit so fast, I didn’t really have time to check our coordinates.”

“Better than nothing. People beat the odds all the time, man.”

“True, true.”

Dominic helps me to my feet, gives me his shoulder to grab onto as I hobble out of the cabin and up to the cockpit; by the time I struggle up the ladder, I’m gasping and sweating, shaking and weak. My leg is more messed-up than I thought, and I think I’m still incredibly dehydrated. Not in good shape at all, that’s what I am. I get on the radio and give my report to the Coast Guard, with as good a last-known location as I can manage and a description of Christian.

I’m on a deep-sea fishing trawler, on the smaller end of medium size. I can see crew scrambling around the deck, repairing, tending to nets, coiling lines, and a dozen other busy-work activities. It’s a sunny day, calm waters. I can feel the rumble of the engine, which is strange to me after spending so much of my life on sailboats.

I’m content to sit in an old, cracked leather chair in the corner of the cabin, watching Dominic converse in low tones with the older guy at the wheel. The door leading from the cockpit to the deck is open, letting in the smell of the brine-laced breeze and the sounds of the ocean, the low murmur of the voices of the crew, the trilling call of an albatross.

I still have the box.

I should stay out here, make the Coast Guard crisscross the whole damn Atlantic looking for Chris.

But I sit here in the cabin, tapping on the lid of the box, and I hear his voice in my head. Give her the box, Jonny.

It’s damn near impossible to find someone lost at sea within the first twelve hours, but after three days? He’s either dead, or he got rescued by someone. Those are the only two possibilities. I mean, a distant, distant possibility is that he washed ashore somewhere on the African coast, or that he’s still floating out there somewhere and the SAR crew will find him.

But after three days without food or water? Not good. Not good.

They’ll look, and they won’t find him. I’ll bring the box to Ava in Ft. Lauderdale and we’ll have a memorial service, and I’ll go back out to sea. What else is there to do?

I hate it, though.

I should look for him.

But where do I even start? And how? I’m barely alive myself, The Hemingway is probably at the bottom of the Atlantic by now, or is being hauled for scrap by scavengers, and the tiny bit I did own is gone with it. I don’t think my wallet even made it with me. I don’t know what I’m going to do about myself, as a matter of fact. I wasn’t exactly flush with cash to begin with. I have some bank saved up in a Bahamian account, but it ain’t much, and I gotta go there in person to get it…only I need ID for that, which means I’d have to go back to Columbia to get a new one, or at least a Columbian embassy somewhere. Passport, wallet, my clothes, everything I owned was on that damn boat, man.

Jesus Cristo. What a mess.

“You look like you’re deep in thought,” Dominic says to me.

I sigh. “I’m just starting to realize that my friend’s boat sank, and that all my shit is gone.”

“Sorry I couldn’t tow the cat or something, Jonny. We’re barely limping along as it is. The storm fucked up the engine and we don’t have the parts to fix it.”

“Nah, not blaming you. But my passport, my wallet, my clothes, everything I own was on that, man. I didn’t have much, but what I did have was there. Now it’s gone.”

“Sucks, man. I’ve been there.”

“Yeah?”

He nods. “After getting out of the Navy, I realized I’d spent eight years on a boat and never actually saw anything but a few harbors. So I joined a deep-sea dragging crew. Similar circumstances. Out-of-season storm, boat capsized, most of the crew was lost. I survived, along with a couple others. Lost everything. Another reason I don’t own much. Shit is expensive to replace, so if you don’t have shit to replace, won’t be a problem.”

I nod. “Yeah. Always been my philosophy, too. But losing my passport is a pain in the ass, because I don’t go back to the country of my birth if I can help it.”

“I might be able to swing as far north as Ft. Lauderdale.”

“Get me close, and I can make it the rest of the way on my own. I can’t ask you to go that far out of your way.”

A crewmember appears in the cabin, a kid even younger than Dane, blond-haired and blue-eyed and eager looking. He hands Dominic two mugs of coffee, and Dominic extends one to me.

“I gotta get Dane to Charleston anyway. He’s eighteen in a month, and he doesn’t know this yet, but I’ve got an old Navy buddy who’s gonna take him on as an apprentice. My buddy is a shipwright, builds fancy yachts and shit.”

“That’s what Dane wants to do?”

Dominic nods. “He’s talked about college, but I think he’s mostly ruled it out. He’s a hands-on guy, not a school guy. Bully, my mechanic, says Dane has a hell of a knack for anything mechanical, and I think with the right opportunity, he could really get somewhere in the world. He ain’t gonna get that stuck with me, dragging the Atlantic. This is what I wanna do, not him. So I called up my buddy last time I was ashore and set things up. I need to have him in Charleston sometime soon.”

A stocky, swarthy man in greasy coveralls appears in the doorway. He’s as wide as he is tall in a muscular way, and his hands are black with grease, as is his face, except two clean patches where a pair of goggles had been. “Cap. I think I got ’er patched. Might be able to get a few more knots out of ’er now.”

“Ah, Bully. I was just talking about you.” Dominic gently nudges the throttle forward, and the engine grumbles and rattles but we surge forward noticeably faster. “Sounds rough but serviceable. Good work.”

“My ears was burnin’, but I thought it was just sparks.” Bully eyes me. “This the feller we fished off that cat?”

“I was just saying that you think Dane has a natural gift for mechanical work. And yeah, this is Jonny.”

“Name’s Bully. Glad you made it.” Bully nods. “Dane? Boy can weld and solder, and any little thing I put in front of him, he can figure out. He fixed a hydraulic jack on his own without so much as a howdyadoo from me.”

“Think we can make it to Ft. Lauderdale on your patch?” Dominic asks.

Bully stares out the windscreen, head cocked to listen to the engine. “Got a bit of a hitch in her step still. I wouldn’t care to give you any guarantees, but I think we could make it, prob’ly. Of course, if she goes out again and I don’t have the spare parts I need, we could be in a world of hurt.”

“Will she hold, Bully?”

“She’ll hold.”

“Get me your list. We need a new antenna anyway, so I’ll pick up the parts you need while we’re in port to drop Jonny off.”

“If I can shut her down completely for a few hours, I can check her over more thoroughly. Poor old girl’s been through hell last few days.”

“Sounds good. Thanks for the update, Bully.” When he’s gone, Dominic glances my way. “Ever work a trawler before, Jonny?”

I tilt my head side to side. “Not specifically. But there ain’t much I can’t do. Been at sea my whole life.” I tap the bandage around my leg. “Might be a bit limited for a minute, but I’ll pull my weight.”

Dominic nods, eyeing me thoughtfully. “Something tells me you will.”

* * *

When I get to Ft. Lauderdale, it becomes quickly apparent that the hurricane blew past us and hit the Atlantic seaboard, starting here, probably, and smashing her way north. The city is a mess. Flooded, houses missing roofs and walls, or knocked down entirely, high-rises battered, signs missing, cars abandoned everywhere.

It’s chaos, still. No cabs, no public transit. Work crews are everywhere, working furiously to clear the mess.

Dominic is out in the bay, making himself useful doing transport work for the dock authority; he’s agreed to wait for me to finish my business with Ava, and then I’ll join his crew for the trip north to Charleston. It’s a good crew, and I don’t mind the work. Not as peaceful or challenging as sailing, but it’s a change of pace and I like it.

In the meantime, with the city in tatters, finding Ava could prove difficult.

I have the address, and I’d planned on simply catching a cab from the docks, but now it seems I’ll have to go about this the hard way. A huge portion of the roads are completely flooded, so nobody will be driving anyone anywhere anytime soon. I have no cell phone, which means no easy access to GPS or anything helpful; not sure cell service is working at the moment anyway. I walk a few blocks inland from the docks, which is tough with my leg still a bit sore; I’m doing my best to skirt flooded spots, but a lot of my journey is made trudging through icy calf- or knee-deep water. I’m standing at an intersection, trying to figure out the best course of action when I hear a motor of some kind; I turn to locate the noise and see a flat-bottomed, fan-powered, airboat approaching from the south, one man in the pilot’s chair at the wheel, a few others clustered around him. The airboat’s fan slows and the craft glides to a stop in the murky water beside me.

“Where ya headed?” the pilot asks. He’s an older man, white-haired with a neat white goatee, decked out in hip-waders.

I shrug. “Not sure exactly. All I got is an address, but I don’t know the city.” I hand him the slip of paper with Ava’s address scrawled on it in Christian’s handwriting.

The man takes it, stares at it, and then pivots this way and that in his seat, as if orienting himself. “Well shit, you ain’t but half a mile off, though you’re headed in the dead wrong direction.” He hesitates a moment. “That area was the hardest hit. Can’t say I know that exact building, but most of ’em around there are…not in good shape. Climb aboard, stranger. I’ll run you there.”

I trudge through the water, my legs bumping into debris and detritus, chunks of wood, bits of insulation, a child’s plastic toy phone, a strip of siding. I climb as gently and carefully as I can aboard the prow of the airboat, clutching the box I’m meant to deliver under one arm.

“Checkin’ in on family?” the pilot asks me, shouting over the fan.

“Not exactly, but sort of.”

“Well that’s about clear as mud,” he answers with a laugh.

“It’s complicated.”

He makes a face and nods. “Meanin’ quit askin’ s’many damn questions?”

My turn to laugh. “Pretty much.”

Only half a mile or so, he said, but we take a long, winding, slow, circuitous route. He drifts slowly down the flooded roadways, peering into open doorways and windows, slowing to a stop here and there, hopping out and peeking in for a closer look.

“What are you looking for?” I ask him, finally.

“Anyone who might need help. Times like this, you gotta do your part. Folks need help, and I’m in a position to help.”

“I see.”

We take on another two people, a young black woman and a wildly overweight older white guy, both picked up from the first-floor window of an apartment building. Finally, the pilot takes a right turn and the sea is shining and twinkling in the bright sun, and the beach stretches away in both directions out of sight. The beach is ruined, flooded, littered with trash and washed-up wreckage, and seaweed and driftwood and who knows what else from the deep sea, along with other garbage and rubble from the city. The rivers are surging, the docks are gone, boats are lodged into the sides of buildings, and on end and upside down and bobbing free, drifting by mooring ropes. It’s a dangerous route we take, now, dodging between wrecked boats, crossing surging river currents trying mightily to dump excess water into the sea. The condo buildings here are ruined, completely. Wrecked totally, most of them. It’s hard to believe there could even be survivors in them at all, but each building is a humming hive of activity, volunteers and firefighters and police and construction and rescue workers, placing sandbags and hauling at the rubble with bare hands and any available tools.

The pilot halts at an intersection, catching at a pole that had once held stoplights over the road. “This here’s as near as I can figure. One’a them buildings,” he says, pointing at the condo buildings facing the beach. “Not sure which, but if you ask around, I’m sure you’ll find the right one.” A heavy pause. “May have to help dig to figure out if your friend or relative or whoever is…you know, all right.”

I nod, and hop into the waist-deep water, feeling the current pulling hard against me, trying to haul me out to the sea. I cling to the pole with one arm and the box with the other, and the pilot lets the current tug him away before hitting the throttle.

I aim for the nearest condo, wading across the road and climbing up the sand dunes. A policeman, wearing his uniform pants, gear belt, and a white tank top, is directing a group of civilian volunteers as they form a human conveyor belt to haul rubble away from the building.

“Excuse me, officer,” I say. “I’m looking for—” and I read him the address.

The officer points down the beach. “Two down, that way.”

“Thanks.”

It’s a long, laborious journey to the correct building, and when I get there, my heart sinks. I’ve been doing my best to keep my emotions at bay, but seeing the ruined condo building and knowing Ava was probably in there when the hurricane hit…it’s hard to have hope. The entire front half of the building, facing the ocean, has collapsed. It looks as if the hurricane winds picked up something enormous and slammed against the condo, and the resulting impact caused several floors to collapse, compacting downward, smashing out windows and columns. The back half is more or less intact, but most of the windows are shattered and the lower stories are flooded and littered with debris and are wind-damaged.

There’s a massive rubble pile already, just inside a four-foot high wall of sandbags keeping out the floodwaters. At the edge of the pile is a kind of staging area, a makeshift pavilion set up with a pair of folding tables underneath. A local deli has set up shop, providing free sandwiches, coffee, and water to volunteers and rescue workers, and there’s another pair of tables nearby, both piled high with cell phones, wallets, purses, and backpacks all watched over by a fit-looking middle-aged man in a wheelchair, missing his legs from midthigh.

“Here to help out?” he asks me, seeing me eye the tables.

I nod, and point at the building. “I’ve got a friend who lives in that building, so yeah, I guess so.”

“Leave your shit here, and I’ll watch it.” He hands me a clipboard with a sheet of paper and a pen. “Write down what you’re leaving, and your name. Anybody wants to retrieve something, they check it out through me.”

I set my box down on the table, and write my name a brief description of the box—Jonny Núñez, safety box, initials engraved on it: CSP.

I join a crew of men picking at the rubble. Someone hands me a pair of grease-stained, well-worn work gloves, and I take them and offer my thanks, and I haul at the rubble. Cinderblocks, siding, rebar, I-beams, bits of plastic and twisted metal and chunks of wood and marble and laminate and tile and drop-tile ceiling pieces and machinery and electronics. Occasionally there’s a shout, and we all rush to the spot and haul like mad, and there will be a body underneath. Alive, dead, or in between.

I remember growing up on the island of Providencia, a little tiny island off the coast of Nicaragua, owned by Columbia. Storms hit us pretty frequently, and homes would be knocked down and we’d all pitch in like this, hauling at the wreckage and pulling people out and rebuilding together. This isn’t new. I’ve been ground zero for a lot of hurricanes, more than I care to count, and I know how it goes.

So I dig with a heavy heart.

Chris is gone. I want him to be alive. I want to believe. But the pragmatic part of me, the part that knows the odds…? It’s hard.

And Ava, now, too? That’s even harder to believe. A big, complicated building like this? So much weight, so much wreckage to move. I know the odds here, too.

I dig.

I move to a line of people hauling the rubble away from the building.

I help move bodies and carry wounded survivors on stretchers to where teams of medics work in a makeshift facility.

The sun goes down and diesel-powered generators rumble, providing light on the scene.

I rest, eat a sandwich, drink some coffee, and go back to helping.

Dawn comes, and then afternoon, and I rest, and go back to helping, and we’ve made progress and I’ve examined every body and every survivor, and none of them are Ava. I have her picture in the breast pocket of my shirt, a snapshot given to me by Chris.

Two days. Three. With each hour, the odds of even finding her corpse plummet.

Midmorning on the third day, a tin fishing boat propelled by a trolling motor drops off a woman, who climbs over the sandbags from the boat. She looks familiar, even though I know I’ve never met her before. She stands just inside the wall of sandbags, breathing heavily as if holding back tears. Shaking her head. I’m only a few feet away, working on a sandwich and a cup of coffee. I’m filthy, covered in dirt from head to toe.

She’s just staring at the wreckage of the building. Then she sees me, and seems to need to say something to someone, anyone. “I don’t—I don’t understand how this happened.”

“Hurricane.”

She sniffles. “I know, but…how can a building just be…gone?”

“You never been through one?” I ask. She shakes her head. “It ain’t just wind and rain. It’s like…God got angry. Scary shit.”

“You were here?”

I shake my head. “Not here, for this one. Others, lotsa times.” I nod at the building. “Looking for someone?”

She shudders, crying, and then her head tips up and down shakily. “My—my sister. Ava. She lives—that was—is her building. My son and I were supposed to visit her, but then I heard about the storm and I left Alex with my parents, and Ava—god, Ava.”

“Ava?” My suspicion meter rises. “Ava who?”

She doesn’t answer right away. “Um. Martin. Ava Martin.” She frowns, rubs her face. “St. Pierre, I mean. Martin is her maiden name. My name. God, I’m sorry. I’m not making any sense.”

“You’re looking for Ava St. Pierre?” I pull the snapshot from my pocket; it’s a candid shot, printed out from Chris’s cell phone, blurry, pixelated from being blown up. But it’s enough to recognize her. “This her?”

The woman takes the photo from me, stares at it. “Y-yes. Why…how…I mean, I don’t understand.”

I take it back and stuff it back into my pocket. “I’m a friend of Christian’s.”

Her expression sours. “The bastard couldn’t make it here himself so he sent you?”

“He was lost at sea. Same storm, I think. I came to find Ava and bring her some letters from him.”

“He’s…dead?”

I shrug. “I don’t know for sure.”

“I’m sorry about your friend, but he didn’t treat my sister very well. I’m angry with him. I never liked him for her.”

“It was a complicated situation, from what I know.” I try to be diplomatic.

She sighs. “I suppose that’s true.”

I finish the sandwich and the last of the coffee. “I should get back.” I gesture at the wreckage.

She just stares. “How…um—is she…will she be okay?” She chokes back another sob. “Is she alive in there, do you think?”

I shrug. “No way to know. I hope so. It is certainly possible, in my experience.”

“How long has she—has she been in there?”

“More than three days, now.”

“Oh my god. Ava. God please, Ava.”

“If she is in a place where she can breathe and she isn’t losing too much blood, and if she has water to drink, she might survive.” At my words, Ava’s sister can’t hold back the sob. “I’m sorry. I’ve been here for three days myself, working to find her. We all are. Not just her, but…” I gesture as a pair of men carry a man on a stretcher. “Many others.”

“I’ll help.”

I point out one of the police officers, who seems to have taken charge of organizing the rescue and dig-out process here. “Talk to him. I think he can help you find somewhere to pitch in.”

“I have to find Ava.” She’s beginning to panic. “I can’t just make sandwiches and hand out coffee.” Anger tinges her voice.

“That’s not what I meant,” I say, trying to placate her, calm her. “I just meant, helping everyone helps you find her. If she’s in there, we’ll find her.”

“She’s in there. There’s nowhere else she’d be. I just talked to her before I drove here. She knew I was coming. Ava—god, she has to be okay. She has to be okay. We’re going to find her. Right?”

Full-on panic, the sudden flow of babble stopping as abruptly as it started, tears streaming down her face. She’s having trouble breathing. Gasping. Waving her hands in front of her face, wheezing, sobbing.

I don’t know what to do. Panicking women are outside my range of expertise, but she’s staring at me like I can do something, and I have to try. So I grab her arms and pull her close. It’s like an instinct, you know? A woman is crying, you hold her. Maybe that’s just me. My mom would cry, when I was a kid, and I’d hug her through it. Or my older sister, after her piece of shit husband ran off on her, leaving her with four kids under five—she’d cry, in the middle of the night, and I’d go to her and hold her through it. I was just a kid, but it was the only thing I knew how to do. And as a man, sometimes afterward, a girl and I would be talking and she’d start in on something or other and I’d listen and suddenly she’d be crying, and the only thing I knew how to do was grab her and pull her close and hold her.

So this woman, a complete stranger, but someone to whom I’m connected via Christian, she’s sobbing hysterically, panicked, scared, worried, upset and confused, and she’s grabbing at me like I’m a lifeline and she’s drowning. So I hold her against my chest.

And I mutter to her in Spanish. Hey, hey. It is going to be okay. Do not cry, little girl, do not cry. The little girl, part, in Spanish it’s a term of endearment. Translated into English, it just sounds condescending, but I promise it doesn’t sound that way in Spanish.

After a few minutes, she backs out of my hold, wiping at her face. “I’m sorry. God, I’m—that’s embarrassing. I’m sorry.”

She has mascara running down her cheeks. I can’t help but wipe it away with my thumb, which only smears it worse. “No worries. Don’t apologize, please.”

“What were you saying?” she asks.

I shrug. “The same kind of automatic nonsense anyone says to comfort a crying person. Just…en Español.”

“Oh.” She’s eying me oddly. Intently. Scrutinizing.

Almost as if she felt the same thing I did, while I was holding her, comforting her.

Almost like I’d done it before. Held her. Comforted her. Whispered to her in Spanish. It was familiar, too familiar, that way the top of her head fit just under my chin, just so. It’s creeping me out, throwing me for a loop. All those English slang phrases, they all fit.

She looks like Ava, in the face. Medium height, on the slimmer side of average build. North of thirty, south of forty, by my estimate. Her hair is a messy mass of raven-black locks, a handful of strands pulled back around the top and front to keep it out of her eyes, the rest left loose. Blue eyes, crazy-intense blue eyes. Lots of mascara, too much. Lots of makeup overall. More than she needs. It’s all coming off, and I want to smear it away to see what she looks like without it.

She’s wearing too-short shorts, tight khaki shorts that hug her hips and cup a tight ass, which is barely held in and covered. A thin, tight purple tank top, tiny barely there straps. McCall’s is written in glittery, sparkly, cursive on the front, right across her breasts, which are propped up by what seems to be a hell of a push-up bra, which she really doesn’t need. The tank top is tied in a knot just under her breasts, baring her belly and navel, revealing faint and faded childbirth stretch marks; it’s the kind of outfit a waitress would wear at a Hooter’s style bar. A name tag affixed just above her left breast confirms my estimation of her employment, and announces her name as Delta. Or at least, that’s what the tag says.

She notices my quick once-over. “I left to drive here straight from work.” She notices her name tag, and unpins it. “It’s a…well, McCall’s is a shithole. Cross between Denny’s and Deja Vú. Only, we don’t have to actually take our clothes off—we just don’t wear much to begin with.” She stuffs the name tag in her pocket, and shifts uncomfortably. “I fucking hate it, but it pays the bills. It’s actually a step up from my last job, though. We worked in bikinis. At least at McCall’s I get to wear shorts and a shirt.”

I hold out my hand, amused despite the way she tends to blurt out more information than I’d expect to hear from a stranger. “I’m Jonny Núñez.”

She shakes, and our hands remain in contact longer than is necessary. “Delta Martin.”

“Nice to meet you.” I gesture. “Not under the circumstances, maybe, but it’s good to meet you.”

“You too.”

Someone calls my name, and I wave at her, and then trot over to where a group of rescue workers is clustered. Deep under the wreckage, in what used to be the ground floor, facing the sea. Can’t tell what the room used to be, since everything is smashed. They’re pulling at pieces of ceiling and wall, frantic. Aggressive. You only work that hard for a survivor.

I join the effort. I hear faint thumps, regular, consistent. Someone desperately but exhaustedly trying to alert rescuers as to their presence. Whoever is down there must hear us.

“Hold on! We’re coming!” someone shouts.

Delta is beside me. Pulling at a piece of drywall. “It’s hard to be sure, but this seems about where Ava and Chris’s condo is.”

She’s got long fingernails, fake nails painted bright cherry red. I take off the gloves and give them to her, and she puts them on, but not before I notice she’s broken several already. One was torn off, it looks like. She works furiously, as do we all; the thumps are fading in consistency and frequency.

“Ava?” Delta calls out. “We’re coming, baby. Hold on, okay? Hold on!”

A giant metal beam lies across a chunk of drywall. It takes six of us to heave the beam aside, and then we have to clear rubble off and away from around the sides. A bathtub, and whoever is here, is trapped in the tub. The drywall is still pinned down by something, the wall itself, I think, having caved in sideways.

A guy wearing a hardhat and the orange vest of a construction worker shows up with a battery-powered circular saw. He thumps on the drywall near one end of the tub. “Scoot up this way!” he shouts. “We’re cutting through!”

There’s a thump on the underside, right near where he’d thumped.

The saw buzzes and whines, and then zips and snarls angrily as he cuts through the drywall. He frees a section covering one end of the tub, and rips it away. Inside is a pair of feet, bare. A few inches of dirty water. Bare female legs curled up into a tight ball on the other end of the tub. The toes are painted baby blue; it’s an odd detail to notice.

“Ava?” Delta chokes. “Is that you?”

A low, ragged moan. I reach in, along with the guy who’d been running the saw, and we haul her toward us. Reach down, lift her free, and I cup dirty white-dust speckled damp black hair to protect her head from bumping into anything, and she’s limp. Alive, but barely. She’s clutching a pink reusable water bottle in one hand, hand curled tight around it, clutching it for dear life. It’s how she survived, probably, that bottle of water. Otherwise, she’d have died of thirst by now, most likely.

We have her out of the tub and the two of us are carrying her gingerly but quickly out from the wreckage and Delta is following, sobbing.

It’s Ava.

Her eyes open, just a sliver, and fix on Delta. She glances at me, and then moans.

“Chris?” A wordless moan of pain, exhaustion. “Chris?”

“He’s coming,” I murmur. “I’m Jonny. He’s coming, okay?”

It’s a lie.

But it’s what she needs to hear. And it just slipped out.

Delta is holding on to me as we settle Ava onto a makeshift stretcher and carry her to the medical tent.

Her hands don’t let go of me.

I don’t think I’ll be joining Dominic and Dane anytime soon.