Page 149 of The Love Haters

I tried to retrieve it, but the bed was on a frame attached to the floor, and the slats were too narrow to get my arm through.

Oh, well. That would be something to solve later.

Back at the door, I was explaining how courage worked to George Bailey—insisting that facing his demons now would ultimately help him reach his personal best—when I felt an eerie pulse of electricity waver through the air.

Then I heard a hissing sound behind me, and then a crack louder than anything I’d ever heard in my life, just as the room lit up in a flash and then went dark again. The sound was beyond full volume: so loud, it seemed to rip the air like fabric. So loud, my unbudgeable friend George Bailey disappeared in a flash and scrambled back into Hutch’s closet, leash and all. The light was so bright, it left a green afterimage in my eyes. One of the windows shattered. Then the searing sound retreated, followed by pops and cracks and the whole sky lighting up, and then rolling thunder.

A lightning strike.

Not on the boat itself, but not far away.

Like,feetaway.

Had it hit a sailboat mast? A cell tower? An antenna?

Whatever it was, in the wake of it, I watched in horror through the hole where the shattered window had just been as the wooden dockwe were moored toresponded to the lightning strike by collapsing in slow motion into the water.

It was almost as if the whole dock just…fainted.

And then it was gone.

And we weren’t moored to anything anymore.

“Oh, shit,” I said out loud—feeling an urgency like now wereallyhad to get out of here.

But, of course, now there was nowhere to go.

Next, I felt an urge to call Hutch again. But there was no way to do that, either.

We were, apparently, completely screwed.

I stared through the window, trying to make it make sense.

The dock that I’d just been trying to cajole George Bailey out onto… was gone.

“George Bailey,” I said out loud, in case this wasn’t already abundantly clear. “We have a problem.”

LOOK, I’M NOTa boat person. I didn’t grow up sailing. I’m fromDallas, Texas! We’re as landlocked as it gets. I was the last person on earth you’d pick tocaptain an unmoored houseboat during a hurricane. I didn’t know how to work a maritime radio, and I didn’t know anything about boat safety, and up until three weeks ago, I couldn’t even swim.

There was probably some way to radio for help in that situation.

But I couldn’t work a boat radio even on a normal day in full sunshine.

I commanded myself tothink. But then I just thought about howthinking about thinkingdidn’t help.

I’m not really a fast processor. For any big decision, I prefer forty-eight hours or so to hem and haw, and make lists of pros and cons, and call Beanie and discuss. Like I’d done, in fact, just hours beforehand, in a different lifetime.

I’d driven along on dry land in a Mini Cooper with heated seats—taking all my safety and comfort for granted as I endlessly yammered to Beanie about how simultaneously passionate and dismissive that goodbye kiss with Hutch had been. How manly yet vulnerable, how angry yet tender, how lost yet found. The astonishing way it felt exactly like a beginning and an ending at the same time.

I mean, that was my whole evacuation journey from earlier today: me summoning pairs of opposite words to try to capture the vibes of that life-ruining kiss while fleeing a hurricane on the Overseas Highway—as Beanie, folding laundry a thousand miles away, validated all my interpretations with ever-more-emphaticMmmm-hmmms.

Maybe I should have been listening to the radio.

A little weather information might have come in handy.

And now here I was. Alone with George Bailey, on a handmade pontoon houseboat tethered to absolutely nothing, adrift in the ocean, during a hurricane.

Fuuuuuuuuck.

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