Lillis is a fiction writer with a love for all things gothic and historical. After graduating from Wake Forest University with an honors degree in English Literature in 2013, Lillis spent time working as a middle school teacher and public relations professional before deciding to pursue writing full time. When she isn’t writing, she can be found baking chocolate-forward treats and picking off her nail polish in fits of anxiety. Originally from Houston, Texas, she now lives in London with her husband. She is working on her first novel.
There was a chill in the air the day death came to Galveston. The heat of the week before broke overnight, and dawn came rosy and iridescent. Gulls hung in the steady wind as if suspended from the distant arc of sky, the tips of their crooked wings cutting shadows in the light. The dawn was pink, and the waves were swollen blue and foam-laced as they slapped against the decks of the piers, piers whose boards usually stood high above the spray and spindrift. Passersby lingered, laughing at the sight, cheering as the waves broke higher and higher, the planks of the walking deck washed black. The children took advantage of the carnival atmosphere, unbuttoning our shoes and letting the cold sand sift between our toes, dancing along the waterline and daring the sea to tag us, screeching when we were caught. The women posed as lookouts, hands shaded eyes and pressed to hips, and the men tucked newspapers printed with vague mentions of a storm beneath their arms, and no one was afraid. It was a Saturday in the richest city in the United States, a September day when the world was turning toward a new century, and all across the island the breeze smelled of oleander and cotton.
I wonder now if destruction always arrives with such splendor.
The seasons were changing then. August had slipped away, dissolved in its own humidity and in the heat radiating up from the beaches. The days cooled, and each evening the sun slipped below the waves a little sooner than before. We didn’t know it, but somewhere beyond the horizon, the thing that would destroy us awoke, pulsed, piled, breathed in wet tropical air and exhaled flashes of lightning veined through bruised thunderheads. It swirled, gathering strength, moving closer, inexorable, unstoppable. On that morning, people on the beach whooped and cheered as the turbid water battered against the shore and the wind clicked the palm fronds. In the streets, the men clutched straw boaters against their heads and women, laughing, pulled up their ruffled frock just enough to keep them out of the tide that had already begun crawling inland.
Would knowing have changed anything? The world was headstrong then, fortified by industry and advancement. We’d banished the night with electricity, built giant chugging machines to ease our labor, kept illness at bay with syringes and tablets. Our earth was shrinking, constricted beneath a crisscross of telegraph wires and roadways, bridges and waterways, tracks and trestles, until all its wonders, all its secrets, were flattened into inked sheaves, folded and stacked, ready to be explored every morning. We’d even learned to outsmart the weather, men with their meters — thermometers, barometers, anemometers — tracking the currents of air winding around the globe, the gathering and dissipating of clouds. Those men knew, swore, the cyclones that battered the Caribbean wouldn’t reach us, couldn’t reach us. Every generation is on the edge of either apocalypse or invincibility, and nothing could convince us we’d mistaken ourselves as the latter.
The postcard-scene didn’t last long; the thin line of the horizon bulged and began to move closer, covering the blue sky with a layer of cloud, shrouding the sun and turning the waves to churning slate. Only when the a few pieces of siding fluttered off the bathhouses did people decide it might be best to head indoors and wait it out. The group moved back to the main road and went their separate ways, some taking to the streets on foot, some climbing into waiting carriages, others paying their nickel and mounting the trolley steps. We went home, me and my mother and little Ruth, who walked with one hand in mine and the other clutching her blanket embroidered with yellow roses and delicate green leaves. Sand ground between my toes and in the fleshy spaces where my fingers interlaced with Ruth’s, and when the first broad drops fell, she reached her chubby hands up to be carried. Mother, warily eying the sky and shifting the shopping in her arms, didn’t acknowledge Ruth, so I scooped her up and continued on walking.
Though the weather worsened, it did nothing to dampen the spirits of children playing in the rain. Here and there I saw a few I knew — Alice Adler from Sunday school using a pail to scoop bucketfuls of murky water and slosh it over the heads of her siblings, all brothers; Billy Greer, who sat directly opposite me in Mrs. Tinley’s class at the Bath Avenue School, standing with precarious balance in a wash tub, attempting to propel it with a stick through the deeper water with little success and quite a bit of tipping over; Robert Morton, who had commandeered his father’s fishing net and was jabbing it in the water with little precision and less patience, every now and then jerking it out with a small minnow or two thrashing in the slack mesh. Something about the way the water gurgled through the streets — the way it rilled and moved, its bleary interior sheltering glinting fish — set the hairs on my arms on end and sent a shiver down my spine, though I could explain why until later. The most horrifying nightmares are often realities, and children have no time for those.
By the time we reached home, rain had settled into a steady pace and leaden clouds hung low in the sky, filtering the sunlight to a dull pewter green. The breeze advanced, whipping up the last blooms of the encore azaleas in tight, eddying circles that eventually met the choppy surface of the water and bobbed away. Fat drops quivered from the pointed leaves of the bougainvillea twining around our porch rail and pocked the puddles gathering in the street, purling like the tide as they inched toward the houses. With the water came the toads. Look any damp place with plenty of leaf cover and you’d find them there, skulking in the dank, foliate shadow. If you were quick, you could catch one, its head peeping out beneath your thumb, black glass eyes bulging and clammy throat pulsing against your fingers. The toads were everywhere that day, as if the water flushed them out of their hiding places, driving them like cattle to higher ground. Wherever you looked, there they were, the rasping whirr of their croaks vibrating their bodies and covering up the fact that all the cicadas had fallen silent in the trees. You didn’t have to be quick with these — if you missed one, another was just there, or there. The boys used them as ammunition, stuffing them in pockets and chasing girls with them, threatening to drop them down the backs of dresses them or tangle them in braids. I grabbed one, holding it tight for Ruth to stroke her finger along its knurled back. It must have been too tight, though, because the more the toad thrashed and kicked, the more I gripped, until it fell motionless, the white belly flat, legs dangling. I set the soft body beneath a tall patch of prairie verbena and told Ruth it had gone to sleep.
Death wasn’t new to us, to anyone; death is as old as life. By age ten, I’d lost all four of my grandparents and a middle sister, Louisa, who caught scarlet fever even after Mother burned all the sheets and clothing I’d touched. Every Sunday, we visited seven bleached headstones, the edges of the engraved names already beginning to plane under the sand and salt air. The sixth was an uncle who I never met, and the last was my father, who passed the year before. He worked selling cotton, and one day, coming back from the shipyard where his men loaded the bails, he was crossing the street when a carriage horse bolted. People who were there said the driver yelled out, but Daddy couldn’t get out of the way in time. The physician who examined his body said Daddy was dead before the back wheels thudded over his chest.
Noon, and mothers called all of the soaked and happy children inside. The sky had grown even darker, turning what should have been a blaze of midday into dim twilight. Wind-blown rain slashed at the windows and water plashed at our doors. Those who were afraid had fled inland, and the rest of us hunkered down to wait it out. Mother did not seem worried then, and if she wasn’t worried, I felt no reason to be. Our house was sturdy, built of wood and brick and topped with slate shingles, like all the houses on the island were then. It had three floors, two bathrooms and a telephone. From my room on the second floor, I looked down into the stream now coursing through the streets and watched it rise, thinking it could never reach us up here. In the river below, early detritus floated by: wind-broken branches, a sheet of tin roof, a rumpled umbrella, a single shoe.
There was no thunder then, no lightning, only the rain and the whistling wind, broken and diffused across the island by the houses along the shore. It was still all a game to me and Ruth, an adventure that would end when we were called to supper, put to bed. Even when people from sandy fringes of the island began filtering down the streets — sloshing past our house on the way to relatives, their clothes wet-dark up to their waists — we didn’t suspect there was any real danger.
Some of those people waded up the street and knocked on our door. There was nothing especially reassuring about our house – it was just as sturdy as others, built of wood and slate and glass like all the rest in our neighborhood, but it was north of the ocean, south of the bay, west of the strand and its chaos, east enough to see the wharf from our widow’s walk. Nearer the beach, water had breached houses, the wind tugging boards lose and rattling windows, sending shingles and shutters whirling off in the gale. They couldn’t stay. Who did they know inland? The Harrises, they thought, and tried to telephone before coming. When the lines were dead, it was not a surprise; they were always the first to go, even in the mildest thunderstorms.
Mother let in Mr. and Mrs. Dressler with their twin boys with sun-white hair and a fat baby whose round face peered out from a blanket, solemn and silent. She also let in the Cohens and their two daughters, their hair disheveled, their faces unreadable. I thought then they were grown up, but looking back, they were no older than sixteen. They were soaked and shaken. The wind was tearing houses apart, they said, and the water had already risen feet by the shore. Some neighbors hadn’t left, said their houses would be able to stand it. After all, they always had before. Mr. Dressler said he supposed they were right, but that he wasn’t given to risk and thought the middle of the island might be a better place to hunker down. The Cohens too, had thought it better to leave, driven out of their house not by the storm but by Mrs. Cohen, who feared deep water more than anything, a strange aversion for someone woken by seagulls each morning. Mother gave them whatever fresh clothes she could find.
The last person Mother let in was Mr. Lowell, who came in rain-drenched and panting. Mr. Lowell had been Daddy’s business associate, worked for him ever since I could remember. He trudged through the water, chest-high in some places, to tell us Ritter’s Café had collapsed, its roof crushing at least three people. The Mechanic street café was a meeting spot for all the wealthy and influential men in the area, a white-tablecloth and crystal haven where careers were made and deals struck with the shake of a hand, fortunes squandered between sips of rye. A waiter, sent to find a medic, had been swept under the water still flowing into the streets, and whether because the current was too strong or because he couldn’t swim, he didn’t regain the surface. But the real omen, Mr. Lowell said, a dark undertow in his voice, was in the wharf. We all clambered up the narrow staircase to the top floor and looked westward toward the distant docks. Where we could usually see the smokestacks and sails of the anchored boats, we could now see them in their entirety, pitching and dipping, looming up in the swollen water as if we were sinking down into the waves. It was only then, the wind groaning beyond the blurred and darkening windows, that I saw mother’s face pale and her eyes flare.
Despite Mr. Lowell’s warning, despite what we saw, Mr. Dressler and Mr. Cohen saw no cause for alarm. We were safe, they reminded us, and as far inland as we were, we could expect no more than some blustering winds and a bit of water that might leak inside. Certainly nothing for a Texan of sturdy stuff to fuss about. If we were in danger, they assured us, we would know. They chided Mr. Lowell for exciting women and children, shooed us back downstairs to the parlor. Though it was early afternoon, the windows were dark and smudged with rain. The gas had stopped working, so we lit the few candles and oil lamps we could find. The mothers tried to keep everyone happy and light, clapping for the baby and reading fables from the illustrated Aesop storybook Daddy gave me for my eighth birthday. Storm or not, company was company, and Mother would not be found remiss in her hostess duties, even in circumstances like this. She brought out pecan cookies and iced tea from the kitchen, and even let the children eat her chocolates she had sent from France. Ruth, as usual, could not be kept still, and tottered across the room to the Dressler baby, patting it on the head and covering it with her little blanket, delighted by a person smaller than she. The men were confident, said even if the storm worsened, nothing could bring the city down. They lounged and smoked, discussed business and the negro in New Orleans who had shot two police officers dead with a Winchester rifle. Serves him right for getting his end, Mr. Dressler said, and serves the rest of them right who tried to interfere with the execution of justice. Mr. Cohen nodded and puffed his pipe. Mr. Lowell cast his eyes aside, pursed his lips, said nothing.
With so many people in the house and too much rain outside to open the windows, the air became close, tinged the warm tang of an exhale. The older Cohen girl paced the room, eyes flicking over books and photographs, tugging at the sleeves of the gingham cotton dress mother had lent her, until finally pulling Mother’s book of Chopin preludes from the piano bench. Ah, music, the men said, just what we need. Rebekah paged through, stopped, settled, and began to play. The first mournful chords of E minor floated up, seeming to hang and reverberate in the humid air. She played too fast and hesitated between measures, careening in crescendo toward the last notes before slowing, fumbling through the final chords. There was polite applause, praise offered by mothers and approving nods from fathers. Mr. Cohen requested something less dispiriting, and after a moment, A major rang out, expressive, gentle.
If you looked in then, through the rain now blowing in slantwise gusts against the window, you would have seen a tableau of domesticity and polite company — two men next to each other, one reclined, arms spread across the back of the settee, the other leaned forward, elbows resting on knees; a girl seated at the piano, her head bent low as she concentrates on fingers splayed across ivory keys; another man in the corner leaning against the wall, his somber face obscured by shadow; a young woman on the floor, ankles crossed beneath the folds of a flower printed skirt, smiling at the pink-cheeked baby who grasps at her forefinger, one arm around a small boy leaning into her waist, his double on her other side; in a chintz armchair near the window a solemn woman, dark haired, eyes closed, hands clasped in her wide lap — she could be sleeping or praying; behind her a girl, bent over, arms folded on the chair back, chin resting on forearms as she watches her sister play; the woman of the house in a rocking chair nearest the piano, hazel gaze unfocused; a toddler straining from her sister’s lap toward an unattended chocolate wrapper; empty cups dot side tables, melting ice pooling in their bottoms, rims dripping with condensation, glass cool to the touch; the room is hazy with smoke and music, lit with the cozy glow only made by candlelight.
But pause a moment, take a breath, look again. Only upon second inspection would you see the quiet stirs and twitches of the subjects, the slight pull of collars, the subtle rearrangement of frocks, small handkerchief dabs at forehead and lip as they adjusted themselves in the pressing humidity; the swift flick of eyes to fogging window, in their gaze the flat reflection of rising water, a brief assessment worked in knitted brows as the live oaks thrashed, tipped, sacrificed leaves and limbs to the gale. Look closer still at the pallor of Mother’s face, the grip of her fingers on the rocker’s arm; Mrs. Dressler’s smile tugging a little too tightly in the corners; the twitch in Mr. Cohen’s jaw as his teeth dug into his pipe; the tension in Mr. Lowell’s frame as he stands still as a shadow. There was nothing to be afraid of, they told each other, told themselves.
They almost believed it.