“Did your mommy just eat something?” she asked him. He was wailing now, his teary eyes wide with primal fear. “Think hard,” she said kindly. “Maybe something that she doesn’t usually eat? Or drink? It will help the doctors fix her if you can tell me.”
The boy pointed at a hollowed-out pineapple resting in the corner of the tent. It was one of the frozen drinks being sold from pushcarts, and it looked to have only a few sips out of it. Her brain registered a vendor walking a short distance away, and she dove for the pineapple. “Hey!” she screamed at the vendor. He kept walking. “Hey!” He turned.
“This drink. What’s in it? Is there some kind of nut or something in here?”
He thought for a second, then nodded. “Almond liqueur.”
Violet put her hand to her forehead and looked back down at the child. “Is that a nut?” the boy sobbed. “Mommy can’t have nuts.”
But here was her handsome stranger, running back through the sand with a lifeguard. “Everything will be okay,” Violet told the boy, hoping it was true. “Nuts!” she called to the lifeguard. “This vendor says there’s almond liqueur in this drink, and I think she’s allergic to nuts. Do you have an EpiPen? Benadryl? Something?” Her coworker Katie had once had a reaction to salad dressing at a business lunch, and Violet remembered the company memo that had gone out afterward, about what allergic employees should always have on hand in case of emergency. She lunged for the woman’s beach bag to see if she’d brought provisions.
“Nine-one-one is on the way, just sit tight,” the lifeguard told the woman. He knelt and started rifling through his first aid kit.
“Is your daddy here?” Violet’s handsome stranger got down to the boy’s level and smiled encouragingly.
There was nothing of any use in this beach bag. Only sunscreen and sand toys.
The boy sniffled and nodded. “At the pool.”
“And what’s your daddy’s name?”
“Dave.”
“And your last name?”
“Smithers.”
“Dave Smithers?” The boy nodded. “Good boy. Which pool—which hotel?”
The boy pointed, and then this remarkably in-control man was off running again. The first wails of approaching sirens sounded in the distance.
“Shit,” the lifeguard muttered. “Shit, shit, shit. I must have used the last one on that wasp sting yesterday. I’m in for it now.”
The woman’s eyes had closed, her brow furrowed as if she were concentrating very hard. She was turning blue. Something in Violet snapped just then, and she felt the weak fa?ade she’d been putting up for the little boy crumbling. “Please,” she pleaded to the lifeguard. “This is this boy’s mother. You have to do something.” The boy had returned to his mother’s side and was clutching her thigh with his tiny splayed hands.
“Help is coming,” the lifeguard said, sounding unconvinced even as the sirens did grow louder. Jesus, Violet thought, taking him in for the first time, his sideways baseball cap and his lean, hairless chest. He’s practically a kid himself.
“Ma’am, can you hear me?” he said loudly, lowering his face to the woman’s. She didn’t respond, and he put his ear to her chest. “It’s labored, but she’s breathing,” he told Violet. He sat up and stared down at the woman, frozen. Whatever training he had, it had clearly gone right out of his mind.
Then, finally, three paramedics were running toward them, yelling for people to get back and give them room. Violet wrapped her arms around the crying child and stepped backward, gently guiding him out of the way. She scanned the beach for her handsome stranger, for some sign of the boy’s father, but all she saw was a growing circle of concerned strangers. Looky-loos, Gram would have called them.
It all happened so fast. The lifeguard snapped back to life and filled in the paramedics, they administered the EpiPen, loaded the woman onto the stretcher, strapped oxygen to her face, bagged a sample from her drink. All the while the boy whimpered and clung to Violet’s legs.
“We have to go. Now,” the lead paramedic barked at the lifeguard. “You said someone was getting the husband?”
“The boy pointed out the hotel, but I don’t see them yet.”
“Tell him to come to Aventura Hospital as soon as he gets here.” He looked at Violet. “Can you stay with the boy?”
Violet blanched. “I don’t know him … I only—”
“Can you stay with him?”
The boy hurled himself at the stretcher, nearing hysterics again. “Mommy! I want to go with Mommy!”
Violet’s heart broke for him. “Can he ride along?” she begged the paramedic. “If I ride with him?”
“We’re not really supposed to—”
The boy let out a heart-stopping wail.
“Please. I’ll keep him out of your way. I’m really not comfortable separating them.”
The paramedic conceded with a brusque nod and turned back to the lifeguard. “Dave Smithers. If that guy doesn’t show back up with him, go to the hotel yourself. Have him paged. Ring his room. Whatever it takes.”
*
The woman made it, just, thank God. The frantic husband did show up eventually. He’d left the pool area after agreeing to be the fifth in a pickup game in the basketball courts around the side of the resort, so he hadn’t been easy to find. He didn’t know the name of the man who’d come yelling for him, and though he wished he could thank him again, he didn’t know what had become of him.
And as she took one last reluctant look over her shoulder the next morning, slinging one leg into the taxi that would take her to the airport, neither did Violet.
3
AUGUST 2016
Caitlin eyed the stormy sky nervously as she made her way to her cubicle. She was the first in the office, as usual, and left the overhead fluorescent lights off. She relished the isolated warmth of her monitor’s glow in this first dim hour of the morning, a manifestation of her satisfaction that she was again brightly beating her coworkers to the start of a productive day. Her husband’s family was a major donor to this nonprofit, and she was well aware of the murmurs that she didn’t need her job or its paycheck. But she liked the work, she believed in the cause, and she wanted to have money of her own, so she’d made a point of putting her work ethic on display until the snark around the watercooler died down. She was wishing she’d been a little less ambitious this particular morning, however. It was so much darker than normal, nightlike except for an unsettling orange glow seeping around the tips of the low fingerlike cloud cover. Lightning streaked across the sky with menacing purpose, and she strained her ears for the beginning wails of the tornado siren, which always struck her as alarmingly faint.
She looked down at the keys in her hand, fighting an irrational urge to turn around and get right back in the car, pick up the twins where she’d just left them at day care, and envelop them in her arms, as if they’d somehow be safer with her, even though her office was just down the road and in the same path of the storm.