Before the Storm by Diane Chamberlain

arms
    above his head as he let it out. Then he sniffed my shoulder.
    “You wear chlorine the way other women wear perfume,
    Mags,” he teased.
    He was not the first guy to tell me that. I liked that he said
    “women” and not “girls.”
    The pool had been my home away from home since it was
    built when I was eleven. Before that, I could only swim during
    the summer in the sound or the ocean.
    Daddy taught Andy and me how to swim. “Kids who live
    on the water better be good swimmers,” he’d said. He taught
    me first of course, before Andy even lived with us. One of my
    earliest memories was of a calm day in the ocean. It was
    nothing major. Nothing special. We just paddled around. He
    held me on his knees, tossed me in the air, swung me around
    until I practically choked on my laughter. Total bliss.
    When I was a little older, Andy joined us in the water and
    he took to it the same as I did. Daddy’d told me that Andy
    probably wouldn’t be able to swim as well as I could, but Andy
    surprised him.
    I couldn’t remember ever playing in the water with my

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    mother. In my early memories, Mom was like a shadow. When
    I pictured anything from when I was a little girl, she was on
    the edge of the memory, so wispy I couldn’t be sure she was
    there or not. I didn’t think she ever held me. It was always
    Daddy’s arms around me that I remembered.
    “How’s Ben’s head?” Uncle Marcus asked.
    “Better,” I said, “though he’s still taking pain meds.”
    “You know who he reminds me of?”
    “Who?”
    “Your father.” He said this quietly, like he didn’t want Mom
    to hear.
    “Really?” I tried to picture Ben and Daddy standing next to
    each other.
    “Not sure why, exactly.” Uncle Marcus put his elbows on his
    knees as he stared at Ben.“His build. His size, maybe. Jamie was
    about the same height. Brown eyes. Same dark, wavy hair. Face
    is different, of course. But it’s that…brawniness or something.
    All Ben needs is an empathy tattoo on his arm and…” He
    shrugged.
    I liked when he talked about my father. I liked when anyone,
    except Reverend Bill, talked about Daddy.
    I was probably five or six when I asked Daddy what the word
    “empathy” meant. We were sitting on the deck of The Sea
    Tender, our legs dangling over the edge, looking for dolphins.
    I ran my fingers over the letters in the tattoo.
    “It means feeling what other people are feeling,” he said.
    “You know how you kissed the boo-boo on my finger yesterday when I hit it with a hammer?”
    “Uh-huh.” He’d been repairing the stairs down to the beach
    and said, “Goddamn it!” I’d never heard him say that before.

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    “You felt sad for me that I hurt my finger, right?”
    I nodded.
    “That’s empathy. And I had it tattooed on my arm to remind
    me to think about other people’s feelings.” He looked at the
    ocean for a long minute or two and I figured that was the end
    of the conversation. But then he added,“If you’re a person with
    a lot of empathy, it can hurt more to watch a person you care
    about suffer than to suffer yourself.”
    Even at five or six, I knew what he meant. That was how I
    felt when something happened to Andy. When he fell because
    his little legs weren’t steady enough yet, or the time he pinched
    his fingers in the screen door. I cried so hard that Mom
    couldn’t figure out which of us was hurt at first.
    When I heard that Andy might be trapped by the fire—that
    any of those children might be trapped—the panic I felt might
    as well have been theirs.
    “I was worried about him,” Uncle Marcus said.
    I dragged my foggy brain back to our conversation. “About
    who?” I asked. “Daddy or Ben?”
    “Ben,” Uncle Marcus said. “He had some problems in the department at first and I didn’t think he’d last. Claustrophobia. Big
    guy like that, you wouldn’t think he’d be afraid of anything. But
    after the fire at Drury—”he shook