My father walked out of his bedroom. “Bingo.” He held his wallet and our passports in his hand.

“But how is that possible?”

“They were in the safe in the closet, and the safe is bolted into the floor.”

“The safe! I hadn’t even thought of that!”

“They’re not even wet. Apparently, the safe is waterproof.”

I burst into laughter. It wasn’t that any of this was funny. I just felt such a wave of relief…maybe wave wasn’t the word I wanted right now.

“Let’s get back up. I want you to stay with your mother while I go and look for a phone.”

“No!” I said, and realized that I’d practically screamed it. “We all need to stick together.”

“We’re okay now. There’s no need to—”

“No,” I said again. “Beth needs to talk to all of us. We all need to be together.”

I expected him to argue. He didn’t. “You’re right. Let’s get back up to the lobby and get your mother.”

We walked through the front doorway. There was no door to close or lock and nothing inside to worry about anyway. I stopped just outside and stood there in the sand. The two palm trees that had grown beside our bungalow were gone—one was a snapped-off, splintered stub and the second had left no trace, not even a hole in the ground. The flowers were all gone as well. The ocean was still out there, but I didn’t know if I could ever look at it in the same way again. Would I ever be able to just sit on the beach, or play in the sand, or wade in the shallows, or…the beach…oh my God.

“Dad, the beach…it’s too wide…the water is being drawn out again.”

He looked out, hard, and then back at me. He looked scared.

“We have to get up to the lobby…we have to get farther away.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

We made our way along the beach as quickly as we could move in the sand. I tried to look back over my shoulder at the ocean as we ran. People had come back down to the beach, and some of them were already down on the exposed ocean bottom again. What was wrong with these people? Had they already forgotten what happened right before the wave hit? Now, instead of picking up fish, they were grabbing articles of clothing or furniture or…bodies. There were at least two bodies that I could see. One already had a group of people gathered around it. The other was lying face down in the mud, no more than fifty feet out.

“Hey!” my father yelled at them, startling me. “Get off the beach! Get off the beach!”

A couple of people looked up at him.

“It’s still dangerous!” he yelled. “You have to leave!”

Some of them seemed to hear and listen and started to walk away from the water. Others ignored him or didn’t seem to understand.