Just up ahead was our resort. It seemed familiar and foreign all at once. The hotel still stood. Solid, concrete, four stories high. From this distance it looked no different—except for what surrounded it. The trees that had once circled the pool had either been torn out or snapped in two, leaving shards sticking up. I knew the gardens and flowers would all be gone. It had once been so beautiful, and now it was just…

I stopped mid-thought and froze in place. That wasn’t the only thing that was missing. The bungalows—the bungalows were gone. I looked up and down the beach, thinking that somehow I must have been so distracted that I’d just passed them, but there was nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Roofs, walls, windows, doors—everything gone. The trees and bushes, the paths leading up to them. Nothing. I searched the ground, desperately looking for a trace.

I picked up a board. Was it from one of the bungalows? There was a piece of corrugated metal…from a roof? No, the bungalows had wooden roofs with palm leaves for shingles. If I searched, would I find a trace of our bungalow? Would I find one of my father’s T-shirts, or a skirt that belonged to my mother…or my brother’s body?

I couldn’t stay there any longer. I staggered up the beach and onto the patio. There had to be somebody here who could help me, who could tell me what had happened to my family.

I walked into the lobby—or what used to be the lobby. Inside was a mess…and there was a car lying bizarrely on its side against a wall. It was dark and damp and smelled awful. The place where I’d spent so much time, so many happy holidays, was barely recognizable.

Then I had a chilling thought. That man in the truck had said he thought my mother had been in the lobby. So, she might have been here, right here, when the second wave hit. How could she have gotten out? How could she have survived?

I couldn’t stay there anymore. There was nothing. Nobody. Not my family, not staff, nobody. It was like standing in the middle of a haunted house. I had to leave.

I walked out the front entrance, through the frame where the door used to be, onto a carpet of sand. Mounds of garbage stuck out of the mud or rested in tangled, mangled piles.

“Hello…how are you?”

I turned. There was a man. He was older, with gray hair, dressed in shorts and a dirty shirt. He was a foreigner, a tourist.

“I’m looking for my wife,” he said. “Her name is Aggie. I’m wondering if you have seen her.” He showed me a picture of a smiling grandmother. “I wasn’t here when it happened,” he explained. “I was up in the hills on a hike…she didn’t want to come…she was too tired. If only…” He started to cry.

“I’m so sorry…I haven’t seen anybody. I’m looking for my family, for my parents and my brother.” I pulled out the picture and showed it to him.