“Becnel deftly captures the way actual women think…. Brisk and entertaining, with a welcome focus on middle-aged sexuality, this tidy tale proves that Becnel is just as much at home writing high-quality contemporary fiction as penning the historical fiction for which she’s known.”

—Publishers Weekly on Old Boyfriends

“Rexanne Becnel skillfully weaves multiple storylines with lively characters and unexpected plot twists in an emotionally satisfying book.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Old Boyfriends

And other praise for Rexanne Becnel

“Ms. Becnel creates the most intriguing characters.”

—Literary Times on The Bride of Rosecliffe

“Becnel skillfully blends romance and adventure with a deft hand.”

—Publishers Weekly on When Lightning Strikes

“Rexanne’s stories stay with the reader long after the final page is turned.”

—Literary Times on Heart of the Storm

Rexanne Becnel

Rexanne Becnel, the author of twenty-two novels and two novellas, is a charter member of the Southern Louisiana Chapter of Romance Writers of America, and founded the New Orleans Popular Fiction Conference.

Rexanne’s novels regularly appear on bestseller lists such as USA TODAY, Amazon.com, Waldenbooks, Ingram and Barnes & Noble. She has been nominated for and received awards from Romantic Times BOOKreviews, Waldenbooks, the Holt Committee, the Atlanta Journal/Atlanta Constitution and the National Readers’ Choice Awards.

Blink of an Eye

Rexanne Becnel

www.millsandboon.co.uk

From the Author

Dear Reader,

As many of you know, I live in New Orleans, in an area that flooded after the levees broke. As we struggled both as a family and a community to put ourselves back together, I wasn’t sure I could write about the storm and everything that followed. I wasn’t sure I could write again at all.

But writing has proven to be my salvation. The routine of going to a coffeehouse (once I found one that was open!) and writing my daily pages turned out to be the only “normal” part of my life for a very long time. In addition, it was cathartic to write about Jane and her fight to survive in a world turned inside out. I am not just like Jane, but I put a lot of me in her. There was no way not to.

As for my beloved New Orleans…we were flooded, but not drowned; devastated, but not defeated.

To the people who refuse to abandon their hometown, I love having you as my neighbors. And to the people everywhere who supported us through our very worst days and continue to do so, I hope to see you here someday.

Remember, you can’t not have a good time in New Orleans!

Love to all,

Rexanne

For the Pizzolato family and for Joanna Wurtele who helped us in our hour of greatest need.

For David, Rosemary, Brian, Valerie, Chuck and Karen who weathered the storm with me.

And for Katya and Mike, and all the rest of my family, friends and neighbors who lost so much but refuse still to give up.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 1

I didn’t evacuate New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina despite the desperate exhortations of our mayor, our governor and every other public official who paraded across the television set during the three days that led up to the storm. They could have done cartwheels naked across the screen and I still would have switched channels in search of The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family reruns.

The reason? I like stories about happy families. Oh, and I’d already decided to commit suicide.

It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about cutting my losses and taking that leap. From the time I was sixteen and my mother made her first attempt (failed, fortunately), it has always been at the back of my mind as a way out if life got too tough.

I held it against Mom for a long time—all her life, actually—which lasted an additional fourteen years until she died suddenly in a freak car accident. After that, I felt guilty for never forgiving her, for always showing her by my exaggerated gestures of benevolence that I was so much better than her, that I could cope and even thrive, while all she could do was fold.

The fact is, she had a boatload of reasons to give up. Being abandoned by her husband to raise two kids alone had changed her from a sunny, happy person into a prematurely old, overworked and mainly sad woman.

Even though I was only nine, it had changed me into a cynic. Not that I’d known what the word meant. I didn’t learn that until the seventh grade when I should have won the spelling bee, but the principal’s daughter did. I had to spell atrophy. She had to spell peanut.

But I digress.

I’ve lived most of my forty-seven years moving from crisis to crisis. My great-uncle Dan used to call Mom Little Orphan Annie, and me Calamity Jane, and I guess he was right. I was Calamity Jane, never meant to be happy for long. My college boyfriend—the love of my life—turned out to be gay. Then after I married, I couldn’t get pregnant, even with the help of every fertility clinic in the Deep South. My husband went to jail for insurance fraud. My wonderful boss died suddenly of a heart attack, and his replacement tried to seduce me.

And of course there were my own spectacular screwups, which cost me my profession and my self-respect.

Anyway, by the time Hurricane Katrina was in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, expanding swiftly from a Category One to a Category Five monster, I’d long gotten over my disdain of Mom’s weakness. I was no better than she was. In fact, I was a lot worse. At least when she’d first attempted suicide, she’d known I would be around to take care of Clark. He’s my Down syndrome brother. But if I committed suicide, who would be there for him?

Sure, Clark is happy in his group home. But he’s a Medicaid patient and the way money is always being diverted from the system, who knows what could happen to him? That’s why last year when I won the Super Bowl lottery at a bar where I’d once worked—six thousand dollars!—I took a major chunk of the money and bought a big, fat life-insurance policy for myself, and set up a trust fund with a medical trustee to handle the money for Clark if I should die.

Clark might lose a sister, but he’d gain a personal aide to take him on outings and provide other opportunities that a state-run group home just couldn’t do.

Like most insurance policies, though, mine has a suicide clause, which didn’t bother me too much at the time because I was more or less in love, had a good-paying job by bartending standards, plus extra money in my pocket and no clouds on my horizon.

I guess I knew in my heart that it wouldn’t last. The good times never do. That’s why I hadn’t told my so-called boyfriend, Hank, about my winnings or the insurance policy. He would have wanted us to party with the proceeds until nothing was left. That’s how he went through his electrician’s pay every two weeks. Why not my money, too?

But that life insurance money is to protect Clark, whom I love dearly. It’s not like when we were kids though, and lived together. Sometimes when I’m really down, I worry that Clark doesn’t love me any more than he loves the aide who helps him get dressed each day, or the one who coaches him through his meals.

I know that’s not true. But sweet soul that he is, he loves anybody who’s nice to him. He’s a happy child in a man’s body, one who delights in sunbeams and dust bunnies, and thinks Cheerios are the greatest food in the world. I have to remind myself that his innocent happiness is something to be thankful for.

Sometimes I’m jealous of the affection he gives everyone else. It’s like sibling rivalry gone amok. In my stupid, emotionally screwed-up way, I’m competing in an insane contest for his love with his caregivers. Whom I adore! Go figure.

The truth is, he doesn’t really need me on a day-to-day basis. Nobody does.

Which brings me to my dilemma on that Friday afternoon in August. Hank was out of town. As a self-employed electrician, he bounces around from job to job. He’d been working a lot in Mississippi and only coming to New Orleans on the weekends. Since I work a lot on the weekends, our primary time together was him sitting at the bar with me feeding him free drinks. By the time we’d go home to my place, he’d be drunk and amorous, I’d be tired and pissed off, and that would be our weekend.

Suffice it to say, I wasn’t looking forward to him coming in that night, so when I checked my messages, I was relieved to hear that he planned to ride out the storm in Biloxi, helping to board up the casino expansion he’d been working on.

I erased the message, then plopped down in the shabby slip-covered chair in the corner of my kitchen/dining/living room. I’d dragged that chair up the stairs myself, rescuing it from a garbage pile around the corner. A nineteen-dollar slipcover from Anna’s Linens had spiffed it up. But now the slipcover was threadbare and I couldn’t afford another one.

Just like I couldn’t afford the bill from the Great Southern Life Insurance Company that still lay on the table beside the chair. Four days it had been there unopened. Why open it when I had no way to pay it?

You might say that bill was the final blow. The clichéd “straw that broke the camel’s back.” For me, it symbolized more than just not being able to pay another bill. It symbolized my life being completely in the toilet.

Things had been bad all year, and not just in the money department. Hank was a pain, long past even pretending he loved me. I sure didn’t love him. So why did I take him in whenever he was in town?

And why did I stay in my stupid dead-end job, mixing drinks for tourists who came to Bourbon Street to do things they’d never dream of doing at home? Respectable people from buttoned-up midwestern towns and neat New England villages getting drunk in strip clubs, puking in the streets. Wanting me to “show my tits” for the Mardi Gras beads they’d just purchased down the street. I was sick of all of them, and sick of catering to them.

Maybe that’s why my tips had been so lousy lately: my bad attitude. Just this week I’d been demoted from the primo weekend evening shifts to the day shifts.

So bad attitude equals bad shifts equals less pay equals worse attitude. I was in a downhill cycle, personally and professionally—if you consider bartending a profession, which I hesitated to do.

Then came this bill. Eleven hundred plus change a year. Hell, I couldn’t even afford the two-eighty quarterly payments, not with rent due next week and utilities, and not much to eat in the kitchen.

Where was my money going these days?

A glance at the garbage can gave the answer. I’d been drinking a lot lately. A lot. A depressed woman shouldn’t indulge in depressants like alcohol. But let’s face it, alcohol and other drugs—which I’d refrained from, give me some credit—are the opiates of the depressed masses, no pun intended.

I’m down, so pour me a drink. Isn’t that how it works?

So of course, what did I do? I turned the bill facedown, then pulled out a bottle of Southern Comfort, poured myself a healthy dose and turned on the television.

Everything on the tube was about Katrina. Where would she hit? Would she still be a Category Five when she came ashore, or would the shallower waters decrease her power? How high would the storm surge be? When would the calls for mandatory evacuations begin?

I nursed my drink, sipping slowly, enjoying the warmth of it sliding down my throat. I closed my eyes and imagined that warmth slipping into my bloodstream, spreading throughout my body, relaxing me, dulling my senses, and turning the Channel Four weatherman’s voice into a drone of white noise that worked with the liquor. I drank; he droned on; and everything slowed down and faded.

It could be like this forever, the smooth voice that had tempted me before whispered in my head. Just give up on the world and let go. No more bills. No more Hank. No more drunk tourists propositioning me, laughing uproariously when I told them to go jerk off in the men’s room.

Just let go, sink into the darkness….

The phone rang, yanking me out of my dark reverie. It was an old-fashioned phone with a loud, mechanical ring.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Jane? This is Verna Jenkins from Community Homes.”

Clark’s group home. I straightened up in the chair. “Hi, Miss Jenkins. Is everything all right?”

“Yes. I’m just calling to tell you that the house is evacuating for the storm. Do you want us to take Clark, or would you rather he evacuate with you?”

“I’m not evacuating,” I decided on the instant. “So maybe he’d better go with you. Where are y’all heading?”

“We have a standing arrangement with a group home in Baton Rouge. We’re leaving on a bus tomorrow morning. I’m just letting all the families know where we’ll be and how to reach us.”

I took the information, then asked to speak to Clark. “Hello, my baby brother,” I said when he came on the phone. “How are you?”

“Fine,” he said, and giggled. As a kid I’d been embarrassed by that overgrown baby giggle. But I’d learned to love it, just like I loved him.

Emotions clogged my throat, but I forced them down. “So. You’re going on a bus ride, aren’t you?”

“Bus ride,” he answered, giggling with increased glee. “Bus ride.”

“Okay, then. Have fun. And remember that your Janie loves you. I love you, Clark.”

And that was it. He handed the phone to Verna and she wished me good luck. I guess that’s when I finally knew what I had to do. Clark was in good hands, and a three-hundred-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy would cement the cracks in his care a lot better than I did with my weekly visits.

I filled my glass with that courage-giving amber liquid, and stared at my life-insurance bill. The problem was, it couldn’t look like suicide because they wouldn’t pay off, and Clark wouldn’t have that extra layer of protection I wanted him to have.

Then suddenly, like a light at the end of a tunnel, it came to me. If I died during the hurricane they’d have to pay. I could feel the adrenaline surge through my body. If I committed suicide by storm, they’d never know. I’d just be an unfortunate casualty of the horrific wind and waters. Too bad; so sad.

But what if the storm turned away from New Orleans? What if it veered east as they so often did, sparing the city?

Then I would drive to where it was going. My car wasn’t in the greatest shape, and my car insurance was overdue. But so what? If I stalled out somewhere in the road, the storm would just get me there.

I aimed the remote control at the television and upped the volume. Walter Maestri, emergency management director for neighboring Jefferson Parish was on, urging everyone to leave. This could be the big one, he predicted. With the storm surge this hurricane was pushing, we could have twenty-five feet of water in the streets.

The easier to drown in, I decided, switching channels.

I watched television all night, fell asleep around six, woke up at noon, and called in sick.

“The hell you say,” the day manager barked at me. “You’re not sick. The whole damn city’s going crazy. Tourists leaving early, and half the staff is cutting out for Texas. Don’t bullshit me, Jane. You’re evacuating like everyone else. But look. Come in today. You can work a double. I know you need the money. Then you can leave on Sunday if you really have to.”

“I’m sick, Robbie. Really.”

“Come on, Janie,” he said in this wheedling tone.

I smiled to hear the asshole beg. “Sorry. No can do.”

“Come in or I’m firing your ass!” he shouted in an abrupt change of tone.

“Whatever,” I said and hung up on him.

It felt good to do that, and it felt even better to hear him pleading on my answering machine ten minutes later. I guess he’d called around and gotten no takers, so he was back to begging me.

I just poured myself another nice glass of Southern Comfort for breakfast and took it into the bathroom with me.

It’s strange. Unless you’ve been there, I don’t think anyone can adequately explain how it feels to have decided once and for all to end your life. It was perversely liberating. And relaxing. And sad. I had a lot of regrets piled up in my forty-seven years. At the top of the list was Clark, of course. Not that he would miss me all that much. But still. I was his big sister, his only living relative.

Correction. His only living relative who gave a damn, since we had no reason to believe our dad was dead, and I knew he didn’t give a damn.

Next regret? That I’d never had kids. I didn’t dwell on that disappointment too much, but it was always there.

And then there was Mom, who I guess had done the best she could with no husband, a difficult daughter and a special-needs son.

After that came the mass regrets, the people I’d let down either because of my stubbornness or my stupidity. Friends, bosses, lovers. One husband. Patients.

The only clear concept I remember from the time I’d been in rehab was that you had to take responsibility for your own actions. That you could never get sober if you didn’t acknowledge your own shortcomings.

Not that I’m an alcoholic, mind you. I’ve had my moments of overindulgence—like now—but I’d never lost a job because of alcohol.

No, my spectacular fall from grace seven years ago hadn’t been due to drinking, but to drugs. I’d had a brief but intense and incredibly self-indulgent go-round with prescription drugs. Unfortunately what I lost then was more than merely the nursing job that I loved. It was my profession. My calling. Nurses who are incompetent or dishonest due to substance abuse have a hard time getting a second chance in the field.

So there was that regret, too. I’d lost a great career, and though I usually blame my ex’s conviction for insurance fraud, the truth was that I had decided to drink during his trial, and I had decided to drink even more when we lost the house. Then when he went off to prison, I had decided to try out some of the pain-killing, brain-deadening drugs I so often administered to my patients on the job.

I’m not a junkie, though, and I’m not an alcoholic, either. If I was, I’d still be using drugs and I sure wouldn’t be the oh-so-desirable employee that Robbie was desperate to have back on the job. No, I’d be in the gutter somewhere, or back in rehab. Or dead.

But my choices of the past were neither here nor there. Alcoholic or not, I would be dead by Monday, so it was a moot point.

One last regret was that I couldn’t leave a note. Not that there was anyone to leave it to. Clark wouldn’t notice that I was even gone. My boss had fired me, and I really didn’t have anything to say to Hank.

Sad, wasn’t it? And it only deepened my depression—and my resolve. No one would miss me. No one would care that I was gone—except maybe my landlord. I had no one at all to leave a goodbye note to.

By late Saturday afternoon I was bored stiff. I sat outside on the front stoop of my four-plex and watched as my neighbors came and went.

“You not staying?” my downstairs neighbor Carlotta exclaimed.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Girl, are you crazy? They saying this one could come over the levees.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing I have a second-floor apartment.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m going to my auntie’s in Baton Rouge. After the storm, though, I’m gonna call you, okay? Just to see how the old place held up. You need any supplies? I’m going to Robert’s on St. Claude.”

“Thanks, but I have everything I need.”

She shook her head. “Okay then. You know where I hide my key, so take anything you need from the kitchen. And one more thing. At least move your car to higher ground, up by the river.”

“Good idea,” I said. Exactly what I didn’t want: higher ground. But later that evening as she drove off, along with several other neighbors trying to avoid the crush of traffic leaving town by driving at night, I thought about the whole water issue. The river levees aren’t the weakest spot for New Orleans during a hurricane. It’s the Lake Pontchartrain levees. That’s where the wind and tides drive the waves to top the levees. So that’s where I should go to drown.

Or maybe somewhere in St. Bernard or Plaquemines Parish. The levees aren’t as high there, and the tidal surges are a lot stronger.

That’s why I spent Sunday driving around town, picking my spot. There was the Lakefront Airport, outside the levees. But it might be guarded by the Levee Police. Or I could try the mouth of Bayou St. John. Or Little Woods where the camps along the lake were sure to be wiped out, just like in 1998 during Hurricane Georges.

I sat in an empty parking lot on the University of New Orleans campus and studied a map of the city. What about the turning basin in the Industrial Canal? That’s where the lake, the river and the Intercoastal Canal all met. There was sure to be a lot of water action there.

My stomach growled. I was hungry, and there was nothing decent at home to eat. Some crackers, maybe. Some peanut butter and tuna and canned soup. I started up the car and headed out, looking for a convenience store or burger place. Anything that sold food.

But nothing was open. I mean, nothing.

I had to drive past my house all the way into the French Quarter and even then all I found open was a couple of bars. Naturally. So I ordered a drink and ate peanuts until almost midnight. By then the wind was really picking up. But until the power goes out, it’s not really a storm. The weathermen were all predicting a landfall around dawn, with Katrina’s eye hitting New Orleans East around noon. The threat of flooding wouldn’t reach its peak until after the eye passed and the winds started coming out of the north. That meant I had at least twelve hours to wait.

It’s funny, but on the one night I should have just stayed in the bar, drinking until it was time to act, I didn’t feel like drinking. The bartender was being really free with the liquor, and a pair of guys from Ontario kept offering me drinks, too. But I was too keyed up. This was it. My time to go. I was hyper, and yet strangely calm. In countdown mode, I guess.

I didn’t want to go home, though. So I found my car and just cruised around, past the Superdome where knots of people were standing around despite the mayor’s announcement that it would not be a shelter of last resort this time. Uptown was a ghost town. Mid City was the same. I couldn’t get across the Industrial Canal into St. Bernard or New Orleans East. The cops had all four bridges closed, probably because of the high winds. And at the St. Claude Bridge, the Industrial Canal was already high, splashing and sending spray onto the roadway.

I stared at the dark, heaving waters, and the first tremor of fear hit me. Could I do it? I’d rejected shooting myself years ago, mainly because I was petrified of guns. That’s why I’d also ruled out suicide by cop. Sure, I could have pulled out my ex’s old handgun, confronted a cop and let him shoot me. But I didn’t want the poor guy to feel bad about killing someone who’d waved an unloaded weapon at him. Besides, what if he was a lousy shot and I didn’t die?

No, drowning in waters too powerful for me to resist was the surest way to do it. Once I jumped in, there’d be no turning back. And anyway, I’d heard that drowning was a relatively peaceful way to go. One big gulp of water would fill my lungs, and that would be it. My lonely loser of a life would be finished, but Clark would be protected. No matter how you looked at it, it was a win-win situation.

I guess I could have jumped in right then, but if someone saw my body too soon, the insurance company might suspect suicide. I had to wait. I decided the lake was my best shot, so around three in the morning I headed back toward the lake-front. By then the wind was really whipping. The trees were swaying and some of the branches had begun to go, littering the streets. The electricity was going, too, neighborhood by neighborhood. I picked my way down Elysian Fields Avenue, weaving through the fallen live-oak branches.

One fell on my car, hitting with a thunk that nearly made me wreck.

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered, gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles hurt. I should have headed to the lakefront hours ago. What if I couldn’t make it? The rain was coming down in erratic sheets, blowing mostly out of the east. But it swirled around, too, like miniature tornadoes. No way I could walk in this.

I watched as a streetlight went down, and right after it, a utility pole in a shower of sparks. Even in the car I didn’t want to get hit by one of them. Electrocution did not sound like a pleasant way to die.

“Dead is dead,” I muttered. But I was getting really creeped out.

This is for the best. For Clark. That was my mantra as my little Corolla fought the howling winds. At the train overpass a powerful gust caught the car and it actually skidded into the left lane. My heart was in my throat, but I kept going. What else could I do?

It was way beyond weird. Gentilly Boulevard was a mess of tree branches, signs and pieces of roofing. There was water in the streets, but not much. So far this wasn’t a very wet storm. It was near Brother Martin High School that I ran into trouble. First a big oak branch hit the trunk of my car. It bounced off, but I veered left into another branch. After I backed out of that tangle, the car stalled. It sputtered a few times. Then it went dead. And all the time, the wind howled like a banshee.

After trying futilely to get the car started, I realized that I was out of gas. Why that made me start crying I don’t know. Maybe because after my miserable failure of a life, now I was also failing at death. In any event, I sat there in my car a long time, feeling sorry for myself and wishing a giant oak limb would crash down on my head and finish me off right then and there.

No such luck.

By the time dawn fought through the heavy clouds and sheeting rain, I decided I’d have to walk the last mile or so to the lake. I hadn’t seen another car on the road since about 3:00 a.m. No wonder. If the winds weren’t reason enough to stay inside, the now impassable streets were. I’d have to wait until the worst of the storm was past before I could make my way to the lake.

So exhausted by lack of sleep as well as tension, I crawled into the back seat and made myself as comfortable as I could.

You’d think all those hours curled up alone in a disabled car would have given me time to rethink my suicide plan. Instead, my failure—so far—only proved to me that I had to do this. My life was a hopeless shambles with nothing to look forward to but getting old. I’d failed at everything else, but I refused to fail at this.

I think I must have fallen asleep. I’m not sure. But the next thing I knew, the car was moving. I jerked awake and sat up, only to find water in the floor of the car.

Water?

I rubbed a clear spot on the fogged-up window, then gaped at the scene outside. Elysian Fields was flooded. Houses, street, yards, and cars were inundated in a roiling mass of water. And my car was floating! Sort of. Had it rained that hard?

I glanced at my watch—9:42 a.m.—then back at the surreal landscape. No way was this much water caused by rain. The levees must have been overtopped.

The car lurched, then lodged against a street lamp that was still standing.

Famous last words. In the next blast of wind the pole went over like a toothpick, bouncing off a van in someone’s driveway. But the wind was so loud, howling through the trees, screaming in the wires, that I barely heard the crash.

I gripped the driver’s side headrest. What should I do?

Go drown yourself. That’s the plan, isn’t it? So go do it.

In three feet of water?

Except that those three feet looked as if they would soon be four. Or more. “Just wait,” I muttered. “Just wait a little longer.”

Within fifteen minutes, the water was over the seat and rising, almost as deep inside the car as outside. I shivered as my capris soaked up the chilly water. Was I going to drown in a Toyota with the doors locked and the windows up? Or would I get out of the car and head toward the lake and deeper water? Assuming I didn’t drown before I got there.

That’s when out of nowhere a dog slammed into my front windshield. Somehow it righted itself, scrabbling around for footing on the wet hood. Then it stood there, spraddle-legged and terrified, staring me straight in the face.

I heard one yelp—or maybe I saw it. Either way, when the next wave sent the frantic animal sprawling, sliding off my car, I didn’t stop to think. I shoved open the door, lunged through the opening and into the water, and somehow caught the animal by the tail.

I don’t know how I caught hold of the dog’s collar, but it was just in time. The next thing I knew, we were both underwater.

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