Chap 10: Shocking
Luke's father had told him that when the leaves turned inside out on the trees, a storm was swiftly approaching. The cool air had dried the perspiration on his and Rory's faces, and while the reprieve from the wet heat was welcome, Luke was feeling nervous.
"Rory, I think we should turn around."
She bit her lower lip. "I kinda had a big cup of coffee before we left . . ." she said.
"Can you go in the woods?"
Rory gave him a look that any Gilmore woman would have given him had they been posed that suggestion.
"I think we're close to the visitors' center," Rory said, clearly nervous as well. But, biological needs being what they were . . .
Luke sighed and trudged on.
They walked quickly and in less than five minutes came upon the visitors' center, with bathrooms nearby in a sheetmetal-roofed lean-to. Luke watched the skies warily while Rory was inside. Not so much as a drop of rain, but the dark clouds were getting closer and the wind was starting to smell electric.
A minute later, Rory emerged and they started walking, quickly.
In the distance, thunder rumbled.
The driveway was polka-dotted with raindrops when Lorelai and Emily came home.
"We're home!" Lorelai called into the silent house. "Luke?" Silence. "Rory?"
"Where could they be?" Emily said. "It's going to storm." She scanned the backyard for signs of life. "I hope they're not out on the lake."
Lorelai spotted her phone in the kitchen and checked the messages. Her eyes widened as she listened.
"Ohmigod," she whispered.
"What?" Emily asked. "Where are they?"
She walked quickly past Emily into the backyard to confirm her suspicion: the motorboat wasn't parked at the dock. Icy fear filled her stomach.
Thunder rumbled closer, and top-heavy trees were starting to sway in the wind.
We're on top of a hill, near trees and a stupid metal bathroom. We may as well be wearing a sign that says, 'hello, my name is lightening rod.' Luke thought. He noticed on many of the thickest, biggest trees, branches without a single leaf on them. Not to mention that they call those big, dead branches 'widow makers' for a reason.
Rory tried the doors of the visitors' center, but they were locked. There wasn't even a porch to stand under. Rain started falling as Luke tapped on a window, hoping someone was inside even if the office was closed, but the building was dark and unresponsive.
"Dammit!" he yelled. The thunder was growing increasingly persistent. A flash of lightning far off – but not too far -- danced at the periphery of his vision. A hundred news reports of deadly waterfront storms played in his mind. If he was out here alone, he may not have been so – concerned (not scared, just aware of the danger); but Rory had never seem as small to him as she seemed now. Lorelai would kill him if either of them got hurt.
A clap of thunder, the loudest yet, shook him to action. "Try you cell phone," he told Rory, more sharply than he intended.
She flipped it open and her heart sunk. "No signal," she said. She started punching random buttons, frustrated, as if she could tune in a signal like a radio.
Luke growled. "What's the point of freaking technology if it doesn't work when you ne—"
A flash of pure white light blinded them. A sound like a Mack truck hitting an embankment assaulted their ears, so loud it blocked out any sense of the rain, wind, or each other. Rory screamed. Something crackled overhead. The air smelled like an overheating hair dryer.
Though spotty eyes, Luke looked up. The tree above them was rending down the center, its two main branches yawning apart. It was so bizarre, so far from any experience he could relate to, that it seemed like he was watching it on television.
Until a branch the diameter of his arm pinwheeled out of the tree, whistled past them, and landed in the mud five feet from where they were standing. They both screamed.
Luke grabbed Rory around her middle and ran. Behind him, he heard more thunks and splintering. The tree was dogging his heels.
Luke half-carried Rory until her legs caught up with her brain and she sprinted like a fawn, hanging onto his hand. The storm had arrived in full force; sheets of rain obscured visibility. They ran past the useless visitors' center, directionless, until another flash of lightening lit a structure in silhouette in the dark forest.
"There!" Rory yelled.
Luke looked where she was pointing, another flash of lightening illuminating what she was looking at. Wordlessly agreeing, they fled through overgrown brush, nettles scratching their bare legs, and leaped over a rocky ditch to land, under cover, in the pavilion.
They stood in shock for a moment, hesitating to allow themselves to feel safe. Rory giggled suddenly, high pitched and not like herself. Luke put his arm around her shoulder, and she wrapped her arms around his waist. She could feel his heart thumping against his chest.
"We're okay," she said, more to convince herself than him.
"Yeah," Luke said, awkwardly hugging her in response.
"Lightening can't strike twice, right?" Rory said.
"It's just a summer storm," Luke said, as if this definition of their situation had just come to him. "It'll blow over, and then we'll go home."
Back at the house, Lorelai stood on the back porch, watching the whitecaps on the lake, feeling the cold rain on her warm face. Inside, she heard Emily on the phone.
"I don't care about the conditions! My granddaughter and son-in-law are out in this storm, and you will do you job or else . . ."
Though Lorelai's brow remained furrowed, the corners of her mouth tilted upward. Help was on its way.
Rory and Luke sat on the pavilion's concrete floor, listening to the rumbling thunder and the rain pattering on the wooden roof. As her heartbeat calmed in her chest, and her knees stopped shaking, Rory started to feel sleepy.
She thought about the argument she'd had with her mother just a few hours ago, how it had prompted her to flee to the woods. And how stupid that had been – the argument, the way Rory had handled it. It's just . . .
"Everything has to be her way," Rory said.
Luke blinked and looked at Rory. It was the first thing either of them had said in fifteen minutes. "Lorelai?" he asked.
Rory nodded.
"Is this about that fight?" Luke said.
Rather than answering, Rory said, "She keeps giving me this look. And she's never given me it before."
"What's she looking like?"
Rory stared at the rain. "Like she's disappointed in me."
"Huh," Luke said, noncommittally.
"What?"
"Nothin'. I don't think I've ever seen your mom disappointed in you."
"She never had a reason to be," Rory said.
Luke considered that. "You think she does now?"
Rory shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe." She wished she could tell someone about Dean – just to say it, get it out in the open, shrink it down so it wouldn't burn such a hole of guilt in her chest.
A cool wind swished through the open room. Rory, in a tank top and shorts, wrapped her arms around her.
"Are you cold?" Luke asked.
"No," she said.
At length, Luke said, "I don't know what's going on between you and her, but I know it's private. I'm not butting in," he said again. "But I think she's just used to always knowing what's going on in your life, and always being right by your side."
"But I'm not a little kid anymore," Rory said, annoyed.
"I know. And she knows," Luke said. "Sometimes you can know a kid can handle themselves, but looking in from the outside, you think how much easier it would be if you could just reach into their lives and do it for them," he said, thinking of Jess.
'Looking in from the outside,' Rory mused. For the first time in her life, something big had happened to her, and she couldn't talk about it with her mom. Rory sighed deeply.
Several minutes later, Luke noticed it first: the sound of motors echoing through the trees. Headlights lanced through the rain-swept darkness. Luke hollered, and soon a pair of four-wheelers bearing poncho-draped men in Smoky the Bear hats drove to the pavilion.
"Are you Luke and Rory Gilmore?" one of them asked.
Recognizing her grandmother's persuasion techniques, Rory affirmed that they were. One of the park rangers spoke into a walkie-talkie while the other scolded them for being out in this weather.
"Well, hop on," the annoyed ranger finally said. "We put your boat onto our trailer. Thanks a lot for leaving it tied to our dock in a hurricane," he said sarcastically. "You could've wrecked the dock."
"Sorry!" Rory said. "We didn't know."
"Hold on, hurricane?" Luke said. The rain had stopped by now, the air was still and cool; even the humidity had blown away.
"Tropical storm," the other, less annoyed ranger corrected. "Blew down from the Boston and then went out to sea. Provincetown got hit hard, but we just caught the end of it. You two are mighty lucky."
TBC
a/n: What the hell is with ff dot net not letting you do astrices to denote scene changes anymore? Those ruled lines look stupid!