The sound reached them all the way down to the field where the chairs were set up—so loud that if Eleanor hadn’t been holding Louise as tightly as she had, she might have dropped her. A few people screamed, and someone yelled, “Oh, shit!” Eleanor could hear the voice of one of the assembled guests begin to pray, in Spanish. Louise, observing the scene, burst into tears and called for her mother.
The noise was like nothing she’d ever heard. A crash, followed by a low, awful groaning. Then silence.
“Oh, God,” someone cried out. “Dios mío.” Someone else.
“We’ll find your mama,” Eleanor told Louise, scanning the assembled guests for her daughter, Louise’s mother, Ursula. Eleanor herself took in the event—whatever it was—with a certain unexpected calm. Worse things had happened than whatever was going on now, she knew that much. And though the piece of land on which she now stood had once represented, for her, the spot where she’d live forever and the one where she would die, this place was no longer her home, and hadn’t been for fifteen years.
It was impossible to know, at first, where the sound came from, or what had caused it. Earthquake? Plane crash? Terrorist attack? Her mind went—crazily—to a movie she’d seen about a tsunami, a woman whose entire family had been wiped out by one vast, awful wave.
But Eleanor’s family was safe. Now she could see them all around her—dazed, confused, but unhurt. All she really needed to do at a moment like this was to make sure that Louise was all right. Her precious only granddaughter, three years old.