Leah crouched, grabbing at the top of the grate. She felt stable, well rooted in the situation. “You in good enough shape to climb out of there if I get you my hand?” she asked. “I don't know about all this mud.” And the water, she thought, the water is rising fast.
“Think so.” Elmer winced and blew his breath out, hard, as he stretched his hand toward hers. She planted her feet and prayed the mud wouldn't give way beneath her. She held his hand in both of hers and slowly, carefully planting each foot, started pushing herself backward, up the hill.
“Hold up hold up,” Elmer said, and she froze, taut, while he wrestled first his right leg, then his left, out of the grate. “Think this left leg of mine is broken. Or close to it.”
“Tell me when you're ready,” Leah said, and when Elmer gave the signal, she kept pulling. Once Elmer was clear of the culvert, there was the mud to deal with. She propped Elmer up, her arm across his back, her hand in his armpit. Halfway to the trucks, they sat down on a downed cottonwood. The rain slicked Elmer's yellow rubber coveralls. She had expected panic from him, or at least some outward show of pain, but he kept his face stoic. Once in a while, he'd step wrong, wince, cry out just a little, but she pretended not to notice. She knew what it meant to crave dignity in the face of mortification. She could give Elmer that now.
“You trying to die today?” Leah asked. “Why'd you come out here?”
“Like I said, you want these gates open, want that water to flow out of here as fast as possible.”
The site was socked in with clouds, landmarks blurred by the steady rain. Leah tried to remember how it looked in the sunlight, the blue of the sky, the laconic drift of cumulus clouds. She heard a noise from her platform, looked up to see the osprey chicks, waterlogged and miserable, shifting position in the nest.
“How bad is it going to be?” she asked.
“I think pretty bad,” Elmer said.
Leah was glad of the cold rain on her face, which masked, she hoped, her tears at the thought of Riverside destroyed—her years of vision and management and work, everything she had imagined it could become—all of it washed out, washed away.
She stood up. “You get all the gates open?”
“Not the one I fell into.”
“I guess I have to get you out of here,” she said, but she didn't want to leave. She wanted to turn herself into solid brick and mortar, grow up to the osprey platform, root herself firmly into the wet clay, send the inundation around and away from her open space. She wanted to fight, but the rain came in sheets, the dam was already open, the system entirely indifferent to her puny desires.
She looked at Elmer, small but dry inside his yellow slickers. The ospreys had hunkered down, gone invisible.
“How long do we have?” she asked.
“Flood's still up top of the canyon,” Elmer said. “We got at least an hour, maybe more.”
“You think opening that gate will help?”
Elmer paused, shrugged. “Might be nothing can help.”
“Wait here.”
“Don't have much of a choice,” Elmer said. “This leg.”
Leah used the footprints she'd left to get back, trying to step as carefully as possible into the existing holes in the suckery mud. When she reached the weir, she paused, stuck her hand in the chilly ditchwater, tensed with the effort of keeping it still and steady while strong current swirled and pressed around it, tried to move it, carry it downstream. The water had risen, was already flowing up and over the concrete box. Leah found the wheel, leaned her whole weight into it, but could not force it open. She kept shoving against it, but her feet slipped out from under her. She fell twice so hard her shoulder made divots in the soggy mud. Toward the trucks, toward safety, she saw Elmer hunched and shivering where she'd left him, and then she felt everything at once. Guilt for making an injured Elmer wait. Fear that she'd lose control, topple into the water, disappear into it. Frustrated rage that she was not, in the end, strong enough to open the gate, to save the site.
“You get it open?” Elmer asked when she reached him, mud-covered and bedraggled.
“Stuck.” Leah put her hands over her face in an effort to preserve her own dignity, but it backfired. She'd rubbed mud all over her own stupid self.
They limped, slowly, toward the trucks. Elmer said, almost tenderly, “You did all you could.” He lifted himself, gingerly, into her passenger seat. The truck radio announced that the schools were closing. Buses that had dropped children off just a couple of hours ago had been sent to deliver them back home. The blockade officers agreed to park Elmer's truck on higher ground.
Elmer called Bobby, told him to meet them at the hospital. “Who's got your boy?” he asked, poking a finger at his phone screen.
“Day care,” she said. “Guess I have to go pick him up.”
Bobby met them at the hospital, and he and Leah helped Elmer into a wheelchair. Leah was anxious to get to Tyler now, to have her boy within range of her care and protection. Bobby put a hand on her shoulder. “I don't know what would have happened if you weren't there.” Leah felt for a minute Bobby wanted something more from the moment, something that might have been, but couldn't possibly have been, a hug.
Elmer looked at her too. “You did good today, Leah. You did your best.”
Leah felt her eyes welling and turned toward her truck, toward Tyler. She felt her blood churning the same as the river. It was humiliating, wanting so much to be forgiven, when the only thing she'd possibly done wrong was marrying Andy to begin with. Really, how could she have known he'd turn out so rotten? They'd had some happy years. Andy wrapping a blanket over her shoulders when she was up late studying, learning the exact amount of cream she liked in her coffee. Andy's deep connection, as deep as hers, to their hometown, a sense of shared responsibility, between them, to improve and defend it. In the end, none of those things had mattered as much as his inability to ever admit he was wrong, his misplaced fervent confidence that he knew more about the people around him than they knew about themselves. Even the worst people were sometimes tender. Even liars, or maybe especially liars, knew how to be kind. She felt an urgency so deep it stung, blood-borne, racing through her whole body, to get to her son. It was up to her to keep Tyler safe, today and forever. It was up to her to be sure he only ever manifested the best of his father, if he had to manifest Andy at all.
LEAH PRESSED THE BUTTON for the secured entry at the day care, and the receptionist said “Okay,” but the doors didn't unlock. The gutters were overflowing, sending a stream of cold rainwater down her back, which pooled at her bra and released slowly, tiny drops zigzagging down onto the small of her back, wetting the waistband of her pants.
Leah stared at the security camera that she knew ran a feed right to the reception desk. They shouldn't be making her stand out here in all this rain, even though she was soaked through already, slicked with mud, a real sight, she was sure. She sucked in her breath, held it, and when she could not hold it anymore, reached for the button again. Before she pressed it, the woman's voice sounded on the PA. “I see you. Hold your horses.”
Inside, she smiled, aware that she was leaving a muddy puddle on the floor. “I'm here for Tyler.”
“You can head on back.” The woman, clearly alarmed by Leah's near-drowned appearance, picked up her phone receiver.
Leah could hardly stand the smell of the day care—sour milk, sour diapers, Lysol sprays and hand sanitizers—and today it was so cold and clammy, tantrums in the background, baby screams. The kids were as unsettled as anyone else. She could not imagine how Tyler stood it at all, and then she remembered that he didn't, not really.
When she reached the classroom, she saw Tyler alone in one corner of the room, building a large tower of blocks. Two of the other three-year-olds were coloring with their teacher, and Ms. Evers, the director, was reading to four others. When Tyler's block tower crashed to the
floor, she saw Ms. Evers flash a look of annoyance. “Tyler!” she said. “Be quiet!”
Tyler was looking at the pile of blocks that had fallen. He looked so heartbroken, and Leah had to fight the urge to run in and scoop him up right away.
“Tyler,” Ms. Evers said, sternly, “did you hear me?”
The other kids at her feet looked at Tyler as though he were a mosquito, something annoying they could swat away without thinking.
And then Leah could not stand it anymore, could not bear to see her boy so lonely, so isolated, to see the adults in charge of his care modeling such uncaring behavior. She did enter the room then, sat down next to her boy, her body between him and Ms. Evers's group.
“Can I help you fix your tower?” she asked.
Tyler crawled into her lap, wrapped his tiny boy fingers in her ponytail. “You wet, Mommy.”
“Mrs. Tinker,” Ms. Evers said.
“I came to take him home because of the flood,” Leah said, “but I'm unenrolling him, as of now.”
“According to the contract, in order to unenroll him—”
Leah cut her off. “I know. Ten thousand papers to sign and some number of days you're going to charge me for anyway. I'm not doing that today. I need to get my boy out of here.”
She lifted Tyler up. It was hard to walk away with dignity, soaking wet, carrying a three-year-old and a diaper bag, but Leah tried to at least keep her chin high, to meet Ms. Evers's eyes with defiance on the way out the door. “You're not very good at your job,” she said, “if you can only manage it when it's easy.”
Tyler, peaceful in his car seat, fell asleep on the way home. Leah marveled at the height and rush of the river. The swirl of the giant puddles outside overwhelmed storm drains, the water halfway up the tires of the truck. The two of them spent the day of the flood together, Tyler snuggled against Leah's side, sucking his thumb. They lit the gas fireplace in the apartment, ate warm soup, read books by candlelight when the electricity went out. They stayed up late listening to the emergency warnings on her battery-powered radio, to the winds that rattled the window glass against its cheap frames.
WHEN THE SKY CLEARED, the Big Thompson flood was still there. Leah and Tyler walked with their neighbors to the barricades the police had erected on a high point above the riverbed. Riverside was somewhere under a deep layer of churning brown water full of debris—hissing propane tanks, twisted trampolines, downed ponderosas with their gnarled exposed roots. Leah could not believe that the town could be so immensely deep. It held so much more than she'd thought it capable of, and everything familiar underneath that churning water was certainly unrecognizable now.
Later, she navigated the barricades, found an open route to the hospital. Elmer's left leg was in traction, the top of the hospital bed propped up, the newspaper spread out in front of him. The air around him shimmered with restlessness.
“How you feeling?”
Elmer looked at the bag of donuts she carried, the boy she balanced on one hip. Leah wondered whether this was going to work, this peace offering. She wouldn't be making it except for a vague sense she had that they'd found their way back to each other, that she could forgive him for blaming her, that he'd forgiven her as well.
Some time passed before he spoke. “You're pretty lucky Marcia's gone home. I'm not sure she'd abide a younger woman bringing me donuts in my vulnerable state.”
“Oh,” Leah said. How embarrassing. “I didn't mean . . .” but then she saw the twinkle in his eyes and relaxed, just a little.
Elmer grunted. She put the donuts on the nightstand next to the bed and sat down on the edge of a visitor's chair. Tyler sat on the cold tile, ran a Hot Wheels car along the metal bars under the bed. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Well, yeah,” Elmer said. “I don't suppose you could close up all those Riverside gates when the water drops. I'm going to have some trouble getting out there for a month or so, at least.”
“I couldn't even budge the one I tried yesterday.”
“It's not rocket science,” Elmer said. “Take some grease.”
Elmer pointed to his jeans, which had been folded and laid neatly over the back of a chair. Leah tried to picture Elmer's wife, Marcia, worried, tired, folding the jeans, working from the assumption that daily care and maintenance of other humans, especially those who can't all the way care for themselves, is an intimate and powerful form of love.
“Keys in the pocket. I got a couple of the gates on padlocks.”
She wanted to ask Elmer how he managed the heart-searing confusion of parenting, ask him for advice about how he would handle Tyler, his thoughts about sparing the rod, about how to talk to people who could not love her boy the way they were supposed to, about how she could be sure she loved him enough, that she loved him the right way. What should she do when people saw things in her boy that weren't there? How could she make rational decisions about something tangled so tightly around her heart?
Elmer handed Tyler a donut, met her eyes, didn't say a word. She didn't know what to make of what passed between them in that silence, but she felt understood.
DAYS LATER, WHEN THE water had receded fully, Leah put Tyler in his car seat and drove to Riverside, the wreckage of five years of her working life. She hadn't found a new child care center, didn't trust anyone with her boy, not anymore. She had been taking him to work with her, assuring her boss it was just temporary, but she had no plan, not yet. The new parking lot at Riverside had been torn to pieces, the asphalt chunks found miles downstream. The new roof on the bathrooms had been torn off. Two large dumpsters were submerged in one of the quarry ponds. The native aquatic plants had in fact been too young to withstand the force of the water, and their tender roots had released and washed away.
Bobby was there, skipping rocks into the pond, and Tyler, fascinated, ran to stand next to him, to get a better view. Leah took a deep breath. “Bobby, I don't know what—”
Bobby waved a hand to stop her. “It wasn't your fault, Leah. I'm sorry for how it's been between us. I didn't know what to feel about anything for a long time.”
Leah sniffed. “Me either, I guess.”
“Dad sent me down here to help you. With the ditches.” He still didn't look at her. Leah wondered if it was only her or everybody that Bobby couldn't face head-on. She didn't know how things stood between him and Amy, his wife. She'd never thought about how the town might have turned on him as well, never wondered how he was feeling about his roots these days.
The three of them walked the site, trying to keep their feet on the weeds and cheat grass, keep their boots from suckering down into the sticky mud. One by one, Leah turned the wheels to close the ditch gates. Only the one she could not move before the flood needed any grease at all. The change in the levels, like so many other things, was not immediately evident.
Tyler was throwing pebbles into the ditch, his laughter bright and loud. Bobby joined in, laughing too, the two of them suddenly oblivious to her presence.
Leah did not know the rules of raising a good man. She had doubts about how much influence any mother had on the heart of her son, but seeing Elmer and Bobby made her wonder how much influence any father had, either. She wondered how much of Andy she would see in her boy as he grew, whether Tyler would have the charm and youthful sweetness that had drawn her to Andy in the first place, what else would turn out to be innate to the boy, rigid, unmalleable.
The osprey nest had been above the high-water mark. The twig configuration of the nest was disheveled but intact. “Look, Tyler,” Leah said, “do you see the nest?” She pointed at the tree. Tyler, enthralled with Bobby, with the deep splashing thunk of the rocks in the ditch, ignored her.
Bobby smiled, shrugged. “Kids, I guess.”
There was no sign of the birds, not the parents or the juveniles. There was no way to know whether they had migrated into the storm, flown themselves free
and clear, or been caught in the rushing misery, waterlogged, pulled into the churn and flow and press of the water. She didn't want to have to witness it alone. She didn't want to be the only one who wondered.
Leah lifted her boy, turned both their bodies toward the tree, and pointed again.
“There it is, son,” she insisted. “Look. It's still there.” Tyler turned away, refused to look in the direction she pointed. Leah gave in, wrapped both arms around Tyler, drew him close into herself, felt the tickle of his still-fine baby hair against her cheek. She began listing, silently, everything she could see was still standing, so much easier to bear than a list of everything that had washed away.
Lost Gun, $1,000 Reward, No Questions
To: Mom
From: Charley
Subject: Project Gold Rush
August 18, 2016
Dear Mom,
Yesterday, Chris and I received a contract to install our hybrid hydraulic braking system in a national long-haul trucking fleet based here in LA. Also, we received a note from our former long-haul trucker of a father that read:
Boys—I'm out on a mining claim near Tonopah. Dying. You want to see me? Be quick. If I were you I wouldn't. But I'm not you. —Del
I said, right away: Not our circus, not our monkeys, brother.
Chris shook his head. He said we should first consider carefully, as always, the price versus the cost of the situation.
My brain was considering Del, but my heart was still at your Colorado picnic table under the catalpa last October, the checkered cloth under your mismatched dishes, black coffee, ham steaks, the visceral mustard of Mary Lou Vargas's famous potato salad. You were having one of your spells—do you remember? When you're there but not there, riding the thermals of your own mind, spelunking through your darkening memories? Either that or you were mentally rehashing what I thought was an especially boring sermon that day. I gave you my arm when you struggled up and down the church steps, but I could have been Aunt Mano, could have been Chris, could have been a wooden crutch. I felt wooden, for sure, puppet-like, hard and cold and splintered. When I stood up, you stood up too. The wind blew dried leaves off the tree, opening pathways to the sun so that it flashed like shagbark paparazzi, the image of you impressed with light like a reverse X-ray, into and through me, seared onto my bones.
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