“Oh, fuck. Rob, come here.”
She’d been sleeping right on top of it.
“Rob!”
Attuned to the white noise around her voice, it took another yell or two to get him to his feet. But by then she had already lifted the small trap door and dropped it again. By the time he reached the stairs, she was pointing at it, open-mouthed.
“What?”
“There’s a fucking person in there.”
“A body?”
“A kid. It was a kid, and he looked right at me.”
“What do you mean a kid?”
But Rob didn’t wait for an explanation. The two crowded together as Sestra raised the hatch door again. Crumpled, fetal, and shivering was a boy with terrified round eyes gaping at them in a soundless scream. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old, and with him he brought an overpowering stench of urine and anxiety. He had been there the entire time, locked inside while Sestra tossed and turned and snored on top of him, while Rob tinkered and tore apart his home.
“Jesus.” Sestra stared at him for a moment before regaining enough civility to extend a hand to him. The boy refused the gesture, moving only to dart his gaze between the two looming adults.
“Are you alone?” Rob asked.
Then Sestra: “Are you hurt?”
“Where’s your parents, kid?”
“What happened?”
“Can’t you talk?”
“Will you talk?”
Rob clawed at his forehead. “This ain’t good, Ses. This ain’t good at all.”
“Shut up, Rob. You’re scaring him.”
“Good.”
“Just go away, damn it. Fucking hell.”
Rob retreated, but only to the top of the stairs, perched like a vulture.
Sestra knelt low next to the floor compartment, just looking at the boy. Deep cracks puckered his dry lips, sweat clung to his hairline and armpits, and his rags slumped over his pointy shoulders, consuming him, having been stagnant too long.
She didn’t know what to do with him. He was terrified of her, and taking care of scared kids had never been a talent of hers. So she did the only thing she could think might be useful.
They had one full water jug left—an old milk jug they’d found floating among a family of bodies. It had a crack at the top and no lid, but it still managed to hold water. She fetched it and tried handing it to the kid.
“Drink,” she said, a command the boy flatly ignored. He contorted his way into that confined space with his limbs hugging his body. From the jaundiced look of him, he’d been this way for days.
Sestra rested back onto her elbows, ignoring the child in return but refusing to leave him alone.
Rob weaved in and out of the room, oscillating between curiosity and a panic attack.
“Just another mouth. Has he said anything? It smells of shit in here. Are you prepared to dip another mouth into the water rations? Has he drunk anything yet? Is he still alive?”
The boy didn’t move, blinking hard at her as if just waking from a dream. Sestra wanted to yank him up by the collar and shake him out of it. Child or not, he was going to die if he didn’t snap out of this comatose terror.
Wake up, kid. Wake the fuck up and get to work. Surviving is work, so work.
How had he made it this long anyway?
Hunger stabbed at her gut, intolerable knowing that there was food on board, but Sestra couldn’t bring herself to eat it while this kid lay in his own piss, staring at her. She wanted to. Rob had already shredded one of the jerky strips, and just thinking about the brittle, toffee-like texture spraying like glass shards in her mouth—something of substance, not gooey and rotten—was more than she could bear. She wanted that fucking food. Oh God, did she want that food.
“Fuck it,” she said, and launched her hands at the boy, who promptly began to scream with a power that made Rob drop something metal on the deck above them.
“¡Mijo! ¡Mijo mijo mijo!” the boy said. “Mamá vengan por mí!”
Rob blundered down the steps. “What did you do to him?”
He kept screaming over and over. Sestra tried to shout over him with little success. “I didn’t do anything to him! I didn’t touch him!”
“What is he saying?”
His words had blurred into gibberish by then, just a shrill, trilling noise.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” Sestra said. She had taken a few classes in high school but had been hungover through most of them, reduced now to understanding a few words here and there—one of which she thought she recognized now.
“He said something about ‘my son.’ Mijo means son or something. I think. I don’t know. Maybe it’s his name.”
“Why would he be talking about a son?”
“Not his son, jackass,” she said, wondering to herself if the boy was repeating his own mother’s last words to him.
When she knelt next to him this time, he turned up his chin to her, shiny eyes loosing a flurry of tears down his cheeks. The slight tremble from before exploded into a tremor.
“Fuck, kid. You’re a wreck.” Again, Sestra lowered a hand to him. This time, he reached back, grabbing her arm and almost pulling her into the compartment with him.
The boy clung to her. Sestra didn’t need to hold him back—he gripped her chest and sobbed into her, a wet, sticky spot oozing between them.
Rob winced, pulling back lest it be contagious.
She didn’t know what to do. Her arms hovered inches away, as if embracing him would make him disappear. The kid burrowed further into her, refusing to let go, and though Sestra didn’t know it then, this was where the boy would stay forever, somewhere nestled into her chest cavity like an impending heart attack, always seconds away from igniting. Not that this was a difficult task. Her heart had been a barren place for some time. It had ached for warmth, for someone to graze against it, for ages—she suspected long before the flood. This child need not more than glance in her direction for her heart to open wide and swallow him whole.
But that’s how everyone was now. Or, at least she suspected that’s how everyone would be if they were alive—full of love with no one left to give it to. As far as she knew, she, Rob, and this boy were the only three people left on earth.
The boy hugged her, and it would be a long time before he stopped.
CHAPTER SIX
The boxes hadn't been enough. Water crept up unfailingly. The attic floorboards swelled with it like a disease, angry and swollen, fighting it. Doris kept her palms to the wood as if to soothe it.
Thea stomped on the pile of wreckage from her perch on the roof, checking its stability before attempting a third run at hauling Doris up it. The first two attempts had ended before they’d began with Thea putting a foot through a box or cutting herself on an exposed beam as her legs wobbled on the unsteady surface. This was as good as it was going to get.
“It’s good,” Thea said. Or Doris thought she said. It was hard to hear over the roar. “I think it’s good.”
Doris studied the mound of things she’d forgotten she owned—a striped ironing board, porcelain dolls that she hated that everyone thought she loved, a floor lamp with a broken shade that she’d sworn to fix someday, soggy boxes full of dull gray things doomed to the dusty, cobwebbed nook of her house, things she feared for one reason or another to throw in the trash where they belonged. Things she’d wanted to forget about, things she couldn’t forget about. All of it was useless trash now. It always had been, she understood only now.
Thea lowered herself back into the attic. The pile held. She stared down at Doris, studying her.
“What?” Doris said.
“I’m thinking.”
“About what?” But Doris knew at once what needed thinking.
“I don’t think I can carry you.”
“I wouldn
’t expect so.”
“You go first. I’ll help your legs up.”
“That’s not going to work.” She wouldn’t be able to keep steady—one misplaced hand or shift of a box would send her crashing to floor, and one more fall like that, and she might not be able to get up again.
Unless she took the ketamine. She didn’t know how much it would even help, and then where would they be? Both doped to hell and in pain. They might as well dive into the water now and save the flood the trouble of chasing them.
“Why won’t it work?” Thea’s already sunken cheeks sucked in further as she furiously attacked the remnants of drugs inside her mouth.
“I can’t climb.”
“Then why’d we bother building this fucking mountain, Doris?”
Doris looked to the roof, then to Thea.
“God damn it, Doris. You are coming up, one way or another. I’ll pull you up by your hair if I have to.”
“You keep saying that as if it’s a noble gesture.”
“To want my sister not to die?”
Doris clawed her fingers into the softening floorboards. “Who are you doing it for? For me or despite me? Because you couldn’t live with yourself otherwise?”
“Oh, fuck, Doris. Of course I couldn’t live with myself. How am I the bad guy for that again?”
Because then you’ll have stolen my drugs and left me here to rot. Because then you’ll have no choice but to admit what you’ve done.
But she shouldn’t say that. She shouldn’t.
She had to get up, but everything was wet and slippery, and the thought of moving made her insides howl. She had to get to the roof but didn’t even have the energy to pull herself to a stand, let alone climb an unsteady trash heap.
Her insides went stiff and heavy, the dread of knowing what she would have to do settling over her.
Thea peered down at her from the hole, expectant. Doris could feel her anxious energy without even looking at her.
She squeezed her hand over the gelled square Thea had given her, trying to douse the rage in her gut—rage at Thea for finding them, rage at Thea for abusing them, rage at James for filling the script, rage at the people who made the fucking drugs her sister loved so much, rage at the money it made them, rage at herself for watching it happen, for not being there, for not grabbing her sister and shaking her out of it, for not even noticing until it was too late. There was rage and rage and more rage, because fury was easy. It was an encompassing emotion that was simple to understand and blotted out the rest. The fuel that lit the blaze—the guilt and shame and everything else—well, that was much trickier stuff.
“Stop looking at me,” she said. “I don’t need your pity.”
Where she expected a fight, she instead was met with nothing. Thea backed away from the hole, swallowed by the storm. It unnerved Doris anytime her sister did what she asked without complaint. It usually meant she was up to something much more sinister.
She had an entire pack of troches burning a hole in her pocket.
“Thea!”
Thea popped back into view. “You just told me to stop looking at you.”
Doris exposed her one troche, squished from anxiety. “I need you to promise me something.”
Thea narrowed her gaze, listening intently. “What?”
“If I take this, you need to promise me that . . .” She wasn’t sure where she was going with this. Promise me that if I do drugs with you now, you’ll stop doing drugs later. It was nonsense, and part of her wondered if Thea had been right as she placed the ketamine in her hand. The water crept higher still in a barrage from every direction, her injured body neared collapse with every breath, and here she was debating the opioid crisis and lecturing her sister instead of doing whatever she could to survive. It was nonsense.
She was nonsense.
“Never mind.”
Before she could think any more on the matter, she dropped the troche into her mouth.
Arms wrapped around her knees, Thea absorbed the destruction. Muddy rapids coursed throughout the neighborhood. The road she’d walked to get here had disappeared under six feet of water. It was angry, with rain like little hands pulling her down. Bracing herself, she wedged the heels of her shoes into the roof shingles. Every direction was brown and gray and pieces of things meant for another world.
She scanned the rooftops for more people while Doris grappled with her conscience or whatever the fuck she was doing down there. Whatever it was, she knew by now that her presence would only complicate matters. Doris would give the word when she was ready, and it wasn’t like she had anything else to do besides feel like shit and wait for the ketamine to kick in.
Every other roof in the cul-de-sac was empty. What were the odds that every one of them had been away when the water hit? She could smell the bloat of corpses—all in her head, of course, but closer than she’d like. It wasn’t as though this was her first encounter with death, but the thought of a drowned grandma sticking to the panes of her front window like a dead fish in an aquarium was not an image she relished.
A family of four huddled atop their roof one street up. The mother wrapped her arms around the necks of her children—not little little, but small enough to not leave home alone. Two sisters? A boy and girl? It was impossible to tell from this far away. The dad army-crawled from one end of the roof to the other, then back again, searching for an escape that wasn’t there. Caged and helpless, his hyper-masculinized need to protect would be the last bit of him to succumb to the flood. Thea almost felt bad for him.
The flood slammed against the side of the house, making sucking noises as an undertow pulled debris underneath the surface.
“This water is angry.” Thea looked at the sky as she spoke.
“Water is always angry.” Doris’s voice was far away, and Thea tried not to let that scare her.
“It’s dumb and strong, like a bad cop.”
“You’d know.”
At this, she turned to peer into the hole. Doris remained just where she’d left her, huddled at the base of the mound. The sky spat at her toes. Get a fucking grip, woman. It wasn’t just the water that was angry.
“It’s not going to stop,” Thea said.
“Yes, it will.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It’s a scientific fact. It cannot rain forever.”
“It could for our forever.”
“Maybe.”
Thea marveled at her sister. Still, to this day, so sure of everything that she felt certain enough to boss around the sky. Thea wished, for even just a moment, to know what that kind of immutable confidence felt like.
As if reading her mind, Doris locked eyes with her. “We are not going to die.” It was not a question.
But she wasn’t up here yet. She hadn’t seen.
“Ready to join me on the roof, Your Majesty?”
And to Thea’s relief, Doris nodded and stood up.
Doris wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream. Thea liked to think it was Doris who looked down upon society from her regal throne, but she was too deluded and drugged out of her mind to recognize her own pedestal. It couldn’t get any worse for Thea, because someone would always be there to catch her when her Grecian column wobbled. Someone was always there to prop her back up, whether it be mom’s wallet or dad’s ostrich head burying, or Doris herself opening doors she swore to seal shut. Thea didn’t know a thing about the mire and muck and stagnation of real life; she’d done nothing but run from it from its very first knock. Thea was nothing but a cloud of dust.
Not knowing how to respond to Thea’s dig, Doris decided to stay quiet. Her sister might be delusional, but she wasn’t stupid. She just hoped the water didn’t catch up to them before she realized it.
Doris gave her house one last look, landing on a broken snowman Christmas decoration shoved in a
corner. Some kids had thrown rocks at it on New Year’s Eve last year, denting the mold in a dozen places. James insisted on keeping all the Christmas decorations out past January first, but she’d wanted them taken down the day after Christmas. They’d argued, and just as Doris had been about to launch herself into the yard and start yanking multicolored lights from the trunk of their mesquite tree, he’d set a hand on her shoulder and said, “Please?”
It was a multilayered “please” that could’ve meant anything, but it had been enough to get her back into the house. He’d been furious, near tears, when he’d discovered it vandalized. Doris thought he’d thrown it away. She should have known better.
She was steeling herself for the climb, back rigid in anticipation, when Thea turned away from the hole. In a fit of frustration, she began to scream.
“Hey! Hey, you fuckers! HEY!”
There were people out there. Other people close enough to talk to—or yell at, anyway.
Doris braced herself against the heap, so very close, yet leagues away. An urgency bloomed—she needed to get up there now, but her upper body strength wasn’t enough. She wanted to know who they were. Did they have a boat? Was it the army or the police? Somebody had finally found them, and Doris had nothing to do but guess and listen to her sister scream at them.
“Hey! Over here! We’re here over here! Where are you going?”
Thea stomped across the roof. She sounded like a monstrous roof rat, like the one that invaded this attic a few years back.
“Motherfucker!”
The water had reached the second-to-top step. It was coming. The attic walls swelled, threatening to fill the entire space. Tighter and tighter. It was harder to breathe. There were people out there, and they had no idea she was there. Thea was acting insane. No one would pick her up. No one would ever know that Doris was down here.
“You fucking pussies, fuck you!”
Screaming and screaming. Just shut up, Thea. If you want anyone to listen, you must shut up first.
All the while, the walls closed in and the roof grew taller and taller. She’d drunk the wrong ribbon-tied bottle and physics didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was that she was stuck in the attic and the water rose anyway.
A Flood of Posies Page 7