Thea’s heavy feet stomped above her, and Doris expected one of them to come through at any moment. Her sister had become incoherent and manic. Jesus fuck. Doris had to calm her down before she tore the whole house down.
“There will be more, Thea!” Doris tried to shout, but lacked the willpower, partly out of fright, partly because she didn’t believe it. “There will be others.”
Whether Thea heard her or not, she wasn’t sure, but she had quieted a few decibels. When she finally peeked through the hole in the roof, her eyes were hard and calculating. She stared at Doris like a predatory bird deciding whether it was hungry.
“You’re coming up,” Thea said. “It’s just us. They left. They looked right at me and they left anyway. Fuck ’em. You’re coming up here now.”
“I can’t climb on my own. I need you to help lift me.”
Rain poured over the back of Thea’s head. The room smelled increasingly of mud and mildew. The wetness of the air was enough to suffocate her. She wanted nothing more than to be free of this coffin.
“I got it.”
Thea braced herself as best she could, hanging her body through the hole, arms stretched down to meet her. Blood from the cut on her arm dripped down, pooling around Doris like mildew. The water had reached her. There weren’t any stairs left to see, just a gleaming topcoat of the flood. Every ounce of her screamed to remember this. It felt like a test—the pop quiz could arrive any time. What color was the scarf of her snowman? Had her wedding dress been white or ivory? What did pressboard feel like? What was dust? What was mud? The questions pressed against her temples rapid-fire. Remember this. Remember this. It scared her, because her instincts knew something she did not, because they told her memories like this would someday be precious.
“This is fine,” Doris said aloud. “I’m coming up.” But she was scared. She didn’t want to be scared, but she was.
Blood splashed like fireworks into the unsettled water surround her. Each drop sank, and then was gone.
“You ready?” Thea said.
Of course not. “Sure.”
Ignoring every opposing instinct, Doris sprang toward her sister. Their hands met, threatening to slip away from each other, but they caught. Thank God, they caught. Thea grasped her with a steady and surprising strength, holding tight despite her injury. Holding tighter still as Doris scrambled, reeling and out of breath and threatening to black out again. The ketamine wasn’t working. It wasn’t enough.
But it had to be. She refused to die in her horrible attic. She would not die here. She would not be loose skin sloughing off bloated bodies. She and Thea would not be statistics. Not this time, at least.
Together, they got her up. Doris broke through the hole, spilling onto the roof with a splat. Thea lunged on top of her to stop her from tumbling down it, right back into the water. It was the closest the two had been in ages.
There they stayed, heaving against each other and trying to regain some sort of composure. Doris couldn’t stop trembling. She was sobbing and didn’t know why.
It was the rain that finally raised her from her stupor. Aggressive liquid pellets slammed against every inch of her. Thea had unknitted herself from Doris. Neither sister faced the other. The rush of water crackled closer now, more immediate, angrier.
Her stomach felt like a brick. Doris noticed the way the rain cascaded against Thea’s cheeks, pummeling her eyelids and running down her nose.
“You made it,” Thea said. “You did it. You made it.”
“I did.” Her response was almost blotted out by a loud crack of thunder. “Have you seen anyone else?”
“No one that isn’t stuck like us.”
“No more boats?”
“None,” Thea repeated.
“Where are all the people?” It was a rhetorical question, one she didn’t expect an answer to.
But she got one anyway.
“It’s just us,” Thea said. “It’s just us, sis.”
It was both everything she’d ever wanted and everything she’d always feared.
They might survive the flood—surviving each other was a different story.
The water rose. Doris dragged herself to the edge of the roof, draping a hand over the side while Thea relaxed as if nothing was wrong, gazing into the sky while cloaked in a distant glaze. The ketamine must be taking hold. Doris didn’t feel much of anything herself aside from a slight dulling to her body. This was enough to grant her a bit more mobility, just enough to shift around without wanting to die. This, she supposed, was something.
She tried to avoid thinking of Thea’s pocked face and tracked-up arms. She didn’t want to think about how, even in a catastrophic flood, she was able to get high. She just wanted to shake her as hard as she could. It didn’t matter that they might drown at any moment.
The surrounding air felt wet. The water neared her fingertips. Only minutes more and she’d be able to lean over the lip of the roof and touch it.
“We’ve got to get in,” Doris said.
“Get in what?” Thea’s words shot away from her.
“The water. What else?”
“You’d better be fucking with me.”
“It’s coming now, Thea, no matter how relaxed you feel.”
Thea rolled onto her side. “Oh, fuck off.” Dragging herself to her knees, she shivered and cast spotlight stares from behind her eyes.
“You really do look terrible.”
“Weird. I feel great.”
Thea’s cargo pants sank in the pockets, clinging wet to her spindly legs.
“Jesus, Thea,” Doris said.
Her jaw stiffened. “Stop it.”
For once, Doris truly didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want this for you. I fucked up. This isn’t your fault. All bullshit, stupid genialities to make herself feel better when all that was needed were two words. Two words Doris just couldn’t bring herself to say right now. She owed her sister more than a deathbed apology, a last-ditch, frightened, pathetic excuse to clear her own dirty conscience.
It wasn’t all her fault either, though.
Her little sister loomed over her. Doris reached up to her. “Help me up.”
Pausing a moment, Thea extended a hand, yanking Doris upright in a single motion.
“We have to get in,” she said again.
“And do what?”
“Swim, I guess.”
The sisters sat on the roof, one kneeling beside the other, both searching for a way out. They looked up, listening for manmade noise. The wuhwuhwuhwuhwuh of helicopter blades or the dull thrum of passing planes—anything at all to indicate that people were out there surviving. Even if they were left behind in the process, to know people were there and trying was a comfort. The isolation of their predicament was almost more unbearable than the prospect of failure.
Doris kept her head down. The water moved in strange ways, hypnotizing in its way. Her body was numbed from cold and exertion, her head a burnt bulb, but the water and its top-slick of old life was entrancing, almost inviting. Looking at it from above, it appeared pained and strangled, an angry flood like any other. But just below, it flowed unfiltered. It knew exactly what it was doing.
The water followed its own current, sucking debris below the surface with its riptide, but some of the bigger stuff kept afloat—mainly uprooted trees and splintered bark, a mattress made for a toddler, the top of a neighbor’s patio table, corrugated aluminum siding from a house or a shed. It all whipped by, up and over the block fences the water had now consumed, but the siding stuck under the lip of the neighbor’s house.
Doris slapped her sister’s arm. “Look.”
“What?”
Pointing, Doris said, “That metal siding there.”
Thea glared at it. “I don’t think that’ll work.”
“It floats, doesn’t it?”
“How you expect to get to it? How do we get on top of it without tipping it over?”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“Better than a house?”
“Look at the water,” Doris said. “Anything that floats is better than a house that doesn’t.”
Thea bit her bottom lip until it bled. “You’re insane.”
“We don’t have many options!
“Fuck! I know, Doris! You don’t need to keep pointing this shit out to me.” Thea screamed over the rain, now louder, more immediate, as if sky and earth were trying to pinch to a close, one end meeting the other.
Thea watched the flood, scowling. “I need a minute. I just need one fucking minute to figure this out.”
They both knew she didn’t have a minute. One minute could be the difference between the metal raft being within reach or miles down the road. One minute meant more water, more distance. It meant more everything. There wasn’t anything to figure out.
Doris dragged her fingers over the rippling spray of rain pelting the shingles. The flood was nearly within reach now.
“What are you doing?” Thea asked.
“Nothing.”
“Get away from the edge. You’re making me nervous. Jesus, I need a cigarette.”
Doris ignored her. Thea needed to get it all out already, and Doris hadn’t the patience for entertaining another of her sister’s hysteria attacks.
Thea paced, stomping in circles behind her. “Can you just—will you move?”
“I’m fine.”
“I know you’re fine, but just move.”
“I don’t need to move, Thea.”
“But will you? Goddamn, even here you’re disagreeable.”
That familiar rage sparked again, just when she’d thought the water had snuffed it out for the moment. “Your discomfort isn’t my problem.”
“Oh, I know, Doris. I fucking know that you don’t give a fuck about anyone’s discomfort but your own.”
“Why the hell should I? You’re a goddamn adult, are you not? Act like one. I’m not going to wipe your ass like Ma does.”
If Thea had had anything in her hands, Doris was sure she’d have thrown it at her. Instead, she stood there picking at her scabs. “I never asked you to. It would be nice if you cared, though, even a fucking little bit, about things.”
“I care about things.”
“About me.”
“Jesus.” Doris pushed the words through clenched teeth. “We do not have time for this right now.”
“If not now, when?”
“There’ll be plenty of time while trapped on that.” She pointed at the metal siding twitching precariously against the neighbor’s house.
“I’d rather not, thanks.”
“Oh, that’s great. Just like always, Thea stomps her feet and gets her way. You run amok, vomiting your bullshit everywhere and letting the rest of us clean it up, and then complain that we don’t care about you. As if my life isn’t already all about you.”
Thea slapped her thighs, almost jubilant in the irony. “Oh my God. Oh, fuck, isn’t this just rich. Queen Doris thinks it’s all about me. That’s pure slapstick.”
“Fuck you, Thea.”
“Please,” she said, flopping cross-legged onto the roof. “I can’t even start with this right now.”
Anger turned over and over and over in her gut. Doris could have hit her. She wanted to throttle her and slap her across her face, but she couldn’t get there quick enough. So she did the next best thing. The only thing she could think of.
“Have you seen James’s wallet?”
Thea drew her jaw in close.
“Do you remember what you did with it?”
Rolling up from her crouch, Thea towered over Doris, expression torn in a hundred directions. She didn’t have to speak; Doris didn’t want her to. Whatever she might have to say was totally irrelevant now.
“Where the hell is my husband’s wallet, sis?” Where the hell was her husband while she was trapped here on her broken roof with her broken sister and her broken body and everything was broken? Where was he the one time she’d truly needed him in years?
But she knew—she didn’t have to guess. Her chest buckled as she avoided the thought of it. She cried. She was tired. She was angry, but that’s not why she’d said what she said.
It took Thea a minute to compose herself. Doris didn’t care.
“I don’t have his wallet,” she said finally.
“Anymore.”
Thea nodded once. “Anymore.”
More silence. Some thunder. Some lightning. Nothing louder than the rift between them.
“I didn’t know that you knew.”
Doris returned her sister’s earlier sentiment. “Please.”
“Did he tell you?”
Doris dipped her fingertips into the oncoming water. It was none of Thea’s business what James might or might not have said. What did she care if he’d come home that same day and bled his heart out to her or remained distant until Doris had finally asked where his wallet was, where he had been? Who cared if she’d known the moment he’d walked through the door, carefully crafting her next move over the course of the following weeks? It was just words—stupid, impotent words dissolving in the rain like everything else.
Thea started to speak, stopped, started, and stopped two more times before abandoning the idea.
To her credit, she didn’t try to apologize.
“I can’t do anything about it now,” she said instead.
Doris acknowledged her again. “You literally could do anything. Anything at all. For once.”
Thea searched the space over the top of her sister’s head. For once, she said. Loaded words, always loaded with Doris. Every word a tamped-down musket. She probably deserved it, but right now Thea didn’t feel like granting her sister the satisfaction of hitting her mark. As if Doris ever missed.
The metal siding Doris kept going on about still clung to the side of the next house. Not far, maybe twenty feet. Thea could get it if she jumped now, but she was pissed. Leave it to her sister to ruin a perfectly good high. God damn her.
Doris remained near the edge of the roof, a relic of her former self. Thea had always gone to such great lengths to avoid thinking of her this way—everything was fine, Doris was still her sister, her accident didn’t define her. But all the family’s efforts to prove that nothing had changed had done nothing to sway the fact that everything had.
She wasn’t sure what to do now. She felt like shit. How long had Doris known about her and James’s shady dealings? How much did she know? How much was really Thea’s fault? Was everything her fault? Part of it, of course, was her fault. Fuck.
This wasn’t supposed to happen today. It was supposed to be like any other day, scouring the streets for a place to rest and something to steal, and not having her insides revolt while the sky tried to kill her. Her eyes were dry as hell despite all the water. There was water everywhere except where she needed it.
Lacking the compunction to do anything but lace her fingers across her stomach, she dropped again to her knees and thought about sleep. Just a good nap. That’s what she would do when this was over—sleep and sleep until she couldn’t sleep any longer.
A splash in front of her. Brown water sprayed onto her face from the direction that Doris had just been laying, now conspicuously missing.
Thea arched like a cat and scrambled to the edge of the roof. A body thrashed in the swirl, flapping, uncoordinated, and then sank.
Doris was in the water.
Hearing white noise, Thea dove in after her. She reached, spread her limbs and fingers out like feelers in hopes of catching a glimpse of Doris’s collar or skirt or hair. But the water was strong, and it ripped at her. Bobbing to the surface, she screamed for her sister, choked o
n water, and screamed again. She swam, felt, swam, dove, feeling and feeling, getting bombarded with twigs and sharp things and oozing slicks of detritus that made her jump. It was foreign and difficult to breathe, and Doris wasn’t anywhere.
She called her name over and over, but she could barely hear herself over the din. “Doris! Doris? Doris! Where are you, Doris?”
Then she felt it. She was surprised that she did through all the trauma of the moment. For a second, she thought it was her sister grabbing her ankle—whatever touched her leg had the unmistakable air of cognizance. But it was too slippery and long and smooth to be Doris, too jointless to be human, and just as quickly as it touched her, it released her. Doris surfaced about twenty feet away, forcing her way toward the metal stuck against the house.
Thea took off after her, less agile and totally without focus, punching the water out of her way more than swimming. Doris bobbed up and over the water, down again, up and down, up and down. Her legs flailed loose, catching her back in the tumult, but she always realigned herself, two steps forward, one step back. She’d always been a swimmer.
Reaching the siding, Doris lunged for it, slipped off, lunged again, and held. Thea chased her, behind by a mile. By the time she caught up, Doris was pinned between the metal and the house, gripping the sharp edges with one hand and the house with the other. Blood poured from fresh gashes in her hands. Thea landed next to her, back to the house, hitting her head against the roof’s edge as she gripped it with her life.
The current was stronger than she expected. She coughed up water and wondered what the hell to do next.
Yelling at Doris was the best idea she could come up with. “Are you trying to fucking drown yourself?”
“Get on!” Doris pointed toward the roof.
Where were the neighbors? Was this part of their shed? Their house? Water covered the windows. There wasn’t any escape now. The neighbors were either gone or dead. So few people on roofs. All of them gone or dead. Was it flooding everywhere?
“Thea!”
Doris’s weak grasp of the metal and the roof waned. Water sloshed over her chin.
A Flood of Posies Page 8