Thea took off swimming to where the roof dipped lower, an easier lurch for her tired body, but even the smaller gap proved difficult. Just a few inches from the top of the water to the bottom of the roof, and Thea scrambled to even get her hands above her head. There just wasn’t anything left.
“I can’t,” she said, unsure if Doris could hear her. Thea’s voice cracked. “I can’t make it.”
Doris wouldn’t know that her sister couldn’t make it. She’d just drown and then Thea would drown and then someone in a too-late rescue boat would pull their bodies from the water in a few days. Or they wouldn’t, and they’d wilt underneath the water to be picked apart by fish and turtles and time, feeding the flowers their poison once the water receded. God help them. Or maybe He already was, but she and Doris were part of the problem.
And then whatever was in that water touched her again, this time drifting casually against her lower back, a nudge, a warning. I hear you, it said.
“Jesus Jesus shit!” The fire returned, and Thea clawed at the peeling shingles. There was something in the water. There was something in that fucking water, and it kept touching her. On purpose. The bone in her pinky snapped and bent back as she hurled herself up, but her entire body was sparking like firecrackers and she didn’t feel it.
Her sister clung to the house. Thea could see her fingers grabbing at the edge a few feet away. Then she couldn’t see them anymore and Doris’s hand was gone.
Nononononono. Thea made it in time, caught her hand as it slipped below the water, pulled her up again.
Doris took a breath and hung her head to the side. She was fading. Thea was, too. There wasn’t much fight left.
“There’s something in the water!” Even though Thea screamed, she wasn’t sure Doris heard. Her sister’s hand felt limp in her grip. She pulled, lacking strength, lacking sanity.
“There’s something in the fucking water, Doris. Come on, come on. Let’s go. There’s something in it! Doris—”
A splash.
How she even heard it—a splash like that amongst the chaos and rain—but Thea was certain she had. Something big, like a dolphin, sleek and silver, leaping up and crashing down. Thea had been staring down at the top of her sister’s head, so she hadn’t seen it straight on. Big and silver, and it was out there in the water with them. Doris hung limp and dazed, gaping ahead with her mouth open.
“Come on!” She was shivering and cold, and Doris was out of it. If it weren’t for the warmth of her skin and slow pulse beating in her wrist, Thea would swear Doris was gone. She shook her. Doris’s hand bled from grasping the edge of the metal. She’d let go of the house, but not that metal. Thea couldn’t haul them both up—metal and sister. It was one or the other or neither, but not both.
“Doris, let go,” she said. You will not drown, sis. You will not.
Another splash. This time Thea caught the silvery glint of it just under the water’s surface. No more than twenty feet away. Whatever it was, it was moving closer, coming toward them like a taunt. No hurry—this thing had all the time in the world.
Doris stared, transfixed. Thea couldn’t bear her to be in the water one more second. That thing was coming. It was here.
So Thea jumped. Releasing her sister’s hand, she sprang on top of the sheet metal, knees slamming hard on the corrugated side. She almost lost it, tipping it too much to one side and slipping, but righted it in just enough time to get steady and center herself. All the while Doris remained lost, hand clinging deeper into the siding’s razor edge.
Reaching out to Doris, she pounded on the metal. Thwaang. The water rippled around them. Doris blinked.
“Grab my hands,” she said.
The noise or the jump or Thea’s crazed face inches from her own or a combination of them all finally broke her sister’s trance, and she winced as she uncurled her hand from the metal. The blood from her wound oozed against Thea’s palm. Doris hissed and reached up with her other hand.
Together, the sisters pulled, all the while waiting for another splash, a closer one. Instead, the siding ripped apart Doris’s blouse and tore into her skin as they muscled her aboard. Doris screamed. It shredded her, but anything was better than being in the water. Alive and bleeding was better than dead and drowned or stuck in the gut of some flood beast.
She hauled Doris up. They crumpled on top of one another in the center of the sheet metal as they bled, and it spun away from the house in the torrent.
Thea couldn’t look. Head down, she wished it all away and tried not to hurl. The pressure of Doris’s body on top of hers was a small comfort. Her sister’s heartbeat was so slow, as if it had already stopped working, but every time she began to get worried, it’d pick up again, just enough to keep Thea calm. Her eyes felt filled with sand, and they stung like hell. Her throat was shredded, and it pained her chest to breathe. Sound oozed over her in echoey thumps, her ears clogged with water. But she was alive.
Doris melted on top of her sister for ages, hours, probably only a few minutes because that’s all they had before their metal raft crashed into something, threatening to knock them both overboard again. Thea jerked up—another house, nothing more than a roof now. Not a monster. Not that thing, whatever it was.
Ricocheting off the house, they spun into the flood surf again, this time with little else to stop them for a long while. Rain crushed the horizon in black and lightning. Whatever might be out there would be underwater before they reached it, unless it stopped soon. Thea looked toward the sky, an unbroken blanket of overfilled clouds. It was not stopping.
She shivered. She was cold and sick and thirsty and tired. She needed rest, some sleep. Doris needed it, too, but neither would get it.
Casting wary eyes at the water, the sisters floated and waited. Thea looked for anything familiar but saw nothing but the tops of streetlights and highway signs and shadows of other tops of things she couldn’t quite discern.
Doris looked up, seeking help she knew would never come.
Water lapped over the edges of the metal, lashing at the long wound down her torso and legs from the edge of the siding. Warm blood and cool water pooled around her hands, funneling down her and Thea’s bodies. They floated. They waited some more.
Thea turned after some time, releasing herself from her sister’s weight. “This is bad.”
This, as in the flood, or this, as in their aches and wounds—it didn’t matter.
Thea spoke again, croaking out a hoarse whimper. “We have to stay out of the water.”
“We can try,” said Doris.
“There’s something in it.”
Doris tried to resituate her body but lacked the strength. She sagged deeper into Thea’s sharp corners. “There’s a lot of stuff in the water. It could have been anything. A dish towel. A hose. A body.”
“It could have been, but it wasn’t. I know what I felt.”
“Just tricks. The drugs are making you see things.”
Thea squirreled out from underneath her. Doris rolled onto her side. The metal pulled up, but Thea slammed it down again with her weight. Water sprayed up, then settled again.
“It touched me. I saw it.”
“I was there, Thea. I didn’t see anything.”
“You were looking right at it!”
Doris didn’t say anything else but drifted in a way that told Thea she wasn’t being exactly honest, that she was trying to convince herself that Thea was wrong.
“So what if there is something there? What are we supposed to do about it?” she finally asked.
Thea lay cheek-down on the metal, arms at her sides. “Stay away from it and hope it doesn’t catch us.”
“Why do you assume it’s bad?”
Clenching her hands, her sister spoke slowly and quietly. “Do you really enjoy arguing with me this much?”
“Who are you to decide, Thea?”
>
“This argument is stupid. They’re huge fucking monsters. Are my labels offending their slimy monster sensibilities?”
Doris slammed an open palm against the makeshift raft. “Just stop!”
Thea stopped her mouth, but nothing else. Her body was limp, but her eyes were sharp and angry.
Night approached. Every gurgle, every swish, was a threat. Doris lay ragged at her side, fury lining her lungs. Thea wasn’t even sure what she was most mad about—the destruction, or Thea herself, or both, or everything.
But Thea couldn’t bother with it now. A haze dragged over her. Exhaustion. Maybe the drugs, she wasn’t sure. She wanted to sleep, to uncoil her muscles and let her body do whatever it was going to do, but then she’d hear something or feel something, or their shitty raft would dip or bob and her heart would catapult to her throat. She expected more noise, distant cries for help, the sound of crunching metal, but all was dulled by the roar of water. Sometimes she’d see other people clinging to floating pieces of their lives, scrambling to keep their chins above water, but just as quickly as they arrived, they were whisked away again. It was just like before, people drifting in and out of her life and leaving just as quickly.
Everyone except Doris, even if it was only spite that kept her there.
Thea listened to the water, and she waited.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was becoming more difficult to see, which was a comfort for Doris. She could imagine then, in the dark. It covered her up. Life was easier when all of her was in the dark.
Thea breathed raggedly, laboring like a pneumonic wheeze. Doris listened to her for a long time, grateful for the noise.
They were quiet for a while before Thea couldn’t tolerate it any longer. She never could handle silence, stuffing the void with her noise whenever it got too quiet. Always a bark, a gnaw, a stab at Doris’s senses. Always sharp—Thea would never let Doris fade out. She took it as more of a personal slight that she had to remedy, another break she had to try and fix, until she finally began spewing explosives like, “I stole his wallet.”
Doris didn’t respond.
“After he gave me money,” Thea clarified, as if that made it better.
Every nerve in her body quietly fired off. All the emotions involved in an exchange that Doris had known about, though never explicitly named. The undeniability of Thea’s confession socked her in the chest harder than she expected. He gave me money. And here Doris was stuck on a piece of metal, sliced up the gizzard and shivering, and Thea said what she said and laid that ickiness in her lap with nowhere for Doris to throw it, like a child’s tantrum. Here, you deal with this.
“You knew,” she said.
Doris didn’t respond.
“He told you.”
James hadn’t said anything—never confirmed, never denied. Doris had only asked him once, and it was the only time she’d seen his face so empty. So, she’d known. And yes, he’d been the one to tell her. He’d been giving Thea money for months, possibly years. He’d gone behind Doris’s back, lied to her for ages, even after they’d both decided to cut off all contact with her. He might as well have stuck the needle in her arm himself.
“What did you do with his wallet?” Doris asked.
Thea shrank, trying to disappear. “What is with the wallet? Jesus.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I took his fucking wallet. I took his money and then I stole his wallet and then I bought heroin and threw the wallet in the dumpster behind Walgreens.” Her pointed words dropped like needles, loud and painful and splattering everywhere as they hit Doris’s surface. “Is that really what you wanted to hear?”
“Yes, it is. It’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”
Thea rocketed upright. “Why? Why, Doris? You just want to get out of me the one thing I don’t want to say? You think I ever forget, even for a second, that I’m just another degenerate addict? You gotta drive the nail deeper and deeper so that I hate myself as much as you hate me? If I kill myself, will you finally be happy? Or will you hover over my grave and tsk that I didn’t do it sooner?”
But Doris was too tired for this. Some of it was right, some of it was bullshit, all of it was . . . she didn’t know. She didn’t care. Why did she want to know about the wallet? Thea didn’t tell her anything Doris hadn’t already guessed. She’d been spitting nails at Thea for years. Maybe she did just want to be sure that one had stuck. Probably because she was just as rotten at the core as Thea, just as messed up, and it fucking sucked to see her anemic reflection getting everything Doris had ever wanted. Like James.
“And now you’re ignoring me. That’s great, Doris. Just fucking great.” Thea’s teeth chattered as she shouted.
“I have nothing to say, is all.”
“Bullshit you don’t.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Doris said.
Thea was quiet, then asked, “Do you even care?”
Did she? “I can’t tell,” she said.
Doris turned away as her sister glared at her, indignant. Eventually she lay back down without saying anything.
The mixture of shock and exhaustion and old news rendered Doris emotionless, which was like an incendiary for Thea. Doris just didn’t have the capacity to feel anything now, so Thea fidgeted, unsatisfied, bracing for an attack that wasn’t coming. Her adrenaline suddenly had nowhere to go.
Lightning whipped across the sky, the resulting thunder shaking the water from the ground up. Every flash revealed a new shadow under the water—willowy, distorted lines that could be anything and everything. Doris cringed at each of them but refused to look away. Thea had no idea what she was dealing with. These were different monsters than she was used to— these were Doris’s monsters, the liminal and unclassifiable kind. The monsters of old stories that shouldn’t exist, but do.
Which was of course when Doris spotted it, as if waiting for her silent acknowledgement. Lightning scored the sky, casting a bright glare against the flood, and a black, tangled shape below. It was gigantic, far more immense than Doris thought possible under the circumstances. She stifled a yelp, praying Thea didn’t see it.
It was right underneath them—its limbs spiraling out like the whiskers of some massive virus. A dread deeper than death sank into her. It found her. It found them both. That sneaky fucking monster of her childhood now bloomed into a fully-grown terror, and she was helpless against it.
“Thea,” she started. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say. She wasn’t even sure if her sister had heard her.
“What?”
The words caught in Doris’s chest. She wanted to scream, to lunge for her sister and wrap her arms around her, to hold her and tell her that she would never let anything bad happen to her ever, ever again. She wanted to say that she was sorry. Doris wasn’t sure what to say she was sorry for, exactly. There was too much. No apology could ever be worthy, but it would be something.
She wanted to tell that she had failed—the monsters she tried so hard to keep away had found them anyway. She wanted to beg Thea not to hate her for everything she didn’t do. She wanted to scream at Thea in turn. There was so much, but just when the emotion felt too huge to bear, just as it threatened to spill into coherent sentences, the lightening would come to reveal the nightmare looming just below. It moved, limbs swishing with power and strength. Did Thea see it? How could she not?
Her thoughts branched in a dozen directions, writhing not unlike the tentacles of the monster beneath the water’s surface. She feared that if she opened her mouth Thea would finally see her for what she was, so she stayed quiet.
Below them, the monster responded in kind—quiet and looming.
For now.
The waters faded, taking a familiar shape.
Doris was home again. Her old home. Her mother’s home. The home where Thea lived. A fog blotted out everythi
ng but the living room and kitchen. Normal. Fine. There was always a fog here. She tried remembering the room without the fog, but couldn’t.
She sat across from her mother, who hadn’t removed her hands from their white-knuckle grip of her mug. Thea had been missing for thirty-six hours. The kitchen smelled of smoke from the frozen pizza Dad had burned in his effort to do something other than “sitting around being pissed off.” As with most of his help, it failed in spectacular fashion. He’d left the house to purchase more scented candles to cover up the smell. She didn’t expect him back for another few hours. Maybe he would go and search for his youngest daughter, but she doubted it.
Each of them was four cups of coffee into the evening, and Doris got up to make another pot. Ma didn’t budge.
“You want Folgers again or the vanilla macadamia nut?” Neither of them gave a shit, but she asked anyway. She made the Folgers.
The police left two hours ago, asking the family to call if they heard anything. They wouldn’t hear anything, and the cops weren’t going to bother looking too hard. Everyone knew what she was doing—she’d just never stayed away this long before. Ma didn’t even want to file a report.
“She’s out. Just out. Working. She has a new job. She’s probably fine.”
Doris called 911 herself, knowing none of those things were true. She spoke to the cops in code so that Ma wouldn’t have a coronary once they left, furious about spreading filthy lies about her sister. Because it was easier to believe that her oldest was a liar than that her youngest was an addict.
Still, despite her thriving denial, there was a stillness about Ma that suggested how deeply uprooted she was at the moment. It was unnerving to know that her mother was experiencing emotions other than frustration and savageness, and Doris wondered how hard they all would pay for it on the back end.
Providing Thea ever returned. But the alternative wasn’t an option. She knuckled the worn buttons on the coffee maker, trying not to think about what new ring of hell she’d descended to where Thea was the one to run away, while she was stuck here, in this suffocating house, alone with their mother.
A Flood of Posies Page 9