by Lamb, Wally
The Merc dropped nose-down and we went underwater. The roaring in my ears stopped and everything turned from gray to black. When I pulled myself and then Annie up into the air pocket at the rear of the car, I saw that it had landed vertically, its nose underwater, its back bumper above it. It had somehow come to a stop that way. I saw, too, that the station wagon’s way-back was about a foot and a half above water. Remembering that Uncle Chick’s toolbox was back there, I lifted myself over the seat back, then pulled Annie up, too. Holding her in one arm, I reached around in the cold black water, feeling among the spilled tools until my hand located Chick’s ball-peen hammer. I grabbed it and used it to smash out the back window. When I looked back, I saw that Uncle Chick, Aunt Sunny, and the baby had made it up to the surface, too. Aunt Sunny was coughing and spitting out water, holding Gracie above her head. Uncle Chick was wild-eyed.
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see that the Merc’s back bumper was leaning against a long, low building of some kind. If I could climb out and onto the bumper without having the car move forward, the roof would be in reaching distance. “I’m going to climb up there, then I’ll pull you guys up,” I called back.
“What? What’d you say!” Chick said. The roar of the water rushing past was deafening. I repeated what I’d said, shouting it this time.
“Climb up where?” Chick shouted back.
“Onto a roof! The car’s leaning against a building and I think I can reach the roof!”
“Save Annie!” Aunt Sunny pleaded.
My hands were wet and shaking from the icy cold, but the pebbly roof shingles gave me some grip, and on my second try I managed to hoist myself up and swing one leg over and onto the roof, then the other. Leaning as far as I dared over the edge, I reached down and coaxed Annie up onto the bumper. Her little fingers curled around mine and I pulled her up one-handed. “I got her!” I shouted. “She’s up here on the roof!”
Somehow, Uncle Chick managed to climb out of the back window and onto the bumper with Gracie tucked under his arm. He handed her up to me, grabbed onto the edge of the roof, and pulled himself up. “Come on, Sunny!” he shouted, turning back to his wife. “Climb out as best you can onto the bumper and I’ll take it from there!”
She tried once, twice. “I can’t do it,” she screamed, panic-stricken.
“Yes, you can! I know you can!”
I realized that her soaked winter coat was weighing her down. “Aunt Sunny!” I shouted. “Take your coat off!”
“What? I can’t hear you?” I shouted it again, as loud as I could. She heard me that time, because I could see her trembling hand fiddle with the buttons while she held on to the seat back with her other hand. One-handed, she somehow got the coat off her shoulders and pulled the sleeves from her arms. The coat fell away. Lighter now, she managed to get herself halfway out of the back window, but she was still halfway inside. Between her outstretched arm and Uncle Chick’s, there was a foot and a half of space.
“Kent, I’m going farther over the edge,” Uncle Chick said. “Hold on to my ankles, and when I say pull, you pull with all your motherfucking might!”
I nodded. “Annie, here,” I said, turning to her. “Hold your sister.”
She shook her head. Said she was only allowed to hold Gracie when she was sitting on the couch. “Come on! This is different!” I yelled. I held the baby out to her and she took her, bucking and crying, in her arms.
I knelt behind Uncle Chick and grabbed his ankles. “Okay!” I said. But what if I didn’t have the strength to do it? What if all three of us got pulled back into that black water? A thought flashed in my mind: I wish Donald were here. We need Donald.
“Okay, I got hold of her!” Uncle Chick shouted. “Now pull!”
With my elbows and knees digging into the gritty shingles, I strained and pulled as hard as I could, managing to move myself backward, but only a couple of inches. “Pull, goddamn it! Pull!” Uncle Chick screamed. I clenched my teeth, grunted, and gained another several inches. “That’s it! Keep going! Pull!” My arms felt like they’d come right out of the sockets, but when I pulled again, we gained another five or six inches. Aunt Sunny’s head came into view. It was working! We were doing it!
“Pull, Kent! Pull!”
As I did, I felt the roof begin to give way under me. Uncle Chick’s body slipped forward instead of backward and Aunt Sunny’s head disappeared again. “The roof’s caving in!” I screamed.
“Okay, let go!” Chick screamed back. “Save the girls, Kent! Save my kids!” On my hands and knees, I watched him slip over the side.
The sound of the roaring water faded away again. I must have gone deaf for a few minutes, because when I looked over at Annie, she was screaming without sound. Afraid that the roof would cave in altogether, I crawled over to her, hugging her body tight against mine. Then I remembered the baby. “Where’s Gracie?” I said. My hearing had returned.
“She was slippery,” she sobbed. “She wouldn’t stop squirming.”
Oh, no! I thought, scanning the empty roof. Oh, no! Oh, no! Then I stood and grabbed onto Annie’s hand. “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to get off this thing before it caves.” Spotting a tree growing on the far side of the building, I led her across the roof toward it.
I don’t remember the particulars of how I got us both up into that tree, but I did. We sat together on one of the bigger limbs, our legs dangling over the side, me with one arm wrapped around Annie’s waist and the other arm holding on for dear life to a branch above. Poor Annie. She had long since lost the blanket I’d wrapped her up in and was only wearing her cold, wet pajamas. She was shivering like crazy, and though I couldn’t hear them, I could see that her teeth were chattering. The shiny black water was racing beneath us, carrying ice and debris. Carrying little Gracie to who knew where. What did she weigh? Fourteen or fifteen pounds? There was no way in hell she could survive. I unzipped my jacket, pulled Annie tight as I could against my side, and zipped it up again, figuring my body heat might warm her up a little. As best I could, I tried to hold in my sobs so she wouldn’t know I was crying for Gracie.
As we waited to be found and rescued, I realized that the rain had finally stopped, and that the moon had come out from behind the clouds. Now I saw exactly where we were, and why the Merc had stopped in that vertical position. After it had pitched itself over that retaining wall, it had landed at the back of the Ford dealership on Franklin Avenue and wedged itself between the long garage we’d climbed on top of and these two huge black oil tanks that sat there, kitty-corner against each other, in front of the car. There, to the right of the tree we were in, was McPadden’s Funeral Home, and across the street was Stanley’s Market, where I bought my sodas and smokes and stole candy bars. To the left were the grinder shop, the Laundromat, the dry cleaner’s where, two days before, I had picked up the long winter coat that Aunt Sunny had worn and later had to shed after it got waterlogged. Just a little ways down the street was the Shamrock Barbershop, where Uncle Chick worked. I found myself wondering if Uncle Brendan’s mynah bird had survived the flood.
Annie reached up and tapped me on the shoulder. She said something that I couldn’t hear over the noise of the water. “Hmm?” I said. “Say it louder.” She wanted to know if the cops were going to make her go to jail because she’d dropped her sister. I thought long and hard. Then I said, “You didn’t drop her. I did. You got that?” She looked up at me, confused. “I had her in my jacket, but she slipped out when we were climbing into this tree.”
“No she didn’t,” she said.
“Yes she did! And I don’t want you telling anyone she didn’t! Okay?”
We stared at each other for the next several seconds. “Okay,” she said. In my whole life, it was the most generous thing I ever did for anyone. Hey, I don’t know. Maybe it was the only generous thing I ever did.
“Look!” Annie said a few minutes later. When I followed her gaze, I saw Uncle Chick. He was back on the roof of the garage, creepin
g toward us on his hands and knees. When he reached the edge, he stood up and leapt, grabbing hold of the tree trunk and then shimmying up and onto a sturdy limb on the other side of ours. He was sobbing, shouting. “I couldn’t hold her, Kent! The car moved forward, and when our hands went beneath the water, she slipped from my grip! . . . But Sunny’s a strong swimmer. She’ll be okay, I know she will. . . . But oh, god! What if she . . . ? Oh, god!”
He hadn’t yet realized that Gracie wasn’t with us. And later, when he did, he rested his head against the tree trunk and wailed.
As the water receded, blocks of ice, smashed cars, and broken tree limbs began to reveal themselves. When we started shouting for help, a guy appeared on the upstairs back porch of the funeral parlor. “I see you!” he called to us. “I’ll get help.” A few minutes later, he and two men in rain slickers and hip boots—firemen, I guess—came sloshing through the knee-high water toward us. Two of the men were carrying a ladder against their shoulders. They leaned it against the trunk of the tree. One climbed the ladder, got hold of Annie, and climbed down again, the poor kid slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Uncle Chick and I climbed down after them. For some reason, there were tangles of twine in the fallen tree limbs. The water was now only up to my shins. As I followed the firemen, I kept stumbling on these loose bricks underfoot. They were all over the place.
An ambulance took Annie and me to the hospital, where two nurses treated us for exposure, removing our wet clothes and wrapping us in heated blankets. Another nurse used a rubber squeeze bulb to suck dirty water and mucous from our throats and nostrils. They made us put on these hospital nightgown things and told us we had to stay there overnight for observation. At first, they were going to separate us, but Annie was too scared to let me out of her sight, so they put us in the same two-bed room. When Annie asked the nurses where her mommy was, they gave each other funny looks and said they didn’t know but people were looking for her.
They had wanted Uncle Chick to come with us to the hospital, but he’d refused, insisting that he needed to stay and search for his wife and his baby daughter. I think it was around midnight when Donald walked into Annie’s and my hospital room. Annie was asleep by then, so the two of us had to whisper. He kept stopping to collect himself in the middle of telling me his story: how the coach’s wife was waiting when the track team got back to school. How he hadn’t gotten scared until they said he couldn’t go home. “Instead, I had to go over to Coach’s house until we found out what was going on. Coach called the police station for me. When they finally called back, they said you guys were here. Dad’s here, too, you know. They brought him in a little while ago. They let me look in and see him, but they wouldn’t let me talk to him yet, because they said he’s in shock. Is Ma . . . is she dead, Kent?”
I nodded. “Gracie, too.”
He looked mad at first—the way he’d looked the day he discovered that I’d wrecked his trophy. But then he broke down. I pushed over and he got into bed with me, put his arms around me and sobbed, his tears falling against my neck. When he left, about an hour later, he looked more dazed than anything else. He was staying the night at his coach’s house.
I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing and hearing the floodwater. Finally, after the second or third time the nurse came in and shined her flashlight in my face, she gave me something to help make me drowsy. When I woke to the sound of birds a little before dawn, I felt, and then saw, Annie asleep against me. Sometime in the middle of the night, she must have climbed out of her bed and up onto mine.
They found Gracie’s body first, stuck in some twine-draped tree branches in front of Stanley’s Market, just a few hundred feet away from where the Merc had crashed. They didn’t find Aunt Sunny’s body until that afternoon when Mr. McPadden and his brother began the cleanup at the funeral parlor. It had gotten a lot of damage, both on the main floor where the wakes were and in the basement where the bodies were embalmed and the caskets were stored. It was weird: they found Aunt Sunny on the floor in the casket room, lying facedown in two or three inches of water with her arm sticking straight up. On the radio, I heard Mr. McPadden say that a block of ice had bashed in the basement doors and the water must have carried Aunt Sunny’s body inside.
I don’t remember getting out of the hospital, or very much about the funeral. Funerals, I mean. Two of them. I remember what the newspaper said, though; all that week, I read every single article about the flood. After all that rain we’d had, the earthen dam holding back Wequonnoc Lake had begun to leak near the base late that afternoon, the paper said, and then, around 10:00 P.M., had collapsed. As the water rushed forward—forty-five million gallons of it, some engineer estimated—the ice on the surface broke into pieces, some of them weighing a ton or more. These were carried along the downward slope, slamming into whatever was in their way with the force of a freight train engine. An old brick mill on Broad Street was in the water’s path, and it collapsed under the force of the surge, burying alive four third-shift workers who were at their machines, making rope and twine. Gravity increased the velocity of the debris-strewn water as it raced south, wrecking a number of downtown businesses before passing over the railroad tracks that ran behind the stores and dumping into the Sachem River. From there, the swollen river rushed downstream toward New London, spilling into Long Island Sound. Three Rivers was declared a disaster area, and flags were flown at half-mast for the victims. In all, seven people died: Aunt Sunny and Gracie, those four workers at the twine factory, and a bum who’d been squatting in a lean-to along the riverbank—some colored guy named Rufus Jones. And this was kind of creepy: the paper said that someone else had died that night, too, in a plane crash somewheres else: Aunt Sunny’s favorite singer, Patsy Cline.
Uncle Chick had to swallow a bitter pill: the fact that his house had remained watertight. If we’d only stayed put instead of trying to outrun the floodwater, Aunt Sunny and Grace would still be alive. Once the funerals were over, my mother took some vacation days and stayed with us at Uncle Chick’s for a week or so. When it was time for her to go back, she called a kitchen table conference with Uncle Chick, Donald, and me. She said it was time for me to come home—that her brother had enough on his plate now without having to worry about me. She volunteered to take Annie, too. Annie would need mothering, she said. Sunny had no sisters and her mother was too sickly to take on the responsibility of a young child. “You helped me out, Chick,” she told her brother. “Let me return the favor.”
“But what about school?” Uncle Chick said. Mom argued that there were kindergartens in New Britain, too.
Chick was on the verge of agreeing with Mom’s plan when Annie, who’d been listening from the next room, burst into the kitchen. “No! I want to stay here with Daddy and Donald and Kent!” she screamed. She threw herself onto the floor and pitched a tantrum. When my mother tried to pick her up and comfort her, she hit her and yelled, “No! Go away! Go home!” Then she crawled on her hands and knees over to me and climbed into my lap.
Uncle Chick said we should probably leave things the way they were for now, and that I didn’t need to move back. “Kent’s no trouble, Elaine,” he told his sister. “In fact, he’s a big help. And he and Annie get along good. She’s going to have to deal with enough loss without him leaving, too.” When I glanced over at Donald, his face was unreadable. Nobody had asked him for his opinion and he hadn’t volunteered it, either.
“I’m staying, Mom,” I told her. “I can cook, help out around the house, babysit Annie in the afternoon.”
“You’re still at school in the afternoon,” Mom pointed out. “And Annie goes to morning kindergarten. Who’s going to take care of her until you get home?” Uncle Chick told her that Annie’s bus brought her back at about twelve thirty, when he was home for lunch. He could bring her to the barbershop when lunch was over, and I could pick her up there.
“Yeah, and all’s I got last period is study hall,” I said. “If Uncle Chick calls the school and explains the
situation, they’ll let me get excused early.”
Didn’t I need to study during study hall? my mother asked.
I laughed. “All anyone does in that study hall is yack with each other and play cards. I usually just put my head on the desk and take a nap.”
“What about you, Donny?” she said, turning to my cousin. “Could you take care of her some afternoons?”
Donald shook his head. He either had band practice or National Honor Society. “And once baseball season starts, forget it. Coach Covino’s a stickler about practice. If you skip, you don’t play.”
“Well . . . ,” Mom said. Reluctantly, she packed her things, hugged the four of us, and drove back to New Britain by herself.
In the weeks that followed, Donald got busier than ever. He didn’t even come home for supper half the time. That was his way of coping, I figured. Uncle Chick coped by drinking. His two or three beers a night became a six-pack, a six and a half. When he moved on to the hard stuff, he started going down to the Silver Rail after work instead of coming home. So it was me and Annie at the house a lot of the time—just the two of us. That was when I started touching her in ways I wasn’t supposed to.
I didn’t really know why I was doing it. All I knew was that Aunt Sunny’s death made me angry and sad, and that my little cousin and I shared a secret: that her little sister had died because of her, not me. I had told that lie to protect Annie, but to my surprise, no one really blamed me. It was the circumstances, they all said. I had nothing to feel guilty about. If I hadn’t smashed that window and found a way out of the car, we all would have died. Not even Donald held Gracie’s death against me. “Hey, you tried, man. That’s all you could have done. I’m just glad you were there for Annie.” He was guilty about not having been there himself, I knew. I could have used that against him, but I didn’t. Instead, I used my hands against his little sister. The better part of me knew it was wrong, but the better part of me didn’t seem to be in control when we were by ourselves, which was plenty. It was like my hands had a mind of their own.