—
Peter and Ben hadn’t heard from Anna again after midnight—they couldn’t reach her on their cell phones, and their landline no longer worked. They sat up and talked for most of the night, listening to the sounds around them, and looking out the window at the flood rushing through the streets below. Cars had been swept along and disappeared. Police boats came by, traveling through the streets, watching for people to rescue, and whenever possible removing them from the places where they were trapped. The engines of the police boats had become a familiar sound through the night. And the building creaked so eerily in the gale-force winds that at times they thought it might be coming down. And they knew there was nothing they could do to get out that night. They were the only tenants left in the building. Everyone else had evacuated, and by morning, they both knew they had made a mistake. They could almost feel the ancient building swaying in the wind. And sensing what was happening, Mike had sat and watched them all night, nervous and alert. Ben stroked him to calm him down and the big black Lab whined as he looked at him with worried eyes.
“It’s okay, boy, everything’s fine,” Ben reassured him, and Mike whined nervously.
As daylight came, after the heavy rains that had continued through the night, the groaning of the building seemed to grow louder, and Mike barked several times as though trying to tell them something, and Peter looked at Ben.
“Do you think we should try to get out?” he asked cautiously.
“I’m not sure we can. The street is still flooded.” And they were close enough to the river that the currents would be strong and hard to fight. The water was moving fast. “We could wait for a police boat to come by.” But they hadn’t seen one in a while, and the building was beginning to sound like a ship trying to break loose from its moorings. Peter didn’t like the sound of it, and neither did Ben, or the dog.
“I don’t think the building will hold for long,” Peter said nervously. “It’s beginning to sound really bad.”
“Yeah, it is,” Ben agreed.
“I was the captain of the swim team in high school,” Peter said, wondering what they should do—try to make a run for it, or stay and wait for the floodwaters to recede, which could take a long time. And if the building collapsed, they’d be killed for sure. “What about you? Want to give it a shot?” Peter wasn’t sure, but trying to escape was beginning to seem smarter than staying.
“I’m a pretty strong swimmer, but I’ve never swum through anything like this. And I’m not sure he can make it either.” Ben glanced at Mike, who had lain down on the floor with his head between his paws and was whining piteously, as though he didn’t like the sound of their plan at all.
“Dogs are smart—he’ll probably let the current carry him along, which is what we’d have to do too,” Peter said seriously. “We don’t have to go very far to get to high ground, as long as we don’t get caught somewhere, or smashed into a wall.” Nothing that Peter was saying was appealing to Ben, but the sound of things breaking in the building and outside was unnerving, and they watched a tree come down a few feet from their front door and the rushing waters sweep it away like a twig.
“That’s what we’d have to watch out for,” Ben said thoughtfully, and as he said it, they heard a crash and the sound of breaking glass somewhere in the building, as the wind blew a window in. Theirs had been rattling for hours. “I think maybe we should get out of here,” Ben said, looking worried, and then glanced down at his dog. “I guess we could try to leave Mike here.”
“What if something happens to the building? We might not be able to come back for him for days,” Peter said, and Ben nodded. It felt as though they had no choice. Anna had been right. It had been dumb to stay, and they both regretted it now. The two boys looked at each other and nodded. They were young and strong and in good shape, and figured they could make it to safety, or be rescued by a passing boat. It was better than sitting there waiting for the building to come down around their ears, which sounded like what was about to happen. The groaning sounds had gotten worse just in the last few minutes.
“Let’s make a run for it and get the hell out of here,” Ben said as he stood up, wondering what they should wear so they wouldn’t get dragged down by their clothes. In the end, they decided on jeans and T-shirts, which was what they had on.
They let themselves out of the apartment a few minutes later, and Mike followed them down six flights of stairs to the front door. There was a steep staircase up from the street, and a foot of water in the front hall, which they waded through to get to the door.
“It must be about twelve feet deep out there,” Peter commented as Ben nodded and patted the dog, and Peter opened the front door. Ben had put Mike on his leash so he could control him better and wouldn’t lose him in the fast-moving water. He could always let go of it if he had to, but it seemed a better way to start out so Mike didn’t swim too far from his reach.
Once Peter opened the door, the wind was so strong that it pulled the door right out of his hand and slammed it against the wall behind them. The glass broke and fell into the water they were standing in, in the hall. The two boys looked at each other and exchanged a smile. They both were nervous but sure now that they were doing the right thing and should have done it hours before. But the tide was lower now than it would have been the night before, and it was better trying to escape in daylight, where they could see what was around them in the water.
“Good luck,” Peter said to Ben, then walked out onto the front stoop and stepped into the floodwater, and an instant later he was gone, swept away with the force of the current, moving at high speed as he tried to stay on the surface and not get pulled down. He didn’t have time to turn around and watch Ben jump in behind him, holding tightly to Mike’s leash. Peter was already out of breath from the struggle when he saw a lamppost coming toward him, and thought it might help slow him down. He tried to maneuver himself toward it, and with a superhuman effort, he grabbed it and hung there for a minute, fighting the powerful forces that tried to tear him from it. Then he saw something dark race past him, and instinctively he reached out with one hand and grabbed Mike’s collar. It was the Lab hurtling through the water. Peter turned and tried to see what was behind them, but there was no sign of Ben, just the dog.
“It’s okay, boy!” Peter shouted at him, holding tightly to his collar, keeping his head above the water with one hand and his other arm wrapped around the lamppost with all his strength. He didn’t even feel a piece of metal slice through his arm as he saw a boat heading toward them. They had seen Peter hanging on, and they sped toward him. The dog was frantic as Peter refused to let go of his collar to keep him from being swept away. The boat was next to him seconds later, and two Emergency Services officers grabbed Peter and the dog and dragged them into the boat. Peter was breathless and nearly unconscious as they wrapped him in a blanket and laid him on the floor, and the dog whined as he lay beside him. Peter waved a hand at them before they could move on.
“No…my friend…he’s in the water…we were together, he was with the dog…” They looked around the swirling waters, but saw nothing. They headed backward for a short distance, but there was no sign of anyone in the water, and without saying anything to Peter, they moved on, as he slipped into unconsciousness. He had swallowed a lot of water and threw up when he came to again. They brought him to a makeshift dock they had erected for emergency boats, and had ferried the people they rescued to it all night. They signaled for an ambulance for Peter, and as they put him on a gurney and slid him in, he waved wildly at them for the dog. The two men who had rescued him glanced at each other, and one of them nodded and helped the big, exhausted Lab climb into the ambulance, and he lay down on the floor. His leash was still attached to his collar, but there was no sign of Ben anywhere. Peter laid his head down on the gurney and was crying when they got to the hospital. He tried to explain to the paramedics what had happened, and that Ben was still in the water back there somewhere where they had found him.
“Maybe he got ahead of you, son, and you didn’t notice. The water was moving pretty fast. We’ll tell the boys in the boats to go back and take another look. Just take it easy now.”
“It’s his dog,” Peter said, crying like a child, feeling as though he had stolen Mike instead of rescued him. The Lab barely managed to crawl out of the ambulance and followed the gurney into the hospital. But no one stopped him as he dragged his leash behind him and followed Peter. The nurses in the ER had seen stranger things that night, as the paramedics rolled Peter down the hall, and left him there crying, when they went to fill out the admission forms. Mike lay down next to the gurney with a mournful look, and a little while later, the nurses came to check on Peter. He had his face turned to the wall and he was still crying, as he thought about Ben, and worried about him. All he could hope was that someone had picked him up by then.
“Is this your dog?” the nurse asked gently. They both looked as though they had nearly drowned, which was the truth.
“He belongs to my friend,” Peter said, turning to look at her. “They went back to find him.”
They had heard a hundred stories like it as the rescue teams brought people in. And not all the stories had happy endings. Many of them didn’t. The death toll so far had been higher than they feared. “What’s the dog’s name?” she asked to distract him as she took his vital signs, and saw the cut on his arm, as Peter continued to cry. She asked Peter his name, how old he was, his address, and if there was someone he wanted them to call. He gave them Anna’s number because he didn’t want to frighten his parents if the hospital called them directly, and the nurse jotted down the number. “The doctor will take a look at you in a minute,” she reassured him, and Mike watched her go, as Peter leaned down and patted him. All Peter could think about was Ben and what might have happened to him after he jumped into the water. The current had been a lot stronger than he had expected, and he hadn’t even noticed he had a gash on one arm from when he’d been hanging onto the lamppost. The nurse had made note of it on his chart and was telling Juliette about him as she handed it to her.
“The paramedics said he nearly drowned. I think he may need stitches in the arm. He came in with a dog. He said he was in the water with a friend, but they brought him in alone.” Juliette nodded somberly. It was easy to spot him down the hall, with the black Lab lying next to the gurney, and she could see that Peter had been crying when she stopped next to him and smiled. They had put heated blankets on him to keep him warm. The OES had gotten a series of generators working for them a short while before. Peter was shaking violently from the cold water and the shock.
“How are you feeling, Peter?” she asked him gently. He was badly shaken, very pale, his lips were blue, and they had treated him for shock in the ambulance and when he came in. Like everyone else she’d seen since the hurricane hit the city, he had been through a lot, and from his appearance, so had the dog. She examined Peter’s arm and decided it didn’t need stitches, and his vital signs were better than she’d expected. He had youth on his side. Anyone older than he wouldn’t have been able to survive and resist the powerful force of the water. He told her about Ben while she examined him, and she told him Ben might have been taken to another hospital, depending on where he’d been found, and by whom, and she asked about the dog. Peter was in fairly decent condition, all things considered, but she wanted to keep him for a few hours to observe him, possibly overnight, to make sure he didn’t have any more serious secondary reactions from nearly drowning. And he told her he was a junior at NYU.
“Would you like us to call your parents?” she offered, and he shook his head.
“They’re in Chicago, and it’ll just scare them. I’d rather call them myself and tell them I’m okay. My mom was worried about the hurricane.” He felt for his cell phone, but it was no longer in his pocket, and his wallet was gone too. It made him realize that Ben might have lost his too, and if he was injured or unconscious, they wouldn’t know who he was. He said something about it to Juliette, and she promised to let him know if a young unidentified male came in, in the next few hours, and he thanked her. He told her what Ben looked like, and then she asked him if he’d mind if she put Mike somewhere out of harm’s way, in case one of the patients objected to him, or was scared of him, although he was very well behaved.
“There’s a supply closet with a couple of cots in it that the ER docs have been using to get some sleep. I’ll put him there and give him something to eat,” she promised, and Peter sat up and watched as she led him away. Mike didn’t seem to object, and she came back a few minutes later and told Peter she had given Mike half a turkey sandwich and a bowl of water, and he seemed peaceful and was lying down. Peter smiled and lay down on the gurney and thought of Ben again, and drifted off to sleep.
When he woke up, Juliette asked one of the nurses to bring him a phone so he could call his parents. He was already crying before they answered. He told his mother where he was and what had happened, and she burst into tears. He was sobbing as he listened to her. Getting through the water was the hardest thing he’d ever done, and just thinking of it now made him shake harder. He knew he had come close to dying in the water.
“I don’t know where Ben is, Mom. He was right behind me, and I grabbed on to Mike. But I didn’t see Ben anywhere, and they didn’t find him when they picked me up. They said he might have gotten ahead of me, but he was behind me when we left the house.” He couldn’t stop crying, nor could his mother, and his father had burst into tears the minute his wife had signaled that it was him. It had been an agonizing wait for word of him.
“He’s probably okay, and they took him to another hospital,” his mother tried to comfort him. It was what Juliette had said to him too.
“I hope so. It sounded like the house was going to collapse, so we got out.” He tried to explain to her, and she didn’t blame him for not evacuating when he should have—she was just grateful that he was alive and had called her. They had been trying to reach him since the night before, but cell service had been poor or nonexistent, and they were worried sick when they couldn’t get through. There was almost no cell phone service downtown by then, and Ben’s mother had called them several times too. Jane Holbrook wasn’t sure now what to say to her when they called her, but if Peter had turned up in a hospital, Ben might have been picked up too, by another rescue boat, and taken somewhere else. If one of them had survived it, the other probably had too. But it would be hard telling her that Peter had been rescued and Ben was missing.
They talked for a few minutes, and Peter spoke to his father too. They wanted him to come home to Chicago as soon as he could fly and the airports opened. It had already been announced that parts of NYU had been severely flooded and would be closed for months. Their buildings extended over a broad area, and those in the worst flood zone had been badly damaged. And the airports were still closed or the Holbrooks would have flown in. They wanted him to come home to recover from his ordeal as soon as he could. Peter didn’t comment, but he wanted to go home too, once he knew Ben was okay.
He called Anna after that, and she cried as soon as she heard him, and they both sobbed when he told her that Ben was missing. “I grabbed Mike when he went past me, but I didn’t see Ben anywhere. Has he called you?” Peter asked her, and Anna said he hadn’t. She promised to come to the hospital if he stayed there, and she said she could take Mike home with her until Ben got in contact with them. After they hung up, Anna’s mother called Ben’s parents, to see if they’d heard from him. They had just spoken to the Holbrooks in Chicago, and Ben’s father was calling all the hospitals to see if they had anyone matching Ben’s description who had been rescued from the flood. It was agony waiting to hear from him, and getting through to the hospitals and obtaining information was hard. Everything was chaotic, and information was sparse.
Anna’s mother went to see Peter that afternoon, and brought him some clothes and a pair of her husband’s sneakers, which fit him, and he clung
to her like a child and cried. There was still no news of Ben, and no sign of him at the hospitals his parents had called. All they could do was wait until he reached out to them, or they located him at a hospital.
Juliette decided to keep Peter for the night when he ran a fever, and she checked on him several times. She told him that Mike was doing fine, that one of the nurses had taken him for a walk on her break, and everyone loved him and was feeding him. Peter had asked Anna’s mother to leave the dog with him. He liked knowing he was there, like a piece of Ben he had with him, and the hospital didn’t mind. When Peter went to check on him in the supply closet, Mike was ecstatic to see him. Peter sat on the floor next to him with his arms wrapped around him until a nurse made him go back to bed.
“What about his friend?” the admitting nurse asked Juliette while she made a note in his chart about the fever.
“We don’t have him here, and I gather no one has heard from him,” Juliette answered quietly, and the nurse nodded. There was nothing else she could say. It was a familiar story by then, of people who had lost track of each other in the flood. And Juliette knew that sooner or later, they would find Ben’s body, or he’d call home. Until then all anyone could do was hope.
Chapter 5
The noise level where Ellen and her mother were was deafening, the lights were on constantly, children cried or played and ran around. Conditions were crowded, people were upset, and it was like trying to sleep in an airport or a train station, and between the stress of what they were all going through and the chaos around them, no one could get any rest. Grace looked exhausted and every bit her age on Monday morning, after the hurricane hit the city the night before. It had arrived with lightning speed in the end, much faster than predicted, and with greater force. Ellen felt no better than her mother, and Gina and Charles were wiped out too. There was almost no cell service, with very rare exceptions downtown, so Ellen could no longer reach George. And just as had happened with Sandy, the news channels reported that the city was virtually untouched uptown. All the serious damage and flooding had occurred south of Forty-second Street, only a few blocks higher than the last time. Charles told Ellen that he would have liked to find hotel rooms uptown for all of them, if possible. His hotel had been evacuated too. But Gina had already told him she wouldn’t go. She still hadn’t heard from Nigel, and he had agreed to meet her at the shelter whenever he could. Most of the bridges into the city were closed, and she suspected that he hadn’t been able to leave Brooklyn yet, and Red Hook had been one of the places hardest hit. She thought he might still be trying to salvage the equipment in his studio. She didn’t want to just disappear to a hotel uptown and leave him worried sick when he came to look for her. It didn’t seem right, however tempting Charles’s offer of comfortable accommodations was.
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