Rushing Waters

by Danielle Steel

  The atmosphere in the house was somber, and as soon as Peter had eaten something, he and Anna took a cab to the Weisses’ apartment. The Weisses had just come back from the morgue after seeing Ben, and were sitting silently in the kitchen, looking dazed, when Anna and Peter walked in with the dog, who was excited to see them. Adam had asthma and wasn’t supposed to get too close to him, but he loved him anyway. Ben had gotten Mike when he moved into the apartment, since he had never been able to have a dog because of Adam. But Peter wanted to bring Mike back to them now. It was right that they should keep him, in memory of their son. Adam wrapped his arms around the dog and started sobbing, and Peter cried as he watched.

  Ben’s parents hugged Peter, and listened as he explained what had happened, why they hadn’t evacuated, which he readily admitted now had been a mistake, but they had thought they didn’t have to. And he explained how they had left the building the morning before, afraid that the building might collapse around them. Risking the floodwater had seemed like the lesser of two evils, which had turned out to be the gravest mistake of all.

  “You couldn’t know that,” Jake Weiss said kindly, with an arm around his shoulders. “You did the best you could, and so did Ben, in a bad situation. I probably would have done the same thing you did. Waited it out to see how bad it got, and then made a run for it.”

  “We should have come uptown with Anna and stayed with you,” Peter admitted, as tears rolled down his cheeks, and Adam sat watching them. He knew he would regret all his life that they hadn’t.

  “No one thought the hurricane would be this bad,” Jake said sadly. “And he might have made it—you did. You can never predict what’s going to happen in life.” He was trying to be philosophical about it, and kind to the boy who was clearly consumed with guilt for surviving. “We’re glad you made it,” he said softly, as Anna and Sarah cried, and they went to Ben’s childhood bedroom. Sarah wanted Anna to have something of Ben’s to take with her, and Adam sat looking devastated and stroking the dog, even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to touch him, he was so allergic to him.

  “I brought Mike back for you,” Peter told Jake quietly after the women had left the kitchen. “You should have him. Ben would want you to. He loved him.”

  “I know he did, but we can’t, because of Adam. I think Ben would want you to have him. It’s a piece of Ben you can keep with you, a part of your life together.” A life that was over and would never come again. Ben would never go back to NYU, or graduate, or grow up, or marry, or have children. They had thought of it all morning. His life had ended at twenty-one, at the end of his boyhood, and he would be young and healthy and vital and handsome in their hearts and minds forever, just as he had been the day he died. “You should keep Mike, and take him back to Chicago with you, if your parents will let you.” Peter knew they would, since they had a golden retriever at home and loved dogs, and his father had loved Mike when he’d seen him at the apartment.

  “They won’t mind,” Peter said tearfully, touched by the gift of the dog he had rescued and loved for all the time he’d known him.

  “Do you think you’ll come back from Chicago?” Jake asked sadly. An era was over. The school would be closed for many months, and he suspected that the memories of the hurricane and how it had all ended would be too painful for Peter to return.

  “I don’t know,” Peter said honestly. “I don’t know what I’ll do now.” It was all too new and too fresh to try to make decisions. “My parents want me to come home for a while.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Jake said, as Peter melted into his arms and started sobbing.

  “I’m so sorry…I’m so sorry I couldn’t save him…I didn’t know where he went, and I couldn’t see him anywhere, just Mike as he went past me. I would have saved Ben too if I could have.”

  “I know you would have,” he said, crying himself as the two women walked back into the kitchen, Ben’s childhood friend and his mother.

  They stayed for a little while longer, Peter kissed them all goodbye, and he and Anna left with Mike and went back to her place in a taxi. Peter was silent on the ride home, wrung out by the emotions of seeing Ben’s parents and Adam. Even Mike was quiet as he sat at Peter’s feet on the floor of the cab. He acted as though he knew bad things were happening and he was mourning Ben too. Peter had never seen him as quiet. And when they got back to Anna’s apartment, the two friends sat together for a long time, talking about Ben and everything that had happened. Like all the other students at NYU, she had the rest of the semester off now too, and hadn’t given any thought to what she would do in the meantime. Maybe nothing.

  There was suddenly no sense of romance between them, although they had been dating for nearly two years, but it was as though they were too powerful a reminder to each other of all they’d lost with Ben.

  “Is it over with us?” she asked him softly, when there was no one else around. The question had haunted her since they had learned of Ben’s death that morning. She wanted to be with Peter now, for the comfort it offered both of them. Her romance with him seemed both superfluous and inappropriate now. It was a time for mourning, not love.

  “I don’t know,” he said, as honest with her as he had been with Ben’s parents about their leaving the apartment. “It feels weird now, doesn’t it?” he admitted, looking at her sadly. They had had a good time together, but now it felt like part of the distant past, a time they had shared with Ben and couldn’t anymore without him. They had lost too much.

  “It does to me too,” she admitted, confused by the fact that it seemed so over now, to both of them. She had thought it was only her, when she first realized it, but now she knew that Peter felt that way too.

  “Do you mind my staying here?” he asked cautiously, feeling awkward with her.

  “Of course not. Where else would you go?” And he had stayed there with her before.

  “My parents should be here in a couple of days when the airports open. I can stay at the hotel with them when they get here.” The funeral was set for Friday. He was glad they hadn’t asked him to speak at it, he knew he couldn’t have. Just being there would be hard enough.

  Elizabeth ordered pizza for everyone. Peter and the three girls had dinner together that night, and afterward the girls watched a movie but Peter went to bed. He was exhausted. None of them had commented on the ugly gash on his arm, when he took the bandage off—they knew only too well how he had gotten it. Mike lay down next to Peter’s bed in the guest room, and Peter let his hand drop down so he could touch him. Mike was his dog now, a gift from Ben and his parents. And he wished with all his heart that he wasn’t, that Mike still belonged to Ben, and he was here to claim him. Peter rolled over in bed and looked down at Mike with tears in his eyes again. “I’m sorry, boy,” he said softly. “I miss him too.” Mike whined and licked his hand, and then laid his head down on his paws, as they both thought of the friend they had lost, the boy they loved so much.

  —

  By Tuesday night, the seriously ill and injured had gone to other hospitals, and the moderately ill as well, due to their lack of enough generators to function fully, and having to rely on battery-operated equipment. And the less seriously ill patients were starting to go home. They still had overcrowded conditions in the ER, as people continued to come in, but it was a little less insane than it had been. And they were still operating at full staff, with everyone’s time off canceled. Juliette had been there since before the hurricane, sleeping in the supply closet, usually with another resident or one of the nurses on the second cot. She would have slept on the floor in a train station by then. It no longer mattered, and she could have slept standing up. The few hours of rest she was able to grab in the supply closet were enough, although she missed the dog when Peter took him home. She had been sad to see him so distraught when he got the news that his friend had died, but it wasn’t surprising. There had been too many other stories like it, and she knew that it would take Peter a long time to recover.
More than likely, he would be traumatized by the memory of it forever. She and her medical colleagues could treat their injuries and their bodies, but how the survivors’ minds reacted to what they had experienced was harder to treat or predict.

  She was on a dinner break at ten o’clock that night when Sean Kelly came by to check on things at the ER and get a sense of how many patients they were treating and for what, to add to their statistics for a federal report to FEMA. More fatalities were being discovered every day, and bodies were turning up in apartments, on streets, and in basements and garages, particularly old people and children who had drowned, but there were many adults too, people who had tried to swim for it, stayed too long in their homes, or tried to rescue others without the resources, expertise, or equipment to do so. And as always, heroes had emerged, and remarkable stories were being related by the media. Juliette had begun to feel as though there had never been a time when Hurricane Ophelia wasn’t a part of their lives. It was all they talked about or thought of.

  “Have you been home since the hurricane?” Sean asked her as they walked down the hall together, while she described her caseload to him for his report.

  “No. I haven’t been out of here in days,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m sure the place is a mess if it got flooded, but it wasn’t so great before that.” She smiled at him, and he laughed. He could easily guess that homemaking wasn’t her strong suit. She was too dedicated to her work and too focused on it to care about much else, or her apartment, and residents in the ER had crazy schedules and more important things on their minds. He could sense the kind of doctor she was.

  “I feel the same way,” he admitted. “If my apartment got bombed, I’m not sure I’d notice.” She laughed at what he said—they had that in common. “Where do you live?” he asked, curious about her.

  “A few blocks away, on Twentieth Street. I got the place for convenience, not its beauty. I’m never there anyway, except to sleep.” She didn’t seem to mind it.

  “That’s what I meant. You’re a crisis junkie. So am I. We all are in this business. It’s not a crime. Do you ever think about having a personal life?” She laughed out loud at the question.

  “Yeah, like when I retire. Even my father was never around when we were kids. He was always delivering babies. And ER is even crazier. I figure I’ll have kids maybe in my fifties or sixties.” He smiled as he looked at her. She was a pretty woman and would have been even more so in street clothes, makeup, and combed hair, which he suspected she never bothered with either.

  “You can manage to do both, or so I’m told,” he said ruefully. “You can actually have a life and work in emergency services.”

  “Really? Let me know how when you figure that one out,” she said, although she knew that some of the residents were married, usually to doctors who worked as hard as they did, and then they never saw each other. And she also knew that a lot of the regular ER docs cheated on their wives with the nurses, or other doctors, and she didn’t want to be a candidate for that life.

  “Do you date?” he asked her when they got to the cafeteria, even more curious about her. She didn’t seem to care that she didn’t have a life, and had made her peace with it. He thought she was too young to do that. But so was he. At thirty-five, he hadn’t had a serious relationship in four years. He just went from one natural disaster to the next, with little time to breathe in between.

  “Sometimes. I dated the chief resident on the ER service for about five minutes. He was a jerk.” She didn’t know why she was telling Sean that, but he was easy to talk to, and he’d asked her.

  “Oh, that,” he said, smiling. “I’ve had my share of those too. What we do doesn’t give one a lot of time to shop around.” And then he surprised her. “After you grab something to eat, do you want to take a ride to your apartment, so you can have a quick look around and see how bad the damage is, if you have time? I can get you back here pretty fast, and lend you a hand if you need it.” It was a kind offer, and she was touched by it.

  “That would be nice. I’m a little scared of what I’ll find.”

  “You might be able to save something you couldn’t otherwise if you go now. And you’ll probably be on double duty for a while.” She nodded her agreement, said she’d run in and grab a sandwich, which was all the cafeteria had for the moment anyway. They had brought in more generators to keep the refrigerators running so they could feed the staff and the remaining patients. And she said she could be ready to leave with him in five minutes. He waited for her, and with her sandwich in a bag in her pocket, she followed him outside. His OES truck with the light on top was parked at the curb, and she got in next to him and gave him her address.

  “So what brought you here from Detroit?” he asked, as they drove the few blocks to her apartment. She had told him in a conversation earlier and forgotten about it.

  “I didn’t get the residency I wanted in Chicago,” she said honestly. “And I got a great one here, so I took it. It’s worked out fine. I like New York. What about you? Where did you grow up?”

  “In New York. In Queens. I’m a local boy—maybe that’s why I care so much about the city and the people in it.” She knew they both had to care about people to do what they did, and care for strangers who were in distress or extremis.

  They were at her apartment by then, and she took her keys out of her wallet. He parked the truck and followed her inside. It was a depressing building, and her apartment was on the ground floor, which didn’t bode well for possible flood damage, although she was far enough from the river that she might have been spared.

  He had brought a powerful flashlight with him so they could look around, since the whole lower part of Manhattan was still without electricity, and he could see clothes and clogs on the floor, a stack of medical books on the table. Her bed was unmade, and there was nothing on the walls.

  “Ah, I see Martha Stewart is your decorator,” he said, teasing her. She had a large fruit bowl on the table with two stethoscopes in it, and a salad bowl full of medical samples to give away, as Juliette looked around, surprised at the lack of damage.

  “It looks pretty much the way I left it,” she said, gathering up a pile of hospital scrubs in embarrassment and tossing them on top of the hamper in the bathroom, and she tried to make order of the clogs.

  “Do you spend any time here at all?” Sean asked her, startled by how spartan it was. It was worse than he’d expected. It looked like a crash pad, which was all it was to her. They checked the fridge, and there was nothing in it except a shriveled lemon and a Diet Coke.

  “Not if I can help it,” she said, laughing, in answer to his question. “All I do is sleep here, and change the sheets when I have time. Sometimes I sleep at the hospital, if my breaks between shifts are too short. And I never eat at home.”

  “You’re actually worse than I am,” he commented. “I have two Classic Cokes in my fridge and a Pellegrino. You beat me on the lemon. But I think I might have a three-year-old frozen pizza in the freezer.” And then he startled her even more. “Any interest in having dinner with me sometime? A real dinner, not my antique pizza. It looks like we both need it.” He was smiling at her in the eerie light from the flashlight.

  “That would be nice,” she said softly, although she couldn’t see how either of them would maintain a relationship. It wasn’t in their job descriptions, but maybe they could be friends.

  “Do you ever dress like a girl, when you’re off duty?”

  “Sure, at my first communion. I had a white organdy dress. And my sister-in-law gave me Victoria’s Secret underwear for Christmas.” He laughed at what she said. “It still has the tags on it.”

  “I think we’d be good for each other,” he said bluntly, as they got ready to leave. There had been nothing to do in her apartment, but he was right, she’d been relieved to see that it hadn’t flooded, and she hadn’t lost the few things she had there. She would have hated to lose her medical books and even her favorite clogs. It had tak
en her two years to break them in.

  “How do you figure that? Wouldn’t you rather go out with a girl who wears real clothes, high heels, and makeup? I’ve been kind of saving all that for when I finish my residency. I don’t like being distracted from my work.” That much was true, and dating had never seemed as exciting to her as her medical studies.

  “Maybe we both need more of a life,” he said, looking at her intently.

  “True,” she agreed with him, and she liked him. She liked his honesty, the career he had chosen, and his apparent lack of ego, unlike egomaniacs like Will Halter at the ER. “But why me?” What was it that he saw in her? She couldn’t imagine. She never thought of herself as a femme fatale, or even particularly attractive to men. She was so used to working side by side with them that she no longer thought of them as potential romantic partners, just as colleagues and buddies, and she knew all their failings and flaws.

  “Easy answer to that one,” he said as she locked her front door and put the keys in the pocket of the doctor’s coat she wore over her scrubs. “You’re beautiful and smart, and kind. That’s an unbeatable combination, and hard to find,” he said, as they got back in his SUV.

  “Yeah, nice guys are hard to find too, and smart ones.” She smiled at him as he turned the key in the ignition. “And most doctors have such huge egos. It’s hard to take them seriously, or want to spend five minutes with them.” Sean wasn’t like that, she could tell, despite his good looks. But like her, he was oblivious to his own attributes.

  “So what do you think? Dinner sometime when things calm down?” he asked as they drove back toward the hospital.