“No, you’re not at all. It’s a lot to deal with,” I said. “Let me know if I can help in any way,” I added.
“Well, maybe. Obviously, he’s been really interested in your house, asking lots of questions. Is it really okay if I bring him by some time to see it? He keeps asking me the layout of the floor plan, and I can’t answer. Which, as you might imagine, makes him more than a little agitated,” she said.
“Of course. Anytime. I would be happy to regale him with the tales of the shellacked woodwork and the hideous wallpaper,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said. “And since you seem to be in the business of saving everyone these days, how’s the hunt for the neighbor’s daughter?”
“I didn’t get anywhere with the county clerk, but it was suggested I try to find the name of the adoption agency,” I said.
“How would you find that?” she said.
“I’m not sure. Unless Elsie remembers or knows it, we could be in for an uphill climb.”
She looked down at her plate. “And if you find the baby?”
“Well, I suppose I would try to contact her, let her know that Elsie is looking for her,” I said quickly, tucking my legs underneath me on the couch.
“And then what?”
“And then . . .” I shrugged. “I’m not sure. It would really depend on what she wanted to do. How she felt about being given up for adoption, I suppose.”
She looked up. “And what if she doesn’t want to meet with Elsie? How are you going to break it to that poor, sweet old woman that her daughter doesn’t want to meet her?”
I sighed. “I’m hoping it won’t come to that. I’m hoping that she won’t have any grudges, that she’ll understand why it all happened.”
Traci shook her head. “Decisions like that are never understood, even by the people who make them. You’re already messing in these people’s lives—you need to be careful.”
I held up my hands. “I’m not trying to meddle. I’m just trying to help her out.”
She sighed. “Sorry.” She glanced toward Chris’s room. “That wasn’t about you. There’s just a lot of emotion around here, with the guardianship hearing. A lot of justification. Regret. A dash of self-pity.”
I nodded. “Of course.”
We sat silently, considering our lo mein, before Chris came back in the room and sat down closely next to me. He smiled and handed me a book.
“Look.” He pointed to a picture of a black cicada, its red and yellow eyes bulging out of its head, looking otherworldly. “That’s what they look like.”
“He means the cicadas coming next month,” Traci said.
I moved my head back an inch to focus on the book. “They do look like that. I remember from last time they were here.”
“Space,” Traci said gently, and Chris moved back to a comfortable distance.
“They’re gonna be everywhere. Millions and millions,” he said, his eyes bright.
I laughed. “Probably. Are you excited?”
He nodded and looked down at the book again, humming softly. He smiled before looking back at me, his eyes so wide that the whites surrounded the irises. “The last time they were here, I was already born. And now they’re coming again.”
“They are,” I confirmed.
“And then they’ll all die and come back again in seventeen years. And I will be thirty-four.” His eyes flickered to me. “The same age as you.” He looked at Traci. “And I will have a girl named Abby and my own house and a job, just like you.”
Traci’s eyes cast down, and her mouth twisted to the side. “We’ll see, buddy.” She didn’t look at me, but instead stared at her food, unable to say anything else.
* * *
Later that night, I woke up to my windows rattling and the sound of rain driving against my roof. A flash of lightning illuminated the bedroom, and a crack of thunder shook the house. I sat up and glanced at the clock: 3:20 a.m. I started to sink back down against my pillow, when another, angrier crack was followed by a brighter flash of lightning. Early summer storms were fairly common in the area, as though Mother Nature had to have one last tantrum before she acquiesced and blessed us with the short summer months.
I grabbed my phone and looked up the weather radar as I tried to push images of horror movies out of my head. I had always frozen when I was alone in thunderstorms. Which, thankfully, wasn’t that often. When I was growing up, my parents were always downstairs. In college, I always had a roommate. After college, Matt. But now, nothing. There were nights when it was supposed to storm when I had proactively asked Abby to sleep in my bed, comforted by her presence. But, of course, she was still at Matt’s house this night.
My fears weren’t without founding. When I was seven, I woke up to a storm beating down on the house. I ran into my parents’ bedroom, certain that the boogeyman was going to grab my ankle as I stepped down from my bed. I nestled safely between them, my mother’s arm around my body as I curled next to her. Their bed smelled like laundry detergent, the product of my mother’s meticulous, weekly washing of all the beds. My dad was lightly snoring, the rhythmic sounds pulling me back to sleep. Protected by them, the storm became a thing of wonder rather than terror. Everything was safe again; the world was a kind place. I had just about drifted back off to sleep, when we heard a loud pop and the sound of glass shattering.
My dad sprang up out of bed, yelling that my mother and I should stay back. We didn’t listen and crept behind him, following the sound to my bedroom. There, on my bed, were a thousand pieces of shattered glass where the window had blown in. Large shards rested on my pillow instead of what had almost been my face. With a margin of ten minutes, everything would have changed. Ever since that night, thunderstorms had inspired a Pavlovian fight-or-flight, hide-or-be-hurt reaction.
Sweating, I saw that the weather radar showed an angry swath of red and orange storms nearly on top of our town, with a red scroll of a tornado watch moving across the top of the screen. It warned that anyone in the path of the storms should take cover in a basement or the lowest point in the house.
My hand shaking, I breathed heavily before I quickly ran to the light switch and flipped it on, my lungs easing a bit in the light. I grabbed my phone and my charger and went downstairs, turning lights on as I went, before the flashes of lightning could startle me in the darkness. I again thought of getting a dog as I walked down to the basement, because at least then there would be another living thing in the house that would be more freaked out than me.
I curled up on the thrift store couch in the basement, and pulled an old crocheted blanket from my grandmother around my shoulders. I wished I had a television in the basement, but I settled for listening to music on my phone. As the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” came on, my blood froze as I heard the wail of tornado sirens outside. I hoisted myself up to one of the small well windows and tried to peer outside, but I couldn’t see anything with the rain driving against the glass.
Remembering the warning, I moved away from the window and curled up in a corner of the couch, my back slick with sweat. Abby. I checked the radar again, and exhaled when I saw that Matt’s house was farther north than the line of storms about to hit.
The power flickered, and I wrapped my arms around my knees and shut my eyes tight.
Please don’t let the windows break.
I wished I had the old weather radio that Matt had bought for me. At first he’d thought I was joking when I told him I was afraid of storms, but the first time he saw me freak out and run down to the basement after the first rumble of thunder, he stopped laughing. The weather radio was my gift for our first anniversary. It ran on batteries, so I could use it if the power went out. We had smartphones, but there was still something comforting about a classic weather radio.
It was the most romantic present he had ever bought me. Unfortunately, I threw it in the trash along with most of his other gifts after we split up, a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
As I liste
ned to the wind push against the upstairs windows, my biceps started to shake from holding on to my legs. After a few minutes, the storm began to die. The sirens faded into the darkness, and the thunder and lightning softened and grew further apart—until all that was left was the rhythmic tapping of the rain.
CHAPTER 18
The rain had stopped by morning, and, after unkinking my neck from the hours of sleeplessness, I headed to work. I was just about to turn onto Maple Street when my phone buzzed with a call from Eddie. I ignored it, pulling into the driveway moments later. I wasn’t yet out of my car before he came running out of the house, waving his hands in the air.
“It’s flooded! It’s all messed up!” he shouted. I saw that his cargo shorts were soaked, and he carried a squeegee in his hand.
“What?” I said as I ran toward the house.
He stopped and took a breath, panting. “The roof. Remember those loose shingles that the roofer was supposed to fix next week? They collapsed and pretty much disintegrated. The upstairs is almost totally flooded.”
“What? How is that possible? The roofer said it wasn’t that big of a problem,” I said.
“Maybe it wasn’t . . . before we got all that rain. It must have been the final straw,” he said.
I pushed him aside and ran up the cracked concrete steps. I didn’t get halfway up the stairs to the second floor before my foot hit water. I stopped and slowly finished the staircase.
“Oh, shit.” On the second-floor landing, water swirled around my ankles, soaking my old shoes. The water seemed to be coming from the upstairs corner bedroom. I waded through the water and looked up into the bedroom. I could see where water had poured down the wall, leaving a stream of rainwater against the plaster. It flowed across the wood floors, and toward the rest of the house, thanks to the pitch in the floors.
“ ‘Oh, shit’ is right,” Eddie said. He put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “I had a bad feeling with all that rain last night, so I wanted to drive by and make sure everything was fine.” He paused and shook his head. “I have a wet vac so we can get started.”
“Are any of your guys free?” I said. It was Sunday, and they weren’t supposed to be here at all. I didn’t even want to calculate the time-and-a-half pay I’d have to shell out if they were even available.
“Couldn’t reach anyone,” he said. He looked down at the wood floors. “Water’s been here all night. It’s probably soaked down to the subfloor by now.” He twisted his mouth into a frown and looked at me. “We’ll try to save it, but . . .”
But I knew that the longer the water sat on the wood, the longer it would expand into the grain, warping and pulling at the old material until it was too badly damaged to sand or repair. As we had seen in the rotted floor joist beneath the upstairs bathroom, water was an old house’s worst enemy, capable of crumbling foundations, destroying floors, and decimating plaster.
“We need a pump or a—” I stopped as I thought of Elsie next door. I remembered the koi pond in her backyard. I sprinted over and banged on her door.
She came to the door wearing a silky black two-piece pajama set. She looked me up and down and clutched the top of her pajamas.
“Hi! Sorry to bug you, but do you have an extra pump for your pond? We have some water issues next door and need to get it out pronto.” My words rushed together, and she arched a penciled-in eyebrow. Even early on a Sunday morning, her makeup was perfectly done. She nodded and pointed me to the shed in the back.
Armed with the pump, Eddie and I floated it in the bedroom, snaking the discharge tube out the second-floor window. The pump whirred to life, and the water started swirling, moving toward the pump and out of the house. I breathed a sigh of relief as it started disappearing, praying that the wood floors were still strong enough to withstand the rainwater.
I watched the pump while Eddie went into the other bedrooms to start squeegeeing water toward the foyer, closer to the pump.
“This would be easier if these floors were even somewhat level,” he called from the tiny bedroom next door.
“They probably were . . . fifty years ago,” I said. I poked my head out of the doorjamb and peered into the bedroom, where Eddie was shoving water from one corner to another, gaining momentum to flush it out of the room. “C’mon. It’s the smallest room in the house. You got this,” I said.
He stopped and shook his head, his dreadlocks giving off a small spray of water. “Does this even qualify as a bedroom?”
“Don’t stop,” I said quickly. “And yeah, I figure it must have been used for a nursery or a baby’s room at one point.” The room was just ten by nine, small enough that a man could stretch out his arms and touch each side.
I wondered if the Moores had planned to use it for another child. I wondered if Elsie and David’s baby might have stayed in this room if she had kept the child. My shoulders sagged with the weight of what could have happened in this room, had times and people been different. The hushed whispers, quiet cuddles, and rhythmic rocking of baby soothing inside the nursery had the adoption never happened, and I felt as though the room knew what it had missed.
“It’s working,” I said as the water finally pushed out of the bedroom. I grabbed a broom and started sweeping it toward the pond pump, which sucked it up and dumped it out the window.
We had most of the standing water cleared from the second floor, and I had stopped to shake out my cramped, waterlogged fingers, when I heard a distant rumble.
“No.” I turned to Eddie, my eyes wide. “I thought the forecast was clear.”
He cocked his mouth into a half frown and stuck his head through the window in the tiny room, looking up at the sky. “I hate to tell you this, but there’s a nice dark cloud moving slowly from the west.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “But we haven’t even tarped the roof. It’s all going to come in again.”
“I would get up there and lay down the plastic myself, but that cloud looks nasty. Don’t want to be stuck up there if a bad storm hits,” he said.
“Maybe we could lay the plastic down on the floors now, to prevent any more water getting on them,” I said. I was about to run out and grab the sheeting, when I heard the unmistakable sound of rain hitting the roof.
“Too late,” he said. Within seconds, water started leaking from the roof again, coming down in cold droplets and landing on the wood floor, thanks to the wind bringing in the standing water on the roof.
“Keep moving,” I said. I kept the pump running and pushed water toward it as it came in from above. My pants were soaked from my feet to my knees, and my face was slick with rainwater. It was already wet, so I allowed the tears that had been building in my eyes to spill over. I knew we were going to lose several days to clean up this mess, which would mean more money hemorrhaged from my already pitiful contingency fund.
When the storm finally stopped, Eddie and I stood in the upstairs hallway, watching as the ankle-deep water was sucked in toward the pump.
“Water’s been up here for”—he checked his watch—“about six hours.”
“Enough for it to have soaked all the way through.”
“We’ll be lucky if we can save any of the floor,” he said. When he saw my face, he wrapped a wet arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. “I’ll do what I can. Dry it out as much as possible.”
I shook my head and closed my eyes. Replacing the flooring would run well into the thousands of dollars. If only I had had Eddie look at the roof first, fix that. It had passed inspection and looked to be safe. Yet I knew that one of the first rules of an older house was that a lot of problems can be lurking under something that appeared to be structurally sound. I knew better. And now I was going to literally pay the price for being an idiot.
As we worked to pull the water out of the house a second time, I watched as some of my faith in and hope for the house got carried away along with the rain. I went back out to my car to grab a towel and dry off, when I saw a familiar figure drive by
. I leaned forward and squinted, my hand in a half wave of bewilderment.
“Gavin?” I whispered.
Even through his car window, his embarrassment was palpable as he stopped and waved back. I could see he wore a white Richmond Burton High School T-shirt that stretched across his broad chest, and a blue Cubs ball cap was pulled down across his forehead. The effect made him look even younger—and thus, much, much younger than me.
“What are you doing here?” I said as I tried to dry my hands off on my thighs.
“Oh. Well, I was in the area, and thought I could drive by your house. I remembered you said it was on Maple, and . . .” He shrugged, his face growing a deeper shade of red.
“So you’re stalking me?” I said with a smile.
He lifted his palms in the air. “What can I say? The way you talked about the house intrigued me. I had to see it for myself. Of course, I didn’t think you’d actually be here and I’d look like a creeper.”
“It was a gamble.” I looked back at the house, and Eddie came outside, waving me back in.
“You leaving this to me now?” he called, holding a push broom in the air.
“I need to get back inside,” I said. “We had a roof leak last night, and it’s kind of a total nightmare.”
“Need any help? I can run to the hardware store, or anything you need. Those rains last night were incredible,” he said.
“Sure,” I said after a moment. “Come grab a broom.”
Eddie unceremoniously tossed a broom at Gavin when we walked into the dining room. “Start sweeping. Fast. These floors will soak up all this water like a sponge.”
Gavin nodded and started working. Eddie shot me a look, his eyebrows raised, but I rolled my eyes in return. I mouthed work to him, and he turned and grabbed a mop, while I turned on the shop vac and started sucking up the water that they pooled.
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