Around ten the rain stopped completely and the water began to fall. By midnight their yard was empty.
They slept with the windows open so they could listen for more rain. The wet carpet and soaked boxes and furniture produced a sour pungent odor.
The next morning they both got up with headaches. Evan phoned the insurance company while Alice washed and dried towels. The water had left its level on the white walls in the living room. The legs of the dining-room table were discolored three inches above the floor.
Evan came into the utility room shaking his head. “Rising water’s not covered in this state.” He took Alice’s coffee cup off a shelf and drank. “Wind-driven rain… now that’s covered. That’s what I should have said. I’m sure that’s what she expected me to say… wanted me to say.” He laughed an ugly snort of a laugh. Alice looked at him and bent back over the clothes. She didn’t know what to say.
Angry all day Evan barked at people over the phone. Around noon two men came and took up the carpets and plugged in huge fans. Evan followed them from room to room telling them this was their first house. Before the men left, they told Alice to run the air-conditioner though it was cool outside. Mildew would ruin the carpet, they said, if she didn’t.
The next day they would take a walk around the neighborhood. And Evan would stop and point out the water marks on trees. He would laugh at rising water versus wind-driven rain. They would learn the neighbors had been better and worse off. One had just installed new parquet floors. Then, of course, there were the two drowned children.
But this day, with only drizzle falling out of a nonthreatening, light gray sky, Alice had finished the best she could inside and surveyed the yard. A jumbled carpet of waste paper and twigs covered the grass. One of the wooden flower borders had lodged in a corner of the fence. Broken planks, empty plastic flowerpots, a child’s sandbox, two pairs of garden gloves, and a ton of other odds and ends from neighbors upstream were wedged in yaupons, draped around the base of the oaks, caught in the porch railing.
“Shit,” she yelled, and hopped to the faucet to wash the biting fire ants off her bare ankles. “Bastards,” she said as she danced under the water. The flood had destroyed their beds and they swarmed over everything.
Alice worried about the flowers laid flat by the water. She hoped the sun wouldn’t come out suddenly and scald everything.
Back inside she dressed quickly in pants and a long-sleeve shirt. She gently opened the bedroom door and watched Evan under a pile of covers, only the top of his head showing.
“Hey, you going back to sleep?”
Evan moved his legs but didn’t turn over.
“Come on, let’s clean up outside. I think we can save most of the flowers. Come on, you won’t believe the stuff washed up out there. I think there’s a tennis racket in the willow over the creek.”
She waited, smiling, for Evan to speak. She wanted his help. She pictured them raking up the trash, cursing the ants they’d never considered when they’d decided to move south. She would have liked his direction about the side fence that now leaned downstream at an odd angle. How do we straighten this? What’s the plan? You, she thought, are the one with those sorts of ideas.
“Hey, come on.” She waited. “I’ll be outside. Come on out when you’re ready.”
But when he did appear, hours later, he only waved and sat on the steps drinking a beer. Alice saw his face and knew that whatever had always been the matter had gotten worse. She smiled at him and waved her rake. “The ants’ll eat you alive!”
All afternoon she forayed off the porch to work in a frenzy before the ants forced her to the faucet. She raked up huge piles of trash.
She was ashamed she felt better when Evan walked around to the front. To check out water marks, she thought. She considered the cat in the current and felt warm with embarrassment. It was too silly. It was a sentimental image from Walt Disney. The cat pawing the dark water. Its teeth bared at the struggle. It could be a poster for a child’s room; though probably too frightening. She considered some possible captions: “Just Keeping Your Head Above Water,” “Hang In There.”
She bent over to slap at the ants covering her tennis shoes. God, Alice, you are a silly girl.
May 2039
The thin old woman stopped to catch her breath, which came in shallow pants fogging the chill air. She set her net bag down and stepped off the narrow road to look first up the hill and then down to the monastery already hidden by the pines. She nodded and smiled in recollection of the monk jabbering away at her. She had bought soap and honey and fingered the lovely carved saints no bigger than the palm of her hand.
“You always speak the best Italian,” he had said.
And Alice had quoted the florid passage from some ancient poet that was inscribed over the entrance to the church. It was a ritual between them. Every two weeks for sixteen years.
Alice picked up her bag and crossed the mountain road to the side sloping down toward the river valley. She held on to pine saplings until she reached a level spot behind a large rock. She pulled down her pants and then her panties, the cold air chilling her hips. She peed only a brief burst. Then she wiped with a Kleenex from her pocket and reached forward to hide it under a rock. There was another there already and Alice laughed. She carefully worked her way back up the hill to the road.
She bent to her task, the bag slapping her leg. The monk had asked about her sister who had visited at Christmas. And Alice had laughed and reminded him it was her daughter. They had both enjoyed his transparent deceit.
She walked and tried to breathe deeply. She took in the odor of roasted meats from the roadside restaurant ahead. Farther up the hill she could see the stone fence of the first decrepit hotel that overlooked the Arno valley below. But Alice couldn’t forget what had happened earlier. She had risen long before Claudia, their housekeeper. She had made bitter instant coffee, listened at Evan’s door, and come out onto the small veranda perched above their yard. Only a sliver of the dull red river showed far below and at a distance of some miles.
Lifting the already lukewarm coffee to her dry lips, she had looked down and seen very clearly the head of a cat, chin down, eyes shut, wet. Paddling furiously. Alice involuntarily closed her own eyes but they saw only the morning light made red, the minute detritus of a night’s sleep passing like odd shaped bacteria under her lids.
She had never owned a cat. Allergies, she thought. She had never seen a cat swim. She was surprised by the vividness of detail.
Later, passing through Vallombrosa, walking easily downhill toward the monastery, she had changed direction, marched quickly into a bar where the locals usually waited for the bus down the mountain into Firenze. The old men were smoking and talking about the flood. There were no old women, of course. Some of the men nodded at her. The bartender shook her hand and asked about her husband.
“No, he’s the same. Good days and bad days.” She ordered a vermouth because it was the first bottle her eyes lighted on. The surprise of the taste so early almost choked her. She had looked at herself in the mirror behind the bottles.
Now Alice crossed the road. “She looks exactly like you. As lovely as they come,” the monk had said, complimenting Alice and Elizabeth. She had nodded, thanked him for his kindness.
Today she was not so fearful of sudden traffic, Italian men attacking the curves in small cars. The flood below kept the road deserted. It had for a week now. The old men in the bar read the Milano newspapers aloud to one another. Worst flood in eighty years. The Ufizzi damaged. Damage in the millions. Church frescoes awash and destroyed. They swore, slapped their knees. She had had one more vermouth — this one almost tasteless compared to the first.