Retreating back inside, Moniza took me by the arm, focused her wide brown eyes on me, and said sternly, “Do not go back out there.”
Now we could hear the washer and dryer tumbling against the walls, their aluminum shells boinging off the concrete. I didn’t get scared until the water started coming up through the vents in the floor.
Filthy brown water bubbled out of the black cast-iron vents and spread over the caramel hardwood, soaking all the antique carpets Moniza had spent years acquiring. The dogs went crazy, particularly young Lila. She ran from vent to vent, barking at the water like she could scare it away, while Dizzy fled from under the couch and up the stairs to higher ground, as fast as I’d seen her move in years.
When the water reached our shins, I went to my office and began grabbing books, mourning the antique bookcase with glass panes, a birthday present from Mo right after we moved in. Suddenly everything we prized on the first floor was in danger.
“Will you and your dad take the couch upstairs?” Moniza asked me. It was a Meyer, Gunther Martini, an elegant antique with silk the color of polished bone, and she’d made me drive a rental truck halfway to Boston to get it. My dad and I hefted the thing, splashed through the water, up the stairs, and shoved it in the hallway. Another flash of lightning, and I couldn’t see the yard, or the road, just water everywhere, up to the door handles of the cars.
An hour later, it had reached our knees, and we began taking everything we could to the second floor: the art, the lamps, the troves of important documents, passports, titles, deeds, and wills. I trudged through freezing water to get it all safely upstairs. My dad hefted the TV, a useless glass window into nothing. Finally, Moniza thought to bring the food and water upstairs. Wading through freezing murk now up to my thighs, carrying up the food I’d salvaged, I found my mom sitting on the bed in the guestroom having trouble breathing. She was panicking, and my dad appeared oblivious to this. She kept asking, “What if it gets higher?”
“It’ll take a long time for it to get as high as that,” Mo said, though I’d seen it move from the fifth step to the sixth in a matter of minutes.
“We should have a plan,” my mother moaned.
“You got an axe?” my dad asked. “In case we gotta chop through the roof?”
He pronounced it ruhf, as he had since my childhood. One of his words that always irritated me.
“Is there even a crawl space?” my mom wondered. There was, but I’d been up there. It was barely big enough to fit three people, and not high enough to stand up. It would be like crawling into a coffin.
“What about the ruhf? We need an axe,” my dad repeated. I did not want to hear that word anymore.
“Dad,” I snapped. “There’s no axe and there’s not going to be an axe. I need you to seriously shut the fuck up, okay?”
He shook his head once in acquiescence and turned away.
“The dog food,” Moniza remembered. For whatever reason, that made it real. We would be trapped on the second floor for a long time, and that was the best-case scenario.
“I’ll go get it.”
I went back down the stairs, checking my watch. In only twenty minutes, the flood had reached my stomach. I waded through the freezing water to the kitchen and got into the pantry where I had to dunk my whole head under to pull out the water-logged bag of kibble. Frigid water clamped my head and now the cold was pure agony. Hauling it back, I could feel the water had risen. It was definitely coming faster now. I passed my office and saw my desk bubbling as water filled the drawers. I thought briefly of Jackie Shipman’s letter in the middle-left drawer, but the paper would now be illegible pulp. Dropping the soaking bag of dog food in the bedroom, I saw my mom weeping quietly.
“It’s because you yelled at your father,” Moniza murmured. I ignored her.
Downstairs, there was an explosion of glass, and then the sound of water pouring in. It was three-fourths of the way up the stairs now, frothing in the flashlight’s beam. I saw the wooden mallard floating at the top. I looked back into the bedroom where Moniza sat, consoling my mom. I was pacing. I was forgetting things. Fear is physical. It creates a fog in your mind where you can’t concentrate. I kept feeling like I’d forgotten something downstairs we would need, and it was too late now. I stupidly watched the water advance.
My dad had somehow, somewhere, found a length of rope I didn’t recognize, and he was going from window to window, pushing the screens out and peering up, letting the rain in.
“What are you doing?” I asked, trying not to sound as angry or panicked or scared out of my fucking mind as I was.
“We need a way to the ruhf, Matt,” he said, like he was explaining how to scrape a green perfectly level at one of his courses. “In case the water gets any higher.” He held up a gadget, a little SPOT GPS emergency messenger. He’d activated it already. “Brought this along, but it’s doing us no good if we can’t get onto the ruhf for rescue.”
“There’s nothing to tie off the rope on,” I hissed.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “We’ll have to make something up. Tell the gals to dress warm, get their shoes on and all. I’ll get up there on the ruhf then I’ll”—he chopped his hand, tomahawk-style—“hook it on somehow.”
“With what?”
He raised his eyebrows to indicate that this would be the tricky part. “I found a hammer downstairs, so we’ll have to make do with that.”
The water did not slow. Another hour, and it was at the top of the stairs, spilling across the second floor. Somewhere north of us, a transformer exploded and suddenly the night was bright blue, purple, and white. In the driveway, all three cars had collected against the garage at haphazard angles. Another vehicle, not ours, was simply floating in the newly formed lake where our lawn had been.
“Think it’s about time,” he said.
“I should do it, Dad.”
He monkeyed with the GPS and batted a hand at me. “No, no, you stay here. Your mom and Mo need you to be calm, you know? If I get swept away, Mo will probably pray thanks to Vishnu.”
Unbelievably, he winked at me. We closed the door to the guestroom so they wouldn’t see what we were up to. He tucked the GPS in my pocket and proceeded to the window. He tied the rope around his wrist and secured the hammer in his belt. The water was nearing the base of the window. As he climbed out onto the ledge, reaching up to grab hold of the gutters, I gave him a boost by hugging his knees and pushing him up. Despite his age, he pulled himself onto the pitch, rope trailing behind him, and I could hear his boots above me as he found his footing and trudged up the roof. Later, I would see what he’d done: tying the rope off to the head of the hammer, and then wedging the hammer beneath one of the solar panels to create an anchor—all with the rain pummeling him and hurricane winds trying to carry him off into the night.
“What on bloody earth is he doing?” Moniza demanded when she and my mom came in, but they didn’t need much of an explanation. At that point, the water was around our thighs and rising.
“C’mon, we need to get the dogs,” I told her.
Lila I could fit in a camping pack, and when I zipped her up with her little head poking out, she looked at me, no longer barking, just whimpering in terror. Dizzy I had to hand to my dad, who crouched low on the slick roof, somehow kept his balance, and managed to pull the frightened old girl up into his arms. Finally, we had to get my mom out there, and despite how fast the water was coming, she was even more reluctant to go than Dizzy. She kept repeating, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”