I wrap my arms around myself, pace. I don’t know how much time has passed when, suddenly, I’m aware of the noises upstairs. Footsteps, voices . . .
The kids are here! They’re home!
Chapter Twenty-One
Kent Kelly
Tuesday, March 5, 1963: I try not to think about that night, but sometimes I can’t help it. A nightmare will take me back there, or something during the day will trigger the memory. The other morning when I got out of work, the van driving me back to the group home passed by some public works guys. They were out early, flushing hydrants, and bam! The sight and sound of that gushing water brought me right back to my aunt and uncle’s downstairs apartment on that March night—the worst night of my life. . . .
Aunt Sunny had just given the baby a bottle and gotten her to sleep. “Finally,” she said, when she walked out of Annie and Gracie’s room. “She’s been cranky all day.” She went over to the window and looked out at the rain. It had been coming down for two days straight. Walking home from school that afternoon, I’d gotten soaked to the skin.
Uncle Chick and I were parked on the couch, watching The Untouchables. Turning to face her husband, Sunny said she was worried about Donald. His indoor track team had had an away meet at Hartford Public, but she’d expected he’d be home long before this. Uncle Chick told her to relax—that the bus driver was probably just taking it slow because of the wet roads. “You look beat, Sun,” he said. “Go to bed. I’ll stay up and wait for him.”
She nodded, kissed him. Bent down and gave me a peck on the cheek. Usually it was Uncle Chick who went to bed first; Aunt Sunny was a night owl like me. Leaving the living room, she was stopped by a blast of tommy-gun fire. On the TV, Eliot Ness’s men were riddling Mad Dog Coll’s thugs with bullets. Sunny said she didn’t know why we wanted to watch this stuff.
“What can we say?” Uncle Chick said. “We’re guys.”
“Good night, you two,” she said, shaking her head.
Uncle Chick was drinking beer, which he usually did at night when he watched TV. There were two empties on the coffee table and he was working on his third. When a commercial came on, he got up to go to the bathroom. As soon as he was out of sight, I picked up his beer, snuck a few quick swigs, and placed it back where the wet ring was. Put my feet up on the coffee table, my hands behind my head. Donald could stay away all night as far as I was concerned. When he came back, Uncle Chick said, “Hey, Numb Nuts. How many times have I told you not to put your shoes up on the furniture?”
“About as many times as Aunt Sunny’s told you to use a coaster.”
He picked up a pillow and beaned me off the head with it. I was just about to fire it back at him when something caught my eye—a light of some kind moving past the front window. Then there was a pounding at the front door. “What the hell?” Uncle Chick said. He jumped up and ran to the door.
Whoever was out there was talking loud and excited, but I could only make out part of it: “dam,” “flood.” “Leave now!” Uncle Chick ran past me on the way to his and Aunt Sunny’s room. “Get Annie!” he ordered me. “Wrap a blanket around her and get in the car.”
As I ran into Annie’s and Gracie’s room, I heard Aunt Sunny’s panicked voice. “Is it Donald? Did something happen to Donald?”
When I picked her up, Annie started whimpering, still half-asleep. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I kept saying. Leaving her room, I almost collided with Uncle Chick, who was hurrying in to get Gracie. “What did I tell you, Kent! Get her in the goddamned car!”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Jesus.”
When I got outside, the wind was blowing and the rain was hitting me in the face. Old Mr. and Mrs. Dugas, the next-door neighbors, were hurrying toward their Studebaker. The water rushing through the street was up to my ankles. Annie wanted to know where her mommy was, and I said she was coming, she’d be right out. From the backseat, I watched them running toward us. Uncle Chick was holding the baby, wrapped up in a blanket like Annie. Aunt Sunny was behind him, struggling to put on her winter coat. The neighbor across the street called to Chick from his upstairs porch to ask what was going on. “Dam broke up at Wequonnoc Park!” he shouted. “The water’s coming this way!”
Uncle Chick started the Merc, hunched forward, and began gunning it down the hill. Aunt Sunny was up front, next to him, clutching the baby. When we caught up to the Dugases’ car, Uncle Chick laid on the horn. “Come on! Move it!” he shouted. Instead, their brake light went on. He drove up onto the sidewalk and tried to pass them, but there wasn’t enough room. “Get going or get the hell out of the way!” he shouted. Gave the horn another couple of blasts.
“Chick, I’m scared!” Aunt Sunny said. Annie was crying now. The baby, too. Uncle Chick ordered Aunt Sunny and me to open our windows because the front windshield was fogging up. Then the Merc stalled, and while Uncle Chick was starting it up again, the Dugases’ car disappeared around the curve. The engine caught and the Mercury shot forward again, but just as we reached the curve, we were hit from the back by a wall of water. The tires lost contact with the road and the car started bobbing around, moving every which way instead of straight ahead no matter which way Uncle Chick turned the wheel. When I looked out the window, a big gray chunk of something whizzed past us. I saw a tree topple over. I remember feeling scared but excited, too—like we were on some thrilling, out-of-control carnival ride. Then something smashed into the back of the car, sending Annie and me flying to the floor and propelling the Merc into a crazy spin. As I scrambled to get us back up onto our seats, Aunt Sunny screamed. I looked out the front windshield and recognized the drop-off we were heading toward—a retaining wall a good fifteen feet high.
The Merc dropped nose-down and we went underwater. The roaring in my ears stopped and everything turned from gray to black. When I pulled myself and then Annie up into the air pocket at the rear of the car, I saw that it had landed vertically, its nose underwater, its back bumper above it. It had somehow come to a stop that way. I saw, too, that the station wagon’s way-back was about a foot and a half above water. Remembering that Uncle Chick’s toolbox was back there, I lifted myself over the seat back, then pulled Annie up, too. Holding her in one arm, I reached around in the cold black water, feeling among the spilled tools until my hand located Chick’s ball-peen hammer. I grabbed it and used it to smash out the back window. When I looked back, I saw that Uncle Chick, Aunt Sunny, and the baby had made it up to the surface, too. Aunt Sunny was coughing and spitting out water, holding Gracie above her head. Uncle Chick was wild-eyed.
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see that the Merc’s back bumper was leaning against a long, low building of some kind. If I could climb out and onto the bumper without having the car move forward, the roof would be in reaching distance. “I’m going to climb up there, then I’ll pull you guys up,” I called back.
“What? What’d you say!” Chick said. The roar of the water rushing past was deafening. I repeated what I’d said, shouting it this time.
“Climb up where?” Chick shouted back.
“Onto a roof! The car’s leaning against a building and I think I can reach the roof!”
“Save Annie!” Aunt Sunny pleaded.
My hands were wet and shaking from the icy cold, but the pebbly roof shingles gave me some grip, and on my second try I managed to hoist myself up and swing one leg over and onto the roof, then the other. Leaning as far as I dared over the edge, I reached down and coaxed Annie up onto the bumper. Her little fingers curled around mine and I pulled her up one-handed. “I got her!” I shouted. “She’s up here on the roof!”
Somehow, Uncle Chick managed to climb out of the back window and onto the bumper with Gracie tucked under his arm. He handed her up to me, grabbed onto the edge of the roof, and pulled himself up. “Come on, Sunny!” he shouted, turning back to his wife. “Climb out as best you can onto the bumper and I’ll take it from there!”
She tried once, twice. “I can’t do it,” she scre
amed, panic-stricken.
“Yes, you can! I know you can!”
I realized that her soaked winter coat was weighing her down. “Aunt Sunny!” I shouted. “Take your coat off!”
“What? I can’t hear you?” I shouted it again, as loud as I could. She heard me that time, because I could see her trembling hand fiddle with the buttons while she held on to the seat back with her other hand. One-handed, she somehow got the coat off her shoulders and pulled the sleeves from her arms. The coat fell away. Lighter now, she managed to get herself halfway out of the back window, but she was still halfway inside. Between her outstretched arm and Uncle Chick’s, there was a foot and a half of space.
“Kent, I’m going farther over the edge,” Uncle Chick said. “Hold on to my ankles, and when I say pull, you pull with all your motherfucking might!”
I nodded. “Annie, here,” I said, turning to her. “Hold your sister.”
She shook her head. Said she was only allowed to hold Gracie when she was sitting on the couch. “Come on! This is different!” I yelled. I held the baby out to her and she took her, bucking and crying, in her arms.
I knelt behind Uncle Chick and grabbed his ankles. “Okay!” I said. But what if I didn’t have the strength to do it? What if all three of us got pulled back into that black water? A thought flashed in my mind: I wish Donald were here. We need Donald.
“Okay, I got hold of her!” Uncle Chick shouted. “Now pull!”
With my elbows and knees digging into the gritty shingles, I strained and pulled as hard as I could, managing to move myself backward, but only a couple of inches. “Pull, goddamn it! Pull!” Uncle Chick screamed. I clenched my teeth, grunted, and gained another several inches. “That’s it! Keep going! Pull!” My arms felt like they’d come right out of the sockets, but when I pulled again, we gained another five or six inches. Aunt Sunny’s head came into view. It was working! We were doing it!
“Pull, Kent! Pull!”
As I did, I felt the roof begin to give way under me. Uncle Chick’s body slipped forward instead of backward and Aunt Sunny’s head disappeared again. “The roof’s caving in!” I screamed.
“Okay, let go!” Chick screamed back. “Save the girls, Kent! Save my kids!” On my hands and knees, I watched him slip over the side.
The sound of the roaring water faded away again. I must have gone deaf for a few minutes, because when I looked over at Annie, she was screaming without sound. Afraid that the roof would cave in altogether, I crawled over to her, hugging her body tight against mine. Then I remembered the baby. “Where’s Gracie?” I said. My hearing had returned.
“She was slippery,” she sobbed. “She wouldn’t stop squirming.”
Oh, no! I thought, scanning the empty roof. Oh, no! Oh, no! Then I stood and grabbed onto Annie’s hand. “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to get off this thing before it caves.” Spotting a tree growing on the far side of the building, I led her across the roof toward it.
I don’t remember the particulars of how I got us both up into that tree, but I did. We sat together on one of the bigger limbs, our legs dangling over the side, me with one arm wrapped around Annie’s waist and the other arm holding on for dear life to a branch above. Poor Annie. She had long since lost the blanket I’d wrapped her up in and was only wearing her cold, wet pajamas. She was shivering like crazy, and though I couldn’t hear them, I could see that her teeth were chattering. The shiny black water was racing beneath us, carrying ice and debris. Carrying little Gracie to who knew where. What did she weigh? Fourteen or fifteen pounds? There was no way in hell she could survive. I unzipped my jacket, pulled Annie tight as I could against my side, and zipped it up again, figuring my body heat might warm her up a little. As best I could, I tried to hold in my sobs so she wouldn’t know I was crying for Gracie.
As we waited to be found and rescued, I realized that the rain had finally stopped, and that the moon had come out from behind the clouds. Now I saw exactly where we were, and why the Merc had stopped in that vertical position. After it had pitched itself over that retaining wall, it had landed at the back of the Ford dealership on Franklin Avenue and wedged itself between the long garage we’d climbed on top of and these two huge black oil tanks that sat there, kitty-corner against each other, in front of the car. There, to the right of the tree we were in, was McPadden’s Funeral Home, and across the street was Stanley’s Market, where I bought my sodas and smokes and stole candy bars. To the left were the grinder shop, the Laundromat, the dry cleaner’s where, two days before, I had picked up the long winter coat that Aunt Sunny had worn and later had to shed after it got waterlogged. Just a little ways down the street was the Shamrock Barbershop, where Uncle Chick worked. I found myself wondering if Uncle Brendan’s mynah bird had survived the flood.
Annie reached up and tapped me on the shoulder. She said something that I couldn’t hear over the noise of the water. “Hmm?” I said. “Say it louder.” She wanted to know if the cops were going to make her go to jail because she’d dropped her sister. I thought long and hard. Then I said, “You didn’t drop her. I did. You got that?” She looked up at me, confused. “I had her in my jacket, but she slipped out when we were climbing into this tree.”
“No she didn’t,” she said.
“Yes she did! And I don’t want you telling anyone she didn’t! Okay?”
We stared at each other for the next several seconds. “Okay,” she said. In my whole life, it was the most generous thing I ever did for anyone. Hey, I don’t know. Maybe it was the only generous thing I ever did.
“Look!” Annie said a few minutes later. When I followed her gaze, I saw Uncle Chick. He was back on the roof of the garage, creeping toward us on his hands and knees. When he reached the edge, he stood up and leapt, grabbing hold of the tree trunk and then shimmying up and onto a sturdy limb on the other side of ours. He was sobbing, shouting. “I couldn’t hold her, Kent! The car moved forward, and when our hands went beneath the water, she slipped from my grip! . . . But Sunny’s a strong swimmer. She’ll be okay, I know she will. . . . But oh, god! What if she . . . ? Oh, god!”
He hadn’t yet realized that Gracie wasn’t with us. And later, when he did, he rested his head against the tree trunk and wailed.
As the water receded, blocks of ice, smashed cars, and broken tree limbs began to reveal themselves. When we started shouting for help, a guy appeared on the upstairs back porch of the funeral parlor. “I see you!” he called to us. “I’ll get help.” A few minutes later, he and two men in rain slickers and hip boots—firemen, I guess—came sloshing through the knee-high water toward us. Two of the men were carrying a ladder against their shoulders. They leaned it against the trunk of the tree. One climbed the ladder, got hold of Annie, and climbed down again, the poor kid slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Uncle Chick and I climbed down after them. For some reason, there were tangles of twine in the fallen tree limbs. The water was now only up to my shins. As I followed the firemen, I kept stumbling on these loose bricks underfoot. They were all over the place.
An ambulance took Annie and me to the hospital, where two nurses treated us for exposure, removing our wet clothes and wrapping us in heated blankets. Another nurse used a rubber squeeze bulb to suck dirty water and mucous from our throats and nostrils. They made us put on these hospital nightgown things and told us we had to stay there overnight for observation. At first, they were going to separate us, but Annie was too scared to let me out of her sight, so they put us in the same two-bed room. When Annie asked the nurses where her mommy was, they gave each other funny looks and said they didn’t know but people were looking for her.
They had wanted Uncle Chick to come with us to the hospital, but he’d refused, insisting that he needed to stay and search for his wife and his baby daughter. I think it was around midnight when Donald walked into Annie’s and my hospital room. Annie was asleep by then, so the two of us had to whisper. He kept stopping to collect himself in the middle of telling me his sto
ry: how the coach’s wife was waiting when the track team got back to school. How he hadn’t gotten scared until they said he couldn’t go home. “Instead, I had to go over to Coach’s house until we found out what was going on. Coach called the police station for me. When they finally called back, they said you guys were here. Dad’s here, too, you know. They brought him in a little while ago. They let me look in and see him, but they wouldn’t let me talk to him yet, because they said he’s in shock. Is Ma . . . is she dead, Kent?”
I nodded. “Gracie, too.”
He looked mad at first—the way he’d looked the day he discovered that I’d wrecked his trophy. But then he broke down. I pushed over and he got into bed with me, put his arms around me and sobbed, his tears falling against my neck. When he left, about an hour later, he looked more dazed than anything else. He was staying the night at his coach’s house.
I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing and hearing the floodwater. Finally, after the second or third time the nurse came in and shined her flashlight in my face, she gave me something to help make me drowsy. When I woke to the sound of birds a little before dawn, I felt, and then saw, Annie asleep against me. Sometime in the middle of the night, she must have climbed out of her bed and up onto mine.
They found Gracie’s body first, stuck in some twine-draped tree branches in front of Stanley’s Market, just a few hundred feet away from where the Merc had crashed. They didn’t find Aunt Sunny’s body until that afternoon when Mr. McPadden and his brother began the cleanup at the funeral parlor. It had gotten a lot of damage, both on the main floor where the wakes were and in the basement where the bodies were embalmed and the caskets were stored. It was weird: they found Aunt Sunny on the floor in the casket room, lying facedown in two or three inches of water with her arm sticking straight up. On the radio, I heard Mr. McPadden say that a block of ice had bashed in the basement doors and the water must have carried Aunt Sunny’s body inside.