With her hand on the doorknob, she turned and looked over her left shoulder and said, “We’ll be right there.”
The way she said it, or maybe the way she moved—almost choreographed, as though all her life she had known that this moment was coming—made me certain she would know what to do with all of our terrible water.
As I headed back inside, I wondered how the day would ever end. I hadn’t had that feeling for years. Not since I’d stopped drinking.
I remembered, no matter how impossible it seemed that any given day would end, it always did. This one would, too.
Even worse, now I knew things could happen in the night. Harm could reach you no matter how insulated you thought you were. It could change you. It could take.
When Carleen arrived a few moments later, she brought her transplanted California surfer-dude blond husband, Henry, and her Shop-Vac. Henry was holding what appeared to be every bath towel they owned, each perfectly folded.
I saw the slightest widening of her eyes as she surveyed the damage, but she said nothing. I had learned this about Carleen: if it was a rainy day, she would never say, “It sure is a rainy day.”
She simply began to assemble the vacuum and then she plugged it in. Carleen was like a trauma surgeon: “Yeah, it’s really never a good idea to French kiss any dog you don’t know, but especially not a Presa Canario. Well, let’s see if we can’t get a temporary face sewn in place for you.”
She raked the vacuum across the floor in wide, even strokes, sweeping the room in a logical grid. And when I saw this I thought, thank God we live next door to somebody with a Ph.D. I had lived in Manhattan for nearly ten years before I even realized it was laid out in a grid. Then Dennis had to explain its advantage.
In ten minutes, all the standing water was gone. It had been simple. She didn’t need a sponge mop or a dustpan or twenty rolls of paper towels.
I’d managed to close the French doors and turn the heat all the way up.
But that is fairly all I did.
Perhaps I oversold myself a little as a pilot. Maybe I was the airsick passenger in the back of the plane, the one who has lifted all the barf bags from the surrounding seats and is filling them up one by one.
It wasn’t only that Carleen owned a Shop-Vac. I could have owned a Shop-Vac. The difference was, she cleaned up all the water with it.
While I most certainly would have electrocuted us all.
My brother descended a few moments after the last of the water had been sucked away. He was driving a British military Land Rover that was hauling a trailer behind it. Instead of parking on the driveway, he plowed straight across it and onto the side yard, then down and around into the back. The wide, toothy tires devoured chunks of half-frozen yard, mixing them in with snow.
He entered the house like a weather system, a super-cell thunderstorm complete with rotating cloud bands and downbursts. At six-three and well over two-hundred pounds, his long legs and huge feet enabled him to travel to the center of the space in two or three great, lumbering strides.
He stood perfectly straight, looming over everything, his eyes not even blinking behind the thick lenses of his glasses. He was expression-neutral and made no sound as he surveyed the room, instantly collecting vast amounts of data, like a barcode scanner at a supermarket checkout.
Some sort of globally convergent infeasible-interior-point predictor-corrector algorithm must have switched in his mind, because all at once, he zeroed in on our Christmas tree.
With great purpose, he moved to the French doors. They seemed to explode open at his touch.
Just then, he noticed Henry and Carleen standing in the kitchen. “Oh, huh,” he said. “Well, hi, I guess.”
Carleen smiled at him, and though he was unable to tell, it was a fully genuine, cannot-be-helped kind of smile. “Hi, John.”
She had always liked my brother. “He’s direct, that’s what I love about him. You always know exactly where you stand with John.”
“Yeah, it’s quite the mess in here. What happened? Did a pipe burst?” he asked.
“We don’t know yet. It came from under the sink but the plumbing in the rest of the house still works, so who the fuck knows.”
“You think maybe your fancy queer faucet turned against you?” He nodded his head at our kitchen sink, the gleaming nickel Franke faucet.
“It wasn’t that,” I said, annoyed. It was too lovely to cause trouble; it wasn’t some garbage-faucet from Wal-Mart. But now that I glanced over at it again, there seemed to be something smug in its gleam.
He shrugged. “Huh. Well, in any case, we have to get everything out of here.”
And as suddenly as the words had left his mouth, his gargantuan paw gripped the neck of the Christmas tree. He hoisted it straight up, high into the air. The tree stand slid off and crashed to the floor as my brother maneuvered the tree over his shoulder, somewhat like a javelin and hurled it onto the deck and into the snow that was packed into a drift against the railing.
Christmas balls popped free of their hangers and flew in all directions. Some rolled back into the house, others sunk into the snow on the deck. Most, though, slipped through the railing and shattered against the stone patio below.
A snarl of lights trailed from the branches, the tiny bulbs crushed into colorful dust beneath his boots.
Strands of silver tinsel blew from the tree and lifted into the air above the backyard. As they were carried higher and still higher, these strands looked not like tinsel anymore, but rather like scratches; tears in the very fabric of everything.
It was an effort for Dennis to even speak, he was so dumbfounded. “What did you do that for?”
My brother turned and looked out at the tree. We all did. There was something quite shocking, even disturbing about it.
It was almost as if my grandmother had come to spend Christmas with us, dressed in her very best outfit and wearing her favorite jewelry—her charm bracelet, her gold and jade rings—and we’d gone and beaten the hell out of her then tossed her broken body into a snowbank. There was just something plain old awful about it.
I hadn’t felt this way as a child when my mother hurled the Christmas tree off the deck; then it had seemed thrilling. Maybe she’ll burn down the house!
My brother grunted and said, “Well, you really oughtta have a fake tree like we do. They’re much less trouble, they don’t mess up the house, and they’re better for the environment.”
I stared at him, picturing a Chinese Christmas tree factory located on a former lake bed or wildlife preserve, spewing toxic green smoke into the unregulated air; the freshly stamped trees being hoisted by forklift onto tractor trailers so they could be driven four hundred miles to the port where they would be loaded onto an oil-leaking ship and taken to America.
Yeah, I was sure they were better for the environment.
He strode around the dining room table, reached over, and hoisted the huge, overstuffed slip-covered lounge chair right off the floor and into the air, holding it steady beside his large hairy head. He barked, “C’mon, what the fuck are you all just standing there for? Don’t you understand? We have to get every single item up off the floor and out of this room. Mush, mush,” he shouted. “Each one of you, grab something and take it into the garage or throw it onto the deck with the tree.”
We did.
And we fell into a silent rhythm, from living room to garage; chair, table, chest. As we worked, a television commercial was irritatingly playing on a loop in my head.
This used to happen to me as a child. Without trying or even wanting to, I automatically memorized every word of every commercial. The difference was, back then I was compelled to act them out.
“Water can be more damaging than fire. When you have a flood or serious water damage, Call ServePro. When fire and water take control of your life, we help you take it back. ServePro. Like it never even happened.”
It was that last line that I kept repeating. “ServePro. Like it never even happened.
”
Only after ten or fifteen minutes of this refrain rat-on-a-treadmilling through my brain did I say, “Wait a minute,” and run from the room, into my office.
I was stunned that the Internet still worked. Somehow, I had assumed the flood had taken everything away, even Google.
When I returned, I smiled at Dennis. “The Cavalry is coming,” I told him. “They’ll be here in two hours.”
With the room now stunningly empty and all our furniture stacked and piled in the garage, only the heavy, soaked rugs remained. My brother squatted down and began to roll, and then bunch the first rug up into a transportable mound. “I’ll take all the rugs down to my house and lay them out on the radiant heat flooring in the basement where they can dry.”
And all our rugs traveled by British military Land Rover past one mailbox, then another, and down my brother’s long driveway and straight into one of his four garages.
Dennis appeared to be in shock so I said, “He may be something of a bull in a china shop but when your china shop is being held up at gunpoint by thugs, you’ll be awfully glad you have a thousand-pound bull behind the counter, snorting and furious and ready to stampede.”
Dennis nodded because it was true.
Carleen and Henry slipped out to take care of their two kids. And the man who literally built our house stopped by. I’d called him because I had developed a psychological dependence on him and it seemed to me he could fix everything. But he could do little more than stand in morbid awe and be appalled.
This would be our lump of coal and reindeer-hit-by-car sandwiches Christmas. Just exactly like all the motherfucking rest of them.
ServePro arrived in a large Ghostbusters’ van. They wore uniforms and carried precision instruments with long, sharp probes that could be inserted into wood, to test its moisture content. After entering the house, they signaled one another using hand gestures and then dispersed; a couple went into the rear, two more downstairs to the basement. The sergeant stayed with me and I found his presence comforting. His unchanging facial expression—one of serious concentration but no surprise—made me feel that perhaps our water damage was less severe than I thought. Maybe he would tell us to lay newspapers on the floor over night to soak up any remaining moisture. Maybe he would say, “Pay no mind to the deformity of floorboards; they’ll spring back into shape in a couple of days.”
Instead, he reached for his walkie-talkie and recalled the rest of the troop.
That’s when they brought out the hatchets.
Whole chunks of ceiling were removed, baseboards pried away from walls. Dennis’s prized carpet was ripped from the floor like a scab and carpet nails shot like sparks around the room.
When they finally left, the house had been filleted, nine industrial dehumidifiers and high-output drying fans had been left behind and the heat had been turned up to ninety.
It was now evening and the day was not destroyed, it was merely over. The house would live.
In bed that night, the walls and windows vibrated, as did the bed itself. This was because the dehumidification equipment, which would need to run twenty-four hours a day for a minimum of two weeks, sounded and felt like a jet engine was loose in the house. Upstairs with the bedroom door closed, we were somewhat isolated from the sound, but there would be no escaping the deep, endless vibrations I could feel in my liver.
Dennis lay flat on his back with his arms straight out from his sides. The dogs stood on his chest and licked his head. He was still wet from the shower, so they were able to get a drink, too.
“You know who you look like right now, especially in your boxers?”
He said, “Who?” then, “Blech, not my teeth, Cow.”
I smirked and said, “Jesus. With your arms straight out like that.”
“Very funny, ha ha,” he said.
Then I asked him, “Do you think I could become a Christian or is it too late for me?”
“Why do you want to become a Christian?”
“Because what Carleen did for us was very Christian.”
“You’re not Carleen.”
I was not Carleen.
After caring for her children, Carleen had returned. She was polished and well dressed and I saw at once how such a person no longer belonged in our house. It was a house for dirty guys in overalls once again.
She handed me a basket filled with fresh sandwiches, potato chips, and cookies.
Things we could eat without heating. Things we could eat with our hands. Our dirty hands. Carefully, beautifully wrapped. So that we would have one square foot of lovely between us.
I stared at the basket. And then at her. “Carleen, this is so incredibly—” I started to say but she put her hands up and waved me to a stop.
“No, but seriously, I can’t believe you did this. Thank you.”
She looked at me and said, “It was nothing. It’s just some sandwiches.”
But it was more than just the sandwiches. And it was the sandwiches, too.
It was how automatically she tossed away those precious five or ten early morning moments alone on her porch with her coffee. It was the way she looked over her shoulder as she reached her door, “We’ll be right there.”
And it was because something in her very nature seemed to act as a sort of scaffolding for the environment around her. There were people who had so much strength that you could borrow some, just by being in the same room with them.
Carleen had brought more than towels and a Shop-Vac and sandwiches into our home; she had brought grace itself, carried it in her bare hands and left it there for us.
In that basket, hidden beneath one of the sandwiches and cunningly tucked right between a chocolate chip cookie and a bag of Cape Cod brand potato chips was Christmas itself. Pure, true Christmas. Unavailable at any mall or even Cartier. The hardy, incorruptible, and now exceedingly rare variety of Christmas—more of a substance than a holiday. Ingesting even the smallest amount would cause you to stop whatever it was you were doing and listen, listen, listen for the sound of bells high in the sky above you.
It was the night before Christmas, six days since the flood. And we’d learned a few things.
It was the German gay faucet.
Cheap plastic valve, aggressive tighten-happy plumber.
And nine humidifiers and industrial fans? You can’t fight the noise. You must give in. You must enter it. It is the only way.
We also learned that if we had discovered the water an hour later, we might have had to rebuild the house. Instead of just the first floor. Which we learned would consume a lot of money and most of a year to repair.
And we learned that it felt kind of nice to walk on warped floorboards in bare feet.
So.
Yeah.
Dennis came into the bedroom where I was propped against the pillows emailing my friend Haven. “Dennis seems really fine,” I wrote her. “I mean, I thought he was going to be a vegetable, I thought he was going to be really sort of damaged by this. But by that evening, he was pretty much okay.”
I looked up from my ThinkPad. “Hey,” I said.
“Come on,” he said.
My first thought was: Oh no.
But he was smiling.
“Come,” he said, motioning with his hand.
I closed my laptop and I followed him.
We reached the bottom of the stairs and I just stared. But he took me by the hand and brought me over.
The room was dark. It was hot as hell. And loud; that Satanic dehumidifier near the fireplace would pulverize my mind if I had to be near it for long. And just below us in our fully wrecked non-rec room, a whole pack of dehumidifiers and fans were screaming away, as they did at every moment. I just normally didn’t stand directly above them—I avoided this floor all together.
But none of this mattered.
Because there in front of me was the most beautiful Christmas tree I had ever seen.
It was perfect.
And when I saw that one of the branc
hes was broken and in one or two spots only an ornament hanger was attached to the branch, then it was even more perfect.
Most of the ornaments, though, were new; I hadn’t seen them before.
“When did you do this?” I asked him.
“Tonight.”
“But why?”
He was silent for a moment.
Then he said, “I wanted you to have your Christmas tree.”
All I could do was stand there and watch it.
Dennis watched it, too.
A couple of times, he turned to look at me and he was smiling.
And I wasn’t smiling.
But then I did, a little.
And he was holding my hand and I was holding his back.
We stayed that way for a little while.
Then without us even knowing it, midnight arrived. And it became Christmas.
“I’m very lucky,” I whispered, so that my voice wouldn’t crack.
He squeezed my hand.
“I always have been, you know.”
“I know,” he said.
He bent over and picked up the extension cord near his feet. The lights were plugged into the end of it.
I assumed.
“Merry Christmas,” he said, smiling at me.
He pulled the plugs apart.
And instantly, the house fell absolutely, perfectly, blessedly silent.
Also by Augusten Burroughs
A Wolf at the Table
Possible Side Effects
Magical Thinking
Dry: A Memoir
Running with Scissors
Sellevision
YOU BETTER NOT CRY. Copyright © 2009 by Island Road, LLC.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com