Fourteeners

by Sarah Latchaw

  I lay on the ground and absorbed its energy. Wind swept over and around, wearing me down, smoothing rough edges. Roaring, always roaring in my eardrums, though I couldn’t tell if it was the wind, the water, or injury. Soon the roaring sounded like a rhythmic thwap-thwap-thwap. Before long, the rhythm overtook the roar and I peered into the silvery sky.

  There it was. A helicopter—military –coming from the west. I lifted a hand to wave it down. Could it see me, as muddy and bruised as the mountainside, or would I simply be unnoticed, a camouflaged body against the landscape? Closer, closer. No signs of slowing. Now it was nearly overhead.

  I need to find Samuel.

  With one last burst, I pushed myself off the ground and waved my arms, jumped into the air, as if I could reach that helicopter and yank it down. It slowed and hovered, its ring of wind flattening the injured slope. I blocked the sun with my hand and tried to see into the chopper. A side door popped open and a man emerged, clad from head to toe in an Air Force flight suit. A rope lowered him down, down, down, until he was face-to-face with me. He smiled, then grimaced as he took in what must be my grisly appearance. He said something to me and I shook my head, confused. Then he pushed up his visor and I saw him clearly, my own personal angel.

  My brother cupped my cheek, afraid to touch me. I collapsed against his chest in a mess of sobs and then his arms came around me, hugged me to him as tightly as he dared. I sank into his warmth, his dryness.

  Angel sought out my good ear and shouted. “I told you we’d come for you, hermanita!”

  Vaguely, it registered that I hadn’t been rendered completely deaf after all. He hooked a harness around me and then we were lifted into the sky, a foot, a dozen feet, farther and farther from the destruction below us.

  Once I was safely inside the belly of the helicopter, I saw the other half of Angel’s ‘we.’

  Pale and trembling, fear was etched in every deep line of his face, in the dark circles beneath his eyes, rumpled clothing, the thin press of his mouth. At once I was in the embrace of my husband, fierce, not at all careful. What little composure he’d maintained collapsed, and he buried his face into my bedraggled, stringy hair and wept.

  “We couldn’t find you. We couldn’t find you,” he cried, again and again, his arms solid and painful around my ribcage. Someone handed him a fleece blanket, which seemed to bring him back to himself and he released me, tenderly wrapped the scratchy thing around my shoulders, covering my tattered appearance that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.

  Once I was decent, I burrowed into him and stayed there as the helicopter circled the canyon. A medic flashed a light in my eyes, checked my vitals, and began to catalog my injuries. I gradually became aware of my surroundings. The Air Guard medic attended two other survivors, in much the same state as I. Another peered out the windows or communicated with the pilot, directing him to washed-out homes, specks of color or movement, any life in the devastation below. The medic pressed a bottle of water into my hands.

  “Slowly, okay?”

  Unbelievable, how my skin was wrinkled and swollen from a night in the rain, but my innards were absolutely parched. I sipped and coughed. Samuel dragged his fingers along my spine in a soothing pattern, back-and-forth. He watched me, and I realized he’d asked a question. I tapped my bad ear and he frowned. Something was definitely wrong with my eardrums. I jammed my fingertips into them, suctioned them with my palms to no avail. Tears welled in my eyes. What if both of my ears were now bad? Of all the things to cry over, additional hearing loss seemed low on the totem pole, but it pushed me over the edge.

  As I cried, Samuel took me back into his arms, and together we shook with fatigue and relief.

  After a long while, he stared straight into my eyes with determination. “Can you hear me now?” he said (shouted, more likely). A little laugh burst out as I remembered those annoying cell phone commercials.

  He smiled. “I think it’s just Swimmers Ear, firecracker.”

  “What did you say a few minutes ago?” I asked (more than likely shouted, also.)

  “I said, ‘Do you know how we spotted you?’”

  “How?”

  He tugged one of my nasty locks. “Your blue hair.”

  “No. Really?”

  “God’s honest truth. Only speck of brightness on that mountainside, saw you a mile away.”

  Well. Wait until I told Danita.

  My body was warm, cocooned in soft, dry, blankets. No more roaring, no more wind or cold.

  “Kaye.”

  I shook my head, which was a mistake. Ow.

  “Kaye.”

  I cracked open an eye to see Samuel peering down at me. His sensitive mouth twitched.

  “Hey,” I croaked.

  “Hey.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Boulder General. You have a long rap sheet here.”

  “The info desk keeps butterscotch candies behind the counter, FYI.”

  “Good to know.” He brushed hair from my eyes. “Your head hurts because you’re severely dehydrated. Your left wrist is splinted, just a sprain. Cracked rib, once again. Numerous contusions and cuts on your legs and arms, like you nearly lost a fight to a mountain lion. You’ve got an IV in your right arm, so try not to move it. And, of course, Swimmer’s Ear. Doctor emptied a gallon of water out of your head. It was enlightening.”

  “Duly noted.” As he said this, I realized I could hear him more clearly than…how long had I been here? I reached up and took his fingers, and saw that my hand was swathed in gauze, shielding a plethora of lacerations. Dang. No one could accuse me of having banker hands. “My mom?”

  “Safe in Longmont.”

  “Danita and the kids? Your folks?” My eyelids were twenty pound weights. They fluttered as I struggled to open them.

  “Marooned in Lyons, but safe.”

  “The Paddlers boys?” I mumbled. “Jaime? My TrilbyJones staff?”

  “Go back to sleep, sweetheart.” I didn’t argue.

  A “thousand year storm” is what they would call the disaster that hit our small corner of the world that September. Those hurricanes I’d fretted over for Samuel’s sake, so far away in Mexico? Well, far-away hurricanes have huge impacts in your own backyard. That ample tropical moisture from Hurricanes Manuel and Ingrid combined with the stalled storms in the Uinta Basin, which we spotted on our mountain climb. What resulted was epic rainfall over our drought-beleaguered Front Range: twelve inches in three hours. Eight lives lost, another six missing. Fifteen-hundred homes destroyed, a billion dollars in damage. Those are the numbers.

  But I’m not a numbers person.

  It was as if a giant from Samuel’s stories had upended a massive trough of mud and debris onto the Front Range, filling every ditch, gully and crevice with brown muck and withering branches.

  Big Thompson Canyon homes were reduced to rubble, plucked from the sides of mountains and hurled onto the rocks below.

  Old trees with roots twenty feet deep were effortlessly torn from the ground like saplings.

  Highways broke and buckled. Two-ton SUVs glided across parking lots like matchbox cars, so great was the force of the water as it swept them away. Even my mom’s truck was upside down and half-sunk into a bed of mud.

  Rescue workers removed a retired teacher’s body from his home after both were crushed by rocks and muck.

  “We heard branches snapping in the tree line just above our backyard, thought it was a bear,” Sofia shared. “I asked Alonso to check, and he asked if I was trying to off him for his life insurance,” she chuckled, though there was no humor in her eyes. “It wasn’t until we heard trees and boulders crashing into the St. Vrain, that we realized we had to leave our home or die in it.”

  She was right, too. I saw what was left of their home…even now, sickness settled into my bones as I recalled memories, sodden and scattered across a slope of putrid mud, alongside Alonso’s treasured library. Sofia’s Mexican folk art was destroyed. The old family room in
the basement was stripped of the upper level and filled to the brim with two tons of mud. And Sofia’s flower beds, tended by slightly arthritic fingers? Crushed.

  Seeing the remains of the Cabrals’ home on 24/7 news coverage had me bolting out of my hospital bed, wincing against the pain in my ribs and wrist as I fruitlessly tore through my suitcase for my ruined Tevas. But I was still hooked up to my monitors (and some pretty strong pain meds), and my skyrocketing stress levels brought a nurse running. The nurse told my doctor, my doctor told Samuel, and now I was banned from watching 24/7 news.

  Three days in the hospital.

  Did I mention my roommate was Ash, my TrilbyJones intern?

  “Do you think Samuel will be back this morning?” (Not ‘your husband.’ She called him ‘Samuel.’) She peered at me from her hospital bed, where her leg was in traction. Apparently, she’d walked across a flooded road, but Boulder Creek had different ideas and slammed her into a streetlight.

  “I’m sure he will.”

  “I saw the interview he did about the flooding on the national news, encouraging donations to the Front Range Flood Relief Fund.”

  “Yes, we watched it together, remember?” We watched everything together. Everything that she chose to watch, because my loving husband placed the television remote in her hands and instructed her not to let me watch the news. So now I was her new BFF. (Or rather, the wife of her new BFF.)

  “Can you imagine the devastation he must have seen when he took that helicopter ride with the governor?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I have an idea.”

  Samuel had become some sort of celebrity spokesperson for relief efforts. He had my full blessing, of course, because I’d much rather have him out there, helping, than stuck in this hospital room while Ash monopolized our conversations. The Boulder Hospital was overcrowded, so the roommate situation was unavoidable. I got it, I really did, and tried to make the best of it because Boulder had much bigger concerns than whether I had an annoying roommate. But even a drawn curtain couldn’t shut out her enthusiastic six a.m. calls to some chick in Baltimore who went by the handle ‘MNN.’ (At first, I thought Ash called her ‘M&M’, but then I realized the Baltimore chick’s full handle was “Missus Nicodemus Nixie’, as in, “Are you awake? Missus Nicodemus Nixie, brace yourself. You will never believe who was just in my hospital room! Eeee!”)

  Somehow, I’d escaped hell-on-earth in the canyon, only to have landed in another kind of hell. I needed a friggin’ jailbreak.

  “You in here, flower?”

  My dad poked his head around the door and I sat up, elated to have a visitor. My mother followed him into the room and my joy grew.

  “Mom!” I reached for her like a toddler and she bent over, gave me a quick pat and pulled up a chair. “Samuel told me you got out okay, but it’s good to see you with my own eyes.”

  Dad took the other chair. “I thought your room would be crawling with friends and family, but it’s quiet, huh?”

  “I told you Tom, Lyons is an island right now. The Cabrals can’t leave unless they hitch a ride on a Guard helicopter.”

  “Which is supposed to happen later today, according to the local news,” I pointed out.

  Mom frowned. “Samuel said you weren’t supposed to watch the news until you were released from the hospital. Doctor’s orders.”

  I tossed up my hands. “What else am I supposed to do? My phone is gone, my laptop was in my Jeep, which is also gone, and one can only read FIT magazine for so long before one wants to rip out one’s IV and do glute lunges through hospital corridors. Is it a crime to want to know how my hometown is doing?”

  My traitor roommate gave my mother the television remote. “I bet you could find a Law & Order marathon.”

  I groaned and leaned back in my bed.

  “I can tell you what’s happening out there better than the television. You heard the farm flooded?”

  I leaned forward, itching for news. “Sam mentioned something about canoeing off the land?”

  “St. Vrain Creek, Highland Ditch, Rough and Ready Ditch—all look like they’re ready for barge traffic. The ground’s completely saturated, so there’s no place for the water to go except up. Well, the water kept rising, so I got the sheep out of the pen while I could still see the ground, the chickens, loaded them into the trailer and took ‘em up to Mark Watson’s place on the hill. All except Loppy. I kept her with me until the water in the basement spilled onto the first floor. Then we untethered the canoe and paddled across the farm until the bottom hit mud.”

  “Your mom shouldered that sheep and waded through the muck until she reached the highway, then hitched a ride into Longmont where she called me from a gas station. Sheep still on her shoulders, mind you.”

  “And here we are.”

  “Ahhh, where’s the sheep?”

  Mom grinned. “In your father’s Prius. Don’t worry, she’s diapered.”

  Good lord, Gran would turn in her grave. I eyed my parents. “So, are you two...?”

  They immediately shook their heads. “Definitely not,” said my dad.

  “I wouldn’t touch that hairy hippie with a ten-foot hookah pipe. Saw Audrey at the school gym and she said the same. Apparently, we’re friends now, after a night playing Rummy under the bleachers.”

  “That’s good, I guess.”

  Suddenly, Ash squealed with genuflects and thank yous. Samuel had returned, armed with a gigantic balloon bouquet and an even larger bouquet of flowers. He placed the balloons on my roommate’s nightstand.

  “These are for the best reader in the world.” I swear his white teeth twinkled. As Ash lost herself in a fit of hysterical euphoria, Sam knelt next to my bed and placed the paper-wrapped flowers in my lap. “And these are for my strong, amazing wife.” He leaned over and kissed my head, then my lips, tender and cautious of my abrasions. His smile held firm, but his eyes were dark blue, sober and serious. I wondered at the things he’d seen.

  “Don’t sugarcoat it.”

  He rubbed his neck. “Well, I’ll say this: Our neighbors have a sense of humor. There are more garage sale signs today than all of this summer.”

  “A woman at the school gym told me the water hurled her refrigerator up to the second floor,” Mom said.

  “Probably along with every other appliance in her house.” The destruction of his parents’ home reflected in his eyes. I didn’t ask if he’d been to our own home, scattered across the ruin of our mountain before we’d even slept under its new roof. “I just got off the phone with Danita. The National Guard is going to airlift them out of Lyons within the hour.”

  “Do they need a place to stay?”

  “Mamá and Papá have friends at their church who will put them up. Dani and the kids are taking our guest bedroom until Angel is off duty. After that, I don’t know.”

  That was the story for more than a thousand of my Front Range neighbors. Leaving town wasn’t as simple as hopping in a car and driving away. Traversing from Longmont to Boulder was like escaping from a hundred-mile maze.

  But the sun did return and the waters did recede. And soon, my family trickled through my hospital room with their own harrowing tales. Sofia and Alonso, Dani and my sweet nephew and niece, and then Angel after Guard duty. Even Luca and his family. All somber-faced, full of half-stories and careful words.

  They were hiding something.

  Tears spilled down my cheeks when Molly’s beautiful red head peeked around my hospital room door, her frame nearly obscured by a gigantic care package.

  “For you and Ash.” She hauled the thing onto the table between our beds and unloaded an endless stream of magazines, pre-packed snacks, and music. Ash loosed a shriek so piercing, birds dropped miles away.

  “O. M. G.! This is a galley proof for Samuel Cabral’s mountaineering book! NO ONE has this yet!”

  Molly winked at me. “Courtesy of your husband. That should buy you an evening of quiet,” she whispered as she gingerly hugged me around my tubes.

>   “What are you doing here?”

  “Someone has to man the home office while you’re laid up. Seriously, do you really think I’d hide away in Alaska? I’m where I need to be.”

  “And Hippie?”

  Molly’s smile dropped. “He’s where he needs to be. Far away in Alaska.”

  “Oh Molly, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. He’s driving Betty the Campervan down when the roads improve, and then he’s off to Minnesota or something. Alaska’s ‘not doing it for him anymore.’ Don’t even.” She swatted my outstretched hand. “Funny, it’s so anticlimactic. No big fight, no dramatic exit.” Her voice cracked. “Oh, I think my heart is going to be broken for a while, but I’m not what Cassady needs and he’s not what I need. Where are those Kleenexes?” As she dug through her purse, a tear skimmed the bridge of her nose and dripped. I offered her the box on my nightstand. When she was in control once again, she slapped her thighs.

  “Long story short, don’t you worry about our baby. TrilbyJones is in good hands.”

  I assured her of my undying gratitude and she tutted, gathered her things to ‘scope out the food situation in the cafeteria.’

  “Oh! Before you go, can you find out how the Valdez family is doing? I haven’t heard from a one of them, save Angel. Hector’s not surprising, he’s probably still miffed. Santiago, though…”

  Molly and Ash exchanged a covert look, but I caught it.

  “What? I’ve gotten this all day, from Samuel, Sofia, even my mom, and I’m about ready to take a hostage if I don’t get answers.”

  Molly faltered, bit her lip. “I need to talk to Sam first.” She ducked through the door, leaving me flabbergasted. I turned to Ash, but she’d already popped in her ear buds and buried her nose in Samuel’s galley proof.