There was only one other, and as soon as she thought it, Doris knew it to be correct. A sixth sense she’d picked up after years of a permanent state of unease. T. H. E. A. Four letters in an email. Doris could smell her, feel the weight of her sister’s presence in her chest. A mixture of doom, guilt, fury, and sadness, she felt a tug toward her sister as reliable as the drip of the leaky roof. The sensations thrummed in unison, each drip another step closer. Another step, another step, another drip.
Stopping her typing, Doris folded her hands in her lap and waited. God damn it. Thea probably needed cash, or a couch to crash on just long enough to reach her dealer. The last time the two of them had sat across from one another, Doris had restrained herself from slapping Thea across her chapped, junkie face. Despite this control, Thea had balked, slamming the front door and breaking the lock as she showed herself out.
She grabbed her phone and dialed. A line trilled, and for some reason this surprised her. With the water beating down and the thunder and the loudness and shaking, she’d just expected the phone to be a dead brick of cold circuits. But it worked and she waited for James to pick up.
He didn’t. He was at work. She knew he was at work. His wallet was just where she’d left it on the kitchen table, soggy with credit cards and a punch card for the sub shop by his office, the only item he might transfer from the old wallet to the new one. She dialed James again, hating that she needed him, but if Thea was on her way—and considering this monumental deluge and Thea’s penchant for lingering on Union Avenue just a few blocks south, she was on her way here—Doris needed backup. In her current state, she couldn’t stop Thea from ransacking the place, forcing Doris to pay attendance to her own robbery.
Her calls continued unanswered, for how long she didn’t keep track. The clouds overhead cast shadows through the room, and the air was thick with moisture and the scent of an old library. She chastened herself as her frustration mounted.
He was at work. He was busy. He was at work.
And she didn’t really want to talk to him.
She was probably being paranoid anyway. Thea would have to be insane to come here begging. She dialed again.
Like it or not, it just wasn’t like James to not get back to her. Peering through the window, she scanned the yard. For what? For James? For Thea? Doris didn’t even know what she wanted to see.
The yard was empty, though there wasn’t much relief in it. Water climbed suspiciously high. Her pretend swamp reeds were gone, swallowed under the mounting tide. It was many inches high, and while she couldn’t see everything without painfully straining, she figured it was high enough to reach over the front porch to the front door missing its weather stripping. Shit.
But then she saw something. Or thought she saw something. The cul-de-sac she lived in was dark under the storm, the streetlights not cued on at this time of day. In the very corners of her windows was a shiver of movement—the type of jerky fluttering of a ghost in the periphery. Then it was gone, disappeared into the gloom. Her stomach pooled into her chair as recognition set in.
She knew that movement. She’d seen it a hundred times as a kid, but never here. Never here at her home. Never.
What the hell was it doing here?
“No,” she said aloud. “Impossible.” Obviously, this was no more than a trick of the eye. A flickering of her imagination produced by her growing sense of unease.
That’s when she heard water gurgling somewhere off in the distance. No—wait. In her living room. It was a subtle, slow sound, like that of a bathtub draining.
There was nothing to be done for it now; she had to get up and check it out. Hoisting herself free with a grunt, Doris startled as her feet hit the hallway with a splash.
Water oozed through the cracks in the door. A slick of it gleamed atop her oak floors. The rug under the coffee table squished as she moved over it.
It was quick—seconds—between that realization and the first surge of the flood. One moment she was thinking about how badly the wood was going to warp, and in the next instant, water crawled up her walls, roared, and splintered pressboard and drywall and glass. Whoosh—it stole her away, colliding against her like a truck. She toppled and was overcome, breathing it in. Slammed against the opposite wall, Doris dug her nails into the drywall and clawed for purchase. She rose, gasping and choking, barely able to hold her chin above water. If she could stand, it’d only be up to her thigh. Panic severed a line connecting her brain to her limbs and everything rebelled.
But she could swim. A far cry from the controlled swim therapy of the rehabilitation center, but she managed.
Or she thought she could, but the rush was too much and water was everywhere and fuck her legs would not cooperate. Her grip was too slick. There was nothing close in which to steady herself.
The water was too strong.
Not able to discern one sensation from the next, Doris didn’t recognize the pull of someone’s arms yanking her up by the hair. It could have been a toppled-over bookcase or a magazine or a chair or a barstool or even God reaching down to take her. Everything was a swirl of water and chaos, and it was killing her.
Hair ripped up by the root, she screamed and gagged as blood poured down her forehead, dripping off her nose. The hands caught her again, a clump of her hair plopping onto the surface of the water, twirling away in the eddies.
The owner of the hands spoke in grunts, struggling to heft Doris’s weight above water and keep it there.
Not even a flood could wash the scent of her sister away.
“Thea,” said Doris between gasps.
“Doris.”
Thea returned the deadpan pleasantry like any proper debutante dragging the useless body of her sister might.
A garage sale copy of I, Robot floated past. One of many copies. It was the first science fiction she had ever read.
Adrenaline shocked Doris into a freeze, her body trembling from the cold while her sister pinned her up by her armpits.
“Fuck, you’re heavy. Can you stand?”
She honestly didn’t know if she could. Pain would have doubled her if it didn’t hurt even more to bend that way. She wanted to curl on the floor and vomit, but the water was rising. God, it was rising so quickly, and Thea couldn’t hold her much longer.
“I can’t hold you. Can you stand? Can you walk?”
Doris vomited in response, curling on the floor turning out to be a completely unnecessary step in the process. The heaving motion of it racked her body—it felt like she might snap in half, like her bones were wrenched apart from the force of it. Then she went limp, sliding down the wall that Thea failed to hold her against like a decommissioned robot—one section at a time. Dripping to her knees, Doris screamed as every fiber of recovering muscle ripped and tore all over again.
For a while, everything was white. Noise, vision, everything.
The water called her back.
Nerves enraged, they sparked and lit against these new sensations. It was as if her body had completely rebelled, throbbing in all sorts of uncomfortable ways, but then she focused on the water; the way it eddied around her, lifting the hem of her shirt away from her body, a gentle reprieve to its earlier show of force.
“Open your eyes! Doris!”
Thea snatched her by the cheeks, squeezing until Doris had no choice but to wince in acknowledgment.
“Good, you’re awake. We have to move.”
Thea had saved her. She might have drowned. She might have died, but as Doris gazed into her little sister’s sunken face, all she could think to say was, “Why were you hiding in my yard, Thea?”
A familiar look scribbled onto her sister’s face, one Doris recognized as the precursor to explosion. It meant a dozen things, all of which were easier swallowed in a gaze rather than in words.
“I wasn’t hiding anywhere. I was fucking running!” she shouted a
t Doris as furniture floated by.
“I saw you—you were out front in the shadows. You were moving weird. Are you high?”
“Can we not? Like, really, can we not?”
“You’re high.”
“And you’re about to drown. Let’s go.”
The sensation of Thea’s hands on her sent a fresh batch of vomit to the back of her throat, but the water was coming so fast, and there was so much of it, and she didn’t have much choice but to grimace through it and go. Arm slung over her sister’s shoulders, Doris hobbled toward the kitchen.
Water lapped against the white cabinetry, and a layer of gray grime already clung to it. The initial surge settled, choosing a devious, slow rise over the powerful punch of its entrance.
Thea heaved Doris toward the countertop nearest the kitchen sink. “Can you climb?”
Doris snorted, exhausted and not sure that she could. They both knew it, yet Thea didn’t dare set her hands on her again without permission. Instead, her gaze fixated on the window overlooking the backyard while Doris decided whether she wanted to ask for help.
“What is it?” Doris asked.
“Nothing.”
“You see something—what do you see?”
“I can’t see shit. It’s nothing but water, sis. Water everywhere. We have to get out of here.”
She couldn’t help but notice the way Thea trembled. She’d say it was from the cold, but they both knew the truth. “Where do you expect me to go? I can hardly move. Out there I’ll just . . .” The rest of that sentence refused to materialize.
“Up, then. You can’t stay here.”
Doris didn’t want to think about that now. It would stop soon; it had to stop. This was just a flash flood, something to enrage her homeowner’s insurer and physical therapist alike, but nothing more. It just didn’t rain like this here. It would stop.
Doris reached a hand toward Thea, past her, and latched onto the sink faucet, struggling to hurl her upper half onto the counter. Thea held back a supportive hand. Doris didn’t want it, any more than she wanted to explain why she didn’t want it.
The faucet bent, and with a guttural clunk below the countertop, it popped free of its setting just as she’d made a little headway. Thea caught her before she fell entirely, pushing her upright before removing her hands.
“You want help?”
“No.”
Thea leaned against the faucetless sink as if this were some kind of business brunch and not a weather-induced disaster. “This shit again?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You said yourself that you can’t move.”
Doris bristled. “I can move enough.”
“Enough to get out of here?”
“And go where, Thea?” Doris gripped the edge of the countertop, willing herself to stay upright. “Out there to get swept away?”
“Better than in here to drown.”
“It’s going to stop eventually.” Eventually, sure. But before she drowned? That part remained to be seen.
Thea shrugged, scanning the room.
“What are you doing?” Doris asked.
“Thinking,” Thea said.
“You’re getting at something. What is it?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Don’t treat me like a mark. What do you want?”
Thea cocked her head to the side as if Doris was pitifully dumb, which was the instant she understood.
“No,” she said.
“They don’t send people as injured as you home without something good.”
“I didn’t fill the prescription.”
“Maybe you didn’t, but I bet James did.”
She was right. James filled every prescription the doctor gave her. Doris had taken a few of them in moments of agony—she wasn’t the addict, so what was the harm? But even then, she knew what would happen. She feared it every day those pills sat in her medicine cabinet. It’s part of the reason she’d told Thea to never come back (a small part, but a part nonetheless). Thea would come for them, and then what would happen? As much as she hated her sister sometimes, she couldn’t bear to be the reason she overdosed. Doris couldn’t live with herself if she let that happen, and now here they were, doing exactly what she’d dreaded for months.
“I threw them in the toilet.”
Thea slammed a hand on the Formica, shit-eating grin morphed into something far more sinister. “You’re going to do this now? Now, Doris? Fuck, look at your house! Look at us!”
Water rushed against her thighs, climbing higher as the moments passed. It just kept coming, as if bubbling up through the floor from an oozing geyser.
“Now is not the time to cling to your principles.”
“Oh no?” Doris returned her fury. “Now is the exact time to cling to my principles. What good are they otherwise?”
Thea took a moment to consider this, then sneered in a way that sent her insides spiraling. “Go ahead and stop me, if you’re so fucking good.”
And then she was off, tearing open the upper cabinets with manic speed. Water dragged her back on occasion, slowing her fury with its weight and accompanying debris, but she remained undeterred.
“Where’d you hide them?” Thea asked as she tried and failed to pry open the refrigerator. Instead it slid against the floor, buoyed by water. “Not in an easy place, I bet. You figured I’d come looking eventually, didn’t you?”
Doris stared at her, unable to do anything. The water alone threatened to swallow her, and Thea was unhinged. God only knew what she’d do if Doris tried to intervene. In this state it’d probably end with them both dead.
Then Thea stopped. “They aren’t in the kitchen. You’d never leave them anyplace I might find myself unattended. Be right back.”
Doris didn’t bother saying anything. She couldn’t stop her sister, and nothing she could say would stop Thea once she sniffed out a high. And by the looks of her—a missing tooth, ghostly white skin, and a gash on her arm Doris only just noticed as she fled the room—Thea hadn’t been doing much with her time but getting high.
The water was surging again, as if whipped into the same frenzy as her sister. Doris’s hands slipped against the counter as she struggled to hold herself up. It wouldn’t be much longer before her strength gave out and she’d be sucked under. Who knew if Thea could find her then? Or if she’d even bother?
She had to get out of this water. Her table, a sturdy oak that had to be assembled in pieces, lifted off the tile, swirling toward her with enough speed to pin her against her cabinetry. With little time to consider the consequences to her body, she jumped up, using the table for purchase as she flopped herself onto the counter.
Just as Doris’s vision clouded white again, Thea rounded the corner, a shadowy image swirling behind her. Then it all melted away to pain.
Doris shouted at her. To her. Words she forgot as soon as she spoke them. Hands crawled over her—whose hands?
But it was Thea. “So you can climb.”
“There’s someone behind you.”
“There’s no one here but us.” She gripped a square, plastic case in one hand.
The room sounded like the inside of a washing machine, rumbles and roars and splashes congealed into a singular gray noise.
“What are you doing here anyway? Why did you come?” Doris said, staring out her kitchen window at a scene much worse than she could have predicted. Her yard was nothing more than a swampy brown river.
“I was hoping to crash on your couch.”
Doris covered her mouth, coughed, and ignored her as the dining table eased against the wall.
“Where’s James?” Thea asked.
Doris snapped her attention to her sister. “Not here.”
“Have you spoken to him? Where is he?”
Doris stared
at her, jaw clenched and jutting slightly to the left.
“Fine,” she said, then unfurled her palm to expose small, pink squares inside the clear plastic case.
“What are those?” She knew what they were. She did not know that James had filled the prescription.
“So, you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
Thea yanked them away as Doris looked closer. “This is ketamine, sis. I didn’t even know they prescribed this shit like this.”
Doris tried sitting up, but the surface was slippery, and she was weak. Thea held out a hand, stuffing the ketamine in her back pocket before she did.
Finally upright, Doris leaned against the wall. “Where did you get that?”
“From James’s bedside table. Lucky for us it was in this handy case, or else it’d have dissolved.”
“James wouldn’t have ketamine. Why would he have ketamine?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
The two were silent a moment, Doris boiling with an emotion she couldn’t quite articulate.
“Where’d you really get it, Thea?” She couldn’t believe it was just sitting here in her own house like that. James knew how she felt about it.
“I told you—”
“Bullshit.” Doris snatched at Thea’s arm, thumbing purposefully at a fresh welt. “Then what’s this?”
“An iron deficiency,” she said, and jerked her arm away.
“You’re shaking.”
“I didn’t come here to get high.” Thea covered her arms protectively.
Thunder rattled the windows. The sisters paused. Water had risen noticeable inches since Thea had returned, and it was still coming. This was bad, and it was going to get worse.
A river pounded against the wooden fencing of the backyard, uprooted it like saplings. There was nothing left of the manicured perfection of Doris’s garden. Nothing but water coming from everywhere, coming to swallow them up.
Thea tapped the porcelain of the sink like she had a nervous tic. Doris couldn’t help but gape at the wreckage of it all.
“Do you have an attic?” Thea asked.
“We can’t go into the attic.”
A Flood of Posies Page 3
