Rushing Waters

by Danielle Steel

  Juliette was a pretty blonde who wore her hair in a braid, lived in hospital scrubs, and never had time to put on makeup. She was passionate about her work and her patients and thought of little else. She was straightforward and dedicated, and unlike Will, she never tried to play the charming card, or operated from ego. Juliette came from a medical family in Detroit. Both of her brothers were doctors, as was her father, and her mother had been a nurse before she married Juliette’s father. And all of them had said that they had had at least one chief resident like that in their careers. They told her that her big mistake had been dating him, which made it look like sour grapes when she complained about him now, particularly since he had dumped her. And she knew they were right. She had no choice but to suck it up and hope he got bored with torturing her in time.

  As though talking about him had conjured him up like an evil spirit, the chief resident showed up at the ER desk five minutes later, and gave Juliette a surly look.

  A little while later, as they both consulted charts at the nurses’ station, Juliette asked him a question in a monotone, so as not to start anything between them. Whatever she said to him would irritate him and set him off, as the nurses had observed countless times. Sometimes it was almost fun to watch them, like a fireworks show on the Fourth of July. You could count on it every time.

  “Are we doing anything to prepare for the hurricane, if the city goes on full alert?” she asked him. She had been wondering about it all day. Having lived through Sandy at NYU Hospital, she knew how important it was to be prepared.

  “Hardly. We don’t need to borrow trouble. We’ll deal with it when they tell us. We don’t have time to waste before that. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got double my normal workload without worrying about the hurricane.”

  “So do I. But someone should at least check the generators before we’re on full alert. That’s what did us in at NYU last time—the backup generators failed.”

  “Are you working for the Office of Emergency Services now?” he asked tartly, his mouth set in a thin line. “Why don’t you call the head of the hospital and tell him?”

  She ignored the sarcasm of his comment, but persisted. “We can at least be prepared down here. We’re below sea level and close enough to the river to get flooded.”

  “Then wear your rain boots to work tomorrow. What do you expect me to do? Set up sandbags myself? I’m the chief resident here, not the maintenance staff. Stop panicking—your patients will pick up on it,” he scolded her, put back the chart he’d been studying, and walked off, as Michaela raised an eyebrow in silent comment.

  “We should be prepared,” Juliette said to her in a quiet voice, and Michaela nodded.

  “He’s right, though. No one has time to deal with it unless we have to. And everyone is aware of what happened at NYU. They won’t let it happen here,” she tried to reassure her. Juliette nodded and walked into the cubicle where the ninety-year-old man with the broken hip was waiting for the orthopedic surgeon to come and see him. They were going to operate on him that night, and his daughter and grandchildren were with him, telling him for the hundredth time that he shouldn’t have been on a ladder in the first place. He was alert and intelligent, not senile, just old.

  “Are you doing all right, Mr. Andrews?” Juliette asked, smiling at him.

  “I was checking out a leak in the ceiling. The building has very old pipes,” he explained to Juliette again. She agreed with his daughter about the ladder, but he was a sweet old man, and she felt sorry for him. His daughter was saying that he had just proved that he could no longer live alone, and he looked devastated. He had passed the mental exam with no problem and clearly didn’t have dementia. He was just independent, had wanted to check out the leak, and had lost his balance. His problem was that he was ninety years old, and no longer as steady as he had been, or as agile, and lived by himself. He said his wife had died two years before.

  “How are you doing with the pain?” Juliette asked him gently.

  “I’m all right,” he said, looking embarrassed, as she touched his hand.

  “You’ll be fine after the surgery,” she said quietly, and he nodded, as the surgeon walked in. Juliette asked his relatives to step outside for a moment, and left them as they continued to complain about him in the hallway, that he just wasn’t sensible, was much too independent, wanted to do all the same things he had done as a young man, and refused to act his age. That sounded like a good thing to her—he was still full of energy and life.

  She went to visit the child who had swallowed the turtle after that.

  The little boy was dressing to go home, and his mother looked enormously relieved. He had just admitted that he hadn’t swallowed it, as he previously told her. He had flushed it down the toilet and didn’t want to get in trouble, so he said he swallowed it. His mother was giving him a stern lecture about lying.

  Juliette looked at him seriously, barely able to repress a smile. “Johnny, do you have a dog?” She already knew the answer, as the little boy nodded.

  “Yes, his name is Dobie. He’s a German shepherd.”

  “I’ll bet he’s a really nice dog. Will you make me a promise?” He looked at her with wide eyes and nodded again. “Will you promise me that you won’t swallow him? I think that would give you a really big tummyache, and Dobie might not like it.” The boy guffawed at what she said, then giggled as his mother smiled.

  “I promise. But he’s too big to swallow.” And the ill-fated turtle probably had been too. It had been his sister’s turtle, and he had told the nurse that his sister would be really mad at him. But on other occasions, they had seen children who had swallowed a wide variety of unlikely objects, which the doctors had observed on X-rays and scans with some dismay.

  “Well, you just remember that. Don’t try to swallow Dobie.” He nodded, and she helped him off the table once he was dressed, and she signed the release form and handed it to his mother. And then she reminded him that telling fibs was not a good idea either. He nodded solemnly and waved when they left a few minutes later, and he informed his mother that Juliette was nice and he liked her. And then he promised not to lie again.

  Juliette went down the line of her patients, doing triage, and was in the waiting room to see the children of the man who had had the heart attack and was on his way to cardiac ICU for an angioplasty, when she saw a bulletin flash across the TV screen. All eyes in the waiting room suddenly turned toward the TV, as the anchorman informed them that Hurricane Ophelia had been upped to a Category 1 hurricane, had picked up considerable speed, and was headed straight toward them. The city was now officially on alert, the subways would be closed by eight P.M., and designated areas of the city were being evacuated. A list of the zones to be evacuated appeared on the screen, and all other residents were being asked to stay home after nine P.M. that night. Further bulletins were promised, and a live message from the mayor at six P.M.

  “Shit,” Juliette said out loud, “here we go again.” And then she turned back to the family of her cardiac patient.

  “Will they close the hospital?” one of them asked her, looking worried.

  “No, we’re fully prepared to handle emergencies like that. We have a backup generator, and we’ll make all the arrangements and accommodations necessary, and it probably won’t be as bad as last time,” she said, hoping it was true, and remembering the scene at NYU, carrying patients down the stairs by flashlight. She went back to explaining the procedure that was going to be performed on their father.

  Afterward she went back to the desk. Several of the nurses were going to have to leave early before public transportation shut down, as they commuted by subway, and relief staff was being called in. Juliette knew just what an emergency of that nature would look like, and realized that her own apartment was in a flood zone.

  “What about you? Do you need to go home to get some things?” Michaela asked her, and Juliette shrugged.

  “About the only thing I have of value there is my pass
port. I can always get another one. My apartment is a mess. There’s nothing I need to run home and save.” Her whole life was at the hospital. She had no belongings at home that were meaningful to her, no pets, no sentimental memorabilia. All that was in Detroit. The place where she lived was nothing more than a crash pad she went to between shifts.

  Juliette saw Will Halter rush down the hall in the ER shortly after that, on his way to examine a patient. There was no time for him to be snippy with her, now that the city was on alert and flood zones were going to be evacuated. And all Juliette hoped was that someone had had the brains and foresight to check the hospital generators, but there was nothing she could do about it. She had patients to see, and if the hurricane hit them as Sandy had, they would deal with it. All she needed to think about were her patients and her job—the city officials could take care of the rest. And whatever the chief resident thought about it wasn’t her problem, and she didn’t care what he said to her.

  —

  Ellen had just turned on the TV at her mother’s apartment when the emergency announcement came on, and she was stunned for a moment as she watched. She saw clearly that her mother’s neighborhood, in Zone 1, was at the top of the evacuation list, and she went to tell her mother, who was feeding Blanche her dinner in the kitchen.

  “We have to be out by nine P.M. tonight, Mom. That’s in four hours. We need to get organized, and we have to find a place to stay. I think we should go to a hotel uptown.” Everything north of Thirty-ninth Street had been untouched in the previous hurricane, and everything below it had been a war zone. Uptown was the safest place to be. Grace listened to her daughter and thought about it for a few minutes, as she set Blanche’s bowl down on the floor with her dinner, and then she turned to Ellen with a look of determination that Ellen hadn’t expected.

  “I’m not going,” Grace said in a strong, steady voice. “We did all that last time, and I lost a lot more because I wasn’t here to protect it.” She had had two feet of water on the lower floor of the apartment five years before, which was enough to damage her belongings, even with the additional upper floor. “And if the living room floods again, I can stay upstairs in my bedroom. It probably won’t be as bad as they say. They’re covering their backs. They don’t want people complaining afterward that they weren’t warned. The building isn’t going to float away. And there are safeguards in place now. The co-op committee here already voted to sandbag the lobby for future hurricanes, in case of an evacuation. I’m not leaving. You can go to a hotel if you want to,” she said as Ellen stared at her.

  “You can’t mean that. It’s too dangerous, Mom. I won’t let you stay.” Ellen was as stubborn as Grace was, and Grace smiled at her.

  “What are you going to do? Carry me out over your shoulder? Don’t be silly. Blanche and I will be fine here.” There was a steely expression in her mother’s eyes, and Ellen felt panic in the pit of her stomach. What if there was a major flood and her mother drowned in the apartment? Other people had in flood zones during Sandy, unable to leave their homes, or trying to escape too late.

  “I can’t allow you to do that,” Ellen said in a frightened voice. And the television announcer had reminded people that not evacuating could mean requiring the services of rescue workers later, who had more important jobs to do than to rescue those who should have evacuated hours before.

  “You can’t force me to leave. I’m an adult, of sound mind, and that’s my decision. Get yourself a hotel room uptown, if you want to, but I’m staying in my apartment.” She left no room for negotiation as she threw away the empty can of special diet dog food and tidied up the kitchen. Then she turned to Ellen again. “I think I’ll move some things up to the bedroom, though, just in case.” She had at least learned that much from the last time, when many of her belongings had been damaged. “But there’s nothing here I can’t carry myself.”

  She walked into the living room then and began putting fragile objects on the coffee table, to carry upstairs. The paintings were hung high enough to avoid water damage, and all she had to worry about were books and objects, and there were some valuable chairs she wanted to move too. She couldn’t do anything to protect the couches and heavy furniture, but there were plenty of small things she could move to her bedroom on the upper floor.

  As Ellen watched her, all thought of evacuating vanished, and she knew what she had to do. As crazy as it seemed, and she didn’t agree with her, if her mother was determined to stay, she had to stay too. She was sure George wouldn’t like it, but she knew her mother. Grace wasn’t going anywhere. She was refusing to evacuate, and whatever happened next, in the coming hours and days, the die had been cast, and foolish or not, they would face Hurricane Ophelia together, come what may.

  Chapter 3

  Ellen was carefully removing the kind of things that had been damaged last time, among them her mother’s collection of coffee table books and leather-bound volumes, some of them first editions, and carrying them upstairs to her mother’s bedroom, and to the guest room she was sleeping in. She had found some plastic sheeting from when Grace had had the apartment repainted after Sandy, and she tried to protect the couches and furniture as best she could, while Blanche ran around barking and getting underfoot. She could sense that something major was going on. And as Ellen wrestled with the plastic sheeting and blue tape, the doorbell rang. It was Grace’s neighbor from across the hall. He had a similar apartment, was a pleasant man, and checked on Grace from time to time. He was very fond of her, and Grace liked him. He was a well-known mystery writer and had moved to New York from L.A. Ellen had met him once during one of her visits to New York. Grace talked about him often, and Ellen knew from her that he was quiet and retiring, and somewhere in his late forties. His books were on the best-seller lists for months when they came out. Ellen had read one or two of them, and liked them. Grace had read them all and was a devoted fan, mostly because she liked him so much. Robert Wells was a household name all over the world. But despite his fame, he was an unassuming person, and Ellen had been shocked the first time she realized who he was. There had been many movies based on his work as well. Ellen knew from Grace that he was divorced and had two grown kids.

  When Ellen opened the door to him, she was startled to be reminded of how tall he was, and he looked surprised to see her. He seemed younger than she remembered too.

  “Is your mother home?” he asked, feeling foolish as soon as he said it, and Ellen smiled.

  “She’s upstairs putting things away,” Ellen explained.

  “I didn’t realize you were here,” he said, feeling awkward for a minute. He had seemed shy when she met him before too. And something about him suggested that he was a solitary, introverted man, but his attention to her mother indicated that he was a caring person too. “I came to see if she needed help. Can I give you a hand?” She opened the door wider so he could come in, just as her mother came down the stairs with Blanche at her heels. The dog wagged her tail when she saw him, and ran over to him, and obviously recognized him, as Grace smiled and invited him in, and was happy to see him.

  “Hello, Bob. Ellen and I have decided to stay. I was just taking a few things upstairs, in case we get flooded again.” Bob Wells looked startled and disturbed by what she said.

  “I don’t think that’s wise, Grace,” he said respectfully. “The building took a heavy hit last time. I don’t think you should be here if that happens again. Why don’t you protect what you can and go to a hotel uptown, or stay with friends?” He exchanged a glance with Ellen, who clearly agreed with him, but Grace had made up her mind.

  “It won’t happen again, Bob. Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, and all that.” But Bob thought that Grace staying in the building was a very bad idea, especially at her age, which he didn’t say. He liked her as a friend and neighbor and never thought of her as older, but in an emergency like this one, it had to be taken into account. If the building flooded, she would have to be agile and strong enough to escape.r />
  “If what they say is true, we could have fifteen- or twenty-foot waves on the river, across the street, at high tide. Let’s not risk that,” he said seriously. It had been enough to convince him to go uptown.

  “It’ll rush down the street, not through my front door,” she said firmly. “Are you leaving?” She was surprised, although the news channels had been urging people to evacuate the designated areas.

  “Yes, I am. I’m going to stay with my agent on the Upper West Side. They’re turning off the power downtown at midnight tonight. There’s no point sitting here in the dark, with no electricity and no heat or air-conditioning. I think you should reconsider. And let me help you in the meantime.” He took a quick look at what Ellen had been doing, wrapping furniture in plastic and sealing it with tape, while Grace stripped the surfaces and shelves. The apartment already looked as though she were emptying it. Ellen had been moving fast, and so had Grace. He had done the same in his own apartment, although most of his furniture was old and battered and was comfortable more than attractive or valuable, unlike the beautiful things in Grace’s apartment. He was planning to take only his current manuscript and his favorite typewriter with him. His older manuscripts were in a watertight safe in his den upstairs, with copies in a vault at the bank, in case of fire, flood, or theft. He didn’t fully trust the safe and never wrote his books on the computer, which he used only for email.

  Bob grabbed the large plastic sheets one by one, and helped Ellen wrap the rest of the furniture, while Grace continued removing smaller objects and memorabilia. Ellen tied up the curtains and lifted them off the floor. They rolled up one of the rugs—the other was too large. And they put Grace’s coats from the hall closet on her bed. In less than an hour, they had done as much as they could, and Grace offered him a glass of wine, which he accepted gratefully. They had done good work in a short time, but he still urged her to leave.