by Tom Abrahams
Something hard banged against Dub’s back. He arched it against the jolt of pain.
“Hang on,” he said to her, his voice raspy. They spun around in the current, which was pushing them sideways now.
“Hang on,” he repeated and tightened his grip. Something else brushed their legs. The sunken threat, whatever it was, passed, and they floated freely. Their bodies spun back and the black water carried them closer to the house.
The rain dimmed everything, giving whatever he could see a smudged appearance. The new moon above provided virtually no light, and the farther they drifted from the streetlamp, the darker their surroundings became.
Keri shuddered against him and coughed again. Then she wriggled from his grasp and her body convulsed. Dub tried adjusting his grasp to keep her against his body, but she slipped free. In a moment she was underwater. Dub reached forward in the water, trying to catch her. Before the panic welled, she resurfaced at his side. She was shaking her head and coughing. Dub reached for her, and Keri took hold of his shirt.
She shrieked, gargling the remnant water in her mouth. Dub wrapped his arm around her again. She shivered, her body trembling now, her breathing heavy. He swore he could feel her pulse against him.
“You okay?” he asked. “Can you make it?”
They were drifting faster now, bobbing up and down in the current that brought them closer to the house. The speed would make reaching the house more difficult. He’d have less time to maneuver.
They were approaching it, but their targeting was off. Dub kicked his legs and used his free arm to spin them, to shift them closer to the house along the edge of the current that seemed as if it had somewhere to be.
They were closer. Closer. And then, at the last moment before they drifted beyond the house, they twirled away from the speed of it and Dub managed to slow them. He backed them to the edge of the composite roof. Both of them slammed against it, and Dub held onto it with his free hand. He pulled Keri onto the roof, inadvertently dragging her bare legs across its rough surface. Then he hoisted himself next to her. They were atop the porch, which was easily six inches or more underwater.
“Wrap your arms around a gutter downspout,” he instructed her. “That will keep the current from catching you if you lose your perch.”
She blankly hugged the downspout.
Dub moved from that roof to a window ledge and then climbed another three feet above the rising water that already covered the porch’s roofing tiles. Once on the second story of the house, he reached down to Keri, spreading his fingers.
“Keri, take my hand.”
She didn’t respond. She appeared dazed. It was obvious to Dub even in the dark and the downpour that she was almost catatonic.
“C’mon,” he implored. “Take my hand. You can’t stay there. Keri!”
When he shouted her name and water splashed across her face, she came to life. She let go of the downspout with one hand and reached with the other. Dub couldn’t grasp her from that distance. They were inches apart and it might as well have been miles.
She tried again and failed. Finally, at his coaxing, Keri inched herself to her feet, using the downspout to balance herself against the flow of water. She shifted her weight, sliding and almost losing her balance twice as she made her way around to the other side of the downspout where Dub awaited her. When she slipped a third time, Dub extended his reach as far as he could till they connected. Their hands grabbed each other and he lifted her upward. She used something to launch herself the final distance upwards, and they collapsed together on the second-floor roof, her body falling onto his.
They lay there for what felt like so long, the rain hitting their faces, their heaving chests, their tired limbs. Dub closed his eyes, resting his mind for a split second before resuming the arduous task of devising a plan to rescue them both.
Keri shifted her weight and rolled atop him, placing her lips on his. He could taste the salt. He inhaled her familiar, intoxicating scent despite the layers of floodwater and sweat and mud. Her cold hands gently touched the sides of his face, her wrinkled fingertips caressing his cheeks.
“I love you,” she said before rolling back onto her side. His heart pounded in his chest, a mixture of adrenaline, fear, and his overwhelming love for Keri.
“We can’t stay here long,” he said. “The water is still rising. The rain isn’t letting up. If somebody doesn’t rescue us, we’re screwed.”
He immediately thought better of what he’d said. Keri’s face squeezed with concern.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” he told her. “We’ll be okay. Somebody will get to us before the water does.”
Keri exhaled loudly. “It’s okay. You meant it. It’s okay to say it. I’m not some delicate flower from whom you have to keep the grim reality of things.”
“I know,” said Dub, “but I shouldn’t have said it like that. Especially after what we just went through.”
They were facing each other now, the rain dripping down their noses and across their cheeks and foreheads. Dub sensed they were both oblivious to the rain. She locked eyes with him in a way that sent a buzzing sensation through his head and chest.
“What did we just go through?” she asked. “What happened back there? How did you find me?”
“Tell me first what happened in the house,” he said. A lump welled in his throat. He tried to swallow against it. “I shouldn’t have left you. I don’t know what I would have—”
“Don’t,” she said. “It’s not your fault. You were trying to help your…wait…where is Barker? Where is that girl he hooked up with?”
Dub shook his head. “I don’t know. I found them. They were at the store. But we got separated.”
Keri leaned up on one elbow, her eyes focused on Dub’s. He had trouble distinguishing amongst the rain, the remnant floodwater, and what he thought might be tears welling in her eyes. “Are they okay? What do you mean you got separated?”
“I lost the rental car,” Dub said. “It got flooded. I started swimming. I found them at the store. There were guys with a boat, and they agreed to take the boat to get you. We tipped over, I fell out, and I lost track of them.”
Dub’s throat tightened. His mind raced. He went to those dark places, the worst possible outcomes that plague pessimists or realists.
He wasn’t either of those. He was too young for those labels, too idealistic. But as a psychology major, as someone who chose to analyze pain and ecstasy and who wanted to swim with demons, he was predisposed to finding the lowest possible depths before working back to the surface.
Keri rolled onto her back and stared at the milky black sky, then closed her eyes, bathing in the rain. A stiff breeze blew across the roof. Dub felt it slice through his wet clothes and saw it pimple Keri’s body.
“I wish I had something to warm you,” he said softly. “You’re shivering.”
Without opening her eyes or changing the expression on her face, she moved her hand onto Dub’s and squeezed.
Dub closed his eyes too. His pulse hadn’t slowed, but his body was heavy. It was like he was wearing lead clothing. He listened to the beat of the rain, the whoosh of the wind, and the rush of a violent current mere feet beneath them.
He thought about the times he’d seen flooding on television as a child. He remembered seeing the torrents of water that ripped through Ellicott City, Maryland; St. Louis, Missouri; and Asheville, North Carolina.
Then his mind went somewhere it hadn’t gone in a long time. It drifted to the night Hurricane Harvey flooded his neighborhood and sent his family scrambling into the flooded streets. It was the end of summer. School had started. It stopped when the rains came, when they wouldn’t go away, when they dumped more than fifty inches of rain on a city that was equipped for half that much in a three-day stretch.
Dub had long ago suppressed the memories of the night that changed the course of his life. He’d capped the memories in a bottle and shoved it in the back of the bottom shelf out of sig
ht. But it was there again, open and in front of him. A shiver rippled through his body as the images flashed in his mind.
That night was the reason he’d always slept restlessly since. That night was the one that had him escaping the murky, cold bayou water on his father’s shoulders. That night was the one that precipitated months of uncertainty, of his parents’ constant arguing over money and debt and red tape. That night was, until now, the worst of his life.
After wading through that dank water for more than an hour, futilely trying to find dry land, a pair of men from Louisiana had rescued his family in their small boat. They’d been with what was called the Cajun Navy, a group of volunteers who’d descended upon Houston to help rescue flooded survivors. Those two men were ahead of the curve. They’d positioned themselves near a bayou ahead of that Saturday night and they’d saved his life.
Dub remembered it smelling like raw shrimp and gasoline. He remembered the men wearing large fish hooks clipped to the brims of their worn baseball caps. They spoke with thick rolling accents that sometimes made it difficult for Dub to understand what they were saying as they navigated the streets-turned-canals with a spot beam and a tireless vigor to help strangers.
The memories were there in full color now. They took him from one disaster and dropped him chin deep in another.
As the rain hit his face now, trickling into his nose and draining from the corners of his eyes, he remembered the boaters’ faces. He recalled how supportive they’d been, how they’d offered food and towels, and how they’d given him some cheap goggles to keep the water out of his eyes.
He could hear their voices in the dark, calling to his family as their outboard-powered skiff gurgled toward them. They’d called out, promising help, safety, and dry land.
“Dub,” they’d called. “Dub, is that you? Dub, we’re here. We’re coming.”
Wait. He opened his eyes. The voices didn’t belong to the Cajun Navy some eight and a half years earlier. The voices were more familiar than that. And they were echoing in this world, not a previous one through which he’d already lived.
“Dub! Wave if that’s you.”
“Do you hear that?” Keri asked.
They wiped the rain from their faces, staring into the dark, toward the streetlamp that gave the dim glow of yellow light.
“I hear it,” he said, now certain it wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t part of his trip down memory canal. It was here. It was now.
Keri’s narrowed gaze turned to Dub. “Is that—”
“Barker,” said Dub. “It’s Barker.”
Dub sat up straight on the sloping roof. He cupped his hands at his face and yelled, “Over here! We’re over here!”
His voice was absorbed by the rain. He called again, then a third time. The dark shape of a boat moved from the light. It was in the darkness now, a purplish shadow fighting the push of the water.
“We see you!” Barker called back. “We’re coming. Stay there.”
Dub and Keri stood. Hand in hand they stepped to the edge of the roof, above the overflowing gutter that pulsed water onto the tiles before it dropped back into the gutter and spilled into the rising water below.
The water was only a couple of inches from the gutter now. It was reaching for it. It was touching it and pulling back for a stronger surge forward. It reminded Dub of an incoming tide taking nibbles at the hand-constructed, compacted walls around a sandcastle. With each surge, a bit more of it was underwater.
“Do you see them?” asked Keri. “I think I see them over there.”
Dub followed the line of her pointing finger and saw the shape of the boat. In the distance, beneath the pattering rain, the groan and whine of a small engine puttered.
“That’s them,” he said.
The current was shifting. It was faster now, if that was possible.
How is that possible?
As they had drifted precariously close to missing the roof of the house on which they now stood, he worried the boat and its undersized motor might not be able to navigate its way close enough to get them.
Yet it moved closer, its elongated shape growing. Dub could make out the figures of people on board the boat now. There were four people. Five? They were sitting low against the frame of the boat. One of them was waving his or her arms. It was probably Barker.
“We’re coming!” he repeated. “Hang tight.”
“Where would we go?” Keri murmured. “What does he think we’re doing?”
The tension in her voice cut through the rain and the cold. She stood there shivering in her underwear and a T-shirt, her arms wrapped tight around her own body.
Dub shifted his weight toward her and put an arm around her shoulder, then moved it to her waist, drawing her more closely to him. Her body was rigid and trembling at the same time.
With his free arm, he waved back at Barker. “We’re right here! On the roof. We’re not going anywhere.”
The boat was within fifty yards now. It was struggling. The bow pitched up and down as the dark figure in the back of the boat tried to fight the current. The boat appeared to be moving diagonally, but it was powering straight ahead.
Dub inched closer to the edge of the roof. His feet were at the gutter. Keri’s toes curled around it. Their bodies were ready before their minds were. Dub resisted the instinctive urge to jump to the boat despite its distance from them.
The motor’s effort was louder now. The voices on board the boat rose above the rain. Dub could make out four people. Two of the men were Louis and Frank, the owners of the boat. Barker was there, and next to him was Gem. Even from that distance, he saw the exhaustion on their faces, the stress that stretched them long and deepened the creases at their foreheads and around their mouths.
They were close now. Twenty feet. Ten. Five. Dub put his hands on Keri’s hips and stepped behind her. She would go first.
Then, short of the roof, the boat spun in the current, its bow facing away now. The motor was spitting and churning water toward the spot where Dub and Keri stood, their bodies itching to jump.
Louis called out, “It’s getting away from me. Current’s too strong. I can’t get closer.”
“What should we do?” Keri asked. “I say we jump.”
Dub shook his head. “That’s suicide. We miss the boat and that’s it.”
The motor gurgle and sputtered. The pilot yelled out again, “I can’t get closer!” The boat was drifting farther away. Six feet. Seven. Eight.
“We gotta jump,” Keri said again. “We can’t stay here. We’re dead if we don’t.”
The rain fell harder against his head. It pounded like tiny hammers working away at his scalp. The boat was drifting, its motor no match for the current.
“I’m jumping,” Keri said. “Let’s go.”
Before Dub could stop her, she leapt from the edge of the roof and splashed into the water, landing halfway between where Dub stood and the motor, and disappeared into the wash of current.
Without thinking, Dub jumped, landing in the current and dropping just under the surface. His head popped up without fully submerging. The rush of the water filled his ears. The cold stabbed at his chest. The back of the boat was straight ahead. But where was Keri?
“Keri!” he shouted, trying to move forward, to use the current to take him to the boat. “Keri!”
He spun around, facing the house as the water pulled him away from it. He bobbed, and water filled his mouth. He choked, coughed, and spat it out. He was churning his arms and legs, working to fight the water and acquiesce to its power at the same time.
There was the boat. The far-off haze of the streetlamp.
The rain. The boat. The house. The haze. The motor.
And then, Keri.
There she was, at the side of the boat. She’d made it. Somebody was pulling her aboard. She was alive. She was in the boat.
Dub ducked his face into the water and kicked his legs as hard as he could. He swung his arms like a windmill, churning the water as he
swam the few feet left between him and the boat. He lifted his head, spotted his target, lowered it again, and swam. He blew air from his nostrils, his arms and legs working. The boat pivoted.
Keri was facing him now. She was leaning over the side of the boat next to Barker. Both of them were leaning over with extended hands. Dub was certain the boat would tip and send all of them into the flood.
Barker grabbed his wrist; Keri took hold of his other hand. He kicked. Dub lifted himself with their help and collapsed onto the floor of the skiff. He heard his heartbeat above the pinging of rain on the aluminum hull.
It took him a couple of minutes to gather the strength to sit up. By then, Louis had better control of the boat. They were moving with the current, staying away from debris and large structures.
Keri threw herself at him. He fell back, her weight on him. She was crying.
“I’m sorry,” she said, kissing his face. “I’m sorry. I just—”
“You just jumped,” said Dub. “It’s okay. We made it.”
“You made it all right,” said Barker. “And Keri jumping like that was totally badass. It was like when your favorite player takes a three, and you’re like, ‘No, no, no!’ Then it goes in and you’re like, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’”
Keri moved herself off Dub, but stayed close to him. They were on the center bench now. Barker introduced everyone to Keri.
“Thank you,” she said. “You saved us.”
“We ain’t saved nothing yet,” said Louis. “We’re riding with the current and trying to find dry land. That’s all.”
“How did you find us?” asked Dub. “I thought the boat capsized. I thought you were in the water.”
Barker shook his head. “No. Almost. When you fell out, you were gone like that.” Barker snapped his fingers. “We looked and looked, and we couldn’t find you. We thought…”
Barker looked at his feet. His hands were clasped together, one thumb rubbing the other. He ran a hand through his thinning hair. His premature balding was all the more apparent when his hair was wet and slicked against his head.
