by Tom Abrahams
“I’m cranking the motor,” said Louis. “We know about where they are, this woman and her husband. If he’s sick, we’ve got to get on it.”
Louis set the choke and cranked the motor back to life. Oily smoke drifted across the open body of the skiff. He throttled the boat forward.
They were moving at a good clip now, outracing the current and angling toward the right side of the street. Frank was the lookout. He stood, bent kneed, at the bow. He scoured the rooftops, the elbows of large trees, with squinting eyes that must have cut through the dark. They must have, because he spotted the woman. He saw her husband and two other women on the pitch of a roof four houses from the end of the street on the right.
Keri saw them too and her eyes widened. She leaned over Dub, trying to affirm what she’d second-guessed. This was the right street. It was her mother and father. Her sisters were there too. They’d come there from the opposite end of the street. She’d been turned around.
Her excitement was immediately tempered as they drew close enough to see her father. He was unconscious or worse. He wasn’t moving. His head was in her mother’s lap. Her feet were in the water. Her sisters flanked her, both of them pale and soaked through. Despite the dark, Keri could tell they’d been crying, might still be crying.
This time she couldn’t resist. She stood up in the boat, Dub balancing her by holding her hips. The skiff wobbled and she took Gem’s hand with one of hers to steady herself. She set her feet wide and then leapt from the boat, pulling herself free from those trying to hold her.
She landed on her knees and chest on the roof, banging her chin on the rough tile underneath the water. She shook off the sting and crawled the short distance to her parents. She didn’t speak. Instead, she threw her arms around her mother, her sisters, and then quickly guided them toward the boat.
By now, Dub and Barker had followed her. They were behind her when she turned to help her sisters. Together they picked up her father, using the buoyancy of the water to move him into the boat at its center. Everyone else made room, shifting to the bow and the stern of the small skiff.
It was crowded and unstable, but as soon as they had her father in the skiff, cold and limp and barely breathing, Frank pushed them free and Louis pushed the throttle all the way forward.
They glided across the water quickly from one street to the next. Keri was focused on her father while the others talked about where to go, how to find a hospital or shelter, what route might be best if they could determine one. Keri’s sisters were doing most of the talking since this was their neighborhood.
Keri’s mother held her husband’s head in her lap as she had on the pitch of the roof. She stroked it repeatedly, running her fingers through his hair. She whimpered but kept her cool, considering.
Dub was at his feet, keeping his knees bent so that he was in a position somewhere between lying down and sitting up. Barker and Gem had moved to the bow of the boat, next to Frank, to give the Monks room.
The skiff was crowded, heavy, and sitting low in the water now. The motor strained when Louis increased the power. He kept riding the throttle, speeding up and slowing down.
They were searching for a needle in a haystack. They had no way of knowing where a shelter might be, let alone one with the kind of medical attention her father needed. Keri was aiming for the closest hospital, or something like it. But in a city with an average elevation of a foot below sea level, dipping as low as seven feet below, there weren’t going to be a bunch of options. Monkey Hill was among the higher elevations in the city, and there was a spot called “The Mountain” in City Park.
They were in a part of the city called Touro, north of the Mississippi River and part of the city’s garden district. More precisely, they were in the Mississippi now. Her eyes scoured the edges of the street, searching for some sign of anything, anywhere that might help them.
“What’s that?” asked Gem. “Up ahead. Are those lights?”
Keri saw them too. A warm, hazy yellow glow hovered above the water some distance ahead. Somebody had power. Louis headed for the light. Like moths they fluttered there, the motor working beyond its capacity to propel them through the water and toward the destination.
As they neared the glow, Keri made out the shape of the building from which the yellow light came. It was a dark, angular shape against the sky. From it, the sound of diesel generators rumbled and burped.
Louis slowed the skiff and steered it toward the building, which Keri recognized. It was the Touro Infirmary. They were on Prytania Street. The old brick building, its burgundy awning teetering above water level, beckoned like an oasis.
She knew it because it was a famous place. It was the first operational hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was the birthplace of Truman Capote. And it was, most importantly of all, open right now.
There were three other skiffs docked at the awning, tied off to one of the support poles. The second-floor windows at the building’s facade glowed with light, one of them shattered. Inside, leaning against the open frame, was a man dressed in blue hospital scrubs. He was waving at them to move the boat closer to the window, yelling something they couldn’t understand.
Louis maneuvered the skiff to the window.
“We’re open,” the man said, “but only for medical emergencies. You got an emergency?”
“My father’s having a heart attack or stroke,” said Keri. “He’s unconscious.”
The man waved them to the window and then disappeared inside. He was back with a second person by the time they floated alongside the opening.
The man, tall with dark skin and eyes, was smiling. The man next to him was shorter and heavier. He wasn’t smiling. He was all business.
“I’m Drew,” said the tall man. “This is Kyle. We’re going to help your dad. Get as close to the window as you can.”
Dub reached out and grabbed hold of the windowsill, and the men inside the hospital window managed to get Bob through the opening and onto a gurney. Kyle immediately started wheeling him away, hopefully for treatment.
Drew stayed at the window. Sweat beaded on his forehead and in the shallow folds under his eyes. He was still smiling. It was the kind of smile a flight attendant offers when passengers board. It was polite, friendly, but it was mechanical.
“Who’s family?” he asked, his eyes dancing across the eight remaining people on the boat. “I can take family.”
Keri spoke up. “I’m his daughter. These are my sisters and my mom.”
“What about the rest of you?” Drew asked.
“Not family,” said Dub.
“He’s my boyfriend,” said Keri in a way that she hoped might leave an opening for Drew to let him stay too. “He’s like family.”
Drew eyed Barker and Gem. “And the two of you? Cousins?” he asked with raised eyebrows. “Distant relatives who somehow found each other on one of those genealogy sites?” Before Barker could reply, Drew answered for him with a wink. “Distant cousins it is. Those sites are amazing, right?”
“We’re not related at all,” said Louis. “Me and Frank here gotta get going anyhow. More people to save and whatnot.”
Drew nodded and waved to the others. “C’mon, climb on in.”
Once they were all inside, and Dub had thanked Louis and Frank for their generosity, the boat shoved off. It disappeared into the dark, not even its motor audible over the echoing rumble of roof-mounted hospital generators.
The hospital hallway was stark. Keri smelled Betadine and bleach as the group followed Drew along the wide corridor. It was lined with gurneys and people in various states of consciousness.
“We had to evacuate the first floor,” said Drew, as if giving a guided tour. “But we’re okay. We’ve been taking in stragglers as they come, not turning anyone away. It’s exhausting but good. It makes me feel like we’re doing something in such a helpless situation.”
“Are you the only hospital open?” asked Keri.
“I don’t know
. They tasked me with finding a way to get people into the building if I could. Breaking that window was the only option. We’ve got another one open on Foucher Street, the other side of the building. I think there’s more activity over there.”
“Where are you taking us?” asked Kristin, Keri’s mother. “Where is my husband?”
“We’ve got a temporary ER here on the second floor,” said Drew. “He’s there. We’ll take you to a waiting area we’ve set up. You can wait there. It’s crowded, though; you might need to cop a squat on the floor.”
“That’s fine,” said Kristin. “As long as Bob’s okay.”
Keri noticed her mother’s face for the first time in the light. She appeared much older than she had before the flood. She walked with a stoop, her shoulders hunched forward. Her cheeks hung like jowls at her jawline but the skin stretched at the bone. Her skin was pale, sallow, and lacked the color of life. Heavy bags rounded her eyes, her hair was matted against the side of her head, and it was drying in an uncontrolled frizz.
Keri squeezed Dub’s hand and let go. Then she took her mother’s and pulled it to her chest as they walked slowly along the crowded corridor. Her head was beginning to throb above and behind her eyes.
None of them had yet talked about what they’d experienced that night. None of them had shared how close to death they’d come. None of them were ready for that.
Keri knew her family had struggled to survive. Her parents couldn’t swim. She couldn’t imagine how they’d gotten onto the roof, how they’d survived.
Her mother smiled at her weakly. It was pained, stretched with concern and preoccupation. At least it was something. It was comforting.
Keri smiled back. She was her mom’s baby. She always would be. She was also the prodigal daughter who’d flown halfway across the country to go to college when she as easily could have gotten scholarships at Tulane, Loyola, or LSU. It was appropriate that she hadn’t been with them when her sisters’ house had flooded.
She’d been on her own, drowning until Dub saved her. Her family had been without her, fighting the rising water themselves. They’d been unaware of her struggles as they battled their own.
She resolved in that moment, in the nauseating stink of a hospital, to do a better job of being a part of her family. She’d call more, text more. She’d come for the holidays and send cards before birthdays came and went. She’d use FaceTime and Snapchat to give her family the sense they were with her and she was with them. She’d tag them and post photo galleries to Facebook. Keri decided these things, as desperate people always do.
“How many people are here?” asked Dub, shaking her from her thoughts. “How many are patients, and how many are…”
“Refugees?” asked Drew. He squared his jaw. “Sorry, probably not the right word.”
“It’s fine,” said Dub.
“I don’t really know how many,” said Drew. “We’ve been too focused on managing everything. We’re barely keeping our head above, er, keeping up with things.”
Nobody else spoke as they wound their way from one crowded hall to the next. Keri rubbed her forehead and winced against the bright light that met them in the “waiting area.”
It was a wide intersection of hallways leading in four directions. To one side was a nurse’s desk. A half-dozen hospital workers were busy behind that desk, while around it there were thirty or forty people sitting or lying down, leaning on one another for comfort. They were all on the floor.
Keri swallowed against the growing thud at her temples and flagged the attention of the nurse in front of her at the desk. She was a woman in her mid-fifties. Her wiry gray hair hung to her shoulders. Her bangs, which hid her eyebrows, were not flattering. She eyed Keri with pursed lips and a forehead wrinkled with irritation.
“Two things,” Keri said to her. “Hoping you can help me.”
The woman was unmoved. Keri noticed rings of sweat leaching from under her arms and at her neck.
“One,” Keri said, unfazed, “I’ve got a splitting headache. Could I please get some aspirin? Or even something for a migraine?”
“What’s two?” asked the nurse.
“My dad, Bob Monk, just came in here,” said Keri, her voice inching toward tremulous. “A guy named Kyle rolled him in. Is he okay?”
The nurse looked down and ran her finger along a piece of paper with illegible scribbles across it. She sighed, as if put upon, and then tapped one of the hieroglyphics. “He’s in with a doctor now. I don’t have an update.”
She looked up after saying this, her features no softer than before.
“Thank you for the information, Keri said. “Do you know when we might get an update?”
The nurse held up the chicken-scratch notepad. “No telling. We’ve got I don’t know how many people here with all kinds of problems. We’ve got near drownings, lacerations, diabetic shock, a whole bunch of injured who fell from a collapsed balcony. It could be five minutes. It could be an hour or three, I just don’t know.”
Keri swallowed, trying not to snap at the woman, who she knew was under tremendous stress. She forced herself to smile and thanked the woman again. “I really appreciate what you’re doing. I know you likely have a home and family and you’re here helping strangers.”
The woman’s frown, which had appeared set in stone, softened. Keri thought she might even see the slightest upturned curl of a smile at the edges of her dour mouth.
“Thank you,” said the nurse. “I appreciate that. I do have a family. They’re okay. Our house isn’t. But thank you.”
The nurse held up a finger, signaling for Keri to stand by for a moment, then stepped away. When she returned, she handed Keri a cup of water and two red caplets. “For your headache. I get them. They can be bad. The blurred vision, the nausea. Take these. They’ll help.”
Keri popped them into her mouth, downed the cup of water, and thanked the woman again. She worked back through the crowd to find where her group had claimed squatters’ rights.
Dub was sitting next to her mother. He was talking to her softly and holding her hand. Her sisters were leaning against one another, their eyes closed and jaws slack. Keri couldn’t understand how they could sleep in the adrenaline-fueled confusion of the place. The odors, the noises, and the people all combined to overload her senses.
She found an empty spot next to Gem. “Thanks,” she said to her. “You were a big help.”
“Of course,” said Gem, offering her hand. “I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Gemma. Gem for short. I think I’ve seen you on campus before. Econ 11 maybe?”
Keri leaned against the plaster wall, her spine feeling sharp against it. “Stats 10, I think,” she said. “Fall quarter. You’re in a sorority, right?”
Gem nodded. “It was a way to meet people. I didn’t know a lot of people when I got to campus.”
“Me neither,” said Keri.
“Barker tells me that your sisters’ names are Kiki and Katie,” Gem said, smiling slyly. You’re Keri. Your mom is Kristin?”
Keri blushed. “Yes.”
“Like the Kardashians?”
“Not like the Kardashians,” she said. “I mean, I guess the older ones. They have K names. But not the ones on television now. They all have names that sound like nouns.”
“True,” said Gem. “I didn’t mean to offend, but I was thinking it might be tough to keep up with you.”
The women shared a brief laugh, a sliver of levity in a night that was drenched with weight. They were interrupted by a man standing over them. He had the look of someone who’d been soaked but had dried again. He was very tall, with a slight gut protruding over the cinched scrubs at his waist. He wore a deep look of concern, and in some way he was familiar. Keri thought she’d seen him before, but not in a hospital. Somewhere else. Somewhere she couldn’t place.
“Are you the Monks?” he said to nobody in particular, his eyes dancing across them. “I’m looking for the Monk family.”
Keri’s mother jumped
to her feet, wobbled, and braced herself against the wall. Steadied, she took two careful steps toward the man. Kiki and Katie woke up, apparently aware of the stranger’s presence.
“I’m his wife,” she said. “These are my daughters.”
The man extended his hand and removed the surgical cap from his head. “I’m your husband’s doctor,” he said. “I’m Steven Konkoly.”
“How is he, Doctor?” asked Kristin.
“Let me preface this by telling you I’m not a cardiologist,” he said, measuring his words. His deliberate cadence was familiar to Keri.
“You’re not?” asked Kristin. “I don’t understand. Should he—”
Doc held up his hands to calm her. “He’s in good hands. He’s going to be fine. Perhaps I should have started with that.”
Kristin sighed; her whole body exhaled. “Oh,” she said, the air deflating as she spoke, “thank goodness. Thank you.”
“We believe he’s had a heart attack,” said Doc. “He’s awake now and resting comfortably. We’re not in a position to have the requisite testing done right now. That will have to happen at the first available opportunity.”
“What testing?” asked Kristin.
“Again,” said Doc, “I’m not a cardiologist. I don’t have privileges here, actually. I’m from California. I’m…helping. They’re overwhelmed. I offered whatever assistance they require.”
“Can we see him?” asked Kristin.
“Soon,” said Doc. “He’s stable. That’s good. But we don’t want any excitement at the moment. Can you give it an hour? We’ll check his vitals again. Then someone can come back and update you again.”
“You’re from California?” asked Keri.
“Yes,” said Doc. “Los Angeles.”
“Oh,” said Kristin. “That’s where my daughter attends school.”
“Do you?” asked Doc, his attention fully on Keri now. “Which one?”
“UCLA,” said Keri.
“What’s your major?”
“Biology.”
“Premed?” he asked.
Keri thought for an instant she saw a look of recognition flash across his face. It was brief, but it was there. “Maybe,” she said. “Or research. I don’t know yet.”
