Hidden Heart

by Amy Lane

  “Yeah?”

  “Move that and as many of the foil blankets and wool blankets as you can to the porch, then start knocking all the planters off it. It’s big enough for the five of us, but it might not float with all those damned planters.”

  He felt a little sick inside, ordering these nice kids to massacre this poor lady’s house, but in the time it had taken him to take stock of the situation, the water had gotten to the second step.

  Imelda had the right of it.

  Theo reached inside the Tahoe and pulled Imelda up on the radio. Yeah, he had a phone in a Ziploc bag in the pocket of his windbreaker, but cell service out here wasn’t great on the best of days.

  This was not the best of days.

  “Imelda!” he barked. “Water’s coming fast. We’ve got ourselves a raft, and I’m getting Thelma out now. Get someone out here quick—we’ve got no idea how long this thing’s gonna hold together.”

  “On the radio now,” Imelda said. “Hang tight, Theo. Go with God.”

  The radio clicked off, and Theo slogged up the porch steps to pound on Thelma’s door, not wanting to talk about his relationship with God at the moment. Since his mother had passed away, he and the big sky daddy had been pretty damned distant, but that wasn’t anybody’s business but his own.

  “Mrs. Andreas? Darlin’? How you doing in here?” He took a chance that the old girl had left her door unlocked and thrust it open—and then thanked all the gods at once. “Thelma Andreas, put that down! It’s me! Theo. Kim Wainscott’s boy!”

  Thelma, who was in her eighties if she was a day, paused in the act of loading her ancient rifle and allowed the muzzle to droop to the floor.

  “Theo? What in the hell are you doing here? There’s vandals attacking my porch! Can’t you hear them?”

  “Yeah, Thelma. They’re the rec-center kids. They’re breaking the porch off from the house—”

  “Why?” she wailed. “Why would they do that? I thought we were supposed to help each other! I needed your help getting Stupid to safety. Damned idiot cat took off through the hole in the roof last night!”

  Theo followed her anxious gesture and saw that, sure enough, the hole in the roof, which was right near the chimney in the low ceiling, was over the fireplace mantel. If Stupid had wanted to go gunning for the hills through the hole in the damned sky, well, the enormous dark gray striped Maine coon cat would have had ample opportunity to have done so.

  “Thelma,” Theo said helplessly, “you know those cats can swim. I’m sorry he’s gone, honey, but while you’ve been holed up in here, the dam broke. We’ve got maybe five minutes before your whole house is going to be underwater.”

  Thelma stared at him. “Well, shit,” she said after a moment. “What do we do?”

  “You got any supplies?” he asked. “Water? Soup? Warm blankets? We’ve got an ice chest with water, Gatorade, and first aid, but—”

  “I got a box of those foil packet things,” she said, sounding lost. “Two cases of granola bars, some bleach tablets, and a five-gallon bottle of water. My son brought them out the last time he tried to convince me to move to town.”

  Theo felt a bit of hope wash over him. “Well, that’s the first good news I’ve had all day. Sweetheart, you go get your photos in a trash bag to keep ’em dry and tell me where to get the supplies. If your porch is as buoyant as I think it’s gonna be, we may be stuck there a while.”

  IT worked. God, he was surprised it worked.

  By the time he’d hustled Thelma out of the house with a trash bag full of her dearest possessions, Maisy had loaded the food and water onto the porch and tied it with the bungee cords he’d packed in the ice chest. For the fifty-thousandth time in his life, he gave thanks to his father’s military training and all the contingency plans he’d been braced for. Those foil blankets didn’t just retain body heat, they were fireproof. The first aid kit had everything from sutures to antibiotics. There were wool blankets working as pads for the ice chest and a coil of rope to hold the boxes of food, and if he counted the garden hose that was wound up on one of those plastic frames with the handle, that made two coils of rope, and they were in business. Theo set Thelma down on the ice chest and double-checked the kids’ work to make sure the porch was completely unsecured. The water by this time was an inch or two under the struts that held the whole deck together, and Theo had all of thirty seconds to close his eyes, cross his fingers, and wish he believed enough to talk to God and ask him for the damned contraption to float.

  He shouldn’t have closed his eyes. The porch gave a lurch and a groan and suddenly there was nothing sturdy or solid in the world.

  The boys both said, “Whoa!” and Maisy screamed. Theo’s eyes shot open and he whipped his head in her direction.

  “Girl, you make that sound again and we’re tying you to the garden hose and hauling you behind us, you understand? This is no time and no place to scream like that unless you are well and truly hurt.”

  Maisy stared at him, eyes huge and hurt in her pinched, pale face, and he wanted to kick himself. “Sorry, Theo,” she said in a small voice, and he took a deep breath and tried to get his own fear under control.

  “It’s okay, darlin’. I shouldn’t have yelled. You surprised me is all.”

  He got a weak smile in return and felt like a first-class heel. He knew she’d been stoking a wee crush on him over the past year. He didn’t lose his temper often—and very rarely with kids. He’d been part of the Sticky community for his entire life. Big John hadn’t wanted to have a family in the city, so he’d come to the most remote and beautiful place he could possibly think of and brought his family with him.

  Of course, Theo knew John and Kim had expected more children. His mother had almost died delivering him, though, a phenomenon many men denied still happened. Big John had gotten a vasectomy when Theo was only a month old, because for all his blustery, larger-than-life faults, Big John could not ever be accused of not loving his wife and his son for exactly who they were.

  So Theo had grown up in this small community and knew many of the two thousand residents by name. He’d gone to college and gotten a degree in management, then come back to the mountains and asked Imelda if he could help her run the rec center. Imelda—in her sixties and damned ready to retire—had been helping him keep their community busy, clean, and healthy for the last two years. She’d claimed she only had one more year to go, and then she was going to leave Theo to it, and Theo had—at twenty-four—pretty much resigned himself to being the aging bachelor of Sticky.

  He was pretty sure there wasn’t a gay man in a good fifty-mile radius, and if there was, well, why would any other gay man want to live in Sticky, Oregon?

  Theo figured he’d be okay. It wasn’t like he even knew what he was missing.

  And at this moment, holding on to the porch railing with the kids and making sure Thelma had a good grip on the rope he’d given her, finding a boyfriend was the last thing on his mind.

  “We’re still going up!” Maisy said, her voice wobbly, and Theo clamped down some on his fear. No use coming at the girl again.

  “Yeah, sweetheart, I know. This here’s a valley. The water’s going to keep coming up until all of it is out of the lake above us.”

  “Oh God,” Skeet muttered. “That’s a real big fucking lake!”

  Theo decided to let Skeet’s language go, this once, on this clusterfuck of a day. “Yessir, it is. We are going to rise up for a bit, and then the current is going to carry us down toward town.” The roar of the water and the storm, which had blown up again with literally lightning speed, was almost deafening, and his eyes shifted in panic mode to see exactly how sturdy this makeshift raft was going to be. “I would like to find a way to keep us from drifting too far. We don’t want to go too much into the woods, or it’ll be hard for them to find us when the water goes down. And we don’t want to go bumping about too much either, because the trees could eat us for lunch. Our best bet is to look for something we can tie the r
aft to, but not until the water’s a little higher.”

  “What’ll we use to tie it?” Errol asked. Theo tried to keep his smile in place as the boy chewed on a thumbnail, his arms wrapped around his body. All the kids were wearing sensible clothes—sweaters and windbreakers, jeans and boots—in the cold March rain, but these kids had no body fat and super quick metabolisms. They were going to get too cold to help soon enough, and Theo wondered if he should break out the blankets now instead of later.

  “Garden hose,” he said, sounding like he was sure that would work. Well, it was one of the nice stretchy nylon type hoses—maybe it would. “It’s got that hand sprayer on it and it’s firmly attached to the porch itself. It’s perfect.”

  He was lying. He knew it. If there was a hell, he was going to hell for lying to these children. But if he didn’t stay calm, they wouldn’t stay calm, and they didn’t have a chance in any hell if he didn’t stay calm.

  “Okay,” he said, trying not to swallow too hard. “See that oak tree we’re coming toward?”

  They were up past the main trunk now and about even with the heavy branches—and coming toward it fast!

  “Yeah?” Skeet asked, his voice quavering.

  “We’re going to hit it,” Theo barked. “Everybody brace for impact!” He took two unsteady steps toward Thelma and called to the kids. “Grab something!” he said, taking hold of Thelma around the shoulders. “Now!”

  The porch had a sturdy rail, thank God, because that’s all the kids had. Still, nothing could prepare him—or them—for the jarring, terrible sound of the branches and the wooden platform as they collided. For a moment, they were whirled around, spun by the branches and the tide of the flood as it roared from the base of the dam toward town. Theo held tight to Thelma, gratified by her fingers digging into his biceps as she cried out. He kept his eyes on the kids, all of whom were hugging the porch, exclaiming in pain as they were mercilessly buffeted by the wind, water, and wood.

  Finally the jarring stopped, and Theo checked on Mrs. Andreas, patting her hands carefully before running to the garden hose.

  “Kids!” he called, hoping nobody had suffered more than bruises. “Kids, we’ve got to secure this now or we’re going further into the woods, and we’re toast!”

  “Got it, Mr. Wainscott!” Errol called, grabbing the sprayer.

  “You’re still pitching for the Cougars?” Theo asked, pretty sure Errol had a better chance of landing the sprayer over a branch than he did.

  “Yessir.” He frowned, hauling the thing behind his ear in a classic hard-pitch stance. “But I think Maisy might do better. She’s on the girl’s team, and they do slow pitch. Maisy?”

  “I can try,” she said, smiling bravely at Theo. Theo gave her a brave smile back, hoping he was forgiven for yelling.

  “Trying is good,” he said. The porch/raft gave another lurch, and Maisy took the sprayer quickly as Theo hauled at the winder to give her plenty of slack.

  “Where do you think I should aim?” she asked. Skeet got behind her, probably too close, but then the boy had harbored a torch for most of their freshman year, and sighted beyond her right ear.

  “See that big Y-shaped crotch?” he said. “It’s higher than us by about ten feet. It’ll give the boat some room to go up and play out the rope some more before we have to cut ourselves loose.”

  Maisy gave him a grateful smile, completely oblivious to the boy next door. Theo and Errol shared an eye roll, but then Maisy was winding up the pitch, and everybody had to get out of her way.

  It took her four tries, and Theo suspected it was because she was freezing and hungry and stuck on a shifting surface. He was about to get her a blanket and some food when she planted both her feet, gritted her teeth, and made the damned throw. The three teenagers whooped and jumped up and down and hugged, and Theo sank down into a crouch next to Thelma.

  “That was close,” the old girl said, sounding as relieved as he felt. “You’re right. I don’t think we could have made it if we had to go bashing about those trees.”

  Theo nodded and took stock of the water. The rate of rise had slowed—now that they were about ten feet up, the recreational lake that had been trapped in the hills above them by the dam was no longer crashing down. But the lake was—as Skeet had noted—fairly large. This was not nearly as high as the water was going to get in the next couple of hours. Theo looked at the garden-hose sprayer lodged solidly about ten feet above them.

  “We’ve got about an hour,” he said, almost to himself. “An hour and a half, maybe, before we get higher than that thing and we have to think about cutting loose.”

  Thelma leaned her head back against the guardrail. “Well, that’ll give us an hour to pray for a miracle,” she said, and Theo had to give it to her. There wasn’t really a better way to spend the time.

  TWO hours later, he’d fed everybody, given them water, and wrapped them in the wet wool blankets. Wool was a decent insulator, though, even when it was wet, so the kids may not have been comfortable, but they weren’t shedding body heat by the joule, either. They were all sitting in the middle of the raft, except for Thelma, who was as comfortable as they could make her on the ice chest. Theo had started them on camp songs, just to keep their spirits up, and hadn’t mentioned, not even casually, the fact that they were almost higher than the branch they were tethered to, and they were going to have to cut themselves loose soon.

  Turned out, he didn’t have to.

  Their raft—which had been blessedly stable for the past two hours—gave a creak and a groan and one of those heart-stopping lurches, and all the kids went sprawling on the deck. They figured it out right quick.

  Theo pulled his Swiss Army knife from his pocket and was fumbling to open it, not even wanting to think about how bad it would get once they were free-floating again, when they all heard the mechanical whap-whap-whap of a fairly large helicopter close to the ground.

  Theo had never been so glad to see a flying aircraft before in his life. He and the kids stood and waved and screamed, and oh, thank you, Jebus! The copter spotted them.

  Theo had taken EMT classes in school. He’d gotten his degree in management, but he’d known what he’d wanted to do. Sticky was his home—he wasn’t going to desert his mother or any of the people he’d grown up with just because he’d gotten out and gotten his degree. So he figured the EMT classes would make him a shoo-in for Imelda’s job when she retired. One of his classes had dealt with extracting people from difficult circumstances.

  He was not surprised when the small figure in the flight suit stood at the cargo door and dropped a harness down to the raft. The kids helped him raise Thelma up, and Theo watched in concern as that same small figure helped her out of the harness and then lowered it again. This was usually a four-man operation. A pilot, a spotter, someone to work the crane and someone to work the passengers. What in the hell kind of operation had only one person working the crane while someone else flew the helicopter?

  But the hose was getting pulled tight, and the raft would be taking on water soon, so Theo figured maybe they didn’t have a choice in the same way he and the kids hadn’t had a choice when they’d hopped aboard Thelma’s porch. When the harness came down again, he turned to Maisy, but she squeaked nervously.

  “I’ll do it,” Skeet said, smiling at her. “I’ll go first, and then you’ll know it’s safe, okay?”

  “Be careful,” she said, lip wobbling bravely.

  Skeet gave her that game smile from a face that would maybe get handsome one day but right now was dominated by a willful nose and a bony jaw—and ears. He let Theo help him into the harness, and they watched as he went up. Theo held his breath when the single person by the crane helped him in again.

  “Mr. Wainscott,” Errol said softly. “That don’t look right. That girl up there—she’s not that big. That job looks like it takes more people.”

  “I think it does,” he said, also softly. “But if that’s all they got, that’s all they got.” He
gave Maisy an anxious look, and Errol nodded.

  The harness was lowered again right when their makeshift raft began to bob, tugging at its anchor on the tree.

  By the time Maisy got hoisted up, Theo was half-tempted to cut the raft loose and take his chances. The girl up top had been replaced by a much larger man—one who’d yelled at Maisy to get her to stop freaking out, which Theo approved of heartily—but the helicopter was as buffeted by the wind as the raft was by the current and the tree.

  Still, he watched as Maisy got lifted up, up, up, holding his breath with the hope that the girl would make it onto the helicopter and be safe. God, please, he just wanted those damned kids to be safe. He didn’t want to think about the damage to the town or to his home, or how the recent wildfires had taken almost all that was left of the valley and now there would be nothing to keep people in Sticky at all.

  Just let the kids be safe. That’s all. That’s—

  Theo watched as the copter almost upended sideways, and then, in an act of incredible bravery and stupidity, the guy who was helping Maisy get into the copter all but threw her inside.

  And fell right out of the helicopter and down toward the oak tree.

  That’s Not How This Works

  THE water was cold enough to steal Spencer’s breath, even through the flight suit, but his coms helmet remained on, which meant his overwhelming physical sensation was Elsie’s voice puncturing his eardrum by screaming his name.

  “Spencer! Spencer! Goddammit, you lazy fucking cowboy, answer me!”

  Hard to do when underwater.

  As soon as Spencer submerged, he spread his arms and legs, slowing his plummet through the freezing mountain water, which was good, but it also opened him up for impalement from the wicked spars and branches of the oak trees, which was bad. He wrestled for a moment with the tree, swearing in his head if not out loud. Finally he grabbed hold of some sort of line—he’d opened his eyes in the water, but the darkness and the stinging didn’t give him much clarity. He grabbed the ropelike thing, which felt spongy underneath his flight glove, and pulled, dragging himself up at the same time as whatever he was holding on to gave way from its perch on the tree and he found himself being dragged behind a large floating craft.