“Maybe. Or maybe we’ll need to build ourselves a boat.”
I looked back toward the driveway Pete had just coasted down—the one that had been slick with mud but still manageable—and I saw that already it was taken up by large stretches of water. You could see the water seep down to the end, wanting road. You could see Pete cursing and kicking at his swallowed tires. You could see how far the water had gotten, when it shouldn’t have—not with a hill and a highway and fences and concrete barricades in the way.
The logistics of it were unexplainable, like so much of what had gone on since I’d been home.
This flood of water was from more than the rainstorm, I realized—and being elevated on a hill hadn’t helped any, though it should have spared us. From our view on the tall rock, with all the lights from the house on, I could see how the hill where the house was built now connected straight across to the large expanse of the reservoir in the near distance. The water was a flat sheen, seeming the same height all across. There used to be a road—the two-lane stretch of Route 28—between us. No longer. Now there was no differentiating where the reservoir ended and the house began. Now it looked like we lived at the edge of a great, thrashing ocean.
The reservoir water had crept in to wrap its cold fingers around us, expanding past its own walls and making it up here. It had gotten out.
Because of me.
Ruby balanced with me on the tall stone, trying to figure out what we should do. I was silent, and not helping by staying silent, but she kept a hold of me and made sure I didn’t slip. I thought of London down there, and hoped she’d gotten out. Then I remembered she wasn’t in any peril. She could breathe in the deep just fine.
Pete would need a tow if he wanted to ever leave, and Ruby’s own low-riding Buick wouldn’t make it out of the drive tonight, either. Jonah emerged from the house saying water had gotten into the basement and he’d have to rent some kind of pump to flush it, but other than that the house was all right and we should go inside and get dry.
“Are you telling me what to do?” Ruby snapped at him, her wit’s end having already been reached long ago and now whipping and snapping in the wind.
“But it’s stopped raining,” he said. “The water’ll go down. Just get in the house.”
Ruby shook her head defiantly. But when she looked around the shallow lake of the backyard, her veranda an island drifting in the midst of it, she changed her mind.
“We’re going upstairs,” she announced. “Jonah, we’ll be out of here tomorrow. Make sure my car can get down the driveway.”
Jonah squelched closer, his hair wet and dripping tears on his tattoos. He had no idea what he looked like to us, or what he sounded like when he opened his mouth. “Baby, you can’t be serious. You’re leaving, just ’cause of a flooded basement?”
Here’s something I knew: My sister was not his baby. In fact, my sister didn’t allow herself to be anyone’s baby; she never had, not even when she was one. Anytime a guy called her a word like that, I knew it meant he’d lost her for good.
“Oh, the basement’s just one reason,” Ruby said. “You know all the other reasons. Don’t make me say them out loud in front of my little sister.”
Pete and I had clearly interrupted an argument. I tried to peel my eyes away, to be polite. But he looked on, to be rude. Then he spoke, to make it worse. “Hey, what about me? What about saying all this in front of me?”
“What about you?” she said. “If you can’t get down the driveway, you can sleep in your car, can’t you?”