Yet they all nodded.
The water pooled from the floorboards and now reached knee level. Every moment or so the noise and jolt of something hitting the car rattled them.
“This will need to be fast,” he said. He rolled down the driver’s-side window. More water poured inside, and the sound of the roar of the river that had been the road filled their ears. It was a roar punctuated with the din of rocks hitting metal.
Later, Liz would wince at the noise of a friend’s rock-polishing tumbler as the girl turned agates into smooth stones, which would be fashioned into key chains for her parents, a bolo tie for her granddad. The relentless noise reminded her of that terrible Saturday excursion to the lake.
Dan hoisted himself out of the car by grabbing the top edge of the doorframe and pulling himself up and backward through the opening. The water grabbed at him, but he made it onto the ledge of rock he’d been aiming for and turned back their way.
The car started to move and the kids screamed.
A second later Dan was outside the back window on the driver’s side, fighting the torrents, his eyes full of terror. Kids don’t often see grown-ups looking that way. Never had Liz seen a grown man appear as though he was going to fall apart. He pounded on the glass and motioned for Jimmy, who was sitting next to it, to roll down the window.
“Now!” Dan yelled. “Goddamn it, do it!”
“We’ll drown,” Jimmy said.
“Open it,” Seth said. He was sitting between Jimmy and Liz.
“Open the window, Jimmy,” Dan said, “or you will drown. When I get you out, you’re going to go on the roof of the car and from there . . . from there, over to that ledge and then up above the road. The water’s not going to get higher. It’s going to recede. We’ll be fine there until help comes. Okay?”
The car moved again.
Jimmy, shaking, did as he’d been ordered and rolled down the window.
Their laps were now covered with the murk of the unexpected tide that had filled the car.
“Take my hand,” Dan said. “Right now!”
Jimmy did, and in a second he was out the window. Liz could hear him crawling on the roof, then silence.
“Where’s my brother?” she called out past Seth.
Dan’s face appeared again. The flood had battered him. A cut above his eyebrow and on his cheek had turned some of his light-colored blue shirt to a violet hue. “He’s good,” he said. “Your brother’s fine.”
The car moved a little more.
Liz heard Jimmy scream her name. “You got to get my sister! Get Lizzie out!”
“She’s coming, Jimmy!” Seth yelled back.
“We need to get you out of this car right now,” Dan said, his voice now more urgent than it had been a moment before, when Liz had been all but certain she was going to die. But when he thrust his hand in blindly for his son, Seth lurched away from him, grabbed Liz by her shirt, and dragged her over him. It was Liz Dan took hold of and yanked through the window. He winced when he saw her emerge into the chaos outside, and then both of them looked back into the station wagon. The last things she saw were Seth’s terrified eyes and his Have a Nice Day T-shirt with its image of a smiley face.
And that was it.
Nothing after that.
Nothing except what had been told to her and what she’d read in the paper when she was in high school and the Bend Bulletin went online.
Local Boy Drowns in Flash Flood
An outing turned into tragedy yesterday morning when a nine-year-old Bend boy drowned on a canyon road off US Highway 97 near Diamond Lake. The boy, his father, and two other children were caught in a flash flood.
“The father managed to save the other two children but, despite valiant efforts, not his son,” said Oregon State Police lieutenant Wilson Donaldson, who led the rescue and recovery team.
The driver told police that the group was on the way to a day of fishing at the popular lake when a flash flood hit.
“The car they were driving was carried more than fifty yards by the floodwaters. It got caught on some rocks, and the driver proceeded to evacuate the children to higher ground,” Donaldson said.
After the man retrieved two children, the car apparently dislodged, sweeping both the man and his son away with it.
The father was found unconscious downstream, where an off-duty firefighter from Redmond rescued him. The deceased boy was found in the vehicle. All involved were taken to the hospital and are expected to be released shortly.
Officers also reported one other fatality: a horse. The animal’s owners and another young woman in a separate car were recovered without injury.
The names were withheld until the Tuesday paper. That article was brief and indicated that the police had conducted an investigation and found that there had been no wrongdoing on the part of the driver. The last mention of the incident was the funeral notice.
And yet, to all of those who were there, and both families, the incident clung like a mark that could never be washed away. Dan and Miranda retreated from Liz’s family. Liz and her brother were reminders of what they’d lost.
Only once did Liz ever hear her parents directly talk about Dan Miller and the accident that had claimed his son’s life. They were grateful, of course, that their own children had survived. More than grateful: overjoyed. But instead of sympathy for another’s loss, Liz’s mother took an approach that would define her in her daughter’s eyes. Her mother could be a selfish and spiteful woman, always looking to blame others in an effort to boost her own mood. It seemed at times that being negative fueled her sense of joy.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know. Dan might have been drinking that morning. He might have been impaired—seriously so, for all we know. I mean, honestly, you have no idea what happened and neither do I.”
Brian Camden immediately dismissed Bonnie’s unkind and judgmental remarks. “His drinking early in the day started after the accident, honey. You know that, Bon. Be fair.”
“I don’t trust him,” she said as she swirled the last few sips of a martini in her glass. “Letting Seth die. Killing your own kid like that.”
Liz’s father was used to his wife’s cruel streak and often just let it roll off him. Not this time. This time he just couldn’t.
“He didn’t kill him. It was an accident. A terrible tragedy.” Brian stopped and regarded Bonnie. “Honestly, what’s wrong with you? He saved our son and daughter. Are you really forgetting that?”
She motioned for another drink. “Of course I’m not. Get a grip. I don’t like it when you dismiss what I have to say out of hand. It’s demeaning. Really, think about it. You can’t say that he doesn’t have blood on his hands.”
“It was an accident,” he insisted.
“That’s going to follow him for the rest of his life.”
“Only because people like you keep reminding everyone and twisting it into something it wasn’t.”