SIMON’S HOME FOR THE GENTLY LOVED by Molly Gutman
Simon can remember a time when he wasn’t in the house – but that was forever ago, when Andrew was alive. There’s no sense in fishing up those memories. All anyone should know is each of them appeared on the porch of the gingerbread Victorian on Tenth and Maple, a couple of belongings in their hands. The sign fixed neatly above the door announces it as Simon’s Home for the Gently Loved, so that’s what everyone calls it. Over the threshold, in the door. Welcome to Simon’s.
The children have changed into pajamas, and Basil, the oldest, stifles a yawn behind her fist. Rivers of porch lights swim through the windows – not the only rivers and not the only swimming the Delta’s about to be facing. But who sees it coming? No one here, that’s certain. Not even meteorologists know.
Ethel appears in her nightgown, feeling her way to the bed. Basil remembers – just a tick late, if you ask Simon – to pull the covers back. Ethel can still manage them herself, but the woman is already blind. What is making life a little easier on her?
“Thank you,” Ethel says, her hand on the exposed sheet. She lowers to bed and pulls the quilt to her knees.
The stupid cat rolls to its stomach, tucks its paws under. The house settles in. It’s tasteful, if a little old-fashioned. When Simon inherited it, he changed almost nothing, so the curtains on the windows are still ruffled gingham, and the antique hardwood is covered in patchwork rugs. In short the house looks like an old woman.
He carries the book to the chair. Basil settles on the arm – she’s learning to read, and follows along with Simon’s voice. He doesn’t mind much, either; she’s warm and soft on his shoulder, and kids smell like hand soap and crackers. He never wanted kids of his own. Or, more accurately, the thought hadn’t occurred to him as possible. Of course it is, now, and of course it always has been.
The children, Basil and the smaller Eddy, have a mother squirreled away somewhere, but you can count her out for Bible stories. She’s elsewhere, maybe in her room with the marijuana pen she thinks is still a secret, maybe in the entry closet sampling coats that aren’t hers. Never mind Mississippi hasn’t been properly cold enough for coats in years. Simon tries not to worry where Janet might be. She’s the least predictable resident, often the least reliable, and involving himself is more trouble than it’s worth.
It’s Ethel’s night to pick the story, which means of course she’ll pick Noah.
“I think, hmm. Oh,” she says, “let’s do the Ark.”
What can he say? Simon’s a master at nothing if not routine.
And as the only member of the house both able and willing to read the Bible, he’s exhausted with this story. Especially one so casual toward the deaths of so many – he can’t help but wonder whose voices drowned under the page.
When Simon moved in, the house didn’t ache with the memory of Andrew like he feared it might. He wasn’t haunted by specters of Andrew at every corner. The house felt only like a house, thank God. But lonely, in the early years.
Before Basil or Eddy, before Janet or Ethel, before anyone, Simon didn’t know this house from any other. But he knew the sanctuary: a few minutes from the county line is a small animal haven, run by two women who can’t bear to see shelters so full. Andrew dragged him there every spare hour.
They’d be overcome by a swarm of paws. The dogs preferred Andrew, which was just as well. If anything Simon was endeared to the goat, its thin legs, the removed gaze that said plain as anything: it was too old for this shit.
Andrew looked muscular roughing around with dogs. He kept in shape; this was important to him. So was the volunteer work with animals. Not time with Simon watching and re-watching all the classics.
Simon always felt a pang of jealousy and would always smother it down. “We’ve got food to put out.”
“Oh, they can wait!” Andrew would laugh and fall over. “This is just as important.”
“They’ve spent all their lives waiting. Don’t keep them hungry.” That always worked because it was true.
Andrew’s mother had passed the house to Andrew – who couldn’t bear to live there, so empty and sad, he said – and then, when he died, everything came to Simon. There had been no one else to take it. And he was too blurry with grief to think particulars; he left it vacant til retirement.
He entertained thoughts of making it a sanctuary for what Andrew loved: misfit, lonely animals. But he’d never learned to like animals, and besides, residential zoning was a problem.
So a sanctuary for people – yes, that worked. Simon drafted fliers, writing at the top,
Do you feel like a mismatched sock lost in the dryer?
Simon’s Home for the Gently Loved
is a sanctuary for people with no one left –
He thought it clever, just what Andrew might have written. He put the address at the bottom. He posted them on his next trip into town and promptly forgot, til Ethel came. And with Ethel, too, came the status of the house as a shelter, strange and shabby though it was. He received a modest sum to keep them in food.
At the time, Ethel hadn’t yet gone blind and she’d seen a flyer on a pole outside Kroger. That was all the push she needed, she said, and Simon didn’t ask for more. They lived a compact life as roommates. He and Ethel had a fondness for classics and exhausted Simon’s DVD collection, but these were fascinations he and Andrew shared, too, and sometimes films called up the past too strongly. They started a garden with tomatoes and okra. Not to mention the good sun does a body; Simon kept them in sunscreen though Ethel resisted, said she’d made it this far. She resists lots of Simon’s suggestions, especially ones in the garden. She’s fifteen years his senior and never lets him forget: “I’ve been around longer,” she’d say. “I know how deep to plant these seeds.”
Simon would mound up the soil anyway, at the depth he thought appropriate. “They’ll sprout either way.”
“Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.”
And then, not quite four years ago, Janet showed up with the kids. Eddy was an infant and Basil was just big enough to handle the steps, but only slowly and with a fist full of Janet’s pants. Janet was slow on the steps herself, with her autoimmune arthritis. And she had come with arms covered in purple. Simon recognized the color of hate on a body. And more bruises revealed themselves over those first days, when Janet’s teeshirt slipped cleaning windows, or when Basil wiped her nose on Janet’s skirt so the cotton lifted. It was a month or so til the color disappeared.
* * *
In the morning, Ethel pulls cans from grocery bags and hums a hymn – she says she wishes the home were more like church – and the song’s melancholic, sounds like a warning. A chill runs through Simon.
“Put that back,” Janet says. “It’s collards.”
She has an uncanny knack for finding the remote, Basil’s crayon drawings, the shreds of books Eddy pulls apart and the evidence he hides. But she never can find what Janet wants. The sky’s darker than it should be at noon.
“I’ll stand out of your way, then,” Ethel says.
“That’d be great.” Sounds of cans grow louder inside the pantry. Simon hears Ethel pouring fruit into the pantry basket. Then a fumble and a groan. Cans rattling on tile. One rolls into Simon’s field of vision; Janet comes out chasing it.
“Dented,” Janet snaps. “Wish you’d done that shit at the grocery; could have saved us money.”
“I – ”
“Go away.” Then, as if it pains her: “please.”
Every now and then the two of them get like this, usually by way of Janet’s temper, and Simon can never stand it. “Hey now,” he warns them both.
“Wait a minute,” Ethel says. “I was only helping.”
Janet flexes her fingers. Her gaze swings between them. “You help enough. You and Simon both.”
Simon asks what exactly that’s supposed to mean.
“Means you’re doing just fine with my kids.” All at once she’s on the verge of tears. “And I. And. All I get from them are wet pants and I can’t even put away groceries without interference so both of you get out and leave me just one fucking thing – ”
And then the doorbell rings.
By the time they reach the entry, Basil’s already opened it. Outside stands a woman with a defiant face, lips thin like knives.
Basil picks up the cat and pushes it at her.
“This is the cat,” she says. “He doesn’t like water.” This is why Simon so loves having Basil and Eddy around; what they consider pertinent astounds him.
“Pretty cat,” the woman says. She’s younger than Simon first assessed. Teenager, maybe. Nice leather jacket. Unmistakably pregnant.
Ethel clasps her hand on Simon’s arm. “And who are we, then?”
“Nova,” she answers. “Am I at the right place?” Her voice has that edge Simon dislikes in youths prone to talking through films in the single-screen theater.
“I’ll say. I’m Basil. Eddy’s peeing. That’s Ethel; she can’t see. And Simon, and my mom, Janet.”
Simon happens to know Janet hates the kids calling her by name – they’re six and four and it’s still funny – but Janet’s outburst hasn’t settled, and makes him uneasy.
Ethel’s uncomfortable, too; she announces her need for a nap.
To Nova, she says, “Welcome home. I hear in your voice you’re a lovely singer. Tonight I’ll teach you a hymn, sure?”
Nova doesn’t respond. Silence floods the room.
She waits for Ethel to leave before asking, “This isn’t some religious place? That’s why I didn’t go to the shelter, I thought – ”
“She just does that,” says Janet. She notices Nova’s belly. “Well, I’ll be. That’ll pop soon.”
Not how Simon would have said it. Again Nova doesn’t answer – though this time she covers her stomach – and Simon asks if she’s hungry.
“Deathly.”
Basil pulls her to the kitchen. Simon makes to follow and notices the door’s still open. He shuts them in.
* * *
Not an hour later Simon feels the house creaking. He’s started in his sixties to feel weather in his wrists and knees.
Simon is in his favorite chair in the attic with a magazine, under a square of hazy light from the lattice window. The rain comes nicely; he likes reading to the patter on the house. And Nova weaseled in just before the weather.
But then he remembers the weather channel, how the meteorologist had talked about conservation, drought. Simon sticks a finger in the page and casts a harder look at the window. Instead of drops, it’s coming in sheets.
He works his joints and thinks of Janet and her arthritis. She’s in the kitchen with Nova, asking about her pregnancy. Any day now they’ll have to devise some way to get her to the hospital.
* * *
Basil’s on Nova like a tick. Nova must remind her to be gentle; she’s at the end of her pregnancy. Janet’s in the pantry, finishing the groceries she’d started to put away earlier; she’s already fed Nova a whole box of spaghetti and shown her how to treat the cut on her forearm with Vaseline.
Nova’s quiet, but Basil makes up for it in droves:
“You have such straight hair; will your baby have hair? Some babies are born that way. Is it a girl? We can put it in pigtails! The hair.” And on and on. She perches on the counter and puts her head on Nova’s shoulder. “I’m so glad you came to stay with us. I should be reading on my own but I’m not good yet, so I can practice with you. Ethel will teach you to sing, and you will teach me to read!”
Finally Basil takes a nap and Nova floats to the bay window, more a specter than a living girl. And she does it again. On the second day Simon asks why, and she jumps at his voice. She gives a bashful look and wets her bottom lip.
“Dunno.” Drops of water gather and slide down the window. The static noise of the rain is a sad edge under her voice. “I guess I’m waiting for someone. Or hoping to wait for someone.” Her voice catches, and she wipes a sleeve at her face. “I’m an idiot to hope he’ll come. He doesn’t even know I’m here!”
Stroke of luck, really, that Simon doesn’t have to deal with this can of worms: Janet says, “Fuck, woman, he’s missed his chance. Don’t waste the time. Not to mention this whole situation.” She gestures belly-ward. “Which, lemme tell ya, won’t leave time for anything else. God. Get a grip.”
“Get a grip,” Nova repeats. “Fuck.” She nods and that’s the end of it.
Years ago Janet’s husband planted himself in the driveway, shouting to bring her ass outside and show him their children, that he already called the cops and they better believe it, that did she know all sorts of filth lived in houses like these and if she came home he’d keep her safe. She marched outside and unleashed a string of words so vile that Simon shudders to revisit it, as much in pride as anything. This moment of Janet’s buoyed many faults to follow. Least of which because it took so much out of her; when she came back inside she cried three hours straight. She locked herself in the bathroom so she didn’t have to speak, so she could take a shower and wash her face and return to the group on her own clock. Since then, Eddy’s been suspicious around the bathroom, spends gobs of time in the bedroom eyeing the doorway. Simon suspects it’s to keep his mother from locking herself away again; next time, he will join her. Or maybe not, since he slips toward the bathroom at the first sign of tension, like when Janet and Ethel get into it again and again. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of joining Janet as much as a matter of emulation. Janet, at least, was faster over the ordeal with her husband than Ethel – who at the sound of the man yelling retired herself to bed and did not rise for two days.
* * *
Rain batters the house until it starts to bruise.
* * *
Four straight days of flood, so heavy it sequesters them inside. It’s dark and noisy, and sounds get lost underneath.
On the fourth day they feel pitching underfoot. Simon’s the first to notice; he’s in the kitchen paging through a magazine when the buffet scrapes on the hardwood. He moves, by instinct, to save the decorative plates.
But then Ethel cries out from her bedroom. Simon rushes there to find Nova and Basil and Eddy and the cat, all of them already with her, all of them caught sideways against this or that piece of furniture. Nova braces her stomach, crying out.
“I think the house detached,” Janet says, turtleneck up to her ears. He hadn’t seen her in the room. “We’re floating.”
Eddy climbs on the bed and mutters to himself. He rotates his hands on imaginary dials, watching Janet.
From the window they can see the water sloping one way, then the other, as the house tries to stabilize. For a minute the car lifts with them, and then it noses down. This is the last they’ll see of the car. The water is up to the other houses’ windows. Then they’re floating – Simon can’t believe it – past tidy rows of roofs. Past houses submerged to their shingles. Past chimneys like swamp trees.
Who can explain it? The electricity stays on, the taps keep working.
And they have a hard time pretending the rest of the Delta isn’t also adrift; it’s easier to pretend this, especially for Simon, but the proof keeps finding them.
For instance: theirs isn’t the only house to float. One wood-paneled home has broken free of its carport, and for a while lists near enough to see a family in the window. The sight of the house on the water is arresting: the chairs on the porch slide all to one end, tip in slow motion, and splash off.
The mother and father and their son look on wide-eyed from their own front entry.
“Do you think there are many others out there?” Simon asks.
Janet wrinkles her nose. “Probably lots died.”
“The ones without boats,” Nova says. “Yeah.” She shivers, surely thinking of the boyfriend.
The truth? Simon’s lying to himself to say he’s not thinking of the men who killed Andrew. He recognizes a hope in himself, and awes at it, that the murderers lack boats, that their houses have not untethered from their foundations. He feels guilty even thinking about it. He feels guilty not thinking about it.
The world seems different, worthy of grieving. What they knew of Mississippi has liquefied. Simon watches Ethel’s blank face and wonders if she’s thinking of the drowned garden. He aches for the okra they left behind. Who knew he would miss okra?
Those first two days they hear shouting, the drone of boats passing. Red Cross helicopters pat overhead. Nova’s getting on fine, but Simon knows her labor’s looming closer. And where will the boats be then?
Far off they see silhouettes of other buildings skimming the water. But those grow distant, too, until they see none save their own, and the flood that stretches on without relief.
The members of the house sit listless for hours at a time, staring out at nothing. At least til Eddy locks himself in the bathroom, between Janet’s room and the kids’. Janet wedges herself against the door to bully it open; Basil tries to reason with him.
“Me and Mama need this bathroom. It’s not for you to hog.”
From the other side of the door come growls. And then, eventually, his muffled human words: “This is how I’m safe.”
A terrible guilt swirls in Simon; he was thinking of Eddy and the bathroom just the other day. Should he have kept a closer watch? Stayed nearer this side of the house? The children aren’t his responsibility, but then again they are. This had been within Simon’s power to prevent.
Nova asks for a credit card. Simon doesn’t trust her with his, so he digs out his library card and gives her that. She slides it all too deftly between door and frame, but no luck.
Eddy snarls and barks. The cat, anxious, watches from the wardrobe.
Janet’s growing wild; she bangs her fists on the door and demands Eddy open it. The cat’ll miss him. Watch out, she’s gone! Tip tip tip go her feet into the wood as though she’s left the room all empty.
But the toddler doesn’t take the bait, refuses to let himself out. She pounds the door again, and every couple hits misses; the house is rocking on the water, and all of them keep misplacing their steps and belongings. They’ve all been sick because of it, not just Nova.
Janet’s flushed, looks an inch from crying.
“This is my – I’m a – ” but she sees Basil, sighs, lowers her voice. Simon knows that look; she’s picking through her mothering to find the cracks that led to this.
“Can we take apart the door?” she pleads.
But the house is too old, with the wrong types of doors.
“Then there’s a key! Got to be one somewhere. Ethel, find it.”
Ethel has an impish gleam. “You’d like help now, would you?”
Lately he’s noticed how much older Ethel seems – how she’s often made tired, how she spends more time in bed, less able to concentrate. She hasn’t yet lost her knack for finding things. But this streak of devil in her seems the right thing to be relieved about, in a time like this. She seems disturbed by Eddy’s turn toward the animal.
“He’s young,” Simon says. “He’ll come out when he’s hungry.”
Grrrr, Eddy says.
They don’t yet know the child is armed: a blanket and pillow, a coloring book, a flashlight. A family-sized box of peanut butter crackers.
When they learn all these articles are missing they realize, too, that Eddy will no more shortly leave the bathroom than they’ll leave the house. And that exit is nowhere in sight, considering all anyone can see is an ocean of flood in the rain.
Janet’s agitated, smokes so frequently the hall takes on a sour fog. Simon stress-eats a can of Spaghetti-Os, and then another one. Frankly he feels less special. He’s grown used to his private world of grief; now, in the flood, the others share it with him.
When the call said Andrew was in the hospital, Simon thought it must have been a ploy, old hat for Andrew, always the dramatic one: just a way to make them meet so he could say he was finally serious, like Simon had been begging him.
He hadn’t heard from Andrew for two days, not since he’d insisted they break up. The nurse’s voice could have been anyone. But no, Simon told himself, that was paranoid. So he sped to the hospital.
At the front desk, he bent toward the counter. He said Andrew’s name. The nurse, a gangly youngish man with white hair, exhaled and looked at his lap. It was bad, his posture said. His lips drooped in apology. He gave Simon the room number.
Simon’s chest was a clock ticking. The room was up a flight of stairs. When he rounded the doorway he saw a crowd of nurses at the bed. Simon had the fleeting hope he’d found the wrong room.
He stepped inside and said Andrew’s name, and the nurses turned.
“Are you the boyfriend?” one asked, and if she said it with distaste, he didn’t notice – he wasn’t paying his usual, vigilant attention to the tone of that question. Maybe he nodded. One of the nurses shifted, and he saw Andrew.
Look, there’s no use calling up that image, nothing good in that pained transfiguration of such a lovely man.
Who knows what was told to him then and what he learned after, that two men in trucker hats had chosen that evening to attend the one county bar known to be friendly to gay men. Well, friendly was relative then, is still relative now. But anyway not unfriendly, not usually. And you hear these things happening – even nearby, even recently. But then it happens to you. One of the trucker hats had pretended to be sweet to Andrew. The last the bartender saw, the two of them were speeding off, the other trucker hat driving close behind. Andrew had been found behind the theater by an early morning jogger, unconscious but breathing.
No, what Simon remembers from the hospital is this: the machines behind Andrew started to moan. A flutter of nurses, and then nothing. They parted to let Simon through. He wanted time back; he begged himself not to split from Andrew in the first place. Simon couldn’t get the sanctuary out of his head. Who, if not Andrew, would love those dogs the way he had?
* * *
Of course the damn cat is an issue. It only drinks from the sink in Eddy’s bathroom. Janet sets out a bowl of water it won’t touch. Nothing works. It stands for hours at the door, crying for water or maybe at Eddy, who punctuates the silence with howls.
Simon figures Eddy’s behavior has lasted plenty long, and tells the toddler as much.
“I won’t leave til the water does,” he says through the door.
Simon should have kept better watch of Eddy in the first place. He’s a likable kid, but just barely, destructive and wild in that exhausting, sad way. Except where the cat’s involved. Those two are kindred, somehow; Simon can’t quite understand it. And now the cat won’t drink in a floating house. Simon shouldn’t just throw it to the flood – though he’s glad Eddy can’t see his smile at the thought.
* * *
What Simon learns, he hears second-hand from Janet: Nova was with an older boy she’d met waitressing. She was saving to buy a car, and a fast one – her eventual goal is to move to Baton Rouge and stunt drive. But they were caught in the restaurant kitchen. And then she was pregnant; her parents kicked her out, and then the boy wouldn’t let her in his house. The church she’d grown up in turned up its nose. All her resources dried up.
Of course she’s no more thrilled with Bible stories than Janet is. And evenings aren’t the same without Eddy: the absence of him is a fierce haunting. Simon keeps hearing growls from odd corners of the house where Eddy’s sounds can’t possibly have carried.
The noise of the rain feels like pressure on their ears. And they’re in the wrong places, everything’s wrong: Basil’s watching over Nova’s shoulder, not Simon’s. Nova’s belly is a whole bizarre world in her lap; everything bends toward it as if by gravity. Ethel doesn’t want the blankets Simon turns for her; they suffocate her legs. She asks Simon to sit with her, and she holds onto his arm. Ethel’s grown worse in these last days of flood. She jumps when anyone mentions Eddy stuck in the bathroom; she pretends to want him free, but Simon gets the feeling she feels safer with him locked away.
“Uhrr,” she says, the end of the word something Eddy-ish. “I want Nova to read.”
Nova bunches her nose. The lamp swings in the rocking of the house, to which they’ve almost – almost – grown accustomed at this point. The umbra of light keeps bumping Nova’s shoulders.
Simon can’t stomach the thought of listening to Noah in all this. “Basil, you pick.”
“Jonah?”
“Maybe a little drier.”
“When Jesus walked on the water, he didn’t get wet,” she says.
Just then the house bumps into something, or scrapes something; what’s important is it makes an especially large dip in one direction. Simon grabs the rail of the headboard with one hand and with the other slaps an arm like a seatbelt over Ethel. She yelps and tightens her grip. The armchair Basil and Nova share slides into the lamp, which falls over unceremoniously.
“What’s out there?” Ethel asks. “Tell me.”
The window frames a square of gray and pink. “Sunset through rain,” Nova says. “I guess.”
Simon asks if Ethel has ever flown in a plane – how can he have known her all this time without asking? – and when she says she has, he compares it to when the plane turns, when one side sees just the sky, and the other just the ground.
“Oh.” She shakes her head. “Don’t tell me what you see when we tip the other way.”
“But I want to look!” Basil is clinging to the windowsill, up on the toes of her socks. “Goodness gracious,” she says. “Here comes the water!”
They can see it, too; for a second the horizon rights into view. And then the house tips the other way. They’ve swung so low a crash seems inevitable – but it’s physics, not a miracle, that they don’t. Still. Simon’s been holding a breath all this time.
Ethel lets out a whine. “I don’t need to hear this.”
“But it’s amazing! It’s all just water, like what if I turned into a mermaid and we were all mermaids and we lived underwater and never had to do school and – ”
“ – My husband tried to drown me.” Ethel’s looking at the wall behind Nova, and under her eyes are wet banks on the verge of breaching.
Simon’s not sure she knows what she’s saying. The house edges skyward again.
“It’s a horrid story and I didn’t want to bother you. Y’all have your own hurt. No sense adding to burdens.”
He realizes that Ethel never saw Janet’s bruises – she was already blind when Janet and the kids came. And he’s always taken such care not to mention Andrew. Even though this was Andrew’s house, he’s been so careful to strip his conversation of those memories. All any of them know are strokes of each other’s pasts. Up til now that had been enough.
“You don’t have to tell us.” Nova squirms in her seat.
But Ethel seems unable to stop herself. “He pushed my head in the tub. And I fought him, and he broke the tap so it flooded, and he locked me in the bathroom.”
Simon feels cold all over. Once, a couple of weeks after she’d made it to the house, she mentioned that her husband was feral. That was the word she used: feral. And Simon felt his own past wasn’t anyone’s pain to share or to know, and so he didn’t want to know more of Ethel’s. And that was all she ever told him. Has she been holding onto this the whole time, begging for a way to bring it up? Worse – had Eddy in the bathroom helped drag it up again?
And what’s more, he’s horrified Basil’s in the room to hear it. But she seems fine; she comes to touch her forehead on Ethel’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Basil says, in sympathy or as an apology for explaining the view. The house bobs its window-gaze between the water and the sunset, but it’s righting itself again.
“Oh, sweetie. I’ve been carrying that too long.”
Basil nods and kisses Ethel’s sleeve. She’s surprised him again, this time with sage compassion. She’s done a lot of growing up right under his watch, and Simon must not have noticed.
Ethel pitches her head in the direction of the window. She clears her throat and croaks out what she must have been thinking all this time: “God saved us, you know.”
* * *
Later in the evening, Janet’s the one to approach him: she’s taken stock of the pantry. She rubs a knee as she talks; her trips to the upstairs bathroom are troubling her arthritis. Nova’s sudden appearance hadn’t given them time to shop for six. And they hadn’t anticipated the flood. Their cans are down to single layers, and the boxes they keep in bulk are thin. They finished off the refrigerated goods yesterday. About a week until they’re out.
Tonight Simon hears Nova pitching through the house. She’s come looking for Basil, and Janet hasn’t seen her, and she’s not with Ethel. Has she locked herself in with her brother? Simon can’t handle two quarantined children on top of everything – he’s overloaded already, with an abundantly pregnant teenager in danger of labor any day now and a blind woman and uncooperative Janet and the awful cat and the dwindling food, all stranded in a floating house. God, when he puts it like that. Their life is busy enough just surviving each other, locating together their own place against the world. It’s not exaggerating to call that love. But the flood throws it all off proportion.
And that’s only to mention the trouble inside. None of them can shake proof that so many outside are dead. How many had the fortune to float, like the house had? How many had been alone?
They do find Basil at the bathroom door. She has the Bible and a flashlight, reading in hedges and stops.
“Noah was six hundred years old when the. Fl-udd-waters. Came on the earth.” She notices them standing in the doorway and swings the flashlight at them.
“I’m reading to him,” she says. “If I read then everything’s normal.” Her face is obscured by the beacon of the flashlight. She raps her knuckles against the door. “And Eddy gets a story, like we’re playing house and I’m the mom. Except we’re only kind of playing. Right, Eddy?”
* * *
Incredible, how easily they lose track of each other. Janet’s the next to go missing.
And though Nova ought to be on bedrest, she’s the one to find her on the front porch, legs between the banister rails, up to her ankles in water. Simon helps Nova down and sits on Janet’s other side.
“The honest truth?” Janet kicks her feet. “I’m better off bobbing out there like a bag of wine.”
Rain soaks through the knees of Simon’s pants. “You’d be cold,” he manages.
“And dead,” Nova adds.
“That, too.”
Janet keeps her face out toward the moon’s refraction, the hard breaks of the water.
Nova breaks the silence. “This is about earlier, right? Basil playing mom?”
Of course it is; Simon understands now. And he’d forgotten her outburst earlier this week – time before the flood compressed and stretched oddly.
Janet hunches her shoulders in the cold.
Simon hadn’t realized how low the temperature dropped. No one is properly dressed. “Come inside. Plenty coffee still. I’ll make decaf.”
“I don’t want inside.”
The rain makes her hard to hear. The house could be over the rescue sanctuary for all Simon knows; they have no landmarks by which to tell.
Janet coughs into her sleeve. “What’s all this animal stuff with Ed? I can’t shake it. And all I see when I walk around are places I did a horrible job raising them. I picked their father all wrong, and hid away, and moved them away from other kids! And Basil’s behind in her school, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and she knows it. Nova, she loves you more than me already. And they both love Simon” – here Simon bows his head – “and Ethel. Should’ve got them someplace better for kids a long time ago, and now . . .” She grips the railing. “I’ve known a long time this disaster was coming. Just didn’t know it’d look like the end of days and Ed would lock himself in the tub. Also my fault.”
A fish breaks the surface and pops back under.
“Yesterday Basil told me she wanted to grow up,” Nova says, “so she could move her kids into a house like this. I mean I hope she doesn’t have to. Point is she likes it here. This place is built on unconditionals; gives you forty chances instead of the standard two. You can’t say that about everywhere. You’re not doing so bad.”
Simon’s taken aback; never has he heard such kind words about the place he put together. So much of the house relies on its people. He hopes he’s played as big a role as Ethel has, or Janet. Even Nova.
Then Nova screams and clutches her abdomen.
Here, finally: the baby, coming bloody and loud, into a world of disaster. Simon calls emergency services but all the boats are taken, all the hospitals full, and besides they can’t figure out where this house has floated off to, sorry. Nova’s red-faced and puffing, squeezing her eyes against contractions. At some point she bites through her lip; her chin is dotted with blood.
“Sorry my ass,” Janet says, padding the upstairs bathroom with towels.
Basil’s the best nurse of all, perfectly calm and running everyone’s various chores. Simon feels useless and quarantines himself outside the door, trying not to crowd the bathroom. From inside come moans positively apocalyptic.
They dose her up on ibuprofen but have nothing stronger.
Basil fills the bath with warm water. She wishes Eddy were here to see the new baby, and hopes he’s warm in the tub at the other end of the house – she says it once and then drops it, and only Simon hears it. His stomach drops again with the guilt of not watching Eddy closer.
Hours in, he takes a shift so the others can rest. The whole bathroom is sweaty. Basil can’t bear to leave; she takes a nap on the shower rug with a pillowcase sleeping bag.
And then the end comes as they knew it would: Nova’s is no easy delivery, given the lurching floor and the inexpert help of the residents. Around six the next morning she finishes pushing. She and the baby are as fine as anyone could expect, which is to say, fine enough. Alive.
* * *
Around seven, the noise to which they’ve grown accustomed dies without warning. The rain quits. Simon never could have anticipated the soreness in his ears.
Through the window is the endless water, mirror-smooth. He can hear Eddy crying from the bathroom.
Nova’s whispering to the baby. His short life has, so far, only known the world a place of noise. She coos his name over and over: “Shh, Rain. You’re okay, Rain.”
They have no way to measure, of course, but Simon suspects the water is receding. Their house lurches. Drinks spill. People trip.
He’s on his way to Nova with a bowl of macaroni – they all lament their inability to feed her more nutritious food – when a crash sounds upstairs. He rushes up.
At the base of the stairs to the attic, Ethel sprawls unconscious. They trust her to move about the house on her own because she knows it well, though to tell the truth Simon’s suffered nightmares with similar endings to this one. She struck her head in the fall and isn’t breathing. A slick of red on the stairs matches the dark patch in her hair.
Janet’s walk sounds around the corner, too close now for Simon to stop her. She registers Simon first, then Ethel, then Simon again. He must look a mess.
And then she notices what Simon hasn’t: a couple inches from one of Ethel’s outstretched hands, a small key glints from the floorboards.
“The key to the bathroom,” Janet guesses.
He turns to answer but can’t see through the tears. Some sort of shape floats behind Janet. Simon blinks to clear his vision and sees the pitiful figure of Eddy, in the same clothes he’s worn several days now. He has greasy hair, a trail of crumbs across his mouth.
“That’s a funny place to sleep,” he says.
It’s a wild, terrible reunion, Eddy and his mother, with Ethel’s crumpled figure keeping watch. Janet cries into his hair; he wails into her sweater. Simon is relieved to see him, too. They squeeze the toddler and send him downstairs to find anyone else, anywhere other than here.
Ethel both is and isn’t hard to move; her body is terribly light. Simon and Janet together haul her to her bedroom. They tuck her in bed, covers and all, for want of a better idea.
Simon’s never been the touchy type, nor Janet, but they hug and feel a little better.
This high in the house, they’re cushioned from sound. The occasional drop tips from the eaves. The wind whistles once. Mostly what Simon notices is the smell of old wood, the cologne the house wears. How different it seems now. How different outside the house, too, and how much sadder.
Ethel’s head looks small from the pillows; Simon’s proud of her for sharing, horrified though her story made him. It hasn’t hit him yet. He can’t fathom the house without her. He sits crisscross on the hardwood, out of sight of the bed, and taps the floor for Janet. He notices on her wrist a beaded bracelet of Basil’s design. Basil made it years ago, and though Janet wore it for a while, Simon hadn’t seen the bracelet lately.
“I think,” she says, turning the thought over, “Ethel found the key a while ago and hid it from me.”
What an awful thing to say! Simon tries a few responses and can’t make any work.
“I’m kidding. Mostly. And if she misbehaved it’s just because I rubbed off on her. I’m a bad influence.”
“Well, you know. Bad is good sometimes.”
She bumps his shoulder in solidarity, staring at the pattern on the chair cushion.
It’s well past due to bring his own memories home, to allow the ghost of Andrew and their stories and Simon’s sadness to creep around. This is the right thing to do.
“Did I ever tell you how I met him?” he asks. But it’s a silly question.
“Well, go ahead. This was his house, do I remember that?”
This story he quite likes, even if it’s a touch precious. He expected to be the only moviegoer at The Wizard of Oz; the cinema ran classics every summer weekend, and though the matinee filled, the evenings were typically deserted. He’d had a rotten week, was in a foul mood. Needed the film to lighten up. And here was some jerk sitting in the middle of the theater, directly where Simon would’ve been had the man not so rudely taken the space himself. Simon managed the steps and found a seat in the back. But the man was devilish for more than stealing seats. Toto bites the neighbor. The seat-stealer yelps and glances to Simon. By the time Dorothy meets the fortune teller he’s shifted two rows back. Row by row he moves. And the tornado comes, and by the time the screen changes to color they were the two of them in the back row, a whole theatre and emerald world to themselves.
“That,” Janet says, swallowing a grimace, “sounds nice. Sweet, actually. Thanks.”
* * *
In the end of rain, in the birth and Ethel’s death, the damn cat’s gone missing and no one’s noticed. Frankly no one cares, least of all Simon. But the accumulated loss of another member is too much on the taxed house. Its emotional extremities have stretched to breaking. The air is too quiet, even with the baby.
And what noises he makes! But Simon’s glad to have distraction. The house is cold and empty without Ethel; no one knows how to feel.
Nova is up, and healthy, keeps Rain cradled on her. She cries about Ethel between shifts of crying about the baby. And who had expected the blood to keep coming? They’ve laundered piles of Simon’s and Janet’s clothes. Simon plans to tell her: if they leave the house and find Mississippi standing, he’ll help her find a way to college. Or if that’s not what she wants – and he gets the sense it’s not, though he thinks it only sensible to offer college first – he supposes he’d be happy to help find her a stunt driving program to get her certified. He would like to know someone in a job so exciting. And if anyone, Nova has the temperament.
For now they help each other by distraction, searching for the cat. Simon looks in Ethel’s room so no else has to.
He hears a shriek from downstairs and for a minute can’t force himself to follow it.
The cat’s on the porch with a bird, tail swishing.
Through the door Eddy goes, chasing the cat til it drops the bird. They, at least, are returning to normal, and of that Simon is glad. But that the cat should live and the bird die – or that they should survive, and get a baby, while the Delta drowned, and with Ethel dead on the second floor? The children haven’t known how to react to such awful news. They keep asking where she’s hiding. And then the matter of notifying the city of the body, though it has plenty of those to deal with. She claimed God saved them. But for what?
Basil better situates the cat in Eddy’s arms. “Don’t hurt him, now,” she says.
Janet tries hard, Simon can tell, not to grimace at Basil’s bit of mothering.
From their view through the porch, scraggly trees poke over the banister. And, near the horizon, silhouettes of other houses settle onto an exposed strip of highway. So the floods are dying down, as Simon suspected. Eventually the water will recede and the house will situate. He puts a hand to the wall; they have food to restock and dead to bury. All else can wait.
Molly Gutman’s stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Portland Review, The Normal School, and Mid-American Review.