Flood

When the floods came and went, I thought we had made it, I thought we were safe.

We managed to leave before the water levels became too high, stranding some of our neighbours as we found out later. Adam had packed the car days in advance and when the alerts went off all we had to do was pack Evie, easy enough, a two year old could just be plucked up and restrained in her car seat, and Sam, who proved to be slightly more complicated. He was seven years old at the time but also autistic and non-verbal, and had the strength of a full grown man when he set his mind to it.

I had been explaining to him for days and days before the hurricane hit that we might have to leave quickly, and go to a hotel, and that we will be back but it might take us a while, and that he will have his favourite toy, Woody, and all his snacks with us, but we might not have time for his morning routine when the time for us to leave came. He understood as much as he did, he never indicated to me that he heard, he never did, but when the alarm in my phone went off and we rushed from the house in the pouring rain, he came with us without a meltdown and sat quietly in his seat, buckling himself in.

I ran over to Florence’s house, she lived just across the road and was all on her own ever since her husband died last spring. I banged on the door and screamed her name, if she was home, she would have heard me. Relieved, thinking she must have left already, I made my way back to the car.

The ancient Honda Civic came through one more time. Over dangerously crumbling roads and water as high as the car doors it took us out of the danger zone and all the way to the hotel we had preselected to be our evacuation plan.

Three days later we were told the water had receded enough for us to be able to go back and inspect the house. We were so relieved. Sam had been in total meltdown for almost the entire three days. He had banged his head on the floor so many times I couldn’t think of the black and blue bruises his fine brown hair was probably hiding from my eyes. He had cried and cried for hours every day until his hazel eyes seemed black and he fell asleep, exhausted, only to wake up a couple of short hours later, waking us all up again with his wailing screams for something I could not provide him.

We hugged and cradled both him and Evie, absorbing his fists and lashing arms for what felt like an eternity every night and every day. We cried ourselves to sleep with him and Evie, exhausted, heartbroken, in tears and in pain for his suffering, the depth of which we couldn’t fathom. Poor little Evie cried with us, I wish I could have helped her more, I wish I could have split myself in two - to be the perfect parent for her as well as give all of myself to Sam. She never asked for any of this, my blond little angel, we did the best we could.

The moment we got the all clear we packed the car and drove back home. We didn’t know what we would find when we arrived and thought we would probably have to find different emergency accommodations but we couldn’t stay in that hotel room for a minute longer. We heard of houses in the neighbourhood that had collapsed, some that had flooded beyond repair, while others burned to the ground. When we turned the corner and saw our house standing tall amongst a sea of wreckage, seemingly untouched, it was the best feeling in the world. I couldn’t describe it even if I tried. The sun was out and shining bright, the sky so peaceful and washed clean, I couldn’t believe that less than a week ago we couldn’t even see past the end of our noses for the rain and the clouds.

The first thing that hit me was the smell. Flood water smell like sewage, and the sweet sickly scent of death. Inside the house it was even worse. The water had indeed entered the house at some point and we could see a clear mud line on the wall, almost three feet high. Every step shook the loose tiles beneath my feet as if I was walking on water, waves of flooring coming up to meet my shaky legs with every step I took. The walls absorbed so much water they were swollen, like a malignant sore about to erupt, they spewed dirt and puss whenever we tried to touch them. Everything was ruined. But we were together, and we were alive.

The mud covered everything in a thick black layer of rotting goo. I walked from room to room, bewildered, in shock of what had become of our once happy home.

We left Evie and Sam in the car, Florence, who had apparently been back for a few hours now, volunteered to watch them as we tried to salvage whatever we could from the debris inside.

As I walked deeper into the house I saw the black sheened mud was everywhere, nothing had been untouched. Our wedding photos on the wall were distorted and had popped out of their frames from the water pressure, our clothes and belongings were strewn in shallow puddles, looking like corpses, floating face down. I felt like the mud was burying me alive. Gingerly I tried to pick up an item or two, the children’s end of year photos, some toys, and the mug my grandmother gave me just before she died…

From the corner of my eye I saw a movement outside the window. For some reason Florence took the children out of the car and was walking them inside the house. What the hell was she doing? It wasn’t safe for them to come inside, that’s why we asked her to wait outside!

I started walking outside when I heard the scream. It was Adam, and I had never heard him make that sound before. He rushed past me, Evie in his arms. He slammed the door to Sam’s room and pulled me behind him, hard. I couldn’t hold my footing on the treacherous floor and slipped out of the house, my arm nearly pulled out of its socket. Why was he holding Evie? And where were Florence and Sam?

Adam pushed Evie into her seat and shoved me into the car, his panic had overtaken me as well and I didn’t look back as he tore out of the driveway, his face a contorted mask.

“What is it? What happened? Was there an alligator in the house?”

Adam didn’t answer, his mouth was still gaping open, full of the scream he no longer had the breath to let out.

Finally I looked behind me at Sam. He was not in the car.

“Sam! Adam! Turn around! Sam is not here! He’s not in the car!”

“I know!” Adam yelled back at me, his eyes as dark as the mud that had swallowed our house.

“What do you mean you know?! Where is he?? Stop the car right now!” Adam didn’t stop, if anything, he accelerated, taking me further and further away from my son.

“What the hell are you doing? Did you leave him with Florence? Adam! Answer me!”

“I don’t know what happened! One minute he was just fine and then, and then, then he was gone!”

“Gone? What the hell are you saying? STOP THE CAR RIGHT NOW!” I grabbed the steering wheel and tried to push Adam off it, desperately trying to turn us around. The wheels screeched in protest and Adam hit the brakes hard. Evie tumbled out of her car seat and I hit my head on the dashboard, I saw black spots for a moment and the car came to a halt, the sudden silence roaring in my ears after our panicked screaming match. The moment of silence broke when Evie started crying from the floor of the car behind me. I picked her up quickly and hugged her.

“What the actual hell is happening? Where is Sam?”

Adam was sobbing into his hands, a total mess of a human being, who the hell even was this man? And where was my son?

I shoved the crying and kicking baby into Adam’s lap and got out of the car. The house was still visible behind us and I started running towards it, towards Sam.

“Hannah! stop! Don’t go back there! He’s gone OK? He’s not there! I don’t know what that is but it’s not Sam, it can’t be Sam…” Adam’s voice chased me down the street, getting weaker and less important the further I ran.

Every step took me closer, but the road seemed to have a will of its own, slowing me down, sucking on my heels, and not letting me go as fast as I wanted. It felt like I was in one of those dreams, the dreams where you’re running as fast as you can, but not getting anywhere. The mud, the unbearable putrid mud, was everywhere.

I came up to Florence’s house first, the door was wide open. It was clear it had been hit pretty hard. I peeked my head inside but it seemed empty, no Florence, no Sam. The sky had darkened in the time it took me to run back, sending creepy fingers of green clouds all over the once beautifully bright morning sun.

The door to the house was closed and I approached it hesitantly, did Florence take Sam inside?

I turned the handle but the door wouldn’t budge. It opened just fine for us a moment ago, but now it seemed like the house was trying to keep me out. I pushed on it, hard, and heard the sound of air being sucked hastily inside, and then a pop, and it felt like I was pushing against a wall of mud, pushing against me from the inside. Finally the door gave and I fell in, landing on my hands and knees in a thick layer of muck.

“Sam? Sammy! It’s mommy, are you there?” I looked up from my sprawling position on the floor towards Sam’s room, the door was still closed from when Adam shut it behind him when he ran.

I heard a low rumbling, felt it through my knees and arms embedded in the black goo. Someone was in there, and something was terribly wrong.

“Mommy?” the house roared with the word inside my head, inside my skin, turning my stomach inside out. That was my son’s voice but he had never said that word to me. Ever. Not once. Not when he was a toddler, taking his first shaky steps into my anticipating arms. Not when he was laid up with a fever of a hundred and three, shivering in my lap as we rushed him to the hospital. Not when I told him every single day how much mommy loves him, and how I will always, always, be there for him. I knew he lived almost all of his life inside my head, somewhere where I couldn’t go, no matter how hard I tried.

There had always been precious moments between us when I was able to communicate with him, in those moments I saw him recognise me, and recognise my love, and I had always hoped my love for him was strong enough to keep him with me, to pull him out of the ethereal world where he spent most of his time.

I stood up, pulled myself inch after inch out of the raw, heavy black substance that had swallowed up my house.

Whatever water had flowed through here in the past few days, it had brought with them something else, and that something had taken over my son’s voice.

Slowly, ever so slowly, fighting for a footing on the waves shaking the floor beneath me, I reached the door to Sam’s room. Breathing in hard, I opened it.

My mind had exploded, it must have. The room was covered in a dark, heavy matter, it seemed like it wasn’t just my mind that exploded, it was as if a grenade of raw oil, the souls of a hundred thousand dinosaurs trapped in it, blew up inside. So did my son. His head, still attached to one shoulder and one hand, and was hanging upside down from the far corner of the ceiling. A leg was kicking aimlessly on the floor right in front of me, and parts of his torso were splattered on the wall to my right.

“Mmmmommoy?” His voice filled every corner of my body, sucking the air out of my lungs, filling them with pure dread. The smell of death and decay erased any smell I had ever smelled before in my life. There was nothing left.

Sam’s head turned towards me and I could see Adam was right. This wasn’t my son, even though he was right there. My body suddenly felt like it had caught on fire, the urge to move almost burning it to a crisp. But my heart, my heart simply melted away on the spot. Flashes of memory chased one after another before my eyes while tears filled me like the heavy rains that caused these floods. Me, rocking a crying baby that couldn’t be consoled for hours and hours until my knees buckled and I couldn’t rock back and forth anymore. Sam, looking at me with a hollow look, not recognising me calling his name, over and over again for days on end. The sheer joy I felt the first time I guessed right the cause of one of his meltdowns and taking his pain away. His teacher, telling me she is recommending we see a specialist, having Sam in her class for less than a month, recognising something inside him I couldn’t at the time, name. The hours spent in agonising pain, pushing and breathing, waiting to meet my baby for the very first time, and the unimaginable tearing pain that came over me just before he slid out of me into his father’s arms. Me, looking at that angelic baby, fighting an unreasonable fear that I had had all my life, A fear that grow bigger inside me when he was diagnosed and I realised how much of his life will be lived somewhere else, not with the rest of us. Somehow I knew that I had only borrowed this precious soul, it was never fully mine.

What was I supposed to do? What could I possibly do now?

“MMMMOOOOMMY….” Sam’s severed head was starting to float across the ceiling, like a stranded raft in a dark cold sea, coming closer to me as I stood there, frozen in time.

Something brushed against my leg and I looked down, a piece of hair, a dark shirt I recognised, was flouting eerily in the heavy mud engulfing my feet, trying to suck me down. Florence.

I grabbed the dirty white clump of hair and pulled it up with all the strength I had. Florence was still connected to it and I was able to reveal her face. Her hollow eyes glared at me out of sunken sockets, her empty gums smiling at me as if it was just another Tuesday and we were talking about nothing in particular, standing idly by her baby avocado tree outside. She was clearly dead, and yet, her lips parted and sounded the word that was also coming out on my son’s dead mouth, hanging upside down above me.

“Mommmmmmyyyyyy?” I glanced up, the head that used to be the head I loved most in this world, but now, couldn’t contain the hate I felt for it, was getting closer by the second. Rage filled every molecule in my body and the fire that just moments ago beckoned me to flee, suddenly demanded something else entirely.

I picked something up from the mud, almost up to my hips now, I don’t remember what it was, maybe a fork? Maybe a knife? And started stabbing Florence in the face. I stabbed at her eyes, her ears, her mouth, whatever I could reach while still grabbing at the back of her head by her hair. All I wanted was revenge. You hurt my son? I will hurt you back. It did not matter how weak I felt compared to this demon of the flood who had in an instant, and so easily, devoured my whole life.

Flailing my makeshift weapon, screaming and yelling, I felt the floor coming up to fight me. Wave after wave it shook me, and losing my footing, I fell. I didn’t let go, though. Whatever this thing was, I will hurt it until I have no more breath in my body, no more hurt to feel. I was being pulled under by a hundred invisible hands, and I saw the mud level go above my eyes while I took one last giant breath and the smell of rot, death and loss pervaded my lungs. Refusing to stop stabbing at the head I was holding, Florence’s face felt more like mincemeat than an organ by now. I didn’t stop until the darkness outside had wholly taken over my inside.

Never mind all this, my love. I let a final thought cross my mind, I will see you again in a short while, and this time, I wordlessly promised, we will be together for all of time.