The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (257 page)

He hadn’t yet realized that Gracie wasn’t with us. And later, when he did, he rested his head against the tree trunk and wailed.

As the water receded, blocks of ice, smashed cars, and broken tree limbs began to reveal themselves. When we started shouting for help, a guy appeared on the upstairs back porch of the funeral parlor. “I see you!” he called to us. “I’ll get help.” A few minutes later, he and two men in rain slickers and hip boots—firemen, I guess—came sloshing through the knee-high water toward us. Two of the men were carrying a ladder against their shoulders. They leaned it against the trunk of the tree. One climbed the ladder, got hold of Annie, and climbed down again, the poor kid slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Uncle Chick and I climbed down after them. For some reason, there were tangles of twine in the fallen tree limbs. The water was now only up to my shins. As I followed the firemen, I kept stumbling on these loose bricks underfoot. They were all over the place.

An ambulance took Annie and me to the hospital, where two nurses treated us for exposure, removing our wet clothes and wrapping us in heated blankets. Another nurse used a rubber squeeze bulb to suck dirty water and mucous from our throats and nostrils. They made us put on these hospital nightgown things and told us we had to stay there overnight for observation. At first, they were going to separate us, but Annie was too scared to let me out of her sight, so they put us in the same two-bed room. When Annie asked the nurses where her mommy was, they gave each other funny looks and said they didn’t know but people were looking for her.

They had wanted Uncle Chick to come with us to the hospital, but he’d refused, insisting that he needed to stay and search for his wife and his baby daughter. I think it was around midnight when Donald walked into Annie’s and my hospital room. Annie was asleep by then, so the two of us had to whisper. He kept stopping to collect himself in the middle of telling me his story: how the coach’s wife was waiting when the track team got back to school. How he hadn’t gotten scared until they said he couldn’t go home. “Instead, I had to go over to Coach’s house until we found out what was going on. Coach called the police station for me. When they finally called back, they said you guys were here. Dad’s here, too, you know. They brought him in a little while ago. They let me look in and see him, but they wouldn’t let me talk to him yet, because they said he’s in shock. Is Ma . . . is she dead, Kent?”

I nodded. “Gracie, too.”

He looked mad at first—the way he’d looked the day he discovered that I’d wrecked his trophy. But then he broke down. I pushed over and he got into bed with me, put his arms around me and sobbed, his tears falling against my neck. When he left, about an hour later, he looked more dazed than anything else. He was staying the night at his coach’s house.

I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing and hearing the floodwater. Finally, after the second or third time the nurse came in and shined her flashlight in my face, she gave me something to help make me drowsy. When I woke to the sound of birds a little before dawn, I felt, and then saw, Annie asleep against me. Sometime in the middle of the night, she must have climbed out of her bed and up onto mine.

They found Gracie’s body first, stuck in some twine-draped tree branches in front of Stanley’s Market, just a few hundred feet away from where the Merc had crashed. They didn’t find Aunt Sunny’s body until that afternoon when Mr. McPadden and his brother began the cleanup at the funeral parlor. It had gotten a lot of damage, both on the main floor where the wakes were and in the basement where the bodies were embalmed and the caskets were stored. It was weird: they found Aunt Sunny on the floor in the casket room, lying facedown in two or three inches of water with her arm sticking straight up. On the radio, I heard Mr. McPadden say that a block of ice had bashed in the basement doors and the water must have carried Aunt Sunny’s body inside.

I don’t remember getting out of the hospital, or very much about the funeral. Funeral
s
, I mean. Two of them. I remember what the newspaper said, though; all that week, I read every single article about the flood. After all that rain we’d had, the earthen dam holding back Wequonnoc Lake had begun to leak near the base late that afternoon, the paper said, and then, around 10:00
P.M.,
had collapsed. As the water rushed forward—forty-five million gallons of it, some engineer estimated—the ice on the surface broke into pieces, some of them weighing a ton or more. These were carried along the downward slope, slamming into whatever was in their way with the force of a freight train engine. An old brick mill on Broad Street was in the water’s path, and it collapsed under the force of the surge, burying alive four third-shift workers who were at their machines, making rope and twine. Gravity increased the velocity of the debris-strewn water as it raced south, wrecking a number of downtown businesses before passing over the railroad tracks that ran behind the stores and dumping into the Sachem River. From there, the swollen river rushed downstream toward New London, spilling into Long Island Sound. Three Rivers was declared a disaster area, and flags were flown at half-mast for the victims. In all, seven people died: Aunt Sunny and Gracie, those four workers at the twine factory, and a bum who’d been squatting in a lean-to along the riverbank—some colored guy named Rufus Jones. And this was kind of creepy: the paper said that someone else had died that night, too, in a plane crash somewheres else: Aunt Sunny’s favorite singer, Patsy Cline.

Uncle Chick had to swallow a bitter pill: the fact that his house had remained watertight. If we’d only stayed put instead of trying to outrun the floodwater, Aunt Sunny and Grace would still be alive. Once the funerals were over, my mother took some vacation days and stayed with us at Uncle Chick’s for a week or so. When it was time for her to go back, she called a kitchen table conference with Uncle Chick, Donald, and me. She said it was time for me to come home—that her brother had enough on his plate now without having to worry about me. She volunteered to take Annie, too. Annie would need mothering, she said. Sunny had no sisters and her mother was too sickly to take on the responsibility of a young child. “You helped me out, Chick,” she told her brother. “Let me return the favor.”

“But what about school?” Uncle Chick said. Mom argued that there were kindergartens in New Britain, too.

Chick was on the verge of agreeing with Mom’s plan when Annie, who’d been listening from the next room, burst into the kitchen. “No! I want to stay here with Daddy and Donald and Kent!” she screamed. She threw herself onto the floor and pitched a tantrum. When my mother tried to pick her up and comfort her, she hit her and yelled, “No! Go away! Go home!” Then she crawled on her hands and knees over to me and climbed into my lap.

Uncle Chick said we should probably leave things the way they were for now, and that I didn’t need to move back. “Kent’s no trouble, Elaine,” he told his sister. “In fact, he’s a big help. And he and Annie get along good. She’s going to have to deal with enough loss without him leaving, too.” When I glanced over at Donald, his face was unreadable. Nobody had asked him for his opinion and he hadn’t volunteered it, either.

“I’m staying, Mom,” I told her. “I can cook, help out around the house, babysit Annie in the afternoon.”

“You’re still at school in the afternoon,” Mom pointed out. “And Annie goes to morning kindergarten. Who’s going to take care of her until you get home?” Uncle Chick told her that Annie’s bus brought her back at about twelve thirty, when he was home for lunch. He could bring her to the barbershop when lunch was over, and I could pick her up there.

“Yeah, and all’s I got last period is study hall,” I said. “If Uncle Chick calls the school and explains the situation, they’ll let me get excused early.”

Didn’t I need to study during study hall? my mother asked.

I laughed. “All anyone does in that study hall is yack with each other and play cards. I usually just put my head on the desk and take a nap.”

“What about you, Donny?” she said, turning to my cousin. “Could you take care of her some afternoons?”

Donald shook his head. He either had band practice or National Honor Society. “And once baseball season starts, forget it. Coach Covino’s a stickler about practice. If you skip, you don’t play.”

“Well . . . ,” Mom said. Reluctantly, she packed her things, hugged the four of us, and drove back to New Britain by herself.

In the weeks that followed, Donald got busier than ever. He didn’t even come home for supper half the time. That was his way of coping, I figured. Uncle Chick coped by drinking. His two or three beers a night became a six-pack, a six and a half. When he moved on to the hard stuff, he started going down to the Silver Rail after work instead of coming home. So it was me and Annie at the house a lot of the time—just the two of us. That was when I started touching her in ways I wasn’t supposed to.

I didn’t really know why I was doing it. All I knew was that Aunt Sunny’s death made me angry and sad, and that my little cousin and I shared a secret: that her little sister had died because of her, not me. I had told that lie to protect Annie, but to my surprise, no one really blamed me. It was the circumstances, they all said. I had nothing to feel guilty about. If I hadn’t smashed that window and found a way out of the car, we
all
would have died. Not even Donald held Gracie’s death against me. “Hey, you tried, man. That’s all you could have done. I’m just glad you were there for Annie.” He was guilty about not having been there himself, I knew. I could have used that against him, but I didn’t. Instead, I used my hands against his little sister. The better part of me knew it was wrong, but the better part of me didn’t seem to be in control when we were by ourselves, which was plenty. It was like my hands had a mind of their own.

It started innocently enough. One morning she came into the kitchen while I was cooking us breakfast. Walked over to the stove, put her hands on her hips, and sighed. “Guess what, Kent? I got zema again.”

“You got what?”

“Zema. It’s real itchy. Want me to go get the cream that Mommy puts on it?”
Used
to put on it, I thought. The poor kid was still struggling to accept the fact that Aunt Sunny’s absence from her life was permanent.

“Yeah, go get it,” I said, scraping scrambled egg onto her plate. High school started before Annie’s school did; the deal was that Uncle Chick was supposed to get her up, feed her, and see her off on the bus. But Chick was already starting to be pretty unreliable, and no one seemed to object if I skipped school. I’d started staying home as often as I went.

When she came back with the cream, I read the back of the tube. “It’s
ec
zema, not zema,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, then pulled her dress up to the waist, revealing the red rash on her thighs.

“Where’s your underpants at?” I asked her.

She looked down. “Oops,” she said. “I forgot to put them on.”

I shook my head. “Good thing your head’s screwed on or you’d probably forget that, too.”

“That’s what Mommy always tells me,” she said.

I knelt in front of her, squeezed some of the cream onto my fingers, and rubbed it into her rash. I didn’t touch her between her legs, but there it was, and seeing it put me back in Irma’s basement, looking at Nadine’s. “There,” I said. “Feel better?” She nodded. “Okay then. Go put your underwear on, then come back and eat your eggs before they get cold.” I glanced at the clock. “Bus is coming in fifteen minutes. You better step on it.”

“Okay,” she said, and dashed away.

All morning long, I hung around the house and tried not to picture it: Annie’s bare thighs, her little pink button. But my mind kept wandering back to what I’d seen when she pulled up her dress. It was weird. A few days earlier, I’d poked around in Donald’s stuff and found a dirty magazine: women clutching their tits and fingering their snatches. I had flipped through the pages and gotten off, but it took me a while. But now, thinking about little girls’ pussies—Nadine’s, Annie’s—I went from zero to sixty. I jerked off twice before lunch and once after. What was I? A fucking pervert or something?

When I heard Annie’s bus pull up outside, I went to the door and waited for her. I asked her how school was. “Good,” she said, “except for when Richard Plante hit me at recess.”

“Yeah? Did you tell the teacher?”

She shook her head. Whenever kids squealed, she said, Mrs. Kovacs said she was going to have to take the tattletale out of the closet and make them wear it. “Want to play slapjack?” she asked.

“Yeah, okay. Go get the cards.”

She did what she usually did when we played that game: climbed up onto my lap so that she could be the first to slap the jack when I turned over the cards. But she was squirmy that day, and I felt my dick starting to stir. “You’re heavy,” I said. “Go sit in the chair.” I was fighting it.

So I wasn’t sure why, during our second game, I asked her how her eczema was. Did she want me to put more cream on her legs? She shook her head. “Okay then. Good.” I was part disappointed and part relieved. I let her win. Then I told her she should go watch TV or something because I had to start supper. When she came back in the kitchen a few minutes later, I was peeling potatoes. She asked me if she could peel some, too. I told her no, she was too young to use the peeler. She could hurt herself.

I
could hurt her, too, I realized. I had to stop thinking of her in that way.

I spent the next couple of days steering clear of her, which wasn’t easy, because she kept shadowing me. “Go play with your Barbies or something, Annie. Scoot. Don’t be a pest,” I’d tell her, and she’d poke out her bottom lip and walk away. Once when I told her to stop bothering me, she stuck her tongue out and said she didn’t even like me anymore, which was bull. “Oh, boo hoo,” I said. “I’m so sad.”

After we ate supper—it was just the two of us, usually—was when the temptation got the strongest. She’d be in the bathroom, taking her bath, and I’d find myself on the other side of the door, listening and feeling myself up as she sloshed around in there, singing, talking to herself. One night while I was doing that, I heard her cry out in pain. “What’s the matter?” I called.