Two If by Sea (3 page)

“It's Frank,” he said. “Sweetheart, I'll call again. Obviously, I'm alive. Natalie . . . Natalie and her family . . . her brothers and their wives and daughters are missing. Edie, I'll call back. I love you and tell Mom I love her.”

Frank went to his car and opened it. There was bottled water in the boot of the car. As if seeing it for the first time, he recognized the first-aid kit and granola bars, all neatly packed in a box that Frank transferred to a horse van when he went to a jumps event, or to deliver or to pick up a horse for the owner of the place he'd worked. He didn't recall ever using it, although he knew that he replenished it once in a while. Distances in Queensland were vast, often parched and heat-blasted, or washed unrecognizable in mud, and habitation was unpredictable. Standing in the road, Frank opened a bottle and downed it. He opened and drank two more, tore open a granola pack, and swallowed it without chewing or tasting.

For a moment, the food centered him.

He walked back to the stone bench and sat down again.

He'd left Brian at the bar at twelve thirty, to stretch his legs after tucking Natalie in. Blissfully languorous, just beginning her fifth month, she'd been too drowsy even to open his gift, so he'd left it at her side, still in its silver wrappings. It came from a gallery in London and was hundreds of years old, a maternal primitive sculpted of thick dull gold with a coil of fire ruby at its center that would hang out of sight beneath Natalie's scrubs, between her breasts. Perhaps she could not have worn it at work. She was too often called on to do minor surgery to wear any jewelry at all, even her earrings. Still, he thought of the primitive mother now floating curved in dark water, to be found in five hundred years and presented by another bemused fellow to another abundant bride, and of the man who had forged it once, to commemorate the majesty of the commonplace miracle.

“I might like to maybe take some time off,” Natalie said one morning, after they'd been snorkeling, after they demolished enough Eggs Benedict to feed four and made love in a way that left nothing else to do except sleep.

“Research?” he'd said.

“Social research, Yank. Say you have a kid. You'd want him to have everything, right? Like a stay-home mommy for a year? Like dual citizenship?”

Frank said, “Well, a theoretical kid? We haven't ironed out the kid business. I'm not pushing you for kids. I am forty, after all.”

“So am I. I need to get some of these genes passed on. So this kid, it will be theoretical, but only for about the next six months,” Natalie said, drawing out every word, preening, as a woman who'd made life had a right to do, as though she had been crowned a serene highness.
Two weeks later, they saw the ultrasound picture, his son's assertive penis and cunning alien leer. Picturing that moment, their astounded faces, how they gripped each other's hands, Frank tumbled from the bench. He grasped his knees and puked in the mud beside the shell path.

The cell phone rang.

It was the chief of volunteer firefighters in his sector, outside the city, alerting him to a voice page from the State Emergency Service. He ignored it, pressing the button to power the phone off. Before he could, it rang again. Frank touched the speaker.

“Goddamn it, Frank Mercy, if you aren't answering this phone, you'd best be dead,” the woman said.

His chief of volunteers was a hard woman, who had no idea where he was or what had happened. He also knew that she would have called him anyway and would find him somehow, as she had when he was two hours home from his honeymoon. Frank threw the phone to the ground near the car. It kept on ringing.

Fifteen times.

Twenty times.

Thirty.

F
IVE HOURS LATER,
in sweltering heat before noon, his back and flanks sweat-soaked under his duffel coat, Frank stood in the back of a patrol boat with two college kids, raw rookies, a young woman and a young man so terrified and clumsy they were more likely to brain each other with the eight-foot blunt-end body hooks than they were to pull anyone to safety. Still, even a raw volunteer was better than nothing. Not much better. The floodwaters still rose. Helicopters crowded each other like fat-bodied dragonflies darting at the many stranded in places the cutters couldn't go. As the Brisbane River burst its banks, whatever resembled a cogent plan of rescue was abandoned in favor of desperate duck and drag efforts on the part of every crew in every kind of conveyance, from cutter to rowboat.

There was no time to search.

A search would need to wait until they could pull out families they could see. There were plenty of people stranded on top of their cars or clinging to their gutters. So far, Frank and the crew in the patrol boat had hauled ten survivors up to waiting transport to Our Lady Help of Christians, where Natalie had been chief of emergency services. One family, a grandmother and two children, were floating on a hollow-core door. They brought each group to at least some dryish area nearby the hospital. Each time he glanced up, Frank could see small figures in blue drab, Country Guard, hastily erecting tents that they filled with cots and blankets and first-aid supplies. Most of the people they found were at least able to walk the last block to the hospital under their own steam—but a few were in shock, and others had serious lacerations or fractures. For them, Frank and one of the college kids unrolled the Easy Evac stretcher and hustled to the bottom of the hill where paramedic teams parked in lines exchanged their stretchers for Frank's empty one. When one bus pulled away, it was replaced by another: Frank saw the names stenciled on the sides—
Rockhampton, Cairns, Wollogong
.

The medics must have driven all night.

As soon as Frank and the rookies finished depositing a group, they ran back and threw themselves into the boat, the driver opening the throttle before they could sit down. The closer they came to the river, the more often they saw what appeared to be a shred of forfeit future. Impossibly, a Christmas tree, still lighted and fully decked out, beamed up at them from a depth of three meters. With the porch and front wall of their house ripped off, a family sat with their feet in the water, watching the television. A woman, hip-deep, was taking down her wash. A stiffened cow, a big black dog, and chickens. Frank had not thought of chickens drowning, for they could fly. And then there were the floaters, looking like duffels. The rookie girl—Frank thought her name was Cassie or Cathy—cried, each time, “I hope it isn't someone!”

Not once or twice but six times thus far, it was.

When that happened, the pilot, a man Frank knew slightly, threw down a buoy, as dignity seemed to demand.

Two of the dead were old men, one a woman Frank's mother's age; another was a teenage girl. They were wedged between bridge pillars, bobbing in cars like aquarium fish or hung up on the cornices of roofs. In the time it would take to dislodge and move them, others would die. The pilot turned up the boat's radio. Emergency Services Medal Radio transmissions warned residents not to stop for food or petrol but to leave the city in an orderly and calm manner, despite every road being jammed with cars like pegs in holes. The south stadium and commuter railway station were filled to capacity with refugees from submerged streets. Every block or so, they had to slow to make their way around an inflatable or a rowboat, or the intact debris of a house ripped off its stump. Trees so large that a full-grown man could climb them tumbled past.

All of them were drowsy with fatigue and hyperarousal.

The sight of a young couple, perhaps twenty years old, wearing life jackets, open-eyed and livid, but still clasped together, snapped the teen volunteer like a matchstick.

“How can they be dead?” she said. “They're floating! They've got to be just unconscious.”

“They're dead, honey,” Frank said. “Try to take some deep breaths.” With the pole, Frank towed the pair of sweethearts to higher ground and got out to tuck a numbered blanket over them.

As he scissored a single long step back over the boat's side, the girl said, “Did you even check for a pulse? How did they die? What if they are alive?” Frank thought, but did not say, that the couple were upended long enough to breathe too much water. He could see the muddy smudges around their nostrils.

“They're not alive,” Frank said. “You'd know. You're a first responder.”

“This isn't rescue,” she said, rubbing at her forehead with her hands, quivering between a tantrum and tears. “I came to rescue. We're just dragging for the dead.”

To allow her the privacy to calm down, Frank asked the boat pilot, “Where do you live?”

“Down there,” the man told him. “A few kee from here. There's no way to get to it.”

“Tough.”

“My wife and the boys are with her mother. Something to be said for divorce.” He shook his head and said, “But you lived on the river.”

“We lived on the river,” Frank said.

“Did Natalie have her night off? Was she at home?”

“Not at home. But yes. She was at the beach. A Christmas party.”

“I'm sincerely sorry for your loss, Frank.”

“Thank you,” Frank said. Nothing ever meant so little that was meant to mean so much. Dozens of times, pierced by their inadequacy, Frank had said the same words. He never had enough stamina to explain. During his life, Frank met people who said “it was never talked about” (whatever “it” was). He found this kind of people unbearably precious, more self-important in their magnificent silence than the ones who repeated their experiences in endless and lugubrious detail. Now he identified with the silent ones. He might never speak this, his own unspeakable. He fully understood how those people spent their lives unable ever to speak of the war, the crash, the fire.

“It doesn't do to think about it,” the pilot said then.

“No.”

The girl volunteer turned to Frank and said, “His mother and father are missing.”

“Look sharp,” the pilot called to them, as if to distract the others from considering a presumption of grief on his behalf. He nearly heeled the boat, rounding the corner of Queen Street and Myer: Frank saw the green-forked sign protruding a foot above foaming brown water and remembered stopping there on the way to pick Natalie up from work. Some kind of boxy microbus was hitched on its side, half buried in muck. “I saw movement in there. Purposeful movement.”

At the same moment, the girl moaned, “There are kids in there. Oh please, please, please no.”

Frank could see the level of the water rising inside the van, nearly keeping pace with the flood tide. One of the kids was bigger, maybe six or seven, kneeling on the passenger seat, his arms and upper torso above water. The other two were nearly submerged. A girl? No, it was a woman. The woman tipped the smaller kid's face up to the roof, as though pointing out a constellation, while the water lapped their shoulders. Both children were boys, or at least both had short, thatched blond hair, their square chins and bulk suggesting Dutch or German. They were nothing like the woman, who was tiny. Indonesian, Frank thought. Mother? Nanny? From a distance, Frank could see the older boy hammering at the side window, his mouth stretched wide in . . . this surprised Frank . . . a smile. As the boat sidled nearer and their eyes linked, Frank saw a drowsy peace descend. The kid was thinking, Here come the Marines.

“We can get them out of there,” Frank said.

“Whatever we do will shift that thing,” said the boat pilot. “There's nowhere at all to stand.”

“Well, there has to be something down there. They're hung up on something,” said Frank. “We can stand on that.” Frank jumped over the side. He tried to see the vertical plane under his feet. It seemed to be the roof of a second car, slick but firmly lodged. The pilot cut the motor, and immediately the boat began to drift down toward the valley basin. Frank said, “Come on. You need to be out here with me.”

To the boy rookie volunteer, the pilot said, “Here, idle this, there's a mate.” As the boat pilot unhooked the Jaws of Life, the rookie boy scrambled over the back of the seat and expertly set the boat against the tide, the motor burbling, while the girl, her concentration sudden as a shot of sedative, steadied herself with her thighs against the hull and leveled the rescue hook. If they could make any opening, there would be a chance to snag them. The current was unexpectedly vehement, and Frank needed a pitched intensity to keep himself standing. His perceptions slowed to the rhythmic song of his breath. Never hurry, his first partner had told him, twenty years ago. The mistake you make going too fast will cancel out any good you do. He could see the older kid mouthing,
Help
. Frank crouched, giving the pilot room to attack the hood of the van with the spreader. Slowly, the man opened the jaws, prying the roof from the door pillar, and as he did, the older kid began to wriggle toward the gap. The pilot shouted, “Stay still, son. Almost there. Easy does the trick.” The rookie girl primed the blunt loop of the hook, sliding it closer to the woman and child in the driver's seat as Frank prepared to haul the older kid free. Frank had a handful of the boy's soaked shirt in one hand when the kid shrank back. “It's okay,” Frank said. Still, the bigger boy scrambled out of Frank's grasp. “Son! No!”

“Take him first,” the kid said quietly. Again, he smiled. Frank thought, What kind of kid smiles as a flood closes around his throat? The boy said, “He's little. Please. He's important, too. He's very important.”

“We'll get him. I promise. You're closer.”

“Take him first,” the older child said clearly, visibly shivering. “Hurry. He's important. He's my brother.” The woman leaned forward to the margins of the seat belt harness, holding the little kid by his shoulders, then the strap of his backpack. For an instant, the little one tottered beyond the reach of her hands, and Frank was not sure he'd snagged the child or only the pack. In his arms, the child had the deceiving insubstance of a kitten. Frank sat back against the current and turned to hand him to the girl in the rescue boat.