The Flood Forgot Me but My Mother Found Me

The water had reached the second floor of our house when I woke up. Not gently rising either, the way floodwater does in movies, but churning and brown, carrying pieces of our neighbor's fence and someone's trash can past my bedroom window. I sat up in bed and listened. The house made sounds I had never heard before, groaning and popping like it was trying to decide whether to stay standing. Downstairs, nothing. No footsteps. No voices. I called out for my mother and my voice came back flat against the walls. I got out of bed and stepped into water that reached my ankles, then my knees by the time I reached the hallway. The family photographs that had hung along the stairwell floated past me, my face on a beach in Maine when I was eight, my parents' wedding picture, Cora's first birthday with frosting on her chin. I grabbed the wedding photo without thinking and shoved it into the waistband of my pajama pants. "Cora!" I shouted. "Mom! Dad!" The house answered with a long creak. I waded to Cora's room first. Her bed was stripped, her stuffed rabbit gone, her backpack missing from its hook by the door. My parents' room was the same. Drawers open, closet doors swinging, the jewelry box on my mother's dresser emptied of everything except a tarnished bracelet she never wore. I stood in their doorway with water swirling around my thighs and understood something I did not want to understand. They had packed. They had chosen. And they had not chosen me. I went back to my room and pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt over my wet pajamas, then wrestled my bedroom window open. The roof of the front porch was about four feet below my sill. I climbed out and landed hard on the shingles, scraping my palm on a loose nail. The rain had stopped, but the sky was the color of old pewter and the water below me kept climbing. Nine hours I sat on that roof. I know because I watched the clock through the attic window behind me, its face lit by the emergency bulb that clicked on when the power died. I watched rescue boats motor past my street. I waved. I screamed until my throat felt raw. Twice, boats came close enough that I could read the letters on their sides, and twice they turned down other streets because someone with a working radio had told them the Wilder house was already clear. Of course it was. My parents had told them so. By the time a volunteer boat finally circled back, the water had reached the porch gutter. The man who pulled me aboard was named Luis, and he wrapped a silver emergency blanket around my shoulders and asked me twice if I was alone. I said yes. At the evacuation center, which was really just the Bell Harbor High School gymnasium filled with cots and crying children, a woman at the registration table asked for my name. I gave it to her. She typed it into a laptop running off a generator. "Wilder?" She looked up. "We have a Wilder family already checked in. Gerald, Margaret, and Cora." "I know," I said. She frowned at her screen. "You're not listed." "I know," I said again. She gave me a cot near the far wall and a paper cup of orange juice, and I sat there for an hour watching families reunite. Fathers carrying daughters on their shoulders. Mothers wrapping their sons in blankets. Everyone touching everyone, checking faces, counting heads. Then a woman's voice cut across the gym. "Cora? Cora, stay close to me." I looked up. My mother was walking toward me. She wore a dry sweater I had never seen before, donated probably, and her hair was pulled back in a knot. Behind her, holding her hand, was my little sister Cora, seven years old, wearing a pink raincoat that was two sizes too big and carrying a plastic terrarium with a small green turtle inside. Sheldon. They had brought the turtle. My mother's eyes found mine and she stopped walking. Her face did something complicated. Confusion, then recognition, then something that looked like joy and grief had been poured into the same cup and stirred. "Cora, wait here," she said, and let go of my sister's hand. She crossed the gym floor fast. Her shoes squeaked on the hardwood. I stood up because I did not know what else to do with my body. She grabbed my arm above the elbow, her fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. "Elara?" she said. "Elara, is that you?" I looked at her. I looked at Cora, who was watching us with her thumb in her mouth. I looked at the turtle in the terrarium, swimming in two inches of water, saved. "Ma'am," I said, "I think you have the wrong girl."