My eyes flash to the front door just as it cracks inward, wood splintering along the wall. I blink, trying to focus through the dark, and I think I see someone standing in the open doorway.
The figure moves toward me, shadows melting into shadows, and I almost slink away, my nerves vibrating, but a hand reaches for me.
“We have to go!” the voice says.
I can’t speak. Can’t think.
“Lark,” he says. “Take my hand.”
I feel his palm grip mine, and he’s pulling me through the doorway, free of the house. But half of the front porch is gone, broken apart. I shake my head, stunned by the amount of water swirling around us. The house has drifted back, farther into the woods, and Swamp Wells Road feels impossibly far away.
“We need to hurry,” he says, and my eyes look into his for the first time.
The boy I never thought I’d see again.
I open my mouth to speak, to ask him what he’s doing here, but he’s already stepping off the broken porch into the water, standing waist-deep. “I won’t let you go,” he says, his hands now reachingup for me. My ears ring, the storm thundering overhead, the house cracking and snapping behind me, but I reach out and he folds his hands around me, lifting me off the porch and into the water. Into his arms. My eyes flash back to the house, where the creek is carrying it away, into the trees, into the dark. Swallowed up by the storm.
Oak’s hands are braced around me, keeping the creek from sweeping my legs out from under me, and slowly we wade through the deep water, until it turns shallow, and we manage to reach the grassy bank. I want to sink to the ground, but Oak won’t let me. “It’s not safe,” he says, urging me up the edge of the creek that has now become a river, until we reach Swamp Wells Road. His truck is parked on the wet pavement, the ditch along the road surging with water.
He opens the passenger door and lifts me inside.
The sound of the storm is instantly dulled. Only the thump of my heartbeat fills my ears. I close my eyes, telling myself to breathe. Telling myself that this is all a nightmare, and if I focus hard enough, I’ll finally wake.
But when Oak opens the driver’s side door and pulls himself inside, all the noise comes roaring back into focus. The rain against the metal roof, the wind howling against the windshield.
He turns the key in the ignition, and heat begins pouring from the vents. I realize for the first time that I’m shaking. Oak wraps something around my shoulders, a sweatshirt, and I open my eyes, holding my hands toward the vents.
Finally I look to the window, and I see what’s been lost.
The sky is gray and wet. At the end of our driveway… the house is gone.
Not even a memory of it remains. The creek carried it away, pulled it out to Rabbit Cross River, where it will surely break apart, board by board, year by year, dismantled along the banks. Our past taken with it. But it’s not just the house that’s vanished.
The garden has been ripped from the soil.
Every bulb, every petal, torn away.
The creek took it all.
Gone.
I’m finding it hard to breathe, to slow my thoughts. Witnessing the loss of everything.
“I’m sorry,” I hear Oak say. As if I should feel sad, as if I should begin to cry. But I feel tangled up, spun inside out. I feel something intangible, unnameable. Unfathomable.
Loss, but also…
I lower my hands from the vents, my body no longer trembling. “What are you doing here?” I ask.
He breathes, is quiet, then absently reaches into his back pocket, retrieves the paperback he always keeps there, and tosses it onto the dashboard, settling back into the seat. The book is wet, soaked through, pages warped. But the heat from the dash will dry the paper. I stare at it as he clears his throat. “It looked like it might rain, so I thought I’d drive somewhere, instead of walking.” He blinks through the windshield at the storm. “I drove over the county line without even thinking about it…. I—I didn’t plan to come here.” His voice is crisp, careful, like he doesn’t want to reveal too much, like he’s trying to keep himself hidden beneath the soft edges of his lips, which I can still remember against mine. But I already know—because Mrs. Thierry told me—he walks by my house each night. Aritual. A habit. A torment he can’t shake. He comes here each night, whether he will admit it or not. “I was driving by your house when I saw the water.”
“Nothing happens by chance,” Mom would say. “Life is a series of predestined moments, timed perfectly, orchestrated by hidden threads that bind us to our destiny.”
But I don’t know if I believe anything she said anymore.
I close my eyes, listening to the rain, trying to make sense of everything.
“My suitcase…,” I say, suddenly remembering, sitting up to peer through the window, but also knowing… it’s long gone. Carried away with the flood. I’ve truly lost everything. All that’s left is the postcard in my shorts pocket and the cash in my wallet.
