Mount Kisco
When the Croton Dam burst during the Hudson Valley Inundation of 1974, the floodwaters swept away bridges and homes and highways all the way down to Manhattan. A little 19th century cemetery in the woods behind our house let loose its coffins. They rose from the oversoaked loam, were swept along the incline on which I’d chipped my front tooth in a toboggan incident the winter before, and came to a rest in an eddy, caught by our swingset. Outside our kitchen window we found a floating jumble of corpses in tattered old-timey formal dress. Tangled in the remains of their fancy hardwood caskets, the skeletons swirled, bony limbs and hairy skulls bobbing in the murky water.
Over the following days the water just kept rising, swallowing our station wagon in the driveway and coming to a lapping rest against the stones of our front porch. Dark little waves from the grotesquely swollen reservoir licked at the rock foundation under my bedroom window, fueling my nightmares of entire populations meeting their deaths by drowning.
At six years old, my little sister dealt with the cognitive dissonance of this crisis by constructing a reality around herself as a member of a royal family under siege in a moated castle. She dug from her closet the Halloween costume our mother had sewn the year before and then refused to take it off, insisting we call her Princess Starburst. Over the course of the week we were stranded, her yellow ball gown grew grimy and tattered. As her elder by four years I played my role by piercing her fantasy at every occasion, with as much derision and cruelty as possible. Our mother believed it was natural for siblings to argue, and as a matter of principle did not intervene unless someone had resorted to violence or bad language.
Our home was a former Episcopalian church converted into a four-bedroom house, constructed in 1910 of local fieldstone, featuring an authentic belfry, an impressive two-story peaked stained glass window, a leaky basement, rattling windows and a soaring ceiling in the flagstone floored Big Room. The previous winter, the price of energy-crisis heating oil had us sleeping under electric blankets and waking to frigid bedrooms, then scurrying downstairs to dress for school in front of the kitchen fireplace.
It had been explained to me, or more likely I’d overheard, that our house on the hill was the sole surviving structure from way back when the valley was flooded to create the Croton Reservoir. A whole village had been submerged! I would learn later that the story of the church’s miraculous survival from a flood of Biblical magnitude was utterly untrue; the Croton River had been dammed in 1842, generations before our cornerstone was laid. Yet there was ten-year-old me, knobby legs dangling off the porch, spending entire afternoons imagining an old fashioned disaster like a silent movie reel in my mind. I was heavily into Little House on the Prairie and frequently fretted over the crises that kept befalling the Ingalls family and thus American pioneers in general. In our living room there stood a rustic wooden cane chair with very short legs that nobody was allowed to sit in because it “came across the plains” with my quadruple great grandma on my mother’s side. Had everyone in the valley below made it out in time, before the wall of water descended? Were they forced to evacuate in covered wagons? Did the children remember their rag dolls?
My parents had purchased the church from a couple of authentic hippies, who in turn moved next door to the Rectory and left behind a red velvet flea-ridden couch, a baby grand piano, several fringed lamps and a monstrous two-story sculpture of plastered styrofoam created by the artist of the duo, a magnetic, tall frizzy-haired Amazon named Nickel who was not only the first working artist I had ever met in my decade on the planet, but also the most charismatic human being. Nickel was a generation older than my parents, physically robust and utterly unafraid. She spent her weekends camping solo in the backwoods, hiking upriver with a full-sized aluminum canoe on her head. She walked around our shared yard naked. She wrote songs and performed them on her Autoharp in a clear strong voice in our Big Room, where the acoustics were far out. Years later, she and her husband Ernie, a public interest lawyer from the Bronx, would join an ashram and along with their little boy Paulie would follow their guru to India.
Nickel’s sculpture was a free-form plaster blob of shocking white, with jutting appendages like amputated limbs, framing peek-a-boo windows that featured miniature scenes of tiny plastic dolls performing age-inappropriate acts. My parents grumbled over a 20-foot statue that would be impossible to get through the door without the use of a chain saw. “It’s like a fucking white elephant swallowed another fucking white elephant,” observed my father. In reality, they left the sculpture intact, I suspect, in order to appear groovy. They had after all sacrificed Woodstock for the duty of parenthood. There was still marijuana to be smoked and autoharps to be plucked and T-shirts to be tie-dyed and my parents were determined to join the party, better late than never.
The Inundation submerged Croton Point Park and the entire Amtrak station and also rendered much of the Peekskill Parkway impassable for years to come, throwing Westchester County commuter culture into disarray. My father, a young finance executive at IBM, couldn’t get to the office. “I’m cut off from Armonk, dammit,” he repeatedly emoted over the kitchen phone with grave seriousness during his morning conversations with other important young white men as he prepared his instant coffee, naked except for thin sagging briefs behind which his junk would sway menacingly.
We were lucky to have phone service at all, my mother would remind us. My father refused to accept this as a blessing, since being “wired” meant he was expected to call into Armonk and, therefore, to perform his job. My father was deeply opposed to work in general unless it involved an entrepreneurial scheme, a blossoming character flaw that would cause the family much grief in the future. In 1974 however he hadn’t yet thrown it all away; he was only just beginning his rebellion against the IBM corporate culture by sporting a full beard and wearing Earth Shoes with his 3-piece suit. He pulled it off because like most sociopaths my father was charming as hell, the most interesting guy in the room.
Phone service was reduced to an emergency party line, forcing my father to compete with other men in our neighborhood who were also trying to reach Armonk or Wall Street or wherever. “The company’s been called to national service by the goddamn Feds,” he snarled one morning into the phone as my sister and I crouched over our Kap’n Krunch. We watched his frustration rise as he struggled with the twisted phone cord like a boy with a rubber snake.
“They’re accelerating R&D,” he said, “which of course leaves us guys in finance with our balls in a vise.” I didn’t want to look at his face but I did, and he was waiting. He held my eye, let his gaze fall to his dick, and winked at me.
*
I hated my sister with a consuming passion. My feelings were fueled, I understand now, by the fear that my father was likely doing to her the same as he was doing to me. If I’d loved her the situation would have been untenable. Over the next fifty years my relationship with my sister would mature, get better, worsen, improve again and then rupture completely. By middle age we would finally come to rest in a state of mutual mistrust only slightly less visceral than we shared in 1974.
Trekking up the stairs in the Big Room at bedtime the night before, my sister had sulked and taken her time, blocking my passage with her tiny feet and muttering some fairy tale to herself. The sodden dirty yellow polyester of her costume trailed on the steps behind her. I wanted to step on her hem and send her face into the concrete staircase but instead I just said I hate you.
Our father was behind me on the steps and I felt the stinging thud of his open palm against my temple. “Don’t ever say that to your sister,” he snarled.
There was a little brother, too, the golden child, the youngest, age three, a big-boned blond boy born 11 pounds healthy with a head that fractured our mother’s coccyx on the way out. “Broke his mother’s goddamn tailbone,” our father crowed drunkenly on the phone to his alcoholic dad the day my brother arrived.
In the eyes of our mother, this boy could do no wrong and still cannot. But my brother would endure a childhood of mockery from our father for his failure to give a shit about sports, cars, business or other manly pursuits. He’d also endure an unkind relationship with his sisters, for my sister bullied him as mercilessly as I bullied her, and I did nothing to stop it. I am proud to report we would all manage to break this pattern when it came to raising our own children. Years later at family gatherings I’d go weepy at the casual way our kids, all the cousins and siblings, would express their affection for one another, all hugs and bye love yous. As for me and my sister and brother, our relationships never overcame the damage of our upbringing. Given that now we’re all old as hell, I don’t see anything changing.
I was born in June 1964, shortly after the assassination of JFK, to a pair of terrified 21-year old Catholic kids from the sticks who’d gotten married, exactly nine months earlier, to escape their awful families. My sister was born in April 1968, six weeks after the assassination of RFK, to a couple of 25 year olds parenting a preschooler, whose anger at their families had long since fixed onto one another. My brother was born in November 1970, almost halfway through the Nixon administration, arriving into a marital shitshow starring two overworked and bitter 27 year olds doggedly replicating the dysfunctions of their families of origin, not to mention two scared older siblings eager to shovel the shit downhill.
One Sunday morning six months before the Inundation, my father, in an alleged demonstration of how to respect an adult and for her own damn good, swung closed the heavy front door of the church onto the trembling fingers of my sister, who had just started the first grade. As the door headed toward her hand and made contact and as she wailed bloody murder, screaming for our help, my father stared at us, at my mother and me, clarifying his deeper intent: that we shall under no circumstances stand up for one another, even and especially for the weakest among us.
After her alleged accident with the front door, my sister’s hand was in a cast for six weeks. To help heal her fingers and regain dexterity, the doctor suggested she take up an instrument, perhaps the piano. Nickel came over on Thursday afternoons to give my sister lessons and, I suspected, to whisper weird hippie-crone stuff into her ear. From that point forward, in whichever house we occupied, our lives were soundtracked by my sister at the piano, her healed fingers pounding an incessant fuck you to our father.
From the time I was my sister's age, our father looked for opportunities to see me naked. What he was doing to my sister isn’t mine to tell. Not that she’s ever really told me. Whatever he did, it would continue for another six or eight years past the Inundation, until we began to look more like women than children and he lost interest in us.
The leer on his face! In every shower in every bathroom in every home and every hotel room for the following sixty years, I would squelch the impulse to peek behind the curtain to make sure no wolf waited there.
My father never told me not to tell anyone. Besides, what would I say, and who would I tell? My mother? The thought was absurd. Though my sister had tried, the year before. She’d gone into our parents’ bedroom and tossed a handful of straight pins between the sheets on our mother’s side of the bed. In the night our mother suffered little scratches all up and down her legs. My sister received a scolding but nobody looked into her scared pretty little face to ask sweetie, why did you do that?
The hem of her princess dress floating around her ankles, my sister watched in silence on the seventh day as the water breached a crack in the stone and flowed onto the back porch. In the kitchen rescuing her new Tupperware my mother yelled at us to get our feet out of the floodwaters. The waters began to seep under the kitchen door at the top of the cellar steps. We placed sandbags on the linoleum to keep the deluge at bay and moved everything we could to the second floor.
Since our situation wasn’t yet dire enough for an emergency airlift, we settled in for an indeterminate period upstairs. My mother met our complaints by reminding us of our good fortune and asking us to imagine how bad things must be for the people down in the city. “If they can’t even rescue a goddamn IBM family,” my father agreed in an unsettling moment of compassion, “the Bronx must be a circus.”
Upstairs, my mother commandeered my sister’s bedroom for our makeshift kitchen and dining, and moved my sister’s bed into my room. While we claimed to despise this arrangement, it had the benefit of ending our father’s nighttime visits. So as the waters rose and filled the kitchen and living room and playroom and began to mount the curved stone staircase of the Big Room, and as Nickel’s styrofoam sculpture floated off its base and tipped with a soft splash, and as we fell asleep wondering if we’d wake underwater, my sister and I at least enjoyed the small blessing of safety from the man who slept across the hall.
Over the following decades, my sister and I would see one another through four marriages, three children, four divorces, and two foreclosures. In our fifties, our estranged father dead, our mother ailing, our kids adulting and our spouses finally out of our lives, we would turn toward one another for companionship and survival. Our sisterhood would deepen into a kind of adult best-friendship. We would launch a little business together; we would collaborate on artistic endeavors; we would co-sign a lease on a crumbling old house in Normandy with space for our kids and their kids. And then one morning during the pandemic of 2020, a month before my move to establish the new homestead in France, I would wake to an email from my sister with the message that she never wanted to see me again.
*
On the eighth day, we woke to waves at the top step of the big staircase. My sister and I stood in our pajamas on the landing balcony, gaping at the Big Room, which had transformed overnight into a swimming hole. The morning light through the panes of stained glass landed on the water’s muddy surface in muted rainbow squares. Nickel’s white elephant statue had inverted like an iceberg and was spinning mildly at the center of the ochre pool, its flat styrofoam bottom exposed like the backside of a canvas.
“Get dressed, girls,” said my mother. “Jeans and sneakers. Lifejackets and duffels.”
We rushed into our clothing like the terrified children we were, only to stand on the balcony for twenty minutes, watching the water inch toward the landing as our father, knee-deep on the third step from the top, struggled to inflate our government-issued emergency life raft.
Our Family Evacuation Plan had called for preparing the raft well in advance of this moment. It was to have been inflated and stocked before the waters reached the first floor. I’d found the Plan in the kitchen junk drawer, a government worksheet completed in our mother’s Catholic school penmanship. I brought it upstairs and read it out loud to my sister in our room, in the dark, using the flashlight from the emergency duffel bags our mother had sewn from a patchwork of old jeans and the downstairs drapes. My sister had decorated her bag with magic marker images of houses and rainbows and stick families, but I’d carefully sewn my Girl Scout badges onto my duffel, arranged in a circle around the embroidered collectible David Cassidy arm patch I’d received in the mail as a member of the Partridge Family Fan Club.
As a child who lived in her imagination, I had of course developed an evacuation plan of my own, the kind you deploy when you’re inhabiting a Nancy Drewlike autofictional world in which you’re alone in the house, parents and siblings written out of the scene. My fantasy escape was the weird tiny skylight in our hallway bathroom, tucked right under the eaves. If I stood on my sister’s stepstool, I could poke my head and shoulders outside.
The first time I peeked through it was nighttime, and the stars felt within reach of my fingers. I saw Nickel framed in the kitchen window next door, washing dishes at the sink, the light behind her casting a yellow square onto the lawn. The second time, right after I found the neglected Family Evacuation Plan, I tested my strength. I knew from having passed the President’s Physical Fitness Exam that I could lift my body weight on the parallel bars, so pulling myself onto the roof would be easy peasy.
I sat at the edge of the skylight, my legs dangling inside, and watched the moon’s amber reflection float on the murky water where our lawn used to be. My brain spun itself a tale of self-rescue and heroism. But unlike Carolyn Keene I couldn’t dispatch inconvenient family, not even in my fantasy. My parents were far too big to fit through the skylight, and my sister would never be able to reach it, not even from the stepstool. I climbed down from the roof, prohibited myself from thinking about it and resigned myself to whatever fate befell the others.
Now in the dawn light, my mother and siblings and I waited and watched, following my father from room to room as he discovered that once inflated, the raft would not fit through any of the upstairs windows. Back in the Big Room as he tantrumed fruitlessly I followed my sister’s gaze to the little door that led to the belfry and pictured the five of us dog paddling under its pointed ceiling, our mouths tilted upwards to suck in our final breaths of air.
Our father was grappling at top volume with the question of whether to deflate the fucking thing and try to re-inflate it outside the house in what were perilously rushing waters when he struck upon the idea of simply breaking through the big stained glass window and floating us all to safety through its substantial archway.
He began by throwing the heavy black upstairs telephone at the window. It sailed cleanly through, leaving a tidy hole in a pane of yellow glass six inches above the water line. I crouched down to peer through the hole and saw treetops where our yard used to be.
The bedside tables from our parents’ room made better projectiles and widened the hole considerably, and my father began looking for other items to sacrifice. He headed toward my room.
“Daddy,” said my sister, following him, tugging at his drenched pantleg. He shook her off, entered our room, and with a sweep of his arm cleared the surface of my writing desk. My snowglobe from our vacation to Denver smashed and broke, its interior waters producing a glittery puddle on the hardwood. The plastic winter village inside looked tiny and dying in the open air, as though gasping for breath.
“Daddy,” said my sister.
He lifted my desk and tilted it to fit through the door and the contents of its drawer slid out, my pens and my journal and the personalized stationery from my Christmas stocking and a hundred little pink paperclips all tumbling to the floor. The drawer itself landed on its corner in the center of my father’s sneakered foot. He blinked, and the look of pain on his face was like Charlie Bunker’s when Meathead slammed the door on his hand.
I covered my mouth to stop a bark of laughter and my sister froze with a look of horror on her silly blond face. Just as my father was inhaling to turn his wrath upon me, my mother arrived and deflected it in an elaborate fuss over his pain, taking off his shoe to assess the damage and cooing over whether it was sprained and could he put any pressure on it?
Through all the hubbub my sister kept it up: “Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.”
“What?” My mother finally said. “What? What?”
“The elephant,” my sister said, pointing back down the hallway toward the Big Room, where Nickel’s styrofoam iceberg floated.
“Give me my shoe,” my father said.
“The elephant,” my sister said.
“Enough,” he told her, bending his toes and wincing, and shot a look at my mother. She reached for my sister to steer her away.
My sister twisted out of my mother’s grasp. She walked straight up to my father, who was perched on the edge of my bed, poking tenderly at his bare foot. Outside the water kept rising. She placed a hand on his knee in a gesture so adult it still kills me to recall it.
“An elephant is big,” my six-year-old sister said. “You can crash it through the window.”
*
My father, it must be noted, was not an athletic man. He was exceptionally tall and tended toward scrawny, although by his thirties his beer habit had begun to show in his belly like a sad little pregnancy. When confused by the heady mix of mediocrity and confidence that characterized the white men of his era, he would leap toward inevitable failure with all the gusto of Johnson moving on Vietnam. Upon the advice of a child, he was now eyeing Nickel’s inverted white blob in the same way he’d done a real glacier the summer before, on a family road trip to Alaska in which he pulled the station wagon to the side of the road to harvest free ice for his beer cooler, slipping and sliding and cracking a rib in the process.
Fifty years later my sister’s email let me know I was a pathological narcissist like our father, that I was suffering from severe personality disorders, and that all our lives she’d been quietly apologizing to others for my meanness and cruelty. She told me she’d be taking control of our little consulting business, that she’d informed our principal client that I was unfit to do the work—ghostwriting a book about empathy—since I had none. She let me know I’d been emotionally abusive not just to her but to everyone else in the family, including my child.
We haven’t spoken since. There is no reunion at the end of this story. She won’t appear at my deathbed and I won’t appear at hers. It’s fucking tragic but that’s how we’ve ended up.
As for my father? Before the Hudson Valley Inundation of 1974, there was no considering a future without him. Until the waters rose, I thought he would be with us forever. It would take more than a flood to get him out of our lives but a decade later I would finally break the silence, ridding ourselves of him. In another decade he would die, early, in Mexico, estranged from us all, having never quite found the easy life.
*
My father stood on the landing and like a gondolier used a broomstick to heave the bobbing sculpture toward the window. It floated towards its target, connected with a thud and bounced away. On his second attempt the glass bent and groaned, and on the third the panes collapsed in a shower of rainbow shards that sliced like hail into the brown water. We cheered, desperately, and then went silent as Nickel’s masterpiece caught in the current and was carried, swiftly, through the gap in the treetops where the driveway used to be.
The reality struck that my father would now expect us to ride a rubber raft into perilously rushing waters. We were going only as far as our own rooftop; the Family Evacuation Plan called for us to sit there and await a government helicopter. But still. How did he think we’d all get up to the roof, anyway? The Big Room was situated at the front of the house, and the waters were coming up from behind. To reach the roof we’d have to paddle around the front portico, make our way against the current on the other side of the house, and then find a place to scramble up. The whole adventure struck me as a job for stunt doubles, not a middle class suburban family.
Having submerged the entire Big Room, the water was approaching the second floor balcony, where my sister and brother and I stood in our life jackets like miniature whitewater adventurers. My father hoisted the raft over the wrought iron railing and my mother tied it fast. It floated below looking both larger and less stable than I’d hoped. He swung his long legs over the railing and eased himself down, feeling gingerly behind him until his toe connected with the raft. He lowered his other foot ungently, rocking the boat.
He lost his balance, nearly tumbled backwards, regained himself, and smiled in victory. Then the wake he’d created bounced off the walls and smacked against the raft, sending him to his ass on the vinyl bottom and spilling water into his lap.
“Let’s get in the boat, girls,” my mother said. “Shannon, you first. Then your sister.”
“Hang on,” said my father. “My backpack.”
My mother heaved my father’s emergency bag to the rim of the railing. Two weeks ago I watched her pack their bags. She stuffed hers with first aid supplies and freeze dried food and clean socks and filled our father’s with six plastic gallon jugs of purified water. The next morning as she glared, he removed two of the jugs in his bag and replaced each with a six pack of Coors.
She lowered the pack into his waiting arms, where momentarily he cradled it as he regained balance. He placed it carefully in the center of the raft. She handed down her pack of food and the homemade cloth duffel bags containing our dry clothing, which he tossed into the bow and the stern as ballast. They began to soak up the water sloshing around the bottom of the boat. Then she handed over our brother, who my father placed atop his backpack like a trophy.
Satisfied, he turned his attention back to me and wiggled his fingers expectantly in my direction. “Come on, let’s move,” he barked, shaking his open palms at me as though I’d want to get anywhere near them.
I gripped the railing in one fist. I was quite capable of swinging myself to the other side: late one night last summer when everyone was sleeping I’d done it. I stood on the wrong side of the railing with my back to the flagstone floor two stories below. It hadn’t been as thrilling as I’d hoped.
Now my feet wouldn’t move.
*
“I’m not saying your sister is a sociopath,” said my shrink fifty years later. “What I’m saying is she engaged in sociopathic behavior.”
We’d been trying to determine her motivation: why she’d appeared at my 26 year old daughter’s house to inform her surprised niece that she’d grown up abused and that she needed to distance herself from her mother. Why she ordered me to stay away from my child, and why she promised to do everything possible to see that this happened. Why she was kicking me out of the family.
My therapist theorized that my sister was in relapse from the opioid addiction that had taken control of her forties. We uncovered clues I hadn’t before put together that left me feeling foolish and enabling. She posited that our sisterhood had grown too intimate and I was coming close to seeing the truth.
But that explanation is too easy.
*
“It’s okay, Shannon,” said my mother. “You won’t fall.”
I felt the tug of my sister’s fingers on my belt loop and looked down. She whispered some words and because here was even the tiniest diversion from this awful moment, I bent down to hear what she was saying.
When my ear reached her mouth she slipped her hand into mine and said, “Don’t.”
I straightened, holding onto my sister’s sweaty hand. Ignoring my father I looked into my mother’s face and said, “No way.”
“Get into the goddamn boat, Shannon,” my father said.
When my mother was in mortal fear, her face would be overcome by a rigid and terrifying smile. “I’ll show you,” she said. “But you’ll need to help your sister over the railing, okay? Then you go last.” Giving me no time to object and in a deft graceful motion, she swung one leg then the other over the balcony railing and posed there, gripping the wrought iron with her back to the flood, eyes darting between the two of us with that tight toothless grin that revealed for certain we were all very much up shit creek.
“Just like this, sweethearts,” she told us, and without even looking behind her she lowered herself into the arms of our father. The two of them stood there, establishing equilibrium. We crouched down and watched them through the railing.
“I’m not getting in that boat,” whispered my sister.
All at once I grasped that my parents, tethered four feet below, could not reach us. Neither could they climb back to the balcony.
For the first time in our lives my sister and I were in alliance: her grip on my arm told me she understood as well as I did that our father was an asshole and our mother was afraid of him and this situation might well get us all drowned. I followed her gaze to the knot that held the raft to the railing. My mother’s tight slipknot. One good tug and the rope would fall free. We’d be done with them. How many people in the village below had ended up dead a hundred years ago because they had fathers like ours?
Probably if my sister and I both tried hard enough we could get her through the bathroom skylight.
“Girls!” my mother shrieked. “Now!”
I stood, dragging my sister to her feet. She struggled against me like a six year old toddler.
“Swing your leg over,” I told her. My arms were wrapped around her from behind, although with considerable difficulty considering the bulk of her lifejacket.
“But the piranhas!” she wailed.
“What the hell did she say?” yelled our father.
Was this the moment that would fester in her heart for the next fifty years and finally come out like a sideways nuclear blast? “There are no piranhas, you idiot,” I said, shoving her over the railing and into our mother’s grasp.
After I pulled the slipknot, I lingered long enough on the landing to watch my family pass through the broken window, my sister glowering and my parents hollering. I dashed to the bathroom skylight as though the licking water were, indeed, infested with the killer fish of my sister’s imagination. Lifting myself outside, I looked toward the Rectory. There were our neighbors on their own roof, having obviously followed the Emergency Evacuation Plan. They’d fashioned a shelter of tarps strung between trees and brought up lawn chairs and a cooler. I even spotted Nickel’s Autoharp.
A few hours later an Army helicopter pilot found my family safe and sound, having disembarked on a rooftop down near where Seven Bridges Road used to be, and they were airlifted to Armonk. Before nightfall another helicopter arrived for me and Nickel and Ernie and Paulie. By the time we were rescued, I was cold and soaked to the bone but Nickel and the boys had kept my spirits up by shouting riddles and word games and strumming Yellow Submarine and Raindrops Keep Fallin on My Head.
*
When I lifted myself through the skylight and stood on the roof, I’d been surprised to find my family still in sight. Their bright orange raft was caught in a tight eddy, spinning like an amusement park ride, my father leaning over the fore trying to interrupt the pattern and instead serving as a fulcrum, increasing their velocity.
He shouted in frustration and fell backward, loosening the raft from its spin. It caught a fresh current that carried them swiftly southeast, in the direction of our school bus stop. Before I lost them through the trees my sister turned her face toward the house and spotted me. I recalled the two of us waiting for the bus together last winter. One morning it was so cold her tears froze to her eyelashes. Elbows jutting and fingers splayed as I’d learned in our school’s emergency preparation drill, I raised my arms over my head and signaled goodbye as she disappeared around the bend.
