The Daughter Who Cleans Floors
The Night In March
I have never told this story to anyone in my family, and until the night of the party I had told it to no one at all.
It was three years ago, in the second week of March. A hard thaw had come on top of a wet winter, and Harlan Creek, which is normally a polite little stream you can step over in boots, had swollen into something brown and loud that took out two bridges in the county. The rain had been coming sideways since noon.
One of my crew leaders had a boy with a fever that night, so I covered her shift myself, the law offices on Division Street. I finished at about ten-thirty, stripped off my gloves, and took the county road home, because the state highway was already flooded at the low spot.
The county road follows the creek for about two miles. You can feel the water through the dark more than you can see it.
I was doing maybe thirty when I saw the taillights.
A pickup truck, a big dark one, nose-down at the edge of the Elm Street bridge, where the guardrail had given up. Its rear wheels were still on the road. Its front half was in the water, and the water was moving fast enough to rock it.
I do not remember deciding to stop. I remember the van door, and the rain on my face, and my own voice shouting “Hello? Hello?” into a wind that carried it away.
There was a man behind the wheel. An older man, gray hair, a dark suit and no coat. The truck had slid and tilted, and the driver’s side was already under the waterline, so the river was up to his chest, and he was pinned there by the weight of the cab and by the seat belt, which had locked across his shoulder and would not release.
“The buckle’s jammed,” he kept saying. He was calm in the way terrified people can be. “It’s jammed. Go and get help. Go and get help.”
“I’m not going anywhere, sir,” I told him.
I could not open his door. The water pressed it shut. So I went in through the passenger side, which was still above water, and I braced one knee on the seat and reached across him. He said, “Please, don’t, you will fall in,” and I said, “I have you,” and I do not know why I said it, because I did not. The truck lurched. I felt it slip another inch toward the creek.