By Lisa Richter
I’m sitting on the floor of my bedroom closet. It is dry here.
Outside the door beyond the foot of the mattress, water drips steadily from the ceiling, the upstairs living room floor overwhelmed by the morning’s savage torrent—gaps in its aged oak and along the walls having swallowed the floodwater and now relentlessly spitting it out. Away briefly, I’d returned to a gushing roar beneath the kitchen sink. Water to the ankles, vibrant wool rugs a seabed, a river pouring down the stairs to the bedrooms. Opening a slider to the rear deck, water soared over the edge.
Above me, an emergency crew stomp and shout, their monstrous water-sucking machines growling over the floors. Tomorrow more equipment will arrive: massive fans with black roping cables; knives to slice through drywall; claws and shovels to ravage and lift damaged floors, the damp flesh to be torn from its bones. Then the drying—99 scorching degrees. But first everything had to go, picked up, packed in, labeled, sent out to storage, and fast the supervisor told me when he arrived, although exactly how long ago that was, I’ve no idea. How many minutes, hours have I been sitting here, hiding out I now admit to myself, protecting this space?
My love’s clothes hang to my left on double bars, primped on shelves. Six pair of jeans stand sober at my shoulder, bottoms frayed, denim worn to velvety softness. Suits in wools and cottons, her stunning Ann Klein tuxedo. Below them, aligned on the floor: worn leather boots, cross-trainers, Ferragamo dress pumps in mahogany and coal. I move slightly and the cuff of a pale silk blouse, a favorite of her evening gigs, brushes my chin.
Lynda and I began our housing search a year before the fatal diagnosis. When she entered treatment, we continued looking, believing she was going to get better, purchasing this home together as proof, a home large enough for both our grand pianos, a music studio for her, a writing room for me. Friends took me aside, said 19 The house is too large for one person. I despised their warnings. Think of the future, they said, and I shook my head.
From upstairs, the steady screech of packing tape being unrolled, the biting zrripp as it is torn free. Something heavy drops and the house trembles. A moment of stillness, then a man begins singing in Spanish with a voice open and careless and free. A terrible, beautiful joy.
A Latina woman comes down the stairs. Her dense black hair is twirled into a low knot, and she wears, stretched over her ample body, the same black shirt that each of the crew wears. She watches me from the doorway, arms clutching flattened boxes, everywhere about her a sense of urgency, her gaze moving from me, to the clothes, back to me. I sit on the floor, legs folded, and stare back.
She bends cardboard into a box, slaps a strip of tape over its seam, steps through the doorway, and stretches out a hand reaching for Lynda’s things and I say NO. These garments once touched her skin, some still bear her scent. They are what is left. I say NO, I will do it, though it has been three months and I haven’t yet and I don’t know how, or if I can. Lately when family members call, ask what I’m doing, I say Nothing much, when I’m honest. But you must do something! they insist, their voices elevating to a worried squeal, for they once knew me as a woman of ambition, their own lives laden with frenetic activity. Action is good! their panic declares, yet what they cannot know, cannot see, is that inside I’m being carved out at an incredible rate.
I am widow! I want to bellow, holding the word up as a shield. Widow, though it doesn’t entirely fit: we were two women, lovers but not married and yet…. Widow: inhabiter of grief’s shadow, of black lament. Widow, I want to declare. Empty. The woman wavers before me, confused; she has been commanded to pack. She tries again, assembling now a wardrobe box taller than she, a container with a metal bar allowing clothes to be hung and later removed wrinkle-free, ready to wear, and I shake my head, another no, for Lynda’s clothes—when I pack them later that evening after everyone is gone and darkness has calmed, after I’ve first slipped into her favorite sweats and coffee-stained moccasins, buttoned on the flannel shirt she composed in mornings still smelling faintly of cigarillo, knowing these will be the items I keep—her clothes, which will eventually be six cumbersome boxes full, will not come back.
In several weeks, when the rebuild is underway, I’ll know with calm certainty that Lynda instigated this flood, forced this cleanse. An act both ferocious and loving. Necessary, she would have thought, to free me to live again. For although walls and floors needed replacing, nothing more was lost. Not a book, a laptop, a photo. None of the beds were wet, stunning it was, the water raining down around them. Artwork, just out of reach of sopping cascades. And my piano, protected within a halo, the flood water encroaching on all sides through the carpet’s white wool then halting inches from the piano’s legs.
The woman stands before me, waiting. For a long moment we watch each other, industrial vacuums thundering overhead. Finally, she sets the wardrobe down and sits with me, certain, at least, of what she sees: the water, so much water, this swollen house. I lay my head on her chest and weep a widow’s tears.