No Ordinary Day (24 page)

“Note to self,” he said aloud, continuing to breathe regularly to try to offset the arousal that had flared intensely and was now turning painful, “cats, especially those belonging to girlfriends, have
the
worst timing in the world.”

‡

G
ingerly Ace stood
up, stepping away from the purring cat. “I guess that’s our signal to go. Do you have everything you came for?”

Lucy rose as well, nuzzling Sadie. “Everything I need for now, I guess. Except maybe a do-over.”

“The whole day, starting from this morning? I would vote for that.”

She grinned at him. “I don’t think you rank high enough to make that happen, Sergeant. But Sadie seems to have interrupted a very promising conversation.”

The National Guardsman chuckled. “Is that what you call it? Conversation?”

“When I tell Mildred Caulfield what happened? Absolutely. We were having a nice conversation and suddenly Sadie appeared. That’s my story.”

“Who is Mildred Caulfield?”

“The very nice lady I’m supposed to spend the night with. She lives up on High Street and doesn’t mind cats, according to Eleanor Preston, who made the arrangements. I think Eleanor’s got a Rolodex in her brain. She seems to have placed herself in charge of finding accommodations for everyone who’s displaced, and no one ever says no to Eleanor.”

Ace sighed. “Well, then I guess we’d better get you two there. Cat carrier?”

Lucy winced. “Basement.”

“Of course.” Ace shrugged. “You can’t just carry her in the car. Have you got another pillowcase?”

“You want to put my cat in a pillowcase?”

“Not particularly. She already doesn’t like me, and I don’t think stuffing her in a pillowcase is likely to make us friends. Do you have a leash?”

“I keep it in the cat carrier.”

“Hmm. Then pillowcase it is. I’ll take your other stuff out to the car, so we can minimize her discomfort.” He hoisted the packed pillowcases. “Maybe you can put the things from downstairs into a garbage bag. Unless you have more sheets?”

Lucy sighed. “Yep. Super-high thread count I bought with my first paycheck. In the dryer. In the basement.”

“OK. Back in a minute.”

When Ace came back inside, Lucy was in the living room, loading the second of two garbage bags with the non-clothing items she had gathered from her house. “It doesn’t seem like much, does it?” she said wistfully.

“There’ll be more, Lucy. Tell me about this do-over.”

Lucy’s fair skin turned rosy in the light from the dimming lantern. “Maybe we could meet back here tomorrow? After you get off duty? Unless you get a kick out of calling me ‘ma’am’ .”

Ace laughed. “No, ma’am.”

She turned away, crestfallen.

“No to the
ma’am
, not no to the idea of seeing you in better circumstances,” Ace added quickly. “But what about the cat?” He looked around. “Where
is
the cat?”

“She’s locked in the bathroom with her dinner. Getting her into a pillowcase is going to be a two-person job. And tomorrow she can stay with Mildred.”

“I’ll take this out, and then we’ll get Sadie. And tomorrow? It’s a date.”

Lucy smiled. “Copy that.”

Sadie was reluctant to go in the pillowcase, and Ace held it at arm’s length as he escorted Lucy to the car, keeping clear of the screeching, squirming bag. “Are you sure you want her on your lap? I can put her in the back.”

“No, I think she’ll be calmer in my arms, even if she is tied in the pillowcase. Can you help me with the seatbelt?”

Ace handed the bag over doubtfully and fastened it for her as the pillowcase prison squalled and thumped. “Seatbelt. Cat. Anything else?”

“Dinner? I don’t think I ate anything today. Just drank a lot of coffee. And I had breakfast, but it was a really long time ago.” She looked off into the darkness down by the river. “Another lifetime.”

“I have trail mix in the glove compartment,” Ace offered. “There’s no electricity in town, so I doubt any of the restaurants are open. And it’s after one in the morning.”

Jokingly Lucy turned to the bag in her arms.

“So, Sadie, what do ya think: on our first date, he grabbed my caboose, stared down my shirt at my boobs, made it into my bedroom, and all I got for dinner is oatmeal. Should we keep him?”

“There are chocolate chips, too,” Ace said defensively. “And mini-marshmallows.”

Lucy caressed the cat through the pillowcase. “Sadie says I should stop being obnoxious and thank you for saving her—both of us, actually.”

“I didn’t save either of you. I just followed you into a flooded building and escorted you into another one. And now I’m driving you to somewhere dry, somewhere you can have pleasant dreams. Where exactly?”

“High Street. Number 18. It’s yellow.”

“Not in the dark it’s not.”

“Maybe you can see which one it is in the light of all the emergency vehicles?” Lucy said hopefully.

“You get me to High Street and I’ll find you the house.”

Lucy directed him out of the riverside neighborhood and up the steep hill, away from the flooding and the flashing lights. As they turned onto High Street, one of the houses with the slanted walkways and stone steps carved into the face of the mountain itself had candles burning in the lower windows, and a very dim spotlight aimed at the house number.

“I like this lady already,” Ace said, pulling into the driveway. “We think a lot alike.”

He escorted Lucy and Sadie to the front door and pushed the button for the doorbell.

Nothing happened.

“Knock,” Lucy said. “There’s no electricity.”

“Right. I must be tired or something—wait—there’s exterior light. They must have power up here. The doorbell must just be broken.”

The door opened, and Mildred Caulfield, a sweet-faced woman with graying-black hair, welcomed them into the house with a smile.

“Hello, Lucy, and, er—”

“Ace,” the National Guardsman said, offering his hand to her, which she shook pleasantly. “I’m just the delivery man, ma’am.”

Mildred seemed slightly relieved. “I’ve got warm soup on the stove, and a pot of tea. What would you like?”

“Soup sounds wonderful, thank you,” Lucy said. She could feel exhaustion hovering at the edges of her consciousness, preparing to shut her down. “And a bed. And a place to put my cat, if that’s OK.”

“It’s more than OK,” said Mildred. “I love cats, as Eleanor probably told you. He can have Oscar’s bed. You’re in the room at the top of the stairs. Why don’t you take a nice shower and I’ll bring your meal upstairs?”

Lucy looked at Ace, who was smiling, staring at the floor. “But I have to help bring my things inside.”

“Nonsense. Your young man will do that. Give me the cat, and I’ll bring her up as soon as she’s seen where we keep the litter box. I have some cat treats in the pantry. I bet she’s had a rough day of it, poor kitty.”

“Her name is Sadie. Thank you so much. And thank you, Ace.”

She came to him, under the sharp gaze of Mrs. Caulfield, and kissed him goodnight. Their kiss deepened, although not as much as either of them would have liked since Lucy was still holding a bag of squirming cat.

“What time are you off duty tomorrow?” she whispered.

“Eight o’clock,” Ace whispered back.

“You know where to find me.”

Mrs. Caulfield cleared her throat.

Both of them suppressed a snicker.

“All right, I still like her, but I was wrong about she and I thinking alike,” Ace whispered humorously.

Mildred cleared her throat again. “Give me the cat, dear, and up you go,” she said to Lucy. She turned to Ace. “This is a respectable house. We’ll see you tomorrow, I expect, during appropriate hours. You can just leave everything on the porch tonight.” She shooed him out and closed the door behind him.

Then she took the pillowcase from Lucy and gestured pointedly toward the stairs.

Lucy headed up, but she could still hear Ace chuckling quietly as he brought the pillowcases to the porch, then got in the car.

She went to the window in her new temporary room in time to see the headlights turn on as the Jeep backed slowly out of the driveway onto the steep street overlooking the swollen lake and broken lower part of town, invisible in the dark.

The car’s high beams flashed, looking for all the world like a wink.

Lucy exhaled and watched until it was out of sight.

Wondering if everything she had experienced on this extraordinary day had been a dream.

‡

T
he next day,
Saturday, as Ace had predicted, he was summoned to the Obergrande dam to assist the Army Corps of Engineers in making plans to unclog and bring the hundred-year-old structure back online.

As he had noted at the Town Board meeting, the assessment he and the other engineers reached was that the simple spillway dam was crumbling in some places, insufficient to handle the flow of the Hudson that had increased enormously over the course of its lifetime.

Something about the reports of the early details of the flood nagged at the back of Ace’s mind, something that did not add up entirely to him.

But it was too soon be making decisions, or analyzing hunches yet, he decided, and told the other A.C.E. participants in the discussion. The river was still in flood stage, though it was ebbing. The catastrophic destruction had not even been fully investigated, let alone catalogued.

All of the dead had not even been found.

He had come that Saturday morning into a somber office in West Obergrande, an office that had received the news shortly before his arrival that the death toll was already over 175 and rising, something unheard of in the past. Each new story, each revelation, was more heartsickening than the one before. Ace began keeping a list of buildings that were going to need to be replaced or rebuilt, a list that grew longer by the hour.

And everyone at the table knew that, until the final toll was taken, until the funerals and burials and every other state of mourning had been undertaken, they could only do band-aid engineering, as Colonel Genovese called it.

The streets were still catching fire in places, power lines still falling down, sparking, sinkholes opening in the middle of roads.

The conditions both in and around the flood zone were hazardous.

Ace thought about the new acid that burned in his stomach when contemplating these conditions, a worry he had never experienced in these types of situations before. It actually surprised him how ill the whole realization of the instability of the flood zone made him.

Until he realized what it was.

Someone that he loved lived in this place.

And therefore was threatened by it.

Then, a moment after the realization came to him, a smile followed it.

Because now he had someone that he loved.

Lucy, like the
other citizens of Obergrande, spent the day walking around in a fog for the most part, assisting in rescue efforts where she was qualified to do so, comforting people who had lost loved ones or who were still searching for them.

Each time she ran into someone else who had survived was a joyful reunion, yet relief was not always present, because around every corner there seemed to be someone else she knew who was missing or dead.

She came to the edge of the flood zone in the center of the village and looked to see which of the businesses had survived, and which had not, which were going to need renovation but would recover. She was relieved to see that her favorite street in town, Heavenly Street, was mostly intact, though damaged.

Heavenly Street was so called because seven of the quaint stores along the avenue had the word ‘heaven’ in the title—Pancake Heaven, Sneaker Heaven, Knitter’s Heaven, the travel agency, Heaven on Earth, the candy store, Seventh Heaven, Hardware Heaven, and the liquor store at the end of the street known as Heaven Can Wait, all interspersed between the other shops. All the shops were closed now except for her favorite, Hardware Heaven, the door of which was standing open.

Lucy had managed to remember to pack a sweater and had worn it into town that morning. She had worked up a head of steam on the walk down from High Street, the farthest place of Obergrande to still be part of what was considered the east side. She pulled the sweater more tightly around her, and carefully climbed the wet wooden steps up to Hardware Heaven.