Chapter 24 – Juliette
TWENTY-FOUR
JULIETTE
“Jules, wake up. Something’s not right.”
I stirred underneath the blankets and tried to blink myself into awareness.
“What time is it?” I asked, my voice cracking.
I could feel him slipping out of bed and immediately AP voiced his disapproval.
Oh, shit. Was Creed dreaming again?
I sat up and pulled AP onto my shoulder. He was alert now as if sensing something. Noise. A loud noise.
“What is that?”
“Rain,” Creed said. He bent to turn on the bedside lamp, but it clicked over twice with no light. Then he picked up his phone from the charger which was dark. “Check your phone. See how much power you have left.”
Okay, he was too lucid for this to be a nightmare. I reached for my phone on the opposite nightstand and also saw the charger was dead. I checked my battery life.
“Sixty-two percent,” I told him and saw him nod.
“Stay here,” he said. Thunder broke over us as he said it, but I wasn’t someone who fretted about storms.
I got out of bed, Creed’s t-shirt falling to my knees, and pulled Patch off my shoulder, setting him back down on the bed. “Stay here,” I told him. He meowed profusely but proceeded to make biscuits with his paws in the sheets.
Phone in hand, I hit the flashlight feature and made my way out of the bedroom, down to the foyer. When my foot hit the runner, I felt the problem.
The rug was wet.
Shit, was there a leak in the roof? Lifting my phone towards the ceiling I ran it down the hallway but the ceiling was dry as far as I could see.
I kept walking toward the living room, but I was trying to imagine a hole in the roof large enough that rain would be pouring through into the house to cover the floor.
The house didn’t sit on a traditional foundation. They didn’t build basements back when it was built. There was a three foot crawl space that ran the length of the house and a small five foot cellar that was dug out just under the kitchen, which had been used to keep things cool back in the day.
I ran my flashlight over the house, looking again at the ceiling first, when Creed burst back through the front door. He must have been on the porch.
“Come here,” he said, taking my free hand and dragging me outside with him. The rain was pouring down in sheets so that it was almost impossible to see anything. “Is there higher ground than where our trucks are parked?”
“Higher ground?” I repeated, my brain not processing what he was trying to tell me.
“Rain’s coming down too fast. The valley’s flooding. If I can’t move them to higher ground, water’s going to take them.”
“Oh, shit! The chickens!”
I bolted off the porch in the direction of the barn. I didn’t need to see to know what direction I was going. I felt the water cover my feet, and I trudged through what was now grass, water, and mud.
“Jules! Stop!”
Except there was no stopping me. They were animals trapped in a coop and water was rising. They had to be scared. They had to feel betrayed that we’d just left them like that.
But it was like being in one of those horrible dreams where you were moving your legs as fast as you could but you were barely making progress. My foot got caught on something and I sprawled forward, as the phone flew out of my hand.
Shit. It was in the water! Phones weren’t supposed to go in the water. It had been the most expensive gift I’d ever been given. The most important gift I’d ever been given. What an idiot I’d been to risk it.
Herb was going to kill me.
“Jules!”
I could feel hands trying to wrap around my waist, but I crawled away.
I was on my hands and knees now, my body almost fully covered with mud as I tried to search for the phone, with sweeping motions of my hands in front of me.
The flashlight was on. I should still be able to see it in the rain.
Except I couldn’t. What if it turned off? How was I going to fix this?
Rice. Everyone on the internet said to put the phone in rice if it got wet. I could still save it if I just got my hands on it.
“Where the fuck is it!” I shouted. I had to find it. I needed the light if I was going to get to the chickens. Where the fuck was all this rain coming from?
“Jules!”
This time it was a solid arm around my stomach and I was being hauled up to my feet. Mud slid off the front of me, and for the first time, I could acknowledge I was freezing. It shouldn’t be this cold in the summer.
Another second and I was being lifted over Creed’s shoulder. My body hanging down his back. He was shirtless and I clapped my hands on his lower back, trying to find somewhere to pinch him to get his attention.
“The chickens! They’re shut up inside the coop!”
“I already let them out!” Creed shouted back. “Nothing else to do!”
Except chickens couldn’t really fly. Did they swim? Like ducks? Maybe we should have had ducks instead this whole time.
“My phone!”
He was carrying me back through the rain, the mud. We were beyond wet, beyond dirty, and the pitch black around us felt like we might have been adrift at sea instead of on a farm in Montana.
“It’s gone.”
I kicked and hit at his back. “It can’t be gone! It’s too expensive!”
“Jules,” he shouted, finally setting me down on the porch. “Get it together. Now!”
“It’s too much water,” I said, my lips almost numb now, as my whole body was shivering.
“Listen to me. I need you to focus. I want to see if we can save the trucks. Tractor’s already flooded.”
The drive off the access road to our farm ramped up to the gravel area where we parked our trucks, however, the barn with the tractor and the rest of our farm equipment was built next to the crops, which was lower in the valley.
I couldn’t really see anything now, without my phone, without a star or sliver of moon or any light coming from behind the house. Just the downpour of water as it fell from the eaves off the roof of the house.
I’d seen rain. I’d seen flooding. But I’d never seen this.
“Jules! Is there higher ground?”
I wracked my brain even as I wrapped my arms around my mud soaked body.
Higher ground?
No.
He’d have to wade through the mud and water to even get to the trucks, assuming he could drive them anywhere. Once there, he risked the chance of getting caught in a moving current. Everything could go wrong then. The truck could flip. It could bury him.
“No. There’s nowhere to take them.”
“Fuck!” he shouted. “Okay. Get inside.”
“What are you going to do?”
“There’s a tarp in the barn,” he shouted over the downpour. “I’m going to try and cover the crop.”
I grabbed his arm to stop him. “A tarp isn’t going to do anything. If it’s flooding like this, the creek is already overrun. There’s no way you’re going to protect the crop.”
He seemed to weigh my words. “I can’t do nothing!” he shouted.
I shook my head. “There’s nothing to do but wait it out. It will drain, and then we’ll see what we’re left with.”
“When?”
“When the rain stops,” I said, looking out over the porch.
We made our way back inside the house.
“I need a towel,” I said, not moving off the welcome mat. “I’m covered in mud.”
“You need a shower. There should be enough hot water left for both of us.”
He moved toward me like he was going to pick me up again, but I stepped back.
“No, get Patch.”
“Patch is fine, we need to get you warmed up.”
“No, we need to be upstairs. Just to be safe. Get Patch.”
“Stubborn as fuck,” he muttered, under his breath.
But he made his way back through the living room to the hallway that led to our bedroom.
A minute later he came back with the laundry basket, except it was filled with folded towels, what looked like clean sweats, and Patch sitting on top of all of it, howling in distress at the direction the night had taken.
Carefully, I made my way up the stairs, knowing I was leaving a muddy mess behind me, but messes could be cleaned. The important thing was for us to get clean, dry, and warm. Eventually the rain would stop, and when it did, we would need all our energy for what was to come.
Creed popped Patch onto the pillow on my twin bed and shut the door behind him, so he wouldn’t escape.
Together we stripped and got into the small upstairs shower, letting what was left of the hot water tank wash away the mud. The tub was brown with dirt, but that was another thing to worry about…after.
Creed rubbed us both down with clean towels. I didn’t own sweats, but he put me in one of his sweatshirts that fell down to my knees and a pair of his socks that covered me up to my shins.
We stepped across the hall back to my bedroom. I was pleased to see Patch had settled down into a ball on the pillow.
“You take the bed,” Creed said.
“No, we’ll fit.”
“We won’t.”
“We will,” I insisted, taking his hand. I scootched to the far end of the bed and carefully laid my head on the section of pillow AP wasn’t occupying.
Creed was right. He didn’t really fit. But I’d left him enough room so he could lay on his side, his face just skirting the edge of the pillow where AP slept in a ball between us.
“Go to sleep,” he muttered.
“Can’t. The rain’s too loud.”
“Whatever needs doing, we’ll do it. You don’t have to worry about that,” he said.
I believed he meant that.
But a part of me, deep down, believed that once he saw the damage, once he understood the impact of it, once he understood this farm could suck up all his savings and leave him with nothing, he would leave.