Chapter 2
Story: The Girl at the Flooded Window
The water rose three more inches before the sun went down.
Marisol watched it from the front window, her hands wrapped around a mug of lukewarm instant coffee she wasn't drinking. The flood had turned Sycamore Lane into a brown river, carrying bits of fence, a plastic lawn chair, someone's trash can, all of it swirling in a slow pattern that caught the last of the afternoon light. Across the street, the Whitaker house slumped against the sky like a tired animal, its paint peeling, its porch sagging, its windows dark except for that one upstairs window where a small pale shape still stood.
The girl had not moved. Not in three hours. Not since Marisol first saw her.
"She's going to be cold," Marisol said. "She's in a nightgown. Barefoot. The water's rising into the ground floor of that house — I saw it come over the foundation an hour ago. She needs to come down."
Dean sat on the couch behind her, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. He hadn't said more than ten words since his confession. She could feel the weight of him back there, heavy and silent, a man holding up the ceiling with the effort of not talking.
"Dean."
"I heard you."
"Then say something. Anything. Tell me what happened to your sister."
He shook his head. A small, tight movement. "I can't."
"You can't, or you won't?"
"There's a difference?"
"To you, maybe. To that little girl standing in a flooded house across the street, there's no difference at all." She turned from the window, her voice going sharp. "You said she's supposed to be dead. That means you know what happened to her. You know why she's not in that house with your parents — with you. You know why she's been gone for years. And that girl is standing there watching us right now, and you're sitting on my couch refusing to tell me the shape of the hole in your life."
Dean's jaw worked. He looked at the window, then away, like the sight of it physically hurt him.
"Talk to me," she said, quieter. "Please. I'm standing here holding a rabbit that looks exactly like a rabbit in the hands of a little girl in the house you grew up in. I need to understand what I'm seeing."
He took a long breath. Then another. When he spoke, his voice was rough, scraped clean of its usual calm.
"My parents bought that house when I was six. Before that we lived in an apartment across town, a little two-bedroom on Flint Street. My father worked at the plant, my mother stayed home. It was fine. It was normal." He paused. "Then my sister was born. Riley. Two years after we moved in."
"Riley," Marisol repeated. She looked at the window. "How old was she?"
"She'd be seven now."
Marisol felt the breath leave her body. Seven. The girl across the street looked seven. The girl in the floral nightgown, with the long unbrushed hair and the matching rabbit, was seven years old.
"The night she disappeared," Dean said, and stopped.
Marisol didn't push. She watched him. His hands were shaking.
"The night she disappeared," he said again, "I was supposed to be watching her."
The words hung in the wet air of the room. Marisol waited.
"We lived right across from this creek — Sycamore Creek, it runs behind the street. That night it was raining, like now. A storm came through. My parents had a party, neighbors over, everyone drinking. My mother asked me to watch Riley while she helped my father carry things in from the grill." His voice dropped. "I was fourteen. I didn't want to babysit. I told Riley to go play in her room and I went to the den to watch TV. I told her to stay. She was six."
He stopped. Marisol crossed the room, sat on the couch beside him. She didn't touch him — she knew better, knew he'd flinch away — but she sat close enough that the warmth of her shoulder reached his.
"When the rain came down harder, the creek rose. It came up over the bank, over the yard, into the street." Dean's voice was barely a whisper now. "I didn't notice. The TV was loud. It was an hour before my mother noticed the house was quiet and went to check on Riley."
"And she wasn't there."
"She wasn't there. The back door was open. The creek was already over the yard, up to the fence line." He swallowed. "They found her rabbit the next morning, caught in the fence at the back of the property. The grey one. The one with the stitched ear — she'd torn it getting it caught, and my mother sewed it back on. They searched the creek for a week. They never found her body."
Marisol's hand went to her chest, where the rabbit's soft worn head rested against her collarbone.
"They declared her dead after five years," Dean said. "Presumed drowned. A child her size, in a creek that fast, in the dark. There was no way she survived."
"But she did," Marisol said. "She's across the street right now."
Dean shook his head. It was a broken, helpless gesture.
"Dean, look at me." She took his face in her hands, made him meet her eyes. "That is your sister. That is Riley. She's standing in the window of your childhood home, holding the same rabbit you told me they found in the fence that night. I know what I'm seeing. You know what you're seeing. So we need to figure out how she's alive, and how she got back here, and why she's in that house."
"How," he repeated. "How do we figure that out from here?"
"We get across the street," Marisol said.
The words felt too simple. Too big.
"The water's still rising," Dean said. "It's moving too fast to wade. We'd be swept off our feet before we got past the curb."
"Then we find another way."
"There is no other way. The bridge at the end of the street went under this morning. The National Guard's doing evacuations past Route 9, but they're not coming down here. We're cut off."
Marisol turned to look at the window. The girl — Riley — had lowered her hand. She stood still, her face a pale smudge in the gathering dark, one hand holding the rabbit against her chest, the other pressed flat on the glass like she was trying to feel something through it.
"There's a boat," Marisol said slowly.
"What?"
"There's a boat. A rowboat — a little aluminum one, I saw it against the side of the foreclosed house down the block. The one with the blue shutters. It's tied to the porch post."
"That's not ours. We can't take someone's boat."
"We can take it and give it back. Or we can leave it here and let that little girl stand in that window until the water takes the house down." She looked at him hard. "What's it going to be?"
Dean held her gaze for a long moment. Then he stood, walked to the mudroom, and came back with two life jackets and a length of rope.
"It's getting dark," he said. "We go now, or we don't go at all."
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