Since Irie’s birth in 2004, I’d come closer to solving the mystery of why motherhood pumped me up with such joy. The intimacy, the purposefulness, and the promise of a blank slate were among the plausible explanations, but most important was my new chemical makeup. Oxytocin, the “love drug,” had compensated for my lifelong serotonin deficits. Oxy au naturel was better than anything the pharmaceutical companies had invented—and, for me, equally addictive. Proven to counteract adrenaline, the baby-making hormone had completely rebooted my mental health. I felt electrified and tranquilized simultaneously; I lulled my babies, and they lulled me.
Perhaps that was why I watched in wonderment as rain surged up under the door between the playland and the parking lot with remarkable force, a sudden high tide urged on by gravity. Within seconds, the McDonald’s PlayPlace was a wading pool. I thought I was watching a movie. I unlatched my breastfeeding baby calmly, as if a bathroom sink had simply overflowed. But a server rushed toward us, insisting we evacuate. With two children in soggy socks, another in a portable carrier, I huddled at the main entrance alongside fellow patrons, calculating how fast we could sprint if I goaded Irie and Leo with fun, games, and merriment. But by the time we reached the car, we were soaked to the bone. Fern, at least, was damp but not waterlogged beneath the gingham canopy of her hand-me-down car cradle. I called Ryan at work.
“We were at the McDonald’s on the frontage road, and the playland flooded.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Ryan said, and I was forced to reiterate the melodramatic truth. “Shit, OK. I’ll leave right now.” We quickly clicked good-bye. If Ryan didn’t act fast enough and the deluge continued, Ryan worried we’d be separated in the coming days.
As the children and I drained into the upholstery, Irie said, “It’s like being at the car wash!”
“Yes,” I said. “Or Niagara Falls.” Ryan and I had honeymooned seven years earlier in a cheesy motel with a heart-shaped Jacuzzi a few blocks from the famous cascades of water, eating cheap food we paid for on credit, blessing our marriage on Maid of the Mist, but this water plummeted from the sky instead of over the Niagara Escarpment. Clouds clenched, groaned, and broke historic floodwaters as if from a bottomless amniotic sac.
I tried turning from McDonald’s onto the frontage road through a cataclysm of water where the asphalt dropped. Other vehicles, mostly cars, forged through depths up to their hubcaps, headlights submerged like alligators’ eyes. I maneuvered through crisis as my brain dispensed oxytocin in calm, liquid surges, alongside a quarry where the road was high, but every time we reached a T intersection, our minivan careened again into the floodwaters. On Ninth and Ohio, a bar owner stood knee-deep in waders, as if fishing.
“Stop the car!” he screamed. “You’re making waves!” Water billowed against the breakwater of his establishment, Andy’s Pub & Grub, sloshing and smacking. I called Ryan again, and he warned me of being swept away in a current. It seemed possible: we stalled and bobbed in a truck’s wake. The rain pelted the windshield as I revved through the churning brown vortex onto a side street. An auto body shop, cutely labeled Automobile Hospital, dark and seemingly defunct but nevertheless like a beacon of light, appeared. Nestled alongside the south entrance was a measly ramp—an incline of no more than twelve inches. We coasted up onto that wedge of gravel like a boat up onto the shoreline.
The lagoon at South Park, retention ponds, and creeks were overflowing, making a dirty bath of the entire city. Yards, gardens, and sidewalks blurred indistinguishable from our natural boundaries—the Fox River and Lake Winnebago, which literally means “people of the filthy water.” Locals affectionately refer to it as Lake Winne-septic, and today we were all swimming in it. As Ryan neared Winnebago County from Milwaukee on Highway 41, his was one of the last vehicles allowed to pass before police closed all four lanes. Water sluiced up from the ditches over the road like schools of river eels. When he gained on Oshkosh, he took his chances at the first exit. Lane markers refracted beneath the water.
“I felt like I was in one of those mazes on a kids’ restaurant menu,” he said. “Every drowned car was a dead end.”
White-knuckled and gritting his teeth, Ryan wondered if driving his Nissan Sentra and its $325-per-month payment into the floodwaters might be a blessed setback. Our comprehensive plus gap insurance policies would cover the loss. The Oshkosh city manager and governor of Wisconsin declared a state of emergency. Half of Oshkosh homes would be pronounced variably damaged; three-quarters of the streets were impassible. A Canadian National train derailed at a washed-out bridge, and the accident led to an oil spill. Our house on Hazel Street, one block from Lake Winnebago, built in 1888, suffered only a dainty rivulet of water in the basement, which flowed right back into a hole on the concrete floor. Every small stroke of luck buoyed our spirits.
A year earlier, we’d escaped our short life in Milwaukee, one of the most dangerous and the most segregated city in America, according to census reports. In Bay View, where we’d rented an apartment, businesses were robbed at gunpoint, Irie’s Radio Flyer trike was swiped in broad daylight, and the skittish driver of an armored car, replenishing cash at our nearest ATM, once pulled his gun on me and my stroller of babies. Everybody in Milwaukee lived on the brink of hysteria. Life in Oshkosh would be different—a good, wholesome place to raise a family.
Ryan killed his long commutes talking to colleagues on his cell phone. Fellow lawyers in other states convinced him that if he started his own law firm in Oshkosh and lasted two years, he’d be self-employed forever. “It’s
