with milk, slopping soggy bits onto the table.
“Burt! Don’t do that…” Catherine suddenly broke off.
With the part of her mind that mother’s use to keep track of everything going on around her even while dealing with her children, she had heard something on the radio that she turned on each morning while setting breakfast out. The announcer’s voice was low, almost inaudible, and rarely intruded into her conscious awareness.
“…reports the following school closures because of unexpected flooding in the…”
“What’s wrong, Mom?” Will turned to look at the radio.
“Shhh.”
“For the Newton Park area…”
“It sounds like they’re closing some of the schools today. Too much rain. Shhh.”
“…and for Tamarind Valley, Reagan Jr. High, Pitt Elementary, Redwood Heights Elementary, Greenwood Elementary, Charter Oaks Elementary…”
Hearing the name of their school, Burt and Suze broke out into spontaneous cheering. Will was quieter but a broad grin creased his face.
“No school, no school, no school…,” the younger two chanted. Sams waved his arms up and down and joined the chorus. “No school, no school, no school…”
Will restrained himself.
Catherine sighed. No school today. Great.
8
It wasn’t half an hour after she had herded the four kids into the back bedroom to play and settled herself down to cleaning the kitchen and finally making herself some toast and tea when the front door opened, then slammed shut.
“Willard?” She jumped to her feet and started toward the entryway just in time to see him stamping his feet and dropping his sodden raincoat onto the tile.
Oh, no. The garage door opener again.
“What happened?” Somehow he looked different than he had when he got home last night, even though he was just as drenched. Did the car break down? Was he feeling ill? After all, last night had been difficult for him.
“You’re not going to believe this.” Willard looked as if wanted to laugh and curse at the same time. She’d never seen such an expression on his face before.
“What?”
The freeway’s flooded. The freeway!”
Catherine didn’t quite know what to say.
“Just before you get to the San Fernando Valley, you know where the freeway takes that deep dip before the final hill? Well, apparently it’s flooded there. All eight lanes. Traffic both directions is stopped completely! I couldn’t believe it.”
“But you’ve been gone for hours.”
“Yeah.” Now the odd look was replaced by a grimace. “It took nearly two hours for the highway patrol to funnel everyone off the freeway and onto that little, single-lane access road heading back toward Tamarind. You wouldn’t believe the mess.
“And even that road was nearly flooded in a couple of places, so we had to slow down to ten miles an hour or so. It’s unbelievable.”
By this time, he and Catherine were back in the kitchen, sitting around the table. She was pouring Willard a cup of tea and refreshing her own.
“Then it took another hour or so to negotiate the surface roads. Half of them were either shut down completely or restricted to one-way traffic only because of mud slides along the hills. I didn’t think I was ever going to make it home.
“But that’s not even the worst of it,” he said after taking a long sip and shivering slightly at the sudden warmth. “I was listening to the radio the whole time, trying to figure out what roads to take. The freeway is shut at the northern end of the valley as well, just before the Camarillo grade, right where the eight lanes narrow to six. No way out to the north.
“And the road at Norwegian grade has actually slid halfway down the hillside at one place. There’s only part of one lane left, and the cops have shut it down completely as well.
“Basically, were cut off. There’s no way out of Tamarind right now, at least not until the rain stops. Literally, no way out.”
Catherine stirred her tea. “The schools are closed as well. Here and in Newton Park both. And a lot of the houses in the higher parts of Coastal Crest are in danger of sliding if the hills get any more unstable.”
“All this after only a day and a night of this rain. What will happen if it continues as long as the forecasters predict?”
It did. The rain didn’t ease for four days, when traffic was finally allowed to travel north and south on the freeway. Norwegian grade wouldn’t be usable for seven or eight months, depending on how long it would take to carve a new roadway out of the hillside. And in the lower parts of Tamarind Valley, some of the housing developments were cut off stores and businesses for almost a week.
Charter Oaks fared better.
It was built on a small rise, not quite a hill exactly but one of the higher parts of the valley. The Huntleys were not totally isolated. When they ran out of milk on the third day, Willard could negotiate the rain-sodden streets far enough to buy more-along with toilet paper, that other necessity for any household with multiple children. But for all intents and purposes, even they were housebound.
Two adults. Four children. Two hamsters. And a dog.
The rain continued to fall so hard for three of the four days that, except that single trip to the store, none of them left the house.
It was a big enough house. Everyone had a place to go for a moment of peace and quiet. But mostly they spent the days in the family. Willard watched TV, alternating between whatever sports events he could find and the incessant “Storm Watch” reports on half the channels. He missed going to work. He felt almost uncomfortable stranded in the house, with nothing purposeful he could do. He fidgeted, finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on anything. Several times, when one of the kids raised a voice-whether in pique or even once when Sams abruptly shrieked with laughter at something Will, Jr., had done-he felt a deep irritation, something like the infant cousin of the fury the first night of the rains. A couple of times he couldn’t keep himself from almost yelling at them to be quiet. He wasn’t at all happy. He wanted to get out of the house.
Catherine watched with half an eye, mostly when reports on the “Storm-of-the-Decade” were on, and the rest of her attention on knitting scarves and sweaters for nieces and nephews that lived in colder climates. Although not an imperceptive wife, she noticed nothing particularly wrong with the way Willard was behaving.
The kids played Monopoly. One marathon game. The three oldest sat in their usual places around the board, rolling the dice and moving their tokens-there was an odd bit of squabbling at the beginning, when Burt grabbed the Boot, Suze’s favorite, and Will took Burt’s favorite piece in retaliation. It took an intervention by Catherine and a warning from Willard that the game would be put away for the duration if anything like that happened again to settle things.
Sams seemed perfectly happy to squat along the fourth side, holding out handfuls of money whenever it was needed. When he got tired, he simply rolled over and fell asleep on the floor, his blanket tucked securely along his cheek.
So they played, breaking only to eat and go to the bathroom and, somewhat later than usual, head unwillingly to bed. When Suze ran out of money on the first day, Will loaned her some. When Burt hit “Go Directly to Jail” three times in a row, Suze calmed him down.
And the rain continued. They could hear the constant drumming on the roof, and the splattering of drops on
