Rushing Waters (4 page)

“Yes,” he said pessimistically, “and it could get worse. Why don't you and your mother go somewhere for a few days, out of harm's way?”

“That's silly, darling, we don't need to do that. The city is very responsible about it. If anything, they're given to overwarning people now. We'll hear about it if the situation looks dangerous. And people are better prepared now for a storm like Sandy. No one's going to get surprised again.”

“You can't stop the river from overflowing like last time, and your mother lives in Zone 1,” he reminded her. She smiled at what he said—he knew all the language, the geography, and the concerns after the last time.

“Don't worry about us. We're fine. Enjoy your weekend,” she told him.

“I'm just concerned if another hurricane hits the city.”

“It won't, and if it does, we'll be prepared.”

“Have you stocked up on food and water and flashlight batteries?” he asked, sounding almost military about it.

“My mother has adequate supplies. We'll be fine, I promise.” She asked him about his weekend then, and who was there, and a few minutes later they hung up. He had said there were fourteen guests staying at their friends' house, most of whom she knew, although not all. She knew it would be a great weekend for him, and she was touched that he had called to check on them in New York. She was happy he had something to do—it would make her absence seem shorter. She always felt a little guilty about leaving him when she traveled, even when it was for work. But during the week, he'd be busy at the office. And she knew he was going to a shoot again the following weekend, before she got back.

Ellen did a little work on her computer after that, and her mother did the same. The dog was asleep at Grace's feet, after she had tried the new sweaters on her, and was satisfied that they fit and were as cute as she had hoped. The rain and wind continued relentlessly outside, but they were cozy in the apartment, with music playing softly on the stereo. Despite the hurricane supposedly just days away from them, it was a pleasant, easy afternoon.

Charles had called Gina as soon as he woke up in his room at the Soho Grand on Saturday, the day after he arrived. His calls continued to go to voicemail, and he sent her an email and a text. He knew she didn't always check her messages, especially on weekends, when she was busy with the girls. Chloe was on a soccer team, and Lydia had just started ballet. They seemed to be enjoying their new life in New York and had told him all about their new friends. They never mentioned Nigel to him—they seemed to instinctively sense that he didn't want to know. And Charles could tell whenever he saw them that they were happy and well cared for by their mother, although it broke his heart to be so far from them. He had been an attentive father from the beginning and loved his wife and being with his family. But the ten-year span between him and Gina, and the difference in their interests, careers, and styles, had proved to be a chasm he couldn't bridge. She hadn't fully settled down yet when they married, and loved going out all the time. Charles was building his career and had already sown his wild oats, and he loved staying home. He tried to keep Gina happy, but not always with great results. She worked in a racier, more exotic world as a model. And the stability he offered seemed tiresome to her. Once married, she found his life and friends incredibly boring. She missed being with people her own age. He had thought she would adjust to a more staid way of life, but she hadn't yet when Nigel came along. Charles's parents had disapproved of the match since the beginning, and their warnings had proved to be right. They said she was too immature to be married and didn't appreciate him, all of which was accurate.

Gina's dreams of being an actress had been eating at her, and the modeling she did exposed her to a very different world from his. She had gotten pregnant with Chloe six months after they started dating, and as soon as they found out, Charles had proposed to her. He felt it was the right thing to do, and he loved her. Gina didn't feel they had to marry and wanted to wait until after the baby, which went against everything Charles believed. He was old-fashioned and traditional and wanted a real marriage and family life with her. He had convinced her to marry him when she was four months pregnant at twenty-four, just as her modeling career took off, and she began getting small roles as an actress, which made married life seem even less exciting to her. Two years later Lydia had been another slip. A second child pulled Gina even further into married life and away from her goals. Charles had promised to pick up the slack with their daughters, with a nanny, and he had kept his word. He had fallen in love with his children, and loved Gina passionately. She loved him but chafed at the restrictions of marriage and the conflict with her career goals. When she turned thirty, she had been seized by a wave of panic that she'd be trapped in domestic life forever, her modeling would end, and her acting career would run aground before it fully took off. Everything Charles stood for became a threat to her. And she blamed him for talking her into marriage when she was so young. Many of her friends had children out of wedlock, which she said she would have preferred. Marriage felt like a prison to her.

Charles had always seen a depth that she was capable of but had no desire to develop yet. She was a good mother to their children, when she was around, but she longed to pursue her career among models, actors, producers, and all the creative types who seemed like more fun and were familiar to her. She tried to explain that being a banker's wife wasn't enough for her. And then Nigel had come along, like an emissary from the world she craved. He was right up her alley, or so she thought—a photographer she had met on a shoot in Tahiti for Italian
Vogue.
Although she said she had never meant for it to happen, their romance had taken off like a rocket while they were on location and caught the attention of the tabloids, since Nigel was well known on the fashion scene. Nightmarish months had ensued, of embarrassment for Charles, public humiliation, and his parents' outrage over what he and the children were going through. And not wanting to engulf him in scandal, within two months of when it began, Gina informed Charles that she was leaving him. She said she needed to be free, to experience the last of her youth. They had both cried when she told him, but she insisted she was sure. And Nigel provided too great a lure. He was far more appealing to her than Charles.

She said she was moving to New York to work with American
Vogue,
who was currently enamored with Nigel, and he had promised her dazzling opportunities if she followed him—possibly even a chance to make a film with producers he knew in L.A. It was all too exciting for Gina to resist, and so was he.

Charles would have tried to stop her legally, but he knew that the court battle would be public and ugly, and she would resent him forever if he deprived her of her dreams. He knew he had to let her go, and he hated Nigel for stealing her from him. He helped her get an agent in New York, and they were clamoring to book her for shoots with other photographers as well. Her career had finally taken off. All Charles could hope was that she would tire of it one day and come back to him. He was gracious about it—and now regretted it bitterly. After a year, Gina loved New York and was still with Nigel, she was a successful model, and the girls were happy with her. It appeared that he had lost them for good and all. And Nigel and his world seemed to suit her better than Charles ever had. It had all worked out as she had hoped, much to Charles's dismay. Nigel's unshaven, unwashed good looks were typical of the milieu Gina had been craving for years. She'd been too young and too ambitious for the ordinary domestic life Charles had offered her. He felt as though his whole life had gone down the drain the year before. The divorce had recently become final, and he wondered if she was going to marry Nigel, or at least have a baby with him. Marriage seemed to mean nothing to anyone in their world. Relationships and alliances appeared to come and go, with children born of their brief unions often trailing in their wake. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to anything in Charles's life.

He hadn't started dating again—every other woman paled in comparison to Gina, despite her betrayal and change of heart about him. She was more beautiful and more exciting than anyone he had ever known, and she was the mother of his children, a role he felt deserved profound respect, although she didn't feel the same way about him and had left him for another man. Charles had been deeply depressed for the past year since she left, suffering from bouts of anxiety, and all he felt able to do was put one foot in front of the other to get through the days. He lived for his visits with the girls and was trying his best to detach from their mother, so far with little success. Every time he saw a photograph of her, in an ad or on the cover of a magazine, his heart took a leap again. He knew it was pathetic, and he had to get over her, but he hadn't yet.

And in her usual casual, haphazard style, she wasn't returning his calls, as he waited in his hotel room, hoping to see the girls, and finally went for a walk to get some air. He was a strikingly handsome man but seemed unaware of it. Women noticed him as he walked past them on the street. As he always was, he was indifferent to their attention and never thought of himself as attractive, particularly since Gina left. It was obvious why Gina had fallen for him in the beginning, to everyone but him. He was good looking, intelligent, had a good job, did well, came from a good family, and adored her. But compared to Nigel, who didn't have Charles's values or attributes, he was serious, conservative, and responsible, none of which seemed sexy to her. And when Charles got nervous, he felt like a bumbler at times. Nigel was so much smoother and more sure of himself, but Charles thought he had no soul, and he questioned how long Nigel would stick around. But he showed no sign of exiting yet.

For all his many qualities, any woman would have wanted to be with Charles, but he didn't care. He was oblivious to them—all he wanted was the marriage he had lost, and even he knew there was no hope of retrieving it. She seemed too happy where she was, with Nigel in New York. Her life there was everything she had hoped for when she left, although Charles wondered how long it would last. Nothing was stable in her new world. But after a year, Gina was still on a high, dazzled by it all.

He walked around SoHo, and along the Hudson River for several hours, and still hadn't heard from her when he got back to the hotel at four o'clock and turned on the TV again, to check on the hurricane. It was a perfect focus for his anxieties, terrified that the city would be destroyed. He had nothing else to do that day. But there had been no major change. The hurricane had made a small detour in the Caribbean but was back on course toward New York again, and had picked up a little speed. He tried to imagine where Gina might be with the girls, but he had done everything he could to contact her, several times. Now all he could do was wait. He ordered a hamburger from room service and sat staring at the TV, watching CNN. Hurricane Ophelia was being compared to Sandy, though seemed less ominous for the moment. But it couldn't be dismissed as a potential threat to the city, albeit a lesser one. Even that didn't reassure him, as he ate the hamburger and worried about his girls. And their mother's lack of response to his messages was as maddening as it always was. And wherever she was, he wondered if she had her cell phone with her, or the battery was dead, which was frequently her excuse for not returning his calls.

On Saturday, Juliette Dubois had been on duty in the emergency room at one of the city's three largest hospitals since noon. She was thirty-one years old, a resident and ER doctor. During Hurricane Sandy, she had been in medical school at NYU and was assigned to NYU Hospital. The hospital had been heavily damaged and had had to be evacuated, and she had helped to carry patients out of the building for transfers to other hospitals, when the backup generators failed. No one had expected the kind of damage they had experienced. No lives had been lost in the evacuation, but there had been some terrifying situations involving preemies in incubators and patients on respirators that had to be manually operated by hospital personnel until they got to the hospitals that took their patients. It had made a lasting impression on Juliette and given her a profound respect for natural disasters. And although Hurricane Ophelia didn't seem as dangerous so far, a chill had run down her spine at the first reports and at the news that it was headed for New York.

She hadn't had time for a break in the five hours she'd been on duty. Saturdays were always busy in the ER. People who got sick during the week and hadn't bothered to call their doctors took a turn for the worse on Friday night and had no recourse except to go to the ER over the weekend. A bad flu had been rampant in the city, which was a particular threat to children and old people. Household accidents abounded on the weekends, as did sports injuries, women who went into premature labor, and people who broke bones when they fell on city streets.

They had two broken hips in the ER now, an eighty-four-year-old woman who had been hit by a bicycle in Central Park, and a ninety-year-old man who had fallen off a ladder while checking out a leak in his ceiling. Paramedics had brought them in, along with the usual assortment of heart attacks, minor injuries, asthma attacks, cuts that needed stitches, and a four-year-old whose mother thought he might have swallowed their pet turtle. Juliette loved the variety of what they treated in the emergency room, from serious injuries to minor ones, although at times the place was a zoo.

At five o'clock she was having her first break of the afternoon when Will Halter, the chief resident, walked by her. He was proverbially tall, dark, and handsome, and they had dated for three months earlier that summer, with poor results. They couldn't stand each other. In Juliette's opinion, he had an ego the size of the building, and since she hadn't been willing to cater to it, he had dumped her. He had dated nearly every nurse in the ER, even some of the married ones. She felt stupid for ever having gone out with him, but he was easy to fall for. Everyone did—patients, nurses, med students. He had a bedside manner that made patients nearly swoon over him, although Juliette was no longer convinced that he really cared about them and thought it likely that he didn't. But she had to admit that technically he was a good doctor, even though she thought he was a miserable human being.