“Yay! We’re going swimming!” I heard Jaxy’s excited yells from behind me and could see him jumping up and down near the door. I brought my hand up to shield my eyes from the water coming at me from all angles and shouted to Ruby.
“Get your brother and go upstairs! I’ve got to find the valve to shut this off.” Ruby followed my instructions and I noticed Jaxy’s face fall in disappointment, realizing it wasn’t a fun event. I waded through the water toward the washer, trying to find where the water was coming from. I pulled on the back corner, trying to move it away from the wall, but it only gave an inch. I squatted and pulled harder, trying to leverage my weight against the machine.
Water was still spraying everywhere, and all of my clothes were drenched and sticking to my skin. My shoes were completely filled with freezing water, and my fingers and toes were starting to go numb.
I adjusted my hold on the backside of the washer, now able to squeeze my arms between the two machines, and pulled hard. It took at least ten tries. Me tugging on the machine as hard as I could, feeling it barely budge, but move enough to motivate me to try again. Eventually, the machine was pulled far enough away from the wall that the plume of water spraying out was smaller and there was enough room between the machine and the wall to fit my body. I hopped on top of the machine and then squeezed my body down, feet first, still trying to assess where the water was coming from.
I was not familiar with anything I was looking at, made only more foreign to me by the water spraying everywhere, but I did spy a turn dial that looked just like the ones I’d usually seen outside of houses to turn hoses on and off. I reached for it and started turning furiously. After what seemed like a million rotations, the volume of water flowing from the hole in the wall finally tapered off and eventually turned into a trickle.
I was standing up to my calves in freezing water, drenched from head to toe, with absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do next. I climbed back on top of the washer and then hopped off again, heading back to the kitchen. The water had made its way into the dining room. I saw my purse sitting on the kitchen island and I grabbed it, searching for my phone. I called Devon, but I went straight to voicemail.
“Devon, some sort of pipe burst in your laundry room. There’s water everywhere. I have no idea what to do. Call me ASAP.”
I walked out of the kitchen and went up the stairs, heading toward the master bedroom. When I passed the kids’ room and saw them sitting silently on Ruby’s bed, so I halted in their doorway.
“Hey guys. Everything’s okay. Just a little leak.” Ruby’s eyebrows went up as if to say, “Little? Really?”
“Can we go downstairs?” Jax asked.
“Tell you what, gather up all the towels in the house and meet me in the kitchen, but don’t go into the water, okay?”
“Got it!” Jaxy yelled as he hopped off the bed and ran past me into the hallway, opening up the linen closet, on a mission.
“Help your brother, please? I’m gonna go try to find some dry clothes?”
“You’re going to wear Mommy’s clothes?” Ruby’s voice was both surprised and sad. I knew they hadn’t gotten rid of anything of Olivia’s, I knew it was all just sitting in her closet and dresser. None of them were ready to remove her from the house, and I wasn’t ready either. But it hadn’t occurred to me that wearing her clothes would upset Ruby or Jax. In fact, I hadn’t really thought about how I would feel wearing her clothes. The emptiness is my gut told me it was a bad idea.
“No, baby. I’ll find something else.” I saw the relief float over her features, tension obviously leaving her shoulders as she exhaled. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” I added, knowing that if there weren’t a lake currently residing on the bottom floor of her house, I would sit down next to her, hug her to me, and tell her all the ways her mother loved her. But in that moment, I couldn’t take the time to give that to her. Later, I thought. “Can you go make sure your brother doesn’t try to swim in your laundry room?”
“Yeah,” she said, her normal sassiness gone. She walked past me and I kissed the top of her head, wanting so much just to make all her pain go away. When she disappeared down the stairs, I continued on my way to the master bedroom.
When Olivia had been alive, I’d spent a good amount of time in her bedroom. Not a lot, but enough that I was familiar with it. We’d dye her hair in her attached bathroom, try new facial masques in there. When she’d gone to fancy dinners for Devon’s work, I’d sit on her bed and watch her try on dresses, always jealous of her amazing body and natural beauty. Even when she’d been hugely pregnant, she’d been slim and seemed to grow only in the belly.
When she’d brought Jaxy home, I’d spent hours in this room, watching her nurse her newborn, helping her in any way I could. When she’d been sick, I’d also spent hours in this room trying to help take care of her. It hadn’t ever occurred to me before, but in that moment, I was glad she hadn’t died at home. It was painful enough to stand in the doorway of the room I’d avoided since she passed. I don’t know if I could have gone in knowing I’d see the last place she’d been alive, or the place she spoke such soft and sullen words to me.
Her side of the room, the side farthest from the door, seemed untouched. Her satin robe still laid across the back of her big reading chair by her favorite bay window. There was still a glass on her bedside table with a stack of paperbacks next to it, as if she were going to lay down that night, pick one up, and start reading it. Everything seemed to be waiting for her return.
My heart started beating faster and I knew if I didn’t leave the room, soon the tears would come. Being in that room was too much for me to handle. The room still had so much Liv in it, I could only think of how much Liv I didn’t have.
I moved quickly to Devon’s dresser and pulled open drawers frantically, sighing in relief when I found a drawer with jogging shorts and t-shirts. I pulled one of each out quickly, nearly ran to the bedroom door, and then slammed it behind me as I left. I leaned against the closed door, sucking in deep breaths, trying to calm myself down. After a few moments, I felt the control of my emotions come back to me, and moved to the kids’ bathroom to get out of my soaked and frigid clothing.
I went back downstairs wearing Devon’s clothes. It was impossible not to smell him on them, but I tried my hardest not to hold the collar of his shirt purposefully to my nose and inhale. I’d smelled him plenty of times in my life and, as sad as I knew it was, I could pick out his particular scent over any other. It was clean and spicy. All male.
I found Ruby and Jax standing in front of a pile of towels that were all soaked and doing nothing to help the standing water problem.
“Thanks for getting the towels guys.” They smiled at me, but then just continued to look at me as if I knew what was supposed to happen next. “I’ve got no idea how to deal with this.”
I pulled up a browser on my phone and Googled, “How to deal with standing water.” None of the pages that popped up looked as though they’d be of any immediate help, and the only thing I could think of was to get the water out any way I could. So I grabbed a big mixing bowl from a cupboard, and started bailing water out the French doors. The kids grabbed cups and helped, but I told them to stay out of the water, as it was still intensely cold.
We’d been working for a while, not making much progress, when I heard Devon’s voice.
“Oh, my God,” he said, and I looked up to see him placing his briefcase on the island, eyes wide, taking in all the chaos.
“What are you doing here? Did you miss your work thing?” I immediately felt terrible, as if I was causing so many problems. My feet were freezing, I was wearing clothes that smelled fabulous and were too big for me. My hair was a disaster from the earlier incident with the storm inside the laundry room, and all I really wanted to do was take a warm bath. “I’m sorry,” I cried, dropping my hands to my side, making the giant mixing bowl I held onto slap against the side of my leg. “I didn’t know what to do. Google wasn’t any help. The thing in the laundry room was spewing water when we got home and I was just trying to get the water out.” I was rambling and on the verge of tears, no longer able to keep my composure together when Devon walked straight to me, through the freezing cold water, dress shoes and slacks still on, and wrapped his arms around me.