Part 3 – The High School Gym
The boat ride felt like crossing some invisible border.
Behind him, his house shrank into a gray shape half-hidden by rain, the porch steps already under. Ahead, the flood stretched flat and brown, swallowing streets and front yards he’d known for fifty years.
The two young men rowed with quick, practiced strokes, their breath visible in the damp air. The woman with the oversized life vest sat opposite him, watching his shoebox like she knew what was inside.
“You got everything you need?” she asked.
Thomas looked down at the cardboard, darkened where rain had found it. “We’ll see.”
The boat scraped the submerged curb outside the high school. Volunteers in ponchos guided them through double doors propped open with sandbags. The smell hit first—wet clothes, instant coffee, and that faint gym-floor varnish every school in America seemed to share.
Inside, rows of cots lined the basketball court. People moved quietly, voices low, as if they were sharing a secret no one wanted to repeat.
A man in a red volunteer vest led Thomas to a cot near the far wall. “We’ve got hot soup in the cafeteria. Bathrooms down the hall. If you need anything—” He paused, searching Thomas’s face. “—or if anyone comes asking for you, we’ll send them over.”
Thomas nodded. He set the shoebox on the cot and sat beside it. His knees popped in protest. Around him, people busied themselves with small tasks—drying socks by a space heater, pouring Styrofoam cups of coffee, adjusting blankets. A baby cried somewhere in the corner, the sound sharp against the rain still drumming the roof.
He pulled the afghan over his shoulders. It smelled faintly of cedar from the chest he’d kept it in all these years. He had the sudden, ridiculous urge to drape it across another set of shoulders—smaller, laughing, carrying the weight of no more than a school backpack.
Kathleen at eight.
Pigtails crooked.
Asking if she could ride her bike to the river to watch the fishermen.
The last time they’d spoken without anger had been in this very gym, at a parent-teacher conference. She’d been fifteen, cheeks flushed from basketball practice, and had begged him to let her join an art trip to New York. He’d said no without thinking, certain the city was too dangerous, certain he knew what was best.
The memory slid into the years that came after—the slammed doors, the silence at the dinner table, the day she left with a single duffel bag.
He pressed the afghan tighter.
A shadow fell over him. The woman from the boat knelt beside his cot. “They said the roads south might open by tomorrow. Your daughter—Kathleen—she’ll get through faster then.”
He blinked. “You know her?”
“No. But you said her name when you were talking on the phone in the boat.” She smiled faintly. “I just…hope she makes it here soon.”
He nodded, unable to answer.
When she moved on, he opened the shoebox on his lap. He took out the blue tin music box and wound it once. It played the same three broken notes, then the single perfect one. The sound drew the attention of a little girl on the next cot over, no more than four years old.
She slid off her cot and padded toward him, blanket trailing behind her. “What’s that?”
“A music box,” he said, holding it out.
She turned the crank, face serious with concentration, and smiled when the perfect note arrived. “It’s pretty.”
“It was my daughter’s,” he said.
“Where is she?”
He hesitated. “On her way.”
The girl’s mother appeared then, apologizing, ushering her back. But before she left, the girl pressed the music box back into his hands. “Don’t lose it,” she said, in the exact tone Kathleen had once used when handing him a seashell she’d found at the beach.
The rest of the afternoon blurred. Volunteers handed out bowls of soup. Someone tuned an old radio to a station reading flood updates. Names were called over the PA system for people whose relatives had arrived.
Not his.
Not yet.
By evening, the gym’s lights cast long shadows across the floor. Rain had slowed to a steady whisper. Thomas lay on the cot, staring at the rafters. His hands rested on the shoebox like it was an anchor.
A volunteer passed with a clipboard. “Mr. Callahan? Your daughter called again. Said she’s an hour out. Roads are clear up to the bridge now.”
He sat up too quickly, the afghan sliding to the floor. “She’s coming here?”
“Yes, sir. We’ll bring her over as soon as she arrives.”
He tried to settle back down, but his body wouldn’t still. The gym seemed louder now, voices sharper, the hum of the vending machine insistent. He kept glancing at the doors, expecting her silhouette to appear.
The hour stretched. Then two.
When the doors finally opened, the cold swept in before the figure. She was smaller than he remembered, hair streaked with gray, but the eyes were the same.
“Dad,” Kathleen said.
He stood, every joint loud, the shoebox clutched in one hand. They met halfway, stopping just short of touching.
For a moment neither spoke. Then she reached for the music box in his hand. “You kept it.”
“I kept a lot of things,” he said.
Her fingers brushed his. The touch was enough to break something open between them.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He shook his head. “Me too.”
And in the background, from somewhere in the gym, a child’s laugh rose up—a clear, perfect note in a place built for echoes.
Part 4 – The Night in the Gym
They sat on the edge of his cot like two people waiting for a bus that might never come.
The shoebox was between them, open just enough for the corner of the wedding photo to show.
Kathleen glanced around the gym, at the cots and the pale, shivering faces and the volunteers moving like tired shepherds. “It smells like my old school,” she said quietly.
“It is your old school,” Thomas answered. “Same floors, same rafters. Just more cots.”
That got the smallest smile from her.
For a while, they didn’t speak. A heater kicked on across the room, its fan low and steady. Somewhere, a baby cried, then hiccupped into silence. The storm outside had lost its temper, now only sighing against the high windows.
“I almost turned around twice,” Kathleen said finally. “Coming here. First time at the gas station—this kid came up asking for change and I thought, ‘What am I doing, driving into a flood for someone who…’” She trailed off. “And the second time was at the bridge. I saw the water, and I thought maybe you’d already left for somewhere else. Somewhere I couldn’t find you.”
“You found me,” Thomas said.
She nodded, looking down at her hands. “Yeah. I did.”
Silence again, but different now—less like a wall, more like a space where something could grow.
He reached into the shoebox and took out the matchbook from the Paramount Theater. He turned it over in his palm before offering it to her. “Remember this?”
She blinked. “No.”
“That’s ‘cause it’s from before you were born. First date I took your mother on.”
Kathleen took it, ran her thumb over the faded lettering. “You kept it all this time?”
“I kept everything that mattered,” he said. “Just not always the right way.”
Her mouth pressed into a line, but she didn’t hand it back. She slid it into her coat pocket like it belonged there.
They talked in small pieces after that—about the drive from Atlanta, about her two kids (“Teenagers, Dad. They eat like it’s a competition.”), about the work she’d been doing for a community garden project. He told her about the Henderson boys down the street, about the stray dog that had started sleeping under his porch, about how the river sounded different at night now, lower somehow.
When the gym lights went out at ten, replaced by the softer hum of the emergency fixtures, Kathleen pulled the afghan over both of them. They sat side by side, their shoulders touching just enough to remind each other they were real.
In the dark, Thomas said, “I heard the music box in your room today. Before I left. It played by itself.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I used to wind it every night before bed. Even when I was too old for it. It made me feel like nothing bad could happen while I slept.”
“You left it behind,” he said.
“I didn’t want to,” she whispered. “But that night… I thought if I took it, I’d be taking something from you too. And I was angry enough to want to. So I left it.”
He let that sit between them. Somewhere far off, a door clanged shut.
“Why did you call today?” he asked.
“Because I saw the news,” she said. “And because I didn’t want the last thing between us to be a slammed door.”
He thought of the hundreds of mornings and nights between that door and this cot, of all the words he’d rehearsed but never spoken.
“Me neither,” he said.
They didn’t talk much more. The night settled over the gym, heavy and tired. Thomas listened to her breathing beside him, slower now, until it matched the rhythm of the rain easing outside.
He let his eyes close, but the images kept coming—her first Christmas, Evelyn’s hand in his at the hospital, the way the river had looked this morning before it decided to come for them all.
Somewhere, deep in the dark, the music box’s perfect note sounded again.
