The water rushed the low bank, its first destruction the unbinding of the strange bound sticks that had for years appeared along the West Side Highway bike path, sticks crisscrossed atop stones stacked in ways that suggested they meant something to someone. In an instant the water broke it all down, the detritus swiftly clogging the already clogged drains as the river rose—fast, there was pressure there, volume and shifting tides, currents, swells—over the West Side Highway bike path, flooding the recently resodded Hudson River Park, the roots of its sycamores and maples, ornamental cherry and dogwood too shallow to grip. The trees toppled and bobbed, knocking in a surging logjam the limestone foundations of the once tenement art galleries, the red-brick churches and garages, and too numerous to count glassy condo towers—each a flimsy envelope leaking carbon, heat, cooled air in summer. Now, capable of resisting nothing, their glass panes pop and shatter like so many bottles lobbed to the sidewalk, the ones that remain reflecting the darkening sky and the tempest of the day and the rising swirl of water as the higher, richer tenants stand in black silhouette.
Helen puts her hands into the rush of water. She knows it is unstoppable; ridiculously unstoppable. Too soon the famous buildings will buckle and go under just as easily as she did a little girl at the great waterfall at Great Falls. She went under in her daisy two-piece, her hard, pale body tight and smooth as the water that knocked her breath out, Great Falls too rough, her mother had warned. She could still hear her mother’s warning somewhere far away, distant as church bells.
She had known all along, her mother was saying.
What the hell had they been thinking? her mother was saying.
What the hell had any of them been thinking?