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Rosemary, the four-year-old, woke up first. She told my brother-in-law, Lance, that there was something on the roof.

Seven of us were at my family’s river house on the Guadalupe, between Ingram and Hunt, for the Fourth. Our little stretch of river is wide, green, cool, deep, and slow. It is some of the best swimming anywhere and one of the most beautiful spots in Texas, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve spent many peaceful afternoons there, floating and staring up at the cypress trees that tower over the water. The house, a one-story cabin on stilts about fifty yards from the river up our steeply sloped yard, was built right after the 1987 flood that devastated this region, killing ten teenagers. Concrete pillars put our family’s place a few feet above what officials consider a one-hundred-year floodplain. More than once I’d tried to imagine the waters rising that high, but it seemed impossible.

We’d had pizza for dinner and spent that Thursday evening playing hide-and-seek with Rosemary, a rambunctious, expressive, willful little girl with blond hair and blue eyes who can speak Spanish and calls me Tío, and her baby brother, my twenty-month-old nephew, Clay, a towhead who’d just learned to say the words “boo” and “yellow.” After the kids went to sleep, a few of us played charades until about 9:30 p.m., when we all said goodnight and went to bed.

I woke around 3 a.m. to the sound of thunder and rain. My only thought was, I hope it stops so I can go on an early-morning run. Shortly before 4:30, I would later learn, Rosemary climbed down from the top bunk of the kids’ bedroom and went to get her father. Lance stepped out of bed to see what was causing all the pounding and creaking. I stirred at about that time, too, and heard what I figured were the kids running around the house, excited by the storm. Or maybe the winds were causing tree branches to slam against the metal roof. I heard Lance call out for his wife, my sister Alissa, and I got out of bed and walked into the main living area. I saw my dad, Clint, who is 73, and Lance peering out through the sliding-glass doors that led to the back deck. The house was dark, but Dad held a flashlight, aiming it into the night.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“We’re in trouble,” he said. “Big trouble.”

I looked past them. The river was as high as the deck, twenty feet above the ground.

We had spent so many hours on that porch looking out over the yard and to the river below. Now the water splashed against the bottom of its railing. The gravity of our situation didn’t sink in right away, but the facts were clear: We were surrounded by fast-moving floodwater, and we had no way of escaping to higher ground.

I ran back to my bedroom and woke up my husband, Patrick. Soon all of us—Dad, Lance, Alissa, Rosemary, Clay, Patrick, and me—came together in the living area. Clay flashed his adorable smirk at Patrick, eager to play. We talked through our options. Getting onto the roof was impossible. We had no ladder, and the eaves were about eight feet above the deck. Patrick weighed whether we could all climb through a window into the live oak whose branches were near the back of the house, then realized it wasn’t reachable. Lance called 911, but the dispatcher said he didn’t know when anyone could get to us.

I tried to imagine a scenario that would turn out okay. I imagined rescuers in a yellow raft emerging from the darkness. I imagined being stuck in the house for hours or days, grateful for all the groceries we’d brought for the weekend. I imagined my husband pointing out that the floodwaters were starting to recede. I imagined the relief I would feel when I realized he was right.

The river rose. Within a minute or two it was about a foot high against the glass door. We got dressed, put on shoes, and packed bags so we could be ready to leave in case someone, anyone, miraculously arrived.

As we reassembled in the kitchen, the vinyl flooring under our feet started to bubble, and then water began to pool. My dad walked into his bedroom and saw the carpet floating off the floor. The river’s musty scent permeated the house, mixed with what smelled like freshly chopped wood. My sister sat Rosemary and Clay on the kitchen island countertop. We discussed whether we could get them higher, maybe even on top of the cabinets in the small space below the ceiling. Then the roof over the porch crashed down and we heard glass shatter in my father’s room, just off the kitchen.

Rosemary asked, “Why did the window break?”

Clay started to cry.

When the sliding-glass door opened and water poured in, Lance ran to it, shoved it closed, and held it shut. The pendant lamps began to swing wildly over the kitchen counter. The house was shifting. It lurched sharply, and we all struggled to stay on our feet. It felt like walking down the aisle of a plane during strong turbulence.

“We’re moving. We’re moving,” Patrick said. The realization was terrifying. The rushing, still-rising water had lifted the house off its pillars. It was afloat.

And then it wasn’t.

I saw part of the deck rip away. I heard windows break from every corner. Cracks split the walls. We crashed into something, probably a tree. I don’t know how long it took—ten seconds, maybe fifteen—for the house to come apart.

Alissa managed to keep both kids on the countertop, one hand on each, still trying to reassure them. As the house came undone, she grabbed one in each arm. This is the part that will forever haunt me. If I or anyone else had been closer to them, we would have helped her. We would have grabbed one of the kids. But we didn’t know that we were about to be plunged into the water. We simply didn’t know.

Alissa remembers two things after she and her children hit the water. She heard Clay coughing. And she heard Rosemary saying “Mama.”

This is when our stories diverge.

As we were thrust into churning water, into darkness, our disintegrating house sucked us down into the river. The last thing I remember from inside the house was seeing the refrigerator coming at me. Patrick saw the countertop tear away from the kitchen island with Alissa and the kids on it.

Lance found himself trapped under the sliding-glass door that he had been holding shut. He unlocked it, pushed it open, and swam through it and to the surface.

Dad got pinned underwater by a massive, hard object—he thinks it was a piece of furniture or timber—and he couldn’t get loose. He twisted and turned, and thought clearly to himself that this was what it was like to drown. He figured he had about thirty seconds left before he would start taking water into his lungs. He pushed as hard as he could against the object, came free, and kicked to the surface.

Patrick also felt something, maybe part of the house, maybe furniture, pinning him under the black water. He pushed himself underneath it, and then he was out. He scrambled onto a flat piece of metal, part of the roof.

When I surfaced, I didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten away from the house. The stormy night sky and the murky water were the same color. I heard Patrick calling for me. I looked around and saw a large piece of floating metal. I couldn’t see him, but I yelled, “Are you on the roof?” He said he was, so I swam toward his voice. I felt him grab my hand, and we were connected for a second, maybe two. But we couldn’t hold on.

As the river carried me downstream, I struggled to stay above water. I was surrounded by branches, by twisted metal, by uprooted trees, and countless smaller objects—bottles of sunscreen, books, couch cushions, coolers—that came from inside our home or someone else’s. I realized I’d lost my shoes and my phone. I grabbed at every branch on every tree that was still standing. A few snapped off in my hands, leaving me with fistfuls of leaves. I managed to briefly hold on to one, perhaps for a few seconds, until the force of the water and the constant assault from debris ripped me away.

I latched onto a tree with branches large enough to support me and pulled myself out of the water. My breathing was frantic but my mind was focused. I considered the possibility of death. I thought, If I survive, I’ll be the only one. I contemplated life without my husband, my dad, my sister, her family. How could the kids survive what I’d just endured? I felt fear, of course, but it wasn’t as intense as the terror I’d felt inside the house. In the kitchen, I had feared the unknown, what might happen if we were swept away. Now I experienced a moment when acceptance somehow repressed the fear of dying, of losing the people I love the most, of whatever else this catastrophe had in store.

The tree began to crack and moan. Then it slowly fell into the river, and so did I. I reached for another tree and climbed as high as I could, a couple of feet above the rushing water. I stepped up to a higher branch, and then another. If this tree collapsed, I wasn’t sure if I would fight to stay above water again. I pleaded with the tree to hold me, to withstand the power of the river. Please, I whispered, please.

I checked my watch, which tracks the sunrise. It was 5:20 a.m. I had to wait a little more than an hour for first light. The rain kept falling in sheets, getting stronger for a while and then ebbing. Another plea: Please stop raining, please stop raining. The downpour felt somehow insulting. I watched water heaters, a trailer, and a shed float past. Then a car, its headlights on and pointing at the sky.

Over the roar of the water and the cracking of trees, I heard screaming. It was guttural, primal. “Who’s there?” I called out. “I’m in a tree too. We have to hang on. Someone will help.”

“It’s Alissa!” my sister screamed. “I’m with Rosemary. Clay is gone.”

The memory of those words will never leave me. A combination of profound relief and unbearable sadness overwhelms me now, even as I type this. Alissa and I kept yelling to each other, though neither of us could clearly make out what the other was saying. “Be strong for Rosemary!” I implored. “You have to survive this!”

Intermittently I could hear just one word—“Clay”—as Alissa cried out for her son.

I glanced at my watch every few minutes, the water below me rising a foot or two and then falling, only to rise again. At some point after sunrise, I realized the river was finally receding for good, more branches below me becoming visible as the minutes passed, though I still couldn’t get a good view of Alissa. I’d later learn we were about half a mile from our property.

As the river subsided, I saw that I was actually close to the bank, maybe twenty yards away. It would’ve been an easy swim if not for the pull of the current and the dangerous amount of debris.

Because of the storm clouds, the darkness lingered after sunrise. I was quaking from the chill. I yelled Patrick’s name and, for the first time, began to cry—for my dad, for Clay, for all of us. I wondered who else was alive and who wasn’t.

Then I noticed Patrick running along the riverbank. I couldn’t believe he was there, fully dressed, wearing his tank top and shorts, his shoes somehow still on. (He had lost only his wedding ring, he later told me.) “Patrick, I’m here!” I yelled. For the first time, I thought we had a shot at surviving. Patrick was the first normal thing since the house broke apart. It was like being alone on an alien planet and another human randomly arrives. And then Lance came jogging up after him.

They’d ended up in the same pecan tree, about two hundred feet from the riverbank and about two thousand feet from where our house once stood. Lance has a watch with a flashlight that he’d turned on after Rosemary woke him up. Patrick said he spotted the beam after he climbed into the tree. They were only a few yards apart, close enough that they could talk without yelling. Lance kept repeating, “My son, my daughter. There’s no way.” He called out for Alissa. At one point their tree was struck by a house but somehow remained upright. Worried about how long it could hold, they decided to climb down the tree and across some rubble that was piling around the house. The two hundred feet of water between them and the bank was pooling, not rushing. Patrick, a strong swimmer who’d served in the Coast Guard for four years, went first. Lance followed once he made it to shore.

Patrick told me they’d been running as fast as they could to search for us, but they were crossing rough terrain along a slope littered with debris and massive downed logs. When he spotted our niece in a nearby tree, Patrick, for the first time, began to cry. Lance started frantically looking for ways to get his wife and daughter to shore.

I watched from my perch as they tried to figure out a way to get Alissa and Rosemary safely on land. The water was still too deep and moving too fast for anyone to swim. More waiting.

Patrick went to search for my dad and ran into a couple who told him they’d found an older man who matched his description. They pointed him to a nearby house where Dad was being cared for. When Patrick arrived, my father was wrapped in a towel, and he broke down when he heard that my sister and I were alive. He explained that he’d managed to climb into a pecan tree after washing about a half mile downriver. He said he’d watched an intact house float right past him. He feared he’d lost his entire family. At first light, he had jumped down and swum ashore because he was afraid of hypothermia and shock. “Two folks took me in,” he said. “Another couple showed up, also tree dwellers, and she was six months pregnant.”

Patrick returned to tell us my dad was safe, and he and Lance began working to rescue Alissa and Rosemary.

In the river’s roiling churn, with Rosemary clinging to her neck while she paddled with one arm, Alissa had somehow managed to push her daughter onto a branch, which Rosemary hugged with her arms and legs, lying flat. Alissa stayed in the water just below her, gripping the tree’s trunk, and as the waters receded she stood uncomfortably on a branch below her. Alissa would tell me, five days later, that Rosemary wanted to play “I spy” while they waited in the tree.

Patrick waded into the water to intercept a blue kayak that was floating by. An older couple, watching from a house on a nearby hill, brought Lance and Patrick an inflatable inner tube, and they decided the tube was the better option to catch Rosemary. More control, softer landing.

For Lance, these fraught moments were the hardest, most stressful part—being so close to his wife and child but not yet knowing how to save them.

Seeing Patrick fetch the kayak, I realized that the expanse of river between my tree and the bank was now about six feet deep at most. I shouted that I was ready to jump, but first Patrick checked to make sure there wasn’t any debris below me. He instructed me to leap out away from the tree rather than straight down because he’d felt an exposed root system. Because the river had receded so sharply, I was now some fifteen feet above the surface; my tree was essentially a vertical trunk, with no way to climb down. I launched myself backward into the area he’d confirmed was clear. Once I hit the water, I swam to shore easily.

When I got to Patrick, I held him for a while, overwhelmed. I said something like, “I thought I’d lost you” and “I was so afraid” and “I couldn’t think about losing you.”

After that, Rosemary’s rescue happened quickly.

Patrick and Lance rigged the inner tube with a green garden hose they’d found and tied it around a downed tree. Lance waded into the water, positioning the tube beneath his daughter. I stood downriver, ready to catch Rosemary if she missed the target and got caught in the stream.

Alissa urged us to hurry, saying she didn’t think she could hold on to the tree much longer. She had to pry Rosemary’s hands from the branch. Rosemary, terrified, started to cry. Then my sister cradled her daughter and dropped her twenty feet into the river, where her father was waiting. She landed directly in the middle of the inner tube, and we all cheered. Lance carried his daughter to shore. My sister jumped into the water right after, and I grabbed her, put my arm around her, and together we walked to safety.

Alissa collapsed on the riverbank, crying out for Clay. Rosemary became calm when she reached dry land, but her face had a blue cast. We were all shivering. We told Rosemary how brave she’d been and that she was now safe and that it was going to be okay.

Alissa stood, still sobbing, and we all scrambled up a hill to a nearby house, where the older couple, the Marvins, had called 911. Other neighbors arrived, offering us towels, dry clothes, shoes, water, cookies, and a first aid kit. One of them was a psychiatric nurse practitioner named, of all things, Jennifer Lopez. She and her husband, Chris, were so kind, so helpful, so calm. I’ll never forget them. Patrick went four houses up, to where my dad was sheltering, and walked him carefully along the road back to the Marvins’ place.

We were covered in cuts and bruises. Our muscles were sore. But we were okay. Rosemary, remarkably, didn’t have a scratch on her.

With a neighbor’s phone, I called 911 to report that a twenty-month-old child was missing. He has blond hair and blue eyes, I said.

The fire department ferried us to Ingram Elementary, which had become a reunification center for victims of the tragedy. Through the raindrop-covered windows of the fire truck, everything looked gray or black. I hadn’t realized the magnitude of the storm—that it killed more than a hundred people. Trees everywhere were flattened. Cars on the side of the road were barely recognizable, just twisted chunks of metal. There were massive trailers that had been tossed around, homes and sheds destroyed. When we passed by the dam in Ingram, water was flowing over it, something I’d never seen before. It sank in that this was not something that happened to just my family. I marveled at how anyone pulled into that river, anyone at all, could have survived.

A Hondo ambulance crew eventually picked us up from the elementary school and took us to a hospital in Fredericksburg. We would spend the day there. My sister, who was in and out of consciousness, was kept under observation, and Dad had a gash on his forehead stitched up. The staff treated a severe cut on Lance’s finger. Patrick and I stayed with Rosemary in the waiting area.

In Alissa’s waking, grief-stricken moments, we told her over and over that saving Clay was impossible, that she did all she could. That the flood was in control. In the days since, she has talked about feeling Clay in her arms, and then not having him in her arms, and how she understood in that moment that he was going to die. She said over and over while we were in the house waiting for the first responders, “He can’t swim. He’s a baby.”

The next day, Kerr County officials contacted Lance to let him know they’d found a deceased child that matched our description of Clay. My cousin Sam Parsley drove Lance, my aunt Lynne Parsley, and me to a makeshift morgue behind a Kerrville funeral home to confirm that it was the little boy we loved so much. It was.

According to an official we spoke to, Clay had been found along the Guadalupe near the Rio 10 Cinemas, on Bandera Highway, about a dozen miles from our property. Lance touched his little chest and wiped his blond hair and said, “That’s my boy.”

And then to Clay: “We’re so sorry. We love you. Your Mama loves you so much. She tried to save you.”

Dear Rosemary, in the emergency room you ate Cheez-Its and sipped water from a straw. I asked you about “boo-boos.” You looked at my arms and legs and said, “Tío, you have a lot. There’s one there, there’s one there, there’s one there . . .”

“Do you have any?” I asked.

You shook your head.

“What about that small spot on your leg?”

You said it was from falling off your bike weeks ago. You didn’t cry in the waiting room. You sat there wearing nothing but a man’s T-shirt that fit you like a dress as you waited patiently. I asked if you understood what had happened.

“The river house broke,” you told us. “We rushed in the river.”

That is what happened.

But I want you to know more about that Fourth of July weekend, when the Guadalupe rose and broke the river house and tore our family members away from one another. I want you to know what we lived through, how your mother saved your life. That your father and Patrick helped rescue you. I want you to know how heartbroken we all are that your baby brother was lost—but how amazed and relieved we were that you were saved.

I want you to know how much your family loves you and how much we love one another. This was so hard. But we are strong—and so are you.

Rosemary, I also want you to know that we had so much fun the day before the flood. We swam in the river until you wanted to jump from the rope swing. That came as no surprise, because ever since you took your first steps on your first birthday, you’ve been a fearless, observant, determined little girl. You’d been riding your bike—without training wheels—since Christmas. At the playground, you’d already climbed across jungle gyms and up ropes and rock walls, higher than your protective parents were sometimes comfortable with and well before I ever thought possible. At the swimming pool, you’d quickly learned to hold your breath and go underwater, and you’d raced across the diving board and cannonballed into the deep end while older, bigger kids watched with awe and envy.

With Patrick on the bank and your mom in the water, you pulled yourself up the rope and swung out over the river. At just the right moment, you let go and splashed down in your life jacket. We all cheered, and you wanted to do it again. You wanted your dad and your Pops to see you swing out on that rope. Your brother Clay wanted to do it too, but of course he was too small. His mom held him in his life jacket while he grabbed the rope. She lifted him up as if he were swinging and carefully dipped him in the water. He giggled every time.

Later that evening, when we’d all dried off and gone inside, Clay ran after you in his diaper while you, Patrick, and I played hide-and-seek. Clay laughed and you screamed when Patrick jumped out from behind a door. He followed you under the bed when I told you it would make a good hiding spot. And when you and Patrick sat down to read a book while your mom made dinner and your dad and Pops were outside investigating a broken water pump, Clay climbed up on the couch next to you and put his head on your shoulder. He looked up at you and smiled. He was, as always, so happy to be by your side.

Your Grandma Alex, who wasn’t at the cabin that day but soon came to comfort us, told me once that she and Pops decided to buy that river house because they wanted their grandkids to grow up spending time there together among the cypress trees, swimming, kayaking, swinging on that rope, and jumping into the great Guadalupe. I’m so glad you and Clay got to do that. And though he won’t be able to play with you again, I know that by the time you can read this, you’ll have had many more adventures and a lot of fun, thanks to your courageous Mama.