The Deluge

‘The flood is coming.’

Philomena continued to stir the porridge, barely registering her seventy four year old patient’s words. Mrs. Gomez was one of the thirty elderly people under Philomena’s and her husband’s care. Seven years ago, the couple had turned their large seaside bungalow into a home for the elderly. Their only son had just been killed fighting in the war, and they could not think of what else to do with the large house. Even though Milton was hardly ever home during his last years, the emptiness became tangible knowing he was no more. Philomena had been a nurse and her husband, Greg, an ex-policeman, who was always well known for his philanthropy. In a town which seemed to have no dearth of unwanted oldies the ‘Paradise Old Age Home’ became something of a landmark over the years.

‘The flood, Mena! The flood!’

Mrs. Gomez spent her ample free time either reading her Bible or predicting deaths. While this used to alarm Philomena considerably in the beginning, Greg’s constant reassurances soon put her at ease. It was, one had to admit, rather unlikely that they be killed by a massive termite infestation (‘The insects, Mena! They will make powder of our bones!’) or that their long time gardener, Gooch, poison their lettuce (‘Mena, don’t feed me those. That man Gooch, I saw.. I saw him….’) or even that the unusually warm summer was due to the underwater volcano that was slowly getting ready to erupt. The last allegation, Philomena and Greg had a nice laugh about at dinner. One had to admit Mrs. Gomez had an enviable imagination. She must have been a good writer, or perhaps a bad journalist in her better days, before they found her alone and hungry on the beach a year back.

Thinking about that started to make Philomena feel bad about ignoring her attention-starved patient for so long. She took the bowl of porridge to Mrs. Gomez, sat by her side while the latter talked animatedly about her four grandchildren who would visit her in the weekend. They couldn’t make it the past fifty times but Mrs. Gomez was positive that this Saturday was the one.

After helping her into bed, Philomena headed out with Greg for their nightly seaside stroll. Every night the sound of the waves, the smell of the sand and the feel of the shells beneath their feet gave the Smiths some kind of closure, till the wounds opened up again the following day. They usually talked about their patients, wondered out loud if Mr. Kumar would survive his cancer, if Mrs. Clancy was getting into her drug habit again, if they needed fresh bedsheets. Some nights they talked about their son, timid in his boyhood, how Greg said the Army would make a man out of him and how he never came back. The conversations, laced with heavy nostalgia, but forcibly interspersed with daily trivialities often proved overwhelming for Philomena. She found herself drowning in a sea of loneliness, regret and sadness that was so familiar yet still so raw in her heart. More than the loss of her beloved son, Philomena felt for her husband, that stoic man; how much longer could he stay strong? Being surrounded by people more helpless and lonely than themselves did not seem to help.

Philomena was silently sobbing into the strong arms of her husband, when suddenly they noticed a wobbling figure in the distance. She squinted and gasped when she recognized her. It was Mrs. Gomez flailing her arms and running towards them as fast as her arthritic knees would let her. She was wailing ‘The flood, the flood!’
Philomena’s heart resumed beating. Thank God it was just one of Gomez’s eccentricities, and not something disastrous. She turned around, ready to exchange a weary smile with her husband but found his back facing her instead. She adjusted her thick glasses to see why he was staring open-mouthed at the sea. Her blood went cold.

A few hundred feet away was the biggest wave she had ever seen in her fifty five years, rushing towards them. The fear that had instinctively enveloped Philomena’s senses suddenly gave way to a sense of peace. She held Greg’s hand tight and looked into his eyes one last time.