There was stuff floating in it, too. Wood and branches and clothes and bags and newspapers and shoes and garbage and things I couldn’t identify. There were little swirls of these things, as if they were about to be sucked down in some whirlpool. But then they just bunched up together and broke apart and started floating away again.

“My God,” I said. “Mi fucking dios.”

Over an alley as we were, we couldn’t see too far beyond the edges of it. Jaden started climbing up the ladder to the silver-painted roof. The ladder went down to the second floor, but no farther. I could see him climbing up above me, just his ass and legs moving up and up. I started up after him, my knees shivering just a little bit in the cold and maybe because heights aren’t especially my thing. The last bit of the ladder, where I had to stand on the top and scrabble up to the roof without holding on to much, made me feel queasy. But I made it. I was up there and we were looking down.

All around us was water. It made the buildings look like Legos floating in a bathtub. The sun was shining down, but the air was cold and the slight wind still blowing up off the water was colder. Around us we saw groups of people here and there standing on their roofs, waving over at us. I thought to myself these must be the people who are left. Not just left after the storm, but the kind of people who were like us who were still left in the neighborhood, left behind by what had been happening all around us. People who’d been forgotten.

Off in the distance, we heard the buzz of a motorboat heading down what had once been streets, but were now canals of water. There was a smell in the air like rotting, like shit, and I wondered what had overflowed—sewers or some kind of waste treatment facility, or what.

Yet despite the smell, and the garbage, and the looks of fear I could see even in eyes that were buildings away, there was a kind of peace, too. A kind of stillness that made everything seem okay. The way the sun was reflecting in the water and off the buildings as it rose up in the sky. The blue of that sky itself, so untroubled and serene. I almost forgot where we were for a moment.

“Holy shit,” Jaden said, and where we were came back to me full force.

“What do we do?” I said. “We can’t even walk out the door. The water’s too high. The entire first floor must be flooded.”

We wandered around the rooftop from edge to edge. It was an island now. Around us, people were waving their arms at us, maybe hoping we had some kind of answers that they didn’t. I looked across the alley at a short, brown-skinned man in a yellow baseball cap. I waved back at him.