“Yeah, me too. How close is the next town?” Eddie asks.

I peer over the edge, watching them upside down. Ellie pulls out the atlas. She runs her finger along the thick black line she sharpied in before we left.

“Las Cruces,” she says. She opens the map app on her phone to double-check. “Twelve miles. Can we make it that far?”

For the next ten miles, it feels as if the motor home itself is holding its breath. I climb down to the couch and watch the rain through the side window and trade anxious glances with Ellie. Eddie seems intently focused and, thankfully, calm, although I have a feeling it’s a very willful calm that will only last until we’re safely parked and he can stop driving. Ruth has her earbuds in and is watching the rain too, but she doesn’t exactly seem scared. She’s watching the storm like it annoys her.

A tree branch flies across the road in front of us, missing our windshield by just a couple feet. Ellie gasps so loud it’s almost a scream.

“How much longer?” says Eddie. His teeth are clenched now.

The wipers are hardly keeping up with the deluge at all anymore, and we’re down to under twenty-five miles an hour. The radio announcer keeps making his monsoon announcement, telling everyone on the road to be careful, and telling everyone else to stay inside. Towns are beginning to lose power. We pass a line of cop cars and a rolled minivan on our left.

We finally see the Las Cruces exit. Eddie pulls off the freeway and the street goes down through a ravine so filled with water I have doubts about whether the RV can cross it, but we do, and then Eddie points us uphill. I see a flock of crows diving into the swaying branches of a desert willow.

“Where should we stop?” Ellie asks.

“I don’t know,” says Eddie. Both of their voices are just a bit loud, as if the storm is inside the RV, and they have to shout to hear each other.

We pass a gas station and a four-story stucco Holiday Inn. We pass several auto shops. Everything is so flat and treeless, except for a tall and jagged range of mountains to our right. And now it is all filling with water like a swimming pool.

There’s a Walmart up ahead with a huge parking lot. “Let’s stop there,” Ellie says. “We need to get off the road.”

Eddie nods. Just a few more yards. We turn into the Walmart parking lot and Eddie stops the RV. As he shifts into park and shuts off the engine, the pounding and swishing sound of the rain gets louder. For a full minute we all wait in silence, listening to the raging outside.