Leah used the footprints she'd left to get back, trying to step as carefully as possible into the existing holes in the suckery mud. When she reached the weir, she paused, stuck her hand in the chilly ditchwater, tensed with the effort of keeping it still and steady while strong current swirled and pressed around it, tried to move it, carry it downstream. The water had risen, was already flowing up and over the concrete box. Leah found the wheel, leaned her whole weight into it, but could not force it open. She kept shoving against it, but her feet slipped out from under her. She fell twice so hard her shoulder made divots in the soggy mud. Toward the trucks, toward safety, she saw Elmer hunched and shivering where she'd left him, and then she felt everything at once. Guilt for making an injured Elmer wait. Fear that she'd lose control, topple into the water, disappear into it. Frustrated rage that she was not, in the end, strong enough to open the gate, to save the site.

“You get it open?” Elmer asked when she reached him, mud-covered and bedraggled.

“Stuck.” Leah put her hands over her face in an effort to preserve her own dignity, but it backfired. She'd rubbed mud all over her own stupid self.

They limped, slowly, toward the trucks. Elmer said, almost tenderly, “You did all you could.” He lifted himself, gingerly, into her passenger seat. The truck radio announced that the schools were closing. Buses that had dropped children off just a couple of hours ago had been sent to deliver them back home. The blockade officers agreed to park Elmer's truck on higher ground.

Elmer called Bobby, told him to meet them at the hospital. “Who's got your boy?” he asked, poking a finger at his phone screen.

“Day care,” she said. “Guess I have to go pick him up.”

Bobby met them at the hospital, and he and Leah helped Elmer into a wheelchair. Leah was anxious to get to Tyler now, to have her boy within range of her care and protection. Bobby put a hand on her shoulder. “I don't know what would have happened if you weren't there.” Leah felt for a minute Bobby wanted something more from the moment, something that might have been, but couldn't possibly have been, a hug.

Elmer looked at her too. “You did good today, Leah. You did your best.”