Hand over hand we started to haul in the fire hose. More and more hose was pulled through our hands, and then at last the woman splashed into view! She was crying and sputtering, and as my father grabbed her she started thrashing her arms and legs and scratching. He spun her around, pinning her arms against her sides, but she started screaming.

“You’re safe!” he yelled. “You’re safe now!”

She kept screaming and—

“I’ll bring you to your baby. He’s all right.”

She stopped struggling. She stopped screaming.

My father led her up the stairs. The fire hose was still tied around her waist. She stumbled, and I reached out and took her other arm. We reached the second floor and she saw her baby and burst from us, the fire hose trailing behind her as she ran. She scooped the baby from my mother and wrapped her arms around it, clinging to it with all her might.

“You did it,” my mother said to my father. “You saved her.”

“Not me. Him.” He pointed at me. “To come up with an idea like the fire hose under these conditions is nothing short of brilliant.” He put an arm around my shoulder. “But if you ever put yourself at risk like that again, I’ll personally drown you myself, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

He wrapped both arms around me and squeezed me so tightly that I had trouble drawing a breath. He was shaking…or was it me?…or was it both of us? A third set of arms—my mother’s—wrapped around us.

“I need both of you to stay here now,” my mother said. “I can’t risk losing either of you…I was so scared.”

“We’re okay. Let’s take care of the people who are here.”

He went over and untied the fire hose from the woman.

“Danke…danke sehr…thank you,” she said. “You…you saved”—she gestured to her child—“mein sohn and me.”

“It was nothing,” my father said. “We just did what we had to do.”

Now that she was sitting there and everything had calmed down, I knew I recognized her. I’d seen her and the baby and her husband on the beach, the little one always under an umbrella, protected from the sun. I knew what her husband, the baby’s father, looked like. He was tall and had blond hair and he couldn’t have been any older than she was—maybe in his early thirties. I knew they were German and friendly. The only thing that mattered now, though, I didn’t know. Where was he?

For the first time I noticed that there were other people in the corridor. Some were dressed and dry while others looked like drowned rats. They had cuts and scrapes and—I looked at my own arm and saw that it was all scraped. I just hadn’t noticed. It didn’t bother me but it looked ugly, looked like it should be hurting. Great, something to look forward to.

My father walked over to the railing and I followed. Below was an ocean of water. The patio, the beach, the pool were all under water, all gone, disappeared, as if they’d never been there at all. The tree where the woman had been clinging—where we’d been clinging—was gone. Almost all of the trees and bushes that had provided shade for the pool were either under water or washed away completely. For the first time I looked up from the water and to the hotel itself. There were dozens and dozens of people standing on balconies, looking down. Some of them had cameras or video recorders. I wondered if what we had done had been captured on tape. Maybe I should have smiled or waved…how bizarre. People were still snapping pictures.