Part 5 – Paperwork, Promises, and Flood Warnings
The next morning, Walter woke up before the alarm that nobody had set.
He shuffled into the kitchen in his robe and slippers, breathing harder than usual, and stood at the window like he was watching the weather channel even though the curtains were still drawn.
Lisa poured coffee and fussed with pills, lining them up like little soldiers on a paper towel.
She kept glancing at the clock on the stove, at her phone, at the folder on the table with the memory care brochure peeking out.
Maddie sat on the other side of the table, stirring cereal that had already gone soggy.
“I’m just going to look,” Lisa said finally, breaking the silence in half.
“Tour the place, ask questions. It doesn’t mean we’re making any decisions today.”
She said it like a line from one of those pamphlets, something printed on glossy paper and handed out in waiting rooms.
Walter snorted.
“People don’t tour funeral homes for fun either,” he muttered. “You walk through, you breathe the disinfectant, you leave with somebody’s business card and a headache. Then everyone pretends it was just research.”
Maddie’s spoon clinked against the bowl.
“So don’t go,” she blurted. “We can take care of you here. I can take care of you. I can keep an eye on you, I swear.”
Lisa closed her eyes for a second.
When she opened them, they were shiny but steady.
“Baby, you’re sixteen,” she said softly. “You’re supposed to worry about grades and crushes and whether your jeans look okay, not whether your grandpa remembers where the bathroom is.”
“I can do both,” Maddie shot back, her voice cracking.
She shoved her bowl away, milk sloshing over the side.
“It was one storm. One night. We saved him. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
I sat between them, my head moving back and forth like I was watching a slow, painful game of tennis.
The air smelled like burnt toast, cold coffee, and the sharp electricity of hurt feelings.
Underneath it all was the faint, persistent scent of river mud that clung to Walter’s skin no matter how many showers he took.
Walter cleared his throat.
“Let your mama look, kid,” he said, his voice calm in a way that made everyone else go still.
“If the place is awful, she’ll come back and say so. If it’s… less awful, at least we know what we’re arguing about.”
Lisa shot him a surprised glance.
“You’re not mad?” she asked. “About me going without you?”
He shrugged one shoulder.
“Last time someone else picked where I stayed, I woke up in a military barracks with thirty snoring strangers,” he said. “Didn’t get much say in that either. Least this time someone who loves me is doing the scouting.”
He reached down and scratched my head.
“Buddy will keep me out of trouble while you’re gone, won’t you?” he added.
I wagged my tail because that part, at least, I knew how to do.
After Lisa left—with too many apologies and not nearly enough answers—Walter shuffled to his recliner.
He sank into it like a ship into harbor, groaning softly as his knees bent.
Maddie lurked in the doorway, arms folded, eyes red.
“You could tell her no,” she muttered.
“Just say you refuse to go anywhere. They can’t force you, right?”
Walter stared at the blank television screen.
His reflection looked back at him: thinner than before, hair whiter, eyes older than his face.
“Legally?” he said slowly. “I don’t know. Practically? If I keep trying to drown myself in the river like a fool, I’m not sure what anybody can or can’t do anymore.”
He patted the armrest.
“Come sit,” he said. “Bring the dog. He makes us both handsomer.”
We pushed into the room together, Maddie dropping onto the couch with a dramatic sigh while I parked myself between Walter’s feet.
He rubbed his toes against my ribs through his slippers, an old habit that meant he was thinking hard.
“I keep seeing it,” he said quietly. “Not the hospital, not the water. The other thing.”
Maddie wiped her nose with her sleeve.
“What other thing?” she asked.
“That log,” he said.
“The one they pulled us up against. It wasn’t just any old hunk of wood. I swear, if I’d had more air in my lungs, I could’ve read our names on it.”
He stared past us, eyes clouding and clearing in turns.
“Me and Mike. We carved our names into a drift log down there one summer. Said when I retired, we’d drag it onto the bank, build a dock off it, start a camp. Teach kids how not to be idiots around water. Maybe then their parents would sleep a little better.”
Maddie’s brows knit together.
“You never told me that,” she said.
Her voice had lost some of its sharpness.
“Lots of things I didn’t tell you,” Walter replied.
“Some I forgot on purpose. Some I forgot because my brain sprung leaks.”
He tapped his temple lightly. “But that one came back when the river was trying to send me packing. Funny timing.”
He bent forward, grunting, and grabbed my collar.
His fingers were clumsy but insistent.
“You were there, Buddy,” he said. “You felt it under us, didn’t you? That wasn’t the river trying to take me. That was the river reminding me I never finished my job.”
Maddie looked from him to me, chewing her lip.
“You really think you could do something like that now?” she asked. “Start a camp? With your memory and… and everything?”
Walter smiled, and for a second it was the easy grin from the photo on the wall.
“I may forget what day it is,” he said, “but I haven’t forgotten how to tie a lifejacket, or how to tell when the current’s lying to you. Besides, camps aren’t about one guy barking orders. They’re about a bunch of people pulling in the same direction.”
He winked at me.
“And a good dog,” he added. “Every decent camp needs a dog.”
The front door opened and closed again hours later.
Lisa’s steps dragged more than usual as she came down the hall.
She smelled like antiseptic, lemon cleaner, and the fake lavender they use in places that want to seem nicer than they are.
“How was it?” Walter asked, before she could speak.
His voice was even, but his fingers tightened in my fur again.
Lisa looked older than she had that morning.
There were new lines at the corners of her mouth, and her shoulders drooped as if the building she’d walked through had climbed on and hitched a ride home.
“It was… clean,” she said slowly. “Bright. They had a big fish tank in the lobby and a piano in the common room.”
She sat down at the table without taking off her coat.
“Residents can bring personal items,” she continued. “Photos, blankets, their favorite chair. They do music therapy, memory games, little exercise classes. The staff seemed kind. At least the ones they let me meet.”
Maddie hovered in the doorway, arms crossed.
“Did they smell like pee?” she asked bluntly.
Teenagers don’t always know how to aim their questions softer.
Lisa winced.
“No,” she said. “They didn’t. It wasn’t… depressing. Just…”
She searched for a word and couldn’t find one that fit.
“Contained,” Walter supplied.
He’d seen enough places like that on TV dramas and in old friends’ stories.
Lisa nodded reluctantly.
“Yeah,” she murmured. “Contained. Doors that buzz when you open them. Hallways that loop around so people don’t get stuck somewhere they can’t find their way out of. They have a garden courtyard, but it’s fenced. You can see the sky, but not the street.”
Her hand flattened on the folder like she was trying to smooth out all the complicated feelings stuffed inside it.
“They said he’d be safe there,” she said softly.
“They said after the near drowning, they’d be more comfortable if we moved fast. Before a judge decides we’re not taking this seriously enough.”
Maddie’s face twisted.
“So that’s it?” she snapped. “River tries to kill him once and suddenly strangers think they know what’s best for our family?”
“Strangers didn’t pull his soaked body out of the water,” Lisa replied, sharper than she meant to.
Her voice cracked halfway through and she took a shaky breath.
“Strangers didn’t spend the night in a plastic chair waiting to hear if his lungs would keep working. That was me. That was you. I’m exhausted, Maddie. I’m scared all the time.”
She turned toward Walter, eyes pleading.
“I don’t want to put you in a home,” she said. “I don’t. But I also don’t want to bury you. And those feel like the options everyone keeps offering.”
Walter studied her for a long moment.
Then he looked at the brochure still sticking out of the folder.
The picture on the front showed an old man laughing with a young boy over a board game, both of them too perfect to be anyone I recognized.
“Did they have a river?” he asked quietly.
Lisa blinked. “What?”
“A river,” he repeated. “Lake, pond, mud puddle big enough to float a twig. Any water that wasn’t just coming out of a faucet?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Just that garden and the fish tank. And some nature photos on the walls.”
He nodded, as if confirming something to himself.
“I believe you when you say they were kind,” he said. “I believe you when you say it’s safer than here. But if I go in there, the part of me that still remembers the real river is going to howl like this mutt when you forget to feed him.”
I thumped my tail halfheartedly; even I knew this wasn’t joke time.
“So let’s make a deal,” Walter continued.
“You do whatever legal mumbo jumbo you need to keep them from dragging me out of here in handcuffs. Guardianship, power of attorney, all those phrases that make my head hurt. In return, we try something first. Something that makes the river less of an enemy and more of… what it used to be.”
Maddie leaned forward.
“Are you talking about the camp?” she whispered.
Walter smiled, small but real.
“Why not?” he said. “Not a big fancy thing with counselors and matching T-shirts. Just… a few kids from the neighborhood. Maybe from church or the community center. Couple weekends a month. Teach them what I know. Use whatever time my brain gives me before it clocks out.”
Lisa stared at him like he’d suggested a road trip to the moon.
“Dad, you almost drowned,” she reminded him. “You’re on an inhaler now. You get winded walking to the mailbox. And you want to be responsible for other people’s kids near the same river that nearly killed you?”
He shrugged, a familiar stubborn tilt of the chin that said the conversation wasn’t over.
“That river didn’t almost kill me,” he said. “My confusion did. Ignorance is dangerous. Knowledge isn’t.”
He patted my head. “Besides, I’ll have a lifeguard.”
I barked once, more from habit than agreement, but the sound broke some of the tension.
Maddie laughed through her tears, a wet, hiccuping sound.
“Camp River-something,” she said. “Camp… Riverlight. That sounds cheesy enough to work.”
Lisa rubbed her temples as if she could press the idea back out of her skull.
“Even if I wanted to say yes,” she said slowly, “we don’t have money. We don’t have insurance that covers ‘grandpa’s passion project.’ We have a mortgage, my two jobs, and now whatever bills the home health nurse sends.”
Walter’s eyes softened.
“I’m not asking you to build a resort,” he replied.
“Just don’t shut the door on it yet. Let me talk to Pastor Jim, or the guy at the bait shop, or that lady at the community center who’s always begging for volunteers. Maybe they’ll laugh me out the door. Maybe they’ll see something else.”
He reached for her hand, his fingers thin but warm.
“Sign whatever you need to keep them from calling you negligent,” he said quietly. “I won’t fight you on that. You’ve carried enough alone. But don’t sign my whole life away to a building with a fish tank until we see if there’s still some use for me by that water.”
Lisa’s face crumpled, then steadied.
“I can’t promise anything,” she whispered. “Not yet. I need to think. I need to make sure this isn’t just you chasing ghosts.”
Walter nodded.
“Fair,” he said. “Ghosts don’t need life jackets. Kids do.”
That night, after everyone had gone to bed, he sat in his chair with a notebook on his lap.
The house was quiet except for the hum of the fridge and the distant rush of the river outside town, swollen but receding.
He wrote slowly, his handwriting wobbling but determined.
I lay at his feet, listening to the scratch of pen on paper.
Occasionally he would pause and ask me a question like, “You think kids still like hot dogs, Buddy?” or “We’ll need extra towels, right?” and I would answer with a tail wag because that seemed to be enough.
On the top of the page, in uneven letters, he wrote:
“Camp Riverlight – Ideas Before I Forget.”
As the ink dried, I understood that this was more than a list.
It was a line he was throwing out into the current, hoping something bigger than fear would grab on before the system, the sickness, and the slow, persistent pull of the river finished what they’d started.
Part 6 – When the River Calls His Name
The week after the river tried to take him, Walter started acting like there was a clock ticking somewhere only he could hear, and everyone else was pretending not to hear it.
Every time he picked up his notebook and stared at the words “Camp Riverlight – Ideas Before I Forget,” his heart beat faster under my chin like it was racing the ink.
We fell into a strange new routine.
Home health nurses came twice a week now, smelling like hand sanitizer and laundry detergent, checking his blood pressure and lungs and asking Lisa questions with complicated names and simple answers.
“Any confusion?” they’d say, and Lisa would laugh once, short and sharp, because how do you measure that with a cuff and a clipboard?
Walter hated the stethoscope cold on his chest, but he tolerated it.
He joked with the nurses, asked about their kids, asked if they’d ever roasted marshmallows by a river.
When they left, he would look at me and mutter, “Nice girls, but none of them can tie a proper fishing knot.”
One afternoon, Maddie came home from school with a flyer crumpled in her hand.
She dropped her backpack by the door and waved the paper like a white flag that didn’t mean surrender.
“They’re doing sign-ups at the community center,” she said. “For summer programs. Sports, art, coding… maybe this is where we start.”
Walter squinted at the flyer.
His finger traced the list of activities, leaving a faint grease streak from the ointment the nurse had rub on his hands.
“Don’t see ‘Old Man Teaching Kids Not to Drown,’” he said. “Think they’d add it?”
“I think they’d at least listen,” Maddie replied, stubborn hope lighting her face.
She glanced at Lisa, who was sorting mail at the table, envelopes with red stamps lurking under the pile.
“If we go talk to them, Mom, will you come? Please?”
Lisa hesitated.
She looked at the stack of bills, at the pamphlets about memory care, at her phone where unanswered texts from work blinked like tiny warning lights.
Then she took a breath.
“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go see if the world still has room for one more crazy idea.”
The community center was a low brick building that smelled like gym socks, floor cleaner, and popcorn from a machine that hadn’t been cleaned properly since sometime around when Walter’s hair started to gray.
Kids ran down the hallway in mismatched sneakers, chasing a basketball that bounced off walls and grown-ups’ patience.
They met with a woman in a navy polo shirt behind an office door with a poster of smiling children taped crookedly to it.
Her name tag said DIRECTOR in small black letters; her coffee breath said she hadn’t had time for lunch.
She smiled at Walter the way nurses did—warm, practiced, with a layer of worry underneath.
“So,” she said, folding her hands. “You want to start a… camp?”
“Not on your dime,” Walter replied.
“On mine. Or what’s left of it. Just thinking… a handful of kids, maybe ones whose parents work late or can’t afford the fancy lakeside place out of town. Teach them river safety, basic camping skills. Fish, first aid, know the difference between adventure and danger. That kind of thing.”
He talked slower than he used to, but when he got going, something in him straightened.
He described little day trips, hot dogs on sticks, lifejackets lined up like bright soldier ants along the bank.
He even mentioned bringing in a guest to talk about wildlife, pausing to ask me if I knew any raccoons who did public speaking.
The director listened, her eyes softening with each detail.
“I love the heart behind it,” she said finally. “God knows we need more programs that keep kids off screens and outside, especially in summer. And you obviously know the river.”
She hesitated, the word “but” hovering in the air between us like a mosquito that hadn’t bitten yet.
Then she sighed.
“But… I have to think about liability. Insurance. Background checks for anyone working with kids, especially around water. We’d need certified lifeguards, staff ratios, emergency protocols. And you mentioned you had a… cognitive diagnosis?”
“Dementia,” Walter said plainly.
“I forget things. Names, dates, sometimes where I put my coffee. I don’t forget what drowning looks like.”
“I’m not doubting your experience,” she said quickly.
“It’s just… if something happened, the question wouldn’t be whether you had a good heart. It’d be why we cleared a program led by someone with a documented condition like yours near a body of water. Lawyers don’t care about campfire stories.”
Lisa’s shoulders tightened.
“I’d be there,” she put in. “And my daughter. We’d have younger, able-bodied people present. We’re not talking about dumping a bunch of kids on him alone with a canoe.”
The director bit her lip.
“I can talk to our board,” she offered. “Maybe there’s a way to do a modified program. Classroom-based water safety? A guest-speaker series where you share your stories without actually taking kids to the river? We have a room and a projector. That might be safer for everyone.”
Walter’s eyes dulled at the edges.
“Tell kids about the river without letting them touch it,” he murmured. “Like teaching them to ride a bike by describing the spokes.”
“It’d still be something,” Maddie said quickly, reaching for his arm.
“We could decorate the room. Show pictures. Maybe a field trip later, with lifeguards. Baby steps.”
I watched Walter wrestle with the choice—take a small, sanitized piece of what he’d imagined, or hold out for something that looked more like the camp he saw when he closed his eyes.
His jaw worked, the muscles twitching.
Part of him was already standing on the bank handing out lifejackets. Another part was lying in a memory care bed staring at a fish tank.
“Talk to your board,” he said finally, voice rough.
“If they don’t laugh you out of the room, I’ll come tell stories. Might as well put this leaky brain to work while it still floats.”
On the way home, the car was too quiet.
Maddie stared out the window, fingers drumming on her knee.
Lisa drove with that too-tight grip again, her thoughts louder than the radio she’d forgotten to turn on.
“It’s a start,” Maddie said eventually.
Her voice sounded like she was arguing with herself.
“They didn’t say no. They just… said ‘let us check.’ That’s almost a yes, right?”
“Or a polite delay,” Lisa murmured.
“But you’re right. It’s not a door slamming. It’s… a door on a chain.”
That night, after Walter went to bed, Lisa sat at the kitchen table with her laptop open.
The blue light made her look tired and unreal, like a ghost haunting her own life.
She clicked and scrolled, sometimes snorting softly, sometimes wiping at her eyes.
I padded over and put my head in her lap.
She startled, then scratched behind my ears automatically, eyes still on the screen.
“Did you know there are whole forums for people like me?” she whispered.
“Caregivers. They call themselves that, not daughters or sons. Just… caregivers. Like that’s their whole job description.”
She read out loud, half to herself, half to me.
Posts about bathing resistant parents.
About wandering in the night.
About hiding car keys and grieving someone who’s still breathing.
“Listen to this,” she said.
“‘Sometimes I feel like the system gives me two choices: be a martyr and keep them home until I implode, or be a monster and put them in a facility and live with the guilt.’”
Her hand tightened in my fur.
“I’m so tired of feeling like any choice I make is the wrong one, Buddy,” she whispered.
“If I help him chase this camp idea and he gets hurt, they’ll say I’m irresponsible. If I shut it down and move him to memory care, my own kid will look at me like I killed him before he died.”
My tail thumped weakly.
I didn’t understand insurance, liability, or online forums.
But I understood the way her shoulders shook silently when she thought everyone else was asleep.
The next morning, the woman with the clipboard called.
Her voice came through the speaker phone on the counter, cheerful and firm at the same time.
“Hi, Ms. Thompson. Just following up. We have a room opening in our memory care unit next Tuesday. Given Mr. Harris’s recent hospitalization, we can prioritize his placement if you’re ready to move forward. If not, I’m afraid we’ll have to offer it to someone else on the list.”
Lisa’s eyes flicked to Walter, who was in his chair, watching a rerun of a show he’d already forgotten seeing.
He laughed at a joke a second before it happened, some tiny piece of his brain remembering the punchline even when the rest of him didn’t.
“How long would we have to wait if we pass?” Lisa asked, voice thin.
“Hard to say,” the woman replied. “Weeks, months… sometimes longer. There’s a lot of need. And the next opening might not be in a room near the garden. This one would be a great fit.”
Great fit.
Like a collar that didn’t chafe, or a crate that was just big enough to stand and turn around in.
“I’ll… I’ll call you back tonight,” Lisa said.
“I have to talk with my family.”
They hung up.
Silence poured into the kitchen, thicker than any river water.
That evening, the three of them sat at the table with me under it, like some furry centerpiece.
No one ate much.
The food tasted like cardboard to them; to me, it smelled like meatloaf, but even I didn’t ask for scraps.
“They have a room,” Lisa said finally.
“The kind with a window that looks out on a courtyard. They said you could bring your recliner, Dad. Your radio. Pictures. They’ll help you get dressed, remind you about meds. There’s staff there all the time. You wouldn’t be alone.”
Walter cut his peas in half with his fork, even though nobody cared whether he ate them neatly.
“They have a river?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“But they have a fountain. And a bird feeder. And… and they won’t let you wander into a flood, or forget the stove is on.”
Maddie clenched her fists on the table.
“How fast do they want an answer?” she asked.
“By nine tomorrow,” Lisa replied.
“If we say yes, we move him in next week. If we say no, we go to the bottom of the waitlist. And if anything else happens before then…”
She didn’t finish.
Walter looked at his daughter, then at his granddaughter, then down at me.
For once, his eyes were completely clear, every piece of him present in the room.
“I don’t want to go,” he said simply.
“But I also don’t want to be the reason you two spend the rest of your lives in hospital waiting rooms and courtrooms. If saying yes keeps them off your backs, maybe that’s what we do.”
Maddie slammed her palm on the table.
“That’s not fair,” she burst out.
“You’re not a burden, you’re my grandpa. You taught me how to skip rocks and how to change a tire. A place with puzzles and sing-alongs isn’t… it’s not you.”
Lisa rubbed her temples.
“Maybe it doesn’t have to be forever,” she said, grasping at a middle ground.
“Maybe we move him in, get some support, and if the camp idea works out and he stabilizes, we revisit. It doesn’t have to be a one-way door.”
We all knew doors have a way of closing behind you, but nobody said it.
Instead, Walter nodded slowly.
“Okay,” he said. “One condition.”
Lisa blinked.
“What could you possibly bargain for right now?” she asked, half laughing, half crying.
“Before you hand me over to the folks with name tags,” he replied, “we give Camp Riverlight one real chance. Not a brochure, not a board meeting. A day by that river with kids and lifejackets and hot dogs. If it’s a disaster, I’ll walk into that memory care place myself. If it’s not… then maybe we talk about other ways to keep me and the river on speaking terms.”
Silence again, but this time it crackled instead of suffocating.
Maddie grabbed the idea like a stick thrown into water.
“We can do that,” she said.
“I can design a flyer. We can ask the church, the school counselor, Mom’s coworkers. Just a small group. We keep it safe, we document everything. Show the caseworker we’re not reckless, we’re prepared.”
Lisa looked like someone had handed her a live wire.
Hope and terror flickered across her face at the same time.
“I don’t know if we can pull that off in a week,” she whispered.
“But I know this: if I say no without trying, I’m going to hear about it from you two until I die. And probably from him even after he forgets why he’s mad.”
She forced a shaky smile.
“Fine. One trial day. Then we reassess.”
Walter leaned back, exhausted from the effort of negotiating his own future.
He reached down, resting his hand on my head.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a deadline, Buddy,” he murmured.
“Funny thing about deadlines—they sound a lot like the roar of a river when you’re standing too close.”
I pressed closer, feeling his pulse thump against my skull.
Somewhere outside, beyond the houses and the streetlights and the community center that didn’t know what to do with us yet, the real river kept moving in the dark.
I had the sudden, heavy feeling that before anyone pitched a tent or lit a campfire, it would try to claim Walter one more time—and this time, it wouldn’t wait for permission from any calendar or clipboard.