Part 7 – The Escape Before Sunrise
In our house, you can always tell when a deadline is getting close by how fast the humans stop pretending they’re fine.
The week before “Move Grandpa to Memory Care Tuesday” and “First and Possibly Only Camp Riverlight Saturday” was like living inside a shaken soda can.
Maddie turned the dining table into a war room.
There were markers, sticky notes, a laptop, and three empty coffee mugs that weren’t even hers.
In the middle sat the first draft of a flyer, the words splashed across the top in crooked blue letters: RIVER SAFETY DAY WITH GRANDPA WALTER & BUDDY THE CAMP DOG.
Walter loved it.
He leaned over the table, squinting, his fingers tracing the letters like they were carved in wood.
“Make sure you put ‘lifejackets required,’” he said. “Big. At the top. If we’re gonna get in trouble, it won’t be because some kid shows up looking like a popsicle stick.”
Maddie chewed her marker cap.
“Should we… say anything about the dementia?” she asked. “Like ‘Grandpa’s forgetful but supervised’? Or does that just sound weird and make people not show up?”
Lisa looked up from the stack of forms she was filling out for the memory care place.
Her eyes had the glazed focus of someone reading instructions in another language.
“If you mention it,” she said slowly, “people might feel better because we’re being honest. Or they might freak out and think I’m dragging their kids to a hazard.”
Walter snorted.
“Newsflash, Lisa,” he said. “The hazard is the river, not my brain. The whole point is to teach them that.”
He tapped the table. “Put ‘hosted by community center’ at the bottom. People trust logos.”
The community center director had called back two days after their meeting.
Her voice on the phone had been careful but, underneath, a little excited.
“Our board likes the idea of a pilot program,” she’d said.
“If we call it a ‘River Safety Family Day’ and make it part of our official schedule, we can put some liability under our umbrella. But we need certified staff present, and I want at least one trained water rescue professional on site.”
Lisa had clutched the phone tighter.
“You mean like a lifeguard?” she asked.
“Exactly. I reached out to the fire department,” the director replied.
“One of their water rescue guys lives near you. He was actually on the team that pulled your father-in-law out of the river. He remembers him.”
That part made Walter sit up straighter when she repeated it.
“About time I got to meet the fella who manhandled me out of my bath,” he muttered.
“Hope he knows I’m buying him a hot dog.”
So the plan took on shape:
The community center would handle sign-ups and waivers.
The fire department would send a rescue tech named Ray.
Walter would teach kids how to read currents from the bank only—no boats, no swimming, just lifejackets, ropes, and stories.
Stories I had heard a hundred times.
Stories that, in the right light, still shimmered.
Maddie posted a photo of the flyer on the local community page, the same one that had once hosted shaky cell phone footage of Walter gripping the river railing and shouting about a bus.
This time, she wrote a long caption:
“My grandpa almost drowned last week because dementia and a flooded river are a bad mix.
He’s spent his whole life near this water and wants one last chance to teach kids how to be safe around it.
We’ve got the community center and fire department on board.
If you’ve ever worried about your kid near the river, this is for you.”
The comments came fast.
Some people typed hearts and “Bless him.”
Others asked, “Is this safe?” and “Is this the same man from that video?” and “Will there be enough supervision?”
One person wrote, “Maybe he should be learning safety, not teaching it,” with a laughing emoji that made Lisa’s jaw tighten.
Before she could respond, another commenter replied, “Or maybe we don’t throw away elders just because their memory is broken. My cousin drowned in that river. I’ll be there with my kids.”
Humans argued with words; I lay under the table and let the vibrations of their feelings shake through the floor.
In between online battles and phone calls, there were quiet moments that cracked me open more than the loud ones.
One afternoon, I found Walter in his chair, the notebook open on his lap, the pen lying forgotten on the carpet.
He stared at the page like it had betrayed him.
The title was there: Camp Riverlight – Ideas Before I Forget.
But below it, the lines dissolved into scratchy half-letters, loops that never became words.
“You ever feel like you fall asleep in your own head and wake up somewhere else?” he asked me.
He sounded small.
“I know I had three good ideas this morning. I remember feeling proud of them. Now I can’t even remember the shape of them.”
I nudged the notebook with my nose.
On the margin, in his shaky handwriting, he had managed to write three clear words at some earlier moment:
NO KIDS ALONE.
“That’s enough for today,” I told him with a wag.
Not in words, but in the way I pressed my weight against his leg.
Sometimes three right words are more important than a whole paragraph.
Two days before the event, a man in a fire department T-shirt knocked on the door.
He smelled like river mud, metal, and the faint trace of smoke that clings to people who run toward sirens instead of away.
“Walter?” he said, stepping inside when invited.
“Name’s Ray. We met last week, but you were too busy not dying to remember me.”
Walter barked out a laugh.
“That so?” he replied. “Well, you did a lousy job if I’m still here complaining.”
They shook hands, the grip on both sides firmer than I’d expected.
Ray walked with them down to the river that afternoon, me trotting ahead, nose full of last week’s ghosts.
The bank was still raw and gouged from the flood, tree roots exposed like bones.
“We’re keeping kids up here,” Ray said, planting his boots well back from the waterline.
He pulled a coil of rope and an orange throw bag from his pack.
“No one on that dock. No one in boats. We’ll mark a line with cones—this side ‘lesson,’ that side ‘trouble.’”
He looked at Walter. “You okay with that, sir?”
Walter scanned the water, his eyes narrowed.
I could see him weighing pride against pragmatism, memory against the new, unwelcome awareness of his limits.
“Yeah,” he said finally.
“I don’t need to put a kid where I just almost checked out. We can teach a lot from dirt.”
He pointed to a knot in the current where twigs spun in tight circles. “See that? That’s a low-key troublemaker. I can talk for an hour about that spot alone.”
Ray nodded, satisfied.
“We’ll bring extra lifejackets, first-aid kit, radios,” he said. “You bring your stories and that dog. Between us, we’ll send kids home more scared of undercurrents than monsters. That’s a good thing.”
That night, I watched Lisa pack a tote bag like she was going on a month-long trip instead of a four-hour event.
Snacks, hand sanitizer, sunscreen, printed name tags, a stack of waivers.
Her phone buzzed with a reminder from the memory care coordinator: “Just confirming tomorrow 9 PM is the latest to accept the room.”
She stared at the screen for a long time, thumb hovering.
Then she turned the phone facedown.
Maddie came in with a stack of cheap glow-stick bracelets.
“Kids love these,” she said. “We can give them out when we talk about visibility. Like, ‘See? You want to be this easy to spot near water.’”
Her eyes glittered with a hope that scared me more than her fear had.
Later, when the lights were off and the house breathed its slow night-breath, Walter didn’t sleep.
I felt him get up, shuffle to the window, pull the curtain back.
“Can’t believe they’re actually letting me do this,” he whispered.
He didn’t know I was watching from my bed.
“I thought my last job in this life was going to be not setting the microwave on fire.”
He turned and saw me.
“Camp director,” he said, almost to himself. “For one day. Beats bingo.”
In the gray just before sunrise, birds argued outside the bedroom window.
The digital clock glowed 5:11 a.m.
Humans were still in their beds, tangled in dreams and exhaustion.
Walter wasn’t.
I heard the soft scrape of his bedroom door, the whisper of his slippers on the hallway floor.
My eyes snapped open.
The air smelled different—coffee not yet brewed, cool morning damp, and under it, something sharper: adrenaline.
He moved like someone trying not to wake a baby.
Careful, quiet, determined.
At the front door, he fumbled with the chain.
When it clicked, I padded over and nudged his calf with my nose.
He started, then chuckled softly.
“Morning, Buddy,” he murmured. “Figured you’d be ahead of me.”
He bent down, breath wheezing, and scratched between my ears.
“Camp directors get there before the campers,” he said. “Somebody’s gotta make sure the path’s not washed out, pick a good spot, talk to the river a bit before we introduce it to a bunch of kids who don’t know its moods.”
He was still in his pajama pants, but he’d pulled on his old work jacket, the one that smelled like grease and peppermint and hospital laundry.
His hands shook on the doorknob, but his eyes were clear and bright, tuned to a frequency that didn’t sound like confusion at all.
Behind us, the house slept.
Lisa’s soft snore drifted down the hall.
Maddie’s phone buzzed once with a late-night notification she’d forgotten to silence.
I could have barked.
I could have run to the bedrooms, jumped on the beds, made enough noise to wake everyone and stop this quiet jailbreak before it started.
Instead, I stood in the doorway beside him, every hair on my back lifted, torn between two loyalties that felt like one: keeping him safe, and keeping him whole.
He opened the door.
Cold morning air rushed in, carrying the faint, steady roar of water over rock.
No storm this time, no sirens, just the low, endless song of the river doing what it always does.
“Come on,” Walter said, stepping onto the porch.
“Let’s see if our classroom’s still there.”
He didn’t look back.
So I followed him down the steps, my paws whispering on the damp wood, the sunrise bleeding pink into the edges of the sky.
As we headed toward the path that led to the river, every instinct I had screamed that leaving without the others was wrong.
But another voice, older and quieter, said this might be the last time he walked down there as a man making his own choices, not as someone supervised on a schedule.
The grass was wet against my legs.
The air smelled like mud and new leaves and the barely-there memory of last week’s flood.
Ahead, the line of trees opened toward the sound of moving water.
I pressed closer to Walter’s leg, feeling the tremble in his muscles, the stubborn set of his jaw.
If the river was going to try to take him again before the kids even arrived, I was going to be right there, between him and the edge, whether I liked it or not.
Part 8 – The River of Memories
Morning at the river didn’t look anything like the night that almost killed him.
That was the first lie it told us.
Mist hung low over the water like someone had spread a thin blanket and forgotten to tuck in the corners.
Birds hopped along the muddy bank, yelling at each other about worms.
The sky was pink around the edges, as if the day was just waking up and stretching.
Walter stood at the top of the path, breathing hard, one hand on his chest, the other on my head.
“You smell that, Buddy?” he wheezed. “That’s a river pretending it never did anything wrong.”
To me it smelled like it always did—mud and fish and old leaves and something deep and cold underneath.
But there was a new layer now, faint but real: the ghost of last week’s gasoline, the sharp tang of fear that still clung to the dirt.
Dogs remember smells the way humans remember songs.
We walked slow.
His slippers weren’t made for wet grass, but he’d put them on anyway, toes disappearing in dew.
He shuffled, half dragging one foot, and I matched his pace, close enough that my shoulder brushed his calf with every step.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he muttered, more to himself than to me.
“You’re thinking, ‘We should’ve waited for Lisa and the kid and the guy with the rope.’ You’re right. You’re a smart dog. I’m just a stubborn man who’s tired of being late to his own life.”
He stopped halfway down the hill, chest heaving.
We both looked back at the sleeping town—the small houses, the quiet street, the front door he hadn’t locked behind us.
Then he looked forward again, jaw set.
“If they’re gonna stuff me in a building with carpet that all smells the same,” he said, “I want one morning where I decide where my feet go. Even if they argue with me the whole way.”
I didn’t understand carpets or buildings or what it meant to be “stuffed” somewhere, but I understood this: he needed to be here.
Not for drama, not for attention, but for something inside him that the hospital and the brochures hadn’t touched.
When we reached the bottom of the hill, the river came into view.
It was lower than during the flood, but higher than on the lazy days when kids threw rocks and adults pretended not to see the “No Swimming” sign.
The current moved in long muscles under the surface, flexing and relaxing.
The dock was gone.
The storm had chewed it loose and dragged it downstream—only three cracked pilings stuck out now, like teeth in a broken jaw.
The path itself had been bitten too: a chunk of bank was missing, leaving a raw, crumbly edge.
“Look at that,” Walter breathed.
He wasn’t talking about the missing dock.
He was pointing a little farther down, near a bend where the water sheared against the bank and old roots clung like fingers.
There, tangled in a mess of branches and trash, was a log.
Not just any log.
Even from where we stood, I could see the grooves and scars along its side, lines cut by something sharper than weather.
Walter’s whole body leaned toward it, like a plant reaching for sun.
“That’s it,” he whispered. “Buddy, that’s our log. Me and Mike’s.”
He laughed once, a startled sound, like someone who’d found a long-lost tool in the bottom of a drawer.
He moved closer, ignoring the way the ground sloped and crumbled.
I went with him, my paws slipping slightly in the damp dirt, every instinct in me prickling.
The river might have been calmer, but the edge between land and water was a liar—soft, unstable, pretending to hold weight it couldn’t.
“Easy,” I whined, circling in front of him.
He stepped around me, waving one hand.
“I’m not getting in,” he said. “Just touching it. Old friends say hello.”
He crouched—slowly, joints complaining—and stretched out his hand.
His fingers brushed the wet wood, tracing the carved grooves, the knife scars softened by years of water and silt.
For a moment, the world held its breath.
Walter’s shoulders straightened, just a little.
His eyes sharpened, the cloudy film lifting like morning fog.
“W-A-L-T,” he murmured, thumb moving over each letter.
“And M-I-K-E. Look at that. We were so proud of that ugly carving. We thought we’d live forever just because we stabbed our names into a tree.”
His voice broke on the last word.
He swallowed hard, hand still on the log.
“We said we’d drag this up on the bank one day,” he went on.
“Turn it into a bench for kids to sit on while they learned how to cast. Said we’d show them where the current tricks you, where it hides snags, where it pretends to be shallow.”
He looked at me then, really looked, as if I were old enough to have been there too.
“I forgot the whole thing, Buddy. Just… gone. Like a commercial between shows. And then, under that black water, I felt it. I thought the river was taking me back to where I lost him. Turns out it was handing me the bill for a broken promise.”
I didn’t know how to tell him that promises didn’t have expiration dates written on them, even when brains did.
So I nudged his elbow, wanting him to move back, away from the crumbling edge.
The wet dirt under his slippers shifted with a soft, treacherous sigh.
It happened fast and slow at the same time.
One second he was crouched, balanced, hand on the log.
The next, the ground under his front foot liquefied, collapsing into a slanted slide of mud and roots.
He yelped, grabbing for the log.
His weight shifted, and his legs went out from under him.
For a terrifying heartbeat, half of him was over the water, the other half scraping down the bank.
I lunged forward, teeth snapping around his sleeve.
The fabric tore a little under my jaw, but I held on, paws scrambling for purchase.
The river rose up to meet him, cold and indifferent, licking at his dangling slipper.
His lower leg plunged into the water up to the calf.
He gasped at the shock, one hand clamped on the log, the other on my collar now, fingers digging into my skin.
Mud smeared his robe, his hair, his breath.
“Don’t you dare,” he wheezed, not sure if he was talking to the river or himself.
My claws gouged ruts in the wet soil as I leaned back with everything I had.
We slid an inch, then another, but not all the way in.
For a few seconds, nobody moved.
The river pressed against his leg, pulling, testing.
The log dug into his palm, solid and unforgiving.
I barked, loud and sharp and frantic.
Not the “squirrel in the yard” bark, not the “mailman at the door” bark.
This was the sound I’d made on the boat right before the world flipped.
There was no one to hear, I thought.
Everyone was asleep.
The community center director was probably still in bed, Ray at the fire station, Lisa dreaming about forms and court dates.
Then, faint and far but real, I heard a car door slam somewhere up the hill.
A voice called out, muffled by trees and water.
“Buddy? Walter?”
Maddie.
Her voice cracked on his name.
Another voice, lower, more controlled, followed.
“Stay back from the edge, I’ve got him,” it shouted.
Boots pounded down the path, faster than Lisa’s would’ve, heavier than Maddie’s.
Ray appeared at the top of the cut in the bank, silhouette framed by the early light.
His eyes took in everything—the tilted body, the mud slide, the log, my straining posture—in one quick scan.
He dropped to his stomach without hesitating.
“Hey there, sir,” he called, tone steady like this was a drill, not a potential disaster.
“How about we don’t start the safety day by making me jump in after you again, huh?”
Walter huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh if he’d had more oxygen.
“Just… saying… hello to an old friend,” he panted.
“Ground gave out before I did.”
Ray slid closer, belly flat, feet braced against a tree root.
He grabbed the back of Walter’s jacket with one hand and my collar with the other.
“On three, we’re all going up,” he said.
“Buddy, you pull. I’ll lift. Walter, you hold that log like it owes you money.”
His voice left no room for argument.
He counted, and we moved together.
My legs shook, but I leaned back, teeth still locked in fabric.
Ray hauled, muscles in his arms standing out like ropes.
The mud tried to keep us, sucking at Walter’s leg with a wet, ugly noise.
Then, all at once, it let go, and we fell backward in a heap onto safer ground.
Walter lay on his back, chest heaving, one slipper gone, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and river water.
Above us, I heard Lisa’s footsteps pounding down the path, branches snapping as she pushed through.
She slid to her knees beside him, hands flying over his arms, his face, his chest as if checking for missing pieces.
“Are you kidding me?” she gasped, voice shaking.
“I leave you alone for two hours and you find the only broken piece of ground left on this whole riverbank? Dad, I can’t keep doing this.”
Walter blinked up at her, eyes a little dazed but more present than I’d expected.
He lifted one muddy hand and pointed weakly toward the log still jammed at the edge.
“Found our bench,” he wheezed.
“Me and Mike’s. It’s right there. River tried to chew it up, but it spit it back out. We can’t… leave it like that.”
Lisa stared at the log, at the carved letters half-visible under slime and silt.
Something in her expression shifted—anger thinning, grief thickening, a new kind of tiredness settling in.
Ray sat back on his heels, breathing hard.
“We should mark this whole section off,” he said.
“Cones, tape, the works. Kids aren’t coming near this edge. We can drag that log up farther, make it safe. But we’re not doing it today without half a dozen more hands.”
Maddie arrived then, face streaked with fresh tears and pillow creases.
She took in the scene—the mud, the missing slipper, the log—and looked like she might either scream or hug everyone at once.
“You promised,” she choked, dropping to hug Walter’s shoulders carefully.
“You promised you wouldn’t go near the water alone again.”
“I stayed mostly on the bank,” he protested weakly.
“The bank just… moved. Gravity’s rude like that.”
She swatted his arm, then clung tighter.
“You’re not funny,” she muttered into his robe.
“Okay, you’re a little funny. But you’re also grounded. Do you even get how close—”
“I get it,” he said quietly.
His gaze flicked from her to Lisa to Ray, then down to me.
“I also get that log isn’t going to drag itself up here. And if I’m going to be locked away next week, I’d like one piece of this place where I can still sit and know who I am for five minutes at a time.”
Lisa scrubbed her face with both hands.
“You almost went in again, Dad,” she said.
“This is exactly the kind of incident they warned me about. The kind they use to tell people like me, ‘See, you waited too long.’”
Ray cleared his throat.
“Look,” he said, glancing between them.
“I’m obligated to write this up. Any near-miss near the water, especially with his history, goes in a report. I can’t fudge that. But I can say he had support on scene. I can say the area’s unstable and we’re marking it off now. I can say we’re putting extra safety measures in place for the event.”
“The event that might not happen now,” Maddie whispered.
“If the community center hears about this, they’re going to cancel. And the memory care place is going to look like the only sane option.”
Walter closed his eyes, breathing slow and shaky.
“Then drag the cursed thing up here,” he said.
His voice was thin, but the stubborn thread in it was steel.
“Make it a bench. Make it a prop. Make it whatever they need it to be so they’ll let me sit on it one day with kids who know the difference between watching the river and respecting it.”
Ray looked at the log, then at the three humans clinging to each other and the wet dog pressed against their legs.
He sighed.
“I’ll call the crew,” he said.
“We’ve got a couple of strong backs at the station who owe me a favor. They can swing by with some gear after breakfast. We’ll get that thing up onto stable ground, well back from the edge.”
He met Lisa’s eyes. “If we’re lucky, we can show the board that we took a hazard and turned it into a teaching tool.”
Lisa nodded slowly, like someone agreeing to a surgery they weren’t sure would work.
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Okay. We do that. We document it. We tell the truth before somebody else tells their version. And… we still run the safety day. Carefully. Perfectly. Or as close as we can.”
Walter let out a breath that sounded like it had been stuck in him for years.
“Camp Riverlight, day zero,” he murmured.
“Classroom inspection. Log retrieval. Old man nearly learns the same lesson twice.”
He turned his head toward me.
“Next time I say ‘just one more trip to the edge,’ bite me,” he said.
His fingers found my ear, tugging gently.
“Hard.”
I leaned into his touch, mud and river smell and human fear all tangled together in the air around us.
The river rolled on, pretending innocence, nudging the log we hadn’t moved yet like it was daring us.
Somewhere behind us, up on the street, I heard the distant wail of another siren starting its song.
Not frantic this time—measured, controlled, like the beginning of a drill.
For the first time, I didn’t just hear danger in that sound.
I heard something else layered under it, faint but real: the possibility that, if we survived this morning and the day to come, this river might finally be more than a place that tried to take him away.
It might become the only place where he still fully arrived.