Rupture

It’s the kind of winter sunrise that inspires poetry. The smell of coffee fills my little kitchen as I stand at the window, watching a pink sky light up a thin blanket of snow that has settled on the rooftops below.

The delicious quiet is interrupted by a text ding, which I’m not allowed to ignore: “So sorry to bother you but the water’s not running in my bathroom.” It’s from Erin, my first-floor tenant. She pays rent. That means I owe her running water even if it’s before I’ve had my coffee.

In an effort to disguise my panic, I respond, “I’m on it.”  

Let me say up front I’m not easily scared and not too prissy to deal with grimy pipes. I used to be a nurse, which is to say my hands have been dirty. Back in the seventies, a space suit wasn’t required just to check a blood pressure, and everything from saliva to bile has been under my fingernails. A little crawlspace dirt and fiberglass is not what worries me. What worries me is the not knowing what I don’t know.

Bodies come standard. Hearts and gallbladders and descending colons are usually right where I think they should be. Bad veins? I’ll start an IV in your foot. In pain? I can look at your grimace and figure out how much morphine you need. By contrast, this hundred-year-old colonial building, especially the mysterious basement, could be one of those black holes out in the galaxy for all I understand about it. If only Erin needed help with a ruptured appendix instead of frozen pipes.

With flashlight in hand, I descend three stories to the underbelly of landlord world. Clomping around the basement, wearing pajamas and Doc Marten boots, I say to no one in the dark, How did I end up here?

The shortest answer I can offer is that my husband (also a DIY-challenged health-care professional) and I bought a triplex in my hometown of Louisville as part of the retirement plan. We wanted to live on the ground floor and have the upstairs tenants pay the mortgage.

At the time of purchase we lived and worked in Portland, Oregon, where we had moved to support my mother-in-law. The Plan, as I imagined it, featured me in my golden years as the bohemian matriarch doling out wisdom and shots of tequila to our much younger, fit tenants who could hear me yelling that I’d fallen and couldn’t get up. It would be a co-op concept for a geriatric alert system. The tenants, acting as first responders, would get reasonable rent and free happy hours in exchange for rushing to my rescue or at least noticing I was missing in action before the smell of death wafted upstairs.

But as life rarely respects The Plan, family duty called me to move back to Louisville sooner than anticipated. For now, I live in Louisville while my husband continues to work and take care of his mother in Portland.

As luck would have it, when I needed to move, the attic apartment of our building had recently been vacated. Instead of being a postmenopausal woman living in her parents’ basement, I am a postmenopausal woman living in two rooms with a twenty-square-foot kitchen. More suited to a hobbit than a full grown adult, the space makes me feel like a minimalist giant. All this is to say I’m an on-site landlord but I use the term loosely. I’m someone for the tenants to call. Then I call someone who knows what to do.

And on this subzero morning, Bruce is that someone. Plumber extraordinaire and friend, he has owned a reputable business for decades. His pipe intuition is as honed as my patient radar.

Because pipes are exploding all over town, Bruce quickly diagnoses my situation as if he were triaging incoming wounded soldiers in a MASH unit. “If some part of your house isn’t flooding, your frozen pipe is not an emergency. Find your main water valve and turn it off until I call you later.”

Like Scarlett O’Hara being forced to deliver Melanie’s baby, I’m too proud to cry—although I want to scream into the phone, “I don’t know nothing about no main water valves.” Instead I say, “Sure, no problem.”

I point my flashlight upward and look with trepidation at three red stopcocks, assuming they represent the three apartments. Okay, okay. Those look familiar. Do plumbing stopcocks work the same way IV stopcocks do? Are they included in some universal protocol like the choking sign?

I turn them up, down, and around while staying on the phone with Erin, who repeatedly says, “Nope, no change. Water still on.” In a moment of panic, I worry that I’m releasing gas or cutting off someone’s oxygen supply. What if I’m calling the fire department with each turn of the lever?

I give up on the red stopcocks and go in search of another valve; that’s when I spot what looks like the dark, brooding jugular of my building. There’s no sign on the black pipe and stopcock, not even a hint that this has something to do with water. Really? Who gets away with that kind of neglect? Without posting warning signs over patients’ beds, hospitals would be shut down in a day. Signs like: Patient Has the Plague: Wear a Mask, Patient Falls a Lot: No Salsa Lessons, Patient 105 Years Old and Tired: Do Not Resuscitate.

When Erin exclaims, “Water’s off!” I feel the power. Can I decide that three otherwise healthy people are about to become dehydrated without a physician’s order? For the rest of the day, I fumble about blindly. Since I cannot just hold an x-ray up to the light, I’m forced to wander and wonder where a pipe might blow.

In a moment of lucidity, I find an access door from a closet in the basement to a crawl space beneath the frozen bathroom. Without a space heater on hand, I improvise with one of those old midcentury floor lamps, the kind with light bulbs hot enough to heat an infant incubator. After positioning the lamp, I worry about a fire so I go back up into everyone’s apartment and check their smoke alarm batteries. Back down in the basement, I wrap up in a blanket, and do crawl-space private duty. Sitting on a ratty beanbag chair, I reminisce about the easier good old days when I gave enemas to impacted patients.

When Bruce calls me later in the evening he sounds like an exhausted trauma surgeon. “What’s your status over there?” I describe my treatments, and he instructs me to turn the water back on and open all the faucets. Everything runs except for one line. He’s cautiously optimistic. “Well, you’ve done what you can. With any luck you’ll get through the night.” A few hours later, the sickest pipe starts running, although the stream is weak.

Early the next morning I run down to the basement to discover that we’ve come through without a flood or a fire. Despite my failure to remind tenants to let their faucets drip, the pipes survived the night. Like I was after my first code blue, I’m exhilarated, giddy with thoughts of my handywoman future.

But before I can go online to shop for fashionable overalls and a tool belt, there’s the dreaded ding. “My furnace isn’t working.”