They couldn’t save their daughters’ lives in the July 4 floods. Now they’re dealing with the grief and the guilt.

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DALLAS — No matter how hard RJ Harber tried to stay positive, the week leading up to what would have been his youngest daughter’s 12th birthday challenged him. Friday was Halloween, when his two daughters would normally go trick-or-treating with friends. Sunday was All Souls’ Day, when the deacon of their church read the names of both girls among a list of those in the parish who had passed away that year.

On the following Thursday — Brooke Harber’s birthday — the school dedicated benches to Brooke and her 13-year-old sister Blair, who died with their grandparents in the July 4 flood while the family was vacationing in Central Texas. The girls’ friends painted the benches with symbols of things they loved: a soccer ball, a lacrosse ball and cat prints for Brooke; a puppy pawprint, flowers and a cross for Blair. Brooke’s classmates ate red velvet cakes from Nothing Bundt Cakes — her favorite.

RJ, 44, and his wife Annie, 43, have been crushed by grief since the night of the flood, when RJ woke to lightning flashing and thunder crashing, and the couple stepped out of bed into water. They were spending the holiday weekend in their family house by the Guadalupe River and had to escape through a window.

They roused their neighbors, then RJ had jumped in a kayak to try to reach the house closer to the river where his girls and his parents had slept.

But he couldn’t save them. The river, swollen by massive rains, was smashing through neighborhoods, RV parks and campgrounds, claiming more than 100 lives.

In the months after, the Harbers have struggled to get through each day, wracked with sorrow and guilt.

Why did they survive? Their two children were their everything; the loss was so enormous that they didn’t yet have space to grieve RJ’s parents. As the weeks dragged on and the holidays approached, RJ and Annie did what they could to keep living. They’d raised their children to try their best always and now they tried to do the same.

“The wound is still just wide open,” RJ said. “Going through the holidays, if we didn’t have faith and each other and community, I have no idea how we would do it.”

Their weekends, once packed with activities with their kids, have become dreadful days with nothing to do. Friends support them. One brought Annie a strawberry banana smoothie every day for weeks because it was all she could get down.

Brandon Starr and his huge goldendoodle Shep walk nightly with RJ and the family labrador, Tucker, who somehow escaped the flooding river house and found them. They talk about whatever’s on RJ’s mind. Sometimes he wants to talk about his girls. Other times, the conversation goes elsewhere.

RJ, a criminal defense attorney, has taken up biking. Annie hasn’t returned to her job as an educator at the girls’ Catholic school but instead walks two hours each morning with a colleague.

The couple has sought out Catholic priests for counsel. They go to therapy.

They somehow got through summer and the back-to-school season before they faced Brooke’s Nov. 6 birthday. Next will come Thanksgiving, then RJ’s birthday, then Christmas and Blair’s birthday on Dec. 29.

They’ll have to get through those days without their energetic Brooke, who could play multiple sports games in a row without tiring, who could be mischievous, who wore her hair in a high ponytail, slicked back without bumps. They’ll have to get through without their angelic Blair, who rarely if ever got into trouble, who became an altar server at their church and prayed the rosary every night.

“I’m just trying to make them proud, but I don’t want to live without them,” Annie said. “I don’t know how to live without them.”

The last time Annie saw her girls was in the riverside house they were sharing with their grandparents. She told them what she told them every night when she tucked them in: “I love you, always and forever.”

Then she made the short walk back to her house.

* * *

For months, every time he woke up, RJ imagined himself back in that kayak, in the pitch black night, trying to reach his daughters and his parents.

“My babies,” Annie had cried as she and RJ had escaped their house. “My babies.”

The river had churned into whitewater as RJ fought the current. Waves knocked him into the piers of another raised house. The air felt freezing. Rain pounded.

With a flashlight, RJ could see the water had not quite reached the top of the first floor, where his parents slept. His dad, whose mobility was limited because of Parkinson’s Disease, might have already been dead, he thought later.

The girls had slept in the loft above the ground floor.

The nightmare unfolded in what had been a beloved place. RJ’s parents brought him to the picturesque river to vacation starting when he was young. When he got older, he became a camper and counselor at the all-boys Camp La Junta. RJ and Annie took their daughters to vacation on the Guadalupe, too.

The parents thought about sending Blair and Brooke to camp, but learned of a one-bedroom, one-bathroom home for sale in a small development they called Casa Bonita. The community shared a riverfront, with amenities such as a rope swing and slide. In 2020, the Harbers bought the house with RJ’s parents.

“We can do all the same things we do at camp, but do them together,” RJ realized, “and that’s going to be something that we remember and cherish for the rest of our lives.”

Blair and Brooke grew up visiting there, making pots out of river clay, playing glow-in-the-dark capture the flag and falling asleep in a room lit by fireflies that they caught in containers.

When the whole family travelled to the river at the same time, they borrowed a neighbor’s place. They switched up who would stay in which house.

The days before July 4 had been perfect. The girls helped set the table for a party their grandma threw for the neighbors. Blair made her favorite chocolate chip cookies. Brooke chased down an escaped dog. On July 3, the family went horseback riding, played games and swam.

Now in the kayak, RJ would need to paddle against the strong, debris-filled current to reach the house and figure out how to fight the water long enough to break the upper window. Somehow he would have to get the girls — his focus — safely onto the small, flimsy kayak.

He’d left Annie back at the river’s edge, where she tried to swim to Blair and Brooke but kept getting pushed underwater. She called their phones over and over but couldn’t get through.

RJ faced an impossible choice: He could try to save his kids and almost surely die trying, maybe killing them too, or he could turn back. He could trust the house would hold and the river wouldn’t top the roof and that his daughters would ride out the flood, rattled but alive.

Trees flew past RJ. Then a car came right at him. He started to realize the river could easily take him.

If RJ could get himself back to Annie, maybe they’d all make it through this alive. He turned the kayak around.

“I had to make a decision,” he said. “And it haunts me every single day.”

Only later, around 4:15 a.m., would he see one of the texts his youngest daughter sent. “I love you,” it said.

“I love you,” RJ messaged back from a house on higher ground where he and Annie sheltered with other neighbors. “Go to the roof.”

* * *

At first light, the Harbers could see the house they owned was gone. Later in the morning, they were able to see the area that had been closer to the river. The house where the girls and grandparents stayed was gone too.

It took all day July 4 before the river lowered enough for them to get out of the neighborhood. RJ went with someone in a truck to look for his parents and kids, praying they caught trees and hoisted themselves to safety.

A helicopter picked up Annie. When she saw the devastation, she pounded the pilot’s window and begged the pilot to open the door and let her jump out. She had to find her kids.

Guilt wracked her: Why didn’t her daughters sleep on the fold-out couch in their house that night? Why didn’t the family go on a different trip?

Since she was a girl growing up in Michigan, Annie knew she wanted to be a mom. When she was five, Annie picked Blair as the name she would give her first child.

She moved to Dallas in 2008 to take an elementary school teaching job in the same city where her two brothers lived. Her new roommate had a brother too, who fell for her at first sight. RJ, a Dallas native, asked Annie out the night they met. They married in 2010.

The next year, Annie gave birth to Blair.

“She changed our lives,” RJ said. “From that moment on, our children were all we cared about.”

Two years later, Brooke was born.

“They were truly just my world,” Annie said.

Blair was their girly girl, a sensitive nurturer who stuck up for her friends. She baked, practicing recipes until she perfected them. For her dad’s birthday, she made a double-layer cake with buttercream frosting from scratch. And she was crafty, creating flowers out of paper.

“She was the sweetest, kindest, most gentle personality you could ever meet,” RJ said. The family called her “Bee.”

Brooke was competitive and spunky — a ball of energy. She brought out the fun in others. She never went anywhere without making a friend, be it a 4-year-old or a 74-year-old. And she poured herself into sports, where she excelled. “She didn’t know a stranger,” Annie said. The family called her “Bunny”

Their grandparents on their dad’s side lived an 8-minute drive away and adored them. Granddaddy Mike Harber, 76, cheered at his granddaughters’ sports games, took them to Crumbl for cookies and made waffles and bacon when they spent the night. Grandma Charlene “Maizie” Harber, 74, brought the family together for Christmas Eve, Easter and Kentucky Derby parties.

At home, the girls slept in rooms next to each other. If Blair came home upset, Brooke offered to beat up whomever had bothered her big sister. During lacrosse games, they passed to each other. Both adored animals. Blair was almost 3 when her parents got her a white Havanese puppy for Christmas. The dog, Maddie, followed her everywhere and died in the flood. Brooke later got a black-and-white cat, Oreo, even though her mom was allergic.

Blair wanted to be a vet and Brooke a zookeeper.

Each morning Annie woke the girls and drove them to St. Rita Catholic School, which they attended and where their mom also taught. Both Blair and Brooke were dyslexic, inspiring Annie to work with kids with learning disabilities and build up their confidence.

She and RJ went to every school event and sports game for Blair and Brooke, brimming with love and pride.

Annie tucked notes in her daughters’ lunch boxes or hid them other places. “You are a star,” read one that Blair saved.

Now each morning, Annie opens the blinds and kisses Brooke and Blair’s empty beds.

“Good morning angels,” she says, just like she said when they were alive.

* * *

Friends rushed to be with RJ and Annie and support them. Sometimes that meant doing errands. Other times it meant just being with them.

Their friend Maureen Hodges, 43, frequently drove from her home in Austin to Dallas to check on RJ and Annie, not wanting more than a few days to pass without seeing them. Her husband, Will, grew up going to camp with RJ.

Maureen Hodges thought about trying to help Annie and RJ just get through 15 minutes at a time. She suggested activities to do together, such as watercolors. She thought about any other way she could show up for them, including a game of mahjong, a comforting hand or invitations to stay with them in Austin.

The depth of the Harbers’ loss felt staggering to Hodges, a nurse practitioner.

“The grief is proportionate to the love,” she said. “It’s tremendous”

On his own 43rd birthday, Vijay Mehra, who grew up going to school with RJ, called RJ and got no answer and decided just to drive to his house and wait. The two went to spend time with another childhood friend who lived nearby.

“I just want him and Annie to know that they’re loved and they’re supported and we’re here unconditionally to help them navigate all of this,” Mehra said.

He could see that RJ, normally a lighthearted goofball, was broken. His eyes looked empty. Together, they reminisced about Blair and Brooke. They laughed, but even then Mehra could see the darkness.

Everyone knew they couldn’t fix the Harbers’ sadness. Sometimes, friends aimed simply for distraction. George Radigan, 44, and his wife, whose youngest daughter played soccer and lacrosse with Brooke, took the couple to Maryland and Las Vegas.

“You want to laugh, I’m here to laugh,” George told RJ. “You want to cry, I’m here to cry. You want to talk about the girls? I’m here for that.”

In the backyard, the Harbers got rid of their daughters’ trampoline and planted a red oak. They adopted a puppy, Sunny, who is related to Blair’s dog Maddie.

Christian Angleton, 34, dropped by the house often. Her daughter Emma was best friends with Blair. Angleton would lay in bed with Annie until one day they transitioned to hanging out on the couch. Eventually, Annie started helping Angleton with her balloon decoration business.

One day, RJ went up on his roof with tools to cut a tree limb. For the first time, for a few moments, he found himself not thinking of what he’d lost.

* * *

The Harbers started a fund to raise money for disaster relief and causes that meant something to Brooke and Blair, such as Catholic education and sports. They gave friends some of their possessions, such as Brooke’s soccer jersey and Blair’s blanket.

“We never want them to be forgotten,” Annie said.

Parents at the girls’ school, St. Rita, planned a basketball tournament to celebrate Brooke on Nov. 8, the weekend after her birthday. The event would raise money for the fund.

Edward Spooner, 47, who helped out that day and who has kids the same age as Blair and Brooke, figured that RJ and Annie were living through everyone’s deepest, darkest fear. The dozens of middle schoolers and parents arriving at the school gym that afternoon were smiling. But he figured many cried earlier.

“We’re all just trying to do our best so that our friends keep moving forward every day and our sons and daughters keep doing the same,” Spooner said.

The Harbers had been hearing stories about other students that gave them hope, of girls who were going to mass, being nicer to each other and treasuring their lives because of their daughters. They heard parents were spending more time with their kids. Young athletes wore Brooke’s number 8 to honor her. They saw girls displaying the acronym DIFB: Do It For Blair and Brooke.

Angleton put those letters as the centerpiece of a balloon display for the party for Brooke, who, she said, “was fun and full of life and their little ray of sunshine.”

When the Harbers arrived, they found they couldn’t walk through the gym’s front door and face everyone at once. Sometimes, they could feel everyone’s eyes on them. The head priest and a friend escorted them through the back.

They took seats on the front row of the bleachers that had been covered with a sheet of pink plastic — Blair’s favorite color — and watched as Brooke’s classmates played basketball. The girls wore yellow bows and yellow socks and yellow event shirts — Brooke’s favorite color.

RJ held Annie’s hand.

Watching the girls play, RJ knew this was exactly the party Brooke would have wanted. On his wrist he wore two of the pink and yellow bracelets friends had made to honor his daughters.

He and Annie believed RJ’s parents were taking care of the girls in heaven and that they would see them again.

They had decided to try to have another child.

“We have more love to give,” Annie said.

When the tournament ended, people gathered around.

Girls and parents held Annie, hugged Annie, kissed Annie. “Love you,” they kept saying. Then they filtered out of the gym.

“Whew,” Annie said.

RJ exhaled and blinked, as if coming back into reality.

They looked at each other. Tears welled in RJ’s eyes. Sunglasses shielded Annie’s.

“Oh man,” Annie said. “What a week.”

RJ repeated the goal he’d had for the day, wanting to celebrate his daughter: “Positive today. Positive today. Positive today.”