“Oh, Jesus.” Del had followed after her into the street. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
Tess stood for a moment on the sidewalk, looking one way and then the other. How far could a girl go in six hours on foot, in a city covered in toxic mud, strewn with jagged debris? She could be anywhere. Nowhere. She could have fallen through the center of the earth. Beside her, Del was taking hard, deep breaths as if she’d just swum the length of an Olympic-sized pool. Tess stepped away from her into the middle of the street, her hands opening and closing in the empty air. At the corner of Kerlerec and Pauger, the light flickered and went out, and then the brownout cascaded down the street like a wave, the houses going black one by one until the whole neighborhood was submerged in the liquid light of dawn.
part two
Into the Trembling Air
One Day before Landfall
August 28
For most of her life, when Cora thought of floods, she thought of Old Man River, that wrinkled white guy dressed in shredded blue-gray linen out at Jean Lafitte. His name was Mississippi, from the Ojibwe word for Great River, and he would explain to the gathered children how he heaped up soil along his banks as he writhed his way to the sea, building the Delta—the very land they stood on. When there was enough dirt, some Frenchmen planted a flag, laid a grid of streets, built homes. But Mississippi liked to wash that land he’d made, and so they built levees to contain him. Here, the actor would moan and shake his tattered linens: it really made him mad to be hemmed in! He was old, remember, and his joints were stiff, and though they smoothed his bed with their slow-moving dredges, he didn’t like working so hard; he preferred to roll down a nice gentle slope to the sea. He told the children how he thought sometimes about jumping his banks and destroying the cities of the people who imprisoned him, about trying out the Atchafalaya Basin for a change. At any time, he warned the children, he could tunnel through the foundations of their levees, make a crack wide enough to run through. And once he’d escaped, they could send their hounds, their helicopters, but they’d never get him back, no matter what they tried to do.
When she thought of floods, Cora liked to remind herself that they had been warned, to tell herself that disaster anticipated was disaster forestalled. The government made the rounds, after all. Crunching along the shell road, officials wearing hard hats and orange jackets came to inspect the levees, driving trucks marked ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS. They traveled the length of the river as it moved through the parish, circled the seawalls that protected the island city from the lake—called Pontchartrain—where resurrected pelicans gathered, grunting and squeaking over their nesting grounds. Cora loved the lake. There were egrets and whistling ducks there, thick oily clots of cormorants and flocks of swallow-tailed kites, snake birds curled in oaks, and sapsuckers too, drumming in the trees as if they had some news to share. The lake was so wide that from the center of it—mile twelve of the longest overwater bridge in the world—the horizon would vanish, as though the painted veil of the far shore had been raised just an inch, leaving a strip of empty air like a rent in the fabric of time.
Today the water shone with heat, but Cora walked under the trees, where the shadow of the leaves and the breeze off the lake made the morning almost cool, the earth damp under her bare feet. She liked to go off the grid on Sundays when she didn’t have to work brunch—turn off her phone, turn off the radio, take a walk somewhere alone. After a hard week in the kitchen, she sometimes played a game with herself where she tried to spend the entire day without hearing or saying a single word. So far today she was winning. She hadn’t seen a soul. On the way up the land side of the lake levee she had filled her pockets with clover, and she meant to sit on a rock at the shore and make a necklace out of them, the way she and Del used to do when they were little girls.
As soon as she came out from the copse of trees, though, the levee patrol caught sight of her. A cruiser moving slowly along Lakeshore Drive threw on its flashers, and before Cora could put her hands over her ears she heard them say: Lakeshore Drive is currently closed to the public. A mandatory evacuation order for Orleans Parish is in effect. Vacate immediately.
The flood was coming, then, after all.
CORA DROVE TO her parents’ house, under the slowing interstate and past gas stations where long lines of cars strung from the pumps. Going, going, everyone ready to be gone—in the low pressure, she felt light, as if she might float up into the quickening air, as if she’d turned into one of those cormorants at the lakeshore. Fly, if you can fly. But fleeing wasn’t cool. No true New Orleanian—Her grandfather would curl his lip: something cowardly about it, something disloyal. Abandonment’s just not a thing you do.
In the house on Esplanade, the clocks were ticking, and from the kitchen came familiar voices, television voices.
“Mom?” Cora stepped over the threshold. “Pop?”
She dropped her keys on the mail table where they settled slowly, jingling. The AC compressors clicked on, and the chilled air carried the smells of pecans and bacon. Breakfast had been eaten; in the kitchen, three placemats were on the table, two crumpled dish towels, two plates smeared with yellow egg. The reporters’ voices scattered from the television.
—the highest temperature ever recorded in the Gulf and the lowest pressure since the National Weather Service began keeping records in—
Last time a storm had brushed near them, years ago, she and Del had gone to the river and leaned from the crest of the levee into the wind, so solid with speed that it stopped them from falling, though they had been trying to fall.
To repeat, for anyone just tuning in: a mandatory evacuation order is in effect for the river parishes.
The great red arrow of the storm curved towards its own beginning like one of those snakes that means eternity, but the woman reporter was smiling. They liked scaring you, reporters. That was what they lived off—catastrophic weather events, terror attacks, murder-suicides, soldiers killed by roadside bombs. Two days ago, when the storm was already brewing, the woman had been at Eleusis in her helmet of silvering hair—Table sixty-two: dressing on the side, medium filet hold the béarnaise—and all night long she’d laughed, her on-screen guffaw so loud they could hear it in the kitchen.
Now, if you do choose to stay, please be prepared. Fill your bathtubs, make sure you have batteries for flashlights, non-perishable food items, first aid kits, duct tape, an axe. I know many of you don’t need a reminder, but if the water starts to rise—and if we get the kind of storm surge the models are predicting, it may well rise that high—an axe may be your only way out.
Cora twanged the TV off. Her heart was beating too fast. She closed her eyes, tried to take the three deep breaths Dr. Nemetz prescribed, but the reporter was waiting behind her eyelids, axe raised over her head. She picked up her parents’ plates and brought them to the sink. On one of the burners, her mother’s pecan coffee cake sat cooling, and there were two eggs and three slices of cooked bacon lying on a greasy paper bag. They had expected her. They had not meant to go without her, but they had. They’d fled headlong.
She called out again, but there was no answer. There was an axe in the toolshed, though.
She took a handful of cake to the back door, opened it, left it open. If they had gone without her, so be it. It had been a thrill once, being alone. Her parents would go out, perfumed and buttoned, and once she’d locked the door behind them, she was free. Alone, she could walk naked through the rooms of the house, lounge in bed, sit on the front steps for as long as she wanted, watching the wind move the leaves of the trees. Now, behind the high branches of the magnolia, the sky was rushing past as though the earth had sped on its axis, but that was all right: the house would hold her. She teased apart the swirling crumb of her mother’s cake. She breathed in the damp green air.
Cora finished the cake before fighting with the shed door—reluctant old thing, she had to lift it up on its hinges, wrench it back. The smells of gasoline and rust mingled with the taste of pecan. She
pulled the light chain. Over the workbench the axe hung on nails, its sharp edge painted red like it had ambitions.
The back door of the house slammed as she came out, axe in her hand.
“Goddamn it, Cora.” Her father stopped at the edge of the veranda. “Thank God! Where have you been? We’ve been calling you since six o’clock yesterday. We were about to send a search party!”
Workmanlike in his belted jeans and tucked-in shirt as always, he looked her over, and, as always, she felt judged: braless in an old tank top that bared her long bird’s neck. She shifted the axe, one hand at its throat, one at its waist.
“Well?” her father said.
“You weren’t here.”
“We went to pick up supplies. Why do we pay for your cellphone if you never turn it on?” He waited.
“It’s Sunday,” she said.
“Fuck, Cora.” He rolled his eyes. “We’ve got a hell of a lot to do before we can get out of here, and I’ve got to go get your grandfather too, before the nuns run off with him to Mississippi. Are you packed?”
She shook her head. Of course she wasn’t packed. They weren’t going anywhere. They had never gone. She waited for him to tell her that nothing was wrong, that the storm wasn’t coming. That they would go close the shutters, set out the candles, the playing cards, make a pitcher of sangria and listen to the rain. When the eye passed them—if it passed—they would go out for a walk and look at the stars.
“This is unacceptable, Cora. It’s going to take us hours to get out as it is.” His hands fidgeted. Only once before—when she walked in the front door after leaving that bullshit college in a hurry—had she seen him scared. “And what’s that—an axe?”
“Yes.”
The axe was heavy, even for two hands. She hefted it, like she was practicing hacking a hole in the roof, except that there was nothing above her but the sky.
“You don’t intend to stay?” he mocked her.
She was not sure “intend” was the word. She had always stayed.
SHE LAY ON her back on her bedroom rug, her mouth open to catch the rain. With her eyes closed, she could see it better: The huge dark mass of water revolving slowly in the sky. The roof—rafters and all—lifted off the house and set down like a jaunty hat on top of a large tree. Old Man River rising from his bed and striding across the city, trident in one hand, Bengay in the other. Her father was outside, hammering plywood over the big kitchen windows. She spread her arms out wide on the carpet, palms up, and waited.
At least her mother had stopped trying to get into her room. The thumb latch Cora had finally been allowed to install when she was sixteen had jumped every time Tess put her shoulder against the door, while she’d gone on and on in her loud shrink’s voice about necessary truths, defined the word “mandatory,” listed wind speeds, all the while carefully avoiding the words she thought Cora was too feeble to hear: overtop, surge, drown. Meanwhile, Cora lay on the rug repeating them to herself like Dr. Nemetz had taught her to. You were supposed to say a word until it lost its meaning, replay a nightmare—a rape, a burial-alive, whatever—until the images started to look funny to you, like some kind of demented joke.
When her father had come back from picking up Papie, Cora had listened through the floor while her mother shouted at him about sedatives. It amused her—her mother’s conviction that nobody give Papie anything, when she used to come into Cora’s private home, open her private medicine cabinet, put the unopened plastic jars on her kitchen counter like accusations. Now it was all: Did you allow them to give him something? A single Valium could set him back years, Joe. Years. But when it was about her mind, her reality, that fucking orange prescription bottle had clacked against the linoleum: I don’t know why you refuse to help yourself, Cora. She had often imagined her mother would lock her up if she could, keep her in an upholstered cage, stuffed on roast chickens and cream cakes.
“Cora?” her father was calling from downstairs. She held still. “Cora!”
She listened to the risers groan as he climbed slowly up the stairs. She closed her eyes, breathed through her nose. As the storm approached, it would be rising like a coil of proofed dough.
Her father knocked on the door. “You packed?”
She rolled her head against the carpet. She would not be strong-armed. She tried Dr. Nemetz’s other method: she pictured the storm breaking apart like foam on milk, a cormorant asleep on a calm lake, her mother laughing out of the window of the truck as they sped home.
“You know that your great-aunt was swept away during Camille,” her father said through the door.
She saw Pauline of the oval picture frame wiping her hands on the front of her apron as she walked to her front door, under the entrance hall’s low ceilings, beside the long, mirrored wall. Pauline peered through the peephole, shot back the bolts, and when the water rushed in like a crowd of hungry guests, she fell back onto the floor, her hand up in a wave.
“Go away,” Cora said.
“We didn’t have the tools that we do now,” her father continued. “Back then, we had to wait for them to call a storm in from Havana. We couldn’t see it on the radar. Aunt Pauline didn’t leave because she didn’t have the chance to leave.” The doorknob turned, the door caught against the lock. “Honey, would you please let me in.”
Cora knew the story: How Mamie had kissed her St. Christopher medal as Joe backed out into the street to go find Pauline. How the trees in Mississippi had been pressed down in flat spirals as if by the wind of a landing helicopter. Her father always digressed at this point in the story to sing a paean to croakers—how, before Camille, Pauline would dust them in cornmeal and fry them up crisp, bones and all—but then he’d go on again. How he had driven around Mississippi for hours unable to get his bearings. How, when he had found Pauline’s house at last, there was nothing left but the concrete steps and a single overturned dining chair. How he had walked along the swaybacked fence until he found all they’d ever find: Pauline’s favorite church hat—aqua, with a spotted veil—plastered against the chain-link. How he had picked it up, brushed off the sand.
“Go away,” Cora said softly. She closed her eyes and imagined him going. Putting up his hand, waving good-bye. Positive visualization, this was called. This hurricane would veer off at the last second to become sideways rain across the darkened beaches of Mexico. Her parents would go, but she would be locked down safe here. Key, latch, and bolt. She did not hear footsteps though, and so she repeated herself, raising her voice on each iteration. “Go away! Go away! Go away! Go away! Go away!”
When she finally stopped shouting, he was gone.
She got up and went into the upper hall. Above the stairs, light came through the stained glass tinged blue and orange, making the air into water. Tomorrow, the wind would only be strong enough to blow the dead leaves from the oaks and some of this heat off the streets, and she would go walking through the shade down to the restaurant, where she’d have Bobby make her a plantation punch, and Troy would come in from prepping in the kitchen and nestle a little too close to her on the next barstool, and they would laugh at the foolishness of all these cowards who’d spent hours in traffic escaping nothing. She would lean her elbows on the bar, and Troy would rub her shoulders while Bobby refilled her glass.
HER MOTHER STOOD at the head of the dining room table, cradling an armload of felt-bagged julep cups. At her feet, the hope chest was filled with silver—Ziploc bags rolled around the fish forks, salad forks, oyster forks they never used.
“Well, well,” her mother said. “Look who’s risen from the dead.”
Papie slumped in a wingchair shoved up against the wall under a portrait of one of the pasty Marleybone ancestors, looked at her blankly. In the kitchen, the TV was rambling: Fifty dollars down will get you a bedroom set living room set today!
Her mother crouched and began nestling the julep cups inside the chest. “Your grandfather and I were just discussing the possibility that there might be looting.”
/> Cora doubted it. She looked at Papie, his mouth open like a sheepshead’s.
“This evacuation, regardless of whether the storm turns—” Outside, a pot rang against the concrete steps like a gong. “This evacuation is going to be its own disaster. An empty city is not a safe place.”
Cora rolled her eyes. An empty city sounded pretty great to her. It was something she’d always longed to see. Since childhood, she’d liked imagining herself as one of Bienville’s crew, stepping out of a rocking pirogue onto the shores of Bayou St. John. When the duke and the Indian guide turn away, she parts the curtain of willow leaves and crouches down in the sand, waiting to unbutton her heavy coat and high boots until the crew have shouldered the dugouts and walked off in the direction of the unnavigable river. Once they are gone, unburdened of her heavy European clothes, she builds a house of palmetto fronds and cypress, learns Choctaw and Chitimacha, raises a litter of orphaned raccoons.
“Goddamn it!” her mother whispered as she stomped past Cora into the hall and out the French doors. In his armchair, Papie was listing sideways, as if the house had already started to drift.
“You lived through Betsy,” Cora said to him. “Do you remember it? What it was like?”
“Betsy.” He nodded his head heavily. “Betsy Frazer. Nice bosom.”
“No, Papie. Betsy the hurricane.”
“Hurricane? An act of God you call it.”
The French doors slammed behind her, and her father, bringing the heat with him, stalked into the dining room.
“Your mother tells me you still refuse to come,” he said. “This is fucking impossible, Cora.”
She just stared at him
“Why do you have to make everything a struggle?” He actually wanted an answer to that, his hands on his hips. “Why are you acting like this?” he shouted.
“Joe,” her mother said.
“We don’t fucking have time for this,” he spat at her, taking Cora’s wrist in his hand.
The Floating World Page 17