Her hand on the gear shift, Cora looked at her, but Mrs. Randsell didn’t seem confused.
“But your house is flooded, Mrs. Randsell,” Cora said carefully.
“Oh, I don’t mean back to Metairie.” Mrs. Randsell’s hand flapped. “I mean home home. My house. I suppose your being Tess’s daughter, you think it never belonged to anyone but Madge.”
“Don’t you think you’re better off coming back with us?” Troy said from the backseat. “We’re planning on leaving, soon as we find my sister and her little boys. You come on with us—we’ll get you to your son.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Mrs. Randsell just stared through the windshield as Cora began to drive them downriver. “You don’t think I sat alone in that flooded house through the storm and two days of heat just to go to Houston now? I’m no fool—when they say a storm is coming I believe them—but there comes a time when a person is too old to leave her home.”
“You heard the radio,” Troy continued. “They’re serious about getting us all out of here.”
“And they’ll come get me once they’re finished with that out there.” She flung a jeweled hand behind her. Before they’d left her house, she had emptied her jewelry box onto her person. “No. You can take me out in my coffin.”
“That’s the thing, ma’am. We don’t plan on taking you out in your coffin.”
“Don’t talk back to me, Mr. Holyfield,” Mrs. Randsell said.
The car fell silent.
So far, uptown, the streets were dry. The storm seemed only to have brushed across the neighborhoods, tossing branches into yards, littering the streets with shingles.
“I was born in that house, you know. ‘Madge’s house,’ ‘Augie’s house’—it was my grandfather’s house. My father put the addition on, where the kitchen is, and he left it to me and August Senior when he died. My mother died in the bed I was birthed in. My husband courted me there. I’ll tell you—that was the hardest thing about giving it to Augie. After Madge went around ‘renovating,’ I couldn’t hear his voice anymore.” She sighed. “Every time I stood on the landing where we’d used to have our tête-à-têtes on my mother’s little settee, I could hear him talking—even before he died. Of course, I suppose that was why I moved in the first place. I got to where I couldn’t stand to listen anymore.”
“I’ll take you home,” Cora said.
“Thank you, dear.” Mrs. Randsell’s hand covered Cora’s, and her touch, despite all of the diamonds, was as light as air.
The sun had started to set, and its light slanted across the city. When they entered the Garden District, the day seemed to shake loose from the tight fetters of the heat, and the silence lifted. Through the closed windows, Cora heard a chattering as if someone were throwing a party on a nearby lawn.
“Invasive,” Mrs. Randsell said as a cloud of green parrots lifted from the top of a palm tree. “Drive out all the songbirds.”
In the rearview, Cora watched Troy watching the birds.
“Three generations in that house and now—” Mrs. Randsell made a popping noise. “I should have had more children is what I should have done, but we can’t always control those things. I know Augie couldn’t either, I’m not saying that. Madge wanted them, just couldn’t have them, and he was so in love with Madge. Still is.” She sighed. “A mother can’t say, ‘Marry again, boy! Hurry up and make me some grandchildren before I’m dead.’ He’s still handsome, though, don’t you think? Even if he is getting old. He could still find a young enough woman, but he won’t. It’s just that I always thought—old-fashioned of me, but I saw the house passing down into the future, to my grandchildren and their children’s grandchildren.”
Mrs. Randsell allowed herself one sigh before going quiet. Cora counted—Augie’s children her age, their children having children in 2030, those children’s grandchildren taking possession of the house in 2090, when, according to the most recent climate models, the sea level would have risen three feet. Cora was crying when they finally pulled up in front of the house she’d gone to so often in party dresses, holding boxes of almond petits fours in her lap. Mrs. Randsell’s hand patted her rhythmically on the arm.
“It’s been a rough day, dear. All that you went through to come find me, out on that terrible water. Why don’t you all come in, and we’ll see what my son has for us to eat.”
Inside the wrought-iron gate, a bough of the holly tree had fallen, scattering golden berries, and Cora picked it up and carried it with her, laying it down again beside the steps. Bees were murmuring in the azalea bushes, and Mrs. Randsell unlocked the door onto the house, which exhaled its pent-up cool. For a few hours, she could stay here, let Mrs. Randsell feed them, pretend that she was one of those phantom grandchildren, that she, Cora, was meant to inherit this house and pass it on through inexhaustible generations. For a few hours, she would try to believe that the world was only what she saw through the Randsells’ kitchen windows—a bench under an oak tree, a clear swimming pool, a swath of grass. She would forget about the people on their roofs grateful for the coming night, forget about the crowded beaches in her dream. The Jeep waited in the street, the pirogue on the roof still dripping.
Two Days after Landfall
August 31
They had been down this street already—there was the mannequin in the hot-green fishnets again, floating like one of the drowned. All morning, every time they turned a corner, there would be an SOS spray-painted on the side of a house or telegraphed by a white T-shirt hanging from a closed window, and the people they rescued had gotten worse by the hour, more tired, more upset, as the helicopters buzzed across the rooftops like carrion flies. The rooftops were empty now—they had done that much—but Troy kept calling, making up little heatstroke songs.
We’ve got your ride right here,
His name is Paul Revere,
and he’s ready to take you away from here.
We got water here for the water-weary!
Water for the water-borne.
Anybody there to hear me?
Call out if you’re home alone!
The sound of the oars took up where he left off, and Cora turned them off their well-traveled street, down into the deeper water.
There was no one on the rooftops here either. She turned right, and cars rose up out of the flood like stepping-stones. There had to be people somewhere nearby. She kept expecting to turn a corner and find the remnant of New Orleans clustered on the roof of a school like it was a cruise-ship dock, Reyna and the boys waiting front and center with their luggage.
When she turned to the left again, Troy suddenly stopped singing, and his hands moved out as if he wanted to take away the oars. A shadow moved across the pirogue and suddenly, she knew where they were. She looked up as the façade of their neighborhood church rose up serenely from the water, intact even to the stained glass.
Cora began rowing backwards towards their houses, and Troy started shaking his head.
“They’re not there,” Troy said. “And I’ve already seen my house. I don’t need to see it again.”
“But I haven’t seen mine, Troy,” she said. “We were in such a hurry yesterday, we didn’t look.”
He reached out for the oars again. “You don’t need to see that, baby. You know what it’s going to be.”
“Don’t patronize me,” she said as she swept the boat around the corner, across Troy’s lawn, looking towards her little house across the street, flooded to the middle of its windows. “I know what I need.”
“I don’t think you do.”
He grabbed hold of the oars, but she snatched them away. As he stood up, the boat rocked and water sloshed over her legs. His hands reached out to push them backwards and away from his front porch—he was being idiotic, he was too worn down—but when the pirogue butted up against the house, they heard the sound of splashing, of feet running inside.
“Reyna!” Troy hollered. He leapt from the boat onto the porch, his feet splashing. “Reyna? Is that yo
u?”
His hand spun on the locked doorknob, and then he began pounding on the door with the flat of his hand.
“You leave us be!” a woman yelled. “You will not take us! You cannot make us go!”
“Tyrone! Willy!” Troy shouted. “It’s your Uncle Troy. You come on out now.”
On the side of the house a shutter flapped open and banged against the weatherboard, and the yelling started up again, accompanied now by the sound of furniture being dragged across a floor through shallow water. From the window, a hand extended, a little arm waving something orange.
Troy bent close to the door now, talking, his hands flat, and Cora pulled the boat backwards and up along the side of the house. In the window, a boy, no more than four, stood naked except for a pair of water wings, his brown legs covered in weeping red pustules. Behind him, Troy’s kitchen was lit with dozens of candles that sent a perfumed stink out over the smell of the floodwater. The little boy blinked his sticky eyelashes and held out his arms, but before she could reach him, he leapt out at her in a flurry of plastic and skin. The pirogue keeled one way and then the other, but she caught him, an arm between his damp legs, a hand clapped to his back, as floodwater sloshed across them. She could feel where the water had touched her, as if she’d been burned. The little boy must have waded through it for some time—the gasoline and industrial waste and sewage—and he must have trailed his hands in the water, because they too were covered in sores. In the house, running feet splashed and a calmer voice interrupted Reyna, who was still yelling at them to go away. Quickly, Cora settled the boy in the bow and picked up the oars.
“Stop! Stop!” Reyna yelled, thrusting her head from the window, just as Cora made it to the edge of the house. “Stop! That is my child! You can’t take my child!”
Troy looked at Cora from the porch. “Do you see Tyrone?”
Cora shook her head. Inside, the running feet changed direction, and then the door opened against the security chain. Reyna tried a softer tone. “You tell that woman to give me back my boy. He’s not going back to that hellhole of yours. That’s no kind of place for children. Full of rapists, killers, and all you do is stand around and say the buses are coming, the buses are coming, the buses are coming, the buses are coming—”
“Reyna, Reyna, it’s me. It’s Troy, Reyna, we aren’t going anywhere like that. We’re going to get you out of here.”
“Mom, that’s Troy, it’s Uncle Troy,” the other boy was saying, somewhere behind her in the house. He sounded oddly—frighteningly—calm.
“What do you know?” she’d begun to shout again. “How do you know who he is? You know how they are, people claim to want to help? They’ll kill you as soon as look at you.”
“Don’t you listen to her, son. Come on to me, baby. Come on.”
Cora bent towards the little boy and put her hands over his ears. It seemed true that Reyna was ill, but who was to say, given the state of things, what was insanity and what wasn’t, when the sea walked on land and mechanical buzzards swarmed over houses capsized like ships. She looked into the boy’s frantic yellow eyes as they searched her face. She struggled to keep her expression blank, free of the horror she felt as she listened to Reyna yell, though she knew that if she’d been in Reyna’s position, forced to walk for miles across a flooded city in search of safety for her children, she would be yelling just the same.
Troy had finally gotten the door open, and Reyna waded out onto the porch, followed by a gangly older boy, maybe ten. Reyna was wearing Troy’s kitchen jacket and nothing else, and her legs—and the older boy’s too—were ulcerated like the baby’s. She leaned against the porch rail and stared at Cora, her eyes almost completely red, and Willy hid his face in Cora’s lap.
“We’re just here to get you home, Reyna,” Troy said. “That’s all we’re trying to do.”
“Who’s this bitch, then? That’s what she’s trying? She’s got my child in her boat.”
“She’s a friend of mine from the restaurant,” Troy said. “You come on in the boat too, and we’ll get you out of the water, get you cleaned up, get you some food.”
“They just want to help us,” said the older boy, who held a backpack across his chest.
Reyna looked at Cora with such intensity, Cora could feel it on her skin. “You know what help gets you?” she asked, as if it were a real question. “Fucked.”
EVENTUALLY, THEY HAD to lie to get Reyna in the boat. They told her Calliope had not flooded as it had done in the last several hours, that her neighbors were already home. They told her that what she’d heard were just malicious rumors, that the city was returning to normal and she would be safe at home with her children. They’d told her they would take her home.
After they’d made it to shore and Reyna, Tyrone, and Willy were safely inside the Jeep, Troy had taken Cora by the shoulder and whispered that they had to get Reyna to a hospital, that he had seen her this bad only once before. After her first child was born, she’d called from the hospital screaming that the nurses had taken the baby away. It turned out that the little girl had died in the night, and in the next few days, Reyna had tried four times to take her own life. Cora had not been able to ask when or how before Troy opened the car door and pushed Cora in.
Now, Reyna talked nonstop as Troy drove them away from the margins of the flood, her exhaustion-sharpened face turned out the window, her arms and legs wrapped around the boys who squirmed like puppies in her embrace.
“Don’t look, boys, don’t look. There’s nothing but filth out there, like I always told you. It comes up from underneath. And once you see it, you’ll never stop. You’ll never get your eyes clean.”
Cora watched the boys in the rearview mirror. Tyrone was staring out of his window, watching the filth roll by, but Willy had his head cradled against his mother’s breast, his hands over his ears. He was humming.
“No-city no-place nothing nothing nothing.”
“It’s going to be alright, boys,” Cora said.
“Don’t you talk to my children, bitch. Don’t you start lying to them again. They know it’s not true. They know not to listen. They know what you—”
“You’ll see,” Cora continued. “We’re going to get out of here just as soon as we can. And the first thing we do when we get out of the city is we’re going to go to a Burger King, and we’re going to get hamburgers, milkshakes, whatever you want—”
“You’re not taking us anywhere!” Reyna yelled, hitting the back of Cora’s seat so hard that she jolted forward. “Not anywhere! We’re dead already. Dead before we died.”
“Hey!” Troy yelled. “That’s enough.”
In the rearview, the boys huddled against each other, Tyrone looping his arms over his brother’s shoulders. Cora stopped. They would be at the checkpoint soon enough, and Reyna would be gone, and Cora would be able to reassure them.
“ — trying to tell me what I’m going to do with my own children. What I’m going to do, how I’m going to be, when they’re the ones, with their yellow rooms, their overflowing toilets, their pills in little cups—”
Reyna kept talking, but she had turned her face to the window again, and Tyrone began stroking Willy’s back. His hand ran up and down, quieting his little brother, and Cora tried to visualize Del sitting in her lap, running her fingers through her hair the way she did when Cora couldn’t handle things.
Finally, they reached the checkpoint, and Troy stopped the Jeep. “Reyna,” he said. “Can you give me a hand with something? I want to get some flats of water.”
For some reason, she didn’t argue with him. She just got out and followed him across the streetcar tracks, towards the tents and military Humvees. As soon as Cora thought she was out of Reyna’s line of sight, she unbuckled her seatbelt and bent into the backseat, reaching under the driver’s seat for a jar of peanuts.
“It’s going to be okay.” She opened the jar slowly, desperate for Tyrone’s eyes to stay on her hands. “It’s going to be okay. I promise. We�
��re going to go back to my house, and take a bath, and bandage you up, and get fresh clothes.”
She tapped peanuts into Tyrone’s hand, risking a glance up to the encampment where Troy was speaking to the guardsmen.
“We’ve got lots of good things to cook for dinner,” she said, while Tyrone pushed the peanuts into his brother’s mouth as though he were feeding a puppy. “Baked beans and some steaks in the freezer should be thawed out now, and canned peaches. You like peaches?” she tried, but just then Reyna started screaming.
Tyrone looked up. She couldn’t stop him. He watched the guardsmen put his mother in handcuffs, watched his uncle walk away with his hands in his pockets as though he had nothing to do with it.
“Row, row, row your boat,” Cora started to sing, desperate to drown out Reyna’s screams, desperate to keep Willy from looking through the window. “Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream. Row, row, row your boat—”
Even as she sang, she felt the impact. She’d been falling ever since the rain had started, but now she felt herself land, hard. She watched Troy hitch his jeans up and wait for a Humvee to pass before crossing the street. His face was blank—shell-shocked but resolute. The air was suddenly as clear as still water, and she could hear Willy chewing his peanuts. He smiled up at her as his hand reached into the glass jar for more. Tyrone was still looking through the window, and she scrambled into the backseat and threw an arm across his eyes. His mother was trying to jerk her manacled hands away from the two guardsmen who held her, her head lowered, showing the spirals of her braids.
“It’s just for now,” she heard herself saying as Troy opened the door. “Those men are going to help her, so that she can come back home healthy and look after you right.” She didn’t even know if she was lying, like the bitch Reyna said she was. Regardless, Tyrone nodded and put another peanut in his mouth.
TROY WAS AT her father’s grill cooking the steaks from the thawing deep-freeze, and smoke twisted across the firelit yard, tangling with the moss hanging in the trees. Cora sat on the lower gallery with Willy in her lap, bandaging his legs. The smell of soap was strong on his fuzzy head. She’d washed him three times with dish detergent then orange oil then shea butter shampoo, and she breathed him in, talking about clean streets, freshly made beds, red leaves on a bright blue day. Her hands worked rhythmically as she laid on the fabric tape and ripped it with her teeth.
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