“What’s taking so long?” Papie glanced at her, then looked back at the door.
She shrugged. The kettle she’d put on when her father had dropped Papie off hadn’t even boiled. She looked at the clock—still only ten—but that meant she’d been awake for over a day.
“What in God’s name can be taking so long?” Papie said again.
Del shrugged. “Track fire.”
He cocked his head. His flannel shirt was misbuttoned, and mismatched socks peeked out from under the high cuffs of his pants. “What?”
The kettle finally began to whistle, and Del got up. “Excuse me.”
He pushed himself to his feet to watch her leave the room.
In the kitchen, she turned the burner off under the kettle and brought it to the tile counter where she had sliced the lemon and laid out the mugs, tea bags, honey. The courtyard was still in shadow, and in the window over the sink her face was reflected as clearly as in a mirror. She reached behind her head and undid the knot of her scarf while the tea steeped, let her hair spring free. Her mother had sent her to check on Cora’s house after they’d searched the Marigny, and now they’d gone back again. Del was glad. She hadn’t looked properly, distracted by the flames whipping the dim sky, the neighbors clustered around. It looked like a decent fire she’d set, but she hadn’t gone close enough to see if it had accomplished its purpose—she didn’t like being there, at the scene of the crime. She was afraid someone would put it all together, the smell, the burning, Cora and Troy. But she really looked nothing like her sister: her face was round where Cora’s was angled, her skin darker but more freckled, her lips riper, roughed up now from kissing.
“They all want to do it fast these days,” Papie said when she came back into the room.
“Do what?”
She held out his mug, and he took it in two hands. Her whole life, his nails had been ragged and jammed with sawdust, his fingerprints highlighted with stain. Now, they were pink-padded, raw pecan-brown, like babies’ hands. It had been years since they’d taken him away from his workshop, but she’d never seen before that his hands had changed.
“Fast. Instant gratification. Like a bouillon cube. Don’t want to take the time to learn.”
She sat down on the Dobies’ too-soft leather sofa and closed her eyes. Her head hurt, and her eyes watered, the smell of smoke stuck in her nose. She should turn off some lights, but she didn’t feel like standing up again.
“If you do find someone good, then they want to learn everything you know as quick as they can and then run away before you’ve got your use of them, make their own profits. They don’t care for the hard work, the real work. Shit work, I heard one of them call it, the job I paid him to do. Want to hire their own men to do it for ’em, and I’m not going to be a party to that. No, ma’am.”
Del nodded. Furniture, he meant. Actually, she had always enjoyed doing the little things Papie had tasked her with: rubbing wax into the surface of crosscut mahogany, blowing sawdust out of precisely drilled holes, gluing together long strips of ebony and oak. That wouldn’t have lost its meaning, she didn’t think. Not even the little things. Not even now.
“It’s not to my taste to train my own competition.”
“Your tea okay, Papie?”
“No, ma’am.” He examined his cup. “Too hot. Don’t want it to burn me.”
“Mm.” She took a sip of her own and smacked her lips. “Mine’s cooled off pretty good.”
“My mouth is burned.” He looked up at her. “My mouth is burned!”
“No, Papie, no—you’re okay.”
He was looking around, suddenly startled, at the Dobies’ oak bookcases, at the paint-dulled medallion around the Noguchi lantern, at her bare feet, at his clean hands on the chair arms, at the steam lingering over the lip of his mug.
“It’s burning me.” He dropped the mug, tea flooding out over the rug.
She stood up, as if she could push him back to wherever he’d been just seconds ago—his workshop? 1989? She held his shoulders, steadied him, and he dropped his eyes to the brown mark the tea had made on the rug.
“It’s a mess,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s all in a mess.”
Through the long front windows of the house, Del saw that her parents had returned from double-checking Cora’s house. Her mother walked delicately, weaving and watching the sidewalk because of her bare feet, and her father had his arm around her shoulders. He looked at the air in front of him, speaking, filling his cheeks with air between each set of words.
“It’s going to be all right,” Del told Papie, taking his hand in hers. “We’ll fix it.”
“You?” His eyes traveled around on her face, searching for something.
“Adelaide,” she said.
Her father followed her mother up the steps, leaning towards her terry cloth back, yearning towards her.
“I had a girl apprentice once went by that name. Made a pretty little chest, some marquetry on the drawers I showed her how to do.”
Del nodded and smiled at him as her mother unlocked the front door. There was a bitter, smoke-laced edge to the air—the smell of autumn.
“She wasn’t there, like you said,” her father said as he came into the house. “But she had been there—all her furniture was out on the street. Was it like that when you went?”
Del shook her head. “No.”
“Are you sure?” Her father was wide-eyed with worry and exhaustion.
“If her furniture was outside? Yes, I’m sure.” So, Cora had seen the fire. So, she knew.
Her mother settled into the hall chair as Del picked up the photo of her sister her father had brought from across the lake, a photo from last Christmas, when it had snowed. Snowflakes clung to Cora’s lashes, to the tips of the old fur pulled tight around her neck. She was looking up, trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue. She’d been getting so much better.
“If you know where she is,” her father said, “you’ve got to tell us.”
“Oh, Jesus, Dad. Obviously.”
Del walked clear across the room, looked through the far window. A woman and her Irish setter walked past the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the Dobies’ garden, the dog’s coat flickering between the black bars. “I told you about Troy’s sister—”
Her father sighed heavily. “I know, baby.” He strode across the room and hugged her tightly. “I know. I’m scared of that too.”
She tried to look him in the face and say it, but he kept ahold of her. She dug her chin into his shoulder, stared at the sickly azaleas. If Cora had seen the fire before disappearing, then that was confirmation: Reyna was the dead woman from her dream. Her dream was not a dream. And if the fire was what had released her—allowed her to leave—then they had to let her stay gone.
Del decided that once the police got there she would steer the conversation towards suicide: tell them how sick Cora was, list the names of her doctors. That way nobody would put a trace on Cora’s phone, no APB’s would go out with her picture and license plate. Even if they did end up connecting the Jeep to Troy’s house, the bone fragments in the ashes would confirm their suspicions. There were too many other bodies, too much else going on.
“Suicide is not what I’m scared of,” she said to her father.
He shook his head. “We can certainly pray.”
“I did something.” She looked at the rug. “No one had come to get Troy’s sister, and—”
Her mother looked up from her hands. “You didn’t tell Cora about her, did you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Jesus!” She stomped her foot, and the teaspoons rattled on the glass coffee table. “Of course I’m fucking sure! I’m not the one with dementia. She knew already. She already knew.”
Her father picked up the tea tin and stared at it.
“She didn’t kill herself,” Del repeated.
Her mother swallowed, her unwashed hair flat against her scalp. “What did she tell y
ou?”
“Cora said she had dreamed of a dead woman on the kitchen floor. She said that it was her fault.”
Tess stood up from the chair so fast its back hit the wall behind. “I can’t believe you! She tells you this and you keep it to yourself?”
“She told me yesterday. You weren’t here, remember? I tried your cell. I had no idea where you were.”
“And so you left her here alone?”
“Tess—” Her father tried to corral her, but Tess was pacing in a fury, walking straight past his outspread arms. “Calm down, honey.”
“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down! You left her here alone, Adelaide. You left her here!”
“I did. Right. I’m the one who left her.”
Her father backed against the sofa with his hands out, signaling stop.
“Please, Tess,” her father said. “Del, please.”
She listened to her blood course through her ears. “I don’t know why I even bother. We should all just fucking take the Fifth.”
There were, however, some things that could not go unsaid. Some things that, kept bottled up, would poison you from the inside. It was necessary to say it. Necessary like vomit.
“I think Cora knew about Reyna,” she said. “I think she’s the dead woman in her dream. I think it isn’t a dream. I think Cora’s been to Troy’s house since the storm. I think that’s where she’s been going at night. I think that’s where she went.”
“God—Jesus—that’s where she’s been going,” her mother said. “She told me, she tried to tell me that that’s where she goes when she leaves the house at night. Mother of God.”
“Well, let’s go there then,” her father said.
Del shook her head, and her mother stared at her, her lips locked between her teeth.
“What the hell do you mean?” her mother said.
Del looked outside again. A squad car had turned the corner and was rolling slowly towards them, the driver looking out of the window at the house numbers.
“She won’t be there anymore.”
“How could you possibly know that?” her father asked.
“Because the house isn’t there anymore.”
“What?”
“It burned down last night.”
“Oh, God.”
“The fire trucks were there when I went to see if Cora was at her place this morning.”
“That burned house across the street?” her father said.
“I didn’t want to tell you.”
“Why in God’s name not?” her mother shouted.
“I didn’t want to scare you.”
Her mother laughed once, a gutteral ha.
“Did she set it?” her father asked. “Do you think Cora set the fire?”
“I don’t know,” Del said, and it sounded like the truth as it left her mouth.
She didn’t know anything, she realized. All she knew was that there were roses there and roses here, Reyna burned and Cora gone, the Jeep missing and the bed cold. She didn’t know when Cora had gone to Troy’s last night, if she had. She didn’t know if Cora had seen Del set the fire, or if she’d come only after, or when she had gone or where or how far. She was relying on words that had floated up out of someone else’s nightmare. There had been no gun there, and she had only seen Reyna’s body briefly, in the dark. Anyway, she didn’t know how a shotgun to the face looked any different than a pistol, a grenade: there’d been no traces of the shot, only a face that was no longer a face, but more like an enormous wound. All she had were Anthony’s words, Shot herself full of buckshot, and her father’s weeks ago, Well, the shotgun we thought was stolen has magically reappeared. But she didn’t have any more reason to disbelieve than to believe.
“You gave Cora the shotgun,” she said to her father.
“What?”
“Troy’s sister was killed with a shotgun.”
It was as if she’d stuck a pin into a balloon.
“You think your sister killed the woman.” Her mother said this flatly, the way Del imagined she repeated things back to her patients, so that they would hear how crazy their thoughts sounded.
“I don’t know what to think. You said the shotgun was missing when you came back to the city. And then you found it in Cora’s laundry basket.”
Her father wrapped his fingers around her wrist. “My poor baby.”
She pulled her hand away. “Cora’s strong. That’s what you don’t get. You think she’s suicidal. You think she’s gone.” She threw her chin at the street, where the cops were slamming their doors, getting out onto the sidewalk. “And you better the hell tell them that. But just know that you’re wrong. She was down here by herself, saving people in the heat. Burying dogs. Bringing people water. She’s not going to give up now.”
“That’s not how trauma works,” her mother said.
“I don’t care how it works! I don’t think we understand at all what she went through or what she’s going through now. I don’t think we have the first fucking idea.”
“Language, Del.” Her mother sank down into the little side chair by the door, and Del wanted to grab her. Wanted to wrap her hands around her mother’s bony chest and shake.
“It’s not like something’s not been going to happen,” her father said. “We’ve been waiting for something to happen. It just finally has.”
“Listen—” Del said. “I’m just trying to help! I’m telling you it’s possible Cora might just have left. She might have had a perfectly rational reason to go.”
“Murder?” her mother laughed. “Arson?”
Her father sighed. “You’re some hard on your sister, Adelaide.”
“It’s you who’s hard on her. You defeat her! You already called the morgues.”
“We can’t turn our faces away from reality, Del,” her mother said.
Del laughed.
The police were shuffling up the porch steps from their car, the creases of their pants shining greasily in the sun. The woman officer turned a knob on the radio clipped to her belt, and static pushed through the windows. Del went to open the door.
TESS HAD BEEN so grateful for Joe’s presence as they’d discussed suicide with the police, discussed the river, the lake, the bayou—all the places you could drown—that she’d invited him to stay the night. As he put his hands on her back, helped her up from a chair, she almost physically felt a weight lift off her. It was like the old days when, on the parade route or at the zoo, he would grab Cora, riding piggyback, and lift her up—little legs kicking—and settle the giggling girl on his own shoulders. Just the fact of his broad back in the worn-in undershirt, his hands opening a Barq’s or scrubbing the stupid tile counter, had been a relief, and she’d felt herself go limp. Grief was infinite, though, wasn’t it—something like love that, divided, did not diminish. And now, in the Dobies’ bedroom, as he teetered on one leg pulling off his shoe, he seemed so burdened that she worried he might collapse.
She watched him in the mirror. She was brushing her teeth, the lines permanent now around her eyes, and she considered making a pact with God: to repent, to forgive, to ask forgiveness. If it would bring Cora back, she would fall on her knees in front of him, reciting the Act of Contrition. Deus meus, ex toto corde paenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum. She spat the toothpaste, rinsed. To bring her daughter back, she would put their home back together, regardless of what he had done, what she had done. She would move to the Northshore. She would make breakfast. She would keep her mouth shut. If it would bring Cora back, she would walk across the bedroom carpet, put a hand under his arm. If she did that, she knew Joe would straighten up and hold tight to her, and half of her wanted that badly. She was tired of hurting him, tired of the way his hand trembled on the back of his shoe. She would do penance. Did it matter that it wasn’t really for their sake that she would do it? Did it matter that, in her heart, she knew that she would commit all her sins again?
Yes, her heart said. Yes, it mattered.
She dried her face, t
urned to him.
Joe, barefoot, straightened up and went to close the bedroom door.
She moved her lips, trying out the words: I have sinned against you, whom I should love above all things. Should love. Father Patin would tell her that sin drove one out of the embrace of God’s love, and that was why she couldn’t feel it, because she had not yet asked for forgiveness. Human love was only borrowed from the love that God had for us, he would say, but she still loved her children, didn’t she?
When she looked at Joe, she felt only pity.
He looked at her from across the Dobies’ bedroom, not taking his shirt off, not unbuckling his belt, like a houseguest. He knew he needed her permission to undress, to get into Laura and Dan’s bed beside her, to regain his place. He was right, and then again, the fact that he was right made the wrongness of it all manifest. The fact that he would even ask, waiting there across the room, meant that this could not be fixed. He would always cede control. She would always take it.
She looked at him, not in the eyes, but at the fuzzy hair growing out of his scalp.
“I can’t.” She shook her head. She hedged. “Not tonight. Not yet. I’m sorry.”
All he did was nod, and then he picked up his shoes and wandered into the hall, closing the door softly behind him.
Fifty-Six Days after Landfall
October 24
Sunset
Cora drove east out of the city, along Lake Borgne. During the storm, the Gulf had surged into the lake, and the lake had broken, foaming, over its banks as the wind drove it headlong across the marshes. The water had thrown its creatures up on land, and the deflated carcasses of snakes, nutria, muskrats, and alligators now lay among the shivered planks and bricks that had once been the stilted houses of fisherman.
As she passed through Bayou Sauvage, a sounder of wild boars wading in the water among the trees lifted their heads to watch the Jeep. Beyond the low, weed-eaten walls that bordered the bayou, the hulls of ships came into view—a whole flotilla beached like the navy of a vanquished nation. Wide-bottomed trawlers lay on their sides against the salt-dead shoulder, and the rusting riggings of shrimpers flew against the sky. One steel-hulled ship had been thrown high into the roadside cypresses, breaking through their heavy branches, until it had settled down onto the trees’ trunks as if they were pedestals. Here, huge rags of saltwater prairie—four-foot deep, block-wide sections of marsh grass that the surge had torn out of the swamp—lay across the road. By now, they had been crushed and rutted down to the asphalt, but she still had to slow to cross the deep mud, watching the green marsh float by over the dry land while the blushing, still water of Lake St. Catherine glistened in the distance.
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