On 10/10/05 Cora Boisdoré,
My Adela,
So Mrs. Randsell’s dead. Mom comes out to the pool where they’ve put me with a bucket of rum and sits down on the lounge chair, says, Honey, she didn’t make it, I’m sorry. Puts her hand on my head at least before she started bitching about sunscreen. I knew it was going to happen. I knew it. Even before the stroke, Mrs. Randsell said—when we were still on Felicity Street—that it would happen. Said she’d never see the city again. I won’t either, of course. None of us will. Even when we were sitting out on Uncle Augie’s lawn, drinking coffee every day before I went out into the flood, I wasn’t there anymore. None of us were. We had already stopped existing.
I’m trying to forget it all, like she said. If I could, I’d like to replace everything I saw—everything I did—with something else: histories, the world before we ruined it. To see, instead of Vin’s suburb, a copse of sweet gums at the end of a row of cotton, strung with spiked fruit. To see, instead of cotton, the swamp that was drained to plant it—bald cypresses bending their knees above the water, tossing their wispy heads. I don’t really get anywhere, though. A blink of a better world, then nothing. Just blank. Just fine. “Fine, fine, I’m fine,” I say until I almost start to think it’s true. That’s the way Mom and Dad are, constantly. As if they’re oblivious to the fact that for weeks their lives have been draining into the Gulf with the floodwater. They don’t understand that this is the way ghosts live, among the memories of the things they’ve lost, haunting houses and neighborhoods that are no longer theirs, maybe no longer there at all. A haunting of brass bands and churches, a haunting of buttermilk drops and purple plastic pearls strung from telephone lines. Soon, though, they’ll see. They’ll understand the quick shock of ruin.
Dead already, she said. Dead before we died. We thought she was fucking nuts, sent her away, but it’s true: you only have to look in the mirror to know it, look around at these exiles who keep coming by with jambalaya and tissues, dressed up in lipstick and sunhats to look like the living.
It turns out sacrifice doesn’t get you shit, you know. Whatever you do—it doesn’t matter. Even with your heart raised up in the priest’s hands, the crops fail. And it continues to beat, they continue to serve you chicken, expect your “participation,” expect you to shower and dry with the towels they wash and fold. Mom takes me to buy shoes appropriate for a funeral, and I nod my head. I am trying to tolerate, you see. Since you asked me how I was.
C.
Del pushed the stool back and ran up the stairs two at a time. In Dan’s gym, she turned on the light and looked around. Her own wide-eyed face stared out of the foggy mirror of the disassembled vanity. Her suitcase yawned open, and her shoes were kicked off between the door and the bed. There was Cora’s empty rose vase, Cora’s mug of cold tea, Cora’s laptop in plain view on a side table jammed into the corner, just sitting there next to a couple of books, an untouched newspaper, a jar of pens. She fought her way through the furniture and popped the computer open. The screen was clouded with mildew, but it turned on with a hum. She wiped it down with her shirt, opened Cora’s Outlook. A long list of boldfaced e-mails appeared on the screen.
She wanted to shake the computer in her parents’ whining faces. I don’t know what else you want us to do, sweetheart. We’re just going to have to prepare ourselves. She picked her way back across the room and closed the door, sat down on the floor with the computer. She opened Cora’s sent mail folder and watched the messages load—just a dozen or so, dated between September nineteenth and the twenty-ninth. She hit the reload button once, then again, but nothing new appeared on the screen. She clicked on Cora’s final reply to Troy, on the twenty-ninth—just one sentence, I told you I can’t—and as she scrolled down, trying to see what Cora couldn’t do, Mrs. Randsell’s name leapt out at her, then Reyna’s. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and pressed the down arrow. She would start at the beginning.
On 9/6/05 Troy Holyfield,
Cora, we are safe in Rome by my auntie. Please reach us as soon as you can at (319)709-6984 to tell us that you are okay. Don’t try my mobile because they are not working. I am feeling a lot of guilt for allowing myself to take your Jeep.
On 9/8/05 Troy Holyfield,
We have not heard from you and there is no answer on your house phone and this makes me worry that something happened. I ran into this friend of mine Russell who just got out and he says the police are going house to house forcing people out and they’re arresting some, I guess for ignoring the evacuate order. I hope this is not the case with you and that you just went by Mrs. Randsell, like you said you would do in case of an emergency. Call me if you can. My mobile is not working, so use the house (319)709-6984
On 9/10/05 Troy Holyfield,
Please call if you can. (319)709-6984
On 9/14/05 Troy Holyfield,
Listen, Cora, maybe you are not getting these messages, or you don’t want to get them, which I understand as what we went through together was like being in war where they say you either become brothers or you never want to see them again, but I need your help. I called the place on the card the medics gave me to check in on my sister they don’t have record of her. No way of saying where she has gone to. I call the police, I call Charity. The line’s disconnected. I put her name on one of those boards they have on the internet for people who are missing, put her name with the Red Cross but nothing’s turned up. Call me, please. I am at (319)709-6984, and I also got a new mobile (319)867-3852.
On 9/14/05 Troy Holyfield,
I know you feel guilt, Cora, but there is no need. You should see how good the boys are. It’s all over their face. All I need you to send is one word that you are all right and I will stop trying to reach you.
On 9/17/05 Troy Holyfield,
They say they are letting people back in to check on their houses, and I wish for you that this is what has happened, that your folks went in and found you and now are in your dads car on the road going out of town, at least you have dry feet and clean clothes and water. For me I wish that you were here with us. The boys are starting school again and I am looking for some work. I wish peace for us all and health and safety and air-conditioning and a plate of Wallace’s fried oysters aioli. I don’t know if what I wish is possible or ever will be but I wish it anyway.
On 9/22/05 Troy Holyfield,
Please contact me to let me know you are safe and that you have gotten out before this next hurricane touches down.
On 9/24/05 Cora Boisdoré
Troy, please do not worry, I am safe in Houston with my family.
On 9/24/05 Troy Holyfield
Thank the lord girl. The boys want to hear your voice. They have been asking if you call, and I tell them, like I tell them about their mama, that you call after they’re in bed and are going to come up to see them soon. I haven’t told them I don’t know how to find her. I don’t know really what to say. So I say you and their mama both call and ask after them and you want to know how they behave in school and that you are going to bring Tyrone his blanket he left at your house when you come visit, which might be some time since I told them the airport is down and you have to see about your own folks. Willy came home yesterday with a picture he drew of you and his mama, both of you with wings on like angels and he said it was so you could fly here to see us. If you could call after they’re in bed I would appreciate.
House: (319)709-6984
Cell: (319)867-3852
On 9/24/05 Cora Boisdoré
Troy, you should prepare them not to see me or Reyna again.
Del exhaled hard. She had been holding her breath, she realized, barely reading, just scanning for that name. Sh
e backed up, reread Troy’s e-mail, realizing she’d barely understood half of what he’d written. Like I tell them about their mama. Both of you with wings.
IN THE EYE of a storm, there was silence. Unlike other so-called silences, with their ticking clocks, bird noise, distant engine rumble, this silence was true and total. The cloud walls rose up to meet a perfect patch of sky, and you could hear your blood rushing in your ears. Joe had heard stories of people who’d lashed themselves to trees after their houses went under, who lifted their heads when the winds died to find their families gone and the branches filled instead with animals: alligator and squirrel, bobcat and goat, moccasin curled up beside muskrat like the lion and the lamb. This was no eye, but still all he heard was a constant B ringing in his ears.
Tess’s mouth was moving. Her hands gripped the back of the empty rocking chair they’d stationed in the portico, where his father had been sitting when they’d last seen him. She pointed at his shirt pocket. Her shoulders rose and heavily fell. Joe looked at her fangs, the fur on her bony arms. He backed away, down the stairs, across the lawn. He started the truck. She was moving towards him, slowly. Stalking him.
On the forums, they said that wandering could be occasioned by a hallucination or by a need. Hunger, thirst, lust, habit. The belief that the LO was expected at work, the suspicion that home was not really home. You, the CG, were supposed to label the doors of the house—BATHROOM, KITCHEN, BEDROOM. A stop sign might discourage outdoor journeys. You were supposed to purchase a packet from a company called Home Safe, with iron-on labels for the LO’s clothes.
Joe idled the truck down Esplanade, looking down the side streets. When they had walked around the corner to Esplanade from the Dobies’, his father had seemed to know where he was. It’s a fine house, Joseph. He had squeezed the slice of lemon into the go-cup of ice tea they’d picked up from Port of Call. You got anything sweet? Maybe it was the caffeine that had done it. You were supposed to keep the LO hydrated and fed. He’d had a boiled egg for breakfast but it was past lunchtime now. In the distance, a church bell tolled one, two. His father always liked to talk about how they would go down Claiborne after church when he was little, back before the city destroyed it. Get a stuffed crab at Sheep’s, maybe a pocket pie. You got anything sweet? Joe put his foot on the gas, ran the blinking yellows all the way down to the I-10. Sheep’s had been to the right. He turned.
Under the interstate, the corpses of flooded-out cars sat in long lines of eternal bumper-to-bumper traffic. Their windows and paint jobs were all clouded with a thin coat of mud, and doors and trunks had been left open—an exodus caught in the mud while the parted sea towered trembling beside them, the Israelites running, the red water crashing down on the heels of the last child pulled up the bank. Waking in the hot cab of the truck that morning he’d come searching for Cora had felt a little like waking in the Sinai—families burdened with trash bags and coolers picked their way across a desert of mud crisscrossed with torn power lines. But there was no Moses here leading these people out of bondage, no milk and honey on the other side. Those were all just fables—lies to get you through.
He’d told Tess they’d turned him back at the bridge because he knew she wouldn’t believe the truth, but even that she hadn’t believed. A woman of the water, Tess would never know deserts. She thought he should have tried harder, thought he’d backed down. Why didn’t you tell them about Cora? she wanted to know, as if Blackwater would have sent out a search party. She wanted to make everything about responsibility. About trust. She believed that what separated them was thin and moveable—Du Bois’s gossamer veil—but it was more like a barrier of bulletproof glass. The truth was, she had her world, he had his, and their words came to each other muffled and distorted by what stood between. That was why he’d lied to her: there was no way he could ever make her understand. He honestly hoped she never would. That she would never have to watch him be pushed, handcuffed, into one of their prison vans.
You didn’t want to find her. Tess kept saying. You didn’t want to find her. Implying: You don’t want to find her now. But he did. His foot was off the gas, his eyes were wide open. He wanted to find his people, hold them close, never let them go again. Could she say the same?
As he approached St. Louis No. 1, he spotted a gray-and-brown figure moving out among the disabled cars, and he pulled the truck up onto the sidewalk, rolled down the window and squinted through the shade. The old man had his back to him, and he was moving away through the cars, trying one door handle after the other, peering through the windows. Joe got out of the truck, stood a minute while his eyes adjusted to the shadow. Blue shirt, serge pants. It was his father, alright. Thirty yards or so away, Vincent was reaching in through the broken window of an old Lincoln, fumbling for the handle.
“Pop?”
He withdrew his hand, looked at Joe, reached in again through broken glass.
“Mr. Boisdoré?” Joe shouted. “Vincent Boisdoré?”
His father looked towards him, then turned away.
The fenders pulled at Joe’s pants legs as he wove between cars. His father was still popping handles, looking at his right arm from time to time, occasionally fondling the antennas of the cars as if he were wading through cattails on a riverbank. Joe quickened his pace. His jacket pocket caught on a mirror, ripped. He got stuck between an SUV and delivery van, had to back out, go around, and by the time he’d found a clear channel, his father was almost a block away.
“Sir!” He jumped up onto the hood of a Miata and yelled it.
“Just trying to find my car.” His father spoke loudly, in that voice Joe remembered from childhood—the traffic cop leaning in through the window, the lawyer in the seersucker suit waiting for the two of them to get out of their seats on the streetcar so that he could sit down. No matter his anger, Vincent always, eventually, complied.
“This is an impound lot, sir. None of these cars is going anyplace.”
“I didn’t park illegal.” That voice again, the edge of defiance. He hadn’t stopped walking. “It was Boh Brothers, moved the street.”
“That’s right, sir.” Joe walked across the hardtop, and off the back of the trunk. “But the fact remains these cars are in the possession of the city.”
But his father had stopped listening. He’d gone back to trying the doors. Joe could see it all play forward: If one of them opened, he would sit down in the driver’s seat and lock the car from the inside. Joe would have to kick the passenger window in. His father would be frightened, maybe hurt. Joe might have to call 911.
“I got a call, for a taxi pickup,” Joe tried. “A Mr. Vincent Boisdoré?”
His father just shook his head, rubbed his right arm, moved away.
“Your wife’s looking for you. Wants you to come on home.”
“You know my wife?” He turned towards Joe, and Joe pushed his way towards him.
“Sure do. Sylvia,” he said. “Great soul.”
“You’re going to give me a ride home?”
On one of the forums, a CG, someone’s daughter, had written that for the LO home might not be a physical place, the way we usually thought of it. That it might instead signify the world where they had felt like themselves, and therefore might not be something anyone could provide. Still, Joe nodded as he sidled between the last cars that separated them. The backseat of the Trans Am beside him was full to the roof with ruined suitcases and cardboard boxes, its drivers’-side window smashed. His father stepped towards him.
“You know the way?” Vincent asked. A long cut ran across his forearm. Blood was congealing in the tiny springs of his hair.
Joe nodded. “I can get you home.”
SO FAR DEL had gathered this: That if anyone had killed Reyna, it had not been Troy. That he had left New Orleans with her children after some sort of incident that involved bringing her to the medics. That some emergency had happened to make Cora leave Esplanade for the Randsell house. That, meanwhile, Reyna had gone missing, and though Cora knew,
or thought she knew, where she had gone, she wouldn’t say.
Cora was writing other e-mails around this time—to Del, to her therapist, to her chef and her landlord and her small handful of girlfriends—but to Troy she would say very little, though Troy was the only one begging her to speak.
On 9/30/05 Troy Holyfield
Cora, I tried your uncle’s house in Houston he says you cannot come to the phone. Please let me know how I can reach you.
On 10/03/05 Troy Holyfield
Cora, I have a favor I don’t know who else to ask. Will you call please.
On 10/06/05 Troy Holyfield
I thought I was doing right getting her help. I mean, she got WELL for a while, Cora. Had a job at Ochsner, was working on getting her medical assistant certificate. But in that situation, I don’t know. I don’t know if there was any right thing we could have done. Maybe she shook herself loose. Maybe bringing her to the authorities for a second time that night was not the right thing to do, but I had to think about the boys and would they have been safe with her? Could we keep her safe from herself if we tried? I was trying to do right by them, and I guess I did wrong by her. Maybe I should have made you drive the boys out of town, stayed there with her myself, nursed her back. Maybe if I’d brought her meds out of Calliope, shoved some down her throat while she was knocked out on the stairs, we could have all left in the morning together, easy as pie. Lord knows there’s been enough pain in her life, in all our lives. Enough babies stolen away from enough mothers. Enough of this badness. I’m worried about the likeliest scenario to have happened, and like you said I’m trying to prepare Tyrone and Willy, except I don’t know if they have any more room in their heads for badness.
The Floating World Page 27