You don’t call and that’s all right. But I’m getting nowhere with looking for her, and I am beginning to be afraid that you are right. I don’t know why, but I get this sense. Did you go by my house again before you left? If not, could you go again when you’re back and check to see if she there and also go by her place in Calliope?
Del felt Troy’s fear building in her, the bottom falling out of your faith in the solidity of things, in their ability to hold you up. If there had been anything to learn from the last few months, it was this—that you could rely on nothing, that no one would protect you. You couldn’t necessarily even rely on yourself.
On 10/14/05 Cora Boisdoré
“Help gets you fucked” she said to me. I pretended like I didn’t understand, but I think I always have. You don’t say that sort of thing to yourself if you can help it, not and try and live in the world but help does fuck you over. Sometimes what and who and how you are and what you’ve done and what you’re going to do can’t be changed, not by anybody, even with the best intentions. They think they’ve helped me by bringing me out to Houston. We thought we were helping the little boys. We thought we were helping Reyna by putting her in hands we thought were good, but what good did it do. Mrs. Randsell is dead, Reyna gone. The storms just keep coming. One day the seas will come to walk on land, I don’t care how far you go. Run, little chicken, run, run, but the sky’s still gonna fall. And it’ll fall regardless of if you’re in the flood or in a new built house with the air-condition running, because what does being in the air-condition change except how quickly you remember reality when you wake up in the morning. It’s still going to fall, and so you’re just putting it off, and all putting it off does is make it worse when it does happen.
I could live here, presumably. My auntie circles want-ads in the paper for line-chefs. I could buy a little house, live a fake little life on the dry land. Some days I try to pretend none of it happened. Try to forget. Blot it out, like Mrs. Randsell tried to tell me to do. Blot it out blot it out blot it out she said when she took me in, took me into her arms the night I went to her. And so I tried: You and me, we drove away from New Orleans that night, before the storm came, right? We saw nothing, did nothing but drive. Nothing but fuck, right? In that little Motel 6 by the side of the highway. Nothing but pig out on Arby’s and Dairy Queen and fuck and watch Pay-Per-View. Nothing else. Nothing else happened.
Some days that feels better to me—sometimes it’s all I can take—but some days, I’d rather have the flood. At least in the flood things are coherent. So, yeah, help is a fucking. Your sister was smart. It’s better to stay stuck in the shit if the shit is what you’re destined for.
We’re going back to New Orleans, whatever that means, tomorrow. I’ll look for her, but I don’t think she’s anywhere, Troy. I’ll let you know.
On 10/14/05 Cora Boisdoré
You asked me how I know what I know. How I know that she is gone. It’s because while I was still at home I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking I heard her coming in through the magnolia, looking for the boys. I had dreams where I saw her come prowling through the house, disguised as a dog sometimes, sometimes as herself. Sometimes, there was only the feeling that she had been there, laid like a veil over something else—a fawn torn apart, its throat ripped open, or a tent filled with those boys’ screams. I was scared so bad I was sleeping with the duck gun, though what a gun could do against a nightmare, I don’t know. But it wasn’t just dreams, was it? Not that there’s really much difference between nightmares and what we’re living anymore.
This was the last e-mail in Cora’s sent folder, and Del turned her face away from the screen. She felt cold, as though freezing water were pouring down her back. She reread the last e-mail. She had seen footsteps printed in the dust at their parents’ house, the little feet with the long second toe—the footsteps of a real living person. Their house creaked loudly when you walked through it; if Cora had awakened at the sound of Reyna’s footsteps, would she have picked up the gun she slept with and gotten out of bed?
Cora had gone back to Troy’s house like she told him she would, and she’d returned every night until Del burned it down.
Del shut off the computer now, pressing down on the power button so hard that her thumb went pink, then shoved it under the mattress of Cora’s bed, ripped back the curtains and cranked up the blinds. Dust swarmed in the spears of sun thrown between the shutter slats. It hung like gauze over the mirrors. She wrapped her hand around Cora’s bedpost and tried to concentrate on Papie’s carving. Solid things, real things. Ivy, jasmine, devil vine.
TESS SAT OVER her drink, warm Knob Creek with a dash of Peychaud’s in a plastic cup that left no mark on the copper bar. The dining room in front was full, as were the tables behind her. For the last hour, she’d watched people walk by on Dumaine, stop, put their cupped hands to the glass.
The noise in the room was strange—a bustle of voices without any background clatter of wineglasses and knives on plates, since the water pressure was too low to wash real china and silverware. Tess kept looking behind her to be sure the restaurant was still there, that the people she heard talking were not actually an audience murmuring amongst themselves while they watched her sitting in front of the mural behind the bar—swans on a lake and the colonnade of the Peristyle—like an actress in a one-act play. The Lady Escapes she’d title it.
Because she had escaped, hadn’t she. She could admit that she had long had fantasies of being free of them all, and now she had in fact stepped out of the house she and Joe had built, leaving her husband to deal with his missing father all by himself. She would solve only her own problems now. She’d gone for a drink.
Ideally, she would have walked across the Quarter to Galatoire’s, where there would have been chipped ice in a real glass, a Pernod wash, a twist of lemon. Ideally, it would have been Friday lunch, and the tablecloth would have been strewn with the crumbs of one of those hot, crackling loaves they served only at dinner. Ideally, she would have had béarnaise with her soufflé potatoes and fried eggplant with powdered sugar and silence, while in front of her the mad society put on their tableau in the seersucker suits and bright silk skirts of summer. Ideally, Nelson would have bowed, a starched napkin draped over one arm, and said something mildly wicked while he placed the drink in front of her. Ideally, there would have been frost on the glass and the air would have smelled like garlic and the ceiling fans’ brass blades would have spun over the mirrored room. Nelson was dead, though, the chipped ice gone, Galatoire’s closed, for now at least, and so this would have to do.
She picked up her cup, shook the last drop of bourbon onto her tongue, and lifted it into the bartender’s line of sight. He had been keeping his distance, not giving her a menu or chatting her up, seeing something in her face, maybe, that said it would be too much effort and ill spent at that.
“I’d love another if you could.”
He nodded. “I hope you haven’t been stood up.”
She laughed and took her purse from the empty stool beside her, settled it in her lap. “Nope. I am all alone.”
“I’m sorry.” He reached under the bar to grab a menu. “As you’ll see, we’re not totally up to speed. The kitchen’s about half-staffed and no oysters.”
“No?” She gazed down at the offerings, handwritten on a sheet of blue Xerox paper—four appetizers, four entrees, two desserts. She was not hungry, though she knew that she should eat.
He shook his head. “Storm surge got into the beds.”
“I heard P&J’s going to be getting in sacks from Nova Scotia.” Clucking his tongue, a bald man in a bow tie came to take the empty stool. “Sure you don’t need this?”
She relinquished it with a wave of her hand.
“Read in Tom Fitzmorris they had forty thousand pounds of oysters go bad,” the bald man said. “Can you imagine?”
She shook her head and gathered her new drink,
put her nose in it. “I don’t want to.”
“Me neither.” He brushed the thought out of the air. “Shouldn’t have brought it up. It’s best to get back to the business of enjoying ourselves as quickly as we can.”
Tess nodded at him, smiled, though she could feel her eyes going dull. “Made out all right?”
He laughed, making his martini slosh from his cup. “I’ve got flood insurance if that’s what you mean. No? But what you gonna do.”
She considered the damp bar. Crumpling the paper napkin in her hand, she blotted up the vodka he’d spilled. Shadows of the drops remained on the copper.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m not the type gets worked up about things I can’t do anything about. The minute I saw the pictures, and I’m right off the 17th Street Canal, mind you, I said to myself, Verg, you take this in stride now. Nothing you can do about it, so—equanimity. Always wanted to move to the Quarter. Look at it that way.” He stuck out his hand. “Vergil Ferguson.”
“Tess Eshleman,” she said. “Good to meet you.”
“Not Dr. Eshleman?”
She would have stepped into the mural then if she could, walked right up to the man in the boater standing on the edge of the lagoon and let him row her out among the swans.
She nodded.
“I know a patient of yours. Shouldn’t divulge the name, though, should I? Ruin our tête-à-tête with doctor-patient confidentiality.”
“Maybe that would be best.” She looked down at the menu, rubbing her right shoulder with her left hand so that he would see her wedding band, that lying little ring of gold.
“I’ll bet your services are much in demand, these days. Even I could maybe use them.” He laughed a hiccupping sort of laugh. “You probably think I’m so deep in denial I may never claw my way out.”
“No.” She shook her head. His eyes, a damp, well-lit blue, were set inside merrily wrinkled lids. We put too much emphasis on sanity, she thought. On reality. You could not change reality, but you could change your perception of it. Make accommodations. “You seem to be doing just fine. Anyway, I’m not practicing at the moment.”
He nodded. “Doctor, heal thyself?”
The bartender rubbed the places in front of them with a rag and set out two placemats, two napkins, two forks, two knives, and she started to push herself away from the bar.
“Something like that.”
It was hard enough just to be here without being expected to help someone else manage it. They said, in New York, that the towers had made them kinder to one another, but here, they had already been kind. When you turned up the volume on that kindness, it blared. She pulled her purse into her lap. She should go, anyway, help Joe find Vincent, deal with telling Del about the divorce, get in bed before she gave herself a headache. She reached inside her purse for her wallet—she had the right small bills to pay for her drinks and make a quick exit—but as she was pulling out the money, there was a thump against the plate glass, and the bar went quiet under a fusillade of curses.
“Don’t you try and run again, motherfucker!”
A green windbreaker was shoved against the window, pulled back up, slammed back again. The man’s brown skull knocked against the glass.
“You think I don’t know what you been up to? You fight me, we will taze you, you hear? Don’t you make me taze you.”
The policemen had their nightsticks out, and as they leaned in to turn the man over, Tess saw their faces, one white and one black, fat as hogs, lit up by the dining room’s chandelier. The alleged criminal’s cheek was smeared against the glass, his eye swollen shut, and his shoulders jerked while the white cop yanked one wrist and then the other into the handcuffs.
“Should have kept running,” the bartender said.
Tess nodded. They all should have. They should have taken the opportunity the storm provided, each started over again, each put their FEMA money down on their own little house on their own little hill. Bought a cow, a bag of flour, a box of salt. Gone down to the village church and confessed their sins to a strange priest and started fresh as newly baptized children. He could have gotten free, this man in the green windbreaker. They all could have gotten free. They could have vanished into the chaos, into the records lost into the water, into the refrigerated tractor-trailers full of unidentified bodies. The storm had been like Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras Day—if you lost your grip on whoever was following you, if your hand slipped out of your husband’s hand, if you lost sight of your daughter’s hat, the crowd could come between you and sweep you both on, in different directions, away from each other, then farther away.
The cops had pulled the man onto his feet and were hauling him to their squad car, and the hubbub of disembodied voices rose again in the tiled room. A server came out of the back with two plates, and the smell of beef—Grilled Tenderloin, Cauliflower Gratin—intermingled with the smell of the bleach they must have used to mop the back bar when they’d returned after all those weeks of heat. Vergil was talking again, and she put her wallet back in her purse and turned to him, smiled.
“You know what Tom said—I used to come here a lot when he and Anne were still running the place. He was really broken up about going, but Anne was so sick—”
“A brain tumor, right?”
He nodded, his eyes on the painted lagoon, on the arched bridge that spanned its two yellow banks. “It really puts it into perspective, and, when you get right down to it, it sums up how I feel about it too. He looked at me and said, quoting Lafcadio Hearn I think it was, ‘I’d rather be here, Verg. I’d rather be here in sackcloth and ashes than own the whole state of Ohio.’ ”
Tess closed her eyes. Here. And where else, really. Even if she went away to her imaginary hill, to a cabin on the salt flats of Brittany, they would come after her. One morning, she would open the door and find them all standing there in a dense little knot—Joe, Vincent, Del, Cora, her mother, Joyce Perret, Jason Katz—all of them shivering in the cold, all of them needing her. She looked down at her hands wrapped around the copper rail at the end of the bar. They were smooth in the dim light, young looking. Then the cops turned on their blues.
“That’s where they went, isn’t it?” she asked. “Ohio. Where Anne’s from.”
The bartender laid down their bread basket. “Maybe I should go ask her for a job.”
“Ain’t no ersters in Ohio,” Vergil said.
She looked down at the menu and noticed that Anne’s squab dish—the crisp-skinned bird over that bed of woodsy, rich dirty rice—was still there. She did have to eat.
“I’ll have the squab then,” she told the bartender.
“Atta girl,” Vergil said. “That’s the way to do it. And one for me.”
DEL HAD DIALED Troy’s number four times from the Dobies’ kitchen phone but pressed send only once—and then she’d hung up on the first ring. Cora’s words had been stuck in her head for so long that they were beginning to make sense. Help is a fucking Help is a fucking Help is a fucking. Like the tiny FEMA checks that didn’t do much except keep people from coming home. Like the volunteers rebuilding houses that would just flood all over again. She imagined Cora in her nightgown, wandering down the aisles of a fluorescent-lit pharmacy, a little plastic cup brimming with pills in her hand. Del had been running away from everything that was fucked up and damaged for so long—this place, her sister—she had never looked at it honestly, never realized that, sometimes, brokenness was the only way to be. She opened Cora’s computer and did a search and deleted anything that included an occurrence of the words Reyna or sister or gun, and then she shut it down again.
Just then she heard a key in the front door and froze. The hard soles of her mother’s flats clunked against the floor.
“Adelaide?”
Del picked the computer up off the bed and tucked it under the mattress again. Her mother was calling her name, a little hitch in her voice as if she was crying or drunk.
When she opened the bedroom door, her mother was h
olding onto the banister, climbing the stairs. She was, in fact, wasted.
“Where the fuck have you been, Mom?”
This made her mother stop, two feet on one riser. “Peristyle.”
Even from here Del could smell the bourbon on her breath.
“You’ve eaten?”
“I did. Squab.” She straightened herself, ready to put on that attitude she took every time she was in the wrong—an armor of arrogance she must have learned from her racist drunk of a father.
“Well, I was waiting for you, but I guess I’ll eat now.”
Her mother let her blow past her, and Del could practically hear the slow wheels of her brain turning as she shuffled around to follow. Del went through to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator to pull out the tub of congealed red beans. Her mother stared in at her from the dark hall.
“I’ve left your father, Del.”
“I am aware.”
“For good. It’s for good. I—I’m seeing Augie. Your father and I are getting a divorce.”
“A divorce. Good.”
“I’m sorry, Del.”
Del shrugged. “Yeah, well—” She dumped out the rice into a bowl, scooped out some beans, ran a little water over.
“You haven’t heard from your sister?”
She threw the plate in the microwave. “Of course I haven’t fucking heard from my sister.”
“Oh, Adelaide,” her mother sighed. “Do you have to be cruel to me about it?”
“I’m the cruel one?”
Opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish, her mother came into the room. “I’m sorry.”
“You said that already.”
“Do you think I’m not torn up about this?”
“Honestly, you look like you’ve got some pretty good painkillers on board.”
“Oh, goddamn you, Del. I’m a grown woman. I can have a drink.”
The Floating World Page 28