“Sure, sure.” The microwave whirred, spinning her dinner around.
Cruelty—Del supposed it balanced out, her withholding versus her mother’s withdrawal. When there was no right thing to do, you could only choose between different varieties of wrong. She’d said everything already, after all, and they hadn’t believed her. The only piece of useful, non-incriminating information she was keeping secret was Troy’s phone number, and there was no reason to think he had any idea where to find Cora, or, more importantly, that Cora would be better off if she was found.
The microwave beeped, and Del sat down with her plate at the counter. Her mother was skulking along the cabinets. She took down a rocks glass then stood staring at the freezer. Del wasn’t going to give her permission. As she said, she was a grown woman, she could have a drink if she damn well wanted one.
“So, this thing with Uncle Augie,” she said between bites. “It’s been going on for a while?”
Her mother opened the freezer, dug her glass into the ice bucket. “We were already separated, Del.”
“You were on a break!” Del heard herself turning into some sort of idiot teenager. Her mother opened the liquor cabinet. “Seriously, though. If this is the new state of things—oh, Dad found Papie, by the way, in case you care—we might as well bring it out into the open. You and Uncle Augie went down to New Orleans and found Cora together, his mother died and you comforted him—it’s understandable. Really.”
“That’s not how it happened, Del.”
“Oh, no? Then tell me, how did it happen?”
“I ran into him at Langenstein’s the other day. It’s been over with your father since Houston. Since he gave up on getting your sister out of the city. I sincerely wish that weren’t true, but it is.”
Del laughed. “So you grabbed a prime porterhouse and a bottle of wine and fell into bed—”
“No, not exactly.”
“—picked right up where you left off.”
“Excuse me?” The bottle of rye stalled at half tilt over her glass, and now she poured, one finger, then two. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”
“Oh, we knew.” Del speared a piece of andouille, put it in her mouth. “We saw you. What year was that? The year Madge was diagnosed? We were little enough still that you probably thought we wouldn’t understand. We were hiding behind the curtains, waiting for the fireworks, and suddenly—” She spread her hands for effect. “—all was made clear. Why Dad hates Augie, why you always worked yourself up into a tizzy when they were coming over, why—”
“That’s right, Del, just get it all out.”
“Oh, it’s not like I’ve been holding some grudge. Like I’m all damaged. My idyll of monogamy shattered! Everyone deserves a fling or two. It’s just that your generation with your antique morals had to wait ’til after you were married. It’s more complicated that way, you know, but so be it.” She took another bite. “I’d say your best friend’s husband wasn’t the best choice though, especially when your best friend had cancer, but it’s cool.”
“That’s not what happened, Del, but think what you like. I can see I can’t fall any farther in your estimation than I already have.”
Del nodded, digging into her red beans. “Maybe you’re right.”
Her mother put her drink down on the counter, and Del reached out and took it, raised it in a toast.
“Chin chin,” she said and took a nice big gulp of burn.
Fifty-Seven Days after Landfall
October 25
Cora held the button down and looked out over the motel parking lot as the ice thumped into the plastic bucket. The night was wide and unprotected. She put a hand against her bare neck. Beyond the last ranks of cars, the asphalt tumbled down towards deep ditches, and she felt eyes on her, a creature clutching the edges of the grassy banks, watching her as she stood under the yellow light. She backed up out of the glare, kept her finger on the button. The parked cars crackled in their loneliness.
She’d been doing so well. Had eaten a roast beef and three things of onion rings, downed her Dr Pepper, but now she had a flash of that last night on Esplanade: The hammock rocking her awake. The light in the house. Running until her lungs burned. Her heart sped up. She could pass through to the motel’s courtyard, out of sight, and come around the far stairwell and press herself to the unlit railing of the balcony, run into her room and lock the doors, but the windows would still be made of glass. All it took was a brick, a fist, a length of cord.
The ice machine ground out another handful of cubes, and she released the button, took a deep breath. Tu m’en veux? her brain said. Nobody wanted anything of her here; that was why she’d come. Still, she moved to the edge of the walkway, out of the light. The two older women in the room beside hers were still up. She’d noticed them coming in—Tulane T-shirt, box of chicken. The curly-haired one sat against the headboard of her bed, doing something on a calculator. The other lay on her stomach in a long flowered nightdress, eating a biscuit like an apple while she read. As Cora passed, she looked up from her book and through the window. Cora ducked her head, fumbling for the key card in the waist of her pajamas.
The one in the nightdress swung the door open, and Cora jumped away. “You the Jeep with the Louisiana plates? We keep seeing you on the road!”
The key had fallen to the concrete floor, and Cora bent to pick it up, tried to catch her breath, act normal.
“What?” she asked, straightening back up.
“New Orleans—” The woman pointed with her biscuit. “I can hear it in your voice. Us too!”
“No.” Cora slid the card into the slot, out, in again, but the lock would not catch.
“Come on—” The woman was whining like a little kid. “Come on in and have a drink! I’m sure you need the company as much as we do.”
“I’m sorry.” Cora shook her head as the door finally opened. “I’m from North Dakota.”
She slipped inside, locked the three locks, placed the ice bucket on the table, drew the blinds, then opened her side of the communicating door.
“North Dakota—” one of them was complaining.
“Far way to drive.”
“Bullshit. She’s Seventh Ward as the day is long.” A toilet flushed behind the wall. “I kind of want to go knock on her door. That’s some hard-core denial, North Dakota.”
Cora put down the ice bucket, closed the communicating door. She remembered reading somewhere about a native woman who had been rescued from a tiny island a very long time ago, after eighteen years of living alone. When the Spaniards found her, she was clothed in a gown made of cormorant feathers stitched together with the sinew of whales. Seven weeks after the ship brought her back to California—seven weeks in which the woman danced and ate among the colonists, while the missionaries searched in vain for someone who could speak her language—she died of dysentery. A priest of the mission buried her, baptizing her corpse with a name he chose himself, in a language she had never learned.
Cora climbed into bed, turned out the light. The woman in the nightdress was right. Hard-core denial was what she was aiming for. A new land, a new life. It was as she had been counseled, Mrs. Randsell at the door pulling off her housecoat, wrapping it around Cora while she stood there shivering on the porch. Hush now, baby. Hush. You can’t have. You can’t have done a thing like that. Her weak hands patting at Cora’s scapulae. Just forget it. Blot it out.
But when she fell asleep, she dreamed of nothing but the little boys: Tyrone and Willy sitting among the colored papers and paints on a table in her old art classroom. Tyrone and Willy plucking flowers from a box of Jujubes. Tyrone and Willy standing on the edge of a planet consumed by the roots of huge oaks. Mais si le mouton mange la fleur, c’est pour lui comme si, brusquement, toutes les étoiles s’éteignaient, Willy said, though he didn’t speak French. He and his brother were wearing cardboard Burger King crowns. They giggled as they pelted her with flowers which filled her mouth like sticky candy, until her head exploded with a h
ollow bang.
Cora sat up and waited for a minute in the cold air, listening to the sounds of the itinerant world: a woman’s heels on concrete, the reverberation of a steel door’s slam. The words translated in her head, But if the sheep eats the flower, it is as if, suddenly, all of the stars were snuffed. The little prince wept. Though usually he lived very happily on his private asteroid, he felt lonely here, in the desert of the earth. I will make a muzzle for that sheep, the jet pilot promised. I will make armor for your flower. Cora wrapped her arms around herself, but the motel air encased her like a block of ice. She thought of her mother, of nestling into her chest. She thought of her father’s smell of wood and aftershave. She thought of her sister laying her soft body beside hers in the narrow bed. She thought of Troy, of the boys, of the dog who had come to her out of the ruins and let her cradle its paw in her hands.
She got up and went to the bathroom, steadied herself on the vanity. In the mirror, her hair hung down lank around her tear-stained face. It bothered her that, when the woman had spoken to her, she hadn’t acknowledged her home. It wasn’t like her, as her mother would have said. Mrs. Randsell was right, you could try to destroy your memories, but she had been wrong to think it helped. You were built from the bricks of your past; if even a few of them crumbled, you risked collapse.
She had to look, then. She gritted her teeth, and Tyrone sat up in the big bed, listening to the creaking darkness. Dead already. Dead before we died. Reyna’s words coagulated in the air, and Cora pulled the trigger. Troy carried her body down the stairs, stood there on the dawn-lit sidewalk with her grandfather’s gun. She just fell out. She had believed him. She’ll be good as new soon, you hear. But he had lied. She had seen it: The exploded face. The pool of black blood that whirled, driving through the floor like a drill. You just sit tight with Miss Cora, Troy had said to the little boys. Everything’ll be right-side up again in the morning. But it hadn’t righted itself, had it—the way a reflection, reflected again, retains the water’s wobble, the mirror’s warp. Reyna visited her dreams, her eyes plucked out by birds.
That final night, she’d gone to sleep in her hammock on the upper gallery, the house unbearable now with heat. Startled awake, she opened her eyes to raindrops spinning down from the sky. When the wailing did not return, she nestled back down into her net, her body wrapped around the shotgun. The wails she thought she’d heard could have been anything—a gate opening, a dog’s whine, her own voice in her sleep. Still, Cora clutched the gun in her arms as she rolled to look over the gallery rail. Below, a shadow staggered back and forth across the garden, as if blind. Cora leaned farther and the hammock spun and she fell, the gun fell, banging, on the gallery’s tin floor. Boys! Reyna cried as Cora made for the fire ladder, the rain coming down harder now, the tin loosening under her feet. In her mouth was the taste of rust. Cora vaulted over the railing in her thin nightdress, began to climb down. She could no longer see the woman in the garden, and the wailing had stopped. As she struggled to keep her grip on the wet rungs of the ladder, her vision flashed: white column, gray house, a bar of light moving beyond the shutter slats. A face pressed against the inside of the window glass, its eyes plucked out by birds.
Dead already, Reyna said. Dead before we died.
Cora let go of the ladder and ran.
Barefoot, in only her T-shirt and underpants, Cora ran through the Quarter. Through the high-rises and the parking lots and under the freeway she ran, and she did not stop until she found herself on the front porch of Uncle Augie’s house, ringing the bell. Mrs. Randsell wrapped her in her housecoat. Hush now, baby. Hush. You can’t have. You can’t have done such a thing. The dying smell of Mrs. Randsell’s petal-soft arms. Just forget it all, my darling. There’s no use dwelling on a thing like that. It’s like thinking about the expansion of the universe, like thinking about the sun burning out. Blot it out, she said. Blot it out.
Wednesday
October 26
She had entered in the middle of a blink. Vincent’s eyesight was going, of course, but he’d swear she was gone one minute, there the next. He squeezed his hot eyes shut and looked again.
From where he sat in his recliner, Vincent could see Sylvia lying in the middle of the bed, curled up in her housedress, pretending to sleep. What did I do this time, my love? She liked to pretend to be sleeping when she was angry, leave the vacuum in the middle of the floor, the stew bubbling, go hide out in the bedroom until he apologized. He must have really done it this time—her face closed up tight like an oyster.
He turned his hands over—that right arm swollen tight as a tick, the left, holding the TV remote, a mess of wrinkles and spots. He flipped off the TV, its jabber and brightly painted rooms.
“I apologize,” he tried. “I can’t say I know for what, but I apologize.”
“Not to worry, Pop. We all have our days.”
Vincent looked down at the floor so fast he wrenched his neck. He hadn’t known Joe was there—butting in—sitting on the floor in the middle of a pile of women’s clothes, his nose all red.
He looked back at the bed, at the bedspread—the one with the design of castles made of little knots—swirling under the weight of his wife’s curled body. If he managed to rouse her, if he found the right words, she would push herself up ever so slowly, open her eyes with a smile like the world was dawning fresh, and on her cheek would be imprinted a mirror castle, pale pits on her dusky skin.
“Pop,” Joe sighed, wiping a hand under his nose. “I’m the one owes you an apology. I let you down the other day. Next time, you tell me when you get a hankering for a pocket pie, and we’ll go down to Barker’s Corner and get a Hubig’s, alright. Chocolate, lemon, cherry.”
“What has got into you, boy?” Vincent said. The mirror over the bureau reflected an old man’s face twisted in confusion. “Get on out of here with that mess.”
Quieter, the boy said, “Okay, Pop,” swallowed. He had a stack of receipts he’d pulled out of the pockets of the clothes on the floor. He picked them up, struggled to stand.
Vincent watched the boy leave, desultory, the mess of clothes still on the ground, and when he looked back to the bed, his wife was gone. He pushed forward in his recliner, and it levered him upright. He followed the hallway. Joe was sitting on the living room sofa now, counting his receipts out on top of Sylvia’s hope chest. He’d been getting closer on the carving. Closer to getting it right.
“Where did she go?”
Joe shook his head. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
She was not in her chair by the fireplace, not in the kitchen. He went to the front windows and saw her, far out in the windless moonscape of crashed pines, lying on a bed adrift in the early morning fog. He could almost see her face—soft and ripe with sleep, her skin downy with fine hairs—and he wanted to wrap his mouth around her, like she was a peach. He went for the door, tried to open it, found it locked.
Behind him, the boy stood up, the receipts crinkling in his fist. “Where you going, Pop?”
“Out,” he said.
“Alright, let me come with you.”
But he didn’t want the boy to come with him. It was a private moment he was looking for, out there—he wanted to run his fingertips over the castle imprinted on his wife’s cheek, wanted her to hook her fingers over the waist of his pants. He fought with the door handle, rummaged in his pocket for keys. He had nothing—a short pencil, a rubber band, a bit of lint. They were trying to keep him prisoner. Through the window of the door he could see her sleeping in her white bed in the white fog, like a fairy tale maiden in a dream. The boy came up behind him, put a hand on his arm, which filled suddenly with a sharp, searing pain.
“Let me loose!” he yelled.
The boy backed away, holding up his hands. One of them held a key. He watched the key enter the lock with a near sensual pleasure, watched the door open, went out of it and down the steps so fast he nearly tripped. He heard his own hard breathing.
“P
op, you okay?”
His vision was watery, like he was walking inside a cloud. She was still asleep on the white bed, waiting for him to cross the fallen trees.
“I’m coming,” he said. Suddenly, he realized he didn’t know her name. “I’m coming—”
“Pop, you talking to me?”
“The girl,” he said, as if the boy couldn’t see. But now, he looked back to where she had been, where he thought she had been, and he couldn’t find her for all the ruined forest. He pushed on, his feet crashing down through the branches of the pines, their scent spiking the air.
“The girl?” Joe was following him, his head whipping around as he stared through the wreckage of the forest, looked back at the house. “What girl? Cora? Do you see her? Is she here?”
“Cora?” He blinked. He was trying to remember where the bed had been. Trying to call back the image of a woman waking in a square of sun, the sensation of her hands fumbling at his belt, but he couldn’t find her on the forest floor. He wanted to call for her, but he didn’t remember her name.
“Cora! Do you see her?”
“No!” he yelled, walking faster, trying to escape. “That’s not it! That’s not her name!”
The more the man talked, the less he could remember. Now he couldn’t recall her face. He touched her wrist. No, her neck. He lay his palm against her neck as you would against the brow of a feverish child. He opened his mouth to say her name—the curtains were puffed with sunlight like breeze. Her name clotted on his tongue. He had to shout it out to her if he wanted her to lift her arm from her face, brush back her dense hair.
The broken forest unrolled towards the road, and for a second, he saw the bed covered in shadow, a lighter gray on the black asphalt, her dark form sinking into the mattress. He rushed forward, twigs popping underfoot. The broken trunk of a pine tree snagged his pants leg, ripped it. The light was fading. Soon it would be night, and he would have to let her sleep.
“Cornelia Sylvia Boisdoré,” Joe said.
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