The Floating World

by Babst, C. Morgan

  “Sylvia,” Vincent replied. His heart began to slow, but there was a taste of copper in his mouth. His lungs were burning, his legs shook. He closed his eyes—his wife raised her face from the coverlet. Her hair hung over her cheek like a shadow in the darkening room.

  “Cornelia Sylvia Boisdoré. Remember, Pop, we named her after mom.”

  “Sylvia!” he shouted into the dark room. She lifted her head and brushed her hair back from her face, a featureless face, shining and pitted like the moon.

  AWASH IN THE flickering light of the Dobies’ big television, Del slept curled up into a corner of the sofa, her arms hugging her knees. The coffee table was littered with balled chocolate wrappers, a dirty fork sat beside a dirty bowl. It was nine thirty already, and Tess had intended to wake her, but autumn had happened overnight, and Del looked cold. From the arm of the sofa, Tess grabbed the plaid throw and laid it down over her daughter’s bare legs. Gently, gently. Even so, Del shifted and mumbled in her sleep like a child, smelled like a child—the heat in her hair and milk chocolate on her breath. When she slept, her face had always locked itself into an expression of sternness which Tess read as self-protective, but now, even after a night of sleep, her eyebrows were knit, her wet lips half-open, as if she was trying to work something through.

  Tess dropped onto her knees on the carpet and bowed her head. Poor thing, she didn’t deserve this. Del had always done everything they’d asked, done everything right, gotten into the right school, taken the right job. None of them deserved this, but Tess should have tried harder. Should have remembered what was so hard to remember: that once you had children, your life was no longer yours.

  She put her hand over her daughter’s hard ankle bone, and Del, startled, turned her head sharply into the pillow. Tess dropped back onto her heels. The cold television light trickled across her daughter’s face, and Tess took the remote and pinged it dark. She gathered the foil pebbles from the chocolates, poured them into the bowl. The phone rang. She ran to pick it up, pressed the ON button, went into the kitchen, set the bowl down on the countertop with a click.

  “Hello?” the woman repeated, her voice older, Southern and raspy.

  “Hello,” Tess said.

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m sorry?” Tess said. “You called here.”

  “No, I have three calls from this number yesterday afternoon. Three hang ups.”

  Tess sighed and looked at the microwave clock—9:32. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean, and I’m rushing out the door. I’m afraid I have to—”

  “First you tell me who you are,” the woman said.

  Del turned over on the sofa, and Tess opened the back door and stepped out onto the bricks. “This is Mrs. Boisdoré,” she said. “And if you could identify yourself?”

  “Cora Boisdoré?”

  “No.”

  Muffled now—a hand over the receiver—the woman called, “Troy! It’s that girl Cora.”

  “No, I said,” Tess repeated. “Cora is my daughter.”

  There was a papery flutter as the telephone changed hands. Troy spoke: “Cora, is that you?”

  “No.” Her voice was breaking. She struggled to pull it into line. “This is Tess, her mother.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  She remembered this voice—the fear and sadness in it when he’d called Vin’s house in Houston, asking if Cora was alright, if they would please give her the phone. Tess walked into the garden, into the midst of the scorched plants.

  “Is she all right?” Troy asked.

  “I don’t know. She’s missing. That woman—”

  “My aunt.”

  “Your aunt called me,” Tess said. “She said you’d gotten calls from this number?”

  “I apologize. She’s worried it was my sister Reyna.”

  “Oh. No. You weren’t told?” Tess took a deep breath. At least this was something for which she’d been trained. “I’m so sorry. Your sister passed away. Your cousins were supposed to call—”

  “No, no, they did.” Troy sighed. “Kind of y’all to give Anthony and them dinner. I thank you. It’s just, my auntie—” He sighed again. “They had a run-in, her and Reyna, when Reyna was living with her. Reason why my aunt moved up north. And now that we’ve heard there was a fire at the house, my aunt’s on edge. Seems like she can’t rest easy with Tyrone and Willy here until she’s got positive ID on the remains.”

  “I see,” Tess said. The remains. An elegant word that had lost its elegance. Something brutal about the plural. What remains. “I’m truly sorry.”

  “Thank you,” Troy said. “But Cora, though—did you say she’s missing?”

  Tess shook her head. She would have to ask the police about the fire, though Del had been adamant that they not mention it when they first came. It didn’t matter: she needed to know everything, even if they would know then what she knew. She wasn’t quite sure what that was, anyway: her mind fuzzy like her unbrushed teeth. They used dental records to identify burned corpses, didn’t they? She thought of Cora’s perfect, chloride-shored incisors.

  “There was nothing on your machine?” she asked, grabbing hold of the dried bouquet of a hydrangea. Could Cora have come here, just to use the phone, and then left again?

  “What, you think it was Cora who called us?” Troy said. “She left out of there today?”

  “Yesterday. Or no, the night before that.”

  “Then how is she calling me from your phone?”

  “I don’t know, Troy. It wasn’t me.”

  Tess brought the papery blossom to her face and breathed in its smell of dust and dew.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” Tess said, “that she’s gone.”

  “No.” A door clicked shut. “I guess it’s like for me she’s been missing a good while.”

  “I’m concerned—” She drew in a deep breath. “—that what happened to your sister—”

  “Cora didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  Tess felt the world dilate, the blue sky yawning over the courtyard fence. You gave Cora the shotgun, Del had said with wild conviction. Troy’s sister was killed with a shotgun.

  “What?” she said.

  “Cora kept saying to me—back when she was still e-mailing—that she didn’t believe Reyna was still alive. And then she turned up dead. But Cora didn’t have a thing to do with it. She couldn’t have, I know.”

  “Why? Why would she have had anything to do with it?”

  “Look, there was a tussle.” Troy cleared his throat. “She came back to y’all’s house, Reyna did, looking for her boys. But that was my fault. My actions. My decisions. I chose to bring my sister to the authorities instead of taking care of her myself. I chose to take those children away with me, and I would have done it if Cora’d been fighting me tooth and nail. Reyna sure as hell was.”

  “I thought—” Tess said, fighting for sense. “I thought your cousins said you’d saved her, that you and Cora had saved her and the children.”

  “I thought we had too.” Troy sighed heavily. “Or that we’d at least done the best we could. But we didn’t, we didn’t help her. We couldn’t help her. I don’t know if anybody could.”

  “She was ill—suicidal—your cousins said?”

  “She’d gotten treatment,” he said. “After what happened in the house that night, I brought her out to where they had medics set up. Tried to get her back to a doctor. But there was nothing there for anybody. A tent full of screaming kids. A bunch of men with guns.”

  “Oh, no,” Tess said. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry.”

  “I left her there anyway. I left her there, unconscious, and I took her boys.”

  Tess settled back against the patio table, looked at her feet, blue veined and bunioned from her pregnancies. Persecution complexes did not mix well with real persecution. How many times had she arrived at Charity minutes before they’d shackled one of her patients to a bed? How many times had she seen a commitment backfire therapeutically, thoug
h, practically, there was no other option?

  “I’m so sorry, Troy.” She had failed him. Her profession had failed him. The government had failed him. Civilization itself had failed him. “I am truly very sorry.”

  There was nothing on his end of the line but his slow breathing. How little comfort there was in the world. How meager our ability to care for one another. She thought of Cora, sitting on the kitchen floor, refusing even sweetened milk. It just goes through, she’d said. It goes straight through.

  “Are you sure she knew?” Tess asked. “Are you sure Cora knew your sister had passed away?”

  “She said—after we left she said she kept hearing Reyna coming in y’all’s house. Said she kept dreaming about her, like she was a ghost. And, me, I couldn’t find her. Not in anybody’s records. Not in the Red Cross’s. Not in the prison system. Nothing. I got scared. I sent her—” he said. “When y’all went back to New Orleans finally, I sent Cora to my house to check and see if she was there.”

  Tess closed her eyes. She saw Cora’s skinned palms, the mud on her boots. She’d been alright in Houston. They never should have brought her home.

  “She had nothing to do with it,” Troy was saying. “It was my decision to get those children from her. My own.”

  “Troy—”

  “There was nothing else to do. There was nothing else I could have done. It was the boys I had to look to.”

  Tess nodded at the shadowed bushes along the fence. “Oh, Troy I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what’s happened.” Something viscous, toxic was rising in her throat. “What’s happening?” A bubble of drown. “I don’t know what to do. All I know—” She coughed. “All I know is I’m afraid.”

  There was a silence on Troy’s end of the line, and Tess pressed her fingers into her eyes.

  “She had her troubles, Cora,” Troy said. “You could lose her so easily. You’d think you knew where she was, what she was thinking, but you’d be wrong. I didn’t want to say so, but when you said she was missing—my sister being how she was, that’s where my mind goes to. Dark places. Like, if things get bad, you don’t know how the badness can find a way to stop.”

  “Yes,” Tess said.

  “And you can’t do a thing about it, it’s like dropping sandbags in a river.”

  “Yes.”

  “I should have never left her. I don’t know what happened down there, after I left with those kids. She was pushing her keys in my hand, telling me I had to go. I should never have left her.”

  “She wasn’t your responsibility.”

  “She was all of ours.”

  “Yes. We are all each other’s.” Tess tilted her head up to the pale sky where the dim moon still hung beside the fronds of the dying palm. “I suppose that’s right.”

  “But you couldn’t stop her,” Troy said. “She was going to do what she was going to do.”

  “A force of nature.”

  “Yes.”

  “She was a force of nature,” Tess said, realizing that they had been talking about her daughter in the past tense. Above her, clouds were scudding past towards the gulf, and she sat down on the mat of palms and tilted her head up to the sky.

  THE ATTENDING—A PETITE woman in a taut white coat—turned over the laminated card Tess had made, looked down the list of forbidden medications, and then handed it back to Joe, without saying a word. According to Tess, Joe should be hovering at her shoulder, asking questions about every medication ordered, every monitor, every note she was making in her chart, but he couldn’t bring himself to get out of the chair. His father lay in the bed, his red eyes closed, mucus dripping from his nose. Joe took a tissue from the box on the laminate table and dabbed at his father’s face: no reflexive response. The monitor said 104.3, and Joe didn’t need to listen to what the attending was telling him—infections, MRSA, the high risk of sepsis among the elderly—to know that it was bad.

  His father had wept in the car, after Joe told him that Sylvia was dead. He’d had to say it, to make him stop fighting for the road, stop staggering over the broken pines. He’d sobbed, wiping the tears from his face with that red, infected arm. Joe tried to snap him out of it, tried to talk about other things as they sped down the highway towards the emergency room, but his father would not hear him. Joe supposed there came a time when the dead had more gravity than the living, when they became so many that the balance tipped on its fulcrum and you fell towards them, down.

  The nurses bustled around his father while the monitors beeped—a tall young black man and a round-assed white woman, someone’s mother. You could not deny that caretaking was needed; you yourself would want it in your turn. But sometimes it looked like waste, didn’t it: a void that pulls you in. Already his father rarely remembered him, and half the time, when he did remember, he seemed not to care—only spat at him to get out of the room. Joe wondered where the memory went sometimes, the mule his father remembered so vividly Sunday gone by Monday morning. Of course, he knew—proteins choked the neurons, plaques broke the synapses—but he preferred to think of a hard rain, the mule plodding out of a dense forest and into a field the second before the storm clouds broke, a curtain of water sweeping across the stage. Regardless, Joe knew that in the end he would have nothing to show for all his trouble, nothing other than his own satisfaction, if you could call it that, and his pain.

  “You had him in assisted living, you said?” the doctor was asking. “Where was this?”

  “In Gretna. But it’s been shut down since the storm.”

  “I’d be happy to call Belle Maison for you, with a referral,” she said.

  His ulcer made a fist. “I’m not going to put him back in one of those places.”

  “This is a really nice one of those places, though.” The doctor looked at him from between her penciled eyelids, serenely wheedling.

  It was hard for him not to yell. “No, I said. No thank you.”

  “So, after he wandered off—” She blinked. “—he cut himself on a car window? This was in New Orleans proper?”

  Joe reached out to take his father’s hot hand. “I had to go into the city to be with my wife.”

  “Alright. I’m going to go look into what we’re dealing with,” she said. “That’s a nasty kind of dirt now, down there.”

  Joe nodded. A nasty kind of dirt, as if the dirt of the “Pleistocene uplands” was somehow clean. It was true that the flood, full of farm runoff, that high nitrate sludge, had raised creosote, lead, arsenic from the soil into plumes of petroleum and benzene, but that was what the world was made of now, wasn’t it? That was what we had made of the world.

  “I hate to say it,” the doctor said, “but once we get you all set up and ready to go home, I’d try to keep him over here as much as you can. He’s in a delicate condition. Even just the mold alone—”

  Joe tuned her out. He would have liked to hop her in his truck, pretty doctor in the plum lipstick, and take her through the flood. On your left, my house, Doctor. On your right, my wife. You’ll notice, perhaps, the space beside my younger daughter where my eldest daughter should be. But she is out walking through the desert, Doctor, as am I. As you watch our tires spin on the cracked surface of the earth, I recommend you pull your pretty cotton blouse across your face to protect you from the dust. Terrible, isn’t it? It makes us all choke. But there is no time for concerns like those in the desert. See Cora adjust her sunglasses over her eyes as she rolls down her windows to bathe in the hot air? See my father pulling himself over the broken trees with his trembling hands, now that the mule has vanished into the rain? We don’t have time for the future, Doctor. We hardly have time for the past. The only thing to do in the desert is keep walking. Otherwise you will die of thirst before you make it to higher ground.

  HER MOTHER WAS sitting on the courtyard steps in her bathrobe though it was already eleven. She held a cigarette pinched between her thumb and forefinger like a joint, and her hand was shaking.

  “Mom?” Del said.


  Tess nodded but did not turn, exhaling a thin stream of smoke that floated up over her head. The pack lay open on the brick, only the one cigarette missing from the honeycomb, and Del picked it up, pulled off the cellophane, crumpled it.

  “Smoking?”

  Tess shrugged. She sat slumped on the step like the St. Peter’s Pietà, her knees rounded up under the terry cloth like mountains, the Dobies’ portable phone resting in the basket of her lap. She hadn’t showered yet that morning it didn’t look like, hadn’t even run a comb through her hair.

  Tess took a drag from the cigarette, let out the smoke. “We got a call here from Troy.” She glanced up at Del. “He had some missed calls from this number.”

  Without makeup, her face was puffy and white, as if someone had tried to erase it, and Del felt a sudden pity. Her mother lifted her trembling cigarette and inhaled again, peering at Del like an expectant dog. She had never been a natural mother, her mother, always straining to provide more than she had to give. Del had known that at least since she was six, when Oma had hired an ironing lady who would crouch down and crush her and Cora against the ample bosom of her uniform saying Hello, my babies. Oh, my good babies. Del had known even then that her mother would never have that in her, that open generosity of love—she was too afraid of what her children would take from her, of what they had already taken.

  “Yeah, I called him, Mom,” Del said.

  “Oh.” Her mother watched the smoke tumble from her mouth, shook her head. “Of course. Okay.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have told you I found his number.”

  Tess nodded. “Well. It doesn’t matter. He hasn’t heard from her. He doesn’t know anything. The police—” She fondled the phone in her lap. “They’re coming over soon. They said they have new developments, but not to get our hopes up.”

  “New developments?” Del slotted her thumb into the gap in the cigarettes. The smoke burned her esophagus. “They didn’t give you an idea what those were?”

  “They said not to get our hopes up.” Her mother shook her head. “He said she knew—Troy said Cora knew Reyna was dead, just like you told me. Said she thought it was her fault, because they took Reyna’s children. He told me too—” She swallowed. “He said there have been investigators at the fire. That they’re working towards identifying ‘the remains,’ he called them. I’ve already accepted it.” Her ash was growing long. “She’s gone.”