Del nodded. She pulled out a cigarette, looked at it.
“Don’t, Adelaide—” Her mother reached out for the pack, looking beside her as she stubbed her own out in the potted holly bush. “I don’t know why I bought them.”
“I’ve got to go,” Del said. She looked at her bare feet, the cut-off cuffs of her sweatpants. She should tell her mother she’d set the fire, hand over Cora’s computer, comfort her somehow, if only for the minutes they had before they learned something new. But she couldn’t speak to the police again. Couldn’t ask her mother to lie for her. “I’m going to see Tina. I haven’t met the baby yet.”
“Stay with me, Del, please. Just until the police are gone. I know what they’re going to say. I’ve already accepted it.”
“She’s—I’m overdue to visit. You tell me what they tell you.” She leapt up the steps, went in through the banging screen and upstairs, thumbing her sweatpants off as she entered the bedroom.
The computer was still tucked under the mattress. She grabbed her jeans, took out her big purse. Downstairs, the screen door creaked open again, banged shut.
“Del! Please. They might have questions. Just call Tina, tell her you’ll be a little late.”
She pulled her jeans on and tugged an old Buckner sweatshirt over her head, thrust her toes into her Chuck Taylors.
“Del!” She was at the bottom of the stairs, the banister creaking under her hand.
The doorbell rang. The computer just barely fit in her bag. Downstairs, her mother was opening the door. Del went out onto the landing. The policewoman, Costa, looked up at her from the doorway, smiling and squinting her eyes.
“Hey, Adelaide,” the woman said. “You on your way out?”
Her mother was out on the front porch. Del pressed her purse against her chest.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m late for something. Have you found her?”
“Not yet, but we’d love it if you could stay and talk. You never know what you know.”
“I’m sorry, I’m late.”
Del went down the stairs and breezed past them, her head down. She felt her mother’s eyes on her, smelled her mother’s perfumed body balled up inside the robe. The police stood like ramrods in their pressed blues. She went out the door, down the street. At the end of the block, she looked over her shoulder. Her mother looked after her as the cops stalked into the house.
She pulled the sweatshirt’s hood up over her head and put in her earbuds, though she didn’t turn her music on. Keep your head down, girl, she told herself, and keep walking. In the ratty old jeans, walking on the heels of her shoes, she passed, unnoticed, across Rampart. For once in her life, she was glad of the invisibility granted her by her skin. As the traffic slowed for the intersections, not actually stopping at the flashing red light, no one looked up at her. A woman in a Mercedes stared at the road, tapping her teeth. A man in a pickup truck tossed his Popeye’s box near the overflowing trashcan on the corner. The traffic broke, and she crossed into the shadow of the raised highway.
Above her, the traffic on the highway thundered. The computer was getting heavy. She thought for a moment that the best thing would be to walk out among the abandoned cars, find an open trunk and throw the computer into it. The police had ways to undelete things, recover hard drives; hell, even Fran knew how. But what if there was something in those old e-mails that she’d missed. What if Cora wrote to Troy, or Alice Luce, anyone, to say where she was? She pulled the sweatshirt strings tight to make the hood pucker around her face, then clasped the computer to her chest again and stepped off of the curb. A Suburban was speeding through the intersection. She sprinted. The horn blared, and wind whipped her heels.
She started to run, flopping in her half-on shoes until she’d turned into the Seventh Ward. Her phone started to ring, and she stopped, bent over to catch her breath. She was afraid even to reach into the bag to silence it, and so it kept ringing as the person, transferred to voice mail, hung up and tried again. On Esplanade, cars whispered past. She was safe here, camouflaged as a rabbit in brambles. The streets were still empty. In front of most of the houses, the lawns of dried mud remained untrampled—no one had even come back to look. At the corner of Onzaga, she stopped and readjusted the computer, then turned toward the track.
She could already see up the block to Troy’s house, which was still standing, ringed in yellow tape. The terra-cotta ridgeline of the roof arrowed towards her. She kept to the far side of the street as the front door emerged from shadow, then the house’s flank. Burn marks spread like smudged ink across the siding. The fire had eaten a hole out of the center of the house big enough to drive a truck through. She backed up, looking around her for fire trucks, cop cars, anything. Far down Paul Morphy, a couple of women were getting into their SUV. Del sat down on the stoop of Cora’s neighbor’s house, pulled out her phone, nonchalant, like she was waiting for someone. Three missed calls from her mother. Two voice mails: The Jeep was picked up by a red light camera in Arkansas. But that could mean any number of things. That she’s driving around. Or someone just found the car with the keys in the ignition in Gentilly and—The machine cut her off, and the next one began: It doesn’t mean anything. And they won’t say anything about the fire. About the remains. I don’t know the address, Del, I don’t even know how to ask. Please call—Del deleted the message and pocketed the phone.
The women down the block had driven off now, and she stood up, crossed the street to the burned house, went under the cordon. Between the jagged teeth of the broken siding, she saw that the floor had caved in, but the cabinets still hung from the wall, their singed faces shining dully in the sun. Below them, the refrigerator, vomiting a mountain of bottles and jars, lay on top of a pile of shivered floorboards. Her phone rang again, stopped. In the center of the house, a piece of black plastic shuddered, but she could see no white sheet, no fragment of body or bone.
“IT’S JUST NOT possible right now, Tess.”
Alice held the door almost closed behind her, standing in her kitten heels on her front porch. An acrid, buttery smell was leaking out of the house.
“Gerry burned the popcorn?” Tess said, then cleared her throat. She would not cry anymore. She would be done with the crying.
The corners of Alice’s mouth went up. “Sweetheart, what I should have said is: I think she’s probably all right. If you want to wait, I can see you after groups. I know you’re having a rough time, but I’ve got a whole room full of people in there.” She waved a hand at the house behind her.
Tess nodded.
“Their time is ticking,” Alice said, with a sympathetic smile.
“No one will speak to me, Alice. Joe hangs up the phone. Del’s run off to hide with her fucking high school friends. This sister of Troy’s, that house was burned down the same night Cora goes missing. They’ve found remains. I’m praying they’re the sister, but no one will tell me anything. No one will say anything to me at all.”
Alice shook her head. “It’s like living inside a police procedural around here right now.”
“I just need to work through some of this, say it out loud. I keep thinking about Jung’s scarab. Thinking this has to mean something: The fire and the flood. A corpse gone the same night a living girl—my girl—goes missing. But it’s not acausal, is it—” She was going to cry, she caught her breath, squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s all real, Alice.”
Alice’s hand left the doorknob and came to Tess’s shoulder. “I would have you in there with everybody, but Joyce Perret is with us. I don’t think that would be good for either of you.”
Tess nodded again. “No.”
“Listen, do this for me. Go to the park. Go look at the ducks. Count your blessings. I mean it: Number one, Cora is probably okay. Number two, you’ve got money to live. Number three—”
“You don’t think Cora could have burned down a house, do you? Del thinks she killed the woman—but that can’t be. That can’t be true.”
“Del thinks.�
�� Alice rolled her eyes, blowing air out from between her lips. “Honestly, no. I can’t talk about that with you though, Tess. You need to talk about your fears with someone else. This—” She waved her hand back and forth between the two of them. “—has got to stop. We had—have—a professional relationship. And I just, sweetheart, I think you are a good doctor and a good mother, but I can’t be all this for you. Boyd is back, you know. Or Bruce Sigerson?”
“I’m not looking for therapy, Alice.”
“Okay. We all should be getting help, though.” Alice nodded, blinking her eyes heavily. “Regardless, you’ve got to stop this prying. It won’t get you anywhere. I’m a locked safe.” She made as though to zip her lips and throw away the key. “Okay? No chance. I have to get back inside, but I will offer one more thing, which is that you’ve experienced a major rupture, and like any fission, it’s going to produce a huge amount of energy. Spend that energy wisely. Not in sleuthing or regret. ‘Why’ is pointless. The question is: what now? I know you like a good fixer-upper—that’s your life now, okay?” She leaned over, took Tess’s face in her hands and kissed her on the top of the head.
“Thanks for that.”
“You owe me forty bucks, but I’ll take it in martini form when you’re feeling better.”
“Alright, Alice.”
Alice started to open the door, but then stopped. “Tess, in my opinion there is no possible circumstance in which Cora could have done any violence to anyone but herself,” she said.
“Thank you.”
Alice nodded and closed the door.
If any energy had been produced, as Alice said, from her fission with everything important in her life, Tess felt it leaking from her now, catastrophically. She could pinpoint the fault now, the moment that had occasioned this meltdown. It wasn’t Cora’s disappearance or her sleeping with Augie, it wasn’t Joe’s failing to rescue Cora from New Orleans or her being rough with Vincent, it wasn’t their allowing Cora to stay when they evacuated, or even the storm itself. It had not been the moment of Cora’s conception on the floor of Joe’s studio, or the day she’d married Joe, or the day they’d met. No, it had been the afternoon in 1965 when she’d gone to watch baseball with Madge, the two of them in their pedal pushers, cracking gum. They’d both just had crushes on Augie Randsell at that point, and when he came up to the plate, twirling the bat around, she’d been too shy to cheer, but Madge stood up. Madge yelled, Augie! Augie! Augie! Oi, oi, oi! the color mounting in her cheeks, and Augie hit a home run off the first pitch. As he came around third base for home, he threw his hat to Madge, and she caught it, clap, in two hands, and that had been the moment that began the chain reaction that led her here. Tess had had to go far away from them to make a life for herself that was so different it couldn’t be compared to theirs. Had to go to New York. Had to marry an artist, and a Creole one to boot. Had to take a job. Dr. Eshleman. Move downtown. Mrs. Boisdoré to you, Mr. Randsell. She wouldn’t necessarily have even married him, but the fact that she had never even had the chance had ruined everything.
Stretched as far as she could see down the street were houses she could have lived in with other men, other children. With an ordinary man, the kind her father would have chosen, there would not have been mosaics laid on her porch nor stained glass made for her birthday. There would not have been dozens of images of her worked out of wood and marble and clay. There would not have been obscure jazz records booming through the house at ten in the morning, or sex on the roof when the children were in school; an ordinary man would have gone out of the door at nine and returned at six, kissed her dryly on the mouth as he loosened his tie. But they would have had children together, her and this ordinary man. Tow-headed, unremarkable children, whom she could pat on their uniformed bottoms as they went off for school, without worrying about what insults they might have to endure, what misinformed generalizations. She would not have had to push them so hard—Del could have rested on her laurels, and Cora—as fragile as she was—Cora might have turned out differently if her world had always been completely safe, completely stress-free. Actually, with a different father, Cora would have been completely different. A different girl with a different name.
From around the corner, a little boy came squeaking on his tricycle, all alone, and Tess stepped down from the porch and went down onto the lawn. She watched the little boy wobble past, then watched his father, a portly redheaded man in a golf shirt and Dockers, shuffle out from behind a big hydrangea and follow after him. Blue flowers on the hydrangea, which meant the soil was acidic. Basic soil made pink. The father wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his forearm, nodded at her. Tess nodded back, smiled, then crossed the sidewalk and got into her car. She rolled down her windows, rummaged in her purse for her cellphone, and dialed Augie’s number. He answered on the first ring.
HIS FATHER WAS behind the privacy curtain, mumbling in his sleep. Joe sat in the vinyl recliner and watched Vanna turn the letters over on the muted TV. The whole hospital wing was quiet, as if sound had been bleached out of the world. She turned over three B’s, three T’s, one S, one Y—a gap-toothed “Before & After” phrase that refused to mean anything, even after the contestant had mouthed the words. He didn’t get it until Vanna turned over the last white square: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST OF BURDEN.
Visiting hours were over, but, like a good boy, he’d made them let him stay. Even from across the lake he could feel Tess’s scrutiny. She had called him to give him the Cora update—Tess scrambling for a reason to hold on to her suicide theory, even as Cora’s Jeep was speeding on traffic cameras—but, despite her despair, she’d still gotten on her high horse about his father’s treatment plan. No matter the situation, no matter her own state of mind, Tess always knew best. She had rattled off facts—If your father goes septic, there’s a forty percent chance that he will pass within the year —and big doctor words—immunosuppression, reinfection—to establish her authority. Her opinion was the only one that ever counted, but he thought he might be finished counting it.
The Wheel of Fortune went around and bankrupted all three contestants in a row. You can put me out on the street. He was humming. To shut himself up, he pulled out his phone. Del or his brother Vin: those were his only options now. Put me out. In the past, he could have called Tess, Andy, his mother. Put me out. But you couldn’t make a cellphone call in a hospital anyway. Put me out of misery. He stood up and went out of the room, down the hallway, down the stairs, through emergency, out the doors.
He walked across the ambulance lane and into the slanting red of the sun. An empty breeze was blowing, the kind that said they might drop a few more degrees in the coming days, and it pulled a fine spray of water from the fountain that played in the middle of the lawn. Joe tried to enjoy the sensation, but to do that, he’d have to feel it first. Instead, the longer he stood there, the emptier his mind became, as if the breeze were stripping thoughts from it like dead leaves from a branch. He looked at the pines standing guard over the sky. He stepped into their needles, smelled nothing.
Across the street, an old roadhouse hunkered against the ditch. It was the kind of place he and Vin would go to when they were kids, sneaking out in their mother’s Buick, drinking a couple of beers at the high bar until some redneck got it into his head to quarrel with their presence there among the nice country girls in their bell-bottomed riding pants. He thought of Monica Selvaggio the other day at Sol’s farm, bending across the folding table for the hot dog buns. You could roll a marble across that thing, and if she wasn’t married, maybe she would have let him. He was hardly married anymore. He could go into that roadhouse no problem now, pitch a hip against the bar, grab a longneck by its throat. He could corral some pretty young thing and get her talking: tell her about his dad, tell her about Cora, spin out a story about how she’d left all this behind—the mud and the mold and the coming water—how she was on the road now, her head out of the window of the speeding car, hair whipping around her face, the radio turned up loud
. Maybe the girl would have pity on him, maybe take him out to her truck the way they did now, or so he’d been told, no wooing, no waiting. He tried to remember how that felt, a girl’s body against yours, all sinew and lubricated joints, but he found his mind stopping short at her hand on his zipper, her lips on his cheek. He found a hard refusal in his heart, a fist clenched in his chest.
Above the rise of the I-12 a band of cloud was moving in, tossing the spindly branches of the pines. The breeze snapped with ozone and resin, but he put his hands in his pockets and trotted down the hospital’s long lawn, towards home.
DEL HAD TAKEN herself to a party. Tina’s high school boyfriend, Little Joe Alpharetta, was moving to Dallas the next day, and his boxes were all stacked up along the walls, his entire liquor cabinet—everything from rye to crème de banane—lined up on the counter. A “house-cooling,” everybody was calling it, but the living room was packed so tightly that Del was sweating through her clothes.
She had done three circuits of the room, through the kitchen and out to the keg and back, without managing to attach herself to any of her old high school friends, and so she was back to Tina and George and George’s old crew. Rob Walker was talking about MRGO, and she rolled her eyes at Tina—all dolled up in a skintight dress despite the nursing bra—as she turned sideways to slip between her and the big brown couch. As she straddled its arm, Rob put a sweaty hand on her shoulder. She couldn’t figure out how to make him let go.
“—not to mention the cypress forests it killed, which is only a fraction of the swamp that’s dying every day,” Rob said. “A football field’s worth. Every. Single. Day.”
Del gulped at her beer. “Can we talk about something else?”
The Floating World Page 31