The Floating World

by Babst, C. Morgan

  “I’m sorry, Del, if I’m traumatizing you, but it’s just the truth. What with saltwater intrusion and the increase in storm activity we’re expecting with the warming oceans—”

  “Come on, man, let it go,” George said.

  Tina smiled at him. She had lipstick on her teeth. “Yeah, Rob, Del only just got here. Can you give her some time to get drunk before you purposely make her cry?”

  Del would allow him to do no such thing, but as he kept talking, she felt the anger welling up in her chest again, and she reached up and pulled Rob’s hand off her. She scooted backwards a little and looked out across the party, which seemed to be approaching its zenith. The house was so full that the boxes were no longer visible, and people trying to move through the crowd had to raise their drinks up above their heads as they squeezed between knots of conversation. She spotted Isabelle Franks and Megan Rosier hunched together in the kitchen, and Howie Richard was sitting alone halfway up the steps to the camelback, balancing a paper plate of Doritos on his knees.

  “Well, sure it’s criminal,” Tina was saying, “but who’s going to sue who? The Corps is the government. Can the government even sue itself?”

  “You’re missing the point,” Rob said, and, almost without meaning to, Del stood up again, downed the last warm slug of beer, and pushed herself into a clogged channel that wound behind the backs of some Buckner husbands into the kitchen.

  She paused a moment in front of the food, which the party guests had littered with balled-up cocktail napkins and foam-streaked Solo cups. Isabelle stared at her for a good three seconds, blinking her big brown eyes that had become even more cowlike since they’d graduated.

  “Del Boisdoré?”

  “Hey,” Megan said, the sparkling fringe on her top trembling. “You’re in town?”

  Popping a handful of Zapp’s in her mouth, Del shrugged. “Kinda.”

  Isabelle was still looking her up and down. Del jutted out her hip in her distressed jeans and forced a smile.

  “Tina said you quit your job in New York?” Megan said, raising her penciled eyebrows.

  “They wouldn’t give me leave to come home.”

  Isabelle’s mouth bunched up in one corner as she unconsciously smoothed the pleats on her Lily Pulitzer housewife dress, its pastel seashells like something one of her two kids might have drawn. “Good for you.”

  Megan raised her plastic cup of wine.

  “I could never live in New York,” Isabelle said.

  “Yeah, you’d go broke,” Megan said, pinching at the fabric of Isabelle’s sleeve.

  Isabelle blinked rapidly. “It just wouldn’t suit me. It’s too fast-paced. I’m not one of those mothers who’s going to let a nanny raise her child.”

  Del smiled, nodded. “It’s not really—” She looked down at the white bottom of her cup.

  “Oh, look.” Isabelle pointed at the door, an old Trinity friend of theirs coming in. “McGrath!”

  “I heard Julie’s still in Macon,” Megan said, nodding.

  “McGrath!” Isabelle yelled in her rough old catcher’s voice.

  Megan had pivoted around to the bar and was pouring Pimm’s straight into her cup.

  “I’m going to go refill my beer,” Del said.

  “McGrath!” Isabelle barked. “Mic Grath!”

  The blood beating in her neck, Del pushed her way out of the kitchen and through the dark laundry room. On top of the dryer, a Buckner girl from the year above was perched, her eyes closed. A tear had rolled down each of her cheeks, leaving trails that glistened in the light off the kitchen.

  Out in the yard, a satellite party was taking place within a nimbus cast by the lights strung up in the holly tree. Hearing the screen door bang shut, Little Joe looked up from the tap and nodded.

  Del tripped down the steps and stood beside Courtney Bain, her cup out. “You seen Tina?”

  “No.” Courtney shook her head. “Have you seen Lauren?”

  “No,” Del said. “How’d y’all make out?”

  “We’re alive, I guess. By the grace of God.”

  Little Joe took Del’s cup from her and tilted it into the dying stream of Bud Light, then reached over and pumped the keg. Courtney wandered over to the tree and sat down, and a pair of guys in scrubs got in line behind Del and peeled new cups off the stack.

  She tilted her face up and let her eyes adjust to the thinner light. The night was moonless, but the stars bored bright holes through the ebony of the sky. A rapping came from the house, and she looked up to see Tina standing in the window of the kitchen, knocking her fat diamond ring against the glass. Tina motioned at her, but just then, Del’s phone buzzed in her back pocket—Zack’s name on the bright white screen. She held the phone up to Tina, then walked out beyond the pool of light, pressed the green button, and brought the phone up to her face.

  “Zack,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  She gulped a sip of beer. “Hey.”

  “They convicted my guy today.”

  She sat down on the steps up to the laundry shed and put her feet on the rim of a pot containing an aloe plant whose spikes had gone limp, sick from too much water.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’m not,” Zack said, like a shrug. “Stupid motherfucker. Thinks because he has a trust fund, he can get away with literal murder.”

  “There’s a lot of that. Well, not literally,” Del said, just to respond, and the line seemed to go dead for a minute. Away from the hubbub of the party, she could hear the tree frogs chirping on the batture. A ship blew its horn, and she closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of the ligustrums.

  “So, how are you doing, sweetheart? I didn’t really understand your ‘coded’ e-mail. You guys found your sister? And the other thing, something about Troy’s house?”

  “Yeah, I think it’s going to be okay. Cora’s driving too fast through Arkansas, and the house was really burned to a crisp when I went to look. But it’s over. It’s gonna be okay.”

  “ ‘It’s over?’ So, you’re a stupid motherfucker too.”

  “What?” The aloe pot rocked under her feet.

  “ ‘It’s over,’ like you don’t even remember what you said to me in the car—or maybe you didn’t mean it? ‘It’s not over, it’ll never be over. It’s not just a garbage-removal problem.’ You were right, of course you were right. They’re building your levees back to pre-Katrina strength? Well, that’s great. And they got all the water out, so you’re all good now, you’re going to stay. It’s all hunky-dory, huh? You’re like—it’s like you’ve never seen a movie. The bad guy’s got the cop tied to the radiator, and he thinks he’s safe, so he confesses everything, starts making a cup of coffee, and that’s when they get him. Because he is a stupid motherfucker.”

  “I’m not stupid, Zack.”

  “Then stop doing stupid shit, sweetheart.”

  “Okay, first thing is stop calling me sweetheart,” she said.

  “And the second thing?”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  She felt the party turn to stare, but when she looked back towards the lit circle around the keg, Courtney Bain was talking to Lauren Farrow as she redid her ponytail, her Solo cup held between her teeth, and one of the football types was doing a keg stand. Tina was the only one looking in her direction; holding the screen door open, she squinted through the darkness, her head tilted to the side. Del held the phone up again, and Tina finally turned away.

  “I don’t want to be your lawyer, Del,” Zack said.

  “I don’t need a lawyer! I never asked you to be my lawyer!” Across the yard, the screen door clapped shut. “I asked you to be my friend!”

  “I don’t want to be your friend.”

  Del rocked herself once, twice. She bent her toes around the rim of the terra-cotta pot, leaned forward, her elbows digging into her thighs.

  “Okay,” she said, unable to keep the hitch out of her voice.

  The screen door swung op
en again, and Little Joe came dancing out, waving a piece of paper towel in his hand, trying to get people to second-line.

  “You know what I want to be, Del.”

  She reached her arm out and pried a piece of the flaking paint up off of the bleached siding of the shed and looked at it, a thick but flexible thing, like a snake’s scale.

  “I’m not coming back though, Zack,” she said. She looked across the yard to where Tina’s husband George was ripping paper towels off of the roll and handing them to Courtney and Lauren. Tina was holding the screen door open, and it seemed like the whole party was pouring through it. Someone had turned up the stereo on “Hey Pocky A-Way” and opened all the back windows.

  “You say that,” Zack said, “but this is all going to end at some point. You’re going to find Cora, and soon the rest of things will go back to normal.”

  “That’s not what it’s about. Or it’s not just that,” she said. “I can’t leave, Zack. I’ve already lost too much. Maybe half of it? Twenty-seven thousand acres of cypress forest? A football field a day? My sister’s gone and my grandfather’s halfway out of his mind and my parents are done and the house I grew up in—they’re going to gut it, fix it up, sell it—and I have literally two friends here, but I’m not going to lose the rest of it, okay? I can’t.”

  “Then I’ll come there,” he said.

  She laughed at the absurdity of that statement. “No, you can’t, dummy. You’re from there as much as I’m from here. ‘New York is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish diaspora,’ you said, like six weeks ago.”

  “I can come there.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m going to be all right.”

  “Del, I—” He sighed. “Del.”

  In the silence, she stood up and went halfway back across the lawn. From the screened doors and windows of the house, the Meters were shouting Hey pocky way, hey pocky way, over and over to end the song, and she watched the jumping napkins die in the hands of the dancers as the track cut out and was replaced by the sound of Louis Armstrong’s plaintive horn playing the first notes of “St. James Infirmary.” At the front of the parade, George took a stutter step, then raised his hand again with the napkin in it and started to lead the second line again in a slow march around the holly tree and out of the haze of light.

  “It’s not about you,” Zack said. “It’s not just about you.”

  George was dancing towards her, and as he approached, he reached out his napkin at her, then held the dancing in place as he tore it in half and handed one part to her.

  “I’m at a party, Zack, can we talk about this later?”

  “I’m done talking,” he said, and suddenly she knew that he would come. They would find each other some night soon on the damp bricks of the Dobies’ courtyard, and he would flick his cigarette into the monkey grass and say again the things that he kept saying, and this time she would say them back. She imagined them sitting on the front porch of a house they’d fix up in Bayou St. John as their teenaged children came back home from the parades, tired and satisfied, carrying glittered coconuts in their arms, their necks bowed under the weight of thousands of strands of plastic pearls.

  Little Joe and Vita Barron were singing, Let her go, let her go, God bless her; Wherever she may be; She can look this wide world over; But she’ll never find a sweet man like me, and the girl who had been crying in the laundry room held out her hand to Del, and she stepped in along the side of the line.

  “Dance with me, then,” she said to Zack, and she raised up her phone in the hand she held her napkin in and started to sing along with all of them, though she didn’t entirely remember either the music or the words.

  Fifty-Eight Days after Landfall

  October 26

  Cora found Tyrone on the swings in the schoolyard, a black Saints beanie pulled low on his head. He held the chains twisted so that his feet dangled high off the ground. Behind him, other children in hats and puffy jackets were playing tag, screaming wildly, their snow boots pounding the painted asphalt. The pair of girls next to him swung high enough to make the chains buckle in the air. Every so often, Tyrone released a link so that he bumped down half a turn, and then he wound himself back up again.

  He hadn’t seen her yet. She stood under a leafless tree on the other side of the street, waiting to know what words she needed. She checked the plastic watch she’d bought—fifteen minutes had already passed. She crossed the street. Tyrone didn’t look up, but the girls looked at each other and shrieked, their dresses flying as they flung themselves into the air and across the playground. Cora looped her fingers into the fence.

  “Tyrone?”

  He looked up, his brow bunched under his hat’s gold fleur-de-lis, and let go of the chains. His spinning sped up as they untwisted and then slowed again as the swing began a counterturn. She expected him to run away from her, but he didn’t run.

  “Tyrone. I came to say I’m sorry.”

  His hands caught the chains and held them separate for a moment, his back to her.

  “I know it isn’t enough,” she said. “I know it doesn’t matter what I meant to do, but all I wanted was to protect you. All I wanted in the world was to protect you, but still everything that shouldn’t have happened has happened, and I am sorry. I am sorry about your mother and sorry for what you lived through, and I’m sorry you lost your home.”

  He began to wind the chain back up again, crossing hand over hand. Each time he turned to face her he closed his eyes.

  “And that’s all,” she said. Her heart was beating hard and fast. “I’m going now, unless you have something you need to say to me.”

  She swallowed a mouthful of acid spit, listening to the swing’s hinges creak as he adjusted himself in the seat, and then she pushed off the fence and began to turn away.

  “Don’t.” He took his hands off the chains, spun down three revolutions, stopped himself.

  “I’m here.”

  He held still, his head bent. “She used to get us Milky Way bars from the K&B sometimes, when she was feeling good. She called us little prince, little prince.”

  “Because you are. You are. You are a prince.”

  Tyrone let himself drop a turn and looked up. “We got a dog once. He was big, colored like tinfoil, with no ears. We dressed him up in her clothes before she came home one day, and she didn’t even get mad. She laughed. But we had to let him loose. He bit Willy. Just a little bit. So we took him down to the big park, and we let him go loose, but I saw him again once hanging around the trashcans. But he didn’t know who I was. He growled at me. Forgot to take his medicine, Mama said. I knew it. Seemed like he didn’t like the taste, even wrapped up in yellow cheese.”

  “You know your mom didn’t want to be sick, Tyrone.”

  He wound the chain up tighter, rising off the ground, and Cora stared across the schoolyard. A teacher near the soccer goal was blowing a whistle, but Tyrone didn’t seem to hear.

  “Nobody who’s sick wants to be sick,” Cora said. “She loved you. And she wanted to take care of you. That’s why she came to get you. Even though it was scary when she came—that was just the sickness. She couldn’t hold it back. There are things out there, things that sometimes we can’t protect ourselves from, things we can’t control.”

  He held himself at the top of his chains facing the other children, who were lining up in four columns at the far side of the yard.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you that. It’s scary. But I think you know from scary. I think we all know from scary now.”

  “Do you think I’m going to get sick when I grow up?”

  Cora shook her head, licked her lip. “If you do, we’ll work through it together, okay?”

  “Uncle Troy just says no.” He let himself down a half turn and looked at her from his high seat. Then, he nodded. “Okay.”

  Across the playground, a wide woman in a long skirt was stomping towards them while the lines of children began marching indoors. A strong breeze kicked up, and
a windfall of golden leaves scattered over the fence and across a map of the United States painted on the basketball court.

  “Excuse me,” the teacher was shouting. “Excuse me!”

  Tyrone let the chains go, spinning down fast, and then went running across the yard to fall in line behind his classmates, but the woman kept coming, all the way up to the fence, so close that Cora had to back away.

  “Excuse me!” Her breath smelled like salad dressing. “Who are you?”

  “Nobody.” Cora turned and stepped down into the grass at the curb.

  “Nobody?” She arched a plucked eyebrow. “Are you a relative of the boy’s? Are you his mother?”

  “I’m just a friend of his uncle’s. It’s okay—I’m going.”

  “Oh?” The woman pulled a phone out of her jacket. “We’ll see about that. If you’re a friend of his father’s you’ll know there’s a restraining order out against the mother, and we can’t allow—”

  “His mother’s dead.” Cora stepped into the street. “I killed her.”

  “What?” the teacher said. “What? Hello!”

  Cora kept her back turned.

  “What did you just say to me? Ma’am. Ma’am! Hello? Don’t you walk away from me.”

  Cora wrestled the keys out of her pocket, opened the door of her Jeep, got in, started the ignition. The teacher was hollering for security, and a blue uniform moved from the shadow of the school’s entrance, down towards her car. Staring into the rearview mirror, Cora put her foot on the gas. The tires spun on a low ridge of ice, regaining purchase just as a Sysco truck barreled around the corner. She didn’t have time to hit the brakes.

  Thursday

  October 27

  In the early morning light, the workshed looked hopeful, fresh-faced—it was clean and smelled sweetly of paint. Joe set his coffee on the workbench, turned the radio on to OZ. They were playing some kind of experimental instrument that synthesized theremin music to the weather satellites, and he thought that was pretty rad, thought he’d like to do something along those lines, since he’d decided it was time to find something to do. He hadn’t gone back to the hospital last night but had walked home instead through the rain, battered by heavy drops gathered by what trees remained along the country road. He’d walked with his head down, humming, as though he’d find a yellow light at the end of his driveway and a woman cooking at the stove. Instead, he’d loaded kindling into the empty house and sat awhile by the fire, trying to figure out how to be alone. Del had agreed to come and help today; he’d given himself that, as a gift. And since he had, he’d better do something with it.