A patient patient. That was what he was. Harbor the mind in the ticking body. Get yourself good and strong first, and then we’ll see to your going home, said that little girl in the starched cap standing straight like a soldier. Didn’t mind holding the metal pan for the doctor, didn’t mind the ping-pinging of shrapnel on the pan. When she came through the curtains there was never blood on her frock; she was impervious, like the cold accent of England. An island nation and defensible. He had tried telling her about New Orleans, how it was essentially an island too, ringed by the lake and the river and the swamps. How Sylvia was waiting at home for him, patient, patient. He kept dreaming about her tearing out dropped stitches in her knitting. He’d received a letter saying yes. He’d built that chest from cypress so it could sink if it had to, down to the bottom of the sea, and still hold tight, hold water like a contract, like a vow, which must be what they understood, why they pulled the curtain around the bed and talked in whispers. But the draft did rankle.
DEL STOOD AT the edge of the cabin steps and watched her father’s taillights as he drove to spend the night in the hospital, the rain-washed shells crunching under his tires. With all the lights off, it was dark the way only the country can be dark. Low clouds still veiled the stars, and now that the trees were gone she could see off in the distance the orange fairy lights of the strip malls nestled up against the 190. Someone had lit a wood fire somewhere, but the smell only made her feel colder and more alone.
She slipped the key into the lock and went into the house, pulled the singed sculpture of her mother out of her sweatshirt pouch, pulled the hoodie over her head. A stained mug, half-full of coffee, sat in the middle of the table, and the bread was still out on the board. She wrapped up the bread, loaded the dishwasher with the dirty breakfast dishes her father had left in the sink, called for a pizza, and went to build a fire in the hearth.
As she rearranged the logs piled in the grate, something clattered down into the back of the firebox, and she reached back and withdrew it—a carving of a magnolia cone, made of cypress. She looked over her shoulder. The rag rug under the hope chest was littered with wood shavings, and the patina had a new broad wound gouged in it, the product, she figured, of Papie’s delirious episode. Del sighed and turned around on her knees, trying to line up the broken-off carving with the leaves and petals on the chest, but she could not find where it belonged. Papie had not simply hacked into the chest this time as he had done in Houston; he had cut deeply down into the wood and begun roughing out a trinity of flowers: a closed bud, an open blossom, a more delicate seeded cone. Even sketched as they were, she could see that they were better, the work of a mature craftsman, not the apprentice he had been when he built the chest.
Del got up and turned on the lamp. Alone in the room, she started to laugh. All day long he had tossed in the bed, mumbling about nurses and shrapnel, but he had worked down the lines of the carving here, expertly building the new figures into the contours of the old so as not to lose too much wood. She moved around the piece, looking again at the so-called damage he had done with Vin’s oyster knife. The cuts were rough, but, her fingers on the carving, she could feel how he’d chipped rhythmically with the inadequate knife, incising a deeper trough along the spine of a pine bough to give it depth. The more violent cuts on one of the roses at the center of the lid had just been a first rough pass to thin out the petals, make them finer.
The chest had always been given a place of honor, first in Papie and Mamie’s house and then in theirs, but that was because of its sentimental associations, not its craftsmanship. It was clearly an apprentice work—the lines rigid, the curves inelegant—and she’d bet that it had always bothered Papie, deep down, that it wasn’t perfect. Mamie would never have let him touch it, any more than a decent woman would allow her husband to exchange the flawed diamond on her engagement ring for a better one, and so it had taken her dying and then his mind going, his inhibitions falling, for him to do something about it.
She pulled her sweatshirt back on, went out, and crossed the lawn to the workshop. Del had rarely been in there since her father had taken it over from Papie, and it still surprised her to smell paint and turps where she expected wood and varnish. It was too clean, no curls of planed wood on the workbenches, the windows and shelves cleared of their thin film of sawdust. There was hardly any evidence of work at all, no sketches or unsold works lying around, and now too, the high shelf that ran along the perimeter of the shop that had been filled with sculptures of her mother was empty. Uncharacteristically, her father had left his sketchbook lying on a sawhorse at the side of the room. It was wrong of her, she knew, but she opened the book and flipped through it, past the pages covered in pencil drawings and phrases—degradable matter, renaissant image—underlined and circled and inscribed in boxes, until she reached a page dated 8.28.05. There, he’d drawn a picture of the hurricane as a serpent eating its tail. On the next page, undated, were the words vortex, then, beneath it vertex, crossed out, then, in a double-bordered blue ink box, what she made out as barometric pressure/ things spin apart/ the center will not hold. There is no center. He had dated the following page 9.1.05 and written, beside the date reentry but there was nothing underneath it, and nothing on the pages that followed but a phone number for someone named Roland written in a different pen.
She closed the book and put it back on the sawhorse, shifting it into the angle at which she thought it had been lying. Out on the road, a car passed, and its headlights lit up the window and the Windex streaks on it, the long dull rectangles where something had been affixed to the glass with Scotch tape.
Papie’s lathe, though, was still on one of the workbenches, as was his table saw. His chisels and hammers and vises hung within their Marks-A-Lot outlines on the particle board. There was also wood, she realized. Enormous quantities of newly cut old-growth pine.
Fifty-Eight Days after Landfall
October 26
Cora sat in the passenger seat of Troy’s used Dodge, her head down between her knees, running her thumb up and down the bandage the EMTs had taped over the laceration on her shin. Troy hummed as he drove, and through her eyelids, the blue light of the tow truck strobed as it dragged her Jeep, its front axle broken, ahead of them down the frost-edged road. It was all over now—the cops would have called in the license plate and the NOPD would be at her mother’s door before the end of the day. She had cash still—she’d only spent $400 of the ten grand from her stash—but it was in the backseat of the Jeep, and if she didn’t want to be dragged back home or, worse, to DePaul, within forty-eight hours, she would have to break loose now and run to the highway, hitchhike to someplace she could spend the night, far enough away from here they couldn’t find her. She could find a little cave out in the forest, maybe, fend for herself like the island girl. She tried the door handle. It was locked, but Troy’s arm came hard against her.
Troy stopped humming and moved his hand around the back of her neck. “You’re safe now, Cora. Leave it be.”
She shook her head, and it felt as though her brain was rattling inside her skull. She had hit her temple against the window in the crash. Hadn’t put her seatbelt on. Just trying to get away.
“I tell you they had me spooked,” Troy was saying, “Mrs. Fuscht saying she thought Reyna was there, talking to Tyrone. I mean I know the cops called me saying they’d identified her remains in the fire, but I’m getting to be like Bea and her paranoias.”
She pressed her forehead against the freezing window. “Please stop lying.”
“Lying to who? How?”
She shook her head, gently, gently, the skin of her brow stretching on the glass. “I know she’s dead. I know I killed her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Stop fucking lying to me!” she shouted, made her head ring.
“You think you killed Reyna?”
“I shot her,” Cora said. “She’s dead.”
“Birdshot in her leg. You got me too. Wanna see?”
He was rolling up his sleeve, and so she closed her eyes. She should have kept running, but her body had quit on her. She’d just sat in the frozen grass looking at the fence of the schoolyard as if she’d fallen out of the sky. She had let them shine their light in her eyes, tap at the veins on the inside of her elbow. She’s going to be alright, they said, and for some reason, she hadn’t argued, she had just let them help. She’d watched obediently as the point of light moved back and forth across her face, watched the Jeep crawl slowly from the ditch, and she touched her ankles, her shins, her knees, thighs, hips, ran her hands up her abdomen, over her ribs, her breasts, along the bones of her arms, pushed her fingers into her hair and felt where the bones of her skull had fused, and thought I am all here. I am still here. Where is this that I am?
She opened her eyes and looked at Troy’s arm, the flesh of it pocked pink in six places. Looked at his face—his flat nose in profile, the thin chain gleaming against his neck.
“You have to try, you want to kill somebody with birdshot. You have to at least aim.”
She shook her head. “I shot her. She’s dead.”
“You shot the ceiling. I drove her to the medic tent. Learnt a new word: ‘Syncope.’ They sent her someplace else—I got bills I can show you that they sent me a week and a half ago, thanks—how they pulled the birdshot out of her, filled her up on drugs, and set her loose again.”
“She’s dead.” The heater blew its mildewed breath onto her neck, but cold was leaking through the window and the seams of the door. “She came to the house, looking for them. There were lights. I saw her eyes.”
“Ghosts. Right.” Troy rolled his eyes, laughed, a little sadly. “You sound like one of those tourist mule drivers, you know that? Ghosts.” He pointed to a tree in a nearby yard, its branches decorated with toilet paper streamers and polyester cobwebs. “You want me to tell you what I know happened? She got loose from the medics, and she went straight back to you to get her children, and when she didn’t find them, she took your granddaddy’s gun instead and carried it to my house, and, when she still didn’t find them, she took her life. Your mama told me that gun went missing, and I didn’t want to say but I knew where it had gone.”
“How do you know that? How could you know?”
“You found the gun, right, Cora?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you find the gun?”
“With her.”
“Where?”
“At your house.”
“And did you go to my house, before I asked you to? After I gave you the gun back to protect yourself with?”
“No.”
“So, how did it get there, then, if Reyna—as you say—was dead all along?” Troy shook his head. “Ghosts can’t carry guns, baby—not as far as I know.” He chuckled once, sadly.
She closed her eyes, saw the gun on the tin floor of the upper gallery. Saw the lights in the house—a flashlight beam ascending.
“She only wanted her boys back, you know, Cora. That’s all she wanted. But we didn’t understand her, and she didn’t understand us.” Troy breathed out slowly through his nose. “And you know, I would have welcomed that—her taking them back—if I thought she could. If I thought ‘back’ meant back to the little house she had for a little while off LaSalle Street, where they used to sit out and watch the Indians go by in their suits. If I thought ‘back’ meant to the East, to Darryl’s house, where he was teaching Willy about the Mississippi, saying he was going to see about adopting him once he and Reyna got married, making him his river-pilot next-in-line. Even if I thought ‘back’ meant Calliope. But none of us can go back there anymore, can we.”
Cora heard the woman wailing in the garden. A living woman with a living grief. But Reyna had not found her children. Instead she found a gun, and she took it with her away from the house where her children were not, to the place where she’d last been with them.
Cora took her head off the cold window, and the pain went back to hammering at her temples. Up ahead, a sign hung above a garage: HARMS AUTO BODY. The Jeep bounced in a clash of chains into the driveway. Tick-tock, tick-tock, the blinker said, like a clock. Soon they would sit her down in a brown chair and take her keys away. Soon there would be no way to keep running. She sat back up and buckled the seatbelt.
“You believe me now?” Troy said. “She ended her own life, Cora. She’d been heading that way for years. The blessing is only that she didn’t take anybody else with her.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not for you to be sorry.”
Cora let herself cry, and Troy reached out and put a hand on her upper arm.
“She was your sister,” Cora said. “She was their mother. She was beautiful.” Cora saw her again at the wheel of Darryl’s car, her face golden in the wash of the traffic lights and high-boned like a goddess’s, laughing. “She was so beautiful.”
Wednesday
November 2
The ride from the airport seemed to take forever. The interstate was congested, and the cab driver kept stopping and starting abruptly, hitting the gas or the brake hard enough to make the cherry-scented Christmas tree dangling from the rearview swing like a censer. Tess had to dig her fingernails into her thighs to keep from throwing up. She wanted to roll her window down, but outside the day was biting, ice-blue. Frozen grass blanketed the hilled margins of the highways, and the bare, dark-skinned trees dragged their claws across the blanched morning sky.
The taxi driver hadn’t said a word since she’d gotten in. He just turned off of one highway and onto the next. Supposedly, he knew where he was going. She kept looking for Rome on the mileage signs without finding it. Rome, Illinois—it seemed like a joke, that name.
Once they had turned off the highway, though, the house came up quickly—a dark gray thing huddling behind its garage as if for warmth. Tess paid the driver and let him pull her suitcase from the trunk. After he drove off, she stood for a moment on the empty sidewalk, taking deep breaths of frost into her lungs. The cold penetrated her cloth coat, coming up out of the sidewalk and through the soles of her shoes. In the square windows of the house, the lights were on, and the smell of wood smoke sifted down through the air. She went up the walkway under the naked arms of a maple tree and bumped her suitcase up onto the stoop. Before she could ring the bell, the door swung open. Heat gusted out, and two little boys crowded out around her legs.
“We made you a picture!” said the little one, only thigh high. He looked up at her with eyes that shone like granite, while the older boy clutched a piece of orange construction paper to his chest, not speaking.
“Show her the picture!” The little one elbowed his brother in the chest until he held it up: a crayon drawing of a rectangular building impaled by a sideways tree, captioned ANT TESS s HOUSE.
“Tyrone drawed it,” said the little one. “She says you’re getting it fixed. She says nobody can stay there anymore.”
“Don’t let all the hot air out, boys!” It was Cora’s voice, though there was no one visible in the front rooms, not at the long table or on the flowered couch. Tess reached down and took the drawing, and as the smell of coffee and cinnamon rushed at her, Cora came through into the dining room, drying her hands on a dish towel.
“Mom.”
She had stopped on the other side of the doorway. Tess went to her, hugged her—the heavy little boy wrapping himself around her leg like a bear cub at the same time. There was already a little bit of meat on her daughter’s bones; she felt solid again.
The older boy had his fingers clenched around Cora’s thumb, and she smiled down at him.
“This is Tyrone, Mom, if they didn’t introduce themselves. And Willy.” She rubbed the little one’s head.
She’s doing fine now, Troy had told her on the phone, by way of explaining why he’d waited so long to call. Tess had interpreted that in many ways as she’d booked her tickets, packed her bag, waited in the security line, brace
d herself for landing: Cora fine but still in bed. Cora fine but curled up in a recliner and sucking her hair. With Cora, “fine” meant trying to function. She never succeeded quite.
But now Cora was smiling down at the pair of children she’d fished up out of the flood, a rose-tinged bloom in her cheeks. She had flour on her pants, and one glossy clavicle jutted from the stretched collar of her sweatshirt. The purple had gone from underneath her eyes, and she stood squarely with her feet sunk in the carpet, holding the bigger boy by the hand.
“You look marvelous.” Tess reached out and touched her daughter’s cheek. “Are you—You’re seeing somebody up here?”
“Tyrone.” Cora jiggled the boy’s hand. “Why don’t you and Willy go up to my room and watch some cartoons?”
Willy released Cora’s leg, and he and Tyrone ran off up the stairs.
Cora shook her head. “Alice gave me a number if I need it. But I’m doing all right.”
“Cora,” Tess started. She had a whole speech planned. She was going to pull up a chair beside the bed, take her daughter’s limp hand, and try to revise all of those maternal lectures she’d given her since she was a girl, about death and love and what you could hope for, what you should expect out of life. But Cora was looking at her placidly now—Tess had forgotten that she was so tall—and it seemed that they had traded places, and Tess was at a loss for words.
“Mom.” Cora took her wrist and led her to the sofa. “I’m sorry about what I’ve done to you. I’ve been selfish—”
Tess swallowed, shook her head. “No, honey. You haven’t been selfish. You’ve been sick.”
Cora shook her head.
Tess scrabbled for her hands, held them, and looked hard into Cora’s eyes. “Yes, honey. Yes, you have been sick. But it’s alright. We can get you help.”
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