“We need to talk, Miss Ariel,” Cerise says, nodding, trying to show it’ll be okay. “We can all go into your house. Come on. Duck up under here.”
Cerise watches the smart boy she forgets the name of—it’s a musician, an old one—look up at his mother’s face. This mess gonna affect a lot of people. The little girl starts crying.
“Shh,” Cerise says. “It’s gone be alright. I promise.” She tells the lady cop, “These are Ed’s people.”
The woman nods, frowning, being official and putting her hands on her big belt with all its different weapons strapped on it. They got so much these days, pepper spray and those tasers along with clubs and guns. Too bad it seem like the NOPD not doin much at all with all their stuff to stop the ones who need stoppin’.
Cerise holds up the yellow tape. Ariel and her kids walk under. “Let’s get them set up with a video,” Cerise tells Ariel.
“I want Daddy,” the little girl cries.
“Yo, what happen?” the boy asks. He stares at the red street, his head following the runoff of blood into the gutter. “Whoa …” The boy suddenly goes white and drops his ice cream. He races up his porch steps. He tries to open the front door then starts banging on it. He pushes the doorbell over and over. “Dad! Dad!!” He bangs the front door again.
Ariel stops in her tracks. “Jesus, Cerise, I don’t, I’m not sure I can do …”
What in hell has Cerise made these poor people think? “Oh, no, no,” she says. “Ed’s alive. He alive. Hang on. He’s not here, but he alive and he gonna stay that way. I just don’t think he gonna be okay for a real long while.” Cerise reaches down with her good hand and touches the little girl’s pretty hair.
They get up on the porch, and Ariel goes in her handbag for something. “Miles, he’s not here,” Ariel says.
“I promise I’ll be good. I promise!” The boy breaks down sobbing, crouching against the door.
“Miles, get up. Miles,” Ariel says. “Dad will come back.”
“I don’t want a recarcerated dad!” the child hollers into his knees.
“What?” Ariel asks, giving her daughter’s hand to Cerise to hold while she bends to the boy. Ariel rubs his back. “What, Miles?”
“I want Dad!”
“Hey, hey. Miles. Look at me. Shh.” She keeps on rubbing.
“I promise I’ll be good. I don’t want a, I don’t want a dog dad or a ant—” The child’s just hitchin’ with his crying.
“What?”
“What if he comes back … what, what if I don’t know it’s Dad?” The boy starts wailing like Cerise saw his father do just a short time ago.
“Are you talking about reincarnation?” Ariel asks. She takes the boy’s chin in her hand. “Miles, listen to me. Just listen.”
27
When the relatives arrive, Ed is mowing Joe’s lawn. They pile out of a large pickup truck with a rear seat. Four kids and a mother and father. It’s not what Ed would have predicted for a cousin of Joe’s.
Joe still lies in a coma. The police took two weeks to find his closest living relative. Evidently this is the man from Alabama. Ed stops pushing his manual mower and holds out his hand in greeting. “Hi,” Ed says. “I’m Ed, a neighbor.”
“Damn, I haven’t seen one of those since I was a kid.” The man points at the mower. He has a pronounced Southern drawl.
Ed shrugs and wipes sweat off his brow. “Good for the environment.”
“Yeah, well. I’m Lou, short for Louis, and this my wife, Terri.” The man points at his rumpled-looking kids. “Jenna, Jacob, Jessica, and Jerry.”
“Hello, everyone,” Ed says. “Welcome.”
“You’re the man been visitin’ Joe,” Lou says. He is very tan.
“I guess I am,” Ed answers. “Huntsville’s near Tennessee, right?” Ed directs the question to the woman, but she only looks to her husband.
“Yeah, not too far from the border,” Lou says. “Makes for a long trip.”
The woman plucks at her T shirt, fanning herself off.
“New Orleans in July,” Ed says, smiling. He wants to tell them that it’s his fault that Lou’s cousin is in a coma and his cousin’s wife killed herself. He wants to tell them that they are allowed to force him into labor. He will haul rocks up hills. He will hoe a field. He will do penance the rest of his life. “Good and hot till mid-October.”
“There’s air-conditioning in there?” Lou asks, tilting his head at Philomenia and Joe’s house.
“Sure. Better you guys than nobody, right?” That came out wrong. “Let me get the key. I mean, you know, it’s better to have people in a house than not, right? Houses shouldn’t sit empty.” Shut up, Ed. Get a grip. “I’ll be right back.”
One of the children has some kind of disability. She wears a wooden slab of a shoe and stands crookedly. Ed goes in his front door.
“Ed?” Ariel calls out.
“The Alabama people are here. Just getting the key.”
Ariel comes out of the family room. “You doing okay?”
“Hot,” he says, taking the key from the foyer table.
“Don’t get overheated. You want some water?”
He shakes his head and goes back out.
Lou, his wife, and his four Js are swarming the exterior of the house. Ed’s reminded of ants surrounding a large crouton, figuring out how to carry it away. Lou’s gone down the north side. Ed sees him reaching into ferns. “Here it is,” Ed says, holding up the key.
“Ain’t no pool,” one of the boys calls from the backyard.
“Foundation nice an’ dry,” Lou says to Ed, brushing off his hands.
“They took very good care of the property,” Ed says. He wants to tell the man that Joe’s head resembled a watermelon as much as it did a head the first time he visited. He wants to tell him how the doctors had to take off a piece of skull so his brain could swell out the hole and how poor Philomenia was cremated with no funeral.
Ed wants to tell every person he meets. “Really good care,” Ed says. “Here you go.” Ed hands Lou short for Louis the key. “I cleaned it up in there, but the fridge is emptied out. Let me know if I can help you find a grocery store or anything.”
“We got a cooler in the truck. Stopped at the Wal-Mart off 65.”
“Or directions to the hospital or anything.”
“Yeah, alright. Thanks.”
“Okay, then.” Ed wants to explain when there’s no explaining possible to a man who could care less. “Well, I’m going to finish the lawn.”
Lou nods and calls his brood. “Git over here now!”
Ed sets to his task, to mowing Joe’s lawn, to rolling his boulder up the mountain.
Night-blooming jasmine drifts from Philomenia’s side garden. Ed sits on his porch with his ice tea and stares into the dim light of the street-lamp behind the live oak.
Ariel comes out the screen door. “The kids are down,” she says, sitting. “Mmm. That smells good.” She takes his hand.
They just sit. Half an hour must pass.
Ariel shifts in her seat. “When you’re ready to talk about it, I’m here.”
She’s said the same thing most every night since the shooting. He tells her parts sometimes, but he can’t get out the whole truth of it. He cannot fully confess. He’s only revisited what he told both the police and sweet old Cerise.
Nobody in the living world knows what he did.
Ariel helped him mop up Philomenia’s kitchen. With hoses and brooms and bleach, Ariel and Cerise and Roy and Ed cleaned up the street when the yellow tape came down.
Sharon and Ariel have become friends. Ariel cooks a second dinner some nights and carries it across to the Harrises.
Ed’s imperfect and beautiful wife has taken a leave of absence from work. She may or may not have a job after the corporate investigation is done. It’s okay. They both believe there are more important things to worry about.
He watches her now, since that day. Ariel hugs Sharon every time they see each oth
er. She’s learned all of the woman’s grandchildren’s names. Ariel reads stories to their own kids. Standing in the doorway one night after wandering the house aimlessly, as Miles and Ella giggled on either side of Ariel, half hidden behind a giant adventure book, Ed realized suddenly that she has always read to them.
Now. Here on the porch. If he doesn’t now he may never.
“I hid behind Daniel,” he says.
Ariel is silent.
“Philomenia shot at me four times. I hid. First, I hid in their ginger bushes.”
“Of course,” Ariel says gently. “Anyone would. What else could you have done?”
“You don’t understand,” he says, and his voice breaks.
“Sure I do. I’ll understand anything you want to tell me. I swear.”
“When I ran out of the bushes, I hid behind Daniel,” he says. “Philomenia shot him because she thought she’d get me.” There. He’s told somebody.
“Okay,” is all Ariel says. “Okay.”
“He had his gun out aimed right at her. I hid behind Daniel because I thought he was going to shoot. Or she’d stop because she’d see his gun. But he didn’t shoot. I got somebody killed, Ariel. I killed a boy.”
Ariel nods, and Ed can see something change in her. She raises her hand to her mouth. He watches a tear roll down her perfect cheek. She nods. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, I understand.”
“I’m going to tell Sharon,” Ed says.
Ariel sits and says nothing. Finally she says, “No, you’re not.”
Inside, as they ready themselves for bed, Ariel knows that she can keep Ed’s secret for the rest of her life. She will tell him that. Sharon has already talked about her sons and their guns and what part of New Orleans they got themselves into and how Daniel’s days were numbered, how he gave her money she knows came from the wrong place and how she’s had a sense since she gave birth to Daniel that he wouldn’t live to see his sixteenth birthday.
The boy wore a dress shirt in his coffin. Blue. The pants, Sharon said, weren’t quite long enough, but you couldn’t see the bottoms or his feet.
Now. Now or never. She loves him terribly. Ariel goes to Ed and wraps her arms around his pale, warm torso.
Cerise finds herself so proud of her daughter she doesn’t know what to say. Marie brings what has to be twenty cars full of her old high school friends and all their families to the block party benefit to help with what the Harrises owe for Daniel’s burying costs. There’s so many kids that the street feels busting full of life.
Cerise requested her lady cop friend and one other from that day to be assigned to guard the street ends. Cerise already brought the woman ribs and potato salad and what musta been a dozen deviled eggs. The lady cop’s pretty happy. And fat. She keeps thanking Cerise for the feeding.
Two bands are getting ready to play, courtesy of the young manager fellow at Tokyo Rose. He donated four kegs on top of the bands, and the blond man who’s always around is workin’ the taps. Cerise hears he was a friend of Joe’s. He’s talking to anybody who’ll listen about a new hurricane way out over warm waters.
Ed’s not drinking, she sees. She understands why.
Cerise should try to get done with what she wants to before she’s too emotional. She can do it. She’s a surfer, after all, just born in the wrong place, before her time. She’s been chewed by sharks and lived to surf another day. Hang ten.
Cerise looks at all the people, probably over two hundred, easy. She has to find Klameisha. There. She’s off on her own lawn overseeing a gob of toddlers. Good for her. Klameisha’s a watcher too. “Klameisha,” Cerise says normal, not trying to get any other attention. Cerise waves her claw hand on purpose and walks over. “Hey there. We can both watch the kids a spell.”
Klameisha smiles, looking sad and pretty at the same time.
“I have something for you,” Cerise says.
“Naw, Miss Cerise, we’re going to make it from everybody else here, but thank you.”
“No, listen. Your brother told me something before he died.”
Klameisha looks scared.
“He wanted you to go to college,” Cerise says.
“Naw …”
“I got five thousand dollars to start you off. He wanted it. I swear on my left hand.”
The girl stands staring. Cerise can see why Daniel chose her. Even now, she keeps her eye on all the kids. “Daniel wished it?”
“Yes, he did.”
Daniel’s sister squares her shoulders and lifts her head.
Good enough, Cerise thinks. Good enough.
EPILOGUE
Some of us choose to stay for Katrina.
It’s okay to ask. Everyone does.
The plainest answer is that we decide to stay because it is the only thing we know to do. And we decide to stay because we want to stay, because our bargeboard houses and shotgun apartments are all many of us have. They hold meals, and photographs, maybe a mother who requires dialysis or a dog frail with age. Finally, we stay because there is no other option. Our payday hasn’t arrived and we do not own cars and we cannot afford to take a bus to some town or city where we have no family.
Divided, those of us living Uptown on Orchid Street stay and go both. We fill our bathtubs with water and our cupboards with sardine tins and canned ravioli. Or we pack our cars with unnecessary things, bad paintings of leaves and a doll’s lavender glitter dress and a dozen identical T shirts printed with a picture of a boy named Daniel. We will worry for snowy egrets and palm trees and old roofs.
In the dark days afterwards, one of us will find, while searching for candles, years of an odd, sad life written in journals. A husband and wife will find forgiveness. And those of us living Uptown on Orchid Street inside the big lasso of river, on the beautifully high ground that does not flood, all of us down to the last baby, will eventually find each other again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first words of this novel appeared on a laptop in Toronto. My husband, Joseph, and I had picked up the computer, on sale, in Memphis. At the time, I’d counted the laptop among what I thought to be the minuscule sum total of all my worldly possessions. Hurricane Katrina had reduced our city, and me, to something whipped and dispossessed. I thought I might try to write a swan song for New Orleans.
Most everyone knows what happened in the days after Katrina, which governing bodies failed us miserably. But so many people, thousands and thousands of them, gave and fed and cared. Before Memphis, before our trek to Canada, I’d evacuated to Lake Jackson, Texas. I am perpetually ashamed that I didn’t have the sense then, or in the following months, to properly thank the family who made room for me, who bought me birthday presents, who cried alongside me as we watched New Orleans drown on their television screen. For generosity beyond reason, I wish to thank the Suazo family: Matthew, Stacey, Jason, Claudia, and Isabella. I honestly had nowhere else nearby to go, no other offers for shelter. You gave me far more than that, and I am forever in your debt.
Joseph and I made it from Texas to Memphis, where we walked into the Office Depot and afterwards a barbeque joint, and where, after a long teary night of debate, we decided to immediately return to ruined New Orleans. I’d been gone less than two weeks. So many friends had left pets. Maclean’s magazine had asked Joseph for his story. So back we went. Jarret Lofstead and Raymond Boyden, thank you for your humor and protection and company. Lance, thank you for the shelter in the dark. Jennifer Kuchta, thank you for choosing a house on high ground and for keeping the light on all the months we were later away. Rick Barton, thank you for finding us a room in Baton Rouge and for finding a way to keep UNO alive. You saved far more of us than anyone I know. You were our island in the flood.
Peter Schock, I have no idea how you did it, but you managed to hold together a madly far-flung English department. Thank you for those semesters under the bridge. Jeni, you gathered many of us through e-mails, a little tether to life for us. Thank you. Samantha, your Toronto apartment rocked.
&nbs
p; Some of us made it back eventually. Near and far, indefatigable friends and graduate students and neighbors prompted me to continue writing with gifts of music and wine and stories and food and company. Thank you, one and all: Gord, AC and Bill, AK and Jackson, Rakia, Marcus, Steve, Brandon, Joey and Sarah K, David Parker Jr., Barb, Casey, Jen V, Rachel, Arin, Chrys, Lish, Trisha, Bill and Nance, Sarah and Simon, Corey at the bank, Kris, Kim, Joanna, Allison and Gavin, Pete, Ashley, Sophie, Sean, Will, Dawn, Erica, Jim, Kelly, Emily, Philippe and MS, Julian, Gwen, Alexis, Sonja, Mitch, Gabe and Julie, Sterling and Dale for your smiles in the park, Karen and Steve for a respite on Dauphin Island, Grim Jim, Dinty, Lee, Susan, Bill Gullo and Rachel, Darren and Leslie, Joel, Matthew, Nicole, Francis Geffard, Eddie and Bob. I have forgotten to name others of you, without question. I will tell you thank you in person.
I used a number of books for reference along the way. Thank you, Abram Himmelstein; your Neighborhood Story Project series is a font of authenticity. C-Murder, thank you for Death Around the Corner.
Dear family, you are my backbone. Without all of you, I would not have found the strength to finish this. Beautiful sisters Meg and Emily, I love you beyond measure. Your families, Lance, Steve, Amelia, Alex, Otto, and Eli bring me so much sheer, unadulterated joy. Cheri, Franz and Edna, Travis and Ally, Spanky and Mel, Josh and Bethaney, Katie, Jim, thank you for making me laugh, for helping me to remember that life should be lived with gusto and beer drunk from a cold glass. Blanche, Veronica, Sue, Mary, Suzanne, Frank, and families, thank you for keeping my husband whole. Julia and Jacob, David, Megan and Michael, Barbie and Rudy, you are often in my thoughts. Karen, we will visit soon. Promise. David S, you changed shunts and bandages, and for that I am grateful. Mary Anne, who knew a mean stepdaughter could grow to so love the woman her father married? Sweet Mom and kindest Dad, you created my world. I wish I could give back the tiniest piece of what you gave up for me. This novel comes directly from the heart you filled.
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