But it’s worse between her and Daddy. If the distance between their feelings about going back to Bayou Perdu was a channel, it’s now a gulf. I can hear them arguing through the walls and the closed doors. Not the actual words, just the rhythm of the fight, like the hum of some horrible machine. I don’t want to know what they’re saying, but it’s like slowing down to look at a car wreck. Sometimes I sneak into the hall and stand outside the door to listen.
“We could live in Bellvoir,” says Daddy. “I can commute to the marina.”
“I don’t want to live in Bellvoir. What’s in Bellvoir? How are we gonna afford that?”
“There’s a trailer park there. We can get a trailer and stay there until we can rebuild.”
“Why would I live in a trailer when we’ve got this nice place here?”
“Here.” Daddy’s voice steels up. “In a cardboard box in a parking lot. The whole city is a parking lot.”
“So you’re gonna drive two hours a day and spend all that money on gas to live in a trailer. You think that’s better?”
I hate her.
“It’s better because that’s where our life is,” Daddy replies.
“My sister and my mother are here. I’ve got a good job. Our life can be here now. We don’t have to make it harder than it has to be.”
“This is harder for me, Vangie. There’s nothing for me to do here. I am a fisherman, and I’m five hundred miles from the sea. I’ve never done anything else. I don’t know how to do anything else.”
“You’re not trying, John. You’re not trying. You could get a real job. One that’s not dependent on the weather and the price of gas and the damn hurricanes. Five years from now, there may not be a fishing industry in Louisiana. We’re hardly making do as it is. This is our chance to secure our future. This is it!”
These arguments always end with her making some huge declaration like that and him going silent. These days, I’ve stopped being sick about them. They’re the new normal. Part of the new rhythm in my life, which goes like this: Go to school and count the minutes until lunch. Collect my moments of hope and happiness at lunch with Tru. Sit uncomfortably through Political Science, with Tate there next to me, knowing that I’m eventually going to let him down. Ride home with increasingly hostile and negative Mandy. Tiptoe around Daddy, wondering when the paperwork for our trailer will come, when our ticket home arrives. Wonder when and if I’ll ever hear from Danielle. Have a hollow exchange with Mama when she comes home. Play the blues from my Tru Tunes CD until Mandy screams at me and makes me turn it off. My only breaks come on the two nights a week when I babysit for Aunt Cel’s neighbor while she works late, and I blessedly get to sleep over there and take the bus to school in the morning. That’s the new rhythm. If my life were a song, it would be almost unlistenable.
But those sweet notes. When they come, they just resonate, like the twang of a single guitar string, vibrating long after it’s plucked. While Mandy’s suspended, I have to take the bus. After school, I’m walking to catch it when a big, shiny black SUV pulls up alongside me and the window opens. “Hey, lady, want a ride?” It’s Chase, and Derek is in the passenger seat. Tru pops his head forward from the backseat.
“Sure,” I say, and the back door opens.
I slide in next to Tru. I feel somehow like we’ve reached a new level. We’ve gone beyond the bounds of the music room. “Hey,” he says. “Welcome to the Chasemobile.”
The seats are leather. Everything about this car oozes money. “This is not what I expected you to drive,” I say, immediately wishing I’d kept that thought inside.
“I know,” says Chase. “It’s embarrassing. It totally clashes with my punk image. It’s pretty ironic, though, so I’m going with that. By the way, you don’t really need to be somewhere, do you?”
I think about it. Home. Homework. Room. Nothing. “Not really.”
“Great, you’re coming to my house to help us rehearse, then,” he says.
I glance over at Tru, who shrugs. “This is why your parents always warn you not to get into the car with strange men,” he says.
I feel a pang of guilt. What if Daddy wonders where I am? But he probably won’t notice; he notices so little these days.
We pass the main road with all the commercial buildings and apartments, into the nice neighborhoods with tree-lined streets. The houses become bigger. Bigger than Aunt Cel’s, even. Chase turns onto a cul-de-sac and up a driveway so long you can’t even see the house at the end of it. When we finally arrive, I’m overwhelmed. His house is like one of those country estates in movies. Derek turns around from the front seat and catches the shocked expression I’m trying to conceal. “I know, right?” he says.
“Me and Derek were the first Asian and black guys to come in the door who weren’t delivering pizza,” says Tru.
“Hey, we’re rich, not racist,” says Chase, getting out and shutting the door. “Yes, I’m loaded. My parents are loaded, that is. And I’m an anticapitalist. What can I say? ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ That’s Walt Whitman, by the way. I like to sprinkle my conversation with literary quotes just to confuse people who probably think there’s no brain under this Mohawk.” That’s the thing about Chase. He points out the pretentious aspects of his personality before anyone else can. It makes him seem humble. At least to us. Everyone else at school definitely thinks he’s pretentious.
The house is enormous inside. Everything you see on home shows on TV — towering ceilings, a big stone fireplace, a grand piano. There doesn’t seem to be anybody there. We follow Chase into the kitchen. The pantry is the size of our whole kitchen, stuffed with five of everything. “What are you in the mood for?” he asks. “As you can see, we’ve got enough to sustain us for a year when the apocalypse comes.” He gets out bags of chips and busts them open. The boys get something to drink and I wander into the living room. The shelves are stuffed with books and expensive-looking objects. There’s a whole wall of pictures of Chase when he was little: Chase at the piano playing in some important-looking recital; Chase on a boat in someplace that might be Europe; a bigger Chase in a bigger, fancier recital. From all this I gather he’s an only child. He comes up behind me, eating chips. “Oh, so you found my shrine, I see,” he says.
“Where were you in these pictures?” I ask, gesturing to his piano recitals.
“That was at Carnegie Hall.” He points to the big one. “That other one was at my school,” he says.
“How . . . ?” I start.
“Child genius,” he says. “The second-youngest person ever accepted to the Manhattan Music Academy. Blah, blah, blah.”
I’m dumbfounded. “And now?”
“Got kicked out,” he says. “Not serious enough. So it’s back home.”
Tru comes up behind him. “Yep, and now he’s slumming with us.” He pats him on the back.
I look at the photos again. “You’re a natural blond,” I say.
“Yeah, but I think pink suits me better,” he says. “It’s got the element of surprise.”
We go up the massive staircase to his room, which is really a series of rooms, with its own bathroom and a music room. It’s bigger than our whole apartment. There’s typical guy stuff in here — game console in front of a big flat-screen TV, clothes on the floor — but there’s also a shelf full of trophies and ribbons, from his music. There’s an electronic keyboard, a guitar, a set of drums, huge speakers, and what looks like a sound-mixing board.
The guys mess around on the instruments. “We better get started if we’re going to be ready in two weeks,” says Tru.
“Ready for what?”
“Heller works at this ‘performance venue’ at night, and he said if we came up with an original tune and played it there, we’d get an A,” says Derek. “So now we just have to work on a song.”
I watch them trying to mix their instruments, trying to blend their musical styles. Tru is working on the drums, Chase on the keyboard, and Derek on his trombone. “Wait, what am I
supposed to do?” I ask.
“You can be our manager,” says Tru.
“Or our groupie,” says Derek. “I always wanted a groupie.”
“I’ll get T-shirts made with the band name,” I say. “As soon as we figure out what that is.”
The time passes quickly. I’m watching them zigzag all over the musical map, from modern jazz to R&B. There’s a kind of vibe developing. Not a Tru-and-Evangeline-like-each-other vibe, but an Evangeline-is-just-one-of-the-guys vibe. Like at the marina. I’m with him, and that’s better than nothing, but my spirits start to sink. Every once in a while I chime in with what I hope are witty comments like “Needs more cowbell” or “Sound pitchy.” I’m not even aware of the time until I look out the window and it’s dark. I realize I don’t have an exit plan. When there is a lull, I say, “Well, I guess I need to head out.”
Chase looks up. “Oh, right. You’ll be needing a ride.”
“I’d better go, too,” says Tru.
“Not me,” says Derek. “I’m moving in.”
As we’re coming down the stairs, Chase’s mom enters through the front door. You can just tell she is rich. She’s probably about my mom’s age, but she looks older in a way. She says hello to Tru and Derek, then shakes my hand when Chase introduces me. “Nice to meet you, Evangeline,” she says. “I’m Carol Lowndes.” She says it the way she’d say it to a grown-up.
When we get in the car, I give Chase directions to Aunt Cel’s house because I don’t want him to see where we live. Tru sits in the backseat with me again, and when Chase goes around a turn too quickly, Tru slides into me. We sit like that for the rest of the ride, staring ahead, our shoulders, part of our arms, hips, and thighs touching. One time, I look at him and he is looking at me. He doesn’t look away. We hold each other’s gaze for a few moments. I stay very still, as if moving would make this moment disappear. Does he feel the same way? Is his heart beating as quickly as mine?
At Aunt Cel’s, I call home to ask if I can spend the night. Daddy doesn’t even seem to have noticed that I was gone. But Aunt Cel has some good news for me. “My contact at the Red Cross found a Watts, family of two, who had been registered at a shelter in Baton Rouge. The whole shelter was cleared out within the first month, though, and the people there were transferred to different places all around the country. He’s going to see if he can find out if it was them and where they were transferred to.”
I’m afraid to get my hopes up, but I feel a surge of optimism. And I get to spend time with Mamere. I’m brushing her hair, our ritual that makes me feel closer than I feel to anyone.
“How’s that young man you went to the dance with?” she asks. “He seemed real nice.”
“He is nice,” I say. “He’s very nice. But it’s not that way. There is someone else, though.”
“I knew it,” says Mamere. “I can tell, the way you’ve been humming and looking in the mirror more.”
I’m mortified. “I have? Really?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
I tell her almost the whole story. How I met Tru at the Blessing and then we saw each other again and it seemed like it meant something. Not just because our paths crossed again, but because it happened just when I needed it. How he reminds me of home, but it’s more than that. That I’ve never met anyone like him. I tell her all the things I’ve noticed about him: his kindness, his humor, his passion for his music.
“Dawlin’,” Mamere says very seriously. “A girl could really fall for a boy like that.”
Fall. I feel like I could fall. Just let go of all caution and good sense and just grab him and kiss him one day. But that’s not the rhythm of this thing. It’s like that song he was working on before, opening slowly, slowly as orange-blossom petals. “You don’t go from ‘What’s your name?’ to ‘I love you’ in a week,” I remember Mamere chiding Mandy one time. It will take its time moving from a bud to full bloom. The anticipation is ripe and delicious, but it’s still so fragile. I remember walking through the groves with Grandpere and seeing all those oranges that would never get beyond green because of a hard frost. I am taking it day by day now, feeling it come in and go out like the tides. I’m used to waiting. I’m an angler. I’m as patient as the moon.
After school the next day, I don’t get quite as far toward the bus when Chase pulls up. Derek rolls down the window. “Get in,” he says in a fake menacing voice. I smile and hop in without a word, sliding in next to Tru in the backseat.
“Don’t you guys need a band name?” I ask when we’re at Chase’s house and up in his room.
“We do need a band name,” Chase says. “Too bad ‘The Beatles’ is already taken.”
“How about this?” I say. “Everyone contribute three names. I’ll be the judge.”
After about ten minutes of joking about it, I press them to submit their final three. Chase comes up with Staccato Underground, Fruit Bat Conspiracy, and A Deceit of Lapwings. “It’s a real thing,” he says. “You know, like a herd of cows? A bunch of lapwings is called a deceit.”
“What’s a lapwing?” Derek asks, looking confused.
“I don’t know,” says Chase. “Some kind of bird, I think. I just read it in a list of names for groups of animals.”
Derek has come up with three, too: the Derek Turner Experiment, the Derek Turner Project, and the Derek Turner Experience. Tru’s contributions are the Uptown Howlers, Gumbo Night, and the Thursday Night All-Stars.
“This was a tough call,” I say after a reality-show-style dramatic pause. “All of these names were worthy. So I think I’m going to use part of all of them. Your new band name is Underground All-Stars Project.” They applaud.
The energy level in the music room seems a little higher, and the guys practice with more focus than they did before. When we’re getting ready to leave, Chase’s mom comes home again. She mentions an upcoming weekend at the lake with Chase, and it’s clear that Derek and Tru are going with them. “Evangeline,” says Carol, “would you like to join us?”
I freeze. “Um, that would be great,” I mumble. “But . . .” I trail off. This has taken me completely by surprise.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she says, reaching out and touching my hand. “You wouldn’t be the only girl. Chase’s cousin Sophie is coming with a friend. They’re freshmen at the University of Georgia. I can chat with your parents if you like. I’m sure they’d feel better about it if they knew there was parental supervision.”
How awkward will that conversation be? Very.
Carol calls later that night, and I can hear Mama’s half of the conversation. I think she is happy that rich people have asked me to their lake house. “Well, that would be just fine. Thank you for inviting her,” I hear her say. What a relief.
“She seems like a nice woman,” says Mama.
“She is.”
“And that boy, her son, he’s really just a friend?”
“He’s just a friend,” I say, careful not to mention anyone else who will be there.
I babysit for Aunt Cel’s neighbors the next night, so I sleep over there.
“You’re starting to make a life here,” Mamere says while I’m brushing her hair before bed, and the words hit me like a knife to the heart. No. That’s not it. I’m not making a life here. I’m going home. But I know the reason her words hurt is that there’s some truth to them. She has named that feeling, the guilt I have for enjoying the last few weeks. The way it is slowly tugging me away from my resolve to be home. To rebuild the place I love.
“It’s not that,” I say unconvincingly. “I’m just making the best of how things are.” It’s that pebble-in-my-shoe feeling again. All I can think about is Danielle. If I “make a life” here, as Mamere says, it feels like I’m forgetting about her.
“That’s what making a life is, cherie,” says Mamere. “Everything is changing all the time, and that’s the way it should be. You know, when your Grandpere died — oh, Lord. The love of my life was gone. I didn’t think I could go on. But you came to live with
me, and now look at us. I wouldn’t miss this for the world. Doesn’t mean I miss him any less.”
“Do you ever think about staying in Houston?” I ask Kendra when I talk to her later.
“Hell no,” she answers. “First of all, the scholarship competition is much worse here.”
She’s so single-minded about basketball, about college. I’ve always wished I could be more like her. But that’s not me.
Later, when I’m reading Evangeline, a line jumps out at me. It’s after the Acadians have been expelled from their home in Canada and they are just starting to arrive in Louisiana. Evangeline is separated from her love, Gabriel, and missing home, but from there in her boat, she’s taken by the “inexpressible sweetness” of this new place. She looks around and notices everything. Above her is the Louisiana sky. Below is its reflection in the water. She is there in her boat, suspended in the middle, “hanging between two skies.”
I can’t help but feel like that Evangeline, hanging between two skies: the endless, inexpressibly sweet one at home and the one here, where the dark clouds are now edged by silver.
We leave for the lake house Friday after school. It’s as big as their house house. It sleeps eighteen, Chase tells me. There’s a grand piano here, too. I get my own room with this big cushy bed. Carol brought up a bunch of prepared food from some market and sets it out for us. “Chase’s dad is the cook in our house. He’ll be here soon,” she says. I look around at the expensive stove and double oven. Mama and Mamere would die to have a kitchen like this.
We walk down to the dock with Chase. There’s a little chill in the air, but it’s not really cold yet. I breathe in the smell of the lake. It’s not the same as salt water, but it’s water. The leaves have mostly all turned or fallen off. I have to admit, it’s beautiful here.
On top of the dock, there’s practically another whole house, screened in, with really nice furniture and a refrigerator and sink. There’s a set of stairs that leads down to the dock. Here, there’s a Jet Ski, two kayaks, and a canoe. The big motorboat has been dry-docked for the winter.
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