“I’m leaving,” I say.
She sits up, looking annoyed. Then she does something really unexpected. She puts her arms around me and hugs me tight. A hug with all of her in it — no ego and no posturing. I relax into it, feel some tension go out of me. We hold each other there for what seems like a long time.
“Maybe we’ll come down in the summer,” she says. “Or maybe you’ll come back up.”
I nod.
“You get to have your own room in the trailer, at least.”
“Good luck with Chris,” I say.
“I’ll miss you,” she says, just loud enough to hear. “Call me a lot.”
“I will. I’ll miss you, too.”
When I go downstairs, Mama is sitting on that big pleather sofa in her bathrobe. She looks old. I sit in the chair opposite her.
She looks at me, but not really. It’s like she’s looking past me. I think about what Ms. Bell says. That I’m not responsible for other people’s feelings. I’m only responsible for my feelings. But right now I feel like a traitor.
Then I can feel her focus on me and I meet her eyes. I can’t tell you what passes between us. It’s something that feels like shame and sadness. I wish that I could be bigger, could be better, and more forgiving. That I could have softened my position and tried to see her side of things. Maybe she feels that, too.
When I’ve pictured the gap growing between her and Daddy in these months, I’ve always seen it as water. It’s flowing in faster and faster and the force of the water erodes any ground they stood on. But between Mama and me, it’s like a canyon. A rocky canyon that you’d have to scramble down and up the other side and get all cut up and fall down on the way. I can see her there on the other side, the other side of the room, now. I just can’t get there. It’s going to take a long, hard descent and a tough climb up the other side.
I hear Daddy come in from the truck. He stands in the doorway. I cross to Mama and we hug, stiffly, wordlessly. I pass Daddy in the doorway, leaving them to say good-bye alone.
When we pass the Atlanta airport, I feel like I’ve been released from something that had me in its grip. I got away. I’m going home. I should feel triumphant. But it’s what they call a Pyrrhic victory. A victory that comes at a very high cost. Our family is broken, and I don’t know if we will ever be whole again. I have a hollow feeling that I don’t think even the endless horizon on the sea will fill.
THE TRAILER PARK is called Home Place because, the guy who gives us the keys to the trailer says, they want everyone to feel at home here. Since most of the residents had been living in shelters, coming here must feel like heaven. But as soon as we drive up, I understand everything Mama said. This is a place you go when you’ve got no other choice. My heart kept telling me I didn’t have another choice. But now I’m not so sure.
Home Place is just outside Bellvoir, where an old strip mall stood until it got torn down years ago. They placed the trailers on top of the barren pavement, put a chain-link fence around the whole lot, and voilà, a home place. Row after row of trailers, almost as far as the eye can see. There are streets of a certain kind laid out between the trailers, with stop signs and everything. Everyone pulls their car up to their trailer: beat-up old sedans with windows missing, trucks, shiny new cars. Judging by the cars, there are people here who you can tell probably had nice houses and steady jobs before the storm and then there are people here who were poor. Then there are people like us, somewhere in the middle.
Our trailer is toward the back, on Twelfth Street, the guy in the office called it, unit 1218. We drive back there, passing a few people who wave, others who nod or stare at us intently. Older folks, moms with little kids clustered together.
It’s hard to identify which trailer is ours. They all look just the same, of course. We walk up the makeshift wooden steps and crack open the door. A smell blasts out at us — that plastic, new car smell. The trailer is long and narrow, but they pack a lot into it. It feels more like a real house than you would think. On one end there’s a bedroom with a big double bed and on the other a bedroom with a set of bunk beds. That’s my room.
Daddy sits down at the table, runs his hand through his hair, and looks up at me. It’s a complicated look — part sad, part resigned, and part relieved. He motions for me to come over. I sit on his lap and rest my head on his chest. “I know I was against your coming,” he says. “But I’m glad you’re here.”
“It’s going to be OK, Daddy,” I say because there is nothing else to say.
We put our stuff away and it feels like the walls start to close in on me a little. But less than an hour passes before there’s a knock at the door. I peek through the window. It’s Kendra and Ms. Denise. I yank the door open and fall into Ms. Denise’s very firm hug. Then into Kendra. Nothing has changed with them. This feels like home.
They start handing in a bunch of bags of stuff they brought over “to make the place more homey,” Ms. Denise says: curtains in a cheery red, scented candles, knickknacks, bags and bags of groceries. When they moved into their new place on the base, she says, people gave them so much stuff, they had lots of extras. “So I’m regifting.” She laughs with her big hearty laugh. Before I know it, she’s gone out to her car, brought in a slow cooker filled with gumbo, and plugged it in.
Kendra and I go back to my “room” to hang out. “So,” she says, “here we are.”
We exchange a look, a sort of OK, now what? look, and burst into laughter, then the moment passes and we’re quiet again.
“We’re going to pick up where we left off,” Kendra says. “Katrina didn’t give us a choice. She made us leave. Coming back says you can’t beat us. We’re stronger than that.”
All those years of being a team player has made her good at pep talks. My mind goes back to that conversation in the hammock in Grandpere’s orange grove, a lifetime ago, when we thought this was going to be our year. I know we can’t really pick up where we left off. We’ve been damaged. We’ve changed. But here we are.
When we come back out to the kitchen, Ms. Denise and Daddy are very serious, and I can tell they’ve been talking about Mama and Mandy. I notice Ms. Denise pats Daddy on the hand. “God has a plan for you,” she says. “You’ll see.”
Then we all eat the best gumbo I’ve had since we left last summer.
They won’t let you down the road to Bayou Perdu without a boat registration — people were coming in to steal washed-up, abandoned boats. After they let us pass, my spirits start to lift. Signs of home. The cows are still on top of the levee. If you squint — if you look past the rubble — you can almost imagine that home is just like it always was. Almost. When we get to the marina, there are still heaps of broken boats up on blocks in the parking lot. But there’s a different feeling from the last time we were here. It has that buzz that happens right before shrimping season. People are not just repairing; they’re preparing. It feels hopeful. My heart still feels heavy, but I’m a little lighter on my feet.
There’s construction going on over where the bait shop was: they’re building a new one. For now it’s operating out of a trailer, like everything else. When we walk in, Joe, the guy who owns the shop, comes over and hugs us both. He’s been here the whole time, he says, came back before the water drained. A lot of guys are making money on the side repairing and selling salvaged boat parts, he says. Daddy nods, taking it all in. He could do that, I can tell he’s thinking. There are so many things he could do here, things he knows how to do. He’s in his element. I see a little light creeping back into his eyes. “You need to check out the Second Wind,” says Joe. “Up on blocks at the end of the parking lot. Might be just the right boat to replace the Mandy.”
We find her where Joe said she’d be. She looks rough, old, abandoned. Her wheelhouse is in tatters. The rigging is completely destroyed. The hull is miraculously OK, though, and that’s what matters. All the rest can be fixed. Yes, we’ll take her, Daddy says. There are just a few weeks before brown-shrimp season starts.
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But today we are going to get out on the water the only way we can. Sheriff Guidry has been keeping an eye on the pirogue that Katrina spared us from the back of our gutted house. And he even had it fitted with a little outboard motor, so we could use it like a skiff. We retrieve it from the sheriff’s department boatshed and push out into the water, slowly, slowly. I close my eyes and feel the wind in my hair. Inexpressible sweetness. Like rain on parched ground, color bleeding back into black and white. The pelicans wing above, and there’s a flock of tiny plovers diving in unison. They are back for the spring, and so am I.
It is changed, though. The channels are shallower than they used to be. The places where you could have taken a bigger trawler like the Mandy, you could probably only take in the Evangeline now, if she was still around. The water was so powerful, it picked up ten feet of sediment and dumped it somewhere new. The banks have eroded — the way into the back bayou probably lost forty feet. There was a big marsh that’s now an open bay. All the places I used to know have shape-shifted. Katrina bent and broke the people and the land, and we’ve all had to re-form ourselves.
“Can we find Bayou Valse d’Oiseau?” I ask Daddy.
He seems to have some internal compass. He guides us through the channels until I’m sure we’re lost and we’ll run out of gas. But then, up ahead, there are islands, and we float into a bay dotted with white. Birds everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of birds. I don’t know if it’s exactly our bayou. The land looks different. But it doesn’t matter. The birds are here. There was enough grass and reeds for them to make their nests. The mama birds are roosting. They’re all making a racket — chirping, squawking, chattering, hooting. “They came back,” I say.
Daddy smiles. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile like that since last summer. “They always come back, darlin’. They’re always going to come back. I promise.”
We fish, catch our supper, and talk, just like the old times.
Then, out of nowhere, he says, “It’s happened before that we’ve been apart for a while.” It’s as if he’s said out loud that last part of a conversation that he’d been having inside his head. “I believe we are going to find some way forward together as a family. That way just hasn’t appeared yet.”
I nod. I don’t really know what to say.
We go quiet again.
“Could we go to Baton Rouge for the weekend sometime? Maybe to look at LSU?” As far as he knows, Mandy will be going there in the fall, and I know he hopes I’ll be going there one day, too.
Daddy looks surprised. “Sure,” he says hesitantly. “We could do that.” Then he gives me a curious look. “I’m thinking that maybe this has something to do with a boy?”
I laugh. “What makes you think that?”
“Darlin’, I’ve been so caught up in my own troubles, I didn’t even notice that you had a broken heart. But I see it now.”
“It wasn’t him,” I say quickly. “It wasn’t his fault. His family just had to leave and he couldn’t let me know.”
“It better not be him,” Daddy says. Then he puts on his really bad Mafia accent from his favorite movie, The Godfather. “Because if he hurts my little girl, he’ll be sleepin’ with the fishes.”
“No, you’d like him, Daddy,” I say. “He’s a lot like you.” I tell him what Tru told me about the Nguyens’ fishing and shrimping business up in St. Bernard, how they found a boat they thought they could fix up and get out on the water by white-shrimp season. You could still get in a good season if you did that, I say.
He smiles and shakes his head. “You’re so much like me, poor thing. You’ve just got the water in your blood and shrimp on the brain.”
Monday morning, I wait at the bus stop with about twenty other kids from Home Place who are going to Bellvoir Middle and High. I see three people from Bayou Perdu High, including this guy Shane who was on the football team. He comes over and hugs me even though he has never spoken to me in my life.
“Hey, where’s your sister?” is the first thing he says. When I tell him, he looks disappointed and drifts away toward the other side of the bus stop.
On the way into school, we pass damaged houses with trailers parked in the front yard — people are living in them until their repairs are done. Every telephone pole has little fliers stapled to it advertising services: demolition or debris removal, boat salvage. But I see that people are living out of all kinds of other vehicles, too: abandoned school buses, vans. There are heaps of garbage and rubble everywhere. Steps leading nowhere, everywhere. Everything that used to be in a building seems to be in a trailer now: the church, the town offices, clinics. Everything is temporary.
Bellvoir High is like a middle ground between Bayou Perdu and Brookdale. It’s nicer and newer than Bayou Perdu, but nowhere near as fancy as Brookdale. It’s bigger than Bayou Perdu, but not as big as Brookdale. The kids are a lot richer than at Bayou Perdu — you can tell by the cars in the parking lot — but not as rich as at Brookdale. I can pretty much guarantee they don’t have yoga for PE here.
While the secretary at Brookdale seemed to go out of her way to point out my Katrina refugee status, the one here could care less. She probably gets new students dribbling in every day. “Address?” she asks without looking up.
It occurs to me that I don’t know it.
“You at Home Place?” she asks.
I nod.
“What unit?”
I tell her and she scrawls something on my papers and shoves them back across the counter to me.
I see familiar faces in a lot of my classes. Some of them light up when they see me; people come up and say hi or hug me. I find Kendra in the hall and we hug and tease each other about our new uniforms. I’m back. I did the right thing. But deep inside, I have doubts.
At lunch, Kendra introduces me to her basketball friends, several of them her former rivals.
“You don’t play, do you?” a girl called Delia says.
I shake my head. She turns to the girls next to her and starts talking. Apparently our conversation is over. All day I feel like I’m trailing Kendra, a puppy dog at her heels. She has this built-in group with basketball. I just have her.
The bus drops us back at Home Place after school, and everyone shuffles off down their different rows to their trailers. I can hear fighting coming from inside some of the trailers I pass on the way back from the bus stop, when someone opens a door or a window. Even when they’re closed. Someone is cursing over some small inconvenience: “Why’d you let the damn cat out?” or “Can’t you even make toast without burning it?” But when I get back inside our trailer, it’s quiet. So lonely. I try texting Danielle a few times to let her know I got back. But there’s no response. She’s in a different time zone. Still in school, I guess. Kendra is already working again, so I feel like I’ll never see her in the afternoons.
When I’m done with my homework, I go outside to look around. There are a few little kids circling on bikes at the big empty pavement where the rows of trailers end. A few little boys chasing lizards. I start to walk aimlessly. The sun is beating down on me. There’s no shade here; the only trees are beyond the fence. I walk over, touch that chalky metal wire, shake the chain links, and have the sudden urge to climb over it, to get to those trees beyond, even if they’re just scraggly little scrubby ones. I try to hoist myself up, but there’s nowhere to get a foothold. I cross the scorching-hot pavement, starting to sweat, and exit out the front gate, past the heaps of trash and dead branches on the side of the road, all the way around the back of the fence. I sit under the not-very-shady trees. There are flies and mosquitos buzzing all around me, and I can barely stand it for a second. After all that work to get here.
I walk back around that ugly fence, into the ugly trailer park that’s now my home, and I feel so lost, so utterly lost. The pavement stretches out for what seems like miles in front of me, and I am looking at my feet, putting one in front of the other. Then something catches my eye. Coming up through a crack in th
at endless stretch of hot concrete is a single, delicate pink flower. I stoop and take a closer look. Somehow, the seed of it shimmied down into that crack and took root. Somehow it sought the light and pushed its way up and blossomed. It is all alone out here in this big, barren place, but it is blooming.
Daddy doesn’t get home till late and I have to admit, it’s kind of scary here. The lady two trailers down, Ms. Burns, told me she sleeps with knives under her mattress. She put a welcome mat and potted plants outside her trailer and someone stole them. There’s a security officer who rides up and down the “streets” on a golf cart at night. But I don’t feel safe. It’s because we don’t really know each other. People don’t really trust each other, either. I guess when you’ve been through what some of them have been through, it would be hard to trust.
The next day at school, I wonder if I should talk to the counselor here. Maybe she’s like Ms. Bell. But when I go into her office, I know that I won’t. She’s this blank-faced woman who says, “Can I help you?” in a way that makes it clear that’s the last thing she wants to do. “Just wondering about signing up for the SAT,” I say, and she hands me a brochure. Feeling a little desperate that afternoon alone in the trailer, I call Ms. Bell. “It’s Evangeline Riley,” I say.
“Evangeline! I’m so glad you called. I’ve been wondering about you. How’s it going down there?”
I tell her about school, the trailer park. How things aren’t how I thought they’d be, and how the counselor at Bellvoir isn’t like her.
“Not every counselor is the right one for every person,” she says. “Maybe you could try something else. Doing something you enjoy, that makes you happy. Fixing up the boat. Physical exercise and connection to things you enjoy can be really therapeutic.”
Between Two Skies Page 18