The Floating World: A Novel Page 16

  Later, sometime after autumn had arrived and the crows had overtaken the water tower, he found a dead mockingbird seventy blocks uptown, on the sidewalk in front of Café des Artistes. He was rushing to meet Tess and her mother, who was taking them to lunch to celebrate their engagement, but he lingered outside for a minute, looking. Could this be his bird? He crouched down, very nearly picked up the soft gray body. There was no blood on the feathers, no signs of violence—no indication of whether it was the crows or old age or a misguided migration attempt or what. Inside, at a table beside a mural of frolicking nymphs, Tess’s mother cocked her head at him, as if he were a teenager who’d just asked an embarrassing question to which he should have known the answer. Mockingbirds are very territorial, you know, she said. If they see even their own reflection in a mirror, a window, they’ll fly right at it. Goofing around, she’d pounced his forearm with her long red fingernails, and he’d laughed as Tess swatted at her, blood blooming in her cheeks.

  That day Tess had worn a green dress that pulled the auburn lights out of her hair, and Manhattan had smelled of woodsmoke. After her mother left, they’d lain in Sheep Meadow for hours, his hand inching up her stockinged thigh.

  Too-wee, too-wee, the mockingbird called from the top of the dead pecan. This line of thinking would not do. Down the hall, the toilet flushed. Joe sat up in bed, dropped his feet onto the floor.

  He found his father in the kitchen, filling the filter of the coffee machine with grounds.

  “Damn bird,” Vincent said.

  “I can’t get to sleep either.” Now that he was standing, though, his eyes were heavy, his legs like stone. “Decaf?”

  His father sighed. “It’s past four already. We might as well start the day.”

  “Got big plans?” he said, but maybe Vincent was right—it was no use trying to sleep. If he hauled the rest of the logs to the road today, maybe he could get some of his own work done. They could watch the dawn from the chairs on the screen porch, talk some. His father didn’t seem to want to talk, though. He shook his head, his face stern.

  Neither of them had turned on the lights, but the moon pulsed in at the window. Doo, doo, doo, the mockingbird sang. His father waded from the cupboard back to the dripping machine, his hands weighted with mugs.

  “Pop, what say you we go night swimming?”

  His father, mid-pour, looked at him. “Now how do you propose we go to the swimming hole at this hour? I’m not trudging through brambles in the dark, just because you feel like it.”

  Joe felt a weight sink slowly through his gut. “Not in the hole, Pop. In the pool.”

  “Whose pool?”

  As Joe dragged himself across the kitchen, his father’s eyes seemed to cloud over.

  “Our pool, Pop. We dug a pool.”

  “You dug?” his father asked, not a question so much as a sarcastic accusation.

  Joe picked up his mug and sipped at the coffee. It was scalding and weak.

  “Son, I’ve got work to do. I don’t have time for this silliness.”

  “Pop, do you know what year it is?”

  Caw! Caw! Caw! mocked the bird from the top of the dead cypress.

  “That damn bird!” His father’s mug cracked down on the stone counter. “It won’t let me think.”

  “It’s 2005. We’ve had the pool almost twenty years now. Since the girls were little. Remember how Mom taught Del and Cora to swim?”

  That was not what he was supposed to say. To avoid further agitating your Loved One, the Internet forums said, you were to supposed to lie: Let the delusion stand. Walk the LO to the swimming hole if possible. By all means prevent him from seeing the pool. But Joe didn’t want to lie. He wanted to drag his father into the present moment, to force him to share it with him. When was the last time they’d gone down to the swimming hole back in the pines? It probably wasn’t even there anymore, but filled in, with a Payless shoe store sitting on top of it.

  “I have that dining set to finish for the governor by next Thursday.”

  “No, you don’t, Pop. You mean that four-leaf table, right? Those sixteen Chippendale side chairs and the armchairs with the pious pelicans? You finished all that in 1978, which makes twenty-seven years the governor’s been having his—well, it’s a woman now, so her—dinner at them.”

  Pee-yew, pee-yew, pee-yew.

  “Stop your foolishness, boy. I don’t have time for it.” The last word sharp as a blade.

  His father cinched up his bathrobe and took another gulp of coffee. Joe let him go on down the hall into darkness, towards his bedroom. He waited. The door did not close, and the bedsprings made no noise. Instead, a drawer slid out, a key entered a lock, a latch clicked open. The mockingbird warbled. Something clacked—Tess’s father’s shotgun. His father had opened the bolt.

  Joe ran down the carpeted hall.

  By the time he’d reached the bedroom, his father had climbed out of his window onto the porch. A cold breeze brushed the old lace curtains against Joe’s bare arms as he went through.

  “You seen the bastard?”

  “Who? Pop—” He stepped forward, his hands out, pleading. “You want to give me the gun? I’ll get him.”

  “The bird, you idiot.”

  Doo-wee, doo-wee. Pew pew pew pew.

  Moonlight tracked over his father’s bald, liver-spotted head.

  “Go around by my windows. I’ll show you—he’s at the top of the dead tree,” Joe said, still creeping towards his father, “but why don’t you let me do it? I’ve always been a better shot than you. You wouldn’t want to just scare the thing off.”

  His father flapped his hand as he clomped down the porch steps, and Joe was obliged to follow as he walked the length of the house, turned the corner.

  “What dead tree?” Vincent stopped short, looking out across the property at all of the felled trees. “What is all this?”

  An act of God, Joe wanted to say. This is an act of God. The shambles of their stand of pines stood starkly against the sky. On top of his tree, the body of the little bird trembled as he crowed.

  His father hobbled a little ways into the field. He scanned the sky, the ground. He walked out farther, in a diagonal, until he was beyond the far corner of the house.

  “What is all this?” he said again. “What is all this?”

  “Wind damage,” Joe said. “Bitch was a Cat Three.”

  “A cat?” His father’s eyes were no longer on the trees. Around the side of the house, they could now see the big, red-bean-shaped pool. On its surface, the silver face of the moon wobbled among the leaves, and the old man crouched and lay the rifle in the rimy grass.

  The mockingbird cackled, Ah ah ah!

  It sounded just like a human laugh.

  ON WEST END, a mountain of rubble rose on the neutral ground—warped boards and bricks, TVs, toasters, baby shoes, toilets, magazines, and books—and Del idled past it, her foot off the gas. She was so tired, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She had clicked off the radio, and now the world was oddly silent. Even in the dark early morning, the city should have made some sound—a low moaning, perhaps—but there was nothing, no crickets, no frogs, no birds. She could hear the blood in her ears. The stoplights were still out at many of the intersections, and she went into them with her foot on the gas. She kept seeing a woman in wet clothes hunched over, peering through Troy’s cracked-open front door, water lapping at her ankles. She was trying to imagine what could have made Cora shoot someone, someone she was supposed to have rescued—it was unfathomable, and yet, somehow, driving towards the edge of everything, it had suddenly come to her that that must have been what Cora meant. In the flood, the woman with no face pushed opened the door or came at them with a brick, a broken bottle. She threatened Troy, threatened the children, and Cora removed the safety from their grandfather’s shotgun, the water tightening around them like a noose.

  You weren’t here. You don’t know. When she got back to the Dobies’, she would climb into bed an
d bury her face in Cora’s hair and say that no, she hadn’t been and she couldn’t know, but she was here now and she would try to understand.

  She was here now.

  She looped around the park, still strung with water, then turned around the Fairgrounds. At Troy’s house, there was still no crime scene tape. She pulled through the intersection, looking in her rearview mirror to be sure that none of the neighbors had come back, before slowing the car down. All of the driveways were empty, as far as she could see.

  She parked the Mercedes on the next block and got out, leaving the keys in the ignition, the door open, pinging. Dusty venetian blinds hung crooked in the open kitchen window, and she reached up, jumped. Her feet thumped against the siding, and she fell back into the driveway, pulled her shirt up over her nose and breathed—one, two, three. Her mouth was full of warm saliva, and she spat as she moved around to the front of the house, where everything looked exactly as it had before. In the crust of dirt over the lawn, her own footprints veered diagonally towards the sidewalk to the place where she and Kea had stood, the scales of dried mud trampled to a powder. Across the street, the Indian suit crackled in a breeze. Red and yellow feathers like flames.

  She placed her feet in her own footprints as she climbed onto the porch. Around the door, the dirt had been trampled down, and she toed a flake of green paint up off of the concrete slab. She pulled her shirt up and wrapped her hand in it, tried the door handle, but it was locked. Burned all my bridges, her brain said, and without thinking, she stooped, picked up an empty flowerpot, and crashed it through the windowpane above the door. She looked behind her. The street was completely empty. The flowerpot rolled, rough voiced, across the wooden floor.

  Glass stood in flat fangs around the frame of the window. She wiggled a few out, then reached her arm through and turned the knob. In the cool of the night, the stench hung like lake fog. The moon looked in at the windows, glancing off the edges of the framed posters on the walls, the bottle caps littered on the coffee table. As she waded in, she withdrew the matchbook from her purse, bent back the cover, ripped out a match and struck it, her thumb pressed hard against its head. Phosphorous and sulfur bit into the air. In the haze of orange light she could just make out Reyna’s shape under the oily trash-bag shroud, her left foot showing, the long second toe seeming to point at her across the room. Beside her hip were the flowers Anthony had complained about, three red-tipped yellow roses in a full water glass, somehow not yet gone brittle in the heat.

  She strode across the kitchen and through the next door into the bedroom, where she pulled the top sheet off of Troy’s unmade bed. The match had burned down to her fingers, and she dropped it on the mattress, the flame snuffing as it fell. In the dark again, she went back into the kitchen and held her breath, bent down, and pulled the trash bags off of Reyna’s body. The smell jumped up at her like an animal, and her throat clenched shut. She held her breath as she ballooned the white sheet out into the darkness, whispering the funeral psalm: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he makes me lie down in green pastures. As the sheet settled over the body, she lit another match. He leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. Gulping in breath, she banged open the cabinets until she found Troy’s lighter fluid and soaked the roll of paper towels on the counter, then threw the almost extinguished match inside the tube where it died. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for thou art with me.

  Outside the open kitchen window, she heard feet approaching, crunching through the crust of mud, and she crouched down beside Reyna, below the windowsill. Her pulse thudded in her neck, and the dull ache in her pelvis spread out through her thighs. She stared at the pale square of the window. The footsteps came closer, shuffled near the edge of the house. There is a dead woman on the kitchen floor, her sister whispered. Because of me. But then a dog barked somewhere, shook itself, tags jangling against a chain. She stood back up and put her head through the window. There was no one—nothing—there.

  “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies; thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows,” she said aloud as she gathered the heap of paper—old Times-Picayunes and magazines, bills and letters and advertising fliers—off the wooden kitchen table and rained them over Reyna’s body, and then she settled the roll of towels in the center of them. She took one last gulp of the outside air and pulled the roses—blown yellow blossoms edged in red—from the water glass and laid them over Reyna’s chest. She struck one more match and lit the edge of the cardboard matchbook. The match heads flared. She crouched down and set the book inside the soaked tube of paper towels and watched as the flame grew stronger, a yellow sheet licking the roof of the cardboard. At the stove, she turned on the gas, one knob after the other, and sprinted from the house, not stopping until she’d reached her mother’s car, its door still open, the alarm still chiming.

  On the next block, a dog wandered out into the street and started scraping something off the asphalt with its teeth. When she’d slammed the car door, the dog lifted its head to her, its ears perked, then ran off in a slow lope down the middle of the road, slowing every so often to look over its shoulder, as if it was hoping she would follow.

  TESS STEPPED BACK into the girls’ room, pulled the sheets up on Cora’s bed, folded them over the blanket, plumped the pillow. Cora loved a freshly made bed—little princess with the smooth black hair easing down into her feathers.

  “There,” Tess said aloud, but in the silence that followed that word, her tinnitus struck its bell, a sustained high A, and she dropped to her knees.

  She imagined Cora in her nightdress striding barefoot across the wastes of the drained swamp while Del spun across a tile floor, her mascara smeared, men holding her up, holding her. She wished, almost, that Cora would stumble through the front door, her pupils dilated, her hands skinned and dirty, or that Del would appear, wasted, on the porch on the arm of some strange boy. Tess rocked back onto her heels. They could be together still. Down at Del’s friend Tina’s house or in a booth at Snake and Jake’s, Cora huddled in the Christmas lights over her sleeping sister, chewing on her thumbs. They could have run away together, like they did once as children, barricaded themselves inside the playhouse at the top of the park’s jungle gym. Or they could have been abducted off the street, taken away into one of the abandoned buildings to be tied up and raped and killed. They could have gone to Troy’s house to dig a hole in the mud, bury that poor woman, like Del kept threatening to do. Hadn’t Antigone tried to recruit her sister into burying the bad brother? Del was just like that—idealistic to the point of irrationality. She wouldn’t understand what she was doing when she pulled her sister down.

  Tess grabbed the Dobies’ phone from the bedside table and hit redial—one ring, then Joe’s voice mail. She called Del. It rang, and then her voice sang, clear and competent on the line: You’ve reached Adelaide Boisdoré. I’m unable to take your call right now, but please—Tess hung up, tried Cora’s number. Hi, this is Cora. Thanks for calling. Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. She hung up, redialed Del. You’ve reached Adelaide Boisdoré—She hit END.

  “Goddamn it! Answer your goddamned fucking phone!” she screamed, and the darkness soaked up her voice like a sponge. Her chest vibrated. She pushed herself upright, flashes of Augie’s $800 sheets, his mouth on her rib cage. This was enough of this. The white pages were in the kitchen. She should be sensible, call Del’s friends. Tina was Christina Barth, her husband was George Powell. So, Christina Barth Powell. She staggered to her feet, barked her shin on the flared back of a chair fitted upside down over a tea table. She’d call Tina first, and then Alice, to find out what Cora knew, whether Del had told Cora about the body in Troy’s house. Then she would go there, except that she didn’t know his last name—Troy from the restaurant, whom she’d met in Cora’s kitchen once when he was helping serve grillades at that Christmas party Cora had thrown on a whim. Tess would drive arou
nd the neighborhood, calling out the window. She would need her medical license to get past the police, because of the curfew. She should take Dan Dobie’s gun.

  Halfway down the stairs she stopped. She heard, she thought, the rustle of keys. Footsteps. Something occluded the streetlight, and then, on the front porch, through the small window in the door, she saw her—a dark head in the darkness. The lock clicked.

  Del waited, her hand on the door, the smell of smoke in her clothes.

  “Where in God’s name have you been?”

  “Sorry,” Del said, sarcastically, but she was trembling.

  “Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  Tess was already in the foyer somehow, her hand on the door, then she was out on the porch. The streetlight buzzed yellow, and she looked beyond the hedge—cars parked on the asphalt, the distant whoop of a squad car.

  “Cora?” Del asked.

  Tess was down in the front yard, pushing the gate open.

  “Cora?” Del said again. “She’s not here?” And even through that ever-present veneer of cool, Tess could hear her daughter’s panic.

  “She’s been sleepwalking, or—” Tess said. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”