The Floating World: A Novel Read online

  The drainage canal streamed by beside her, and behind it, across the littered brown no-man’s-land that had once been grass, the houses flaunted their waist-high flood lines. It made her ill, to think that Del had had to see this for the first time, alone. She wanted to call Joe back and scream at him. Before, she’d only hung up the phone. He knew as well as she did what it was like, seeing this for the first time; you could watch all the TV news you wanted—out in Houston, they had been glued to Vin’s leather couch for days—but there was no way to adequately prepare. The flood itself had been straight out of an apocalypse movie, but the aftermath was something else. The innards of sofas strewn across lawns. Cars belly up in the streets. An inch-thick crust of sewage on every goddamned thing. You almost wanted the water to come back. On TV, the flood had shimmered, glinting with sun as the news helicopters ruffled the surface. The water had hidden the mess, lifted everything up, given the city a sense of buoyancy. It had kept you from having to really believe it, and if she could have stayed there, safe in her dream of disbelief, in the gin-smogged Twilight Zone of Vin and Zizi’s suburb, that Purgatory of vacuums and air-conditioning and chain restaurants, she might have. If they had all gotten away, maybe they could have stayed away. If the second hurricane had swerved just a little east and destroyed New Orleans once and for all. If they hadn’t left Cora there. If she hadn’t, in the end, been found.

  Tess couldn’t say this out loud, of course. Not to anyone, but certainly not to the girls. Once upon a time, both of them had come to her for advice, snuggled up into the big bed in the early morning, let Tess stroke their lamb-soft heads. Once upon a time, they had let Tess see them cry, had come running even, a red gash on a little brown knee or a cruel word lodged in an ear. Tess would cradle a heavy head against her chest and whisper reassurances. She would hold a pink palm in her hand and carefully draw out the splinter, hold the outrage down until she could make the necessary cutting phone calls behind closed doors, just hold on until her little girl stopped crying. But that had ended some time ago. Now she wasn’t allowed to help. Wasn’t allowed to see the tears. Wasn’t allowed to touch the hair, God forbid. Cora just barricaded herself away in her house, in her room, in her body—that refuge of last resort. And the last time she could remember Adelaide asking her a serious question was her senior year in high school when she’d taken it into her head to skip college and stay home to apprentice in Vincent’s workshop instead. Tess had told her no, and Adelaide hadn’t liked that answer, and that had been the end of it—of everything, apparently.

  She would admit she’d been glad when Joe had phoned to say he’d pick her up from the airport. Del was Daddy’s girl, despite everything. She was still open with him, whereas with Tess she was shut watertight, her shoulders hunched, bra straps showing. But he hadn’t come, had he.

  I just forgot, Tess, I had a crisis with Dad, I’m sorry. Sorry, he sure was. That was at least true. He’d had enough of “being governed,” was ready to be “in control of his own life.” So he’d set up housekeeping with an eighty-six-year-old man in the terminal phases of a degenerative disease. She used to find it cute, the way he played at cooking, played house like a little boy. Honey, I’m home, she’d shout as she walked in the door after work when she’d left him in charge, and he’d scoop Kraft macaroni onto the plate and they’d tuck their napkins into their shirtfronts. But while he was playing at life, he’d forgotten his daughters—abandoned Del to the aftermath, just as he’d abandoned Cora to the storm.

  And instead of waiting for her mother, for rescue, Del had taken a goddamned cab.

  Beyond the far lane, Tess caught sight of the Coca-Cola façade of the roller rink where the Velcro skates and cookie cakes of all those childhood birthdays must have bobbed against the disco-ball ceiling in the flood. She could still hear the sound of the wheels, the DJ in his tinseled booth, Adelaide skating all sweaty through the break in the wall and into her arms, could still feel the impact of a head on her ribs, just over the heart.

  She made a U-turn and pulled into the rink’s parking lot, where the blue box of a payphone hung from a pole, and stood up out of the car into the flat desert heat of asphalt. Leaving the engine on to pump air-conditioning at her through the open door, she rummaged in her skirt pocket for change.

  There was not another soul out here—no one as far as she could see along the frontage of strip mall and fast-food and warehouse—and when she dropped the quarter on the pavement, she broke out in a cold sweat. Something had gone terribly wrong, as wrong as carpools crashed on highways, children kidnapped from among the wax-cold pizzas and Skee-Ball lanes. Behind the swinging doors of the skate center, there would be nothing but dirty red carpet and warped wood floor and the plexiglass boxes where a claw was always reaching, never holding, like a palsied hand.

  She put the quarter into the slot, dialed the Dobies’ landline. The phone, miraculously, rang.

  “Hello? This is the Dobie residence,” Del said, formal as she’d been trained.

  “Oh, thank God, honey, you’re there,” Tess said. “Are you alright, did you take a cab? I’ve just been to the airport, driving around and around.”

  “Yeah. United. It’s okay,” Del said, and she was chewing something already, she seemed so unperturbed. “I had cash.”

  “I can’t believe—I just can’t believe your father! You shouldn’t have had to see this alone, honey. It is so hard. So hard to see. I should have been there for you. He should have been there.”

  “I’m a grown woman, Mom. I can handle it.” Del laughed, dismissive. Tess should have expected that. “Anyway—” It was Triscuits she was chewing on. Triscuits and that crummy Popeye dip she’d bought. “Grief is the loneliest emotion—isn’t that what you always say, Dr. Eshleman?”

  “Well—” Tess pulled herself up and back, the silver cord going tight against the pole. “Well, I’m sorry anyway. I should never have left it to him. I should have come for you in the first place”

  “Please stop apologizing, Mom. It’s okay. I’m alright. Everything’s fine.”

  “No,” Tess said, shaking her head against the heavy receiver, that she only now realized smelled of vomit. “No, it’s not.”

  “Well, Cora does look like hell,” Del said, crunching Triscuits.

  Tess laughed. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  “And you’ve got me sleeping on a shitty sofa bed in a firetrap.”

  Tess laughed again.

  “And of course the city is a fucking bombed-out wasteland—”

  She didn’t know why she was laughing, but she couldn’t stop. Reflected on the hood of her car, her face looked like a fun house freak’s, her mascara running, her dyed hair standing up like a clown’s wig, her features warped.

  “But everything’s fine, sure,” Del was saying as Tess laughed, bent over her legs. “Everything is completely fine.”

  The water, Tess had heard, had come up through the manhole covers once the drainage canals were overwhelmed. It had not, as she’d always imagined, come as a great wave rising above the river levee the way unladen ships did in spring. No, it had been more active and more sinister. It had broken what was built to keep it back. It had snuck in along channels dug to lead it away. It had acted as if with the intent to swallow, to smother, to ruin, to uproot, but most of all, to lift. It had raised sewage, dirt, poisons, furniture, cars, homes, families high above the ground as if to allow God to get a better look, and the things He rejected it had dropped, left them strewn in ruined piles.

  So, then, Joe was on the Northshore with his father, she and Cora silent in the Dobies’ borrowed house. But now here was Del munching crackers and telling jokes, sarcastic as she’d been when she left them after Jazz Fest. She was like the glass orb on the highest shelf in Tess’s office that hadn’t, unlike the file cabinets, the picture frames, the desk chair, the stapler, moved an inch. It hadn’t even, like the books, grown mold. No, it was clean, blank, crystal clear as ever, and as Tess turned towards the ravaged ci
ty, she realized why she hadn’t, deep down, wanted Adelaide to come home.

  Friday

  October 21

  Del hesitated on the corner of Esplanade and Royal, looking up at the house she’d grown up in. It towered above her, the long, wrought-iron railing of the upper gallery reaching back until it was lost in the branches of the fallen magnolia. The pinkish-brown paint was peeling off the scored plaster in hand-sized flakes, and the shutters were still lashed shut. In the urns on either side of the portico, the impatiens had shriveled to skeletons during their long abandonment.

  The night the storm hit, she had dreamed of the house’s rooms exposed to the city like an elaborate diorama, the wallpaper coming unglued from the cardboard, the furniture standing on toothpick legs. She almost believed she had felt the thump of the tree as it fell through the back of the house, but when she’d awoken with her heart racing, it was 3:00 a.m., and a garbage truck shifted into first gear on Avenue A then stopped with a thunk, grinding its steel jaws.

  She went up into the portico where the National Guard or whoever had spray-painted an X with a date in its arms and a zero in its crotch to say they hadn’t found anything in their inspection—no people, no dogs, no cats alive or dead, nothing drowned or starved, no one in the attic, nothing trapped under the porches. This had happened between her father’s solo attempt to rescue Cora and her parents’ joint second try. Her mother had called her panicked from the bridge after dark: Even the patrols couldn’t find her, baby. Where in hell do you think she could be? The front door had been kicked open, and now a chain was looped through the vestibule shutters and held shut with a padlock. Del fished the tiny key from her pocket.

  In the dim light that seeped through the shutter slats, the house felt like a tomb. All of their furniture was gone, but it still smelled like mildew and humid wood. Scraps of tape and cellophane littered the floor, and the sticky dust was printed with boot tracks.

  Her footsteps ricocheted off the high ceiling. Inside the walls, mold had taken root, and huge varicolored blooms spread over the plaster. The movers had left the doors of the built-in bookcase in the library open, and she went into the room to close them before the hardware started to fail. The wood was swollen, and she had to muscle the doors shut. As she turned away, she noticed bare footprints coming in through the far door of the library. They moved around the perimeter of the room, skirting the bookcase and then exiting through the door into the living room, where they moved around the walls again—a short foot, with a long second toe—and stopped in front of the pier mirror that still stood between the two front windows. The person had moved up close to the mirror and stayed there for some time, shuffling. Del went to stand where the person had stood—not her sister, who had triangular size nines like her own, but not a looter either, not when the silver trays had still been on their tables when her parents had returned, and the television on its console, her mother’s fur coats hanging slack in the cedar closet. They’d thought her maternal grandfather’s shotgun was missing when they’d found it gone from the safe—they’d thought maybe Cora had just forgotten she’d taken it to Augie’s house when she and Mrs. Randsell had evacuated there—but they’d found it again when they’d unpacked at the Dobies’ a week or so ago, dismantled inside a laundry basket.

  The mirror’s silvering had begun to oxidize, and little tarnished dots marked the side of her face like the dark freckles that showed up on her skin every spring like daffodils. She was surprised by how anxious she looked. Her forehead was creased, and when she tried to relax her brow, her whole face fell, becoming the jowly Boisdoré mask she wore whenever she was tired or a couple of pounds too heavy.

  Del wrapped her arms around her chest, feeling her heart clench like a fist. Everything her father had done to restore this place—two decades of patching, of sanding the plaster, rewelding the wrought iron, reglazing the arched windows of the stairwell with stained glass, retiling the gallery floor—had been ruined in a single month. Water and evacuation had finished what the tree started. It had been the project of a lifetime, and maybe it had been too big. Maybe, as her father sometimes said, they would have been better off in a little center hall cottage they could have paid for themselves. Then they could have used her mother’s inheritance to send Cora to one of those special schools that were all outdoor living and therapeutic cows, and her father wouldn’t have had to spend his life on a ladder being mistaken for the help by every UPS driver or florist who stopped by. Maybe then, their whole lives wouldn’t have been able to collapse in a single night.

  Regardless, it was over now. Her parents were over, and anyway there wouldn’t be enough money, even if the insurance paid out, to put their home back the way it was. She had to say good-bye.

  The smell of mildew and wet wool got stronger as she climbed the stairs. The oculus was cracked, and from the landing, she could see the water condensed like sweat between the stained glass window and the sheet of plywood that protected it, and there was one more bare footprint, the round heel almost wedged into the corner beside the banister. The stair treads groaned as she put her weight on them. From the ceiling of the upstairs hall, brown blisters half-filled with rain hung from the ceiling, and the carpet was stained worse than she would have expected, the boot tracks making a pattern over the dirty water stains. On the floor between her parents’ and Cora’s bedrooms at the front of the house, a dark puddle had seeped into the wool—something spilled and left to soak.

  Her room was farther back, just before the dividing door between the front and back of the house. Her door was closed, and someone had jammed towels in along the threshold. Del took a deep breath and turned the knob.

  Her chandelier lay in a heap on the floor, one wire still attached to the box in the middle of the ceiling, which had been skinned down to the lath. Chunks of plaster, held together by dozens of layers of paint, had been swept into a corner beside the curtains that still hung from the windows, so mildewed now that even from this distance, Del could see fuzz on the folds where the light hit. She had had nightmares like this when she was a child: her parents would have vanished, and she would crouch behind a tattered curtain or inside a piece of furniture in an otherwise empty house, hiding so that no one could take her away. She had thought that she would cry, but she just felt numb. It wasn’t her room anymore, nor her house. If she was honest, it hadn’t been for a long time, and she couldn’t blame that on anyone but herself.

  CORA WAS PILED up in her sweats in one of Alice’s vast armchairs—Dr. Luce’s armchairs, Tess reminded herself. She would have to remember to call her Dr. Luce.

  As they had discussed on the phone, Tess would go in first, in the interest of expediency, but Alice was blinking at Cora, in her condescending way.

  “You don’t mind, honey,” Dr. Luce said, “if your mom speaks to me first?”

  Cora shook her ragged, bed-ruffled hair. Clear assent, but Alice kept standing squarely in front of her in her chic professional slacks, her blonde hair newly bobbed. If she was talking, Alice, we wouldn’t have to have a preliminary chat, now would we?

  “You’re sure?”

  Cora nodded, a finger in her mouth.

  “Sure sure?”

  Tess had always avoided sending Cora to someone in her own practice, but Nemetz was off in Phoenix and Dr. Boudreaux was in Atlanta and Letitia Hull’s service was saying she wouldn’t be returning until the new year. She trusted Alice, otherwise she would never have hired her oh those many years ago; she reminded herself that this was why.

  Alice put a hand on the pickled cypress door that led to her study, opened it, then craned her still-lovely neck back into the parlor.

  “If you need anything, honey, you know where the kitchen is, yeah? Gerry’s thumping around somewhere.”

  Cora looked up briefly from her cuticles, and the door closed with an elegant click.

  “Smells wonderful in here.” Everything on the bookshelves—the brown leather volumes, alphabetized paperbacks, stereo equipment,
knickknacks—were all dusted and in their proper places.

  Alice smiled, pink lips gapping over whitened teeth. “Gerry, bless his heart, fought tooth and nail until I agreed to put the whole, practically brand-new Sub-Zero on the curb.”

  “I saw that. I’m sorry.”

  “Maggots, but you know. Anyway, we’ve had an exorcism. Baking soda, a box of super-expensive scented candles, and I’ve been baking. Have one.” She picked up a chocolate chip cookie from a plate on her desk and held it out. “I’ve made dozens and dozens. I sort of feel like a real estate agent.”

  “You need the house to be a haven, if you’re going to be practicing here.” Tess nodded, though she wasn’t sure every patient would find the right-side-upness so comforting. Personally, she had a fondness for oases, but Cora—when they’d finally gotten her back to Houston, she had kept turning off Vin’s air-conditioning. Had refused, for a few days, to shower. Tess took a bite out of the cookie, and the sugar—or maybe the Tollhouse perfection of it—brought tears to her eyes.

  “Well, yes, that’s the essence, isn’t it. A house should be a safe, warm place.”

  “Protective. Maternal,” Tess said.

  “Right, right—the origin, the center, the place to which you return.”

  “Or the place you mean to build—” One of Alice’s faults was that she always interpreted in retrospect. Always dug into the roots of a thing, and so missed out on what it anticipated. Tess’s archetypal “home,” as an example, was not the house she’d grown up in, where her mother locked herself in the bedroom and her father loomed over the bar, calling her boyfriend a “coon.” No, home had always been a place she longed towards: the family she would build, the house she’d restore, fill. The house that now had a tree in its kitchen.