The Floating World: A Novel Read online

  “It’s anticipatory too, remember,” Tess said, then swatted that little criticism out of the air.

  “Mm-hm.” Alice was drifting back towards her desk, the pleats of her slacks so very very straight, to gather a pad, a pen.

  “Anyway, I’d say onset was the morning we moved from our house into the Dobies’.” Alice’s face was settling into a benignly patient smile. “Laura and Dan’s. Such nice people. You might have met them at New Year’s—”

  Alice folded back the orange cover of the notepad, uncapped her pen. “That was when, exactly? Two weeks ago?”

  “Last Sunday, I think?”

  “The sixteenth?”

  “I have no idea, Alice. It was a couple of days after we came back from Houston. Dan and Laura had come back in pre-Rita, and Dan—they really are nice people—just threw me the house keys as they were leaving.” Tess cleared her throat. “It wasn’t as though Cora had been well-well. I mean, I’m not sure anybody could have been, after what she went through.”

  Hell, Mrs. Randsell had called it, though it had looked at first like the opposite.

  Tess and Augie Randsell had imagined so many horrors on the drive out from Houston—his mother drowned, Cora raped or murdered or imprisoned or all three—that they had stopped short at the gate to his garden, half-disbelieving their eyes. It seemed impossible that they had found them both immediately, first place they looked, sitting in the garden, drinking coffee.

  They looked like a painting—a Sargent tableau—their feet hidden in the high grass, their skirts occluded by the overgrown rose bushes. Cora was wearing one of Madge’s linen shirt dresses, and even from across the lawn, Tess could smell her friend’s old gardenia perfume. Despite her eternal mourning weeds, Mrs. Randsell glittered. She had on all the jewelry—her engagement ring, an emerald solitaire, her late husband’s signet on her thumb. Around her neck were three strands of large pearls, and her dress was pinned with a gold narcissus, blooming diamonds. When Augie pushed the groaning gate open, his mother turned, pacifically, and twiddled her fingers. Cora lifted her hooded eyes to her mother’s face.

  We were expecting you, Mrs. Randsell said, grinning, but she’d probably been waiting her whole life for this, Tess thought: a flood or a nuclear attack, a new Civil War.

  On the table, a camp percolator burbled, and beside it sat three bone china cups. Cora, darling, would you run into the kitchen and fetch a cup for your mother, Mrs. Randsell said, and Tess watched her daughter stand, watched her waft, obediently, across the lawn and into the tall white house, her hair long and shining like raven’s wings folded along her back.

  Augie walked across the lawn in long strides. How on earth?

  Mrs. Randsell raised her eyebrows, closing a book of Hesiod around her thumb.

  How were you expecting us, Mother? Augie said, and Tess thought she could hear his racing heart.

  Mrs. Randsell patted the top of a wind-up radio with her jeweled hand. I figured once the gates of Hell were opened, you’d come rushing in.

  Hell, she’d said, though it looked like heaven. Hell, though, it must have been.

  “Not that we’d know anything about it,” Tess told Alice. She realized she’d been plucking at her cuticles and quit it, sat on her hands. “After Augie and I finally found Cora, when we’d gotten her safely to Houston, she was pretty uncommunicative, but we could get her to dress, she was eating. I gave her a few Ambien, at first, to help her sleep. Of course, she doesn’t need it now!” Tess tried to laugh. “But that morning we moved to Laura and Dan’s—Sunday—the lights just wouldn’t go on.” She snapped her fingers. “I went in to wake her—she wouldn’t get up. This is the first time I’ve gotten her out of the house. Did you have a chance to look at the chart?”

  Alice nodded. “She had a depressive episode in ’95, I saw. Please go on—but if you’d like to take a seat—” Alice waved her hand at the various chairs—reading, desk, wing—that had been dislocated from their normal positions to make a circle at the center of the room.

  “You’re starting groups already?” Tess settled herself in the Eames, spreading her long skirt out over her legs as she marveled at how comfortable the chair was—more comfortable, in fact, than any piece of furniture she owned. Alice’s was a different sort of life, full of new things. Or not new—this chair was fifty years old—but different. Sentimental Tess, she chose chairs that broke, antiques with original hardware, original finishes you were supposed to look after to the tune of thousands of dollars a year. She could just as easily have had this: A comfortable chair. Simple, gleaming things. Disposable things.

  “Kids’ groups, grown-ups’ groups, couples’ groups, and singles’ groups,” Alice was saying, her mouth full of cookie. “The city’s desperate for them. As soon as you’re up for it you should take on a few. They—we all—need grief counseling. There’s PTSD, depression, anxiety everywhere, just everywhere.”

  “The Katrina Crazies.”

  “Oh, like Katrina Cough?” Alice didn’t laugh. “If you need space, by the way, to see your people—” She took another tactful bite of cookie. “Joyce Perret called yesterday wondering if you were back. The service doesn’t know how to reach you?”

  Tess looked at her feet, then up into Alice’s face. “I’ve had a lot on my plate, Alice. I’m not sure—” She shook her head, shut her mouth. “We were talking about Cora, though. She’s—We should have stayed in Houston until everything was cleaned up again. Especially not brought her back to Esplanade while it was still a shambles. She feels guilty, I think, that all this happened on her watch.” She pressed a hand against her chest to stop herself. “I’m sorry. I’m getting ahead of us.”

  Alice rushed to swallow. “No, no.” She choked a little, cleared her throat. “Why did she stay, anyway? You couldn’t reach her, or—”

  Tess closed her eyes, and her eyelids glowed orange with the afternoon sun. “She refused to leave.” She took a deep breath. “Said we were being alarmist.”

  “Alarmist?”

  “Ask her—” Tess heard the exasperation in her voice and fought against it. “Anyway, Joe and I discussed it. Argued about it. She’d been doing so well.”

  “How long was she here?” Alice said quietly.

  “Um—” Tess counted on her fingers, partially to avoid looking in Alice’s eyes. It was only three days after the storm hit that Joe had tried to go back into New Orleans for her, leaving Tess in Houston like a troublesome dog—Go back to bed, Tess. Go. Back. To. Bed. Four days by the time he came back, having failed to even cross the parish line. Ten days before the mayor had reopened the city, and she and Joe had tried again and been unable to find her. Twenty-five days before Tess had hitched a ride back in with Augie Randsell as Hurricane Rita approached the Louisiana coast, and they had discovered Cora having coffee with Mrs. Randsell on Augie’s lawn.

  “Just over three weeks. Joe went back right after the storm and couldn’t get into the city. He said the National Guard stopped him at the bridge?” She sighed; you were not supposed to criticize your spouse in front of others. “Anyway, by the time he and I came back together, she was nowhere to be found. The front door to the house had been kicked open, there was mold on all the food. I thought she’d been evacuated. Was in one of those shelters in Ohio or something with no way to reach us, since all the cellphones were down. But she was here. She was here the whole time. God knows what she saw, what happened to her. She won’t tell us. We know that for a while she was out in a boat with this friend of hers, Troy, rescuing people. She saved Ida Randsell from her little house in Metairie, then stayed uptown with her—”

  “Augie’s mother? I saw the obit.”

  “A stroke, the week after we got them to Houston.”

  I figured once the gates of Hell were opened—

  “You and Joe are separated for the time being, you told me?” Alice said.

  “He took his father out of the Little Sisters’. They’re playing house out at the cabin.”

 
; Tess turned her face to the window, ran her fingers through her graying hair. She needed a professional coloring, but Shelly had not yet come back to town. Beyond her reflection, she saw that a limb was missing from the big oak in the side yard. It had been ripped off at the first crotch, and a stake of warm yellow wood jutted up like a bone.

  “Your poor tree.” Tess said, shutting her eyes just long enough to make the tears go away.

  “Terrible, isn’t it?” Alice said. “Though Gerry had some good fun hacking it apart with his new chainsaw. Joe’s father has Lewy Body, right?”

  “Vincent. Yes,” she said. “I think we’re approaching end-stage, unfortunately—no thanks to the Valiums Joe was sneaking him in Houston. He tried to tear up one of his earliest pieces, even. Went after it with an oyster knife. I had to stop him.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Go. Back. To. Bed. Joe had said with so much bile as he stuffed the duffel with clothes. She had grabbed Vincent a bit harder than she would have liked, but she had only been trying to save what was salvageable. For that, he left without her to rescue their daughter. And because he went alone, he failed.

  Alice looked up from her pad with curtained eyes. “Were they—Joe, I mean—already living across the lake the morning Cora—”

  “—wouldn’t get out of bed.” Tess shook her head violently, like shaking off flies. Now, she reminded herself. Be here now. She looked straight at Alice. “That’s how I’ve been putting it, so you know. We don’t use the word ‘depression.’ It just turns her negative.”

  “So Joe was at the Dobies’ with you?”

  “What difference does that make?” Tess said.

  Alice bit her lip. “Really?”

  That tone was a problem of Alice’s, a chink in her clinical armor through which one spied condescension, even a little bit of mockery.

  “She’s not one of your mini-neurotics, Alice. She’s nearly thirty. She knows her father’s and my relationship has nothing to do with her.”

  Alice let loose a snort. “Ah thank you might be the one who’s off her rocka, Dr. Eshlemun,” she said in a Yankee’s best Mississippi drawl. It was an old, stupid joke bestowed on the office by a patient whom Tess had never been able to convince to come out of the closet: Tess’s own joke. She didn’t find it particularly funny anymore.

  “You’re right. I know.” Tess sighed. “I know you’re right. I just don’t feel like talking about Joe.” Even saying his name hurt, as if her lungs were being wrung out like wet clothes. “Of course you should ask Cora about it.”

  “I will,” Alice said, and they sat in silence as a breeze tossed the oak’s remaining leaves.

  “But that’s not it. I know that’s not it. It’s what happened here, after the storm. Whatever she won’t talk about. And it’s the city.” She threw her hand around. “She’s grieving.”

  “Honey, you and I both know grief and depression are different.” Alice laughed.

  “No. I know,” she said, her eyes closed. “I know.”

  “Okay.” Alice’s pen hovered as she read over the chart. “I see that Cora’s had other difficulties. ‘Delusional,’ ‘Possibly hypomanic’?”

  Tess shook her head. “No.” She pointed at the file in Alice’s lap. “Is that Boudreaux? That was a long time ago. When she was just out of DePaul. They had her on drugs. I mean, she’s an artistic person, imaginative, very sensitive, but nothing I’d call delusions. Flights of fancy.”

  “This is Letitia.”

  “Oh, Letitia. Loves her DSM!” Tess sighed. “Listen, Alice, I don’t even know anymore. She’s my child. I know her as a person, not a diagnosis. And, after all, what can any of us know? The problem of the black box, and all of that.” Tess made like to zip her lip. “What am I talking to you for? You’re the doctor here, I’m the mother, and I’m just telling you she’s missing. It’s like my child has fallen down a well.”

  Suddenly, she remembered a dream she’d had the night before, while she was blacked out in the middle of the Dobies’ mattress: a rope hung taut in a column of water, air bubbles clinging to the twisted fibers. Just a slip of a dream.

  Alice leaned towards her desk to grab the file, opened it, thumbed through a few pages. “She’s not on medication now?”

  “No. No more Ambien. Nemetz was doing some cognitive behavioral with her.”

  Alice nodded.

  “She had been improving so much. Functioning so well.”

  Alice nodded again, but she didn’t look up from her notepad.

  “It’s not bipolar: she scores in the teens. Little m, definitely little m. Her ‘problem’ if it is one is just that she’s too emotive, too empathetic. Gets so upset over dead squirrels, that sort of thing, it interferes with her life. Out there, in that boat, I can’t even imagine what she must have seen.”

  “I’m not arguing,” Alice said.

  Tess closed her mouth.

  Alice glanced at her watch. “Anything else you need to tell me before I invite her in?”

  Her mind had gone blank. She looked at the bright green, very expensive new carpet under the feet of the circling chairs. Alice had done well. Alice would continue to do well.

  “Weight loss?” Alice suggested.

  “Yes, though not terrible. She eats in the middle of the night.”

  “Oh?”

  Tess shook her head. “It’s bad, Alice. Without Joe snoring in the bed next to me, I sleep so soundly, I don’t hear her get up. But she does get up. I don’t know if she’s sleepwalking or has just reversed night and day the way she did when she was a baby—”

  “I’ll find out. So she wakes up and just, like, makes a sandwich? Or—”

  “I think she maybe goes and sits in the garden. I don’t know. Her feet are always dirty in the mornings.”

  “Photosensitivity?”

  “Oh,” Tess said, looking towards the study door as if she could see Cora’s pupils through it. “I don’t know. That hadn’t occurred to me. She had her eyes closed all the way over here. She keeps her blinds drawn. But why?”

  “Could she be taking something you don’t know about? That didn’t get put in her chart? St. John’s Wort? Thorazine?”

  “Thorazine?” Tess laughed.

  Alice shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve got to ask.”

  “Thorazine!” Tess gesticulated wildly as she stood from her chair. “That explains everything!”

  “Oh, don’t.” Alice went for the plate of cookies, took another one for herself. “Don’t you want me to cover all your bases?”

  “It would be so easy, if we could just get them all off the Thorazine!”

  Alice stared at her, Alice of the Concerned Brow.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t joke.”

  Cookie still in her hand, Alice opened her arms wide and folded Tess into them. Tess laid her head on Alice’s cashmere shoulder, and then Alice released her and opened the door. In the crewel armchair, Cora was asleep, hugging herself, her bare feet on the embroidery, arms wrapped around her folded knees. Slender bones of arms, her daughter’s arms.

  JOE REVVED THE chainsaw. Back in the day, it would have excited him: all this raw material, the blades spinning in his hands. Only two months ago, he’d already be seeing things in the felled tree—a stag totem, a hieroglyph hawk—but nothing was going to come of this forest except sawdust and fire.

  Heat loomed in the clouded day. Been hot since he’d opened the door at six. Didn’t even try to sneak up. Didn’t even bide its time. It was ten now, and he was sweating as he guided the chainsaw down through the big pine lying like a bridge over the shell drive. Ostensibly the first day of fall had been weeks ago, the day Tess and Augie had found Cora, two days before Rita made landfall, but the only change he could sense was this very negligible softening in the sky. They should call the seasons by their right names, he thought, and Louisiana had only two: a hurricane season and a season of calm.

  He wrestled the hauling chain down through the limbs, under a section of tr
unk, and up again, thrusting his arms deep in the spiny branches, while the needles crept like spiders into his nose. When Joe came up for air, the dusty, menthol scent of the pines filled his lungs. He reminded himself, as he often had lately, of slaves crouching in the cotton fields, sick with smallpox in the cane. There was much that was endurable that didn’t look it, and it was a privilege, not a burden, to do labor on your own account. The forest shrieked, and he sat back on the trunk for a moment and listened. A sound like a teakettle boiling. Tree frogs. Crickets. He’d read somewhere that the Northshore wasn’t alluvial like New Orleans, but Pleistocene uplands; though he didn’t know what that meant, the words came to him sometimes, particularly when he heard that sound, like the call of a raptor. It was the scream of melting glaciers, the sound of heat.

  Out on the road, Sol’s rig slowed, then pulled up across the entrance to the property. A woman’s arm extended out of the passenger window, but she was turned away so that he only saw the thick chestnut hair knotted at the nape of her neck. Sol helloed, lifting his sweat-stained John Deere hat from his bald sunburned head, and Joe brushed his sleeve across his brow.

  “Y’all doing alright?” Sol yelled.

  “Yeah.” Joe trotted towards him up the drive.

  “You caught him?”

  “Yeah. Big net.” Joe laughed, shook his head. “Came back on his own.”

  “What’d we lose?” The woman sat up into the window—Monica Selvaggio, a woman he knew a little from church. She lifted a long hand off the door, let him shake it, though his forearms were flecked with sawdust. “Cow?” she asked. “Dog? Pony?”

  “My dad.”

  She clucked, let his hand go. “I’m sorry.”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Good to hear it,” Sol said. “Somebody’s keeping an eye on him now? He’s at the house?”

  From the back of the rig came the thumping of hooves against rubber. A dun face, a black eye bobbed in the window.

  “Whose horses?” Joe asked.

  Monica craned her long, tanned neck from the window and looked back at the trailer. “Mine. Sol is helping me out, keeping them for me while I get my fences mended. Lost a good half of it, which we could ill afford.”