The Floating World: A Novel Read online

  His father kept looking into the mirror even as the steam whited them out. He touched his reflection, touched Joe’s arm.

  “They told me you drowned,” his father said.

  Just the aphasia, Joe told himself. “Right. I look like a drowned rat,” he repeated. “So, bathroom’s all yours. I might lie down for a minute.”

  Joe stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him. His whole body ached, and his forearms looked like he’d gotten in a fight with a pissed-off cat. He lay himself out on the mattress, his forehead on the backs of his hands. A disk of yellow light sliced in through the windows like a hazard sign. A baby can drown in as little as one inch of water. He shifted, pressed his arm across his eyes, kept himself from going back to the bathroom. His father wasn’t a baby.

  He fell asleep, woke. According to the clock, three minutes had passed. His father was watching him again from the door, and again—he had to shake it—he thought of a child. Cora, waking from a nightmare, waiting for them to notice her as she stood silently in the dark beside their bed. He could almost smell her, feel the heat of her little body as she climbed in between him and Tess, whispering, There was a three-headed wolf and he chased me down a pond and I kept on going down and down and down and down until the stairs stopped working—Abruptly, he inhaled. His father still stood watching at the door.

  “Pop, what’s up?” He pushed himself onto his elbows. “I was gonna take a nap, unless you need me.”

  His father shook his head. Joe made himself see the old man—blue polyester pants belted high on his waist, the tremor in his hands. A feeling of usefulness can be incredibly therapeutic, he remembered reading on one of those web forums. If you forget who your LO is, it makes it that much harder for them to remember themselves. He pushed himself backwards, put his feet on the floor. Everything made of wood in the cabin they’d already oiled, polished, or waxed, but neither of them had touched the hope chest, though it stood in the middle of the living room floor. Joe had been waiting for his father to pick up the tools again, finish the “alterations” he’d started in Houston. But his father seemed to shy away from the chest, as if it was the chest that had hurt him. Occasionally, he would look from the chest to his inner arm in confusion, the marks Tess’s fingernails had left there. He seemed malleable today though. Interested.

  “You feel well enough to do some work today?”

  His father nodded.

  “There’s Mama’s hope chest, remember, needs your attention.”

  “You want me to polish it for you?”

  Joe shrugged. “Or finish the work you started at Vin’s, I was thinking. Tess’s not around to stop you, right?” His father’s hand moved steadily towards his pocket, trembled as he slotted his thumb in. “If you’re up to it, of course.”

  “Anything you say,” his father said.

  “Good, good.”

  Joe put the clothes he’d worn to the store that morning back on. Change jingled in his pocket as he followed his father down the hall. At the edge of the great room, they stopped.

  “That’s your mama’s chest?” Vincent pointed.

  From a distance, the chest looked like an animal had been at it—a wolf maybe, sharpening his claws. In various places across the intricate interwoven carvings of wisteria and magnolia branches and roses, his father had knocked Vin’s oyster knife into the wood, breaking off a petal here, cutting in a thorn there, thinning a stem. He’d heard it from the basement guest room through his sleep, a sound like gunshots. He’d rushed up the stairs, half-dressed, and when he’d flipped on the lights in the den, Tess was standing over his father, his arm in her hand. The oyster knife clattered to the floor. No, you’re the one. You’re the one we should have left, she was saying. There was blood under her nails.

  “If you don’t feel up to carving, you could always just patch it, right? I’ve got wood putty, and there’s cypress scraps in the workshed and Elmer’s.”

  “You want me to do this?” his father said, his lower lip out and trembling.

  Joe took his father’s right hand in his own, and turned his arm over, looked at the four crescent moon scars Tess’s fingernails had made on the inside of his wrist.

  “Not if you don’t want to do it.”

  “It’s your mama’s chest. What if I foul it up?”

  “You are the greatest living cabinetmaker in the South.” He nodded. “You can make a few minor repairs to an old chest. Mama would want you to, wouldn’t she?”

  “She wants me to?”

  Joe nodded. “I think she does.”

  He led his father across the room and sat him down in the rocking chair beside the chest. Vincent’s hands stayed in his lap for a moment, and then they reached out, hesitantly, coming down onto the lid, where the veneer was still smooth and unbroken as the day he had left it on Sylvia’s front porch sixty some-odd years ago, with a note inside asking her to marry him, should he return from the war. His white brows knit, his eyes closed behind the wide lenses of his glasses, he was running his hands over the braided stems of the flowers, the thin magnolia branches. He followed the carving over the side and across the wood he’d damaged, and then up again, and his thumbnail fit into the groove of the closed, velveteen petals, and he smiled but did not open his eyes.

  NEESA WAS STILL singing when they turned up Bayou Road. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. She kept singing as Del crossed Broad and turned up Cora’s street, kept singing as they slowed to a crawl past Cora’s house, kept singing as Anthony sat up straight and pointed at the green house across the way as Cora kept shaking her head in her hands, saying no.

  Row, row, row your boat—

  Del pulled the Jeep into Troy’s driveway, just two strips of broken cement laid over the buried grass. The flood had come up about four feet here, drawing a thick line on the siding just above the house’s raised floor. The window beside them was open, and on the sill, there was the corrugated mark of a duck boot’s sole.

  —gently down the stream.

  “Doesn’t look so bad.” Kea looked at Anthony, jiggled the child on her knee.

  He nodded as he got out of the car, leaving the door open, chiming, and walked around to the front of the house.

  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily—

  Cora pressed her hands against her ears and began to sing in round, her voice a drone. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.

  —life is but a dream.

  The day was softening as it edged towards evening, and the warm air coming into the car would almost have been pleasant if it weren’t for the smell. The whole city smelled acrid, with its rotten freezers, mildewing furniture, but it was stronger here—the smell of a rat in your wall. They sat breathing it as Anthony opened the front door, and the screen slammed shut.

  Cora moaned and crossed her arms over her head. Del saw Anthony’s shadow pass by the window, before he opened the shutters on the other side, letting in the light. He looked around, quickly, then hurried out of the room.

  Del got out of the car and tilted her face up, breathing the heat, like an embodiment of the terrible, yellow stench, and shut the door Anthony had left open, closing Kea and Neesa and Cora safely in. Then she walked down the driveway towards the front of the house.

  On the lawn, a Big Wheel lay on its back like a stranded turtle, coated in the ubiquitous mud, and Del followed Anthony’s boot tracks up the steps. The flood had come in over the front porch, but the mud had been trampled between the steps and the door. Del went past the patrol’s mark:

  She pulled open the screen door. The stench was stronger inside—hotter, almost viscous—and Anthony was standing in front of Troy’s framed Congo Square posters, breathing into the arm he held across his mouth.

  “What is it?” Del said, but she understood the moment she’d spoken the words.

  In the kitchen behind him, caught in a window of yellow light, was a woman’s body without a face. Her jeans were crusted up to her thighs with dried mud, her feet
bare. Around her demolished head, the blood had seeped into the floorboards, turning them black.

  “It’s Reyna,” Anthony said.

  “Who?”

  “Troy’s sister. Tyrone and Willy’s mother.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I can tell.” Anthony opened his eyes. “Just go. Please. Keep them out of here.”

  Del ran from the house and did not stop until she was in the middle of the street, where she emptied her lungs of the burning air.

  A Mardi Gras Indian’s suit was nailed to the front of the house across—the long blue and orange plumes trailing down from the finely worked crown of feathers, a sort of war yell in the middle of all this silence and mud. It was as if a great bird had been picked up by the wind and held there against the house until it died. Del stared at it as she took a few deep breaths and then went back to the Jeep and tapped on Kea’s window, motioning for her to come out.

  The back door opened just enough to let Kea’s legs through, and she turned her head back over her shoulder and said to Neesa, “Sweetie, you sit tight. I gotta go see about something.”

  Neesa nodded. In the passenger seat, Cora was invisible.

  Kea stepped out of the car and shut the door, and Del led her out of earshot of the car. Neesa was peering out of the window of the Jeep, her forehead bright against the tinted glass.

  “What is it?” Kea asked.

  “Troy’s sister.”

  “Reyna?” Kea’s head whipped towards the front steps of the darkened house.

  “She’s dead,” Del said.

  “Jesus.” Kea exhaled. “Jesus. So that’s where she is.”

  “Somebody shot her.”

  “She shot her,” Kea said firmly. “She’s been trying to for years.”

  “Who?”

  “Reyna.” Her hands slapped her thighs. “From the first time I met that woman I could have told you she was going to kill herself. She was out of her ever-loving mind.”

  “She was shot in the face.”

  “Thank God they got those boys out.” Kea shook her head. “I doubt your sister even knows what she did.”

  “But she and Troy rescued all three of them, you said. Why is Reyna still here?”

  “I don’t know, honey,” Kea sighed. “She wasn’t acting right apparently, and they had to bring her to the police. Troy just said they lost hold of her after that. Couldn’t find her anywhere.”

  Anthony was coming out of the house. He closed the door firmly, his eyes to the ground, and shuffled down the steps, holding his hands away from his body.

  “We’re not going to tell Cora,” Del said. “She doesn’t need to know about this.”

  Kea nodded, and Anthony jutted his chin out at them, his tongue curling around his upper lip. He moved around the side of the neighboring house and bent over by the hose spigot, turned the knob with both hands. The pipe convulsed against the underside of the house, but nothing came out, and he shook his head and came towards them.

  “No goddamned water.” He looked at them. “Somebody’s been inside there since. I can’t find the gun she used. I don’t know if it was the patrols took it or what—motherfuckers left flowers. Didn’t take care of her, but left flowers? There’s tracks all up and down in the dirt.”

  “Kea thinks she shot herself,” Del said to him.

  He looked at her like she was stupid. “She’s tried it before. This isn’t a murder mystery.”

  Del ducked her head and backed up a step. “We’ve got to go to the police.”

  Anthony nodded, but Kea raised her eyebrows. “Not if there’s no gun there, I’m not going to the police.”

  “We can’t leave her there, Kea,” Anthony said.

  “They did—” Kea threw her hand at the marking beside the door, her voice going loud. “1-D. That means one dead. They came and saw her and left her be.”

  “We’re not them,” Anthony said. “She’s family. I can’t do that.”

  “Then you dig a goddamn hole. I’m not going to the police, saying there’s a dead woman in a house don’t belong to me, and clearly she killed herself but no there’s not any note. No, officer, I didn’t see a gun, officer. How could I have taken a gun I didn’t see?” She stuck out her wrists at them. “That would be one way to get a roof over our heads, sure.”

  Anthony stuck out his tongue and licked his upper lip. Del turned back to the car. The little girl was still watching, the sides of her hands and her chin now pressed against the window.

  “Y’all should come home with us,” Del said. “Or at least send Neesa home with me while y’all do whatever you need to do.”

  Kea made a clucking sound in the back of her throat. “That’s kind of you, but you’ve done enough. We’ve got some people out in Hammond. If you’ve got a telephone that works at your house, we’ll have them come pick us up.”

  Anthony had stuffed his hands in his pockets, and he looked up over the roofs of the houses. A pair of pigeons wheeled in the pale sky, settled on Troy’s gutter, then lifted up again. “Moving on,” he said, though his eyes had fallen to the feathered suit pinioned against the house across the street. “Alright then, I guess we’re moving on.”

  “But what are we going to do about her?” Del asked.

  Anthony shrugged. “I’ll call Troy. It’s his house.”

  “I can call in a tip, anonymously, if you want,” Del said.

  “Alright,” Kea said.

  The back door of the Jeep popped open, and Neesa’s feet came sliding out onto the driveway. Anthony and Kea both ran at her, their arms out, ready to hold her back. Neesa put up her hands and stuck out her lip, surrendering the way robbers do on TV.

  “She keeps saying ‘No,’ the lady,” Neesa whined. “But I’m not doing anything. ‘No,’ ” she repeated in a low, froggy voice. “ ‘No no no no no,’ but I’m not doing nothing but looking.”

  VINCENT HELD HIS bowl in one hand, held his spoon. Mr. Kastenhoff still stood at the silver stove in his baggy drawers. Vincent wanted to ask where his mother was and when she would come home, but he didn’t want to sass. Instead, he sipped at the potlikker pooled in the bottom of the bowl. It was sure his mother’s string beans, tasting like smoke and pig and onion sweat and salt, and on his tongue the little beans that had slipped from the pods disintegrated like the Eucharist. He was sleepy, and deep down, in the pit of his warm, full belly, he knew that it would be all right.

  It was some kind of a test, the chest he hadn’t dared touch. But that was all right. Mr. Kastenhoff had forgotten about it. It wasn’t like the day in the shed with the veneers, when the old man hadn’t fed him until he’d gotten it right. Or the chairs, when he’d wrenched Vincent’s arm for finishing the carving—finished it well, but Kastenhoff wouldn’t admit that, since he hadn’t trained up yet. He looked at the little marks on the inside of his wrist. He felt the bruise still. It was a test, but he’d passed. He’d barely touched the chest, and he wouldn’t, unless they made him.

  He knew that soon his mother would return through the heavy door and pull off her gloves and tell him about her day. She’d been into town, which was a long way, even on the new paved roads. She would tell him how the bus had smelled to high heaven, full of all the people who didn’t know how to wash their selves, and how she’d had to fight through the thick crowds on Canal Street with the umbrella she carried for the purpose. She’d tell him about the doctor’s office and the jingle-bell streetcar that ambled down the avenue, about the market with its mountains of yams, its flats of crabs with their wiggling claws. She’d tell him about the ladies in the street with baskets on top of their heads, hollering Strawberries! and then she’d take a fried pie out of one of her bags and pull off its crinkling paper wrapper, hand it to him. He would bite into the crispy sugar crust, down into the lemon cream, and all would be right-side up again, everything just fine.

  But the man in the kitchen turned off the tap, touched his heart, flipped off the electric light, told him good night, and she
did not come. He sat in the dark and waited. The moon rose, but she did not come. He fell asleep with the bowl in his hands and woke with the bowl on the floor. She did not come, she did not come, and still she did not come.

  It was not until just before dawn, when the windows were brightening to gray, that he heard something on the path, in the shells. It was not a woman’s feet, not a person’s, but a creature’s—the soft padding of paws up the steps and onto the porch. Then he saw Sheba come through the door. It was strange, that a dog could come through a door that was not open, but not all that strange. Sheba. His good dog Sheba came across the room, her head down, her honey ears up like she was listening. She lay down beside him, resting her head on his knee, and it was lighter than air and warm as breath. She told him everything was all right, in the way dogs have of telling you things, and he knew what she meant, and he lay his hand on her silk-smooth head and patted her, until she decided she’d had her fill and went on off again.

  Saturday

  October 22

  Tess heard the door click open at the bottom of the stairs. Which daughter was it? And was she coming in or going out? She turned her cheek onto the cold patch of drool on the Dobies’ soft mattress, pushed herself up onto her elbows. Downstairs, the floorboards groaned, and the door closed again. Coming in. Across the hall, the springs of the sofa bed squeaked.

  “Cora?” Del’s voice struggled out of the padded dark.

  Tess got out of bed, tied her robe around her, and pushed her head through the door of the girls’ cluttered room. In the lamplight, Del wiped the back of her hand across her eyes.

  “I’ve got her, sweetheart,” she said, though her heart was pounding. “You go back to sleep.”

  Tess waited in the shadows at the top of the stairs. Below, Cora was shuffling across the entrance hall in her duck boots, her nightshirt glowing in the darkness. Tess could almost hear the slow waves of her sleep lapping at the steps. Waking sleepwalkers could leave them in a state of “sleep inertia;” the better course was to lead them gently back to bed.

  Tess edged out of the shadow and put her weight on the top step. The staircase moaned. Cora whipped her head to the side, her hair falling across her eyes. A mistake.