The Floating World: A Novel Read online

  Tess pulled herself back onto the landing, waited, holding her breath, as she had done over the side of the girls’ cribs on countless nights in their babyhood, her hands, her forearms slipping inch by inch from under their sleeping bodies. Cora looked up at Tess, then down at her own body. Her eyes seemed unfocused, and there was something off about her movements. Mania, she heard Alice whispering. Thorazine. It was neither of those things, but there was something seriously wrong nonetheless. Cora crouched on the rug, the nightshirt pooling out over her feet, and shook out her arms as if she was checking the fit of the sleeves. She held her hands out, examined them.

  Tess ran down the remaining steps and bent over beside her daughter. A rope of hair was plastered against Cora’s cheek, the end of it in her mouth, and Tess reached out to brush it back behind her ear, wishing that Cora’s light body would collapse against her, hoping that she would be strong enough to scoop her up in her arms and make it up the stairs. Tess’s fingers grazed her daughter’s cheek, and the touch made Cora jump. Her dilated pupils were sinkholes, edged in only the thinnest margin of blue.

  “You’re sleepwalking, darling. I’m sorry.” Her voice was so loud in the dark. “I’m sorry.”

  Cora kept looking at her hands, and so Tess took them in her own. She turned them palms down, palms up. The heels were skinned, as if she’d taken a tumble running down the sidewalk, and they were filthy, black dirt with the mildewed smell of the flood smeared across her palms, ground in under her fingernails.

  “Are you awake, my love?”

  “I’m not asleep.”

  “What happened to your hands?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s okay.” She tried to pull her daughter into her but Cora resisted. “It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s okay. Sleepwalking is normal. Doesn’t mean anything.”

  Cora snatched her hands back, stood up. “I’m not. I wasn’t.”

  “Then what were you up to, out there at night?”

  Cora stood still as a statue, a terra-cotta figure out of Egypt, perhaps, like the weeping Isis they’d seen at the Louvre—her cheekbones rising as if to meet her low brows, her wide ripe lips in an eternal pout, her hair a river in flood.

  “There’s mud on your boots,” Tess said.

  Cora looked down. Del had sworn up and down that she and those people had told Cora nothing about the dead woman in Troy Holyfield’s house, but Tess could sense a change. At dinner, with little Neesa running around, Cora had been so withdrawn as to be almost absent—she’d kept her eyes hooded at the table, even with those obnoxious people behaving as if she, Tess, were responsible for the fact that they would have to leave the city that night, when what she’d done was offer them a meal while they waited for their friend to drive in from Hammond to pick them up. The woman was affronted when she’d asked her to take off the child’s shoes, and the man had stuck his hand out at her, Stop!, when she’d offered to call the medical examiner about the corpse. Suspicious, angry. They’d all had mud splashed up their calves, just like Cora did now.

  “Do you remember where you went?”

  Instead of answering, Cora turned from her and walked towards the kitchen. Her fingernails played the balusters. Tess checked the lock on the front door, then followed. She flipped on the light. Cora was sitting on the floor. A craquelure of veins showed through her tan, translucent skin.

  Tess got down a mug, filled it with milk, popped it in the microwave. It orbited in the bright yellow light, showing its smiley-face front, its frowny-face back. Cora traced her thigh with her index finger. The microwave beeped, and Tess stirred in a spoonful of sugar, a drop of vanilla.

  “Why bother?” Cora said.

  “Why do I bother?” Tess crouched down and offered the mug. Cora’s hands closed around it so weakly that when Tess let go, she had to grab to keep it from falling. “Because I love you? I care about you?”

  “It’s pointless.” Cora drank, though, holding the mug in two hands like a child.

  “The point is, you need nourishment.”

  Nodding, Cora put the cup down, picked it up, put it down again, as if she was unsure of the solidity of the floor. “I’m sorry, but it just goes right through me.”

  Cora laughed, and for a millisecond, Tess thought that she must be hallucinating: Cora looking up into her face, her blue eyes reflecting the ceiling light, laughing.

  “Right through!” Her hands splashed out at her belly.

  Tess grabbed her wrists. Cora fought, twisting her hands so that Tess felt her skin pulling sideways across her bones, and then she stopped fighting, and the laughter dropped off of her face. Tess felt as though her organs were being pulled through her mouth.

  “You see? You can see it now, can’t you?”

  “What?” Tess shook her head. “Are you on something, Cora?”

  “What?”

  “Drugs. Are you on drugs?”

  “What?” She said it the same way she had before, flatly, as if she truly didn’t understand the meaning of the words.

  “You heard me. Are you on something? Anything.” She couldn’t say out loud that she almost wanted that to be the case. “Did Alice prescribe something for you?”

  “She said it wouldn’t do me any good.”

  “Alice didn’t say that.”

  Cora shook her head. “It would just go straight through.”

  “What do you mean by that, ‘go straight through’?”

  “It would go straight through.”

  “Where were you tonight, Cora?”

  “Nowhere.” She smiled, shaking her head. “Everywhere.”

  “Is it the same old—do you feel a pressure to walk, wander?”

  Cora shook her head, looked down.

  “Do you go walking every night?”

  She bent over her knees and pushed the mug away, then stayed like that, with her hands out and her cheek against the floor.

  “I see her.”

  “You see her? Who?”

  “No one.”

  “Oh, Cora.” Tess lay a hand on her back. “Do you see her now?”

  “No,” Cora said, her mouth pressed open, like a fish’s.

  “Where was she, this—” You did not say hallucination, did not say vision. “—this person that you saw?”

  “In the lake. In the water.”

  “You went to the lake? You walked all that way?”

  Under her palm, Cora’s back rose and fell with her breathing, and Tess reached up with her other hand for the phone she’d left on the counter — 5:10 a.m.

  “I’m calling Alice, honey,” she said. She punched in the numbers, but the phone hammered out the call-failed tone. “Did you discuss this with Alice?”

  Cora’s eyes were closed, her mouth stayed shut.

  “I think we need to get you medicine, my love,” she said, stroking her daughter’s back over and over and over. “We’ll get you help. We’ll make it all right.” She dialed her service, but still the line was down.

  JOE WASN’T SURE what he’d expected. That Del would come bounding towards him, arms outstretched? That she’d jump into his arms and bury her head in his chest? All he knew was that he hadn’t expected this glossy person to emerge from Cora’s car—patent leather boots up to her knees, mirrored glasses—then stand there surveying the ruined woods like some sort of insurance adjustor. The neutral smile on her face didn’t change as he came down the porch steps. She didn’t move. She was apparently unmoved.

  “The lovely Adelaide!” He held her tight, his arms around her hard deltoids, bony scapulae.

  “Hey, Daddy.”

  She sounded like herself, but when he pushed her back to arm’s length, there was that hard creature again. In the silver surfaces of her Ray-Bans, all he saw was a convex version of himself—this fading, disheveled thing.

  “I’m sorry I forgot to come get you the other day.”

  “It’s okay.” The smile was a pose. She never let anyone comfort her, never let them apologize. Instea
d, she’d say, It’s okay, Daddy, her voice cheerful like a little bird’s.

  “Del, Del, Del.” He patted her, two hands on two arms. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  She laughed. “I’m just glad to be out of that fucking city.”

  “Well, it took you long enough.”

  She pulled away and turned towards the house steps. “Two days. Just two days. You could have just as easily come to the south shore.” Their feet were loud in the shells.

  “Got a lot to do out here, you know,” he said.

  A-void-ing, Tess would sing-song. He lifted his chin. The last time he’d been to the Dobies’ he and Tess had fought so long and so hard that Cora had begun to sob. How can you trust me? Tess had laughed. The question is, Joe, how can you trust yourself?

  “How’s Cora?” he asked.

  Del shook her head. “Mom says she’s been wandering, you know, like she used to. Out there—” She cast her hand around the property as if she could see the drowned houses, the mud-cased streets beyond the trees. “She comes home all filthy with flood mud. She really freaked Mom out this morning, I think.”

  “Jesus.” Joe put his hands up to his brow, worked his fingers across his scalp. “But we trust your mother, right? She knows what to do?”

  “Obviously,” Del said, sarcastic, but he knew she believed it. “God, the poor trees.”

  He nodded. “And don’t forget your poor father who’s been chopping up those poor trees.”

  That morning, he’d moved most of the timber to the road so that she could drive up to the house. He watched her look at what was left—the splintered stumps spread among the needles, the tidy piles of logs. Those trees were her and Cora’s childhood. They had named them: The God Tree. The Little Girls’ Tree. The Big Girls’ Tree. The Wish Tree. The Ghost Tree. Cora had imagined subterranean pools that the pines dipped their roots in, and creatures, good and bad, that lived in the branches. She had drawn a double cosmology on newsprint—the Light Forest and under it the Dark Wood in shadowy reflection. Between them was the surface of a pool, sometimes a blue crayon river, that you could pass through only once, unless you knew the secret code. He could still see the two girls lying on their stomachs on the porch, Del’s feet kicking happily as Cora wound wild, ranging stories of the magical creatures who had lived on their land, precursors of the cormorants and coyotes, bears and fawns—the wars they’d fought, the adventures they’d had. The stories were strange, rambling, and dark, and the drawings were beautiful. Cora had stopped drawing in her teens, though, stopped telling stories, and now the drawings were probably disintegrating in one of those wet boxes they hadn’t dealt with yet, and he’d taken a chainsaw to the forests.

  The cabin door opened, and his father came out, his face pillow creased. “Afternoon!”

  Del stepped away from him, but then, remembering herself, stepped forward again and forced herself to kiss him on the cheek. “Hey, Papie.”

  He was holding the door open, his arm out to usher her in. “My,” he said. “Aren’t you a beautiful young thing.”

  She turned sideways to pass him, her bag dangling from her arm. “It’s Adelaide, Papie,” she said. “Your granddaughter.”

  The nastiness in her voice shocked him. Del and his father had been so close once upon a time. Even as a little girl, she loved to watch her Papie drive a chisel down the leg of a chair or pin glued pieces of veneer together in a vise, and Vincent, for his part, was gentler with her than he’d ever been with Joe or his brother, Vin. Maybe because she was a girl, he didn’t expect her to automatically know how to hold a plane or what an ogee was. He was almost patient. For a time, it had looked like he might actually teach her, that the tradition would continue on. With Del’s business sense, they might even open the shop in the Vieux Carré they liked to fantasize about, not far from where François Boisdoré had run his operation until he died in the late nineteenth century, one of the wealthiest Creoles of color in all of New Orleans. They had seen it so clearly, he and Del and Vincent; they’d had dinners where all they talked about were Royal Street rents and windows full of fine furniture, while Sylvia served rabbit fricassee from the big iron pot. Vincent had liked to tease Del that if she followed François’s example too closely, she’d end up selling coffins for some Haitian, and Del would counter that at least they’d be beautiful coffins, and he’d be a rich and handsome Haitian.

  But the summer Del came home from college everything ended. Though none of them knew it, the dementia had set in, and Vincent had forgotten he’d promised to let Del apprentice with him for the summer. He’d slammed the door of the workshop in her face. Del had been so angry—not sad or disappointed. Furious. Refused to visit, refused to talk to Papie, even on the phone. Later, when Vincent was diagnosed, her anger rounded off to a sort of embarrassed disgust, but that was no better. She didn’t deal well with weakness, his Del. It was the same thing with Cora—Del couldn’t tolerate her sister’s sensitivity, her flights of fancy, not now that they were supposed to be all grown up. She wanted to shove reality down Cora’s throat, and, like her mother, she thought Papie should just be discarded now that he was sick and old. Weakness was not something the Eshleman women really knew how to forgive.

  Del was scowling now as she stomped with her bag up the stairs to the room she’d shared with her sister since they’d put the addition on, and he followed her, ready with his talking-to, but she had scuttled up the stairs too quickly, slammed herself in the bathroom, and he hesitated halfway up, stretching his calves on the riser.

  Above the handrail, his mother had hung the second-string family photos in a long diagonal line. He was face to face now with one, time-stamped 1998, of the girls sitting side by side on top of a ladder somewhere on Basin Street, Mardi Gras Day. Del was dressed as Monica Lewinsky, but Cora, twenty-two then, was still wearing fairy princess wings. He looked into her little square face, trying to remember that what was happening to her now was nothing that they hadn’t always known would happen when she was eventually confronted with the world. Cora had never been strong, had never been able to shrug things off, had never been able to pretend something was tolerable when it wasn’t. In every new place they stayed—in hotel rooms and friends’ houses and here, upstairs, when the girls’ rooms were new—he’d had to assure her that she was protected—locks, guns, alarm—that he’d always keep her safe. And he had, for a time, managed that trick of making her believe it: look at her, still in braces, sitting with a book in the crook of the magnolia tree.

  Joe put both hands on the banister, breathed. He could admit that he had not been able to shelter her forever, that he never would have been able to. He could admit that the magnolia tree was inside the house now, and that these photographs were all they had left. All of the others, the boxes and boxes of Fox Foto envelopes stuffed with an almost monthly record of the girls’ childhoods had been in his studio (Tess had packed her mother’s silver, though, very carefully) and now they were gone. Del wanted him to drive into the city, lend them a hand. But was he wrong to want to hold on to the safety he had left? Was he wrong not to want to pluck the ruined prints out of the tree and admire the way the rain had washed away the pigments and pulled up the metals and buckled the paper? There were certain lost pictures he wanted to remember as they had been. Like the one of Andy Roche, who had passed away just six weeks before Joe’s mother had: Andy was laughing so hard he had to hold onto Tess’s shoulder for support. There was the series from their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, when they’d reconvened the bridal party at Dooky Chase—it was the last time they’d all been together, Madge hanging onto Tess’s right arm and Andy somewhere to his left, and Vin had brought him a fake moustache, and Tess had worn a toilet paper veil which she had fluffed mock-vainly all night. There were pictures of Tess’s sweet mother smiling at him as he took her picture, and the video that Cora had done as a school project, in which his own mother had explained how to make her duck gumbo, starting with how you pluck the bird. There was the sh
ot in which Del looked skeptically up at Minnie Mouse, too old for Disney World even at five, and the one that showed Cora sitting among boxes on the floor of her new house in Gentilly grinning like a child, and a square fading portrait of Tess in her lace graduation gown with a big white bow in her bronze-flecked hair. If he couldn’t point out to his grandchildren—Look, see how your mother scowled at me? or Here’s the beach where we went on vacation.—he wanted at least to remember those things true. God, my friend Andy could laugh. Wasn’t that just a perfect day.

  At the top of the stairs, the bathroom door opened, and Del came out onto the landing, toweling her face dry. When she dropped her hands, his eyes stayed with the cloth, expecting her face to be printed there perhaps, perhaps not wanting to look. She’d been crying, and he went to her, taking the stairs two at a time.

  Del stood in the bright rectangle of the open door, and as Joe made his way up, he burned the image into his memory: the redness of his daughter’s eyes, the embarrassed, expectant frown on her lips, the spots of wet on her shirt. There was a scab on her knee where she must have cut herself on pavement, and her hands went out, waiting to embrace him, still her daddy’s little girl.

  “YESTERDAY WE WENT too far,” Alice was saying on the phone. “I understand you’re coming from a place of pure maternal concern, but I shouldn’t have allowed a preliminary meeting. It was damaging, and now you’re trying to come back into our space.”

  Tess smiled at the mud-encrusted shambles of her office, the sodden couch, the box of tissues crushed under a swollen copy of the DSM. Voici: “the hermetic, unchanging therapeutic environment.” How long were they going to keep pretending such a thing could exist, or even that it should?

  “I’m not asking you to break privilege, Alice. I’m just saying—” Her voice was pinched from breathing the mildewed air, and she coughed, then inhaled hard, feeling the tiny burrs of mold pricking at her lungs. “I want you to reevaluate whether you should prescribe something.”