Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (34 page)

The lot was empty except for one car, and it wasn’t Sylvia’s. He looked at his watch—4:40. She must be running late, too.

He debated about whether to sit outside in the car and wait for her, but then decided to go into the church. He found a glass side door open and followed the wood-paneled hallway to a spartanlooking room with drop-ceiling tiles and about half a dozen steel tables and folding chairs set up on the far side—the room where church teas, dinners, and prayer meetings were held.

Built in the late sixties, this was the church where Julian had grown up, where his mother (and later, Sylvia) had sung in the women’s chorus. He hadn’t been inside these doors since he was a child. Even the times when Julian had come back to visit his father over the past few years—Christmases, Easters, Thanksgivings—Julian would pass on Simon’s invitations to church service, preferring to stay in and practice. He wasn’t much of a churchgoer, much to Simon’s disappointment. But so much had changed; since the storm and Simon’s disappearance, it seemed more than once he’d found himself with a fervent prayer on his lips.

He’d just pulled one of the folding chairs out from the table and was about to sit down where he heard someone from the direction of the back door.

“Anybody here? Can we get some help with these boxes?”

A woman’s voice. Sylvia.

Julian walked back out toward the glass doors leading to the parking lot.

“Oh, great. Somebody’s in here,” he heard her yell to someone behind her.

Loaded down with several corrugated cardboard boxes full of food and supplies, Sylvia came inside as Julian opened the glass door.

“Here, let me get those.” Julian took the three boxes from her.

“Julian!” Sylvia said. “I didn’t remember what your rental looked like. Sorry we’re a little late.”

It took him a moment to spot Velmyra, just getting out of her own car. She wore a white sundress, white sandals, and on seeing him, her face lit up in a full smile.

“You’re here!” she said. “I didn’t even see your car.”

Once again, she’d surprised him; she seemed to have a way of just appearing. And this time, it was at the perfect time. The last couple of days had been a whirlwind of mind-bending activity, and not until he saw her did he realize he hadn’t really had much reason to smile since he saw a catfish dangling at the end of his line, two days ago.

Before they went back to the car for the remaining twenty or so boxes, she gushed an apology. She was so sorry she hadn’t returned his calls: her folks had been so stressed about the house, and the insurance company was giving them grief, one of her parents’ neighbors was still missing, and she’d finally gotten a plumber to agree to come to her house, but he’d never shown up.

He held the door open for her as they made another trip to the car.

“You look great,” he said, grateful she’d worn that dress, but knowing it wouldn’t have mattered what she wore.

She was dead tired, she said, so she decided to dress up a little, hoping it would buoy her spirits. As they brought in more boxes, she went on chatting to him about the events of the last couple of days—her eyes flashing, her hands in motion—while Sylvia busily arranged boxes on the table according to neighborhood streets, writing addresses on each one. Julian listened quietly, his face stuck in a slightly vapid smile. He couldn’t remember being so happy to see somebody in a long time.

Velmyra’s eyes, he thought, had always been expressive. He could always look at them and tell what she’d been going through. Today, they told a story of sleepless nights, stress, worry, and a fierce defiance in the face of whatever obstacles she’d encountered.

Dealing with her parents, her relatives and neighbors, and watching the news, she had felt herself slipping into depression, she said. And when she saw her mother’s prescription bottle of Xanax, she almost reached for one.

“But I decided to pull out my paints instead.”

Her eyes brightened as she told Julian about the rush of energy and creativity she’d had; she couldn’t get the paint on the canvas fast enough. It was like an elixir. “I mean, I don’t know if the stuff I’m doing is any good. But I don’t care. It’s fun again, you know? And it’s keeping me from losing my mind.”

She paused, took a long, deep breath. “Anyway, listen to me, going on and on. How are you doing?”

He’d missed her like crazy, not fully realizing it until this moment. Several times in the last couple of days, at the oddest moments (sitting in Nathan Larouchette’s office, playing in the funeral procession, listening to the reading of the will) his mind had drifted back to the small cabin at Silver Creek, the narrow brass bed that creaked and groaned beneath their weight. The soft rub of her hair against the side of his face. Her calming voice as her hand stroked the knotted muscles in his back. And a million other little things that added up to a sum that equaled love.

Hurricanes and other acts of God had a way of clarifying things; clearing away the grimy film of uncertainty, they polished everything to shine, wholly reassessed, in new light. This is important, that is not. That has value, this has none. Silver Creek, his father, Velmyra. His career, even. Everything looked different after the waters had been drained away. Everything. So simple now: the things that really mattered were within his easiest reach, the things he could reach out and touch, but hadn’t.

So he reached out now, brought her shoulders into his, and hugged her.

How was he doing? “Better.” He closed his eyes, smiled. “Now.”

I
t was one of those autumn days in New Orleans—the air crisper and dryer with the teasing hint of fall, the vast blue shock of sky broken with cottony puffs of slow-motion clouds—that long sufferers of the city’s famously intense summer humidity would have called “beautiful,” had there not been a flood that suspended use of that word indefinitely. It seemed nothing was beautiful here now, and nothing would be for a while.

With the Neon piled high with boxes of food and supplies for the returning congregants of Blessed Redeemer, Julian and Vel drove to the relatively mildly flooded Upper Ninth Ward, where the houses had only seen four or so feet of water, to make calls to families on the lists.

As they wheeled through the neighborhoods, they each had so much to share with the other that they almost spoke at once. After Vel covered all the details of her family’s trials over the last couple of days, it was Julian’s turn. So much had happened, he said, he didn’t know where to start. Nathan Larouchette’s condescending offer did not surprise her, nor did the death of Matthew Parmenter, which Sylvia had told her about. But Parmenter had actually left his house and ownership of the red beans and rice mix to Simon? She was stunned.

“What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

“With what?”

“The house, of course.”

He pondered a moment. “To tell you the truth, I don’t have a clue.”

And he hadn’t. Hearing the words at the reading of the will had been surreal. If Julian was now the owner of a million-dollar mansion and a lucrative food enterprise, he sure didn’t feel like it. Everything lately felt like a dream, and this latest development felt no more real than the flood that had destroyed so much of the city.

But at least here in the Upper Ninth, the houses, girdled to their waists with water lines, still stood. Their first stop was the home of the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Tubman Miles. Both born in New Orleans and in their late seventies, the former electrician and hairdresser had had hopes of living out the remainder of their retirement years in close proximity to their grandchildren and a great-grandchild, who lived less than three miles away in a house built by Tubman Miles’s father in the Lower Ninth Ward. When the Industrial Canal levee burst, the flooding waters slid the house off its foundation, and it landed in a neighbor’s yard. The Miles’s daughter, son-in-law, and their four children had all evacuated to Illinois, and didn’t plan to return.

Mrs. Miles, a small, angular woman with finely sculpted cheekbones and a short gray Afro, stood in the mud-covered front yard while Tubman, facemask strapped on, came out of the pink, Creole-style one-story with a box of sludge-covered items.

“Julian Fortier! Is that you, baby?” Mrs. Miles’s face broke into a wide smile.

She hugged him and asked about his father. He shrugged and told her what he knew: nothing. He left the box with her and she thanked him with a promise: “I’ma keep prayin’ for your daddy.”

Julian got back in the car quietly. “They seem OK,” he said to Velmyra, and then wondered what he had meant by that. If being OK meant they were still standing, then they were. But the deep frowns in their foreheads stuck in his mind, and he could only imagine the huge struggles ahead for the aging couple.

“They’ll be all right,” Velmyra said. “They look like the kind who don’t give up easily.” She let out a thoughtful sigh. “The neighborhood’ll come back, better than ever. You’ll see.”

He said nothing. They drove on to the other seven houses on the block to find, here and there, neighbors sitting on their porches, fanning themselves, their faces grim masks of puzzlement, despair, resignation. Occasionally there’d be a commiserating huddle of two or three in a yard before piles of debris, bodies slack in postures of fatigue, or sometimes defiantly erect, hands on their hips or flailing as they shared with their neighbors the day’s travails.

They drove on through block after block of emptiness, houses standing but water damaged and clearly vacant since the hurricane. Each yard, it seemed, contained towers of debris so large they often overshadowed the houses themselves. When someone was home, they delivered the boxes in person, accepting the “bless yous” and “thank yous” of the grateful church members. When they were not at home but known to be in town they left the boxes on porches with a note attached: “From your family at Blessed Redeemer—may God bless you and keep you well.”

Street after street of houses with their own story inside of lives shaken to the core. An unearthly silence presided where there had been the vital sounds of a neighborhood: kids on bicycles, trash trucks trudging through, and car stereos amped up a little too loud. Julian shook his head, an anger he hadn’t felt before rising in him like fever. This place was a ghost town now.

After the first house in the next block, Velmyra said, “I mean, I’m not saying it won’t take a lot of work to bring the place back, but it’ll happen.”

Julian turned to look out his window. “Yeah. Well. If you say so.”

Velmyra turned sharply to look at him.

“You don’t think the city can come back?”

He took in a deep breath. He didn’t really want to get into this, remembering that Velmyra had always been a little blinded by optimism. At least, he’d thought so. But today, seeing all the misery in the neighborhood, he felt like telling the truth, the way he saw it.

“Come back? Back to what? The way it was before?”

And once he started, he couldn’t pull back. There was the crime. The corruption. The schools. The way they treated the musicians and the lousy pay. And that was all
before
the storm. How much worse would it be now? And even if the city came back completely, which now looked doubtful, it would only be back to the same inadequate place. It would still be the wrong city for anybody with real ambition.

“I mean, look at Grady Casey. The cat is a freakin’
genius.
What’s he doing? Playing at the Embassy Suites…”

“Wait a minute.” Ice stiffened Velmyra’s tone. “What if everybody felt that way—the way you do? What if everybody with talent, with potential, left? Who would teach the kids art and music, who’d give them the opportunities we had?

“Who’d preserve the culture? The history? This city is what
we
make it, and it can only be as good as the people who are willing to stay. And believe it or not, Julian, a lot of people were pretty damn happy here, and some were even successful.” She turned to him. “
I
stayed, OK?”

What had he just walked into? He could feel the heat from her eyes without looking. He held up a hand, partly in apology, partly to stop the torrent of anger coming toward him.

“I didn’t mean you…”

As he steered around the corner a little too fast, a stray cat ran from one of the vacant houses and dashed in front of the car; Julian slammed his brakes as the frightened cat scampered away and into another yard across the street. His heart raced. He pulled to the curb and turned off the engine.

He lowered his head, took a deep breath, then turned to her. “Look, there’s no reason for us to have an argument. I was just saying…”

She cut him off. “You want to know why we broke up?
This.
This is why.”

He fell silent. Closed his eyes, exhaled in a tired huff. “Vel. Come on. Let’s not do this…”

She inhaled a short breath. Her eyes quieted, her voice softened. “Remember how we talked about where we would live? You were having a fit to go to New York. I wanted to stay here. You kept saying, ‘I want more than I can find here.’ And I said, ‘Why not stay and help make this city a place where people like you would want to stay?’ And you said…”

“I know what I said.”

“You said…”

“…I wasn’t up to it.”

“Right. You weren’t up to it.”

A moment passed, as both stared through the windshield in front of them.

Looking down, Julian spoke, his voice smaller, his words pointed, emphatic. “I just wanted you to come to New York with me. I wanted us to be together. I thought we could have made a good life there. If you’d really loved me…”

Her hand shot up, a stop sign in his face. “Hold it right there. Why does it have to be about
my
not moving to New York? I asked you to stay—not forever, just a while longer while we sorted things out. If you loved
me
like you said you did…”

“I did love you.”

“But not enough to stay.” She sighed heavily.

Julian’s breathing was tight as he guided the car back to the church, and he ran his hand along the side of his neck where the muscles had bunched together in a spasm. This was not what he wanted. There were more boxes to deliver, but he was exhausted, and he couldn’t imagine that Velmyra would want to stay in this car any longer than he did. This little jaunt was over. How did this happen? He backtracked in his head, trying to remember how it had gotten out of hand.