She ate a cold meal from a tin and drank just enough of her store of water to wash it down before the night came on. And a darker night she couldn’t remember, reaching back to her childhood before they had the magic of electricity and had only the older magic of fire. But now she made do without either, and more stars than she remembered ever shining now shone over her drowned neighborhood. Betsy had taken her clouds inland and left the sky clear.
With her back to the wall, she noted the stillness once darkness settled, but that wouldn’t hold for long. Anger and fear pulsed out from islands, still inhabited—some by the ghosts of the recently dead. The press of that all around worked on her, when she could offer no help. Made her withdraw. For distraction, she studied the stars to see what patterns she might find, just as she liked to do with clouds, or the grain of wood, or the brown baked crust on bread. With so many new stars to see, there were more pictures to see. There were stars so fine and so near one another that they almost couldn’t be seen for themselves as individual points; not if you looked straight at them. They were like shimmering fabric or a fine wash of pearliness against the black of the void. And when they truly began to flow across the sky as if guided by an artist’s brush, then Celeste knew she had let herself flow off into a dream state.
“What does it mean?” asked the bear.
“I can’t be sure, but I think it means I’ve got work to do if I want to keep this from happening again. Aurore was right. I wasn’t ready to do what I’d hoped to do. I learned some things, listening to Betsy and being there to feel her pass. Things I couldn’t have seen or felt watching from far off. Not that I mean to repeat the experience.”
“And you’ve thrown off the ghost,” the bear offered.
“Maybe I have,” Celeste said. “A long time coming, but more than welcome. I feel up to almost anything now.”
In the morning, she was pulled out of sleep by familiar voices calling her name.
“Miss Dubois, are you in there?” A man’s voice.
“Celeste!” called a woman. “I’ve been through enough without having to wade in there to bring you out! Wake up and show yourself!”
Celeste woke with difficulty and fumbled over to the closed hatch in the half-light of the attic. It was already uncomfortably hot and she couldn’t remember having closed the window behind herself. So when she threw open the hatch, the light was dazzling and the hot air poured out. She squinted and shielded her eyes from the brightness as she climbed out onto the roof of her porch. She found George and Aurore in one boat and Nathan in another.
“I told you she was alright,” Nathan was saying.
Celeste sat at the edge of the roof and smoothed out her wrinkled dress. She yawned enormously and wiped the last of the sleep from her eyes.
“Here the world is all but drowned and you’re sleeping late,” Aurore said.
“We’ve come to take you out of here,” George explained in a tone that suggested there would be no arguments.
But Celeste was arguing. “What about everyone else? Are they finding a way out?”
“It’s no use waiting for the water to go down,” George said. “Might be days more or even a week I hear. People are making their way out, or at least to dry shelters. You and Nathan are the last ones from the bakery still here, and he’s leaving too, once you leave with us. I’m taking you back with me to your aunt’s house. She’s been worried stiff.”
“That’s something I’d want to see with my own eyes,” Celeste replied.
“Then you’ll need to get a move on, friend,” Aurore said. “You’ve been the good captain but it’s time to leave the sinking ship. Collect what you need to bring along but mind the size of this boat. We can’t handle much.”
Something passed overhead, churning the air with its great rotor, drifting over the rooftops like a loud and bloated dragonfly. Loud and drab, but a hopeful sight none-the-less. Nathan was pointing to the helicopter and yelling to be heard over it.
“The army or the Guard,” he shouted. “Maybe hauling folks out or hauling food in.”
“So there’s help coming?” Celeste called.
“I would hope so,” Aurore said.
Celeste crouched at the bow and watched the water, an unhealthy looking soup full of the filth from a city and the churned up muck from lake and canal. The thought of wading through it made her stomach turn, but there were plenty out there doing just that. Mostly, they had no choice. And she thought too how this same water was even now standing in her own house. The cleaning up would drag on and on. Best not to think about that until it was time.
Celeste watched as a rainbow colored slick of oil drifted by. Later, there was the body of a cat, stiff and swollen, and for one frightening instant she thought she glimpsed a face below the water, a pale, pained face that brought the ghost to mind, but then it was gone; whatever it might have been. Though she had slept long and deeply during the night, she felt tired, and the sunlight reflecting on the water hurt her eyes. But she kept her watch until they reached the landing.
Tears
Betsy left her mark in many ways; almost as many ways as there were people she touched. People died in the storm and the flood, some moved away after it was over. They’d had enough or had nothing left to keep them there. New Orleans took her licks and picked herself back up again. She was good at that. She had to be.
The bakery was mostly untouched and that made it easier for Celeste to concentrate on her own house, which was a mess. The pumps took the water back out within a few days on her street, but the flood left a calling card that was hard to throw out. Mud and all manner of filth coated the inside of her home, leaving a foul waterline that resisted cleaning, like a bad memory resists forgetting. Much was discarded, and what was left required washing and sweeping and days and days worth of drying air, flowing in from the windows and out through the attic hatch. Slow, slow work that drained her of vitality and cheer.
She was at low ebb when she spilled a bucket of soapy water accidentally and that one simple thing set her temper loose. She flew about the room, flinging whatever came to hand. Hurricane Celeste raged. The language was skillful and blistering. Nothing of the sort had burst out of her since she was a child, and she wielded her mop like a broadsword, slaying innocent dishware on the table and at least one guilty fly on the wall before flinging the mop away to strike a wet thud against the front door, slamming it closed. She followed it there, snatching the door back open again and striding out onto her porch where she meant to scream out the most vile words she could conjure up from memory if not from usage—and they would have been brilliantly vile.
She caught herself when she saw her neighbor, Miss Dee, seated on her own porch across the street. But she was sitting all wrong. There was a slump that wasn’t rest. Not the rest of sleep or even a nap. Celeste ran to her.
“The house will never be the same,” she had told Celeste only the day before. Neighbors had joined in to help her clean since she had no family left and too little money to get help or to move out. “It’s like all the memories were washed away and only the stink of the flood is left.” So she had spent as much of her days as she could out on her porch, only going inside when she had to.
More neighbors came over after Celeste arrived. Someone called for an ambulance to claim the body, but as they waited, no one talked of moving Miss Dee back indoors, knowing she’d chosen to be on the porch, whether or not she figured she would pass away there.
Celeste returned home after the ambulance pulled away. She walked straight through the house to sit on the back stoop and cry like she wouldn’t allow herself to do while waiting with Miss Dee. Just more of all that bottled up stuff inside her. Rage and now sorrow. The flood had been one bad thing, now here was another with the loss of her old neighbor.
“Bad things come in threes,” as Odette sometimes said.
Celeste sighed at the end of so many tears. It was best for her damp house that she had shed them out back. She went inside to make ame
nds with her mop and count her dinnerware.
Disposition
Celeste sat in Odette’s Parlor, tapping on the arm of the chair, hearing the murmur of voices from the other room but not listening to what was said. Less than a month had passed since she had sat in this same chair, stroking Odette’s arthritic hand while reading to her. She’d read to her for years—since she had been a young woman.
A funeral. Meeting relatives she never met before and had no clue how they were kin; all of them in town to pay their respects to Odette. That part was okay, but not the part when everyone learned that Odette had left her nice house to Celeste. Everything else would be handled by sale of estate and the proceeds parceled out to the family by a formula laid out most specifically by Odette in her ironclad Last Will and Testament. A surprise to everyone, especially Celeste.
Her inclination had been to forgo attending the estate sale, but Odette’s Will made it plain she was to attend, and Celeste wasn’t about to cross Odette on that point; even a late Odette. But George had expressed an interest in going and maybe picking up an item or two for his family, so she told him when to be at her house with his truck. They arrived early to a throng of people, only a few of them family or others she recognized from the funeral. Most of the relatives had huffed off back home, but there were still the ones from Birmingham, loitering and complaining in the front room. She dreaded moments with them. Only their little boy, Clarence was pleasant, though painfully shy.
Celeste pushed through the crowd, hoping for a quiet corner somewhere to wait it all out and, from habit, passing straight back to the Library. It was quieter there—maybe because it was a Library and people naturally got quiet in a Library, or maybe because there wasn’t as much there for people to pick over and buy. The desk already sported a sold tag. The spot where she had done her earliest New Orleans artwork. The chairs where she and Odette would sit for their readings still sat together but had been spoken for and would be gone the next day, and little hand written signs were also placed along the bookshelves at roughly eye level. Each book cost a quarter. You could have the lot for two hundred and fifty dollars. Celeste did a quick estimation and figured Odette hadn’t planned on much of a bulk discount. Books weren’t beans to Odette.
A studious looking man—studious, or at least thoughtful—was looking the books over and had already selected two from those he could reach. Two books getting ready to leave the flock, she thought sadly. And for some reason, it occurred to her that all those books packed in so close to each other, were like the people who made up the city, and sometimes a few would leave, by death or by choice. With Odette gone, any holes in the ranks of those books would never be filled.
Without Odette…
Somewhere up on the shelves was the Book of Odette, penned by her and placed somewhere specific but unrevealed. Should someone come in and buy the lot, it would go away and only be found by someone, someday and thought a quaint oddity. And she couldn’t let that happen. She’d noticed the man and woman seated at the table in the hallway collecting payments and went to them now, approaching the woman since she’d been to Dubois’ and would know her and know her connection to Odette.
“I’ll take all the books in the Library,” she told the woman. “Two hundred and fifty for all of them is what the sign says.”
The man with the two books approached the man at the table, and Celeste thought for a moment about trying to beg or buy them from him, but she held herself back. Those had been thoughtful choices and would be in good hands. Better to let them go their way.
The woman rose, taking a little Sold sign and following Celeste back to the Library. She accepted a check from Celeste and only then confessed that she doubted they’d have sold even half, much less everything at once. By the next day, the books might have been half that much. Celeste knew that couldn’t be helped. The books had to stay. Too many associations to let them get away.
So the morning had gone—a whirlwind and then a quieter afternoon as she steered clear of everyone as best she could and fought back the temptation to pick up more of Odette’s things. Once there wasn’t anything left unsold in the Library, no one much came back that way, and she sat in one of the spoken-for chairs.
George entered the room looking dazed and a little stiff. He slumped into the chair beside her. She took his left hand and began to rub it.
“It’s been some years since you used your hands for much more than paper work,” she said. “Paper work, changing diapers, shaking hands with customers…”
“Not to mention crossing forty,” he added.
Still touching his hand, she sensed some impatience. He was more than ready to head home—get back to his family. “You need to get home,” she said. “I think I’ll stay here tonight.”
“I don’t think they left you a bed to sleep on. The big sofa’s gone as well. About all you’ll have is a chair to curl up in. Sure you want to do that?”
“I’ll be fine. May curl up in a chair or on one of Odette’s fine rugs—curl up with a book. Always liked the feel of those Asian rugs she had.”
He rose and dug a fist into his low back. “I’ll swing by in the morning with a truck and some help to load up that big dresser thing I bought. Might see if Nathan can come too so I can give him the heavy end coming down those stairs.”
“You do that. I’ll wait around till you show up.”
“Sure you’ll be alright here alone?”
“I’ll be fine. Any ghost I might see wouldn’t be a stranger.”
There was no ghost, but there was the book. She found it easily enough and might have saved herself two hundred and fifty dollars had she only given herself a little time before reacting. Still, she didn’t have a single reservation over what she’d done. She wanted them here and not scattered like people blown by a strong wind.
The spine of the book was leather like most of the rest, but there was no writing there of any kind. Maybe that’s what drew her to it, or maybe it was at the height Odette could reach with ease, or just maybe, Celeste could feel a sense of Odette most strongly there. She took it to the remaining spoken-for chair, folded her legs beneath her, opened up to the first hand written page and read Odette’s unmistakable long hand.
It was addressed to Celeste’s on the very first page,
Your Odette
For Celeste Dubois
She turned the page, and with the first sentence, she was offered up a revelation.
It has always been a source of pride to have you call me your Aunt—your Great Aunt, but the truth is, Celeste, I am not your aunt at all, great or otherwise, though I am bound to you and your family closer than I am to my own.
Celeste had to read that one three times before she could read further.
There are lines by blood and lines by purpose, and the latter can be stronger than the former, regardless of what old wisdom might say. I have spent the better portion of my life teaching your family and walking beside them through all these years, good and bad, knowing that we all need a champion and a guide if we hope to find our feet along that path that leads ahead, and not down a broken road to being lost. Hard though your parents worked and good as their hearts might have been, that lost road might have claimed them. Finding them and doing what I could, kept me off that lost road as well. That is how it works, Celeste.
Though I am not your aunt, I owe my place in your life to your true aunt who died before you or even Augustin were born. Your mother’s sister, Beatrice. Her twin sister, of whom you may have heard from your father, but perhaps not the entire story. To provide that missing part, I will first tell you my own story…
Odette had lived in New Orleans all her life. Had come from a family that worked its way up from basic trades to owning shops and dealing in properties. Always industrious, Odette claimed she was the dimmest of the daughters, but learned fast and seized opportunities like a proper thief. She married well; to a Creole man who took her to Paris for education and polish. Never wanted children and never
had any. Maneuvered through what levels of society were open to her, but claimed she’d never done it on anyone else’s neck on the way up—at least not that she knew of or had planned that way.
Everything in her life, all lined up and marching along like a picture perfect parade and then the Yellow Fever took the music right out of it—or changed the tune. Never touched her. Not directly, but too close. It took her husband after a hard fight. He was a Catholic man and let the Good Sisters tend to him in his struggle. A close call, and the best effort anyone could have made, but close wasn’t good enough.
Odette was never devout to the depth her husband was. A good Catholic but not the best, as she would say. But she befriended a young sister, just a novice in the order that tended to her husband and nearly pulled him out of harm’s way. This young woman in particular had stayed with him more than anyone except Odette herself. They grew close while they kept watch and fought the best fight they could for him. Odette got to know her like family. Learned about her family out west of New Orleans. A sister and her husband; poor and illiterate, and that sister resented how she’d left her for the church and the city. They’d been close; as close as twins tend to be. The young novice was just waiting for that hurt to easy enough to open up the door again.
Yellow Fever took her off before that time could come around, locking that door for good. Death points out the flaw in putting off. But Odette knew about Death and the side door he’d leave open, if one was determined to find it. She tracked down the resentful sister and gave her back the twin she’d lost, at least the truth of her. She went one better and took the family on as her charge—repayment for the devotion shown to her husband, even though it came to nothing but the death of patient and nurse. But much more than nothing when you looked down the years and what came of those connections.
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