Rain whipped against the windows, pounding on the roof. For a moment the roar outside magnified the small noises inside: boxes bumped and shifted; windows rattled all around. It was like intense music, overwhelming with its sound and hypnotic rhythm. Reesie tapped her toe to the strange beat, and tried to imagine that she was somewhere else. Anywhere else.
* * *
Orlando was kissing her in Audubon Park, one of the most beautiful places in New Orleans. She was wearing a brilliant blue sundress that she’d designed.… But they were wrenched away from each other by some force she couldn’t see. Next she was at the Audubon Zoo, sailing around on the carousel and looking frantically for the brown speck that would be Orlando, but she couldn’t find him as the ride spun faster and faster.
“Hey! Open up! Open up! Let me in! Anybody in there?” Orlando was yelling.… How in the world could she let him in to the carousel? How loud could that boy get?
“Open up!”
Reesie jumped. She’d been asleep.
“Teresa!” Miss Martine was shaking her shoulder. “Wake up, child, there’s somebody at the door, and I’m too stiff to get up.”
Reesie blinked awake. The wind had stopped.
Her back ached; her shoulders and legs ached. The door chimes were making her head ache. But before she moved, she looked at Miss Martine.
“What happened? Is the hurricane over?” Reesie knew that there was a calm spot in the middle of every hurricane, and as the storm passed over land, that eye in the center could fool you.
The doorbell chimes had been joined by furious banging.
“It’s over,” Miss Martine said. “Go on, now. See who it is!”
“We’re in here!” Reesie shouted. “I’m coming!” Maybe it was her father, she thought. She moved a little faster, clumsily unbolting all Miss Martine’s security locks and throwing the door open.
Standing there like a giant wet puppy with dreadlocks was Orlando’s missing brother, André.
Chapter Ten
AUGUST 29, 5:30 AM
Reesie was so shocked and angry that she barely noticed her feet squishing into the carpet. “Where have you been?” Reesie frowned at him.
“Well, Reesie Boone,” he drawled, “this ain’t your house! What’re you doin’ here? And anyway, can’t a brother come in and get hisself dry?”
Before Reesie could answer, Miss Martine spoke out.
“You watch that attitude, André Knight! This is my house!”
Dré’s shoulders immediately shot from slumped to straight.
“Oh! Sorry ’bout that, Miss M. I just came by to check on you.…” Dré stepped in, and a girl appeared behind him.
She was tall and skinny, wearing crazy high platform heels and a tight white dress splashed with creamy flowers. She wore a scarf wrapped around her head like a turban, which Reesie thought was actually kind of cute, and glitter sparkled along with the water drops on her long fake eyelashes.
The pair slipped in the door quickly, but not before Reesie caught a glimpse outdoors. It was still raining, and all she could see was the top of a big tree that the wind must have blown down, and the wires of a split telephone pole snaking across the yard.
“Teresa, can you get those blinds open over there?” Miss Martine called to her.
Reesie knelt on the couch and let more of the weak light in. Then she pulled out her phone and tried her mother’s number.
She was stunned when her mother picked up on the first ring.
“Mama!” Every muscle in Reesie’s body relaxed.
“Reesie! Are you okay? Happy birthday, baby!”
Reesie swallowed hard. She was thirteen! She’d waited so long, expecting to feel special on this birthday. And now?
“Everything … all right … Miss Simon?” Her mother’s words were drowned out by loud static.
“Yes, but—”
“Moved patients … Your father knows where you are.… Love you—” The signal was gone. Reesie took a deep breath and turned on Dré.
“Orlando was going crazy looking for you! Uncle Jimmy evacuated to Houston.”
“I figured.” Dré shrugged. “We went to the house yesterday, and they were all gone. I know Jimmy wasn’t wastin’ time lookin’ for me.”
“That’s not true…,” Reesie began.
Dré waved her quiet. “I know my uncle, Reesie Boone. You don’t!”
“Why is that any of her business?” the girl snapped. She shifted her body closer to Dré’s. Reesie wanted to yell back that it wasn’t her business either—but she pressed her lips shut tight.
“S’alright, boo,” Dré said. “I’ve been knowin’ Reesie Boone since she and my baby brother were crumb snatchers. We can tell her and Miss M.” He grinned in the dim light.
“Tell us what?” Reesie asked.
“Me and Tree—Eritrea—we went and got married Friday. We’ve been celebrating for three days!”
“Married,” Miss Martine repeated slowly.
“Married?” Reesie squealed. “But you’re only nineteen, same as Junior! That’s—that’s—you’re—”
“Yeah, married.” Eritrea wiggled her long fingers in Reesie’s direction. “See?” A slim silver band reflected the light from the window blinds.
“How could you do something like that without even telling your own brother?” Reesie demanded. “I wouldn’t ever forgive Junior if he pulled a stunt like this!”
“I feel bad about it, ’cause Orlando’s my boy. But Jimmy don’t have no love for me. Nothin’ I ever do is right for him!”
“We’re the only family we need, right, baby?” Eritrea pulled Dré close and gave Reesie a look that dared her to say something.
“André!” Miss Martine spoke sharply, flicking on her flashlight. “That storm blew in part of the roof. Come on with me and look at it.”
“Right, Miss M!” Dré quickly separated himself from Eritrea.
Reesie had always thought of Dré as funny and a little goofy. Junior had called him flaky when he dropped out of high school. But Orlando said Dré had gotten his GED and a steady job.
“You can’t believe Dré has a wife, can you?” Eritrea whispered.
Reesie rolled her eyes. “I’m not even thinking about it,” she lied, easing past Eritrea toward the short hall that led to the bedrooms.
“Well, I’ll be! My poor house!” Miss Martine was saying. Reesie stopped so suddenly that Eritrea bumped into her.
“Watch out for the glass,” Dré warned.
A tree limb had crashed through the roof and ceiling. Light rain was pattering through the leaves. Part of the tree had taken out the window near Miss Martine’s bed, and landed on her chifforobe. The window glass had exploded into dozens of tiny fragments that were sprinkled over everything in the small room. Reesie’s sneakers crunched on the floor.
“This is bad, Miss M,” Dré murmured, shaking his locks.
Miss Martine didn’t respond. She bent slowly to pick up some matted brown thing from the floor.
“Oh!” Reesie gasped. “Is that the stone marten from your Louis Armstrong picture?” The fur hung limply in Miss Martine’s hand.
“Stone-what-you-say?” Eritrea tipped closer.
Reesie looked sadly at the wildly flowered dresses spilling out of the smashed chifforobe. Their colors and dyes were already running together as they lay soaked across the floor and bed. She forced her eyes away. All that fantastic old-school fabric!
Dré crossed the wrecked room to take a closer look at the damaged roof.
“Seems like there ought not be so much water puddled in here,” he said, crouching near the floor and making his way in slow motion around the room.
Reesie realized that he was right—every move they made squelched into the rug.
“It’s from the roof, right?” she asked.
He shook his head, looking puzzled. “Let me take a look outside.”
“It’s only a little high water,” Eritrea chimed in.
Reesie saw Miss Ma
rtine’s worried face as they headed back into the living room.
“I don’t know ’bout that,” Dré muttered. He opened the front door, and fast-moving water rushed in. Reesie was almost thrown off her feet by the quickness of it. Dré tried to push the door shut, but the force of the water was too strong.
“Help me!” he shouted. Eritrea waded in his direction, and Reesie pulled herself along the edge of the couch toward him. The three of them put all their combined weight against the door. Slowly, it moved. Dré clicked the lock and looked over his shoulder at Miss Martine.
“This ain’t only ‘a little water,’ Miss M. The water’s rising, and rising fast. We should go up into your crawl space.”
Eritrea stared at him. “Are you crazy? Up in a nasty attic with spiders and stuff?”
Miss Martine frowned. “You don’t think…” She let her words trail off. Dré started grabbing the pillows off the sofa, pushing them tightly against the bottom of the door. Reesie looked down. Water was already above their ankles.
“I don’t know what to think, Miss M, ’cept that this is trouble with a capital T!”
Chapter Eleven
“Exactly what kind of trouble?” Reesie’s voice didn’t sound teenage to her own ears. It sounded small and scared.
“Trouble with the levee, Boone,” Dré answered.
Reesie could only nod. She’d heard over and over in her junior-high Louisiana history classes that one of the things that made New Orleans special was the way most of the city was situated. The city’s bowl-shaped landscape was positioned between Lake Pontchartrain on the north end and the great Mississippi River on the south. The low land was protected by high banks of earth called levees. If the waters rose too high, or if the levees ever leaked, the city could be flooded.
“This water should be in the bathtub!” Eritrea was indignant.
“Yeah, well, bathtubs can overflow, can’t they?” Dré said.
The water was already swirling around their calves. The pale carpet underneath looked like sand at a beach. The heat and heavy humidity in the house was sucking the air away, and Reesie’s chest felt tight. What if she had to swim?
“Miss M, you got something like a crowbar or sledgehammer?” Dré asked.
“Look in that hall closet!” Miss Martine had made her way into the kitchen. Dishes clinked and cabinet doors slammed shut.
Reesie looked at Dré as if he had lost his mind. “Why do you need that?”
“In case we need to chop our way out of the attic, Reesie Boone. Now come on, you and Tree help me get the attic ladder down.”
“This is crazy,” Eritrea murmured, shaking her head. She kicked off her heels. “We just got married!” Her voice was shaking. “This is supposed to be a special time. A happy time, right?”
“Yeah,” Reesie said, strapping her backpack onto her shoulders. “Special.” As she started after Eritrea, something on the dining room table caught her eye—it was Miss Martine’s book of poems. Without thinking, she picked it up to put it into the backpack. Then her eyes traveled up the wall to Louis Armstrong, and she swiped down his picture.
“Who’s in that picture?” Eritrea asked curiously.
“It’s just something special to Miss M,” Reesie said. She knew she sounded rude, but she didn’t feel like trying to explain. Mr. Louis Armstrong and Woman Everlasting were absolutely the last items that would fit before her bag burst at the seams.
Dré pulled one of the heavy dining room chairs into the hall so it was underneath the trapdoor in the ceiling that led to the crawl space.
Reesie and Eritrea held the chair steady so Dré could climb up to reach the latch. He yanked it, and a folding ladder slowly lowered itself. Eritrea grabbed the ladder and pulled while Dré jumped onto it.
“We’d better hurry,” he said. “Miss M, come on!”
Miss Martine came into the hallway holding tightly to a small cooler and a plastic grocery bag.
“You go first,” Dré insisted, taking the cooler and passing it to Eritrea. She pushed her way to the ladder next, barely giving Miss Martine’s dripping slippers time to get halfway up.
“Hey, after you!” Reesie said, but Eritrea didn’t seem to hear—or care. Dré grinned, and a little of his goofiness showed again.
“I still love her, you know?” he said.
Reesie scrambled onto the ladder. She didn’t answer Dré and she didn’t look down. To her relief, when her head poked into the attic, it wasn’t completely dark. Slivers of light shone in through the vents in a small gable at one end. The space was already crowded with old suitcases, boxes, and empty picture frames.
“How come the roof isn’t broken up here?” Reesie asked, trying to squeeze between Eritrea and a beat-up leather trunk.
“That part of the house was added on,” Miss Martine said. “We should stay dry here.”
“Lucky for us!” Dré finally huffed up the ladder, carrying the crowbar. His wild hair brushed against the rafters. Reesie could imagine spiderwebs … and spiders. She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees.
“Found this in the closet, too!” He held up a small transistor radio. “So far I only got static, but maybe I can switch batteries from one of the flashlights and get it to work.”
“Good thinking,” Miss Martine said. “Teresa? Eritrea? Can you get any calls out on those cell phones?”
“Mine’s dead,” Eritrea said, shaking her head.
Reesie twisted her body and managed to pull her phone out. She squinted at the ghostly screen, which read: NO SERVICE AVAILABLE.
“How long do we have to stay up here, anyway?” Eritrea poked Dré with her elbow.
“Till the water goes down,” he said.
Reesie crawled to the open trapdoor and blinked, looking down. The hallway had become almost too dim for her to make out anything, but the smell of wet furniture and curtains and clothes was already strong. Then she thought she saw a glimmer of water, and she jumped back onto her knees, scraping them on the rough floor.
“I—I think it’s higher!” she whispered.
“Now, let’s not panic,” Miss Martine said. “What would you all be doing if we weren’t stuck up in this musty old crawl space?” Her voice sounded a little too loud and a little too cheerful.
Dré cleared his throat and reached for Eritrea’s hand. “Tree and me would be enjoying our happy new home!” He aimed the beam of his flashlight right at Reesie. “And what about you, Boone?”
Reesie opened her mouth, ready to give him a sharp comeback. Instead tears stung her eyes, and a different answer forced itself into words.
“I’d be turning thirteen.”
Chapter Twelve
“Happy birthday to ya! Happy birthday!” Dré did an awful imitation of Stevie Wonder’s singing, making Tree giggle like a five-year-old. Reesie couldn’t help smiling.
“Happy birthday, Teresa.” Miss Martine gave Reesie’s hand a tight squeeze.
She snapped open the plastic cooler. “Here. You have a birthday apple.”
“Hey, can I get in on that, Miss M?” Dré asked. Miss Martine passed out apples and last night’s cold meat pies. The attic began to smell more like a house than a cave.
Reesie sniffed away her tears, thankful that the others were munching so hungrily that they didn’t seem to notice.
“I thought your big day was yesterday,” Miss Martine said. “And we left your cake down in the kitchen, poor thing!”
“Yeah, too bad we don’t have that up here,” Dré said.
Eritrea nodded in the direction of the ladder. “That cake is underwater by now.”
“I can always make another cake,” Miss Martine said soothingly. “I just feel so sorry that you have to spend your special day up in my attic, Teresa! I wish I could give you some kind of little birthday token.”
“She already has something from you.” Eritrea slurped on her apple. How can she slurp on an apple? Reesie wondered, fumbling to open her backpack.
“I
thought you might want to save this.…” She couldn’t bring herself to say, In case you lost everything else, so she just held out the photograph and the book.
Miss Martine leaned forward.
“How thoughtful! I insist that you keep Woman Everlasting. When this is all over, I’ll autograph it for you. That’ll be for your birthday, you hear?”
“But, Miss Martine, I didn’t—”
“Hush now. Let me see if this old brain can recite some lines. It’s been so long. Oh yes! The end of one poem went like this: ‘Find someplace, / get yourself somewhere that you can always enter, / knowing you will be loved.’”
As Reesie listened, the rhythm and feeling of Miss Martine’s husky voice rose to the low rafters and bounced off them. She could imagine those words flowing out of the gable like the water flowing in beneath them. The last few words made her feel closer to all the people in the attic. Like they were family, as crazy as it seemed.
“That—that was deep,” Dré said.
“Amazing.” Reesie nodded.
“I mean, you could have written that yesterday,” Eritrea said.
“Thank you.” Miss Martine sighed. “It was a long time ago.” She gently pressed the book back into Reesie’s lap and sat still, as if the poetry had carried her off into a different world. Like she was remembering her someplace.
Minutes dragged into hours. Dré fiddled with the radio. Scratchy, screechy sounds filled the attic. He and Eritrea kept up a whispered, couples-only conversation. Miss Martine dozed. Reesie pressed herself close to the vent and strained to peek through the louvers. The slats were so close together that she couldn’t see anything more than strips of weak sunlight. She pulled out her sketch pad and a drawing pencil anyway.
The shadow and light made a funny gray-and-white pattern on the page. She used it to design a clothing pattern. First she drew angular lines across the page, so that with the bars of light it looked like a crisscross. Then she made squiggly wavy lines, spaced unevenly. Water. Stupid water. She couldn’t get away from it.
Finding Someplace Page 5
