Finding Someplace

by Denise Lewis Patrick

  Parraine drove into New Orleans on Interstate 10, the same route he’d tried to take on that August day so long ago. It was midafternoon, and traffic seemed light as they passed through Metairie, a suburb right outside of the city.

  Reesie sat in the backseat with her headphones plugged into her ears and her face so close to the window that her nose touched the glass. Over the months she had thought often about coming back, and now that small fear she’d had when she got on the plane had managed to grow.

  Being in New Jersey for so long, without her friends or anything familiar, had almost convinced her that Katrina must have happened in some other place, some other New Orleans, in an alternate universe. But Miss Martine had been reality. What Reesie was about to face was reality, and she really wasn’t prepared at all. Her hands were clenched so tightly around her iPod that its metal casing dug into her palms. Her heart beat fast right along with the house music.

  Everywhere she looked she saw the trail the hurricane had left behind. Many of the warehouses and industrial buildings that lined the highway were stripped down to their wood and metal skeletons. Huge trees lay with their roots clawing the air, some on top of fences and cars—and houses. This damage was clearly caused by wind—hurricane-force winds, not water. She tried to relax.

  As I-10 curved into the city, it curled around the Superdome. All their heads turned to take in the beautiful round shape and the tiny specks of the workers on top of it, repairing the holes where Katrina had ripped away the roofing and poured herself inside. Reesie exhaled, and only then realized that she’d been holding her breath.

  Parraine got off the highway, first cruising along Canal Street as if they were tourists. Reesie counted store after store with windows boarded, or plastered with big signs saying CLOSED. As they neared the French Quarter there were real tourists wandering the sidewalks, and sun glinted off the iron balconies and the clean cobbled streets. But Reesie kept thinking of the purple sneakers that she’d never gotten to wear, of Ayanna and herself eating beignets, laughing at the notion of a killer hurricane. She shivered.

  “Too much air conditioning?” Tee Charmaine asked loudly from the front.

  “No!” Reesie said in a sharp voice. “I’m fine, thanks,” she quickly added.

  Two things stood out from the rest of the strangeness winding across town through the Sixth and Seventh Wards. One, she thought must be her imagination—a shadowy dark line that ran straight across every house, garage, and even some of the stranded cars in sight. She blinked, but as they continued driving, the line still seemed to be there. The other weird thing was a fluorescent orange X that was spray-painted prominently on almost all of the houses. There were numbers around the sides of the Xs. She couldn’t figure it out.

  “Parraine? What’s with those orange Xs?” she asked, dropping one earbud. He glanced at her in the rearview mirror.

  “Means they went in there, checking for people,” he said. “There’re numbers for survivors, and zeroes if they didn’t find anybody, depends on where the number is.”

  “But some of them have more than two numbers.”

  Her mother touched her arm gently. “There’s a number for people who didn’t make it, baby.”

  Reesie frowned. Which is which? She wanted to know, but didn’t ask. She pushed her earbud back in. Tic-tac-toe for the dead, she thought. She could never play that game again. She turned away, just in time to spot the green-and-white ST. CLAUDE BRIDGE sign.

  In the middle of the bridge she raised her head to look out across the Ninth Ward. The destruction was everywhere, making the neighborhood almost unrecognizable.

  And then Parraine exited off the ramp the boats had rowed up on, the day someone reached from these very rails and touched her fingers.

  She opened the window to breathe in New Orleans air. It smelled of dampness and dirt. The remains of houses lay in pieces, scattered planks of wood and Sheetrock and sections of siding were piled everywhere. Reesie blinked. Tossed among the ruins were human things—curtains and clothes, broken furniture and appliances.

  Reesie was completely disoriented; so few buildings were left standing, and there were no street signs in sight. The jagged and broken trees seemed dead. Cars were crushed underneath collapsed garages or carports.

  “Can’t go any farther,” she heard Parraine say, and Reesie looked frantically around for their house as he pulled to the right and stopped. What she saw were rooftops, two of them, blocking the mud-caked street in front of the car.

  “So many lives just floated away,” her mother said, slowly stepping out of the car.

  And Reesie understood, for the first time, the truth of that. Entire houses had washed away, along with the belongings of the families who’d lived in them. Along with some of the people who’d lived in them.

  She swallowed, finding that there was a lump in her throat. She had been so absorbed in her own pain and problems after Katrina that the bigness of the picture had never come clear. Had she hidden from all this on purpose, she wondered? She couldn’t hide anymore. Reesie opened her door. The bottoms of her feet tingled when they touched the ground.

  The adults were talking a lot about the damage now.

  “Some houses got washed right off their foundations,” Parraine was saying as they passed a huge yellow bulldozer parked atop a mound of rubble. “The city is all through here, tearing down buildings before they fall down. They’ll be back to clear those roofs out of the street too.”

  “I guess we were lucky,” her mother said. Parraine didn’t say anything.

  “There are some homes in decent shape over on Deslondes,” Tee Charmaine said. She stepped around a shattered window lying on the ground that still had curtains attached.

  “Yeah,” said Parraine. “When I came by here the other week, Lloyd and I saw Elizabeth Smith over there. One of her boys is working in her house, but she’s the only one back in that block.”

  “She’s in her house?” Mom asked.

  Parraine shook his head. “Heck, no! No power back over there yet, and the water is still funky.”

  “Unbelievable,” Mom murmured.

  Reesie looked to her left and saw a sturdy concrete porch and its three steps with iron rails … with no house attached. She knew that porch. She didn’t know the name of the family who lived there, but she had always seen a man sitting there when she passed by. She wondered where that man was.

  All at once she was hit with the same out-of-body feeling that she’d had only once before in her life; she was saddened beyond tears and sick to her stomach, and could hardly breathe. When Ma Maw died, she’d felt this way.

  The house with the porch was on Reynes Street. Slowly, Reesie got her bearings. One block farther, then a left … She was ahead of her mother, hurrying around a truck whose hood was tiled with dried mud, and a couple of downed trees.

  Dauphine Street. Her street.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  There was the neat redbrick house with white iron window gates. The electrical pole near the curb looked as though its top half had been chewed off, and it was leaning at a crazy angle over a heap of junk. Reesie caught sight of a cream-and-red stripe that she recognized. It was a section of wallpaper from their kitchen. She practically jumped back, bumping the vehicle sitting in the driveway. She turned to stare at the blue Honda. It was her uncle’s old car.

  Of course, she thought. Parraine would have given his car to Daddy, because both his and Mom’s must be in a scrapyard somewhere. She stepped carefully over some cables into what had been their front yard, and felt her mother’s hand slip into hers.

  “Here we go,” Mom whispered.

  “How’re you doing?” Reesie asked, thinking of their conversation on the plane. Her mother only had a chance to nod before the door popped open.

  “Jeannie! Reesie!” Daddy wrapped them both up in his arms there on the stoop. Reesie peeked inside over his shoulder.

  “Dang…,” she muttered. Neither of her parents corrected her. T
hey followed her inside.

  They were standing in the midst of bare bones—even the walls between the rooms were gone. Reesie could see straight through this, the used-to-be living room, to the nonexistent hallway, to the weirdly unfamiliar space that should have been her bedroom.

  She tasted the tears that had begun to run down her cheeks, but she didn’t bother to wipe them. Her emotions were oddly disconnected: they’d lost something they couldn’t replace, yes. But was she devastated? No. For a minute Reesie thought the old guilt might kick in again. It didn’t. Legacy, Daddy had said. Legacy, Miss Martine had said.

  “Oh … Lloyd!” Mom’s words echoed, and Reesie winced at the sound. Her parents seemed small as they stood huddled together in the middle of the empty space. She couldn’t look at them.

  The smell of wet wood was so strong that she reached out to one of the exposed beams. It was—still—soft and damp to her touch. How could that be, months after the flood?

  “Daddy?”

  Her father sighed. How hard it must have been for him! Reesie thought.

  “Listen.” He was clearly speaking more to her mother than to her, so she stayed where she was, in the hallway that wasn’t.

  “We can’t save the house.” His words dropped like rocks.

  “But, Lloyd! The insurance—I’ve been going over the papers, and—”

  “No, Jeannie. No.” Daddy shook his head and walked away toward the back of the house as if he couldn’t face them. Reesie instinctively moved closer, as did her mother.

  “Pete and I had an engineer come out. The place is structurally unsound. And the money FEMA is offering us, even with the insurance payout, won’t be enough to rebuild from scratch.”

  “Couldn’t you use my college money?” Reesie heard herself asking. Her father turned with his shoulders slumped, and pain was written all over his face. But he managed a smile.

  “No, I cannot, Reesie Bear. Your grandmother would roll in her grave if I put this collection of brick and wood over you and your brother getting an education. It wasn’t about the house for her; it was about me and Pete being better off.”

  “Your mother was right, as always,” Mom said firmly. “But this, Lloyd, is about the kids as much as it’s about us, isn’t it? We won’t give up on this. So, we’ll find a rental, and we’ll start saving.”

  Reesie watched her father’s shoulders snap to attention. Superman was weakened, but he hadn’t given in.

  “Jeannie. This ride isn’t going to be easy from here on. Are you sure, now?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Reesie had the feeling that her parents had forgotten that she was there. She quietly eased to the door and out. Blinking in the sun, she shaded her eyes. There was no sign of Parraine and Tee Charmaine, but she only thought of them for a moment before her phone buzzed. She looked at the screen: Orlando.

  “Peanut Butter! How come you didn’t call me? Y’all already there?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. I—”

  “I’m not mad at you. It’s rough, right? You okay?”

  Reesie smiled. “Yeah.”

  “That’s what I’m talkin’ about! Hey, I’m in the car with Tree and Dré. They’re gonna bring me by your house, and then they want to have ya’ll come by and eat. Tell your mama.”

  “I will,” Reesie said. “See you.”

  “Sooner than you think!” Orlando laughed, clicking off.

  Reesie slipped her phone into the backpack slung over her shoulder. She was still smiling, even as she looked across the twisted landscape in front of her. She shoved her hands into her pockets and walked up the street in the direction of Miss Martine’s, kicking dust with the toes of her sneakers.

  She was alone, just like in her last dream. The layers of dried mud covered the blacktop completely, so it looked like the road had never been paved—or as if there was no road at all. There were none of the noises of living around her, no dogs barking or birds and cicadas calling from trees. It was a type of desert, she thought as she went on.

  Miss Martine’s house was gone. Even the lot had been cleared down to the cinder block foundation. Only Dré’s brick shed was still standing where it had been, with its door shut tight and the little window’s panes unbroken. Something green caught Reesie’s eye.

  At one edge of the house’s foundation, near what would have been the back door, were the remains of a little flower bed marked by a row of bricks embedded halfway into the ground. Green spring grass had come up. And unfurling out of that grass were the slender stems of “elephant ears”—Miss Martine called them caladiums.

  Reesie whipped out her phone and stooped close to take a picture of them. That bright green against red brick would make a great painting, she thought.

  And why, she wondered as she straightened up, do I have to think of this nothingness as the end of anything?

  On the spot, she did a 360-degree turn to take in everything her eyes could see. It was bleak, it was ugly. She snapped a picture. Far down the street she could see a truck pull up at a lopsided house. People got out and began unloading sheets of plywood. She snapped again.

  Nothing was the same, Orlando had said. This was new normal, and she was new normal Reesie. She was finished with nightmares and feeling afraid for her family and herself. She was finished with feeling afraid about losing old friends and making new ones.

  Katrina could not win this fight. Teresa Arielle Boone would not let her. It was going to be hard, but she would keep on going, just like her parents and her friends were doing. Just like New Orleans was doing.

  She walked back to the shed and squatted in front of the red door. The paint was peeling, and the wood was buckled. She pushed against it, but the lock held. She twisted her body into a sitting position and opened her backpack.

  First she took out her phone and texted Orlando to tell him where she was. Then she dug deeper into the bag and pulled out Woman Everlasting.

  It was odd, but just right, that she hadn’t taken the time before now to actually read any of it; she felt trembly inside again as she leafed through the yellowed pages.

  There it was. The poem titled “Finding Someplace.”

  She looked up quickly, then reminded herself that no one was there to hear her reading out loud. And to her surprise she discovered that she really wouldn’t care if anyone did. Reesie tilted the book away from the midday glare.

  the mat says

  welcome, but

  my heart reads:

  ‘enter here,

  and be loved.’

  and yes, there’s always

  another dream

  to chase, or

  friend to follow,

  always

  one

  more

  photo to take

  before returning

  before embracing

  the old life

  that’s fading

  in the brightness of

  now; but let me tell you:

  find someplace

  get yourself somewhere

  that you can always

  enter,

  knowing

  you will

  be

  loved.

  Reesie closed the book and got up stiffly, brushing dust off herself. She started to put the book away but decided not to: she wanted to show her parents and Eritrea and Dré—and Orlando. She wanted to explain to them how well she understood Miss Martine’s words. She’d learned a lot about the people in her life since that day in the attic, and a lot about herself.

  She’d found her someplace—by the hardest, as Miss Martine would say—and the funny thing was: it wasn’t even a place. It was the people who’d made her feel strong, even when she wasn’t. It was the people who felt like family, even when they weren’t. Reesie smiled to herself. She could carry her someplace around with her always now, because it was inside her heart.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  We ride through the Lower Ninth Ward early on New Year’s Eve, along the real streets portrayed
in Reesie Boone’s story. Her world is based on the facts of this world, one of the many New Orleans neighborhoods swallowed up by floodwaters during Hurricane Katrina back in 2005.

  As this novel ends, Reesie sees and experiences some new beginnings in her life, yet much is left unfinished.

  This is the truth of the Ninth Ward even today. On my aunt’s street, some houses remain boarded up and some lots are empty because the houses were so damaged they had to be torn down. But many homes have been rebuilt. Sun bounces off new windows. Newness feels like it’s everywhere inside my aunt’s renovated house: walls, cabinets, appliances, towels, and even dishes have been replaced.

  After our visit, my aunt walks us out to the front porch. Children wave to her and shout to each other as they ride the shiny new bikes they got for Christmas. As we drive away, the pavement seems rough and hard for the car to navigate, but we keep going.

  I wonder if the families who made this community come alive again have had the same journey. Some, like the fictional Boone family, have returned and worked for years to rebuild their homes and their lives here. It’s been rough. It’s been hard. Their lives are not exactly the same, but they keep going.

  Ten years ago, New Orleans—and the Ninth Ward—was someplace lost. Like Reesie Boone, it seems this city has discovered where its true strength lies: not in its beautiful buildings, or its great music and food, or even in its ability to come back from such a disaster, but in the people who love it.

  —DLP

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Ottyle, Otlisha, Yanada, Jada, my Cherokee Street cousins, all of my East Coast friends for their generosity, and to Christy and Amy for their incredible patience!

  Denise Lewis Patrick is the author of many books for children and young adults, including The Adventures of Midnight Son, the American Girl Cécile books, and A Matter of Souls, a young adult short story collection. She has worked in publishing as both a writer and an editor, and teaches college courses as an adjunct professor of writing. She is pursuing her MFA in creative writing. Born in Natchitoches, Louisiana, she lives in New Jersey with her family. deniselewispatrick.com. Or sign up for email updates here.