she was now an ornery grandmother—one that would ultimately require intensive hospicing.
I had told Tanio there was nothing he could do to help New Orleans or his family all the way from California, but I was starting to wonder. Cavorting at Burning Man when your family and co-dog’s future was in serious question seemed sketchy.
“You know y’all could come out here if you need to,” Tanio had told me on the phone. “I can send money if you need it. I can leave you a key.”
“I know,” I said. “We really appreciate it.”
“Only I’m not sure what we’d do about Clo and Buster. In my new building they won’t let me have them.”
The next ten days hurt. All the LSU hurricane doomsday guy’s dire prognostications were coming true. Fire, floods, floods on fire. The giant ball of floating ants arrived. Our governor and mayor were on the television with eyes red from crying.
The phone kept ringing and what was coming out of it hurt my ears. Friends stuck on balconies and roofs, friends calling crying because they thought they killed their cats, a woman dead on the sidewalk on my friend’s block, a friend handed a rifle and commanded to guard kids on respirators, rumors of friend’s parent’s neighbors dangling from trees in Mississippi. No one had ever called me to say things like that, much less so many people.
We didn’t know what to do. Our friends didn’t know what to do. No one knew what to do. As days passed, it seemed the single worst idea was to make irrevocable life decisions based on the crazy TV. Television reporters held microphones up to New Orleanians who screamed things like, “These old people are needing water! Get us the hell out of here!” and the reporters, well-coiffed and hydrated, had turned back to the camera and opined, “It’s hard to say what would help this situation that has so gravely deteriorated here….” People were suffering, not speaking a foreign language.
“THEY SAID THEY NEED WATER AND TO GET OUT OF THERE,” I yelled at the TV before Jake would turn it off.
Feeling guilty, well-fed, and helpless, I camped out on the bed with my laptop and cell phone. I tried to help friends find lost people. I transferred the desperate Please-Go-Save-My-Elderly-Aunt-and-Disabled-Cousin-Stuck-on-Palmyra-Street postings of strangers from nola.com into the correct Coast Guard rescue website and then called their emergency phone number and repeated it. It seemed inconceivable that this could help, yet also inconceivable that people were posting desperate SOSs on the Web that trapped relatives had phoned to them in the first place. Jake walked back to the bedroom occasionally. “Are you still doing that?” he said. “Fuck!” he exhaled, falling face-first next to me on the bed.
Our two-night evacuation jaunt had long since turned to Jake’s worst trip home ever. Something about wiping the dogs by-now sterile feet five times a day and padding around barefoot for no reason to protect hardwood flooring only emphasized the river of water on our own street. The longer we were there, the edgier Jake got around his mother. A few days into the long-distance mayhem, into spectating our own disaster, Jake stopped shucking his shoes every time he walked in the door.
One day we were getting out of the house, driving with both dogs hanging out opposite back windows on one of those nowhere drives around Gainesville, just taking in all the orange-and-blue bunting on squat cement buildings for University of Florida’s upcoming first game of the season. Maybe I was trying some time-worn coping strategies on for size—wrapping a lot of words around the spreading wound—because I was prattling on that in the great scheme of things, in the cosmos scheme of things, how insignificant we all were, how our existence was fleeting galaxy confetti and, as such, it didn’t matter. Losses or gains, all the same. Jake looked at me like he wished I would shut up.
“You know that was everything we’ve been working for,” Jake said.
He was right. I felt it in my chest. Galaxy confetti or not, we had to trod this earthly veil—if we weren’t lucky, as two full-grown adults on someone’s mom’s couch or under a bridge. Shit.
Since Jack and Brenda had recently both sero-converted to birding, the backyard had sprouted contraptions stocked with peanut butter, carob, nuts, and granola. The view out the back patio doors was a study of bird and squirrel obesity. During visits I would sit on the sofa with a book or laptop open, and, if Clo was acting too crazy trotting from garbage can to garbage can, her leash in my hand. Jake was slumped in a soft chair near me watching some rare Florida woodpeckers gorge themselves extinct, when his mom brought up some retention pond across town for the third time that day.
“Do you think we could flood here? Maybe we should check our insurance,” she fretted.
“No,” Jack said. “Not at all.”
“The rainwater hit the edge of the patio that time,” Brenda said.
Jack frowned and shook his head.
“It did,” Brenda insisted.
“That is miles away,” he said.
Jake had settled into a look of stony misery by then, yet it seemed this flood fantasy might either crumble him completely or snap him to scary life. I reached over and squeezed his hand. I wondered if people across America were sitting watching the black water rise and seeing water stains blotting their own curtains and floors. It was either the sickest form of empathy ever or the most pure. I couldn’t tell which.
As days wore on, everyone’s short-term evacuation plans unraveled. Friends called to say they were running out of motel money but had nowhere else to go. People started sounding weird. A lawyer friend said he had gone and bought all new clothes at Wal-Mart and he was going to relax and go to northern California for a while, probably quit lawyering all together. Get a job sweeping up at a Starbucks or something. O-kaaay, I said.
“I’m going for a walk,” I told Jake.
I was taking the dogs on long rambles a few times a day to try to clear my head. Around the subdivision into a nearby school’s sandy back lot and around again we’d go, rickety Clo trotting ahead and sometimes falling to her arthritic knees. Buster and I hustled to keep up. My cell phone rang. I answered and held it a little away from my ear. The heat of people’s news was giving me an automatic headache.
“Aunt Mary’s son won’t leave Uptown and he’s too old. He doesn’t have enough water. People are acting crazy. His kids are worried sick.”
I didn’t know what to say. She did the same thing, only not in the worst place. It made me wonder about that infamous Hungarian (or was it Louisianan?) stubbornness.
“And I have some sad news. You know my cousin Dorothy we go take berries to?”
When Dorothy was a city teenager and Mom was a little settlement girl, Dorothy would come visiting from New Orleans. Mom was Dorothy’s favorite. Dorothy used to sneak Mom to the outhouse and smoke a cigarette, then threaten to stick my mom’s head down the black hole if she told. More recently, she was sick. Mom and I would go to her little house in Metairie during spring with a flat of Albany strawberries. Mom would say, “These are the sweet ones, not like they’re planting now,” and Dorothy would tear up over her oxygen mask. The ghosts of city cousin and country cousin would rise in the sickroom between us—two girls in hand-sewn cotton dresses, grappling in an outhouse over a cigarette in the forties.
“What about Dorothy? Is she okay?”
“Well, your cousin who takes care of her? He died in Houston during the
