“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.
All at once, the radio crackled and a woman’s voice came through clearly. Miss Martine jerked awake, knocking over the cooler.
“As of this hour, unconfirmed sources report that both the Seventeenth Street Canal and the Industrial Canal have breached. There’s no official word on the extent of flooding so far, but some areas, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, may be experiencing up to four feet of floodwater.… Repeat, may be experiencing four or more feet of flooding from a suspected levee breach.…”
Reesie dropped her pencil. The edge of her sketch pad trembled against her knees.
“We’re trapped up here!” she shouted.
“Dré?” This time Eritrea sounded like a little girl. Dré pushed past her to get to the ladder. Reesie held her breath as first his feet disappeared, then his knees. Just as his face vanished, they heard loud splashing. His head popped up again. When he crawled off the ladder, he was wet from the waist down. Reesie saw his eyes and knew how scared he was. Her heart thumped.
“We gotta get on the roof,” he said, reaching for the crowbar. “Miss M, I’m sorry, but we have to bust it up.”
“What?” both girls yelled at once.
“Calm it down, a’ight? Yeah, the roof. How else are we gonna get out of here?”
“The roof?” Even Miss Martine sounded uncertain.
Dré twisted his body to remove his shirt. Reesie stuffed her pad away, reminding herself that she wasn’t a kid anymore. She was thirteen, and she was Sergeant Superman’s daughter.
“Let me help,” she said.
Dré looked over his shoulder at her. “Yeah, you right! I’ll start it off.”
“I’ll hold the flashlight!” Eritrea said. The stream of light was shaking like her hand must have been, but Dré leaned and whispered something to her. The light steadied.
“Okay. Get back as far as ya’ll can, now!” He tapped at the wood with the hooked end of the crowbar, then drew back and slammed hard. Nothing happened.
Tap, tap, wham! There was a creaking sound, like what Reesie had heard as Katrina passed over the house taking some of the roof with her.
“How long do you think it’ll take?” Eritrea asked.
“Don’t—know—” He panted. Thump, bam! Bam!
Reesie waited as long as she could before she shouted, “Dré, give it!” He stopped to wipe sweat from his eyes, and she grabbed the crowbar. It was heavy in her hands. She wanted to swing the tool like a baseball bat, but there was no room. She balanced herself evenly on her knees.
“Close your eyes!” Dré said. “Give it all you got!”
Reesie rammed the crowbar straight up. Bam! She heard more cracking. She counted: two, four, six hits. Her shoulders ached.
“I’ll take it, Boone.” Dré gave Reesie a nod. “You did pretty good.”
He didn’t add for a girl. Reesie’s opinion of Orlando’s brother was undergoing a slow change. He took the same position he’d had before and rammed the crowbar into the shattering rafters.
Wham! Wham! Bang!
“Watch out!” he said. Eritrea’s flashlight moved wildly, wood splintered, and a gust of air streamed in. They saw blue sky.
“We did it, Boone!” Dré wrapped his shirt around his hand and carefully pushed out as many jagged pieces of wood as he could from the edges of the hole they’d made.
“Let’s pull that trunk over here so I can get a leg up,” he said.
Reesie obeyed. She watched him flinch as he eased himself out. She wouldn’t forget to tell Orlando that his big brother had turned into a hero.
“I never seen anything like this!” Dré shouted down at them. “I—whoahhhh!” There was a loud bump, then the sound of sliding, falling.… Reesie held her breath, waiting for an awful splash.
“André!” Miss Martine moved toward the trunk.
“Oh my God! Dré?” Eritrea started to climb up. In the light it was obvious she was terrified.
“I’m good!” He sounded breathless. “I slipped—it’s somethin’ treacherous out here! Y’all gotta be real careful.”
Eritrea shook her head and gave Reesie a weak smile. “I can’t let anything happen to him. André is all I got.”
Miss Martine patted Eritrea on the shoulder. “Those Knight boys are hardheaded, child. Don’t you worry. André’s not going anywhere!”
Eritrea nodded and turned away, but not before Reesie saw her tearing up.
Dré’s face loomed over them, blocking out the light. “From what I’m looking at, I think we better hurry up!”
Eritrea got up on the trunk first. “I’m not tall enough!” she said.
Reesie hurried to look around for something, anything else to use as an extra step. She spotted a plastic milk crate filled with junk, and quickly dumped it. She slapped it on top of the trunk and steadied it while Eritrea climbed up and looked out.
“What can you see out there?” Miss Martine asked.
“Oh, it’s…” Eritrea hesitated, like she couldn’t even find the right words. “It’s just bad!” She ducked back in, shaking her head. “Everything is underwater.” She wound her scarf around her waist and tied it. In seconds she was back atop the crate, so that half her body was outside. Pushing up on her elbows, she wiggled up and out.
“I got it. Next!” Eritrea looked down, her braids swinging.
“Okay, Miss Martine.” Reesie nodded.
But Miss Martine gave Reesie a little push. “You go on first.”
Reesie shook her head. “Oh no, ma’am! If my daddy ever found out that I left this attic before you, I’d be grounded for life!” She gave Miss Martine a little shove back. “You go.”
Miss Martine slowly climbed onto the trunk. Dré and Eritrea reached down for her arms. They pulled and Reesie pushed until Miss Martine was sitting on the edge of the hole, her legs dangling. For a minute she seemed to be having a hard time catching her breath, but then she eased herself out. While the others got Miss Martine settled, Reesie collected the radio. She took the last meat pies out of the cooler and put them into the grocery bag.
When Dré finally called, “Ready?” Reesie handed everything up to him. She focused only on avoiding splinters as she lifted herself out. Eritrea caught her arm, and she felt a weird physical sensation when her Chucks touched the shingles, just like the one time she’d been on a skate ramp with Junior.
Reesie crept carefully toward a short metal pipe sticking out of the roof, eased her arm around it, and slowly looked around. She’d figured that once they were out of the tight house and even more cramped crawl space, she would feel relieved. She’d thought Dré was their rescue. But now, in the open air, in ninety-degree heat, she began to shiver.
What had happened to her neighborhood? Where were the front yards and the fences and the porches and chairs? Her stomach heaved. She’d lived here all her life, but nothing looked familiar. It was a river of rooftops and treetops. Telephone poles, thick as young trees, leaned every which way, trailing wires.
And it looked like the water was still coming.
“This is sure nuff some wicked mess,” Dré said as the entire side of a house floated past.
Chairs and bicycles and other personal belongings followed, taken by the current of the floodwaters. Reesie could make out a colorful flat thing tangled in tree branches close by, and realized she was looking at the top of an SUV.
For a few long minutes nobody said another word.
“What do we do now?” Eritrea said. She and Miss Martine were huddled next to the old brick chimney on the slope of the roof, just below Reesie.
“We wait.” Dré sighed. He sat with his legs dangling off the edge.
“My daddy knows where we are. He’s coming,” Reesie said. She’d always believed her father could do anything, but she was worried. It was already afternoon—sooner or later it would be dark. How could he possibly find Miss Martine’s house then? What would happen to them if he didn’t?
There was no rain. There were no cars, no crickets. No faint voices or pounding beats of speakers floated in the air. It felt as if the only life left in New Orleans was there, on top of this little house on Dauphine Street.
Miss Martine told them stories about New York, and tried to encourage them until her energy faded. Eritrea kept fiddling with the radio, but she couldn’t get it to work again. Reesie had parked herself right at the peak of the roof so she was as far away from the water as she could get. She stared at the changing sky as the afternoon passed and the dusk started on its way.
“It’s almost night,” Reesie announced to no one in particular, flicking the flashlight on. Her birthday skirt was underwater. And Ma Maw’s sewing machine and all the yards and yards of fabric stashed under the bed. Her lifetime collection of sketchbooks and markers. Junior’s trophies. Her parents’ African masks. Everything. Soaked. Ruined. Gone.
She kept wanting to hear sounds, sounds of anything—even the awful winds of Katrina would have been better than this, this nothingness. She didn’t even want to close her eyes as exhaustion pulled them shut, because she feared what might happen while she slept.
Each time she nodded off, she jerked herself awake to stare at the strange shapes below, and at the blackness in the distance that should have been the bright lights of the lively French Quarter.
“Reesie! Reesie!” Eritrea was whispering. “Miss Simon! Listen!”
Reesie blinked into the dark, groping for her flashlight. She heard a faint humming.
“It’s a boat! Turn on the flashlights!” Dré shouted. “Hey!”
They all started yelling.
“Help!”
“Over here!”
The putt-putting motor grew louder as the boat came closer. Water slapped at the side of the house in its wake. The motor stopped. Reesie aimed her light in the direction of the sound.
“How many of y’all up there?” a deep voice asked.
“Four!” Dré answered.
“We gotcha,” the voice said calmly. “We gotcha.”