AUGUST 28, 2011
Vale is tending bar in New Orleans—pouring lavender bitters into juniper-infused gin, flicker of wrist, carmine leather, Beyoncé’s “Diva” playing on the dust-covered speakers in the corner—when she gets the call from Deb: High water. A bridge. Your mother.
For twenty-four hours she’s been watching the storm on TV. Hurricane Irene touched down the night before in New Jersey, downing trees, flooding rivers, causing seven deaths. One and a half million people without power. It landed next over Long Island—roads, houses, streets destroyed, sewer plants overflowing in Long Beach. Then headed north into New England, where it lost its intensity and dropped to a tropical storm. Just heavy rain, the news said. Winds slowed. Sighs of relief at the bar. “Baby gone to sleep,” Monty whispered, laying his palm on the cigarette-marred mahogany of the bar top, watching the footage of search and rescue missions along the coast of New Jersey. Someone going to turn this bar into a guitar someday, Vale can hear Moe, the piano player who comes in on Thursdays, say in her head. She wasn’t here for Katrina, but the residual trauma has soaked into her bones, here where they know the power of wind and rain all too well. When storms come there is a magnetic, dread-sickened buzz in the air. They turn the music up. Over-drink. Dance more recklessly. They are waiting, every day, for the next big one, not an if but a when. Tonight Vale mixes drink after drink and, alongside the others there in Marigny, breathes a sigh of relief for their brethren in Brooklyn, brethren in Queens. Awful. Destructive. Yes. But not near as bad as predicted. The end of the world has not come.
The bar is full, and she loves the flickering motions that take over her body on busy nights. She steals shots, dances in slow motion to Shorty and Missy and Kanye.
But later that night, eleven thirty, other footage starts floating in: cell phone videos from northern New England. The winds dropped, yes, like the news said, but the rains picked up. The screen shows images of roads torn up, trees downed. “Just think of the ghosts unearthing,” says Monty, who found his cousin’s body, bloated in two feet of water, at the house where he was born, four days after the storm. Vale taps her glass against his bourbon. Says, “They’ll be just fine there.” Vale is from Vermont—a blue-walled apartment above the river. Hurricanes don’t hit there. It’s one of those places that is oddly immune: to poisonous snakes, poisonous spiders, tornadoes, earthquakes, landslides. But the next shot is of a double-wide—green vinyl siding, black shutters—being swept downstream. “Shit,” Vale whispers, passing another Maker’s Mark to Monty, who starts to shake visibly. Vale’s mother, Bonnie, is in one of those river towns being torn up, right now, by floodwater. The storm, according to the news, has dropped eleven inches of rain in eight hours. Creeks have surged. River depths soared. The screen shows a 250-year-old covered bridge collapsing and going under. Vale reaches for her phone and calls Bonnie’s landline, but the number is disconnected.
She gets the call from Deb, her aunt, a near stranger, an hour later. Deb’s voice is scratchy, barely audible. She must be standing at the top of the field above Hazel’s house, the only place there’s cell reception there on the farm. “Bridge . . . missing . . . eight hours—” she shouts, her voice breaking up in places.
Vale feels a cold stillness. She takes the phone outside into the street’s warm air. The branches of a thick-trunked magnolia rise above her. Sirens wail in the distance. She must have misheard. “What?”
Deb repeats herself. Is shouting over the sound of the rain. Vale’s mother, she says, walked out into the storm eight hours ago. Was seen by a neighbor walking toward a bridge that collapsed. Hasn’t been home since. “They’ll find her. I’m sure,” Deb says, the last word rising like a question.
The images register in Vale’s mind, piece together slowly. The first time she saw her mother with a needle in her arm Vale was sixteen years old; claw-foot tub, wood floors, smell of incense and bathwater. A slow progression of wine, then Oxy, then heroin in that blue-walled apartment above the river.
“Okay,” Vale says into her phone before hanging up. Vale was doing her own stuff back then, too—pills of all kinds. At eighteen, eight years ago, she got clean and left home. She hasn’t seen her mother since. She looks up into the branches of the magnolia rising above her. Puts her forehead against its thick trunk.
She loves this city—its warm heat, its music, its light. She hates home—its silence, its whiteness, its holes, the people she left there.
“Bonnie,” she whispers.
The next morning she slips into boots, packs a bag, gathers her cash, and walks herself to the bus station on Loyola Avenue.