SEPTEMBER 2, 2011
Vale dreams she is back in New Orleans. A party at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, the deserted beach where the amusement park used to be. Shante plays her ukulele, wears a blue dress that shimmers in starlight, has a pair of black wings tacked to her shoulders. She howls, the lyrics to her song guttural punctuations, indecipherable. Flicker of headlights crossing the causeway. Vale and Jack and others are there, too: they are dancing in slow motion to Shante’s song. There is a bass drum—they move their hips to it. Sirens. Flashes of far-off lightning and the steamy, fish-heavy air of mid-August. Jack puts his lips against Vale’s spine, inches them up toward her neck. Vale laughs. Turns. Twists away. Shante sings louder—cackles of laughter. Shrieks of verve. Vale steps into the water, pulling her dress up over her knees, and opens her lips to say something—the word, pearly and half-formed, the color of milk, birthing itself on her tongue—
But Vale’s heartbeat is suddenly loud as thunder under her ribs and the world returns: the stench of the camper. The rushing hum of creek water.
The sucker punch: Bonnie.
Yesterday Deb called the police from a neighbor’s phone, but they still hadn’t found anything. Four days she’s been missing. Vale’s stomach tangles. “My mother’s life is not my own,” she whispers.
It’s dawn, according to the cast of pink in the eastern sky.
Vale wants to return to the dream: Jack’s lips rising up her spine. Jack, a friend she sometimes sleeps with: a left-handed illustrator of hawks and eagles and peregrine falcons, half-Creole, who sleeps in a tree house in the backyard of a house full of musicians in the Ninth Ward. She doesn’t love Jack. It’s the easy coupling of their bodies she returns for; that tree house, the sounds of the city through its open windows. When the levees broke in 2005, Jack stayed put there in that house tacked to trees while the water rose around him.
What tree is Bonnie in? What abandoned apartment/trailer/spot-below-a-train-bridge has she called her own?
Vale rises. Pours water into the rusted teakettle. Strikes a (miraculously) dry match and the stove’s front burner bursts into flame.
When the water boils she makes a cup of instant coffee and reaches for her backpack. She pulls out her black notebook and slips the photo of Bonnie and her out from between the pages. Rubs her finger over her mother’s narrow shoulder bones.
There’s another photo, too, which she places on the table next to the first one. It’s of Bonnie’s mother, Lena, who died of a fever a few days after Bonnie was born. In the picture Lena stands outside the door of her cabin—a place set back in the woods somewhere on this hillside—in a dark fedora, a one-eyed barred owl perched on her shoulder. She wears a threadbare flannel shirt, blue jeans and tall boots, has a dark braid reaching halfway to her waist. Who the hell, Vale asks herself, looking at that photo and at that bird.
She only knows what Bonnie knew: that Lena lived in the one-room hunting camp at the top of the ridge overlooking the swamp with that owl named Otie. “My mother? Lunatic, bat-shit crazy, unwell,” Bonnie would say, shrugging, laughing. “No wonder we’re a little odd, V-bird.” Vale wonders: Bipolar? Schizophrenic?
Three years ago Vale got a tattoo of an owl on her left shoulder in honor of that bird of Lena’s: same markings, same eyes.
Vale finds thumbtacks in a drawer and tacks the photos to the wall above the table.
Bonnie never knew who her father was, either. “Who cares,” she said, wrapping her arms around Vale in that bed where they slept together most nights until Vale was thirteen. “I have you and you have me.” Sheets covered in yellow roses. Bonnie’s long neck, the soft and warm skin of her belly.
The last time Vale spoke to Bonnie was two months ago. Bonnie was breathless. She told Vale about the love of Jesus and how it had found her. Her voice jittery and quaking—her thoughts disconnected—high on something—junk or Jesus or both. “His love is bright burning, honey. All-loving. Holy!” A hoarse laugh that turned into a cough. She said she’d joined a church somewhere. Told Vale it had changed her. That everything was finally making sense. “A new leaf, Vale-honey. I’m cleaning up, I swear.”
“Are you?” Vale had asked. She was sitting on the fire escape of her room in Marigny, looking out over a sea of backyards: shrines, bicycles, vines, Christmas lights strung from rooftops.
“Sure I am,” Bonnie said, before hanging up.
VALE FINISHES HER COFFEE, PUTS THE CUP IN THE SINK, and walks up the hill toward Deb’s cabin.
They’d had dinner at Hazel’s last night—a brief conversation, warm stew. Deb begged Vale to stay at her place in Danny’s old room, but Vale declined. Said, “I like it where I am. All creeky.”
“Can I borrow your truck?” Vale says now, standing in Deb’s open doorway, her hands in her sweater pockets. Deb’s cabin looks the same as it did eight years ago: the long porch running along one end, books and houseplants scattered everywhere, the yard one continuous tangle of garden. Deb stands in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in her hand. Her hair looks more gray in the morning light, her eyes more tired, but her face is still beautiful.
“The roads—”
“I don’t care,” Vale says. “I need to get there.”
“Okay,” Deb says, setting down her coffee and reaching for the keys. “I’ll go with you. I’ll drive.”
The damage is everywhere. They wind their way down back roads in Deb’s rusted blue Toyota, the seats patched with duct tape, seeking a pathway. They turn around four times at washed-out culverts, try different routes.
Deb tries to make small talk, but Vale keeps her face turned to the window, mumbles her replies. “Let’s try this way,” Deb says quietly, pulling down yet another back road.
On every one they pass more destruction: new bends to old creeks, houses torn from their foundations, water carving new pathways through hillsides. Fluid—that’s how the wrecked landscape looks to Vale. Not fixed, at all, as she had always presumed it to be. In New Orleans, sure. But here? She’s always thought of this landscape as abhorrently stable.
IT TAKES THEM AN HOUR, BUT AT LAST THEY FIND A WAY through.
Vale steadies her hand on the truck’s door handle as they pull into the parking lot of Bonnie’s apartment building.
Deb puts her hand on Vale’s shoulder. “We’re here. You all right?”
“Yes,” Vale says, looking out the window at the torn-up river, at a house the color of mint ice cream across the street, at a woman turning from that house and walking toward a shed out back. Bent shoulders. A red coat. Not Bonnie.
Such pretty houses, Vale thinks. And inside so many of them: OxyContin, meth, heroin, fentanyl. Creeping into small towns like this one: a mill town, a hippie town. Winding its way up riverbanks. Anywhere poverty nestles. Where options and jobs are few.
Vale climbs the wooden, exterior staircase to that third-floor apartment—robin’s-egg-blue Formica counters and a pink claw-foot tub, resting on rotting linoleum. She stops at the top of the stairs, closes her eyes, and breathes in. She wants her mother to open the door when she knocks. She wants Bonnie to put her arms around her and say, “Ha! And they thought I’d disappeared.” She wants to see what her mother’s eyes look like, lit up with her newfound love of Jesus. What might that love look like?
Deb puts her hand between Vale’s shoulder blades. “You okay?”
“VALE,” DEAN SAYS, OPENING THE DOOR. SHE HASN’T seen him in eight years. He’s worse for wear: arms shaking, jazzed pale-blue eyes. He opens the door wider, letting them in. “Long time no see. Come in. They’ll find her. They will.”
He’s wearing gray sweatpants and a white tank top, has bruises threading up and down his thin arms.
Vale walks into the kitchen. Looks around. “You haven’t seen her?”
He goes to the couch and lies down, sticks an unlit cigarette between his lips. “No. But she’ll be back. She always comes back,” he says quietly, closing his eyes.
Vale walks around the apartment slowly. Fast-food containers in the sink, pizza boxes in front of the TV, piles of clothes in corners. Vale settles in front of the windowsill where Bonnie’s crystals are still lined up—dust-covered amethyst and quartz.
Beside them is a stack of tarot cards, a book on astrology, books on Native American mythology, and beside that, the Jesus stuff Vale’s never seen before: a New Living Translation Holy Bible; a postcard of Mary holding the baby Jesus, his strangely thin limbs, small head, and adult features; a selection of brightly colored votive candles; a bowl full of rosaries.
Vale doesn’t know what church her mother joined. Something within walking distance: Catholic, Baptist, evangelical. Vale notices how the rosaries, all shapes and colors and sizes—likely picked up at the thrift stores in town—make a bird’s nest of sorts in the white bowl where they’ve been placed. Vale pockets a blue rosary.
Scrawled, with a black Sharpie on the wall next to the window, are the words: Whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. —Matthew, 4:13.
“She was high,” Dean says from the couch, his eyes still closed.
Vale turns to look at him, her hands shaking in her pockets. “What?”
“She was high. She’d just shot up. Thought you’d want to know that.”
Vale looks out the window: the creek and, on the far side, train tracks. “Goddamn you,” she says, not looking at him.
He doesn’t respond.
I’m cleaning up, baby. Getting clean, I swear! Bonnie said, the last time they spoke on the phone.
Vale goes to her mother’s closet and sifts through the sweaters and T-shirts and jeans piled on the floor until she finds what she’s looking for: the old peach-colored silk dress, full of holes, that her mother used to wear around the apartment when she was happy, gloriously drunk, at ease.
“This dress was my mother’s,” Bonnie would say, slipping it over her shoulders. “The only thing I have of hers. Don’t I look like a movie star in it? Glamorous like Rita Hayworth!” Rising and putting her arms around Vale’s shoulders. Putting her cheek against Vale’s cheek, making a kiss-face into the mirror.
Vale puts her nose into the dress: cigarette smoke, jasmine, sour sweat.
Deb touches Vale’s arm. “You ready?”
Vale nods, heads toward the door.
“Don’t worry,” Dean calls out, grinning. “She’ll come back. She always does.”
Vale holds on tight to the stair railing on her way down.
DEB NEEDS TO GO GROCERY SHOPPING, BUT VALE WANTS to look around. “Pick me up here when you’re done,” she says, walking toward where the green bridge once stood. It hasn’t yet been rebuilt; the street dead-ends in a gorge of broken concrete and twisted metal. For thirty feet downstream there’s a tangle of branches, trees, boulders, rusted iron. The water has receded to its normal height. Water—so illusorily peaceful.
The air is cold, damp. A few raindrops slash against Vale’s skin.
She lets out a slow breath, wraps her sweater around her shoulders.
“What on earth were you thinking?” Vale whispers, scrambling down the river’s bank, pushing her way through and over downed branches and sumac. Tangled piles of rocks, river silt, trash. Plastic bottles. Metal cans. A sock—white and small. Vale bends and touches it. A child’s sock. The heel threadbare. Vale sits down next to it. Closes her eyes.
Yesterday, reading the news on her phone, Vale saw a photo of a child in Somalia, where the droughts have been relentless: a boy sitting in a gray washtub, all bone. The victims will be plenty, Vale thinks. The victims are and will be everywhere.
Her mother is a fool, not a victim. One hundred pounds of skin and bones walking out into that torrential rain.
“Goddamn you, Bonnie,” Vale whispers, rising.
THEY DRIVE THE TWENTY MINUTES HOME MOSTLY IN SILENCE. Vale looks out the window at fields, a gray silo, a red barn, the bright streak of Silver Creek winking at them from between the trees. Every inch familiar, and in every shot something changed, upturned, carved anew. Living in New Orleans you get used to the shadow of storms, the earth’s quiet yet undeniable sinking. You get used to recognizing the impermanence of the ground, the trees, the walls, your own skin.
But here? She isn’t used to that temporality.
She thinks of glaciers melting, sea levels rising, widespread famine. Not one place is immune.
Deb pops a tape into the cassette player, and Etta James comes on singing “At Last.” One of the many songs Bonnie loved—music for all those years her medicine and touchstone. Vale turns her eyes toward the trees flying by the windows and thinks of her mother’s body, laughing and twirling, eyes closed, in peach silk. At last. Her mother will be found—she feels the fact of it in the cornfield passing by, in Etta’s voice spooling: hope. Possibility. Redemption.
Back at the camper Vale pours herself a glass of gin. She picks up the silk dress, puts her face into it, and breathes in.
Vale pulls off her jeans and T-shirt and slips the dress over her shoulders. Strings the blue rosary over her neck. She charged her cell phone in Deb’s truck: she turns it on now and blasts Missy’s Under Construction. Looks at herself in the cracked and flyspecked mirror. She looks like her mother. She looks like Lena. She brings her glass to her lips, drinks; a breeze slips under the door, the air cool, damp, licking her ankles and shins.