Between Two Skies

THE TRAILER PARK is called Home Place because, the guy who gives us the keys to the trailer says, they want everyone to feel at home here. Since most of the residents had been living in shelters, coming here must feel like heaven. But as soon as we drive up, I understand everything Mama said. This is a place you go when you’ve got no other choice. My heart kept telling me I didn’t have another choice. But now I’m not so sure.

Home Place is just outside Bellvoir, where an old strip mall stood until it got torn down years ago. They placed the trailers on top of the barren pavement, put a chain-link fence around the whole lot, and voilà, a home place. Row after row of trailers, almost as far as the eye can see. There are streets of a certain kind laid out between the trailers, with stop signs and everything. Everyone pulls their car up to their trailer: beat-up old sedans with windows missing, trucks, shiny new cars. Judging by the cars, there are people here who you can tell probably had nice houses and steady jobs before the storm and then there are people here who were poor. Then there are people like us, somewhere in the middle.

Our trailer is toward the back, on Twelfth Street, the guy in the office called it, unit 1218. We drive back there, passing a few people who wave, others who nod or stare at us intently. Older folks, moms with little kids clustered together.

It’s hard to identify which trailer is ours. They all look just the same, of course. We walk up the makeshift wooden steps and crack open the door. A smell blasts out at us — that plastic, new car smell. The trailer is long and narrow, but they pack a lot into it. It feels more like a real house than you would think. On one end there’s a bedroom with a big double bed and on the other a bedroom with a set of bunk beds. That’s my room.

Daddy sits down at the table, runs his hand through his hair, and looks up at me. It’s a complicated look — part sad, part resigned, and part relieved. He motions for me to come over. I sit on his lap and rest my head on his chest. “I know I was against your coming,” he says. “But I’m glad you’re here.”

We put our stuff away and it feels like the walls start to close in on me a little. But less than an hour passes before there’s a knock at the door. I peek through the window. It’s Kendra and Ms. Denise. I yank the door open and fall into Ms. Denise’s very firm hug. Then into Kendra. Nothing has changed with them. This feels like home.

They start handing in a bunch of bags of stuff they brought over “to make the place more homey,” Ms. Denise says: curtains in a cheery red, scented candles, knickknacks, bags and bags of groceries. When they moved into their new place on the base, she says, people gave them so much stuff, they had lots of extras. “So I’m regifting.” She laughs with her big hearty laugh. Before I know it, she’s gone out to her car, brought in a slow cooker filled with gumbo, and plugged it in.

Kendra and I go back to my “room” to hang out. “So,” she says, “here we are.”

We exchange a look, a sort of OK, now what? look, and burst into laughter, then the moment passes and we’re quiet again.

“We’re going to pick up where we left off,” Kendra says. “Katrina didn’t give us a choice. She made us leave. Coming back says you can’t beat us. We’re stronger than that.”

All those years of being a team player has made her good at pep talks. My mind goes back to that conversation in the hammock in Grandpere’s orange grove, a lifetime ago, when we thought this was going to be our year. I know we can’t really pick up where we left off. We’ve been damaged. We’ve changed. But here we are.

When we come back out to the kitchen, Ms. Denise and Daddy are very serious, and I can tell they’ve been talking about Mama and Mandy. I notice Ms. Denise pats Daddy on the hand. “God has a plan for you,” she says. “You’ll see.”

They won’t let you down the road to Bayou Perdu without a boat registration — people were coming in to steal washed-up, abandoned boats. After they let us pass, my spirits start to lift. Signs of home. The cows are still on top of the levee. If you squint — if you look past the rubble — you can almost imagine that home is just like it always was. Almost. When we get to the marina, there are still heaps of broken boats up on blocks in the parking lot. But there’s a different feeling from the last time we were here. It has that buzz that happens right before shrimping season. People are not just repairing; they’re preparing. It feels hopeful. My heart still feels heavy, but I’m a little lighter on my feet.

There’s construction going on over where the bait shop was: they’re building a new one. For now it’s operating out of a trailer, like everything else. When we walk in, Joe, the guy who owns the shop, comes over and hugs us both. He’s been here the whole time, he says, came back before the water drained. A lot of guys are making money on the side repairing and selling salvaged boat parts, he says. Daddy nods, taking it all in. He could do that, I can tell he’s thinking. There are so many things he could do here, things he knows how to do. He’s in his element. I see a little light creeping back into his eyes. “You need to check out the Second Wind,” says Joe. “Up on blocks at the end of the parking lot. Might be just the right boat to replace the Mandy.”

We find her where Joe said she’d be. She looks rough, old, abandoned. Her wheelhouse is in tatters. The rigging is completely destroyed. The hull is miraculously OK, though, and that’s what matters. All the rest can be fixed. Yes, we’ll take her, Daddy says. There are just a few weeks before brown-shrimp season starts.

But today we are going to get out on the water the only way we can. Sheriff Guidry has been keeping an eye on the pirogue that Katrina spared us from the back of our gutted house. And he even had it fitted with a little outboard motor, so we could use it like a skiff. We retrieve it from the sheriff’s department boatshed and push out into the water, slowly, slowly. I close my eyes and feel the wind in my hair. Inexpressible sweetness. Like rain on parched ground, color bleeding back into black and white. The pelicans wing above, and there’s a flock of tiny plovers diving in unison. They are back for the spring, and so am I.

It is changed, though. The channels are shallower than they used to be. The places where you could have taken a bigger trawler like the Mandy, you could probably only take in the Evangeline now, if she was still around. The water was so powerful, it picked up ten feet of sediment and dumped it somewhere new. The banks have eroded — the way into the back bayou probably lost forty feet. There was a big marsh that’s now an open bay. All the places I used to know have shape-shifted. Katrina bent and broke the people and the land, and we’ve all had to re-form ourselves.

He seems to have some internal compass. He guides us through the channels until I’m sure we’re lost and we’ll run out of gas. But then, up ahead, there are islands, and we float into a bay dotted with white. Birds everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of birds. I don’t know if it’s exactly our bayou. The land looks different. But it doesn’t matter. The birds are here. There was enough grass and reeds for them to make their nests. The mama birds are roosting. They’re all making a racket — chirping, squawking, chattering, hooting. “They came back,” I say.

Daddy smiles. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile like that since last summer. “They always come back, darlin’. They’re always going to come back. I promise.”

Then, out of nowhere, he says, “It’s happened before that we’ve been apart for a while.” It’s as if he’s said out loud that last part of a conversation that he’d been having inside his head. “I believe we are going to find some way forward together as a family. That way just hasn’t appeared yet.”

“Could we go to Baton Rouge for the weekend sometime? Maybe to look at LSU?” As far as he knows, Mandy will be going there in the fall, and I know he hopes I’ll be going there one day, too.

Daddy looks surprised. “Sure,” he says hesitantly. “We could do that.” Then he gives me a curious look. “I’m thinking that maybe this has something to do with a boy?”

“Darlin’, I’ve been so caught up in my own troubles, I didn’t even notice that you had a broken heart. But I see it now.”

“It wasn’t him,” I say quickly. “It wasn’t his fault. His family just had to leave and he couldn’t let me know.”

“It better not be him,” Daddy says. Then he puts on his really bad Mafia accent from his favorite movie, The Godfather. “Because if he hurts my little girl, he’ll be sleepin’ with the fishes.”

“No, you’d like him, Daddy,” I say. “He’s a lot like you.” I tell him what Tru told me about the Nguyens’ fishing and shrimping business up in St. Bernard, how they found a boat they thought they could fix up and get out on the water by white-shrimp season. You could still get in a good season if you did that, I say.

He smiles and shakes his head. “You’re so much like me, poor thing. You’ve just got the water in your blood and shrimp on the brain.”

Monday morning, I wait at the bus stop with about twenty other kids from Home Place who are going to Bellvoir Middle and High. I see three people from Bayou Perdu High, including this guy Shane who was on the football team. He comes over and hugs me even though he has never spoken to me in my life.

“Hey, where’s your sister?” is the first thing he says. When I tell him, he looks disappointed and drifts away toward the other side of the bus stop.

On the way into school, we pass damaged houses with trailers parked in the front yard — people are living in them until their repairs are done. Every telephone pole has little fliers stapled to it advertising services: demolition or debris removal, boat salvage. But I see that people are living out of all kinds of other vehicles, too: abandoned school buses, vans. There are heaps of garbage and rubble everywhere. Steps leading nowhere, everywhere. Everything that used to be in a building seems to be in a trailer now: the church, the town offices, clinics. Everything is temporary.

Bellvoir High is like a middle ground between Bayou Perdu and Brookdale. It’s nicer and newer than Bayou Perdu, but nowhere near as fancy as Brookdale. It’s bigger than Bayou Perdu, but not as big as Brookdale. The kids are a lot richer than at Bayou Perdu — you can tell by the cars in the parking lot — but not as rich as at Brookdale. I can pretty much guarantee they don’t have yoga for PE here.

While the secretary at Brookdale seemed to go out of her way to point out my Katrina refugee status, the one here could care less. She probably gets new students dribbling in every day. “Address?” she asks without looking up.

I tell her and she scrawls something on my papers and shoves them back across the counter to me.

I see familiar faces in a lot of my classes. Some of them light up when they see me; people come up and say hi or hug me. I find Kendra in the hall and we hug and tease each other about our new uniforms. I’m back. I did the right thing. But deep inside, I have doubts.

At lunch, Kendra introduces me to her basketball friends, several of them her former rivals.

I shake my head. She turns to the girls next to her and starts talking. Apparently our conversation is over. All day I feel like I’m trailing Kendra, a puppy dog at her heels. She has this built-in group with basketball. I just have her.

The bus drops us back at Home Place after school, and everyone shuffles off down their different rows to their trailers. I can hear fighting coming from inside some of the trailers I pass on the way back from the bus stop, when someone opens a door or a window. Even when they’re closed. Someone is cursing over some small inconvenience: “Why’d you let the damn cat out?” or “Can’t you even make toast without burning it?” But when I get back inside our trailer, it’s quiet. So lonely. I try texting Danielle a few times to let her know I got back. But there’s no response. She’s in a different time zone. Still in school, I guess. Kendra is already working again, so I feel like I’ll never see her in the afternoons.

When I’m done with my homework, I go outside to look around. There are a few little kids circling on bikes at the big empty pavement where the rows of trailers end. A few little boys chasing lizards. I start to walk aimlessly. The sun is beating down on me. There’s no shade here; the only trees are beyond the fence. I walk over, touch that chalky metal wire, shake the chain links, and have the sudden urge to climb over it, to get to those trees beyond, even if they’re just scraggly little scrubby ones. I try to hoist myself up, but there’s nowhere to get a foothold. I cross the scorching-hot pavement, starting to sweat, and exit out the front gate, past the heaps of trash and dead branches on the side of the road, all the way around the back of the fence. I sit under the not-very-shady trees. There are flies and mosquitos buzzing all around me, and I can barely stand it for a second. After all that work to get here.

I walk back around that ugly fence, into the ugly trailer park that’s now my home, and I feel so lost, so utterly lost. The pavement stretches out for what seems like miles in front of me, and I am looking at my feet, putting one in front of the other. Then something catches my eye. Coming up through a crack in that endless stretch of hot concrete is a single, delicate pink flower. I stoop and take a closer look. Somehow, the seed of it shimmied down into that crack and took root. Somehow it sought the light and pushed its way up and blossomed. It is all alone out here in this big, barren place, but it is blooming.

Daddy doesn’t get home till late and I have to admit, it’s kind of scary here. The lady two trailers down, Ms. Burns, told me she sleeps with knives under her mattress. She put a welcome mat and potted plants outside her trailer and someone stole them. There’s a security officer who rides up and down the “streets” on a golf cart at night. But I don’t feel safe. It’s because we don’t really know each other. People don’t really trust each other, either. I guess when you’ve been through what some of them have been through, it would be hard to trust.

The next day at school, I wonder if I should talk to the counselor here. Maybe she’s like Ms. Bell. But when I go into her office, I know that I won’t. She’s this blank-faced woman who says, “Can I help you?” in a way that makes it clear that’s the last thing she wants to do. “Just wondering about signing up for the SAT,” I say, and she hands me a brochure. Feeling a little desperate that afternoon alone in the trailer, I call Ms. Bell. “It’s Evangeline Riley,” I say.

“Evangeline! I’m so glad you called. I’ve been wondering about you. How’s it going down there?”

I tell her about school, the trailer park. How things aren’t how I thought they’d be, and how the counselor at Bellvoir isn’t like her.

“Not every counselor is the right one for every person,” she says. “Maybe you could try something else. Doing something you enjoy, that makes you happy. Fixing up the boat. Physical exercise and connection to things you enjoy can be really therapeutic.”

I put an ad up on the bulletin board at school. RIDE NEEDED TO MARINA AFTER SCHOOL. WILL PAY FOR GAS. I wait a few days, but no one gets in touch. Then I hear the cafeteria ladies talking while I’m in line for lunch one day, and one of them is saying how she’s helping her husband rebuild their boat. “Do you go down there in the afternoons?” I blurt out. She looks annoyed, but she says she does. So after some negotiations, I am riding to the marina with Ms. Dolores, who makes me call her that rather than Dolores. She’s grumpy and hardly speaks the whole time.

When I show up at the marina for the first time, Daddy shakes his head. “I’m here to work,” I say.

He looks at the ground, then back up at me. “Well, we’ve got plenty of that to do around here.”

I learn to sand fiberglass. I scrounge around for parts and help Daddy put them in. I mend the damaged nets we bought secondhand to save money. Sometimes we fish. I am exhausted at the end of the day. But I feel more alive than I have in months. I’m learning a new way to live in the place I’ll always call home.

So there are signs of hope, like that little flower. There are a few charters going out again at the marina — can’t keep the sports fishermen away when it’s their season. It’s in their nature to get back out on the water. Like it’s in mine.

One day, Daddy goes up to Algiers for a part and I go out on the water and get that sense of peace and clarity I always find on the water. But I can’t sleep that night. No dogs are allowed in the trailer park, but they’re here anyway. I can hear one howling and howling. I’m restless. I have strange dreams. I can feel the weight and warmth and softness of a body next to me. Surprising, but comforting. It’s Mamere, I think sleepily. She kisses me on the forehead and I wake up, confused about where I am. I could swear she was just right next to me.

I get up and walk out to Daddy, who I can hear talking on the phone in the kitchen. I am suddenly afraid. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but I can hear heaviness in his voice.

It’s dark in the kitchen. I can see his outline against the light filtering in from those floodlights near the back fence. I can’t see the expression on his face.

“What is it? What happened?” But somehow, before the words come out of his mouth, I know what he is going to say. Mamere is dead. That really was her in my dream. She came to say good-bye.

He grabs me, hugs me tight. He’s trembling; he’s crying. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

“She wasn’t feeling well after dinner, and she went upstairs to lie down. When Cel went up to check on her, she was gone. She went off in her sleep. She’d had this heart thing for a while, and she didn’t tell anybody about it. Didn’t want to worry us.”

I start to pace. “But . . . but . . .” She can’t be dead. I didn’t get to say good-bye.

“I’m so sorry, darlin’,” Daddy repeats. “You know you meant the world to her.”

I sit down on the couch, pull my feet up under me, make myself into a ball. I am rocking back and forth. “What do we do now?”

“They’re going to bring her to St. Martinville. We’re going to meet them up there. Go back to bed, darlin’. There’s nothing we can do now.”

But how could I possibly sleep? I can’t close my eyes or I’ll see her. I stare into space until I go in to wake Daddy up and find that he’s awake, too. We throw a few things in bags and head out while it’s still dark.

I feel like I’m going to be sick, so I have to close my eyes. The clop-clop of the tires over the bridge turns into a soothing rhythm and I drift off. When I wake up, we’re somewhere that looks like the suburbs of Baton Rouge. I’m not sure if we’re coming up to it or we’ve already passed it. For a minute, I’m not sure if I dreamed it all. I look at Daddy, his eyes focused on the road.

He takes one hand off the wheel and reaches over to touch my shoulder. “Yeah, darlin’. It’s true.”

I look back out the window, feeling my heart go hard. Maybe it’s my punishment. For being so stubborn. For not staying with my mother. For leaving Mamere. I will never forgive myself for this.

We pull up outside Tante Sadie’s little brick house in St. Martinville. She opens the door in her robe — a quilted satiny pink one. Her long silver hair is in braids, the way Mamere used to have them. Her face is somber, but she hasn’t been crying. She hugs Daddy wordlessly and strokes my face. “You were her favorite, you know. Her namesake.”

She makes coffee as we sit at her tiny kitchen table with a pack of powdered doughnuts open in front of us. “Kenny and the kids are coming in this afternoon,” she says. “Fifi’s goin’ to have the gathering after the funeral at her house.”

Funeral. The word stings me. I brace myself for what will be a horrible few days. Then after that, who knows? When I try to look into the future now, I don’t see anything.

I go to the funeral home with Daddy to meet with the director. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he says as he presses his cold hand into mine. He speaks in a hushed tone, showing us the different options for caskets. Daddy doesn’t hesitate, knows what to do. Mamere already has her burial plot, next to Grandpere and near her whole family at St. Martin’s. They will take care of everything, the funeral director says — receive the body when it arrives, make sure that the family doesn’t have anything more to worry about in our time of grief. I don’t say a word the whole time. I feel like I am watching this scene from above. He called Mamere a “body.”

We go back to Tante Sadie’s house to wait for Mama and Mandy. Whereas I couldn’t sleep at all before, now I’m so tired, I can barely move. I lie down in the little pink room upstairs that was Cousin Candy’s when she was little. It is perfectly quiet here, perfectly restful. I close my eyes.

When I wake up, I have that disoriented feeling you get when you’ve slept too long and at the wrong time. I don’t know where I am at first. I can hear voices downstairs. It takes me a minute to realize that Mama is here. I walk down the stairs still in a fog and can see her and Daddy on the couch. She is crumpled up next to him, with her head on his chest. She looks like a little girl. He is running his hand through her hair. His eyes are closed. The step creaks under me and they both look up. When Mama’s eyes catch mine, I know that the wall between us has washed away. I cross over to her, put my arms around her. She is soft again, the Mama I remember from when I was little, who would tuck me in, who made me my favorite fries at the diner when I was having a tough day. The three of us sit there on the couch together silently, until Mandy comes in with Aunt Sadie with groceries and we snap into doing what needs to be done.

The visitation is at the funeral home the next night. When we pull up, we can hardly find a parking space, there are so many cars. There are people I’ve never seen before going in, men in suits, people all dressed up. “That’s Grandpere’s nephew Dell,” says Mama. “And his kids. I think that’s Delphine, Mamere’s cousin. She must be ninety by now.” It hits me that I had thought of Mamere as just mine. But her reach was so much further than I ever thought.

My cousin Ami is there greeting people when we walk in, telling people where to go. She hands me a prayer card, with a Madonna-and-child picture on the front and a picture of Mamere on the back. In loving memory of Evangeline Arceneaux Beauchamp, devoted wife, mother, sister, grandmother, and teacher. There’s a Bible verse, too:

There is a season for everything, a time for every occupation under heaven:

A time for giving birth, a time for dying; a time for planting, a time for uprooting what has been planted.

A time for killing, a time for healing; a time for knocking down, a time for building.

A time for tears, a time for laughter; a time for mourning, a time for dancing.

A time for throwing stones away, a time for gathering them; a time for embracing, a time to refrain from embracing.

A time for searching, a time for losing; a time for keeping, a time for discarding.

A time for tearing, a time for sewing; a time for keeping silent, a time for speaking.

A time for loving, a time for hating; a time for war, a time for peace.

— Ecclesiastes 3:1–8

She said that she would come back home when it was time. So that’s what she meant. It was her time.

I walk into the gathering room and see the open casket. I have to do this. I have to say good-bye, whether I’m ready or not. It feels like I am the only person in this crowded room as I approach, and I see her there, her hair up in a bun like it always was. She’s wearing her Sunday best, a floral dress with a dark jacket over it, her pearl necklace and little pearl earrings. But it strikes me immediately; I don’t have any doubt: this isn’t Mamere. It may be her body, but it isn’t her. What I knew was her spirit, and it isn’t contained in this body. It’s somewhere else now — it’s in me, it’s in all these people around me.

I lower myself to the padded kneeler in front of me and make the sign of the cross. Mamere, I say inside my head, I know you can hear me somewhere. I’m sorry I didn’t get to say good-bye. I’m sorry I wasn’t with you. But I know you’re going to be with me always, just in a different way. This isn’t really good-bye for us. If I ever need you, I know you’re going to be there for me.

I walk out into the lobby, where Aunt Cel and Uncle Jim, Mama and Daddy are in a receiving line. Someone — probably Aunt Cel — created a poster-board collage of pictures of Mamere throughout her life, and it’s leaning on an easel in the lobby. I pore over all the photographs. The big wedding picture of her and Grandpere. Her holding Aunt Cel when she was a baby, her lips dark with lipstick in that black-and-white photo. There’s a bunch of her class pictures when she was a teacher, standing on the edge of rows and rows of little kids. Someone taps me on the shoulder. It’s Mr. Ray from the gas station in Bayou Perdu. I haven’t seen him since the day we were evacuating.

“Hey, darlin’,” he says. He has tears in his eyes. “Your grandma was a good woman. She taught me how to read, you know. My mama and daddy didn’t know how to read — they couldn’t teach me. People looked down on us, ’cause we didn’t have nuthin’. But she never did. When I heard she passed, I got in my car and came here. I said that I got to pay my respects to Ms. Beauchamp.”

The tears start to well up in my eyes and I have to push them back. Mr. Ray tells me he is living in Baton Rouge now and that he heard about Mamere’s passing from Mr. Sumps. Somehow the word has gotten around to people from Bayou Perdu, no matter where they are. What Mr. Ray said is only the first story like that I hear. Miss Helen from the Dollar Store is here. When she was little, she says, Mamere used to give her boxes of Mama and Aunt Cel’s old clothes because she only had one thing to wear and it smelled bad and the other kids made fun of her. This woman I’d never met tells me that Mamere would bring her the leftovers from the diner so she could feed her kids. She’s sobbing the whole time she tells the story. The retired superintendent of schools from the parish is here. He tells me that when they rebuild the elementary school — and they will rebuild, he says — he’s going to recommend that they name it after Mamere. In those hours, I learn that my sweet little old Cajun grandma was the one who was secretly a superhero.

The funeral is packed, so many people that some are standing at the back of the big old church. Grandpere’s remaining brothers — there were six of them, now three, my great-uncles — my great-aunts, their children and their children’s children, cousins, former students, people from Bayou Perdu. Mrs. Menil comes wobbling down the aisle, supported by Delbert, and plops herself across from us. Delbert smiles sympathetically at me. I smile back.

Mandy sits next to me and holds my hand. Daddy and Mama are on the other side of her. They are holding hands, too. Daddy reaches for Mandy, and together we form an unbroken chain. We sing all Mamere’s favorite hymns — “Amazing Grace” and “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace.” There are three priests, so old they can barely stand up. We follow the casket out to the cemetery behind the church, passing all those dead Evangelines. She and Grandpere share a headstone. Her name was already right there next to his. They only had to fill in the year. She came back to St. Martinville, just like she said she would. When it was her time.

When it’s over, we go back to Tante Fifi’s house. The cars line the side of the street. The doors are open and people come and go. The dining room table is practically groaning from the weight of the food everybody has brought: there’s gumbo, jambalaya, boudin, tasso, red beans and rice, chicken. Nobody is going to go hungry. Mama and Daddy are talking to cousins. Mandy and I go sit on the front steps together.

“Not great,” she says. She looks off into the distance. “But I do have a plan. There’s this school in Atlanta. It’s not too late to apply to it, and Aunt Cel said I could live at her house in the fall for free if I wanted to go there while I apply for LSU again. People drop out freshman year, so there are spaces. If you get good grades.”

“Why would you live with her, though? Wouldn’t you and Mama stay at the town house?”

“I don’t know. . . .” She looks around, making sure that Mama and Daddy aren’t within earshot. “Mama hasn’t been happy since you left. She’s thinking of coming back. I heard her on the phone one night when she didn’t know I was listening. Apparently someone at the chicken company knows someone who does the catering at one of those golf courses in New Orleans, and they need someone to manage the dining room. She’s talking about doing it. The pay is pretty good.”

She stares out into the yard. “Chris is going to Auburn next year, which is only two hours away. But if I came back to Louisiana, it would be like five hours away.”

I want to tell her not to plan her life around this guy. But I stop myself. Mandy needs to do things her way, just like I need to do them mine. I smile and put my arm around her shoulder.

From the back of the house, I hear the strains of an accordion. We follow the music out the back door onto the patio. It’s an older guy playing; I think he is one of Grandpere’s nephews. He plays something slow, a little mournful, but so soothing. One of Mama’s cousins — Tante Marie’s son Joseph — comes down with a fiddle and joins. Mamere would have loved this. Like when we were little and Grandpere and his friends used to play on the porch. When they take a break, I approach Joseph.

“Did you ever know this song that Grandpere wrote for Mamere?” I ask. “Called the ‘Sweet Evangeline Waltz’?”

He and the other cousin, whose name is Russ, start playing it. It’s a few minutes later when I see some of the old folks get up to dance. They are spinning slowly around, looking into each other’s eyes or holding on to each other. Then I notice out of the corner of my eye that Mama and Daddy have gotten up to dance. It’s like they don’t see anyone around them, they’re in their own little world, looking at each other, completely absorbed. They love each other. They still do.

I start to drift toward the hammock in the back of Tante Fifi’s yard, to be alone, away from everyone. The music follows me, haunting me, a ghost of Grandpere and Mamere. A friendly ghost. In the hammock, I lie down and look up through the trees. I rock a little, pushing off from the ground with my foot. I close my eyes, feel the breeze on my face, hear the music in the distance. The warmth surrounds me. I feel completely blank. Then the buzzing of my phone near my hip breaks the silence.

I sit up. “I’m in St. Martinville.” I know I sound flat, not like I should sound when I am hearing his voice for the first time in months. “Mamere died. The funeral just ended.” It comes out with a crack, a creak in my voice.

“What? Oh, my God.” There is panic in his voice. “I’m so sorry. I . . . Can I come see you?”

Ms. Bell’s words come back to me: It’s OK to ask for help. “Please come. Come now.”

“I’m going for a walk to get a little fresh air,” I whisper to Mandy in the kitchen. “If anyone asks, I’ll be back soon.”

I leave the house with nothing, not even my purse, walking down the sidewalk toward town with the shadows growing long. The houses on Tante Fifi’s street are big and pretty and settled, with tall trees in the yards, and grass. The azaleas are in bloom.

I reach the sleepy little downtown. There are a few restaurants, shops open. Some people are sitting outside because it’s nice out. I catch a glimpse of myself in the window of the floral shop. I forgot that I was still in my funeral clothes. I look older than myself. I feel older. Older than I did yesterday.

At the side of the church, I stop at the Evangeline statue. There she is, in her cloak and her wooden shoes, staring off with her blank stone eyes. She sits atop what’s supposed to be the tomb of Emmeline Labiche, whom Longfellow based his poem on, but everyone says that the tomb is empty. I look back into the graveyard. There is the canopy over Mamere’s grave. I have to look away.

The heels I wore to the funeral are starting to hurt, so I take off my shoes and walk barefoot toward Evangeline Oak Park. The light has gone that soft, late-afternoon orange. There’s a walkway up to the tree, so massive and ancient-looking, its broad branches stretching out, ivy crawling up its trunk. I was here many times as a kid, when we visited St. Martinville with Mamere and Grandpere. “Not every girl has a tree named after her,” Grandpere said. “You and your mamere, you’re special.” It did make me feel special to see my name on the sign:

I wander for a few minutes, go look at the Bayou Teche, the river that brought my ancestors, depositing them here from Canada, the way the Mississippi brought all those little bits of Iowa and Missouri down and deposited them in Bayou Perdu. All those currents flowing, never stopping. I imagine seeing those rivers from above, the way a bird does, seeing the way they connect and flow together and empty into the ocean. But from here, it’s so hard to see anything more than what’s right in front of you.

I hear a car door shut in the parking lot and start back toward the tree. I see him coming down the path. He’s wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. His hair has gotten longer. He waves and I start to move toward him, not really running, but not slow. His pace quickens, too, and then we are together, like two puzzle pieces finally fitting seamlessly.

That storm, that big, swirling cloud, is inside me. As I hold on to him, it rips through me. It tears down every wall I’ve built up in this last horrible year and I fall to pieces, sobbing. Every disappointment, every dashed hope, every failure, every loss is flooding out of me. It overtakes me. I couldn’t stop it if I tried. But I don’t try. I let go. I let it out. I hold on to him. He holds on to me, and strokes my hair. He doesn’t say anything. We sit on the steps and I keep crying, and he keeps holding on to me. It keeps coming and coming, and then it eases up. It slows to a trickle and I can breathe again.

A strange feeling comes over me — emptiness, but not a sad one. An emptiness that is newness, that’s ready to be filled up with something else now that all that pain has come out. I look up at Tru. My face is puffy, probably hideous. I’ve never felt so naked. And he kisses me, softly, the kiss that I imagined so many times, much stronger than I ever imagined it. We still haven’t said a word to each other. But we look into each other’s eyes, his eyes so warm, so real. I feel like we don’t have to. “I know,” he says finally. “I know.”

We walk down to the river, arm in arm, still not saying a word, but it doesn’t feel awkward. It’s like we have to let the physical presence of each other settle in for a while. My shoulder fits perfectly under his arm. We walk at exactly the same pace, completely in sync, and we stop and look out over the river.

“So much happened when we left Atlanta. You know, I tried to reach you. I sent you a bunch of e-mails.”

“My e-mail was disconnected when I left school. I’m not in school. I’ve been working, washing dishes and driving a forklift, so I could help make money for a new boat.”

“My dad was talking to his cousin, Hip’s mom, last night. Hip got on and asked to talk to me. He said you called. He gave me your number.”

“That was back in December. He told me Kaye Pham was in Baton Rouge. I called her to ask if she’d seen you. . . .”

“Her friend Elly told me that you two were together and I should stop trying to contact you.”

“What?” He looks furious. “I’ve barely even had a conversation with her. Did you believe her?”

“For a while. I thought you had just left and moved on. Until I got your e-mails.”

“Never,” he says. “I never stopped thinking about you. I never wanted to be with anyone else.” He shakes his head.

We look at each other with this sort of sad, disbelieving look. A big, destructive swirling cloud tore our families apart and brought us together. I believe right now that we both believe that nothing can keep us apart. We belong together.

He looks away for a moment. “I wish I could stay. I don’t want to leave. At all. I have to work tonight though. But I would drive all night to see you again.”

We kiss again. “Hang on,” he says. “Stay right there. I’ll be right back.”

I watch him run off to the parking lot, feeling the peace of the wings of a big white bird folding over me. He comes back a few minutes later, his guitar strapped over his shoulder. I can feel my face stretching into a smile.

We sit down by the river, and I dip my sore feet in the cold water. The sky is bruised purple and blue now as the light fades.

“No, it’s OK. Besides, I think that happened for a reason. So I wouldn’t play you that awful song.”

“No, it was. It’s that thing that I told you. I was imitating the style and the lyrics, all the music I knew from Mr. Monks and from my mom’s records. It didn’t sound quite right because it wasn’t from me.”

He pulls his guitar into his lap and he’s looking down at the strings. “Everything that’s happened since the storm . . . it’s like the greatest material for a blues song. Losing the house, the whole town, moving, again and again. Everything. Being apart from you.” He holds me in his gaze, so serious. “There were some nights when I thought I couldn’t go on anymore. I’d pick up the guitar and play and try to write songs. You’d think that the blues would fit me more than they ever have, but what came out was different.”

He strums a little and that look comes over him, like I saw that night at Chase’s house, like he doesn’t notice anyone else around him. He’s consumed in his thoughts. “So I wrote this new one for you.”

It is soft, gentle, like a boat rocking on water, over the waves, with a sureness, a rightness. It is that beautiful sadness that pierces your heart but makes it soar at the same time. It’s about a sailor who’s lost at sea. He’s drifting, and all he can think about is the girl who will be waiting when he finally gets back to shore. Because he’s decided that she’s his home now. Every chord rings with this fierce, fierce love. The kind of love that would hold you up your whole life no matter what came along.