Chapter 22 SIOBHAN
Chapter 22
S IOBHAN
When she opened her eyes, she watched the ceiling fan spin until she could no longer focus on the blades. Her eyelids were heavy as if she was waking up from anesthesia, and it took her a moment to remember where she was.
“New Orleans,” she said out loud, sitting up abruptly.
She opened the shuttered sash window and took in the view of the balcony and part of the house next door. Sunlight flooded in, highlighting the dust motes floating in the air. She stretched, then dressed quickly, ready to embrace the promise of a new day. Fifteen minutes later, face washed and hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, she went downstairs. She could hear activity in the kitchen. Mrs. Robicheaux, the cook, told her that Charmaine was in the backyard and pointed to the open door. She pulled aside the mosquito screen and stepped out. The birds were warbling, and the air was impregnated with the scent of magnolias. Siobhan recognized the click of a lighter and an inhalation of smoke followed by a long exhalation.
“Good morning, Chaz.”
Charmaine sat in a wicker chair, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the Times-Picayune . She lifted her eyes from the paper, smothered her cigarette in a crystal ashtray, and tried to waft away the smoke with her hand.
“Good morning, honey. How did you sleep?”
“Like a baby.”
“I’m glad. Come, sit down. I’ll ask Mrs. Robicheaux to fix you some breakfast.”
Siobhan sat opposite her. There was no breeze, and the tops of the palm trees were perfectly still. She felt a drop of sweat trickle down the back of her neck. Great, she thought. And it’s not even midday.
“Where’s Marcel?” she asked, fanning her T-shirt.
Charmaine frowned.
“He went out early for a run. That ingrate would rather overheat than spend time with his sister.”
“Don’t take it personally. He does the same thing in New York. Every frickin’ day, without exception.”
Mrs. Robicheaux brought out her breakfast though the word breakfast didn’t quite do justice to the array of dishes that appeared. There was a plate of scrambled eggs with bacon, French toast, grits with butter, pancakes drowning in syrup, a bowl of fresh fruit, and a cup of steaming coffee.
Siobhan whistled in amazement.
“I guess you don’t go in for half measures in New Orleans,” she joked.
“Mm-hmm. There’s no hurry, eat at your leisure. You aren’t marching a Starbucks latte from one side of New York to the other. Although ...” She raised her index finger to emphasize her point. “Did you know that the disposable cup was invented right here in Louisiana?”
Siobhan laughed. She picked up a slice of bacon and raised it to her mouth. It crunched pleasingly between her teeth.
“When was the last time you were in the Big Apple?”
Charmaine leaned forward as if about to share an intimate confession.
“I’ve never been to New York, honey.”
“You’ve never been to visit your brother?” she asked, trying not to sound judgmental.
“I’ve spent the last few years caring for our dad.” Charmaine was about to light another cigarette but paused. “You mind if I smoke?” Siobhan shook her head. “You know he has Alzheimer’s? Advanced.” A swirl of smoke hovered a few inches from her mouth. “You can’t imagine how demanding it is caring for someone so sick. And frustrating. You can’t plan anything. You can’t go anywhere. Your days consist of cleaning up feces, putting up with insults, and having pills spat in your face. Look.” She raised her left arm to reveal a large bruise the color of ripe plums. “His goodbye present.”
Siobhan stared at her, horrified.
“Your dad did that?”
Charmaine shrugged. Her cheeks sank in as she took a drag of her cigarette. She held in the smoke for a few seconds before expelling it loudly.
“He recently got it into his head that I was trying to poison him. Witnessing a man losing his sanity to the point that he doesn’t recognize his own children and not being able to do anything about it is ...” She blinked heavily. “Terrible. I didn’t want to send him to the clinic. No sir.” She shook her head and frowned to emphasize her words. “Where could be better than his own home? Who would care for him better than me? But my brother persuaded me. He said: ‘Chaz, it doesn’t matter what sacrifices you make. Dad’s life is only going to get worse; it’s time you started living again.’ And you know what? I think it’s the best decision I ever made. Now I feel ... relieved.” She paused. “Do you think I’m a bad person?”
“Of course not. It’s only natural for you to feel that way. It must have been a really difficult situation. I’m sure your dad will be well looked after.”
“Oh, you can bet on it. Marcel shelled out a fortune to get him admitted to Lakeview House. If they don’t look after him properly, he’ll raise Cain.”
“Marcel’s paying for the clinic?”
Charmaine smiled indulgently and stubbed out her cigarette against the ashtray.
“Honey, everything you see here has come straight out of his pocket: this house, the syrup on your pancakes, the coffee, the clothes I’m wearing, even this pack of cigarettes. My brother is a very generous man. If it weren’t for him, I don’t know what would have become of us.”
“What do you mean?”
In the five seconds it took Charmaine to fill her cheeks with air and exhale slowly, Siobhan realized just how little she knew Marcel Dupont.
“Let’s see, where do I begin ... Marcel and I come from a poor family. My father owned a small carpenter’s shop in the Ninth Ward, which is the largest in the city. The business was attached to what we called home at that time, four streets from the Industrial Canal. I crunched the numbers, answered the phone, that kind of thing. You were probably still a child when the Ninth Ward showed up in every news report in the country. The media portrayed us as the very definition of a Black ghetto.” She counted off the examples on her fingers: “Crime, gang fights, unemployment, poverty, drug addiction ... I mean, the neighborhood wasn’t any kind of utopia, but we had the highest rate of home ownership in NOLA. And I’ll tell you another thing: no one locked their door when they went out. You could be out all the livelong day, and the worst you’d find when you came back was the neighbor’s cat prowling around your kitchen. Of course, the white trash on Fox News preferred a simpler narrative that could be easily assimilated by their mosquito-brained audiences. No offense. About the white trash. It’s just a figure of speech.”
“None taken.”
“Anyway, the Ninth was built below sea level, squeezed in between the Mississippi, the bayou, and a canal. So in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina almost destroyed New Orleans, it was one of the worst-hit zones. And the lowest part of the ward was completely swept away.”
Siobhan lowered her gaze to her hands, interlaced around her coffee cup, and muttered:
“It must have been terrible.”
“Yeah, it was. Katrina is a stain on the history of this city. And it’s still here twelve years later. Some stains won’t come out no matter how hard you rub.”
“I just can’t make sense of it. Sometimes nature is too cruel.”
Charmaine raised an eyebrow quizzically, the way her brother did.
“Nature?” She let out a humorless cackle. “The hurricane was a natural disaster. But the flooding of New Orleans ...” She shook her head. “That was an epic failure that could have been avoided if the federal government and the local authorities had given a single solitary fuck about this place. And I swear to god, I won’t tire of saying that.”
Her words had taken on a belligerent tone. Siobhan stretched out a hand and touched Charmaine gently. The physical contact seemed to calm her. She continued her story.
“A week earlier, they were talking about a tropical storm crossing the Florida Keys and the possibility that it might head north. But it’s the same story every August, and most people don’t even bat an eyelid. Three or four times a season, we hear alarming reports on the news about hurricanes heading straight for the city, but they always seem to change course or abate in the Gulf of Mexico. If any storm reaches NOLA, it’s usually already weakened, and all we get is another gray and rainy day. In Louisiana, we’re used to the routine of hurricanes and their litany of preparations. Then, the NHC raised the category of the hurricane to 2 and people went crazy buying plywood. Mayor Nagin, Governor Blanco, and FEMA advised us to leave the city and head further inland. But of course, that would have meant abandoning homes, jobs, commitments ... My dad was too stubborn to give in to the climate, so we stayed. And we weren’t the only ones.”
“Marcel told me he wasn’t here when Katrina struck.”
“No. Thankfully, he’d gone to New York long before. On August 26, the NHC declared that Katrina would soon reach category 3. They were talking about winds of up to 150 miles per hour. There was a possibility of the levees giving way, and if that happened, we could expect waves up to twenty feet high. But that scoundrel Ray Nagin didn’t order the evacuation of the city until two days later, shortly after it was classified as category 5. Yes, you heard me. When the authorities informed us that the Superdome would be open as a ‘shelter of last resort,’ I was horrified just thinking about it; the previous year, with Hurricane Ivan, that same plan had been an abject failure.”
Siobhan recalled the horrifying images that she’d seen on television: hundreds of people trudging toward the infamous city stadium laden with coolers, blankets, and suitcases; trees torn up by the roots and electrical poles flattened; vehicles floating in torrents of filthy water; destroyed houses, some missing their roofs, marked with a large X on the front wall, or what remained of it; and loads of tents.
“In the end, it went down the way it was always going to,” continued Charmaine, playing with her lighter between her fingers. “The levees didn’t hold, and the river reclaimed its own. I remember I heard a roar, like an explosion, and then I saw a swelling mass of water about to engulf our house.”
“Christ!”
“The water burst through doors and windows. Flattened everything. My dad broke through the ceiling with the ax and we took shelter on the roof; I still don’t know how we managed it. We were up there for eight hours, waving flags we improvised from our own clothes, until the rescue teams put us in a boat and got us out of there. That was August 29, 2005.”
“Where did they take you?”
“The Convention Center. We were supposed to be transferred to other nearby towns, but the buses took six days to arrive. So we had to live alongside corpses in 95-degree heat for six goddamn days. With no food, no drinking water, and no way to attend properly to the wounded. The poor of NOLA were left to our fate. Some of us stayed there, others set out on foot, heading west along the interstate.”
Siobhan took a long drink of coffee, hoping the liquid would dissolve the knot in her throat.
It didn’t.
“Were you able to contact Marcel?”
“No. Eighty percent of the city was waterlogged. All of it except for the French Quarter, which only suffered wind damage and a burst pipe under the wax museum. Because the precious French Quarter never floods. Convenient, right?” she added sarcastically. “There was no electricity, no running water, no fuel, no stores open, and of course no phone lines. The sewage system had overflowed, so walking through the city meant stepping through filth. Until we got to Baton Rouge, we had no way of communicating with my brother, who didn’t even know whether we were alive. After the storm, some people were just never seen again; they simply disappeared. God, it was hell ...,” she murmured, massaging her temples.
“When we came back a few weeks later, it was a mess. One out of every four or five houses had been flattened to a pile of rubble, or was about to collapse at any moment. Our house was pretty much destroyed. The structure was still standing, but that mud bath made it uninhabitable. It stank of mold. There was trash everywhere. The carpenter’s shop hadn’t survived either. We lost it all.” She exhaled. “We were left with nothing, and the insurance people washed their hands of it. The bastards said our policy didn’t cover flood damage. Can you believe it? As though we had left the faucet running in the bathroom. It was Marcel who saved us. First, he helped us move to Tremé. And then, when my dad got sick, he bought this house. The Garden District is a neighborhood for rich white folk; people here don’t mix with Blacks or Creoles. Even so, my brother wanted the best for us. He’s a good man, Siobhan. Did you know he started writing when he was eight?” Siobhan raised her eyebrows in astonishment. “He loved ghost stories, headless pirates, and the terrifying creatures of the bayou. The darker and more twisted, the better. He had a wild imagination. And he was very observant. He still is, in fact.” A smile crept onto her lips. “I always knew he’d go far.”
“Your brother is a terrific writer, Chaz. He has a unique way of describing the world.”
“Oh, I know. Believe me, I know. I’ve read all his books. I’ve even kept an album of press clips from the bestseller list, ever since his first novel came out. My dad never forgave him for leaving, but if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be the man he is now.”
“Why did he leave?”
The question had just slipped out.
“Look, this place swallows you whole if you’re not careful. I’ve seen what New Orleans can do to people more times than I care to admit. Let’s leave it at that. And Marcel has done a lot for this city since Katrina. Every year, he donates thousands of dollars to its recovery.”
An icy shock ran through Siobhan. The man Charmaine Dupont was describing didn’t sound at all like the man she had met in Manhattan a few months earlier.
Marcel Dupont was generous.
Marcel Black, on the other hand, had screwed her over by renegotiating the advance and royalties for the book in his favor.
She was confused.
“Are you serious? I thought he hated New Orleans!”
“He doesn’t hate it. It’s just that ... You see, my brother had a very difficult childhood. He spent half his life standing outside the candy store staring in through the window. Marcel is a wounded bird, Siobhan. And all wounded birds return to their nest sooner or later.”
Siobhan swallowed to free herself of the lump that had suddenly lodged in her throat.
“What happened to your mother? He never mentions her.”
“He didn’t tell you about her? I thought he would have. I can tell he trusts you.”
“I don’t know, Chaz. There are a lot of things I don’t know about him. He hasn’t even told me why he uses a pseudonym. Not long ago we had an argument because ...” She waved her hand. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve asked him several times, and he’s always evasive. Marcel is very reserved. It’s as though he has a ‘No Entry’ sign hanging around his neck.”
Charmaine sighed.
And in that sigh, Siobhan thought she detected something like empathy.
“Well, you know what I say? No more talking about bad stuff. As we say in these parts, laissez les bon temps rouler . Now, I want you to tell me all about your novel, With Fate on Our Side. Please?”
“How did you know ...? Did Marcel tell you?”
“Honey, Marcel didn’t tell me a thing. Do you think he’s only uncommunicative with you?” Siobhan tried not to smile. “Let’s just say ... I’ve been researching you. How could I resist, when you’re the first girl that dumbass has ever brought home?” she said, with a tone of female complicity. “Anyway, I follow you on Twitter. I’m @renew_orleans2005, if you want to follow me back.”