2. Tilly
TWO
Tilly
Original Fabric: The material a building was made of is called its original fabric, and the first rule of preservation is to keep as much of it as possible. Most of what is lost in an old house is not lost to time. It is removed by people trying to improve it.
The reef is coming in wrong, and Jo won't believe me until I show her.
It's a Friday, and Friday mornings belong to Barataria Bay. We both only have classes Monday through Thursday, so since September, we've given our Friday mornings to the volunteer reef crew. We're three hours into a cold one now, running our sites.
We left the city before the sun was up. Now that it is, it isn't much brighter than the night. The sky is the flat white of a winter day. The water is that cold, brackish brown that gets into the creases of your hands and stays there.
Jo cuts the engine, and we drift over the line we laid last month. There's forty yards of bagged shell meant to grow into a living breakwater, and from the surface it looks fine. That's the problem with this work. From the surface, everything looks fine right up until the marsh behind it is gone.
"It's fine, Tilly." Jo is already reaching for the clipboard, ready to log it and move to the next site. Jo has a shrimper's relationship with the clock, and I have a scientist's relationship with doing it right. "Bags are set. We're good."
"Pull us ten feet north."
"We logged it."
"Then we'll log it again." I lean over the gunwale until my hair falls into the water and my knee screams. Even though it's been three years since surgery, it's still tender when I kneel like this for more than about five seconds.
I can see it, the way the current is scouring under the eastern end of the line where somebody set the base course a hand's width too high off the bottom. None of this is in a freshman syllabus. I know it because I grew up standing in it.
In a year that whole run will be a shelf of dead shell with the water running under it, and the marsh grass behind it will drink salt and brown out and let go.
The next storm will take another bite out of Louisiana that we don't get back.
"There, look. The base isn't seated. Whoever laid the eastern anchor floated it. "
She looks, and I can tell she finally sees what I'm trying to say.
Jo's an environmental biology major, same as me. We met in a freshman bio lab in the fall and signed up with the reef-restoration folks the same week. Most Fridays it's just the two of us and her daddy's shrimp boat, out here because we're marsh nerds and love this work.
Jo is a lot of things, most of them louder than me, but she is not the kind of person who argues with the water once the water has spoken. She blows out a breath through her teeth. "Son of a bitch. Okay. Yeah, we'll plan to come back and re-lay it."
"Yep. That's the right thing to do," I agree, and pull myself back up dripping and satisfied, if not a little chilled. I grab a towel and wipe off my arm before pulling my sleeve down.
This, right here, is the only conversation I've had in I don't know how long where somebody heard me out and makes a change based on what I actually said instead of how they perceive me.
Home, they would have told me not to lean over the side and found some correlation between what I'm saying and how it's a slippery slope.
I know these beds the way I know my own teeth.
Not these, not Barataria, but the ones that made us.
The Maybank ground out on Wadmalaw, down along the Stono, where I learned to cull before I learned to read, where my grandfather used to set me on an upturned bucket and quiz me on which shell was three years old and which was five until I could do it blind.
I have the fix. What I don't have, as far as anyone in my family is concerned, is the right to be trusted with an idea, because the last time they assumed I had my shit together, I was seventeen and ended up in a rehab facility in Virginia learning to make a gratitude list.
I'm almost nineteen months sober, but you'd think I just got my one-week chip if you talked to anyone in my family. I keep the number the way other people keep a scar, not to look at, just to know it is there.
That's why I like being here in New Orleans, out of Charleston for a while. Cooper, my older brother, is here, and he watches me like a hawk. But at least we are at different schools, so I can forge my own path, for the most part, here.
"I'm gonna run the trotline before the tide turns. Big boat is too big to get up close," Jo says, swinging a leg over into the little aluminum skiff that lives at the dock for exactly this. "You coming?"
"That's a one-woman job. You got this."
"You good on the big boat for twenty? Or you want me to help you tie it up?"
"I'm good."
"Don't fall in on me." She says it as a joke, not because she's genuinely concerned I will.
"No promises."
She drops into the skiff, unties the cleats, and yanks the pull cord, puttering off toward the marsh edge.
Then it's just me and the bay and the sound of the boat knocking against its own wake.
That lasts a short moment before my phone goes off in the dry bag.
I know before I dig it out that it's my father, because he is the only person who calls instead of texting.
"Hey, Daddy."
"There's my girl." His voice comes through roughly, and I can hear water and wind behind it.
It's the particular hollowness of a man standing on a dock with the phone away from his mouth.
"I'm sorry, baby. I saw you called me yesterday.
I was out till dark on the north grounds and by the time I got the boat up and got home, I figured you'd be asleep. "
"I wasn't asleep." I was awake at midnight staring at my ceiling, being quietly furious at Rhodes Stone, who appointed himself my lifeguard in a bar and did the math on my drink before I finished turning around.
But I am not going to tell my father that, because that would require telling him I ran into him in a bar and that would open a whole other line of questioning and assumptions.
"I finished my packing for the move. It's fine. How were the north grounds?"
"Thin." A long pause as a ghost of wind howls between us. "Real thin, Til."
"Salinity or the spat set?"
"Both. Everything." My father, who has never once in my life admitted a thing was too big for him, says it in two words that cover his whole year.
He clears his throat. "Anyway. Grandbank said he wants you to come home and go over all of this with him. You know he loves to bounce his ideas off of one of us who is actually studying erosion and land preservation. You need to call him."
I'm sure Grandbank was really asking how my sobriety was going, not how to plant marsh grass, but it's a sweet way to frame it.
"I'll call him tonight."
"He'd like that. You're his favorite, you know that."
"I'm his only one who'll sit still for the bucket quiz."
That gets a sound out of him that is almost a laugh. Then the silence comes back, filled only by the gusting wind.
On the water, a pelican drops out of the dusky gray-white sky and hits the surface forty feet off my bow and comes up with nothing. I watch it shake off and climb again.
"You sleeping okay?"
There it is. That's not a question about sleep.
That's the question everyone in my family has learned to ask sideways, the one that means are you okay, which means are you using, which means we are all still holding our breath a little, less than a month after we put your mother in the ground and you did not fall apart the way we were braced for you to.
"I'm sleeping fine."
"Because your mama, she'd want you to talk to somebody if you needed to. Down there. Whoever you've got down there."
"I have people down here, Daddy." I do. I have Jo and I have Helen, my sponsor, and I have my weekly Tuesday meeting in a church basement where nobody knows my last name.
It's the whole reason I'm fine, and it is the one part of my life my family can't picture, so it does not count to them.
"I promise you I'm okay. I know it doesn't seem possible from Charleston, but New Orleans is good for me. "
"I know you are." He says it too fast, the way you agree with something you are trying to make yourself believe. "I know. It's just, with Coop headed off, I got to thinking. We were talking yesterday," he pauses, not finishing the sentence.
He and I have been talking, which is my whole family's favorite sentence, the one that means a decision has already been made about me in a room I was not in.
"Talking about what?"
"About him leaving, about you moving into his place. We just want to make sure you're not by yourself while he's across the ocean, that's all. It's a lot of change at once."
The pelican goes down again. This time it comes up with a fish, and I hate it a little. "Who's the 'we' in that sentence?”
"Tilly."
"I'm asking a real question. Because from here it sounds like y'all have been on a group text about what to do with me, and I'm the last one finding out."
I hear my own voice going up and I make it come back down, because if I sound upset it proves their point. That's the trap of being the difficult one is that every reaction is evidence.
"I am not a loose end that needs tying off before Coop can feel good about his study abroad."
"Nobody said loose end."
"You didn't have to."
He sighs, and it is the sigh of a grieving man who is too tired to fight one of his youngest daughters. If I'm being completely honest with myself, it makes me feel like garbage.
"I just miss you," he says quietly, too quietly for my father, who doesn't do anything quietly. "That's all it really is, underneath. I miss your mama, and I miss you. I don't like any of my girls being far off right now."
Libba, my twin sister, is ten minutes from him at the College of Charleston. I’m the one who ran the farthest, all the way to Louisiana, to a coast that isn't ours. I know I'm the one who left while our entire family is in turmoil.