Finding Someplace (7 page)

“This is bad, Miss M,” Dr
é
murmured, shaking his locks.

Miss Martine didn't respond. She bent slowly to pick up some matted brown thing from the floor.

“Oh!” Reesie gasped. “Is that the stone marten from your Louis Armstrong picture?” The fur hung limply in Miss Martine's hand.

“Stone-what-you-say?” Eritrea tipped closer.

Reesie looked sadly at the wildly flowered dresses spilling out of the smashed chifforobe. Their colors and dyes were already running together as they lay soaked across the floor and bed. She forced her eyes away. All that fantastic old-school fabric!

Dr
é
crossed the wrecked room to take a closer look at the damaged roof.

“Seems like there ought not be so much water puddled in here,” he said, crouching near the floor and making his way in slow motion around the room.

Reesie realized that he was right—every move they made squelched into the rug.

“It's from the roof, right?” she asked.

He shook his head, looking puzzled. “Let me take a look outside.”

“It's only a little high water,” Eritrea chimed in.

Reesie saw Miss Martine's worried face as they headed back into the living room.

“I don't know 'bout that,” Dr
é
muttered. He opened the front door, and fast-moving water rushed in. Reesie was almost thrown off her feet by the quickness of it. Dr
é
tried to push the door shut, but the force of the water was too strong.

“Help me!” he shouted. Eritrea waded in his direction, and Reesie pulled herself along the edge of the couch toward him. The three of them put all their combined weight against the door. Slowly, it moved. Dr
é
clicked the lock and looked over his shoulder at Miss Martine.

“This ain't only ‘a little water,' Miss M. The water's rising, and rising fast. We should go up into your crawl space.”

Eritrea stared at him. “Are you crazy? Up in a nasty attic with
spiders
and stuff?”

Miss Martine frowned. “You don't think…” She let her words trail off. Dr
é
started grabbing the pillows off the sofa, pushing them tightly against the bottom of the door. Reesie looked down. Water was already above their ankles.

“I don't know what to think, Miss M, 'cept that this is trouble with a capital
T
!”

 

Chapter Eleven

“Exactly what kind of trouble?” Reesie's voice didn't sound teenage to her own ears. It sounded small and scared.

“Trouble with the levee, Boone,” Dr
é
answered.

Reesie could only nod. She'd heard over and over in her junior-high Louisiana history classes that one of the things that made New Orleans special was the way most of the city was situated. The city's bowl-shaped landscape was positioned between Lake Pontchartrain on the north end and the great Mississippi River on the south. The low land was protected by high banks of earth called
levees
. If the waters rose too high, or if the levees ever leaked, the city could be flooded.

“This water should be in the bathtub!” Eritrea was indignant.

“Yeah, well, bathtubs can overflow, can't they?” Dr
é
said.

The water was already swirling around their calves. The pale carpet underneath looked like sand at a beach. The heat and heavy humidity in the house was sucking the air away, and Reesie's chest felt tight. What if she had to swim?

“Miss M, you got something like a crowbar or sledgehammer?” Dr
é
asked.

“Look in that hall closet!” Miss Martine had made her way into the kitchen. Dishes clinked and cabinet doors slammed shut.

Reesie looked at Dr
é
as if he had lost his mind. “Why do you need that?”

“In case we need to chop our way out of the attic, Reesie Boone. Now come on, you and Tree help me get the attic ladder down.”

“This is crazy,” Eritrea murmured, shaking her head. She kicked off her heels. “We just got married!” Her voice was shaking. “This is supposed to be a special time. A happy time, right?”

“Yeah,” Reesie said, strapping her backpack onto her shoulders. “Special.” As she started after Eritrea, something on the dining room table caught her eye—it was Miss Martine's book of poems. Without thinking, she picked it up to put it into the backpack. Then her eyes traveled up the wall to Louis Armstrong, and she swiped down his picture.

“Who's in that picture?” Eritrea asked curiously.

“It's just something special to Miss M,” Reesie said. She knew she sounded rude, but she didn't feel like trying to explain. Mr. Louis Armstrong and
Woman Everlasting
were absolutely the last items that would fit before her bag burst at the seams.

Dr
é
pulled one of the heavy dining room chairs into the hall so it was underneath the trapdoor in the ceiling that led to the crawl space.

Reesie and Eritrea held the chair steady so Dr
é
could climb up to reach the latch. He yanked it, and a folding ladder slowly lowered itself. Eritrea grabbed the ladder and pulled while Dr
é
jumped onto it.

“We'd better hurry,” he said. “Miss M, come on!”

Miss Martine came into the hallway holding tightly to a small cooler and a plastic grocery bag.

“You go first,” Dr
é
insisted, taking the cooler and passing it to Eritrea. She pushed her way to the ladder next, barely giving Miss Martine's dripping slippers time to get halfway up.

“Hey, after you!” Reesie said, but Eritrea didn't seem to hear—or care. Dr
é
grinned, and a little of his goofiness showed again.

“I still love her, you know?” he said.

Reesie scrambled onto the ladder. She didn't answer Dr
é
and she didn't look down. To her relief, when her head poked into the attic, it wasn't completely dark. Slivers of light shone in through the vents in a small gable at one end. The space was already crowded with old suitcases, boxes, and empty picture frames.

“How come the roof isn't broken up here?” Reesie asked, trying to squeeze between Eritrea and a beat-up leather trunk.

“That part of the house was added on,” Miss Martine said. “We should stay dry here.”

“Lucky for us!” Dr
é
finally huffed up the ladder, carrying the crowbar. His wild hair brushed against the rafters. Reesie could imagine spiderwebs … and spiders. She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees.

“Found this in the closet, too!” He held up a small transistor radio. “So far I only got static, but maybe I can switch batteries from one of the flashlights and get it to work.”

“Good thinking,” Miss Martine said. “Teresa? Eritrea? Can you get any calls out on those cell phones?”

“Mine's dead,” Eritrea said, shaking her head.

Reesie twisted her body and managed to pull her phone out. She squinted at the ghostly screen, which read:
NO SERVICE AVAILABLE
.

“How long do we have to stay up here, anyway?” Eritrea poked Dr
é
with her elbow.

“Till the water goes down,” he said.

Reesie crawled to the open trapdoor and blinked, looking down. The hallway had become almost too dim for her to make out anything, but the smell of wet furniture and curtains and clothes was already strong. Then she thought she saw a glimmer of water, and she jumped back onto her knees, scraping them on the rough floor.

“I—I think it's higher!” she whispered.

“Now, let's not panic,” Miss Martine said. “What would you all be doing if we weren't stuck up in this musty old crawl space?” Her voice sounded a little too loud and a little too cheerful.

Dr
é
cleared his throat and reached for Eritrea's hand. “Tree and me would be enjoying our happy new home!” He aimed the beam of his flashlight right at Reesie. “And what about
you
, Boone?”

Reesie opened her mouth, ready to give him a sharp comeback. Instead tears stung her eyes, and a different answer forced itself into words.

“I'd be turning thirteen.”

 

Chapter Twelve

“Happy birthday to ya! Happy birthday!” Dr
é
did an awful imitation of Stevie Wonder's singing, making Tree giggle like a five-year-old. Reesie couldn't help smiling.

“Happy birthday, Teresa.” Miss Martine gave Reesie's hand a tight squeeze.

She snapped open the plastic cooler. “Here. You have a birthday apple.”

“Hey, can I get in on that, Miss M?” Dr
é
asked. Miss Martine passed out apples and last night's cold meat pies. The attic began to smell more like a house than a cave.

Reesie sniffed away her tears, thankful that the others were munching so hungrily that they didn't seem to notice.

“I thought your big day was yesterday,” Miss Martine said. “And we left your cake down in the kitchen, poor thing!”

“Yeah, too bad we don't have that up here,” Dr
é
said.

Eritrea nodded in the direction of the ladder. “That cake is underwater by now.”

“I can always make another cake,” Miss Martine said soothingly. “I just feel so sorry that you have to spend your special day up in my attic, Teresa! I wish I could give you some kind of little birthday token.”

“She already
has
something from you.” Eritrea slurped on her apple.
How can she slurp on an apple?
Reesie wondered, fumbling to open her backpack.

“I thought you might want to save this.…” She couldn't bring herself to say,
In case you lost everything else,
so she just held out the photograph and the book.

Miss Martine leaned forward.

“How thoughtful! I insist that you keep
Woman Everlasting
. When this is all over, I'll autograph it for you. That'll be for your birthday, you hear?”

“But, Miss Martine, I didn't—”

“Hush now. Let me see if this old brain can recite some lines. It's been so long. Oh yes! The end of one poem went like this: ‘Find someplace, / get yourself somewhere that you can always enter, / knowing you will be loved.'”

As Reesie listened, the rhythm and feeling of Miss Martine's husky voice rose to the low rafters and bounced off them. She could imagine those words flowing out of the gable like the water flowing in beneath them. The last few words made her feel closer to all the people in the attic. Like they were family, as crazy as it seemed.

“That—that was deep,” Dr
é
said.

“Amazing.” Reesie nodded.

“I mean, you could have written that yesterday,” Eritrea said.

“Thank you.” Miss Martine sighed. “It was a long time ago.” She gently pressed the book back into Reesie's lap and sat still, as if the poetry had carried her off into a different world. Like she was remembering
her
someplace.

Minutes dragged into hours. Dr
é
fiddled with the radio. Scratchy, screechy sounds filled the attic. He and Eritrea kept up a whispered, couples-only conversation. Miss Martine dozed. Reesie pressed herself close to the vent and strained to peek through the louvers. The slats were so close together that she couldn't see anything more than strips of weak sunlight. She pulled out her sketch pad and a drawing pencil anyway.

The shadow and light made a funny gray-and-white pattern on the page. She used it to design a clothing pattern. First she drew angular lines across the page, so that with the bars of light it looked like a crisscross. Then she made squiggly wavy lines, spaced unevenly. Water. Stupid water. She couldn't get away from it.

All at once, the radio crackled and a woman's voice came through clearly. Miss Martine jerked awake, knocking over the cooler.

“As of this hour, unconfirmed sources report that both the Seventeenth Street Canal and the Industrial Canal have breached. There's no official word on the extent of flooding so far, but some areas, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, may be experiencing up to four feet of floodwater.… Repeat, may be experiencing four or more feet of flooding from a suspected levee breach.…”

Reesie dropped her pencil. The edge of her sketch pad trembled against her knees.

“We're trapped up here!” she shouted.

“Dr
é
?” This time Eritrea sounded like a little girl. Dr
é
pushed past her to get to the ladder. Reesie held her breath as first his feet disappeared, then his knees. Just as his face vanished, they heard loud splashing. His head popped up again. When he crawled off the ladder, he was wet from the waist down. Reesie saw his eyes and knew how scared he was. Her heart thumped.

“We gotta get on the roof,” he said, reaching for the crowbar. “Miss M, I'm sorry, but we have to bust it up.”

“What?”
both girls yelled at once.

“Calm it down, a'ight? Yeah, the roof. How else are we gonna get out of here?”

“The roof?” Even Miss Martine sounded uncertain.

Dr
é
twisted his body to remove his shirt. Reesie stuffed her pad away, reminding herself that she wasn't a kid anymore. She was thirteen, and she was Sergeant Superman's daughter.

“Let me help,” she said.

Dr
é
looked over his shoulder at her. “Yeah, you right! I'll start it off.”

“I'll hold the flashlight!” Eritrea said. The stream of light was shaking like her hand must have been, but Dr
é
leaned and whispered something to her. The light steadied.

“Okay. Get back as far as ya'll can, now!” He tapped at the wood with the hooked end of the crowbar, then drew back and slammed hard. Nothing happened.