Recovering Charles (2 page)

Cameras captured water gushing over one levee while a helicopter dropped giant sandbags on a gaping hole in another.

A dozen residents stood on the roof of a fourplex apartment building. They’d made a cross with paper towels. A voice described what we so clearly saw for ourselves and asked viewers to imagine what it must feel like to sit so helpless on an island.

A mother nursed her baby under the privacy of a brown bath towel, and we wondered how long her milk would last without food or clean water.

Every channel had the same images. They came from slightly different views and were painted with their own set of dramatic adjectives. But the images were the same.

A man named Bernard was wading to the Superdome.

Bernard’s wife, Donna, was missing. Seventy-one years old. She had gone to check on their daughter and her two grandbabies a few blocks away. He hadn’t seen her since the levees broke. She needed her heart medication and would die without it.

“Anyone watching, anyone, please, anyone watching, please watch out for my Donna. And pray, please, that she’s waiting for me on dry ground.”

I didn’t remember praying since 2002 when turbulence tossed my plane around before landing in Salt Lake City for the Winter Games. I closed my eyes and began to whisper.

My cell phone rang.

Fountain Realty

Jordan Knapp was the best friend I’d ever had. And she also happened to be the most beautiful.

She was confident but self-aware, and never condescending. Average height. Natural blonde hair that seemed to grow an inch every time I saw her. Real. Reliable. A problem solver. A Realtor. One of the most talented guitar players I’d ever known. A textbook self-starter. Punctual.

Always punctual.

“Hey, Luke.”

“Hey, Jordan.”

“Just got a contract on the place in midtown. The condo.”

“Toldja you would.” I flipped back to Fox from CNN.

“Yes, you did. Let’s celebrate over Italian food tonight?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll be at your place at seven. Cab to Little Italy?”

“Seven.”

“Something wrong?”

“Nah.”

“Luuukey.”

“Jooordy.” Punctual
and
perceptive.

“What’s up, Luke? What’s going on?”

“We’ll talk tonight,” I said, watching the flickering images and listening to a reporter describe why some doors already had white X’s and others didn’t.
Dead bodies.

“Good. See you at seven.”

It was no secret that when Jordan closed her eyes, she saw a classic Disney prince and princess romance in our future. But that future for me hadn’t arrived yet, and I wondered if it ever would. I loved her, certainly, but mostly I loved knowing that this was the most useful relationship I’d ever had. Where she saw a spring wedding and her mother’s pearl-white wedding dress, I saw the next movie, ball game, dinner out, or daytrip to the country.

~ ~

Jordan and I met at NYU. She’d been a law student; I was studying photojournalism.

We met at a birthday party for someone neither of us knew, and we clicked. She was a willing ear, an attractive one, sure, but we hadn’t noticed each other romantically. At least I hadn’t. In time she became bored with law school and earned her real-estate license.

We hadn’t crossed paths for almost six months until a chance encounter at a club in Atlantic City where we discussed organized religion, relationships, Wendy’s fries versus McDonald’s fries, and the career ladder for detectives.

“Luke, listen to me again, it goes like this.”

Eye-rolling.

She laughed. “Seriously, it goes like this. A Sleuth is the highest you can get. It goes Private Eye, then Junior Detective, then Detective—like if you go to school or the police academy for a diploma. Then if you’re top-notch, I mean the
best,
and your peers recognize you that way, you become a Sleuth.”

“Sleuth.”

“That’s what I said. Sleuth.”

More eye-rolling.

“OK, OK,” she continued. “Think about
Magnum P.I.
Tom Selleck played a private investigator, a good one mind you, and de-li-cious on the eyes, but he wasn’t a detective because he didn’t have the piece of paper or formal training.”

Now I added laughter to the eye-rolling. “You’ve lost it, Jordan. You’ve jumped the shark this time.”

“So in closing . . .” She flipped her hair and acted as if she hadn’t heard me.

I liked it.

“The tasty Tom Selleck could never become an
actual
Sleuth, because he didn’t have enough respect from his peers. He was too much a renegade. You need industry support to reach—”

“All right! I give, Matlock!”

“Now
that
guy could have been a Sleuth—”

“You win!”

“It took you long enough.” She pulled her hair toward her right side, draping it over her shoulder, and let linger a style of smile that I’d never seen from her before. Seductive. Soft. “I hope it doesn’t take you that long to ask me out.”

Why not?
I thought.

We left the club and I bought her a strawberry-topped Belgian waffle at an IHOP in Jersey.

“Make a bet?” she asked.

“OK. I’ll bite.”

“If I can eat this waffle in five minutes or less you have to take me to any restaurant I want for our first
real
date.”

“How about three?” I countered.

“Four.”

“Deal. And if you
can’t
eat that ginormous waffle in four minutes or less?”

“I’ll teach you to play the acoustic as well as I can.”

“Chomp chomp!” I taunted.

Two weeks later we ate at the Rainbow Room in the RCA building. The meal was so expensive I could have paid for personal lessons from Eric Clapton.

That was the night I expected the spark my father had described to ignite my heart and change the nature of our friendship.

It didn’t, though I held hope it someday would.

Chapter
2

I couldn’t turn off the TV.

I had plenty to do the week Katrina rearranged the Gulf. I was on deadlines to deliver photos to two clients and was already a week late on delivering a rough cut of a DVD slideshow I’d created for Jordan’s real-estate broker.

But I just couldn’t turn it off.

The final death toll would be hard to pin down, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said in a news conference. She was taking a beating from the national press, which some felt was unfair. Mayor Ray Nagin also had his critics for what they called his dramatic exaggerations and tendency to place blame everywhere except on his own shoulders. Images of submerged and abandoned yellow school buses filled TV screens and newspaper front pages. But above all, FEMA had become the easiest target. Federal bureaucracy. Washington, D.C. mentality. A useless Bush crony. A disconnected president.

None of that mattered to me. Not as I heard another explanation of how the levees failed and Lake Pontchartrain had taken eighty percent of the city prisoner. Not as I watched a woman sob on live national TV that her twin sons were missing. Nine years old. Former Haitian refugees. One was wearing a red tank top and the other his favorite New Orleans Saints T-shirt.

I’d never felt such raw emotion for anyone not sharing my last name.

I changed the channel. Bernard was on another network. He had arrived at the Superdome but had yet to find his wife. He carried a wallet-sized picture of her. He was drinking a Dasani.

“Good, someone got him water. Keep looking, Bernard, you’ll find her.” I didn’t mean to say any of that out loud, but I did.

I flipped to MSNBC. They reminded us the hurricane hadn’t only been cruel to New Orleans. For half an hour, local NBC reporters in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi went national to tell their stories. Hellacious devastation in Long Beach, Mississippi. Power outages in Mobile, Alabama. Fires everywhere. Hospitals shuttling patients out of state. Neighbors helping neighbors.

I opened my laptop and visited the Red Cross web site. I donated a hundred dollars to their Katrina Disaster Relief Fund and bookmarked the page.

I turned the television channel again. An unknown but attractive, well-groomed female reporter was outside giving an update on the state of the Superdome. The sun was beating down on those camped along the sidewalk and cries could be heard all around her.

In the background, a black man knelt over a body covered from the neck down with a gray bedsheet. He pulled the sheet over the body’s head and turned toward the camera, screaming in agony.

Bernard.

Tears began to drop for a man I’d never meet face-to-face and for the woman he loved.

I found yet another channel offering wall-to-wall coverage, but I don’t remember which. They were showing a series of still shots set to a slickly produced dramatic soundtrack—

A body in a grassy median, covered with a stunningly vibrant American flag.

National Guard troops on helicopters.

The roof of the Superdome. Most of its tiles ripped in half or missing completely. The building best suited to handle high winds in all the Crescent City in trouble.
Bitterly ironic,
I thought.
Water is leaking in. Hope is flooding out.

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour hugs a woman outside a temporary shelter.

Mormon missionaries hand out cases of water in a church parking lot.

A man and a teenager paddle three young children down a street in a canoe. A fire burns behind them in an upscale neighborhood.

Cars stuck in an alley, buried under ten feet of water. They look like colored marbles at the bottom of a mud puddle.

A young, tall black man pushes a dead woman—probably his mother—in a wheelchair.

A red Chevy Cavalier sits in a hotel swimming pool.

A man sits alone on an overpass, clutching a black case.
I wonder if it’s a saxophone.

~ ~

I was fourteen and certainly not the most popular kid in Mrs. Ingham’s eighth grade music class. Everyone else had no trouble picking an instrument during the first week. We spent two days goofing around on twenty-year-old trombones, trumpets, clarinets, and whatever else Mrs. Ingham pulled from a closet in the back of the band room.

Wednesday was decision day.

“Can I pick last?” I’d always known I’d go with whatever Chrissy Alves picked. She’d never even
looked
at me before, but playing the same instrument might finally be the excuse I needed to say hello or punch her in the arm the way other boys did to the girls they liked.

Mrs. Ingham smiled warmly. “I suppose, Luke.”

One by one the other kids announced their choices. Big Spencer chose the bass drum. No surprise there, not with the way he liked beating up on people. Olivia chose the violin because she already owned one and had taken a few private lessons. Our popular eighth grade class president, Matthew, went with the tuba, and Green Beret-bound Glen chose the trumpet. His best friend Bryan went for the tambourine on the theory it would give him the greatest opportunity to sleep during class. Caleb only wanted to sing, and quite loudly, but Mrs. Ingham made him pick an instrument anyway.

“But my voice
is
an instrument,” Caleb argued.

“I know, Caleb, and a finely-tuned instrument it is, but chorus doesn’t start until next semester. So choose a musical instrument, please.”

He went for the cymbals and played them with gusto.

The Wages twins picked saxophones. Jay had really wanted to play the bassoon but the school didn’t own one. He settled for the trombone. The new girl from Minnesota picked an orange-colored French horn that was already bent.

Then came Chrissy. She sat at the end of the row below me; I was perched alone on the highest riser. I looked at her profile and admired her sparkly purple hairband. I prayed,
Please don’t pick the—

“Flute!” she announced proudly.

Mrs. Ingham smiled toward me again. She clearly enjoyed this. “And last but not least, how about you up there at the top? Mr. Millward? The flute for you as well?” She winked. I hated it when teachers winked.

The boys giggled and Spencer practically screamed, “You two will make
beautiful
music together.”

Now the girls giggled, too. I might have slugged Spencer if he hadn’t already locked me in the custodial closet twice that year.

Mrs. Ingham disappeared into the deep closet and came out with two tarnished silver flutes and two different-sized cases. “Here you go, you two.” She surveyed the class, each of us awkwardly handling our instruments and making sounds normally heard in emergency rooms and jungles. “And now we have a band!”