Gone

The Whitfield house Uptown took a live oak through the corner of the roof over the guest room, and lost power for eleven days, and Richard's insurance covered the repair inside of four months with only the ordinary amount of paperwork wrangling, and by Thanksgiving of that same year you could not have stood in that house and known, from looking, that anything catastrophic had happened to the city it sat in at all. Elle would say, for years afterward, in the specific tone of a woman aware she is admitting to a kind of guilt without quite being willing to name it as guilt, "We were lucky. We know we were lucky." She said it the way you say a thing you need people to hear you say, so that they'll agree you already understood the size of what you'd been spared, and therefore won't need to explain it to you further.

The house on Tennessee Street was gone. Not damaged. Gone, in the specific way that whole blocks of the Lower Ninth Ward were gone that year, the water having sat in some of those houses for two and three weeks before it finally receded, long enough to rot a house from the inside in a way no repair crew was going to reverse, long enough that when Yolanda finally got back to the block in late October, riding in the bed of a cousin's borrowed truck because there was still no reliable way in by car, what she found where her house had stood was mostly a foundation, some of the porch steps, the same steps, still recognizably steps, where two girls had once raced paper boats down a gutter, and, improbably, half-buried in silt that had dried to a grey crust over everything, one of Odessa's baby shoes, a single one, no pair, that Yolanda picked up and held and did not, for a long moment, seem able to set back down.

She did not cry in front of Odessa about the house. She had decided, somewhere in the five days at the Dome and the six weeks after that in a shelter and then a relative's spare room in Houston, that crying about the house was a luxury she'd allot herself later, alone, on her own schedule, and that in front of her daughter she was going to keep being the specific kind of steady she had always been, because a fifteen-year-old who had just lost her home, her school, her neighborhood, her grandmother's fig tree, and, though she would not have used this word for it yet, the last remaining structure of a childhood that had been hard in some ways and genuinely good in others, needed a mother standing upright more than she needed a mother's honest grief.

What was actually lost, item by item, mattered more than the total number would suggest to anyone who hadn't lived it. Every photograph in that house was gone. There had been no time, in the walk to the school, to grab the shoebox of pictures Yolanda kept on the top shelf of her closet, and so an entire visual record of Odessa's whole childhood, every school photo, every birthday, the one blurry Polaroid of Desmond holding her as a newborn that Yolanda had always meant to get properly framed and never had, simply ceased to exist, all at once, the way things in a flood cease to exist, not slowly, not with any ceremony, just gone, and then gone for good.

Odessa's whole small collection of books, which she had never told anyone how much she loved, having learned early that a girl on her block who read too visibly and too fast got called names for it, was gone. The particular chair where Yolanda had sat up all night during Odessa's childhood fever — gone. Mama Ruth's fig tree in Algiers survived, as it happened, stripped of leaves but alive, one of the strange small mercies the storm handed out at random, sparing a tree while it took a whole house four miles away, and Odessa would think of that tree, on and off, for years, as proof of nothing in particular except that the flood had not been fair, had never once claimed to be fair, had simply gone where the water went.

Camille lost, by comparison, almost nothing, and knew it, and the knowing sat in her differently than grief would have, an uncomfortable, guilty, entirely unproductive discomfort that she did not know what to do with at seventeen and would not fully process until she was well into her thirties. She had her photograph of her father on the car lot, safe in the bag she'd packed with more care than the situation required. She had her house, her school, her whole physical world, waiting for her exactly as she'd left it, more or less, once the roof was patched.

What she lost, and she would spend a long time working out whether this loss even counted as a loss, whether she had any right to name it as one standing next to what her sister had lost, was the specific, uncomplicated ease with which she had once been able to think of Odessa's world as simply a place she visited three weeks a summer. That ease did not survive the fall of 2005. In its place came something heavier and less comfortable: the knowledge, arrived at slowly over months of trying to get information about a family who had, for a terrifying stretch, simply disappeared from every phone number she had for them, that the world she'd been visiting for years had been, this whole time, exactly as fragile as it looked from the outside, and that her own house's live oak through the guest room roof was not, in fact, the same category of disaster at all, however much both families had technically lived through the same storm.

"We were lucky," she heard her mother say, that Thanksgiving, to a table of guests who nodded along, satisfied, absolved.

Camille did not correct her, out loud, at that table. She only thought, for the first time with any real clarity, a thought she would carry the rest of her life and would not manage to say out loud to another human being for eighteen more years: lucky isn't the same as safe, and I don't think anybody at this table actually knows the difference.