PART II: THE WATER - The Storm

Saturday, August 27th, the Whitfields left for Baton Rouge at nine in the morning with two cars, both full, Richard having decided by Thursday that this one had a feeling to it he didn't like, a decision he was able to make and act on with the particular ease of a man who owned two cars, had a standing account at a hotel chain, and did not need to ask permission from a single other soul about what his own family was going to do.

"We'll go to the Marriott," he said, the way another man might say we'll take the highway, a simple logistical fact requiring no further discussion. "Your mother's coming too, Elle, I already called her."

Camille, sixteen, packed a bag with more care than the situation strictly required. This was, after all, the fourth or fifth storm scare of her lifetime that had come to nothing, the city's whole relationship with hurricanes by then a kind of ritual anxiety everyone performed and mostly nobody suffered for. Still she packed, alongside her clothes, the one photograph she kept of her father on the car lot, laughing at something off-camera, because some instinct she didn't examine too closely told her to.

She called Odessa's house before they left. Nobody answered. She tried the number twice more from the car on I-10, watching the city thin out into cane fields, and did not get through either time, and told herself, the way you tell yourself things when the alternative is too large to hold, that they'd probably already left too, that Desmond had probably come through for once and gotten them somewhere safe, that everybody's phone lines were probably just jammed with everybody else doing exactly what she was doing.

On Tennessee Street, the calculation ran differently, because it always had. Yolanda did not own a car that had reliably started in over a year; the one in the driveway was Desmond's doing, technically, a "loaner" off the lot that had been loaned so long it functioned as a gift nobody called a gift, and it needed a jump most mornings and was not, by anyone's honest assessment, a vehicle you evacuated a city in. There was a bus contraflow being talked about on the news, buses that were supposed to come get people who didn't have cars, though nobody on that block had seen one yet and the mayor's press conference kept using the word voluntary in a way that made clear whose evacuation, exactly, was being taken as a given.

"We could ride it out," Yolanda said, Saturday night, not for the first time in her life saying this sentence about a storm that had, every previous time, either turned at the last minute or come through as nothing worse than a bad thunderstorm with a name. "Mama Ruth's not going nowhere, I already know that. She rode out Betsy in that same house and she'll tell you about it till the day she dies."

"Where's Daddy," Odessa asked, fifteen now, old enough that the question came out flatter than it would have at nine, less hope in it, more accounting. "Said he's coming by tomorrow. Said he's gonna get us out to his cousin's in Baton Rouge, said it's already arranged." Yolanda said this the way she'd said versions of it for fifteen years, with a flatness of her own that was not quite disbelief and not quite faith, a place in between the two that a woman learns to live in when she's built a life around a man who is real and unreliable in roughly equal measure. "We'll see."

Desmond, that same Saturday night, was in Algiers with his mother, trying, with a version of genuine effort that surprised even him, to talk her into leaving, an argument he was losing decisively, Mama Ruth being immovable on the subject in a way eighty-one years and a house that had survived one hurricane already had fully earned her the right to be.

"I am not," she told him, "leaving this house to sit in some stranger's gymnasium in Alexandria eating cold sandwiches, not for a storm they've been wrong about six times out of six."

"Mama, they're saying this one's different."

"They say that every time, baby. Every single time." She was not wrong that they'd said it before; she would turn out, this once, catastrophically, to be wrong that it didn't matter. "You go on if you're worried. Take Rennie with you if he wants to go. I'm staying with my house."

He did not, in the end, make it back to Tennessee Street Sunday morning the way he'd promised. There was a version of events, pieced together later from three different accounts that never quite matched, in which he'd meant to leave Algiers at dawn, and had instead gotten pulled into helping a neighbor board up windows, and then into an argument with Rennie about whether Rennie should evacuate at all, an argument that ran long and went nowhere and ended, as arguments with Rennie tended to end, with Desmond simply giving up and deciding to deal with it later, a phrase that had structured most of his important decisions for as long as anyone had known him, and that would, this one time, cost more than it had ever cost before.

By Sunday afternoon, with the mayor finally calling for a mandatory evacuation and the contraflow lanes jammed for a hundred miles in every direction and no way left, realistically, to get four people and an elderly woman who wouldn't leave anyway across the river and out of the city before the roads simply stopped moving, Desmond called Tennessee Street from a pay phone outside a gas station in Algiers, the cell towers already starting to strain. "I can't get to y'all," he told Yolanda, and there was something in his voice she had not heard from him in the whole fifteen complicated years she'd known him, not his usual smooth confidence that everything would sort itself out, but something closer to fear, plain and unhidden. "I'm stuck this side of the river, the bridge traffic's not moving, Mama won't leave the house and I can't leave her in it by herself. Y'all need to get to the Dome if you can. Right now. Don't wait."

"We'll be alright."

"Yolanda." He said her name the way he said almost nothing else, without any performance in it at all. "Get my daughter to the Dome."

Yolanda hung up the pay phone call and stood in her kitchen for a moment with her hand still on the receiver's cradle, and then she went and found Odessa, who was sitting on the front step in the strange yellow-grey light that comes before a storm that means it, watching the sky do something she'd never quite seen it do before, and told her to go pack one bag, only what she could carry, they were walking to the school on the high ground where the buses were supposed to be picking people up, and to hurry, because the light in the sky had a particular quality to it that even a woman who had ridden out every named storm of her whole life understood, immediately and without needing to be told twice, as a warning she had waited one day too long to heed.