PART III - The Years Between - What Survival Looks Like

The FEMA trailer outside Beaumont was fourteen feet by seven, and Odessa would remember, more than anything else about the three years they lived in it, the specific sound the metal walls made at night when the temperature dropped, a low tick-tick-tick of contracting aluminum that she came to find almost comforting, the way you come to find almost anything comforting if it's the sound your particular version of home makes.

Yolanda got work fast: a hospital in Beaumont needed CNAs and did not much care, in 2006, where you'd been living before. She took double shifts the way she'd always taken double shifts, and the trailer got its lights paid and its little refrigerator stocked, and Odessa went to a school where she was, for the first time in her life, one of dozens of "storm kids," a category that came with its own quiet caste system among the other students, some sympathetic, some cruel, most simply indifferent in the specific way teenagers are indifferent to a tragedy that isn't theirs.

She was good at school, in the parts of school that didn't require money. She read faster than anyone in her grade, she could do math in her head that made teachers do a small double take, and she hated, with a heat she rarely let show, that none of it mattered as much as whether you had the right shoes, whether your trailer address showed up funny on a form, whether a teacher's eyes did the specific small flinch of recalculating you the moment she found out where you actually lived.

"You're smart enough to get out of here," a guidance counselor told her once, meaning it kindly, meaning New Orleans, meaning the trailer, meaning, though she probably didn't fully hear herself saying it, the whole category of person she'd already decided Odessa was starting out as.

"Out of where," Odessa said. "I'm from here now. Says so on my forms." The counselor didn't have an answer for that, and Odessa didn't push it, because pushing it wouldn't change the forms, and Odessa had already, at sixteen, developed the specific instinct of a person deciding which battles were worth the energy: this one wasn't, not today, not with a college application still three years off and a mother two rooms away asleep for the first time in eleven hours who needed the trailer quiet more than Odessa needed to win an argument with a woman who'd forget the conversation by Thursday.

They stayed in Beaumont until Odessa was seventeen, then moved into Houston proper, a cousin's converted garage apartment, cheaper, closer to Yolanda's new hospital job, further from anything either of them would have called home before the storm. Mama Ruth's house in Algiers had survived; there was, technically, a place they could have gone back to, crowded in with her. But the logistics of it, no job lined up in New Orleans yet, no way to leave a functioning if difficult situation in Houston for an uncertain one four states away, kept getting pushed to next year, once things settle, the way so many displaced families' next years kept getting pushed, until five years had gone by and Houston had, without either of them fully deciding it, become simply where they lived.

Odessa graduated high school in Houston in 2008, with decent enough grades that a community college would have taken her, and she enrolled for one semester, culinary basics and an English class she actually loved, before the money ran out. It was not a dramatic running out, just the ordinary grinding math of tuition against a CNA's hours against a girl who needed, that same year, to start contributing more than she was contributing, and she left school not with any single dramatic decision but with the accumulation of a hundred small ones, the kind of leaving that doesn't announce itself as an ending until you look back at it years later and realize it was.

She worked. She waited tables, she did prep work in restaurant kitchens that taught her, almost by accident, the actual skill that would end up mattering most: how to season something so a table of strangers would close their eyes on the first bite, how to stretch a pot of something cheap into something that tasted, to the person eating it, like abundance. She sent a little money back to Yolanda even when Yolanda told her not to, because sending money was one of the only ways Odessa knew, by then, to say the things she still didn't have easy words for.

She did not, in those years, tell anyone at all about Algiers, or Rennie, or the specific quiet that had settled into her at nine years old and never fully left. She told a boyfriend, once, at nineteen, a fraction of it, enough to explain why certain things made her go somewhere else behind her eyes for a few seconds, and he had responded so badly, so uselessly, treating the disclosure like a puzzle he was supposed to solve rather than a fact he was supposed to simply hold, that she filed the whole experiment as a failure and did not try again, with anyone, for a very long time.

She thought about Camille more than she would have admitted to anyone who asked. Not often; there wasn't room, in the specific grinding math of those years, for a lot of thinking that didn't produce a paycheck or a meal. But sometimes, folding a napkin at a restaurant table, or catching a glimpse of a girl on a bus with the same particular careful posture Camille had always had, and she would think, briefly, unresolved, I wonder if she's okay, and then put it away again, in the same drawer where she kept most of what she wasn't ready to open.

She came back to New Orleans in the spring of 2010, alone, Yolanda not yet ready to leave a Houston that had, by then, become its own kind of home, and Odessa stood on Tennessee Street for the first time in almost five years, looking at a foundation with weeds grown up through the cracks in it, at porch steps that had somehow survived everything, sun-bleached and cracked but still, unmistakably, the steps, and she sat down on them, alone, twenty years old, and cried for the first time since the flood, not for the house, exactly, but for every version of herself the house had once held, and for how much distance there was, now, between that little girl folding paper boats and the woman sitting on the same step trying to figure out how to build a whole life back up out of a foundation with weeds in it.

"I'm gonna fix this," she said out loud, to nobody, to the street, to the steps, to a father she hadn't seen in almost five years and a sister she hadn't spoken to in just as long. "I don't know how yet. But I'm gonna fix this."

It would take her nine more years to mean it fully. But this was where the meaning started.