Rising

In Baton Rouge, the Whitfields watched it on television from a hotel room with two queen beds and a rollaway, the storm making landfall Monday morning as a wall of green and red on the weather map, the anchors using words like catastrophic and unprecedented with a gravity that still, somehow, felt like something happening to other people, at a remove, the way disasters on television always feel like they're happening at a remove until the exact moment you understand they aren't.

Camille sat cross-legged on the end of one of the queen beds with her phone in her hand, trying Odessa's number and Yolanda's number and even, once, the number for Baptiste Quality Auto, which nobody answered, on a loop, for most of Monday morning, the calls not connecting at all by early afternoon, just a fast busy signal and then, later, nothing, not even that.

"I'm sure they're fine," Elle said, from the other bed, not looking up from her own phone, on which she was trying, with the specific single-mindedness of a woman managing a crisis by managing logistics, to reach her own mother, her insurance agent, and a contractor she knew from a renovation eight years prior, all at once, in that order. "Desmond always lands on his feet. He'll have gotten them somewhere."

"You don't know that."

"No," Elle admitted. This admission was rare enough, honest enough, that Camille would remember it for years as one of the few times her mother had told her a plain unmanaged truth. "I don't. But I don't know how to be useful to you right now except to say something, so I said that."

By Monday evening the levees had failed, first in a few places and then, over the following hours, catastrophically, and the water that came into the Lower Ninth Ward did not come in gradually, the way the television had prepared everyone to expect a flood to come, rising inch by patient inch. It came, in the accounts that would be collected afterward, in a wall, fast enough that people on Tennessee Street who had decided, like so many people that week, to shelter in their attics rather than risk the roads, found themselves within twenty minutes going from a house with water in the yard to a house with water at the ceiling, taking axes to their own roofs because the water had gotten there faster than their understanding of it had.

Odessa and Yolanda were not, by then, in that water. They had made it, on Sunday, walking the mile and a half to the school with a single bag each, one of the last groups to get onto a bus before the buses stopped running entirely, and had ended up, by Monday, at the Superdome, alongside tens of thousands of other people who had done the exact same math Yolanda had done: no working car, no money for a hotel two hundred miles inland, no relative with a spare bedroom and a driveway to receive them in. They had found themselves, however sensible their choices had been at every single step, in a building with no working plumbing within thirty-six hours, no reliable air conditioning in ninety-five-degree heat, food and water running out faster than the buses meant to relieve everyone were arriving, a slow, grinding, entirely visible failure of a hundred different systems that were supposed to have caught these exact people and did not.

Odessa was fifteen. She would remember specific things from those five days with a clarity that never dimmed no matter how much of the rest of her life blurred with time: the exact texture of the concrete under a blanket that wasn't enough blanket; the sound the whole building made at night, a low continuous hum of thousands of people trying to sleep sitting up; a woman two rows over going into labor with no working medical staff nearby for the first six hours of it; the particular, unbearable patience Yolanda maintained the entire time, rationing the little food they had between them, keeping Odessa's back against a wall at all times, sleeping in shifts so that one of them was always awake and watching, because a woman who had spent her whole adult life protecting her daughter from ordinary dangers was not about to stop protecting her in an extraordinary one.

"We're gonna be okay," Yolanda told her, more than once, in a voice that did not entirely believe itself and delivered the sentence anyway, because a mother's job, in Yolanda's whole understanding of the word, did not include the luxury of admitting out loud when she wasn't sure.

Desmond, meanwhile, was trapped in Algiers with Mama Ruth, on the west bank, which flooded far less catastrophically than the Lower Ninth but which was, for five days, entirely cut off: no power, no clean water, no way across the river, no way to reach a phone that worked, no way to find out whether the daughter and the woman he'd told, in the last clear sentence he'd managed to get to her, get to the Dome, right now, don't wait, had actually made it there or not.

He would say, for the rest of his life, that those five days were the worst of it — worse, even, than what came after, because at least after, there was information, there was a number you could call, however slowly it got answered. In Algiers that week there was only his mother's fig tree stripped bare by the wind, and his own hands, and a silence with no way to fill it, and a fear he had never once, in his whole easy, talked-his-way-through-everything life, had to sit inside for this long without a single trick available to get him out of it.

"You should've made them go with you," Rennie told him, once, on the second day, meaning it as comfort, some version of this isn't your fault, the whole city failed everybody, and landing instead like an accusation Desmond would carry for the rest of his life regardless of how it had been intended, because the accusation happened to be true, and had been true since long before the storm, and no flood, however total, was going to wash out the fact of it.