Separate

It took Desmond eleven days to get across the river.

Not because the distance was far. You could see the New Orleans skyline from Mama Ruth's front yard on a clear day, close enough that it had never in his whole life felt like another world. It was because there was no bridge running, no boat he could get to reliably, no gas for the truck even if the truck had been running, which it wasn't, and because Mama Ruth would not leave the house, and because a man does not leave his eighty-one-year-old mother alone in a half-flooded neighborhood with no power and no clean water to go looking for a daughter he has, in his heart, already begun to fear the worst about, not when there is no daughter he could reach even by going, only a rumor of a bus, a rumor of a shelter, a rumor of a building downtown where they were said to be taking people, none of it confirmed, all of it changing by the hour.

He finally got across on the twelfth day, on a National Guard boat that was technically only supposed to be evacuating Algiers residents to a staging area on the east bank, talked his way onto it the way he'd talked his way onto and out of everything his whole life, and made it, by that afternoon, to what was left of the Superdome, which by then was mostly empty, the last of the people who'd sheltered there having been bused out over the preceding several days to cities as far away as they could be sent, wherever there was room, San Antonio, Atlanta, Houston, no master list anyone could produce on the spot, no clean paper trail, just a National Guardsman with a clipboard telling a man who hadn't slept properly in twelve days that no, sir, there was no way to look up a specific family from here, the records were still being sorted, try the Red Cross hotline, though the hotline, when he finally got through to it four days later from a pay phone in Baton Rouge, on hold for over an hour, could tell him only that a Yolanda Carter and an Odessa Baptiste had, in fact, been processed through the Dome and bused out on the third day, destination Houston, and that beyond that single fact, they had no further information, and was there anything else he needed.

There was a version of that week where Yolanda and Odessa waited at the Dome, patient, hopeful, watching every incoming face for the one they wanted, and there was a version, the true one, where they had no idea Desmond was even alive, no way to know whether Algiers had flooded worse than the Ninth Ward, no confirmed information at all, only the same rumors moving the other direction, and where the choice in front of them, on the third day, when a bus finally arrived headed for a destination nobody on it had chosen, was simple and absolute: get on it, because the conditions in that building by the third day had become genuinely dangerous, the heat and the crowding and the failing plumbing having turned a shelter of last resort into something closer to a health emergency, or stay, and hope, on no information at all, that staying would somehow produce a reunion that leaving wouldn't.

"We have to go," Yolanda said, when the bus came. "Whatever's happening with your daddy, whatever's happening with anybody, we cannot stay in this building one more night. You understand me? We have to go."

Odessa understood. She was fifteen, and she had already, in three days, learned more about what her own government thought her safety was worth than she would ever fully stop carrying, and she got on the bus with her mother and left New Orleans not knowing where she was going, not knowing if her father was alive, not knowing — this was the part that would ache longest, longer even than the not-knowing about Desmond, because it felt, in some childish, unfair way, more like something that should have been within someone's control — that four miles from where she'd grown up, a girl who shared her father and half her blood was, at that exact moment, trying every number she had to reach her, and getting nothing, and would keep trying for weeks.

The bus took eleven hours to reach Houston, a trip that should have taken six, backed up in traffic that had no real precedent, no protocol built for it, everyone on that bus arriving at a stadium in a city none of them had chosen, processed into a system that assigned them a cot number and a case worker and, eventually, three weeks later, a number for a FEMA trailer outside Beaumont that would become, for the next several years, the closest thing Odessa had to a permanent address.

Desmond, finally reaching the Dome twelve days after the storm to find it emptied out, records unsorted, no forwarding information available on the spot, stood in the wrecked concourse of that building for a long time before he could make himself leave it, because leaving meant accepting that the search was going to be longer and harder than he had let himself believe it would be, standing there, and that whatever he had told himself, in the five days trapped in Algiers, about how he would fix this the moment he could finally move, talk his way to them the way he talked his way to everything, was not, this one time, going to be enough.

He called every number he had. He drove, once he'd scraped together a car that ran, to three different shelters on rumors that turned out to be wrong. He would not, in fact, confirm that his daughter and Yolanda were alive and specifically located in Houston until nearly three weeks after the storm, through a cousin of Yolanda's who'd managed to get a message relayed through a church network operating out of Beaumont, by which point the particular kind of separation that had begun on that bus, not just physical distance but the beginning of two entirely different post-Katrina lives, moving away from each other at a speed neither girl had chosen and neither girl would find a way to fully reverse for nineteen years, had already, quietly, permanently, begun.