PART I: BEFORE THE WATER - The Girls

The rain came the way it always came in July, which was all at once, like the sky had been holding its breath since morning and finally quit trying. Odessa was eight and Camille was nine and a half, and they were sitting on the porch on Tennessee Street with their bare feet hanging off the edge, close enough to the rain that the mist off it beaded on their shins, watching their father fold a boat out of yesterday's racing form.

"You're doing the wrong fold," Odessa said.

"There's no wrong fold." Desmond didn't look up. He had the paper pinched between two fingers, turning it the way other men turned a wrench, like his hands already knew the answer and were just waiting for the rest of him to catch up. "There's a fold that floats and a fold that doesn't. Everything else is opinion."

"Camille's is gonna sink."

"Camille's is gonna do exactly what Camille's is gonna do," their father said, "and you're gonna watch it happen instead of telling her about it beforehand, because that's half the fun of having a sister, is you get to watch."

Camille didn't look up either. She had her tongue between her teeth, the way she did when she was concentrating on something she'd decided mattered, and her fold was careful and a little too tight, the paper going soft and grey at the crease where she'd worked it too many times.

"It's not sinking," she said, to no one.

The gutter along Tennessee Street ran a good four inches deep when the rain came like this, brown water moving fast enough to matter, carrying a plastic bottle cap and a drowned cigarette butt and, further down, somebody's lost flip-flop bumping along the curb like it had somewhere to be. Desmond set his boat in first, upstream, by the Batistes' fence post, and it took off like it knew where the storm drain was.

"Bottle cap says mine beats both of yours," he said.

"You always win," Odessa said. "You get to go first."

"I go first because I made the boat first. You want to go first, fold faster." She folded faster. Her fold was quick and a little crooked and it went in the water sideways and self-corrected, the way she did most things, and it caught the current and started gaining on their father's boat before it had gone six feet.

Camille set hers in last, and it sat there a second before it moved, like it was deciding, and then it went, wobbling, taking on water almost immediately along one soft grey seam.

"Called it," Odessa said.

"You did not call it, you don't get to call it after."

"I called it in my head."

"That doesn't count and you know it doesn't count."

Their father laughed the way he laughed at both of them at once, which was different from the way he laughed at either of them alone, bigger, like it needed the two sounds together to be worth the effort, and he crouched down at the edge of the porch with his forearms on his knees to watch three pieces of yesterday's news go to war in four inches of gutter water.

His own boat won. It always won; the whole street knew Desmond Baptiste's boats always won, because he had a fold nobody else could get right no matter how many times he showed you, a little extra crease at the stern that kept the back end riding high while everybody else's back end went under first. Odessa's came in second, waterlogged and listing but still afloat when it reached the storm drain grate. Camille's went under three feet from the finish, all at once, folding back into just paper, and disappeared through the grate slats without any ceremony at all.

"Mine sunk," Camille said, like she was reporting a fact she'd already made peace with.

"Yeah it did," Odessa said, not unkindly. This was the kind of thing you could say to Camille that you couldn't say to just anybody, and Odessa knew it without being able to say why. "You fold too tight. You gotta let it be a little bit wrong or it doesn't float right."

"I don't like it wrong."

"I know you don't." Odessa said this like it was a fact about the weather, not a criticism, and it landed that way too. Camille only made a face at her, the specific face she made when she wanted credit for not being mad about something.

Desmond went inside for something, a beer, or his cigarettes, or nothing at all, the way he sometimes went inside for a reason that turned out not to matter once he was in there, and the girls stayed on the porch with their feet in the mist off the rain, and the street went on doing what the street did in a downpour, disappearing at both ends into a grey that could have been a mile away or the edge of the world.

"You think he's gonna come back before it stops raining?" Camille said.

"He always comes back."

"I know he always comes back. I said before it stops raining."

Odessa considered this like it was a real question, because to her it was; she did not yet know, at eight, that this was going to turn out to be the central question of her whole childhood, asked a hundred different ways in a hundred different rooms, and that the honest answer was always going to be depends what he finds in there.

"Probably," she said.

He did come back before it stopped raining, that day. He came back with his cigarettes and no beer, and he sat back down on the step between them like he'd never left, and he told them about the year he raced boats against his own brother Rennie on this same street when the street had different houses on it, before the city tore half of them down and put up the ones that were there now, and how Rennie's boats never won either, how it must run somewhere in a family, who could and couldn't fold a boat, and Odessa filed this away the way she filed everything her father said about being young on this street, like a photograph she hadn't developed yet.

Camille filed it too, differently. She was visiting: she came for two, three weeks most summers, and everybody called it "visiting" the way you'd call a season a visitor, something that arrived and left on its own schedule that nobody in the house controlled, and she filed the story as evidence, the way she filed most things about her father's other life: he had a whole boyhood here I don't get to have. He had a brother. He had a street. She did not resent Odessa for this, not yet, not at nine and a half. She only understood, in the specific unspoken way a child understands the shape of a house by the time she's crawled its floor, that there were two different fathers living in the one man on the step, and that Odessa got the one who'd grown up here, and she got the one who visited. Neither girl had a name yet for what this was going to cost either of them.

That would take years. It would take, in fact, almost the whole rest of the book you're holding, though of course they didn't know that either, sitting on a porch in the rain with wet feet and a losing paper boat gone down a storm drain that would, in seventeen years, take a great deal more than paper down with it.

For now it was only Tuesday, and it was only raining, and their father was between them telling a story about his brother, and both girls, for entirely different reasons, were happy.

"Fold me another one," Camille said. "I want to beat Odessa this time."

"You're not gonna beat Odessa," Desmond said, already folding. "But I'll fold you a good one anyway. Everybody deserves a good boat, whether or not it wins."

He handed it to her crooked on purpose, the crease loose the way it needed to be, and she took it like it was a gift he was aware he was giving. It was, though she would only understand this decades later, standing in a different rain, on the same street, with a woman who had once been the girl beside her.