What The Water Couldn't Wash Away

Camille arrived soaked through, laughing, her careful posture abandoned somewhere between her car and the porch, and Odessa was already waiting with the three boats from four days before, dried flat under a dictionary so the creases would hold, and Marquis was already on the step in his rain jacket, bouncing slightly the way twelve-year-olds bounce when something is finally, actually happening.

"You ready?" Odessa asked.

"I've been ready for nineteen years," Camille said, and meant it about considerably more than the boats.

They walked out to the gutter along Tennessee Street, the same gutter, the same storm drain at the low corner of the block, replaced twice in materials since the flood but sitting in the exact spot it had always sat, because water, whatever else changes around it, tends to remember where it's supposed to go. The rain was steady, warm, the specific kind of rain that doesn't feel like a threat, just a fact of the season, and the gutter was running maybe three inches deep, brown and quick, carrying a bottle cap and, further down, the ghost of every other small thing this same channel of water had carried in the twenty-six years since three children had first raced boats down it on a rained-out July afternoon.

"Upstream," Odessa said, "by the fence post. Same as always."

They set the three boats in together, Odessa's first, out of habit, then Camille's, then Marquis's, though this time nobody called a start, nobody said ready, set, because this was not, this time, a race. The three boats caught the current at nearly the same moment and began to move, wobbling, correcting, finding their particular way down the exact channel a hurricane had once turned into something that swallowed a whole neighborhood whole, and the three of them walked alongside, not hurrying, watching.

"I keep thinking about all the water that's gone through this same gutter," Camille said, quietly, watching her boat ride a small rapid at a break in the concrete. "Since we were kids. Katrina. Every storm since. And it's still just a gutter. It just kept doing what a gutter does, the whole time, no matter what came through it."

"That's about right," Odessa said. "Water doesn't hold a grudge. It doesn't remember what it took last time. It just goes where it's always gone, and it'll go there again the next time it rains, whether we're ready or not." She watched her own boat catch a lucky surge and pull slightly ahead. "I used to think that was the saddest thing about this street. That it would just keep flooding, keep taking things, and never once apologize for any of it."

"What do you think now?"

Odessa considered this, walking, watching three small paper boats do the only thing paper boats know how to do, which is float until they can't anymore, and then, if somebody's willing, get folded again.

"I think," she said, slowly, working it out as she said it, "that the water only ever took what could be taken. It took the house. It took the pictures, the books, the fig tree's leaves for one bad season. It took nineteen years of us not talking to each other, if I'm honest, though the water didn't do that part alone, we did plenty of that ourselves." She glanced at her sister. "But it never actually took you from me, Camille. Not really. It scattered us. It made it hard. But you were always findable, if either one of us had been brave enough to look sooner. The water can take a house. It never had the power to take a sister. We just let ourselves believe it did, for longer than we should have."

Camille didn't answer right away. She watched her own boat, folded twenty-six years too late and four days too early and finally, exactly right, ride the current toward the storm drain at the corner, the same drain that had swallowed a nine-year-old's too-tight fold on a rained-out afternoon in another century, and she felt something in her chest finally, fully unclench, some knot she had been carrying so long she'd forgotten it was a knot at all, forgotten there was another way to carry herself besides braced against a loss that had already, in every way that actually mattered, failed to take the one thing it had always been trying hardest to take.

"Mine's gonna win," Marquis announced, jogging a little to keep pace with his own boat.

"Ain't nobody racing, baby," Odessa said, laughing.

"I know. I'm just saying it anyway. Grandpa always said it, so I'm saying it." Odessa looked at her son, at her sister, at three small folded boats carrying nothing but themselves down a gutter that had once carried away an entire neighborhood's whole understanding of what home meant, and she thought, for the first time in nineteen years, without any grief attached to the thought at all, of her father on a porch step, pinching a piece of yesterday's newsprint between two fingers like his hands already knew the answer.

Everybody deserves a good boat, he'd told Camille once, folding her one crooked on purpose, whether or not it wins.

The three boats reached the storm drain together, wobbling, taking on water at the edges the way paper always eventually does, and one by one, without ceremony, without any of them requiring it to mean more than it was, they went under, and through the grate, and gone. Not lost, exactly, not the way the house had been lost, or the photographs, or nineteen years neither sister was ever going to fully get back. Just finished. Just arrived at the place paper boats have always eventually arrived, since the first afternoon any child anywhere folded one and set it loose to find out what it was made of.

"We should do this every time it rains," Camille said. "Not race. Just this."

"Yeah." Odessa put her arm around her sister's shoulders, both of them soaked through, Marquis already jogging ahead toward the porch, toward whatever came after, toward a whole rest of a life neither of them had expected to be building together and were, now, building anyway, one ordinary rained-out afternoon at a time. "Yeah. We should."

They stood at the corner a moment longer, in the rain, on the ground that had taken so much from both of them in such unequal, unfair, entirely real ways, and had, in the end, for reasons neither of them fully understood, also been the exact ground that eventually gave them back to each other.

Then they turned, together, and walked back up Tennessee Street, toward the porch, toward the boy waiting on the step, toward a house built with two stubborn hands on a foundation that had once been washed away completely and had, against every reasonable expectation, been raised again, not because the water hadn't been real, not because it hadn't cost exactly what it cost, but because some things, it turned out, the water never actually had the power to take at all, whatever the two of them had spent nineteen years afraid it had.

The rain kept falling on Tennessee Street the way it always had, indifferent, ongoing, carrying whatever came next down toward the same patient drain it always had, and behind it, on a porch that had survived a hurricane and a lifetime of silence and one long, hard, necessary summer of finally telling the truth, two sisters climbed the steps together, out of the wet, into the light spilling from the open door, home.