The Last Karankawas(55)

“You stay. I’ll go check.”

“No.” Yvonne was already pulling on her waterlogged shoes. “We’ll both go.” Shit, shit, if she could just recall the words. O Most Gracious Virgin Mary, or was it Most Blessed?

Mercedes’s hand rests tight on her shoulder as they make their way downstairs. Yvonne grimaces at the last dry step; then her cousin squeezes lightly, and she steps down. The water is warm, and a shock—to be so wet, so submerged, inside her house—but she keeps going, feels Mercedes behind her. When Yvonne’s feet touch the ground floor, she is in water above her waist.

“Fuck,” Mercedes whispers.

In the dim light of Yvonne’s flashlight, the water appears colorless, dark and menacing, as if they are wading through a bayou instead of a home. They move into the living room. The water around Mercedes is stagnant and reeks of garbage, slicked with rainbows of oil that catch the flashlight’s beam. They pass the couch, kitchen chairs, television stand, three-level bookshelf of Russell’s John Grisham hardcovers and Yvonne’s Nora Roberts paperbacks, all almost fully underwater. Yvonne pushes her legs through the water, bumping them against debris: books or knickknacks or pillows, she cannot see. Flotsam from her own home. She shivers, thinking of the many storms she remembers here in Galveston, how none had this level of surge—this high water, this lasting. Ike is different; it has turned their own bay against them.

At the front door Mercedes passes her their windbreakers. Yvonne’s has a hood, which she zips up. Mercedes makes do with piling her hair up beneath the Vaqueros ball cap and pulling it down over her face.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Yvonne takes a deep breath and slowly, through the water, pulls open the front door.

Mercedes’s first thought: Everything is brighter. This is a lie—it is the middle of the night, hours away from dawn—but it feels true. The rain falling without its cruel edge, the wind died down to a mere breeze. If not for the water lapping at her ribs, this could be four a.m. on any given night. The utter stillness is eerie, foreboding.

“Come on,” Yvonne whispers. “We don’t have long.” Eyes only last a few hours and are fickle; a lifetime as an islander has taught her so. Sweat gathers on her brow from the humidity, but she shivers as they wade carefully down the driveway; she uses her elbows to bat bobbing soda bottles and palm fronds and sodden scraps of cardboard out of their path. At some point, Mercedes links arms with her. They push through the water together like conjoined twins.

“Anything?”

“Nothing.” No sign of fire anywhere, though they can smell it on the air. Yvonne looks back at the house and scans it frantically. Flames, tongues, smoke—nothing. Relief floods into her stomach. “Let’s see if it’s nearby.”

They are in the middle of Pompano before Mercedes grips her arm, points. “There.” The cause of the iceberg crack and the smoke smell: a house down at the east end of the street is on fire.

“Putamadre,” Mercedes swears, sucking in her breath. She has never seen a building aflame before. Its walls are alight, its roof breathing black plumes of smoke.

“It could have been an appliance still running,” Yvonne says, staring at the columns of smoke. “It just needs a spark. A curtain, some wood.” She has forgotten that her cousin already knows this. She is thinking of her mother, asleep upstairs with her hand on her grandson’s back, and of the last tropical storm they weathered together before Yvonne moved out of the house on Dolphin. Unplug everything, mija. Make sure there are no sparks, nothing nearby that could catch. “In a storm everything becomes a wick.”

Strange, she told her mother that time, hunkering down with the wind screaming outside and the girls playing a video game, screaming inside—they hadn’t lost power then—how so much water can lead to fire. It should be unnatural, shouldn’t it? It’s the electricity, Eva replied in her steady motherly tone of explanation, the one Yvonne hated even as she heard herself use it to scold Jess or the girls, to correct Russell. She imagined blue water—another lie, Galveston water and storm water never blue—and red fire circling each other, boxers in a ring. One should win the fight, she said at the time with a shrug. It doesn’t seem right that both can simply exist. Eva shook her head; when Sarita ran over in tears from something one of the girls said, their mother held her close and cuddled her. She had never done that with Yvonne; had barely looked at Jess since he moved into his apartment and started working at the marina. But Yvonne saw her sister nestle in, close her eyes in comfort against her mother. And she longed for that, too, just for a moment.

The rain is picking up. Mercedes hears an urgency in its falling, the quickening pattern. She moves closer to the house, down the street.

“Where are you going?” Yvonne hisses. “Get back here.”

Mercedes has to see it. She keeps going, moving as carefully as she can. One yard, then two. Past one house, then another. Yvonne following behind, wading and cursing.

Once, Mercedes stumbles in a pothole; the water engulfs her up to her shoulders. She fumbles and steps out, resolving to shuffle her feet beneath the water—as Luis taught her, years ago, on trips to the white sand and blue water of South Padre. Shuffle your feet rather than lifting them in steps, M, and you won’t come down on a stingray. He liked watching her practice, the underwater drag of her feet making her hips move awkwardly above the surface. She saw him watching and laughed.