The Last Karankawas(56)
I miss you, he had written, and some days—like today—she knows her response would be I miss you too. Mercedes walks forward, eyes fixed on the scorching house. Luis would never have let her do this. She slides her foot forward another step. He would tell her to turn back. She lifts her chin and takes another.
Her cousin looks enraptured, and Yvonne understands why—the burning house is magnificent, horrific, holy. A pillar of flame. The wind strengthens, buffeting their faces, churning the water around them into tiny waves, but the women creep closer. The flames sway but do not diminish. At last, Yvonne recognizes the home as the green two-story with the giant old palm tree adorning the front yard. In the eye of the storm, the tree stands forty feet tall, arcing in an elegant comma curve. Its wide, fanning leaves move gently and then frantically, as the wind rises, high above her head.
“That poor tree,” Mercedes says, and squeezes her eyes shut, a tang of salt filling her mouth. It could be the rain, but she imagines it is the tree. Imagines—madly—that she is the tree. She forces herself not to choke, wills the tree to do the same. A palm tree can survive some salt water but surely not five feet of it, not days of submerged roots. Surely nothing could swallow so much and breathe. Still, she thinks, Breathe.
“Prima, let’s go. Come on.” Yvonne reaches for her arm. The wind roils around them, the lightness they admired minutes earlier evaporating. Mercedes fights to keep her balance in the water. Flames roar into the sky, brilliant, eager tongues of orange and yellow thrusting upward. Even from this distance, houses away, her cheeks and the tip of her nose flush with the heat. Rain streams down, too much for the island to handle but useless for the house, and the tree. The tree will catch in a moment. She knows this. It has to. In a storm everything becomes a wick. Mercedes tastes the salt water on the tree’s root tongues, but Yvonne sees the tree catching fire, can picture it before it happens. Flickering in front of her eyes are broad-fingered leaves striking as if by a match—flaring into life—crown of flames atop the lean trunk—skirted with water—snarl of roots drowning.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” Yvonne hears herself whisper. “How fast something can be destroyed.”
“I know.” Mercedes hugs herself. They stand in the rain for long moments, amid the dirty surge water pooling in the street, watching fire consume a house in the eye of a hurricane.
Yvonne doesn’t know where the words come from, but she suddenly says, “It’s taking it all back. Taking it all down. Like none of this is supposed to be here.” She laughs, hysterically. “We put boards on windows and stuff towels beneath doors and think that will keep us safe. As if any of that shit matters or makes the slightest difference. Crazy, right? Stupid of us?”
Mercedes squints through the rain at her cousin. She understands. This house, the palm tree someone uprooted and planted in the lawn. Yvonne’s house and Tía Eva’s house and Mercedes’s house; Pompano and Tuna and Fish Village; the stilt-legged homes on Bolivar and Crystal Beach; the brick buildings on the Strand and the cruise ships at Harborside and the towers of the Bishop’s Palace; all of Galveston, a city built atop the ruins of another city demolished once before, by another hurricane. Jess told her that. He’s always telling her Galveston history. He wants her to feel like she belongs here.
“But it does, sometimes,” she says. “Make a difference. Maybe one window doesn’t break, or one house doesn’t catch on fire. You know? Some things will make it, prima.” The fire crackles, gives a brief belch that makes her tremble. “Some things survive.”
They look up into the dark sky with its eerie gray light.
“Aaron,” Mercedes says, and Yvonne registers her son’s name like the word that breaks a trance. She glances around with her eyes sharp again.
“Let’s go.”
They stumble as they turn in the water, the rain and the wind that has built up again, shoving them, back, back. Yvonne pushes through, Mercedes’s arm in hers, and they shuffle back to the house. It takes a long time, longer than before, when the eye was still upon them. The word comes again: intercession.
And then: unaided.
Yvonne laughs, earning a wary look from Mercedes. “I remember,” she says. “I remember.” She snatches the rest of the line in her mind so suddenly and so clearly that she sees the wooden pews of Sacred Heart, the white-robed priest before her instead of this nightmarish version of Pompano. Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thine intercession was left unaided. No other line comes to her at that moment, but she only needs this one. She repeats it under her breath, clasping Mercedes tight as they climb the driveway, wade to the door, shove it open, and force it closed behind them.
Upstairs they peel off their sodden clothes and pull on dry shorts and two of Russell’s San Antonio Spurs T-shirts. Mercedes climbs into the bed on Tía Eva’s side. Her aunt is still sleeping, but when Mercedes moves closer, she shifts to accommodate her. She lifts her arm to drape it over Mercedes, to rub her hand lightly across her back. Mercedes thinks of Luis, again, his hand on her back; she smells her mother in Tía Eva’s skin. She smiles. I stood in the eye, she will tell them, someday. I stared down a hurricane. What else do you think I can do?
Yvonne wraps her arms around Aaron and pulls him closer. Russell, she thinks. Jess. Carly. Be safe, be safe. Aaron breathes against her chest, sighs in his sleep. The house shudders, trembles, and Yvonne listens to the rain splintering against the windows. Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary. She shifts the words of that one line, rearranges them. Never was it known that anyone was left unaided. We did not flee, she thinks; we never do. We implore thy help. Remember. Intercede.