Chapter 8: Night People

Night people hanging out, looking at each other
Waiting for something to happen
Night people hanging out, looking at each other
Waiting for something to happen

While the day world is sleeping
Night people are creeping, hanging out, looking at each other
When the day world stops moving,
Night people start grooving, hanging out, looking at each other.

If everybody went to sleep at the same time
Every night, the world would die, die, die.

--Alan Toussaint

Amy’s sleep problems began, well, as far back as she could remember.    The cool pillow that brought her comfort when she first lay her head down at night seemed to turn to stone after she had twisted to the one side and then the other, over and over again, trying to find that magical spot where her dreams could begin.  The antique clock that sat in her grandparents' living room  atop the dark mahogany knickknack shelf marked the passing of the long night.  Every fifteen minutes she was reminded  that she was still awake. One strike for quarter past.  Two strikes for half past.  Three strikes for three-quarters passed.  Four strikes for the hour, followed by number of strikes for that hour.   If only she could quiet that clock, but she dared not ask her grandparents.  Finally, when the  light began to change in her room, she would creep through the hallway and fall asleep in the doorway to her grandparents’ bedroom.  In the morning Mere would find her sleeping there and swallow a cry in the back of her throat where lived the memory of Anna’s small sleeping form in that same threshold.

Amy slipped out of her bed.  It was three a.m.  Since her grandparents had died, she had stopped fighting the sleepless nights and instead made friends with her insomnia.  In New Orleans, she could always find someone to keep her company while awake, at any hour.  Lonely she would never be, if she took to the streets.  The coffee shop a few blocks away never closed. Inside she would always find a few heavy smoking, caffeine addicts, doodling in their books or looking absently at the empty streets from the large windows. Over time, she had befriended a few of these nocturnal spirits.  If she wanted more company, she hopped on her bike and headed to the French Quarter and Café Du Mond where the other night people came for a sugar rush or chicory boost.   In the early days after Katrina,  the large military tanks along Canal Street and on the neutral ground on Rampart Street with National Guardsmen aiming their very large weapons in all directions would startle Amy, over and over again.  Almost two years later, New Orleans still felt like a war zone.  It seemed nobody was sleeping any more.

She pulled on her green Tulane sweatshirt and jeans. Tonight she’d stay close to home.  She grabbed her small notebook stuffed with a few folded, yellow papers.  She headed to the nearby coffee shop on Magazine.  Maybe Clayton would be there.  He was always good for a story or two about a French Quarter Grand Dame, in truth a New York City post-Katrina transplant,  who would have ordered another piece of custom furniture from him out of pity for his loss of clientele after Katrina and who felt it her duty to single-handedly save what was left of  the New Orleans “culcha”.  Ralph was her other night-time companion.  He was a poet, teacher and journalist belonging to the dying fourth estate.  She hoped that he would be there. She was growing fond of Ralph.

She liked New Orleans’ local coffee shops.  Not because she believed in the green-movement of shopping local. Like most natives, she abhorred whatever was in fashion.  She avoided the chains, choosing the local venues that didn’t try to be too clean, too smart.  A little dirt was desirable.  Mismatched chairs preferable to the boredom of redundancy.  Old wooden tables that needed a match book to hold them steady better than the cute bistro tables that populated the mall coffee shops attached to large bookstores.  Inside Amy beat the  heart shared by all New Orleanians, a heart that was armored with the  suspicion of the chic and a thirst for the passé and defunct.

Amy stepped out onto the vacant street.  It was dark, but she knew the street so well by now, she could walk it with her eyes closed and still see  vividly each of the shops, what was in the windows and the person who worked there.  A few street lights here and there, mostly there, were working.  Most of the street signs were down and not yet replaced.  Large potholes ruled the streets.  In more than a few windows above the shops,  lights shone, betraying yet another night person keeping watch.  A small mist greeted her affectionately, dampening her hair that would curl wildly in a kind of ecstatic response.  On her walk to the coffee shop a few blocks down from her apartment, Amy thought about history and family. Except for her great-aunt in New Orleans and her uncle in Alabama, everyone in her family had passed.  She didn’t know if her mother’s sister was still alive, having only a few months earlier found out that her mother even had a sister.  She hadn’t asked her uncle about that, not yet at least.   She had spent the last few months reading her mother’s journals and the letters and documents that belonged to her grandfather and great-grandfather.    When she wasn’t working at the hotel, she was in the Tulane Library in the Latin American collection.    With the help of Sean, the collection’s archivist, she was learning about the history of her ancestor’s country Guatemala and the questionable role her grandfather played in it.

Someone, she can’t remember who,  said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." But what if you don’t even know that history?  What if you find out all you know about even your own personal history is a lie, or incomplete?  Whose history is told and whose is untold?  Who tells it?  She was confused.  Unsure whether to continue in her digging up the past.  She was beginning to feel that her entire family’s history was a myth and that there was a large secret story hidden in the pages she carried with her.  She was beginning to wonder who she was and how much she would change by uncovering  the secrets of her family's  past. 

When Amy arrived at the coffee shop, Ralph was there, reading aloud to a small group of street kids of all colors and all ages, along with a few newly-arrived Mexicans, El Salvadorans,  and Guatemalans who also  couldn’t  sleep that night or more likely had no place to lay their heads:

From the air it’s all puddles:
a blue-green frog town
 on lily pads. More canals
than Amsterdam. You don’t
land—you sink. When
we met, you, the Native, shook
your head. Sweat dropped
on the bar … I’m in it up to my eyebrows,
stalled like a streetcar.
My life is under the bed
with the beer bottles.
I’ll never write another line
for anything but love
in this city where steam
rises off the street after
a rain like bosoms heaving.


Ralph loved to read Everette Maddox to everyone whether they wanted to listen or not.  And every time, Ralph won them over with the poems.  He felt that it was his mission to educate the young folks still left in the city about one of its great poetic legends and his constant source of inspiration and the provider of all reasons to keep on living.   He even dressed like Everette dressed—long sleeve white shirt (not matter how hot), small thin black tie (no matter what the occasion), and dark slacks (no matter the season).   Amy at that moment knew she loved him. Hi, she whispered across the room,  and Ralph waved her over, inviting her to join the group.  She waved back but decided that, given what she just found out about herself, she wasn’t up to sharing Ralph. She pointed to another table by the window and smiled.   Ralph shook his head and continued on reading aloud to his disciples, who seemed grateful for the words that washed over them like a cool shower.  But silence is what Amy wanted. And Ralph. She ordered a café au lait and a shoe sole.  She chose a table where she could watch the sun come up over the antique mall building across the way.  She loved how the light would tease the leaves of the oaks and dapple the damp streets… a blue-green frog town/  on lily pads…

The irony, maybe even futility, of digging up one’s past and reconstructing it in a post-disaster city did not escape Amy.  Along with every person  she encountered everyday at work or in her neighborhood, she was recreating her life.  Like her great-aunt, she was trying to rebuild.  But unlike the failure of the levees that destroyed a city, the destruction of the life she knew came from a box of journals and suitcase of papers that had been hidden from her by her own family.   She wanted to tell Ralph about her mother’s journals and her suspicions about how her mother actually died, but she was afraid he’d think she was crazy.  She wanted this relationship more than anything else.  Who was she to offer herself to someone when she was in this place of rebuilding?   The desire she felt for Ralph coupled with her fear of her own history scared her into an all-too-familiar silence. 

Chapter 7: The Dream

It is in the cold black darkness of an early winter’s night when she discovers a deep secret about herself.  Believing it only a dream, she discovers that the secret is, in fact, all about darkness, about unlit corners, shadowy doorways, windowless rooms, about all those places the eyes can no longer see anything, not even one’s own hand inches from the eyes.  The secret that she can see clearly in the dark.

She awakes.  First in a half dreamy state as the images continue to wash over her mind’s eye like tears, images repeating, images reconfigured, images redrawn according to the whim of an unfettered imagination held captive in the world of dreams.   She watches herself move through the darkness confidently, knowing without seeing whatever is filling up the dark space.  She knows it is there. 

She wakes fully.  She is no longer moving through a dark space, seeing without seeing.  She is in her bed, she is certain, certain as the clock’s light on the nightstand revealing 3:03 on his red face, which she can see with her eyes.  That she lies on her bed , which she can see with her eyes; under her yellow and green quilt, which she can see with her eyes; in her small home far North and thousands of miles from her mother.  She knows all this in spite of what she is now hearing.  In spite of hearing her mother’s voice calling out to her, loud and clear that she should come downstairs. She knows she is in her home, awake.

Her mother’s voice persists, insists that she should come downstairs. She begins to wonder about...when other voices in her mind join in, the thoughts in her mind racing each other, one toppling over the other, words stumbling over the other , sentences piggybacking in an endless loop of syntax-less meaninglessness, all this a sure sign she is in trouble, will of course never get back to sleep and lately she is of the opinion that these noisy intrusive voices in her head are, dare she think much less speak aloud, the Devil himself taunting her, working insidiously to possess her through chaotic thoughts, ensnare her in the mind’s confused web of words: the devil of distraction.  She is beginning to believe she had be enlisted into her own private battle with Evil.

She calls out, stop the noise, be gone, demon of distraction.  She tries to pick up the conscious though of what she was wondering before Babel rose up, each voice fighting for hegemony.  Then she remembers,  yes, that’s it. She is wondering why she is hearing her mother’s voice if she is so fully awake and in her own bed.

She listens. It is dark in the room save for the clock’s obnoxiously lit-up face.  She can see all the furniture, every picture on the wall, every bottle on the vanity only because she has put them all there herself.  She can’t see each of these things with her eyes, but she knows they are there. She sees them in her mind’s eyes, in the place where memory of the familiar and safe reside.    She begins to drift away, the voices subsiding as she takes the mental inventory of her room.  The good, the commonplace and the everyday overcoming the evil of noisy distraction, sleep moves towards her like a welcoming ghost, and she curls up on her side, hugging her cool pillow.

Her mother’s voice calls out again, come downstairs please.

She throws off the covers, pulls on her blue woolen socks, wraps herself in her Mexican blanket and heads downstairs, fully prepared to find emptiness below.

Her mother is standing in the living room.  But it’s not her living room anymore.  Or is it?  Numerous tall windows fill the walls of a room larger then she remembers.  Her mother greets her with a tired, grateful smile and hugs her, something that feels out of character and yet familiar.  They sit down to chat and catch up, when her mother’s face suddenly changes as  shadows pass over it.  Her mother’s wrinkles grow more pronounced and her forehead maps out lines of concern, her eyes fix on something beyond. Her eyes follows her mother’s.  She sees the shadowy outlines of people standing in the windows.  Every window frames a dark, faceless figure.  She realizes the figures are growing larger, they begin to loom, hover, press against the window.   They are in every sense portentous.

She is afraid.   Her mother is afraid. They both know  that these figures are ominous, but they don’t know why; they are nameless, unvoiced, untold, silent ghosts.  Her mother turns to her and speaks with an authority that no one dare call into question.  Find a dark space, her mother tells her.  They can’t get you there.  And with your gift of seeing clearly in the dark, you'll escape their evil  and save the world.  And with those words, her mother points to the fireplace that suddenly appears in the room, and tells her to hide in the chimney.

She knows this is one of those times to listen to her mother.

Chapter 6: Anna's First Journal Entry

In the past I kept journals so that I would remember to listen to my children. As much as I love mom, she really doesn't listen to me. She never has. So I began to keep journals. Mostly I wrote about the trips I took or the boys I was in love with, or thought I was in love with.

Amy stopped reading.
Her grandmother had always listened to her.

All that changed last week--about the reasons why I kept a journal. I saw the documentary called Bitter Fruit. It was about the CIA and its role in overthrowing one of the presidents of Guatemala who as trying to create a more democratic country through land reform, democratic in the sense of wealth distribution. I realized that I know nothing Guatemala, about my father and his father and their life in Guatemala. I know we have my grandfather's books and some of his letters. But I've never looked at them except to look at my grandfather's penmanship.

Amy stopped reading.

She thinks about the mahogany bookcase.

Whenever dad talks about Guatemala he tells us about how he ate fresh fruit. How beautiful the weather was--that Guatemala is the land of eternal Spring. He talks about his education, and his favorite book The Three Musketeers. He likes to tell me about Lake Atitlan and the twelve Indian groups that lived around the lake each named after one of the apostles and each group wearing its own distinct dress. And he always said that the Indians were happy and that they didn't want to change.

Amy stopped reading.

She had heard these stories from her grandfather.

I knew my grandmother just barely. She didn't speak English, so mostly I remember sitting close to her and waiting to see what she pulled from her purse. She always seemed to have whatever was needed at that moment. My grandfather died before I was born. Dad never talks about him. When he does, he calls him Mr. Rubio. I know that my dad has nine siblings, two are half brothers.

Amy stopped reading.

She knew this about her grandfather.

I'm writing what I know because what I don't know is beginning to feel very large.

I know that my grandfather worked for some Guatemalan presidents, that he wrote books (which we have) and that he was the Consul General to Guatemala for the Southeastern states when he died in 1944. I'm wondering what role he played in these repressive governments I'm just now learning about.

Amy stopped reading.

She knew this about her great-grandfather.

But she had never wondered about him in this way.

To tell the truth, I'm afraid of what I'll find out. But I couldn't sleep last night, so I'm pretty sure I need to find out.

Amy stopped reading.

She's not sure what to think.

I called dad last night and began to talk to him about the documentary. He says that the communists needed to be stopped, that the communists were the ones killing and shooting. That under Ubica Guatemala became safe again and roads were built and the killing stopped. He says that nothing else happened except that the communists were put down and Guatemala was saved from communism. But I could tell he was upset that I asked. I had never asked about Guatemala and its politicals. And dad had never offered that information.

Amy stopped reading.

She never saw her grandfather get upset.

Every summer during high school I worked for my dad's freight forwarding company on Camp Street. He arranges for goods to be shipped to Central American countries. My job was to go to places like the United Fruit company and to consulates to pick up the bills of lading or to get the documents stamped required for the shipments. I didn't know anything about the United Fruit Company and how it was part of the coup in Guatemala back in the mid 50's.

Amy stopped reading.

She didn't know this about her mother.

She didn't know what her mother was writing about.

I start this journal with the intention of finding out what I can about my family's past, about my father's past and his father's past. It's his father's past that's actually the mystery. That's what this journal will record--who my grandfather was. I'm writing this for myself, and maybe for my children.

I talked to my brother and sister, and told them about what I am doing. My brother as usual encouraged me to continue. My sister as usual became agitated at the thought of uncovering something unpleasant.

Amy stopped reading.
My mother had a sister?

Chapter 5: The Stages of Grief

Amy sat on the unstable antique chair that had come with the apartment on Magazine Street, looking at  the small plastic suitcase and the medium-sized cardboard box she had rescued from her parents flooded home.  The two flood survivors had been occupying a dark corner of the room since she moved back to New Orleans a little over a year ago.   It actually didn’t take her that long to get her things together.  But the move had taken up a lot of her psychic energy.  She needed to focus on the present.

  There weren't too many people who had returned yet, and the only livable area was the "sliva by the riva", the area of town that stretched from the French Quarter along the Mississippi River levee and that wound its way through the lower Garden District and Uptown to the River Bend, on the river side of St. Charles.  The lonely For Rent sign was a small one bedroom that was just a few inches and a slender wallboard beyond what would have been an efficiency apartment.  She found a job at a health club in a downtown hotel and was able to sell the Saturn, which made it possible for her to afford the high rent.  The out-of-desperation $1000 sign-on bonus the hotel offered and which was in fact offered everywhere in town from McDonalds to the Ritz,  covered her moving costs and security deposit.
 
The late evening February sun was scattering spots of light on the hardwood floor of the virtually bare room, barely warming the damp cold air finding its way through the old wavy glass window panes. She had had the suitcase and box since she had emptied her grandparent's attic, but had not yet explored their contents. Not even the words “Anna’s Journals” written in her grandmother’s handwriting on the wrinkled box were strong enough to pull her from her drowning  grief.

Amy thought she knew what it meant to grieve. What could be a greater loss than the loss of her own mother? Or of not knowing her own father? Her mother had died when she was barely two. Her father, she had never met. He was a brief sentence, an aside, something she overheard as she passed by the bedroom door of her grandparent’s room. “He wasn’t ready to be a father,” was the most common portrait her grandmother would paint of him. He seemed to exist inside parentheses, an afterthought. She had also heard some sketchy words “jerk,” “narcissus”, “self-centered”, words whispered when the adults didn’t see her behind Aunt Adele’s newly upholstered (for the fifth time in five years) chair or under Aunt Concha’s heavy black dining room table where Spanish diplomats sat eating inky black squid.

Of course, much more than a sentence or even a paragraph was spoken about her mother Anna. There were stories, short ones and long ones and ones with punch lines and some that seemed almost mythical. Her grandmother told funny stories about her mother, stories that made her laugh. Or she told her stories with a moral at the end, lessons Amy was to learn so that she would not repeat her mother's mistakes. She heard tales of her mother’s energy, her accomplishments, her rebelliousness from all things Southern and gentile, and her bad choices when it came to boyfriends. Her grandfather described Anna differently, like a poet might describe a person admired from a distance. He told Amy about Anna’s dreams, about what she had longed for in her life, about the books she read, the poets she read over and over again, and the music she’d dance to alone out on the patio. Amy knew about cummings and Eliot, about Mozart, about The Nancy Drew Mystery series—all the things Anna loved and cherished.

Amy realized, came to terms with actually, that what she thought had been grieving was as ephemeral as her mother was to her—a notion, a fiction, a reconstruction of fragments of photos and stories. The grief she felt about her mother's death was that of an unrequited lover’s.

The grief she felt when she saw her destroyed home and city, and the deaths of her grandparents a few months later was  different. It was concrete. Physical. A bulldozer that razed her entire being. She sat on the floor recalling a litany of events that had been occupying her thoughts for the past year: Katrina destroyed her home.  Two months later, Mignon died. Then a month later Carlos died, heartbroken and too frail to face the loss of his wife, his home, his city. The day her grandfather died, Amy felt all over again and with twice as much force what she felt the day she had returned to New Orleans after Katrina. She felt deafened by the silence, suffocated by the stench of death, hopeless in the scope of what was gone. She had loved her grandparents as deeply as she had known them. She had loved her city as deeply as she had known it. And she knew them all so very well.

This grief brought with it the hard truth that she had not really grieved her mother’s death. The hard truth that she had not known her mother at all. She knew the photos and the stories. She had lost only what she herself had created in her imagination. A fiction. A fragment. A photo.

And now Amy sat with the box of her mother’s journals, taped, sealed how long ago she doesn’t know. Next to it lay the small plastic suitcase. What she thought she knew, not only about her mother and father, but about her grandfather and his father as well, was about to change in a way as unfathomable as Katrina’s destruction.

Chapter 4: The City of the Dead

After Carlos’ funeral, Amy stood with her grandparent’s lawyer Mr. Rasch, a well-dressed rotund man whose size betrayed the gentleness with which he had managed their legal needs.     They stood together in a tense silence.  The tension did not exist between them, but rather between the two of them and the cemetery staff;  a tension that contained the silent memory of what had happened, or not happened, at her grandmother’s funeral a half a year earlier, when the cemetery had left her grandmother’s coffin outside, unattended, for over a day before putting the casket into the designated section of the wall of the family tomb. Mr. Rasch had discovered this negligence through the network of contacts he had made over the years in his role as President of the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors.  Such negligence was somewhat common before Katrina.  Post-Katrina, it had gotten even worse, like most things in New Orleans, in part due to the poor service of most funeral homes that had existed before the flood, in part due to the loss of available workers after the flood.   There was no place to live for those that lived, no one to bury those that died. 

Amy stood with Mr. Rasch until her grandfather’s coffin was safely secured in the space that was adjacent to his wife of 65 years. She realized she wasn’t ready to leave yet, so she walked outside with Mr. Rasch and thanked him for all he had done,  and told him she’d be in touch to finish up the paper work for the estate, or at least what was left of the estate.  As Mr. Rasch’s large shadow made its way across the deserted streets of the City of the Dead, a ghost town in a ghost town, Amy turned around and entered the narrow hallway of pitched-roof mausoleum.  It had been built about 75 years ago and was made of brick  plastered over and painted white.  Dark smudges of dirt and mold had crept into the corners and nooks here and there.  A distinct rusted-orange stripe encircled the perimeter of the tomb about 12 inches from the ground,  marking the spot where Katrina’s waters had sat for those long days in August over a year ago.    Below the steeply-pitched roof and above the arched doorway stood a white marble cross encircled with white marble ivy guarding the Rubio family whose name was carved beneath the cross.  

In the shadowy cool hallway, she read the plates that named those who had once lived:

Casimiro Rubio   1865- 1040

Angela Toleda Balmes Rubio  1882 - 1966

Adela Rubio Stern  1907 - 1985

Concha Rubio Pascal   1910 - 1980

Eduardo Rubio    1914 - 1997

Graciela Rubio Hirsch   1921 - 1999

Mignon Tuyes Rubio  1920 – 2005

Carlos Rubio   1917 – 2006

Anna Rubio 1955 – 1981

A few of the Rubios were missing. They were buried in other cities – Martha in Houston and George in San Francisco.  With the exception of her grandparents, Amy knew the others who were buried here through the picture and stories she had seen and heard. She knew that Aunt Adela had been the great beauty of the women.  She knew that Aunt Concha had famous dinners for the counsul of Spain for whom she had worked—long dinners  with multiple courses presided over by her Cajun husband Bruce Pascal who started every meal with a Cajun prayer.  Eduarda was known as Guayo, later shortened by the English speaking offspring to Y-O.  He was the electrician who married Jane Callahan, Anna’s godmother.  About Graciela she heard the least, although she had met her at one time. She thought she had once caught the tail end of whisper about her great-aunt Grace’s mental illness.   Finally she was ready to leave.

She walked back outside.  Much of the grass had grown back since the flood.  It still startled her to see how few trees there were, to see so much of the vast white cloudless sky that had been hidden behind the city’s thousands of oak trees, now gone.  The absence of the protective shade of oaks was just another reminder of the absence of so much more—of residents, of the people how made New Orleans what was always so special to Amy.  The mishmash of ideas and races and opinions, the crazy-making conflicts that always ended in laughter and a good meal or a stiff drink.  And as crazy-making as these in-your-face disputes and conflicts could be, their absence was worse.  The music, now silent; the cadence of speech and the unique look of the people, both born of back room liaisons, now silent;  the food, the parades,  all this she missed as much as she missed her grandparents.

In that moment Amy made her commitment to return, to move back and make New Orleans her home once again.  She wasn’t sure how she’d manage it.  There weren’t too many places available to rent and what was available had doubled in rent. Tragedy doesn’t necessarily make heroes.   All her friends were still in places far away. 

She walked back to where she had parked her grandparents’ gold Saturn, when into her brain and completely from nowhere appeared the memory of her grandfather’s mortification  when the sales people at the dealership lined up to sing to him and Mignon as they picked up the brand new Saturn back in 1999.  Her grandfather was a private man who hated to call attention to himself (a trait she had inherited).  Of course, her grandmother had loved the attention, and so in the end Carlos suffered the humiliating experience of this ueber-customer service Public Display of Affection, and was glad Mignon was happy.  Holding on to this memory, Amy felt a surge of energy and optimism and steered the car towards uptown, where the higher land of the city along the Mississippi River, at the rim of the so-called bowl, had not been flooded.  She knew it was a million-in-one chance that she’d find anything, but what was there to loose?

She drove onto the I-10 heading downtown, and turned off the Carrollton exit.  She drove all the way down Carrollton to the River Bend, turning left along the levee and then onto Magazine Street.    About ten minutes later, she stopped the car.  A For Rent sign sat in a window, as lonely as the sole oak tree on the street, as abandoned as the city.

Chapter 3 A large mahogany bookcase, a small plastic suitcase and a medium cardboard box

Amy stared at the black and white photograph.   In the photo, her mother and her uncle,  both preschoolers, are sitting at the dining room table in their home not far from the Canal Street Cemeteries in New Orleans.  Their mother Mignon sits with them, but not their father Carlos.  Carlos was rarely in any of the family photographs. He was always the one behind the camera.  In the background, behind the dining room table, stands the seven foot tall mahogany bookcase with its two glass doors and two small drawers at the bottom.

She sighed, her breath a griever’s prayer.

She remembered that bookcase fondly.    She could see herself even now sitting on the brown and gold floral carpet that covered the floor in her grandparent’s living room.  She was sitting at the foot of this same bookcase, with its lovely fluted columns running up each side, the carved leaves punctuating each end of the  columns, and the round carved trim framing  the top and bottom of the door frames.  Over the years, various collectible items filled the shelves, but it always contained her great-grandfather’s books.  Her grandfather told her that he had bought that bookcase after the war, and had stripped and refinished it.  Amy made him promise that he’d teach her how to strip and refinish furniture when she was old enough.  Of course, he told her in his whisper of a voice.  I will teach you whatever I can.  He never let her down on that promise.

Ever since she was a child, Amy would sit at the base of the bookcase for hours at a time, the two small drawers opened, photographs spilling over the sides and onto the floor.  She enjoyed going through the randomly stored pictures that her grandmother put there before Amy was born.    The photographs were in no particular order. She might find a photograph of her great grandmother from 1920 on some Guatemalan veranda lying next to a photograph of her grandmother on a Biloxi Beach in 1945.  Her grandmother would often remark, each time as if it were the first, your mother also sat there for hours looking at those photographs.    

Interspersed among the photographs were equally random pieces of paper. Some were letters written by her great-grandfather in a form of Spanish rarely spoken today and in an exquisite penmanship  that she had come to find out was called Willigha, a font based on the copperplate formal handwriting popular at that time, equally extinct in her digital world.   There were also painfully thin onion-skin papers with now blurry type-written poems written by her grandfather as well.  Amy admired the handwritten letters as if they were photographs, representations of another time and of people who were no longer with us.   It was however difficult for her to reconcile the ornate, lyrical handwriting of her great-grandfather when placed next to the stern, austere face in his photographs.

After she turned 18, she began to sit with these letters and poems more often, trying to decipher the words with her high school Spanish.  She recognized a love poem here, a tribute to some political leader there,  even  letters from  former Guatemalan presidents.   Because her grandfather never spoke about his father  (and when he did, he referred to him as Mr. Rubio and never as my father)  she sensed that she was not allowed to ask questions about him.

**********

Family stories take many forms.  In some families, they are shouted out proudly at family Christmas dinners, at Passover feasts, at Thanksgiving dinner tables, meant for everyone to hear, again and again and yet again, until the stories become family legend, larger than life.  In some families, the stories are contained within the “begats”  written on the blank pages at the beginning and end of Bibles.  Some family stories become public domain, the subject of cautionary tales or of inspirational self-help. Amy would come to discover her family’s story among the photographs and writings in the bottom two drawers of this bookcase.  Later, after discovering the small plastic suitcase and the cardboard box in the attic, she would have to rewrite that story.  Even so, the stories she would come to tell were like a book with whole chapters missing, lost to sea, dust to the wind.

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Amy put away the photograph of her grandmother, mother and uncle in front of the bookcase.  Two years ago, she had packed up the photographs and papers from the bottom two drawers of the bookcase, a decision that had come to feel to her like an act of supreme providence and grace, as less than a year later Hurricane Katrina would flood and destroy her family home.  She had convinced her grandfather that she would keep the photos safe and preserved.  And that she did.  She took the contents to the bald, yellow-toothed, gnome-like British archivist at Tulane University who oversaw the precious rare manuscripts.  He gave her acid-free special containers  and even  preserved some of the more fragile papers in a clear special material without her requesting him to do so.  The archivist clearly loved to preserve precious texts, even those of a family he didn’t know.  But she had kept them safe and preserved in a way she never thought she would have to.

She had taken the whole lot with her when she decided she needed to live in another town, 1500 miles away from New Orleans.  She had every intention of staying there long enough to walk a different geography, know a different culture, experience a different climate; but there were other plans for her.  When Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans nine months later, she packed up the few things she had actually unpacked , stored them at a local storage unit, and drove back South, first to Alabama and her uncle’s home where her grandparents had evacuated.  She stopped there to see how they were doing, before heading to New Orleans, as the Mayor was allowing people back into the city to see the condition of their homes for a few hours a day.   At her uncle’s house, she unpacked from her car some of the photographs she had decided to take at the last minute so that her grandparents would have something of their past to hold on to, including this one of the family around the table and in front of the family bookcase.    Amy handed her grandfather the photos, randomly picked and randomly stored in the small letter-sized brown envelope.  Carlos held the envelope on his lap.  It seemed as if  opening  the envelope was simply too herculean a task for him. He smiled at Amy, his eyes peering out from deep inside some dark space, his heart visibly beating through his thin shirt.

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When Amy entered her grandparent’s home, her home, nothing, not even the devastation she witnessed for the last three hours of her drive, could prepare her for what she saw. The wooden floors buckled like a roller coaster.  The stench of the moldy plaster and wood, of the rotten food in the freezer and refrigerator was so strong it clobbered its way through her black-mold protective mask.   She found the mahogany bookcase  in the hallway partially covering her bedroom door, still upright, but  clearly suffering heavily. She realized it had floated for days in the flood waters, until it came to rest in this odd spot.   She gently touched the right glass door that was partially open. It deteriorated at her touch, falling to the buckled floor, shattering the glass.     At that moment, she knew she didn’t want to remain any longer than she had to. She took the pad out of her pants pocket and made a list of what she felt needed to be done-what needed to be hauled out to the front of the house for—who? who would pick the stuff up? But she had seen in her long drive through the city that those who had returned were piling up the damage furniture and appliances in front of their homes.  No one seemed to be worried about who was going to pick it up.  Then she went to the attic stairs to see if anything up there was intact.

She pulled on the black-moldy rope that drew the attic stairs down.  The stairs were in pretty good shape, so she climbed them fairly confidently.  She found the box of Christmas ornaments her grandparents had put up the whole time she was growing up and the old wooden children’s xylophone from Guatemala.  After she removed these items, she saw hidden behind them  a small cheap plastic suitcase and a medium size cardboard box with the words “Anna’s Journals” written in her grandmother’s handwriting.  She had never noticed these before.  The urgency to get out of the house didn't allow her to reflect on the fact that she hadn’t known that her mother had kept journals, and that in fact she had nothing written of her mothers. Single-mindedly she quickly but carefully took each of these remains down the attic stairs and into her car out front. With these few rescued items now in her car, she rolled down  the windows to try to diffuse the suffocating odor they brought with them, musty smells that bore witness to the 10 feet of waters that resided in their home for an eternity of days.

Carlos and Mignon, the only two parents she had ever known, survived the initial onslaught of Katrina, but they did not survive the heartbreak it left in its wake.  Mignon died a few months later. She lay down one afternoon to take a nap, and never awoke.  Carlos, his home and his wife gone,  finally lost his battle to the congestive heart disease that he had held at bay for years, so he could take care of Mignon.  Katrina’s waters had been one drop of water too much for his enlarged heart.

The night before her grandfather died, Amy had a dream.   In her dream, Carlos and Mignon were young. They looked like they did in the black and white photographs in the book case drawers.  Mignon was dressed in a long white Victorian gown with a high lacey collar and elegant billowy sleeves.  Carlos was dressed in a white linen suit.  They were standing together on a tall cliff overlooking the sea.  Holding hands, they jumped into the water.

In my dream, I’m now seeing them under the water swimming, almost dancing enjoying the sense of weightlessness and the serenity of the silence.   Above them, the waves of white filigree frame the vision.  They swim to the surface only to find that they cannot break through, they cannot escape the water.  The ocean, the waves and my grandparents suddenly disappear.
In my dream, my grandfather’s face appears, smiling.

A golden light fills the dreamer’s eyes.

Chapter Two: Agua

On the day Carlos was born, the sky over Antigua was a fiery red.


His mother’s bedroom window's faced the volcano called Agua. The local Mayan Kaqchikel people called it Hunapú or "place of flowers". In 1517 Hunapu erupted. A huge mudslide produced a force of water so strong that it destroyed what had been the magnificent colonial city of Antigua. After that, the Spaniards changed its name tothe volcano Agua. Along with another volcano called Fuego, Agua threatened the residents; with periodic rumblings and sputterings of fire. But theirs had been the threat of a loud schoolyard bully, all words and no action. Over the centuries, the people had come to ignore the empty blustering that came from the old mountain.; Only the occasional wealthy tourist or foreign speculator looking to make a quick fortune stood in awe at its feet, watching the hellish lava that it spit out from time to time.


The day Carlos was born, Agua’s smoke choked the sky, and the birds were still. Cassimiro looked out his wife’s bedroom window and said calmly, Angela, have Chona pack a few things for a few days. We’re taking the children and going to Xela. Two days later, Carlos’ baptism was hastily performed in the small Church where his father had been baptized. A few weeks later, the family returned to Antigua, after the aftershocks had stopped, and they felt it safe to return. The earthquake had been relatively minor. The homes of the poorest residents had been destroyed, to no one’s surprise. A few buildings lost some tiles to their roofs, and the church a few stained-glass windows. Over the front entrance of Cassimiro’s family home, a crack the length of a small child scarred the plastered wall.

When Carlos was four years old, his mother gave birth to another son, Luis, her ninth child. One day shortly after Luis was born, Carlos was running in circles on the roof of the house. He loved running up there. From the roof top he could see the entire city and beyond, as their home sat halfway up a mountain at the north end of town. Agua was due South, Fuego West. On the days and nights that Agua was especially active, Carlos would secretly go up to the roof by the back stairs and watch its fires dance. Carlos went up to the roof secretly because his parents had forbidden him to go up there. But that day, Carlos was running freely on the roof. His mother was distracted with Luis who needed a lot of care after his premature birth. His father had gone to Xela on business.

The sun was beginning to set. Carlos continued spinning at the center of the roof, his eyes opened wide, the greens of treetops, the blue of sky and the orange of the setting sun shifting into beautiful shapes of colors and forms. Suddenly a burst of red from Agua exploded into his kaleidoscope. He instantly stopped spinning and rushed to the south end of the roof, but his eyes hadn’t found the horizon to steady his balance, and he misjudged where the roof ended. He flew off the roof and fell to the stone patio below.

By this time the sun had plunged behind the mountains and the cold air began to rush over the town. It was Chona that found him on the ground, unconscious, when she began searching for the children to come to dinner. Otherwise calm during crisis, Chona began to scream. Carlos was her favorite, although she’d never admit to it to anyone, not even herself. Angela heard her scream and rushed outside, holding Luis in her arms. When she saw Carlos on the ground, she handed Luis to Chona and knelt besides him. She leaned over Carlos’ face and felt his wrists—he was breathing, he had a pulse. Barely breathing herself, Angela took Luis from Chona and told her to go into town and bring the doctor back with her. As she went back into the house to find a blanket to cover Carlos, she saw from the corner of her eyes the red fires leaping from Agua in what seemed like a sneering taunt, as if it were sadistically enjoying her pain and suffering.

Carlos survived the fall. Luis, however did not. The cold air entered Luis’ fragile lungs and inflamed them with an infection he couldn’t fight off. Carlos survived, although he almost died. When he awoke, he couldn’t hear or see for a long time. His oldest sister Adela would read to him and encourage him to speak and see. For many years Carlos had dreams that he was flying above the city, above Agua and Fuego. Oddly enough, they weren’t nightmares, but rather pleasant dreams.

As a result of his fall, Carlos broke his left baby toe. It healed finally, but it was permanently crossed over the next toe, like a child’s crossed fingers hidden behind his back as he claims to tell the truth. Carlos’ three children would mercilessly tease him about his malformed baby toe, ignorant to the painful hidden and unspoken memory it held. His granddaughter Amethyst, on the other hand, would look at it with great sadness.

Chapter One: The Appointment

...may your mercy come quickly to meet us, for we are in desperate need.

The sky poured itself over the levee like a melting carnival pinwheel, shifting from a pale blue to slate blue to finally this shocking and unexpected orange. Angela thought about that for just a brief unconscious second—about the unexpected part, how unexpected the orange was, but not unknown. Every sunset from August till October, she had counted on seeing that orange sky from her home office window. Counted on it as one counts on the sun rising each morning; on oysters being safe to eat in the months with “r” in them; on hurricane season ending November 30.

The orange sky was framed by the window in her friend’s office where she sat, telling her story, and wondering if the leafy oak trees outside the window would be enough to cool down the office that had been slowly steaming up since she arrived.  She sat in a comfortable worn brown leather chair, that was cool on her skin, trimmed with brass nail heads that needed a polish, across from Wiley G. Lastrape, Jr., private detective  She realized this orange sky, her orange sky, also belonged to Wiley and his window. It felt so unexpected, to see that sky in his window.

Wiley sat fully present. Wiley always appeared fully present. That’s what she liked about him, even with her unspoken distrust of all PI's and ex-lawyers. Especially Louisiana ex-lawyers. If she’d seen Wiley on the streets, she’d have pegged him as a crooked lawyer and even more jaded PI, someone who represented the mafia bosses she saw every Friday night holding court at the bar at Mandina’s or who did the dirty work of unfaithful husbands wanting to catch their own wives in the act. Every day during the hot weather months, Wiley dressed in a light blue sear sucker suit, starched white shirt and pale blue tie with buttery yellow stripes. On colder days, he’d wear a dark blue wool pin stripe suit with a number of different ties to punctuate a season or (she speculated) a mood. There were the required green-and-red Christmas ties; the pumpkin-orange Thanksgiving ties; and the purple-green-and-gold Mardi ties for carnival season. Sometimes he’d give in and wear a black-and-gold tie for the equally loved-and-hated pro-football team. His dark curly French hair was always a little bit disheveled, as if a favorite spinster aunt had just tousled it as she sent him off to school in the morning.

Wiley was always present when she spoke to him. Fully listening as if she were the only person alive on earth, as if she held the secret to life’s meaning. And so she had come to trust him.

She hadn’t known whom to trust with her story. For years she had known the first chapter of the story and had freely shared this with many friends who enjoyed the tale. But it was only in the last few years that the second chapter had begun to reveal itself. It began to reveal itself shortly after Katrina, which had pushed both her grandparents into their graves when their house and all its contents were destroyed, that is, all but the cheap vinyl suitcase and the medium-sized cardboard box in the attic.

Like Amt, Wiley felt the heat from the window. But unlike Amy, he was beginning to sweat. He could see the unforgiving orange sky reflected in the glass doors of his large antique mahogany book case that had been in his family for generations. That color was a daily reminder to him that he should ask his wife Anne to help him find some sort of window shade to block the heat that defeated even the most powerful air conditioner he had installed after the storm took out his older unit. And every day he’d go home to his wife who mixed the best old fashions in all New Orleans. With one sip, his work day would slip with the orange sky behind the levee and the cool breezes would sweep every detail of his day into the river, until finally all he could remember was why he married Anne.

Wiley sat back in his chair trying to pretend the heat wasn’t stealing away his breathe, and focused on Amy. He had always liked her stories, and her. He had liked her from the moment he met her. She was bright and well-educated and interesting. She was very pretty, but she seemed to have no notion of that. She was interesting in a way most New Orleans women are not—she was actually interested in ideas more than people; both content and form mattered to her; and she didn’t seem decadent enough to be a native of the place. It was as if she were dropped from another planet into her family, at least the maternal part of it that had been in Louisiana for generations. Maybe it was because her grandfather was an immigrant that she didn’t quite seem like a typical native daughter.

But like her grandmother, she told stories true-to-form of a Southerner, with more side bars to the story than the story itself. Each side bar on its own contained the germ of a Gothic southern novel and usually carved a trail like a genealogical chart. The truth is, in New Orleans, at some point in any conversation, in any conversation about family, everyone is eventually, in time and in some side bar, related.

Wiley had come to meet Amy because his doctor, Dr. De Bois Blanc, told him he needed to start exercising or die. Die before his son finished college, which would be in two years. He’d said this to Wiley with a stone face of a friend who loved him and cared enough to scare the shit out of him. So Wiley began his search for something he had always disdained—a health club, something that to him seemed to be an oxymoron in New Orleans, an affront to the culture, as out of place as an honest politician.

His  partner Joe Mole told him about a gym in a large hotel one block from their offices where they took only a few locals. Joe whispered the location to Wiley as he were confessing some shameful sin to a priest in confession. Joining the conspiracy of closet health club members, Wiley told no one, not even Ann, that he planned to visit the health club.

When he entered the health club, had it not been for Amy he wouldn’t have stayed for more than a few seconds. Luckily she was there. She greeted him as it he had entered her own home and that his comfort was her sole purpose in life. And yet he instantly knew she didn’t belong there. That something wasn’t right with this picture.

Amy was pretty and young, a little bit older than his son. He always enjoyed talking to her; it made his otherwise dreary workout tolerable. He joined the gym because of her and its limited the number of outside memberships. This he liked. The limited memberships, that is. He liked that he didn’t have to work out with large numbers of people. And he liked that the fitness club manager was intelligent. They’d talk about movies and politics while he trod on the treadmill. She knew a lot about modern poetry and modern European art. He enjoyed the jarring contrast between the tedium of the work out and the unexpected tour de forces of their conversations. One didn’t find that combination often.

Wiley sat back in his own worn brown leather chair. The young woman across from him seemed to be intelligent. But her story was fantastic, even by southern standards.

When she finished her story, Wiley sat still for a moment. The afternoon sun continued to pour into his office window and onto his chair. He kept meaning to rearrange his office, to put his chair where the sun would never shine on it. Instead, he rolled up his sleeves, making a mental note to ask his wife for some advice on a new floor plan.

His stillness was an involuntary response to the heat and her amazing tale.

“So, Angela, this is an amazing story. How do you know it’s true? And what do you want me to do about it?”