Another Kind of Hurricane (9 page)

Marble cake! That was it! She couldn't wait to go to the kitchen in the back of the Salvation Army and bake it.

Cora wanted to try making a marble cake with three flavors swirled together. The usual marble cake was two. Chocolate and vanilla. But that was a little too ordinary for the occasion, Cora thought.
Two
ordinary. Cora laughed at the joke inside her head.

“Pardon?” The woman at the counter looked up from writing her check.

“Hmmmm? Oh, no, nothing—something I just thought of—” Cora unclipped her hair and let it fall across her shoulders.

Like toilet paper tucked in the waistband of a pair of blue jeans, Cora always managed to drag embarrassing stuff out into the public. She couldn't seem to keep the roll of thoughts she had from spilling out of her mouth.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn't even know I laughed out loud.”

This time it wasn't so bad. Just a random laugh. But people were sensitive these days. Cora knew that. They'd been through so much—too much—and there was nothing funny about any of it. She was lucky. Her small house had been spared. But not her neighbor's. His house sat lower than hers and it got flooded even when hers did not.

“Well, it's important to find something to laugh about,” said the woman. She picked up her shopping bag from the counter.

“Yes,” agreed Cora. The woman was generous. She could have been put off by Cora's laugh. Her neighbor could have been put off by her too. If he had been able to hear her over the rain and wind. Of course she had blurted out that she was
queen of the mountain
as she stood on her front porch as the rain and wind came down. She still didn't know why she had said that. She had stepped outside for just a moment and was overcome by the raging battle taking place all around her little house. Knives of rain clattering down. The shriek of the wind. And she was, on her covered porch, just above it all. She had felt a sense of relief, and a weird thrill, and before she knew it, this
queen
thing had escaped from her mouth.

Just half a second later, she turned her head and saw her neighbor on his roof, water pouring out of his downstairs front window. Cora had seen him on the roof plenty of times
before—he hung out up there with his daughter sometimes, but mostly with two other men. His brothers. They came over to her neighbor's house and sang up there a lot, and she loved to listen to them.

“Do you have any children?” Cora asked the woman.

“Yes,” said the woman. “Why?”

“We just got a big donation from Vermont,” said Cora. “I haven't gone through all of it, but there are some great kids' clothes.” She indicated a pile on the side counter. “Take a look. Someone is about to come by and take them to Baton Rouge.”

The woman walked to the clothes and thumbed through a stack. She pulled a pair of blue jeans from the middle and unfolded them. “These look almost new,” she said.

Cora nodded.

“But they're too long for my son.” She began to fold them again.

“Oh, I'll do that,” said Cora. She took the jeans from the woman.

“I should get home to him,” said the woman. “I'm starting to let him stay home alone, but only for an hour or so at a time.”

“How old is he?” asked Cora.

“Ten,” said the woman.

“Sort of an in-between age, huh? A little too young to stay home alone, but also a little too old to need supervision?” asked Cora.

“Yes, exactly.” The woman began to walk toward the door. “I'll be back,” she said. “I'm so glad you're open.”

“What do you think of chocolate, peanut butter, cinnamon cake?” Cora blurted out.

“It sounds delicious,” said the woman.

“Oh good. To me too,” said Cora. “Three cheers for the generator! I'm trying to make a marble cake with three flavors. Three cheers for three flavors!”

“Sounds complicated.”

“It's for three things, so I thought three flavors would be a nice touch.”

The woman smiled.

“Thing One: I hope that you—oh, not you”—Cora pointed at the woman—“you, my neighbor, move back home. Thing Two: I love listening to you and your trio sing. And Thing Three: I'm sorry for what I said out there in the hurricane—” The words tumbled out of Cora's mouth.

The woman stared at her.

Cora shook her head. She had gone and done it again. Toilet paper in the waist of the jeans, right there in public. She
twisted her hair back into a bun and clipped it into place. She could at least keep her hair neat.

She looked down at the blue jeans in her hands and slowly finished folding them. By the time she looked up, maybe the woman would be gone.

Zavion knew it was wishful thinking, thinking if he could just pay back the money for the chocolate bars he could make the whole hurricane mess go away. But he still felt like he had to try.

Zavion found Papa in the living room hunched over a tiny canvas.

A tiny square slate roof shingle, actually.

The kind Zavion had given as an IOU at Luna Market. More shingles were scattered all over the table.

Zavion had overheard Tavius and Enzo offering them to Skeet and Papa.

“We figured Skeet could use them for some art project, so we collected them as we walked,” said Tavius.

“You should have seen us. Waterlogged and weighed down with these shingles in our pockets,” said Enzo.

“It gave us something to focus on,” said Tavius.

“You should use them too,” said Enzo to Papa. “Make lemonade out of lemons.”

“Make slate-ade out of slate,” said Tavius.

Zavion had watched as Papa picked up a piece of slate and turned it slowly in his hands.

Now he was painting on one.

“What's up, Zav?”

Zavion knew for a fact that if mothers had eyes in the back of their heads, fathers had them on top of theirs. How many times had Papa been bent over a mural sketch working but still knew that he had entered the room?

It wasn't Mama's soft-eyed stare and bear-hug combination, but it was still comforting. Most of the time. Not today, though. But that wasn't Papa's fault. Zavion was on a specific, scary mission today.

Zavion sat down across from Papa. His short hair was grayer than Zavion could remember seeing before. Papa's hair was often all different colors—he had a habit of rubbing his fingers into his scalp while he was painting—but this gray was not paint.

Zavion breathed in the familiar smell of acrylic mixed with hair relaxer and cedar deodorant. It was the only familiar thing his body had experienced since they left their house to slog through the water, and it made him suddenly and forcefully sad.

“What are you painting, Papa?” he asked.

He was stalling for time before he asked his question. The question that could only have one answer.

“Tiny landscapes.”

“You never paint tiny.”

“True.”

“You've only ever painted one landscape.”

“True too.”

Papa's paintings were of Mardi Gras and musicians and fishing for shrimp and oysters and catfish. They were huge too. He usually painted right across a whole wall.

“Sometimes the world tells you to do something new.” Hearing that made Zavion's sadness break apart like fireworks. Maybe this wouldn't be so hard. Maybe Papa was ready for something different. “I woke up with this mighty strong urge to paint some very small landscapes,” continued Papa. He picked up a slate shingle that was drying next to him. “The slate makes the colors pop,” he said. “And it feels good to hold this tree in my hands.” He opened his fingers so the shingle balanced in the middle of his palm. “It's in one piece. I can see the whole thing.”

The tree was from the Appalachian spruce-fir forest.

“A red spruce?” Zavion asked, but he was sure he was right. Its green needle-tipped branches reached to the very edges of the shingle, and the sky around it was a tropical blue, almost
like the sea, but quieter and flat, no brushstrokes to indicate waves. “Mama's tree?”

Papa nodded.

It was the tree at the top of the mural that Papa had painted in Zavion's room. The tree that stood on top of Grandmother Mountain, where Mama had grown up. It wasn't actually there—the University of North Carolina Public Television broadcasting tower was on top of the real Grandmother Mountain—but Papa had given Mama a red spruce on theirs.

Zavion wanted to climb the tree, jump from the ground to its lowest branch and climb all the way to the top, all the way to the still, silent sky.

“I like it,” he said.

He had to do it.

He had to ask Papa now.

“Speaking of the world telling you to do something new—” he began.

“Yes?” said Papa, placing the red spruce tree down again and picking up his paintbrush.

Zavion picked up his own dry paintbrush and pushed it along the wooden table, tracing the shape of a mountain, as if a picture would speak to Papa better than words.

“We need to go to Mama's mountain.”

“We've had this discussion.”

That didn't sound like a promising beginning. Maybe a picture really would be better. Zavion was going to have to be clearer.

“No, we haven't had a discussion about this. We've had a mention of it.”

“A mention?”

“Yes, I mentioned it and you made fun of me, and then you left the kitchen.”

Papa dipped his paintbrush in water and wiped it dry with a rag. He squeezed a dot of orange paint onto the corner of the slate. “Why don't you go for a run, Zavion? Wouldn't that feel good?”

Zavion couldn't imagine running. He was exhausted. Trying not to think about…before…was exhausting.

“Let's go to Mama's mountain,” he tried again.

“I don't know why you are so obsessed with this mountain idea.”

Zavion stuck his paintbrush in the orange paint on Papa's slate and grabbed a slate of his own. “Ask me.” He painted the top.

Papa opened the pink paint and squeezed it next to the orange. “Why do you want to go to that mountain, then?”

Zavion dipped his paintbrush in the pink and added it to the edge of the orange. He unscrewed the red paint and stuck
the tip of his paintbrush in the top. He blurred it into the edge of the pink. He tried to remember the shape of the mural in his room and drew the jagged edge of a mountain and filled around it with red paint.

Before
came flooding in.

Except for Papa, everything he had known his whole life was gone. The big oak tree and its shade and the brick walkway leading up to his house. Gone. The house. Gone. Everything inside the house. Gone. And the one last thing that had reminded him of Mama. Gone.

All of them swept away in the hurricane.

And before that—Mama herself. She was gone too.

After Mama died, Zavion spent every waking moment searching for a way to feel like he wouldn't just float away. And after the moments turned to days, and the days turned to weeks, and the weeks to months—seven months, to be exact—he had found it. It was in the pathway from the bathroom through the art studio across the hall and into his bedroom, the long way to his room after he brushed his teeth, but he walked it the same way each night. It was on the slices of bread he laid out every morning, between the peanut butter and the honey, tucked tight into the wax paper bag he placed in the backpack he took to school. It was tied in the laces of his lucky running sneakers. It was on the thin rim of the
molding over the archway between the kitchen and the living room he jumped to touch every time he passed through. And it was embedded in the gray rocks that sat across the edge of his windowsill, each of them with a white crystal line running through the middle—rocks he had found by the river, made wishes on, and placed on his sill to come true—all these routines and rituals designed and practiced and perfected in order to feel like his feet were firmly on the ground.

And always, always, Grandmother Mountain standing guard over Zavion as he slept each night and woke each morning to begin his maze of a day once again.

That mountain—Mama's mountain—

And now everything from his room, his home, his life, was—

maybe—

maybe not—

probably—

surely—

completely—

gone.

Zavion put down his paintbrush and held the white mountain—rising up inside the blazing sunset—in his hand.

“Because sometimes the world tells you to do something new,” he said.