The Casquette Girls (14 page)

I felt myself drifting off to sleep as I lay there staring at the ceiling, thinking about the little things that were slipping away. Things I had taken for granted before the Storm
.
But I couldn’t muster my lead-like muscles to get up and turn off the light. The long ball ’n chain dangling down from the ceiling-fan started swaying back and forth.

Tension spread through my body until I was stiff as a board.

The chain slowly gained momentum until it swung in a small circular pattern. I was so tired, it was difficult to focus on the blur. I imagined a forceful pulling motion.

Click.

Darkness.

Breath
e
.

October 12
th

My fingers tapped the kitchen counter, waiting for the pot of water to boil, and my eyes kept moving to the clock on the wall – it wasn’t even 7 a.m. yet. I was starting to like the residual effects of jet lag. Before the Storm, I had certainly never gotten excited about waking up early for work before, but now I was just eager for life to return to normal. My eagerness, however, was no match for my muscles, every inch of which were sore.

I groaned as I bent over to stretch. My legs immediately started to shake. “Thirty more seconds,” I whispered and began to analyze my afternoon with
Ziggy Stardust
to distract myself from the pain. I barely made it to the half-minute marker before my torso flung up. The head-rush made the magic music box incident seem even more surreal. It wasn’t just the Victrola, and the keys, and the shutter –
everything
was different now. And it all felt like a dream.

“There is a logical explanation for all of this. You just have to figure it out.” I extended my arm across the counter towards the box of oatmeal and imagined it coming to my hand.

Nothing happened. I felt like a clown.

“Ugh, boil, already!” I snapped at the pot.

The fire under the pot pulsed bigger.
Maybe I am going crazy after all?

“Finally,” I said out loud as the water began to rapidly bubble.

When the oats had formed a hot mush, I sprinkled cinnamon and sugar on top, wishing we had milk. I grabbed the nondairy creamer and then stopped myself. Too disgusting
.
Without looking, I reached for the cutlery drawer, but before I could grasp the handle, it shot open and crashed into my hip. My yelp faded as a spoon jumped out of the drawer and landed in my hand.

I unclenched my fingers from around the utensil, and it vibrated in my palm. My heart felt like it was going to pound out of my chest.

“It’s too early for this.”

On a whim, I popped the spoon into the air. A smile slipped out as it dove into my oatmeal and stirred in
the auburn swirls. The scent of cinnamon danced around the kitchen, reminding me of what our home used to feel like. Lived in.

* * *

Without the air-conditioning, there was no discernible difference in the temperature when I walked out of the steamy bathroom and into the hallway. It was an odd feeling. My father used to keep the house freezing because it got so hot in his studio with all the torches he used.

As I walked up the stairs, a breeze pricked my naked skin; I wrapped my towel tighter.
I know I didn’t leave the bedroom windows open, last night.

Under the lingering aroma of burnt sage, there was a chemical twinge in the air. Something was different. The place looked magnificent, almost shiny, and all the poster
s
I had hung were nowhere to be seen. Th
e
ceiling fan, which I knew I had turned off, was now on high.

“Dad, you are the best,” I whispered, realizing he must have stayed up late when he got home and put a fresh coat of white paint on the walls. I was well on my way to forgiving him for shipping me to Paris.

Craving the connection to the outside world I usually got via the Internet, I pushed the plug of an old-school boom-box into an electrical socket, and was immediately assaulted by voices of varying levels of hysteria. I stopped twisting the dial when I heard a woman with a more grounded tone replying to the disc jockey.

“The real question is why isn’t anyone talking about the fact that people are still dying around here? Are we all really this desensitized to death? And what is the mayor really doing about the crime? This curfew doesn’t seem to be helping anything; in fact, I would suggest it’s making the city even more unsafe. The empty streets are becoming easy target zones for predators.”

Evidently, the early hour wasn’t keeping people from going at it. I sat at the vanity and attempted to put moisturizer on my face, but I was already beginning to sweat.
Don’t even think of complaining about the lack of air-conditioning. At least you have a home, unlike Brooke’s family.

“Thanks for calling in, ma’am. Do we have our next caller on the line?”

“Hello? Hello? Am I on the air?”

“Yes, ma’am, you are live on the air.”

“Oh, good, my name is Nora Murphy. My boyfriend, James Manale, is missing, and I want to ask whether anyone out there has seen him—”

“Excuse me, ma’am, this is just a morning radio show,” the DJ said gently, “but I can give you our hotline number to report missing Storm victims—”

“He’s not a missing Storm victim. We’ve been back from Memphis for over a week. Two days ago, he went out to try to find groceries, and he hasn’t been back since.” She broke down in sobs. “The cops just tell me that he probably bailed on the situation, on New Orleans…”

“Do you hear that, folks? Something is going on in this city. Fourteen people reported dead, and countless reported missing in the last couple weeks.”

The woman’s sobs became hysterical.

“Ma’am, please stay on the line; we’ll collect your information and do whatever we can to help.”

I squirted a cloud of mousse into my palms and rubbed it through my quickly drying waves. Without even trying, a flick of my mind twisted the tuner dial.

“Recent figures show that only about twenty-five thousand inhabitants of Orleans Parish have returned. Electricity has been fully restored in Baton Rouge, but there is no timeline yet for Orleans, Jefferson, St. Charles or the surrounding parishes. We also have reports that all gas stations in Orleans Parish are wiped clean, so make sure to fill up outside the city limits. There’s still no news on when any of the major supermarkets will reopen.”

I put one leg into a pair of jeans, but then, immediately suffocated by the denim, kicked them off and dug through the mountain of clothes on the bed until I found a lilac cotton sundress I had made at the beginning of the summer. It had a large sash that tied into a bow in the back – a tad dressy for work, but at least my legs and back would be free to breathe. I slipped on black Converse sneakers to tone it down.

Three commercials came on in a row, each one with different attorneys claiming they could help get your insurance settlement. When I couldn’t get the radio to turn off on its own, I sprang from my seat and snapped the plastic power button before I could hear the empty promise of another lawyer.

Desperate to be out of the hot attic room, I quickly pulled a souvenir T-shirt from my suitcase – a small velvet sack I didn’t recognize came flying out with it.

“What…?”

Inside the drawstrings was a matching velvet box with a tiny folded note.
Could it possibly be from Émile
?
I paused, wondering whether to open the box or the note first, and then feverishly unfolded the stationary. My heart fluttered, pushing my lagging brain to translate the handwritten French faster.

Dearest Adele,

Even though your visit was short, I hope you were able to find joy in the streets of Paris, in the way that I do every day. Enclosed you’ll find a ring that has been in your father’s family for many generations, and now it belongs to you.

I do long for the day when we can be friends.

Bisous,

Brigitte

I was stunned.

Oh Jesus. What if this was her passive way of returning her wedding ring to my father?
I popped the box open, and a wave of relief washed over me – it contained a ring of an entirely different sort.

Regardless, the little rush of stress caused me to
slam the box down on the vanity.
She hadn’t even told me goodbye in person! How had she slipped the little sack into my suitcase?
I had only stayed at her house – my grandmother’s estate – for one night before my early-morning flight home. I hadn’t even seen her. She had simply left me yet another two-sentence note with a basket of brioche, and had her driver whisk me to the airport.

My subconscious gnawed at me.

Are you really upset to find a note from her? Or just disappointed that it wasn’t from Émile?

I slipped on my standard silver chain and roughly knotted my hair into a loose bun on top of my head. “He’s not your boyfriend. Don’t let this ruin the morning.”

* * *

As I approached Café Orléans, I now realized how much the little outdoor tables resembled any quaint corner of the
Faubourg-Montmartr
e
in Paris. Usually I could smell the coffee beans half a block awa
y.
Today, not even close
.
I could, however, hear the Louis Armstrong sounding through the open doors, which meant Sébastien must have opened up (Jeanne usually blared Beethoven concertos).

It was sad, but not surprising, to see the place void of customers.

This hour of the morning was usually the peak time due to the overlap of the day-job crowd on their way to work and the service crowd retiring from the night shift. This morning there was only one guy, maybe in his late teens, sitting by himself at the corner table in the front window, sketching something on a pad of paper. His messy, light-brown hair hung in his face, and large headphones hugged his ears.

“Sébastien?
”
I yelled, looking for him.
“Tu es là?”

I must have startled the customer because he appeared a little shocked to see me when he looked up from his pad. I smiled at him, and his wide eyes went back to his pencil.

A head of perfectly combed blond hair popped up from underneath the counter. “
Bonjou
r
!”

“Jesus!”

“
Désol
é
!
”
Sébastien said, laughing. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Shouldn’t you be behind a microscope, Mr. Neuroscientist?”

“Haha.” He blushed and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Mémé’s been on the phone with our insurance agent for the last two hours, so I told her I would come downstairs and open up.”

I joined him behind the wooden counter, where the espresso machine was laid out in a million pieces.

“I wanted to make sure there was no mold on any of the parts….”

I scavenged elsewhere for caffeine. Usually, we kept several different industrial-sized vats of coffee brewed at once. Today there was only one lonely pot of standard coffee ’n chicory. I poured myself a cup.

“No milk, eh?”

“
Non
.
No dairy. Nothing fresh, really.” He nodded to the empty pastry case.

“I wonder how long it will be before things go back to normal?”

“I have a feeling we will be redefining what constitutes normal.” Always the pragmatist.

I stirred in a spoonful of nondairy creamer.

“Oh!” I pulled out three boxes of macarons. “I brought something for
la famille
.”

“
Laduré
e
?
” He kissed my cheeks, tore open a box, and stuffed one of the pistachio confectionaries in his mouth
.
“Merci, Adele.”

“Anything for you.” I sipped the light-brown coffee, trying not to cringe from the taste of the fake milk. “So, where should I start?”

He gave me an apologetic look as he eyed the pile of cleaning supplies in the corner.

“Don’t worry, I’m a professional at this point.”

* * *

An hour later, I had finished the mopping and was at the front of the store dusting the floor-to-ceiling shelves of jars that usually contained fifty different varieties of coffee beans but were now mostly empty. I climbed onto a chair to try to reach the top shelves. My biceps shook when I raised my arms overhead for even a few moments at a time. Just as it became difficult not to complain, a booming voice filled the room.

“
Ma chéri
e
!
You’re back!”