Author’s Note: When the Wind Turned is part of the paid subscriber library here at Heavy Crown Press. Free subscribers see a preview each Wednesday when new chapters drop.

After Chapter Fourteen, serialization will pause while the manuscript moves into its next stage of development. I have completed much of the story and drafted several additional chapters, and I will be exploring publication opportunities for the full novel.

Thank you to everyone who has been reading along and supporting the project.

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Chapter Fourteen

The Latin workbook lies open between them at the kitchen table.

Frankie has already gone upstairs. Jacob’s door is closed. Eve hums softly in the living room.

Jeremy adjusts his reading glasses.

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Chapter Thirteen

Classes. Friends.

All soon fall into place.

Tutors don’t become a necessity. Eve finds the after-school extra sessions with her pre-algebra teacher sufficient. Noah integrates smoothly. Jacob’s main concern becomes choosing a topic for his senior project.

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Previously on When The Wind Turned: Chapter 11 (with full previous chapter list)

Chapter Twelve

By the time they cross into New Hampshire, the light has thinned to blue.

Jeremy drives the final stretch in silence. The rental car hums steadily along a narrowing road bordered by stone walls half-swallowed by tall grass. The trees are different here — narrower trunks, leaves just beginning to turn at the edges. September has sharpened the air.

No one says it, but they all feel it.

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Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Years later, the Rosenfelds would only remember the week after the storm in fragments. Distant memory took dream-like shape.

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The story continues below this point:

Chapter Ten 👇

They pass through New Roads without stopping.

The road curves gently, the way it always has, tracing the long, quiet bend of False River. The water is still, reflecting trees that seem unbothered by storms or news or time. The levee holds. The houses stand. Lawns are cut. Flags hang slack in the late heat.

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Jeremy was evacuated from Charity Hospital on September 1st after two days operating in flooded hallways by flashlight. Frankie and the kids—safe in a Baton Rouge hotel—caught a glimpse of him on the news. As Jeremy boarded the evacuation helicopter, he whispered one word:

Frankie.

And made his way toward the family waiting for him.

Chapter Nine

The Reunion at the Crown

FRANKIE — The Cypress Crown Hotel

She draws the largest breath she’s taken in days.

She doesn’t remember ending the call. She just tosses the phone onto the bed.

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Jeremy was still trapped inside a flooded Charity Hospital, performing surgery by flashlight as the storm shredded New Orleans around him. He wrote his family’s initials on his gloves like a superstition, a tether, a prayer.

Frankie and the kids reached a Baton Rouge hotel after escaping New Orleans on a National Guard truck. Tired, shaken, but safe. Jeremy remained trapped inside Charity Hospital, performing surgeries by flashlight as the levees failed and the city flooded. The National Guard finally reached the hospital with plans for a medical evacuation. For the first time in days, both halves of the family felt the faint, impossible return of hope.

Word reached both ends of the broken line:

Medical staff would be pulled out of the city.

Jeremy was alive.

And the waiting began.

CHAPTER EIGHT — Reunion

Date: September 1, 2005

(the day medical staff begin evacuating Charity Hospital)

THE CYPRESS CROWN HOTEL — 6:14 AM

Frankie has slept only an hour.

Every time she closes her eyes, she sees the flooded stairwell described by the Guardsman. She sees Jeremy climbing through pitch-black hallways with only a headlamp. She hears the word evacuation over and over.

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Jeremy and the team at Charity Hospital operated by flashlight as the storm shredded New Orleans. Patients poured in faster than the staff could save them. A boy — maybe fifteen — died on Jeremy’s table, breaking something inside him he didn’t have time to name.

Meanwhile, Frankie, Jacob, Noah, Eve, and Maisie were evacuated out of the city on a National Guard truck, carried north through rising water and debris toward Baton Rouge. The flooding hospital dissolved into chaos. The shelter dissolved into chaos. And just before the chapter ended, a guardsman told Frankie what she most needed — and feared — to hear.

CHAPTER SEVEN —

Where the Waiting Begins

Charity Hospital

The storm had turned Big Charity into a shipwreck.

Generators sputtering.

Water sloshing in the hallways.

Flashlights swinging in panicked arcs across flooded tiles.

Nurses and residents move like ghosts, soaked to the knees, hair plastered to skin, eyes too wide to hide the fear.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Last week in Chapter Five, Jeremy Rosenfeld fought to save lives inside a darkening, flooding Charity Hospital as Hurricane Katrina swallowed New Orleans street by street. In Uptown, Frankie and the kids sheltered in the gym of St. Genevieve of the Sacred Heart as the storm intensified. When the National Guard finally reached their sector, Guardsman John D’Agostino pulled Frankie aside with news that would change everything: Charity Hospital was in crisis — and Jeremy was still inside.

CHAPTER SIX

THE BREAKING POINT

The Guard Arrives

The gym at St. Genevieve of the Sacred Heart feels smaller by the hour.

Sleeping bags are pressed shoulder to shoulder, families are clustered near outlets that no longer work, the air is thick with sweat and the quiet terror people try not to speak aloud. Maisie whines occasionally, head tucked into Eve’s lap, sensing what no one will name.

That is when the National Guard arrives.

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As Katrina’s outer bands clawed across New Orleans, the Rosenfeld family fled to the gym at St. Genevieve of the Sacred Heart — a makeshift shelter where fear, heat, and uncertainty pressed in from every side.

Up at Ochsner, Dr. Jeremy Rosenfeld fought through an unending stream of trauma cases, then was urgently deployed to devastated Charity Hospital as conditions worsened.

Father and family separated by floodwaters, signal failures, and a city on the brink — each trying to survive the night that refused to end.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE THIN HOURS

ST. GENEVIEVE GYM (SHELTER) / Just Before Dawn

The gym has fallen into the kind of quiet that only exists after fear has wrung itself out.

Cots lined in rows. Soft breathing. The low hum of borrowed generators.

Somewhere far off, a baby whimpers and is soothed with the slow, rocking patience of a mother who hasn’t slept in twenty hours.

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Francine (Frankie) Rosenfeld walked through the wreckage of her Uptown home on August 30, remembering the days before the levees failed — the unease, the heat, the way her children sensed danger before adults dared to name it.

Jeremy, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Ochsner, worked through the storm’s approach, scrubbing in again and again as Katrina’s edge brushed the city.

Jacob felt the sky tighten.

Noah monitored every warning.

Eve clung to Maisie and AIM messages from her father.

Now the storm has struck for real.

New Orleans is flooding.

Families huddle in shelters.

Hospitals plunge into crisis.

And the Rosenfelds — separated by water and obligation — brace for the moment everything changes.

Chapter Four

The Day The Water Came

PART I — JEREMY

(New Orleans, August 30, 2005 — early morning)

The storm has already begun tearing at the city by the time the call comes.

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August 29, 2005

As Katrina’s track sharpened, Dr. Jeremy Rosenfeld spent the day in the OR at Ochsner — stabilizing trauma patients while the hospital braced for impact. Between cases, memories of Frankie and the kids flickered through him: their early-morning hug two days earlier, the fear in his wife’s eyes she wouldn’t name, the unspoken acknowledgment that they might soon face something far beyond a storm.

While the city held its breath, Jeremy did the only thing he could: scrub in, save who he could, and hope his family stayed safe uptown.

Chapter Three

The Air Before the Break

(August 26–27, 2005)

JACOB ROSENFELD — Friday Night, August 26, 2005

The air tasted wrong that night.

Not dangerous.

Not chemical.

Just… wrong.

Like the sky was holding its breath.

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Francine (Frankie) Lemoine-Rosenfeld walked through her ruined home on August 30, the walls still holding the shape of the life she’d lived inside them.

Flashbacks pulled her back to August 28 — red beans on the stove, anxious glances toward a strange sky, the kids whispering fears to each other on AIM—AOL Instant Messenger.

A family sensing the wind was about to turn.

Catch up with Chapter One →

Chapter Two

Scrubbing In

August 29, 2005 — The Day Before the Levee Failures

JEREMY J. ROSENFELD, MD

Cardiothoracic Surgery

Department of Surgery

Ochsner Medical Center – New Orleans

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This story is fiction, but the emotional landscape is rooted in lived experience: displacement, loved ones scattered across states, the ache of rebuilding, the quiet grief of what’s lost, the fierce hope in what’s found. Our goal is to create not only a narrative, but a space for profound conversations about trauma, recovery, climate change, environmental injustice, and what it means to be a refugee within your own country.

I hope you’ll read along, reflect, and join the dialogue as each chapter unfolds.

— Ashley Rovira

P.S. As of the week of March 11, the story has thirteen chapters, with Chapter Fourteen going live on March 11. The story will soon be on hiatus. Paid subscribers will still be able to access existing chapters, but the preview availability for free subscribers will change.

Chapter One

Before the Breach

FRANCINE LEMOINE — AUGUST 30, 2005

The waterline is not what she remembers first.

It’s the silence.

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The hardest thing about it, even more painful than the thing itself, was not knowing how to express my feelings about it. It wasn’t that there was no space for it. There were opportunities, plenty of child psychologists, and I had a mother who would have moved heaven and earth to let me express myself anyway I wanted to. The difficulty was inside me. It took me a long time (years, decades) to develop the skill set of self-expression. I struggled as a kid to learn how to be around people and answer questions and have socially appropriate conversations. Around strangers, I did not speak at all. It could take me several encounters to muster the courage to speak. The next door neighbors and their daughter Grace were very patient.

{Note to the reader before you proceed: This writing is along the same lines as my article, “New Adulting,” although I have imposed a paywall from this point. My reason is best articulated in the words of Anne Elliot in Persuasion, by Jane Austen: “My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; this is what I call good company.” (Also, Anne’s idea of good company involves people who achieve cleverness by reading and listening, and showing interest in others. Real interest.) Mr. Elliot replies to his cousin Anne: “You are mistaken, that is not good company. That is the best.” The rest of this article, therefore, is for you who are in the very best class of company.}

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I can’t even remember how old I was. 18, 19. Who knows? Barely old enough to vote, too young to buy a case of beer. (I never went to the trouble of getting a fake ID. I would not have thought, nor had the confidence, let alone the inclination to do such a thing.) And there was no question of ‘passing’ for 21 on looks alone, because for as long as I can remember I’ve had a baby face that makes me look about ten years younger than I am. When I told people I was in the Navy, they were always like, “Wait? What? I thought you were high school!” Even now, in my 40s, I don’t “appear” as anyone’s idea of a Navy veteran, and most people wonder if I’m in Gen Z, again, a reminder of preconceived notions at variance from “what things are like!”) Anyway, however old I was, 18 or 19, I was an “airman” at the Naval Air Station Willow Grove in Pennsylvania. (Here again, another example of “what things are like”—an “airman” in the navy, not a “seaman,” and based inland rather than by the sea.) I’m sure if I really thought about it, I could pinpoint the year, and by calculating the number of months from my completion of A School1 training, could then tell you my exact rank and pay grade at the time. But it doesn’t matter. Whether I was an E-2 or E-3 is hardly the point. The reason I’m thinking about that time in my life now is more to do with its relevance to what’s going on now.

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Uncle Frank joined us again. Well, the truth is, I joined them. It was Frank’s plan, his idea. He invited me to go by text, and I was so grateful because I love visiting Canoo. We had lunch at Copeland’s in Houma (where Canoo enjoys her favorite meal—steak, loaded baked potato, and merlot) and then it was back to Thibadaux where I read to Canoo from Mary Oliver’s book of poetry, Thirst. The first sentence of the first poem encapsulates the book: “My work is loving the world.” Life is precious, it is everywhere, in everything, and time is meaningless in the face of eternity, because everything moves and lives, forever, and death is just the next amazing adventure. Flowers are here to give all, take nothing. They live to give, always, and never stop giving. Anyway, those are my takeaways from Ms. Oliver.

Canoo’s mother and my grandmother’s mother were sisters, Roy sisters, and lifelong neighbors, in Marksville. Canoo moved to Thibodaux1 in the early ‘60s. She and her older brother, everyone’s Uncle Eddy—wonderful, jolly, life-of-the-party Uncle Ed aka Cledmund—settled down for life as teachers. Neither married. They lived comfortably and cheaply, a lifelong bachelor and spinster. Canoo paid $40 in rent to live in an adorable house, just a few blocks from the Lafourche2 Parish Library. “My rent went up once, one time, not by my landlord. I raised it from forty to fifty dollars a month.” Yeggle died in 2019. His obituary put it perfectly in describing him as “beloved brother, uncle, parrain, teacher, friend, poet, party pianist, bridge master, nicknamer, raconteur, and king of pimento cheese.”3 Canoo talks about him a lot. His nickname for her (he had a crazy nickname for everyone) was Ware. As was the case with most of his nicknames, it only made sense to him, but repetition (and affection) over the years made it beloved to the receiver too.

The grandmother I already mentioned, my late grandmother, that was Frank’s mother. But though “cousin” is the actual relationship between Canoo and Frank, they are really more like aunt and nephew. She was my father’s godmother. Marraine, indeed. She is something like a family-wide godmother, just as Cledmund was universal Parrain.

A paywall must be crossed to read beyond this point. Some familial connection to the characters will be the strongest incentive to surpass it. Please consider supporting my work to gain full access to all articles. I’m writing content all the time, and most of it is free, but some things are especially dear to my heart. This is one of those. I appreciate all subscribers, whether they pay or just read what is freely available.

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Christie got a 3-star review in The Guardian. He’s 22, but he’s been doing standup since the age of six. According to the review, Christie is both droll and sly in his performance, bouncing “back and forth between optimism and fatalism”1 in his commentary on Gen Z realities, nostalgia, and nuances. Christie makes a “droll distinction between boy and man”2 (hilariously, as in the video above, by the way) and he bemoans having to grow up—yes, even at the age of 22, he has nostalgia for days of innocence. Life is just easier for a boy than a man, he argues. Boys will be boys, ok, but the 2010s, and thus far the 2020s as well, have been a minefield for any boy trying to grow up into a man.

Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando is a one-man show about a man who died just a couple of years prior to this minefield era. If you’ve been following my content long enough, you know that I gave a five-star review to John Mese’s performance of Christian Brando at Bistro Byronz in Baton Rouge.3 That was back in June, on Father’s Day to be precise—ironically, in fact, if you know anything about Christian Brando’s story. For the Festival Fringe this year, Mese performed in Venue 16, Greenside at Riddle’s Court.

The Fringe offered Wild Son its first venue beyond the continental USA. Written by Champ Clark, a journalist who based the play on conversations he had with Brando while drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, Mese takes the stage as the eponymous character, brought back to life expressly to tell the story as never told before—from Brando’s perspective, from his own mouth even. Notes the actor John Mese, the play’s first line is, “Is it my turn?” Mese proposes that the real star of the play is not him, but the story. It’s Christian’s turn, he says.

“Christian” appears for us in a white shirt and grey slacks, barefoot. The all-black aesthetics (black stage, black chair) compliment and reinforce the stark and raw reality of his story. Thus, Wild Son is about a Boomer male, middle aged,4 whose identity even in death remains overshadowed by father Marlon, one of the “last movie stars.”5 It's a bit different from THE LAST MOVIE STARS, created & directed by Ethan Hawke. That tells one of the 20th century's most epic Hollywood love stories--between Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward. But there wasn't a lot of love circulating in the Brando household. Not that they didn't love each other, the father and the son. Of course they did.... The writer, Champ Clark, who knew Christian Brando personally (and who based the play on interviews between him and Christian over cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon) says, "Christian loved Marlon. He loved him. And Marlon loved Christian, but, man, [fist bump] boom. [Another fist bump] Boom. [Another fist bump.] Like, right from the very beginning. And boom, right to the very end. And they never.... it was never reconciled." Marlon exemplifies a certain idea of toxic masculinity, and his son Christian was a direct victim and extension of that. While Finlay Christie’s act pokes fun at the scary, uncool, reputedly “toxic” Boomer male, I have a sense that there is more in sync than dissonance between the two shows. The Lost Boy is not unique to any generation. It’s just that today the “lost boy” is more or less comparable to what we think of as an incel. In any case, Christie is using comedy to show us the lighter and darker shades of 20-something (male) life today—and it’s undeniable that today’s climate is an especially tricky one for boys to figure out how to be men.6 Wild Son, too, is the story of a kid who got pushed around and abused by his parents, only to grow up and get kicked in the butt by a combination of bad luck and poor judgement.

I'm very privileged and honored to have been able to see the show twice. From showing at several venues up and down and around California, to Louisiana, and now with a Scottish showing under its belt, Wild Son is still a relatively guarded secret of the theatrical industry. The first time I saw it, at Bistro Byronz, I wasn't ready for it. It came to me; it fell into my existence, and I was grateful for that, but the experience of going to it, consciously and knowingly—knowing, that is, what I was in for—opened the door for something completely different.

Christian Brando was convicted of manslaughter in the death of Dag Drollet in 1990. He shot Drollet in a rage after learning that Drollet had been abusing his sister, Cheyenne. That's probably what he is most known and remembered for. That's all I knew about him before I saw the play…well, besides that Marlon Brando was his dad. Christian was a young man in that TV trial. He was the subject of a sensational drama that predated the ultimate courtroom drama of them all—the OJ Simpson trial.

This play by Champ Clark truly captures the story of the broken, the unloved, lost boy. Because even though he lived to (almost) the age of 50, it's doubtful if he ever evolved beyond that broken state. The play addresses the protagonist’s desire to reconcile things with his father. Desire, though, is not the same as fulfillment.

Two things struck me profoundly. The first time, at Bistro Byronz, I was especially moved by the turn of the story after prison: the move to New Hampshire, the training as a welder. The Wild Son reconnected with the beauty of the wilderness. He learned a skill, welding, and it gave him a sense of being able to do something that was useful and productive. He probably never had that before—maybe once before, when he acted in a movie, but his father, metaphorically speaking, took the wind out of that sail.... Welding, though, Christian could do that without his father's ego getting bruised. And he enjoyed being in nature, and I love that he wanted to share that sense of freedom and aliveness with his parents. Mother and father being irreparably damaged themselves, they just thought he was crazy, or on drugs.

Fast forward to the Fringe, and I have now been struck above all by something else:

The Wild Son was exiled to his father's island, Tetiroa, in French Polynesia. He always loved it there (again, he found freedom & peace in the wilderness, this Wild Son) but on this occasion, it was like a prison because of the length of time his father made him stay there. (And this was before the chapter of crime and punishment.) Actor John Mese takes us through the narrative of Christian's escape attempt, how he paddled from island to island in a boat, surrounded by sharks. What a metaphor this is for Christian's life! Paddling in a rough sea full of sharks! Alone, unloved, broken.

A paywall must be crossed to read beyond this point. Please consider supporting my work to gain full access to all articles. I’m writing content all the time, and most of it is free, but some things are especially dear to my heart. This is one of those. I appreciate all subscribers, whether they pay or just read what is freely available.

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