Bayou, Whispers from the Past: A Novel Read online

  At two-thirty, I changed into a clean shirt and jeans and checked my phone for messages. I thought Buck would have been there by now. When I called his cell, there was no answer.

  I called Jack. “Buck’s not here yet, and I’ve got to leave in a few minutes to meet George. Are you busy?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll come over and help him. I told you I didn’t mind.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Have a good afternoon. You’ll be back in time for dinner?”

  “I think so, but don’t wait for me.”

  “OK,” he said, but he always waited.

  ~~~~

  At the museum, George was right on time. He walked outside, still wearing his ranger’s hat, and said, “Where shall we go?”

  “What are you in the mood for?”

  “I wouldn’t mind coffee and pie.” He shifted the old leather messenger bag on his shoulder.

  “Sounds perfect.”

  “Right this way.” He turned toward Jackson Square. “It’s only two blocks.”

  The café had twenty kinds of pie on the menu. We both ordered a coffee and Key lime.

  “So,” he said. “What can I tell you?”

  “I don’t want to bombard you with questions.”

  He smiled, taking a small bite of the pie. It was real Key lime, not that fake green monstrosity that so many restaurants passed off as genuine. This was the kind the great-grandmothers of New Orleans made.

  “We were together off and on for a long time,” he said. “She finally moved in with me when we both got tired of driving so far. And when you’re my age, the time you spend with people you love only makes you lonelier in the times when they’re away. Unless you really like being alone, which neither of us did at that point.”

  I smiled, knowing exactly what he meant. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d been before coming back to Bayou Sabine. Now that I had Jack—and Buck and Josie—I was starting to feel like I had family again. Real family.

  “I won’t say she told me everything,” he said, “because you can never really know everything about a person. But we were about as close as two people can be.”

  I nodded. “I guess I just wanted to know how you saw her,” I said. “It’s funny, but the longer I’m here, living in her house, the more my memories of her are coming back. I just hate that I didn’t see her more after I was a teenager. I’ve got a feeling she would have had lots of things to tell me.”

  He chuckled. “Oh, she never ran short on advice. Whatever your troubles were, she’d have told you exactly what you needed to do to fix them. She wasn’t pushy, mind you, but she had no problem voicing her opinion.”

  I laughed, taking a sip of my coffee.

  George pulled his shoulder bag into his lap and opened the flap. “I think you might like to have these,” he said, pulling a paper bag from the satchel. He passed it to me, and I nearly dropped it, not expecting the weight. “I can tell you stories, but these will tell you more.”

  I opened it and saw it was filled with stacks of letters, held together with rubber bands, and a few small books. When I flipped one of the books open, I immediately recognized Vergie’s handwriting—another of her journals.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Do you want these back?”

  He shook his head, pushing his plate to the center of the table. “All of my memories of her are here,” he said, pointing to his chest. “She would want you to have these so you can know the things you want to know.”

  “Thank you, George.”

  He smiled in that way that grandfathers do and then handed me a card from the visitor’s center with his number written on the back. “Have a look at all those, and if you still want to talk sometime, call me.”

  ~~~~

  When I got home, I opened the bag and pulled one bundle of letters out. I flipped through them, glancing at the postmarks. They weren’t in order, but I could see that many of them were dated after my mother left us. I almost opened one, but then stuffed them all back in the bag and left it on the table. I wanted to read them later, when I would have no distractions. In the last few weeks, the dreams I’d been having of my mother had turned nightmarish, her silhouette looming in shadows, her face so blurry I couldn’t make out her features. Learning more about her, from both her writing and Vergie’s, might put an end to the nightmares.

  Kate and Jack were sitting on the couch in the living room, watching TV. When I walked in, they both looked up at me quickly, then looked at each other with expressions that reminded me of the time my father had sat me down to tell me the family dog had been hit by a car.

  “Hey,” I said, “what’s going on?” I moved to sit in an empty chair, already feeling like my skin was suddenly too tight on my body.

  Jack rose and took me by the arm before I could sit. “There’s been an accident,” he said. “Buck’s in the hospital.”

  “Oh my God.” I already felt sick.

  Jack sighed. “He’s OK. But banged up pretty bad. They’re keeping him in the hospital tonight.”

  “What happened?”

  He sat me down between them on the couch. “He fell off a ladder. Broke his arm, cracked a couple of ribs. He hit his head, so they’re making him stay at least one night.”

  “Is Josie there? Can we do anything to help?”

  He shook his head. “She said not to come, just wait until they get home. She’s staying with him in the hospital.”

  “Was it at the house this afternoon? Were you there with him?”

  He sighed. “I was running late. He got there after you left and before I got over there. He started hanging the fans by himself and said he just got dizzy while he was looking up.”

  “We should go over there.”

  “I went a little earlier and took Josie some dinner and a change of clothes. She sent me back here. He was awake and talking, just really sore.”

  “I feel terrible.”

  “I should have gone to the house sooner,” he said.

  “It could have happened even if you were there.”

  “Yeah, but at least I would have been there when it happened. When I got there I found him sitting on the floor, propped up against the wall. He didn’t even want to go to the hospital at first.”

  My chest tightened at the thought of him by himself, waiting on one of us to get there to help him.

  Jack convinced me not to go to the hospital, to wait until they got home and settled the next day. That night, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, listening to an owl call in the distance. Jack was sound asleep next to me, his breaths slow and deep, a hint of a snore every few minutes. My head was so jumbled with thoughts of Buck and Vergie and George that I couldn’t clear them away and go to sleep.

  First there was the guilt about Buck. I should have stayed until he got there and just been late to see George. Or I could have rescheduled. I should have known Buck wouldn’t wait until Jack arrived. But Jack was supposed to have gotten there faster.

  I’d been too consumed with wondering what to ask George. I’d wanted to find out about my mother, but it seemed strange to ask him out of the blue. Shouldn’t you warm up to these sorts of discussions? What if he told me she lived right down the road? What if he told me they’d all had dinner together every Sunday?

  And then the thought came back to me. The one I’d pushed aside when my father had first told me Vergie had left the house to me.

  Why hadn’t she left the house to my mother?

  ~~~~

  I slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Jack, and tiptoed out of the room. I’d left the letters and books in the kitchen, in Vergie’s old breadbox. It was one of those kinds made of tin that had a drop-down door with a latch, probably from the 1950s. It was painted yellow and white with daisies on the door. It likely hadn’t held bread in over a decade. Jack used it as a sort of catch-all for things like spare keys and flashlights, insurance forms for his car. I’d placed the books and letters inside yesterday, thinking I wanted them out
of sight for a while.

  But this question of the house was bothering me. Why was I the beneficiary and not my mother? Had she become estranged from Vergie too?

  I opened the breadbox and pulled out the stacks of letters. Sitting down at the table, I turned on the lamp and spread them all out on the table and started arranging them in chronological order.

  They spanned five years, but there was one year when there were none. The year after my mother left us.

  I opened one dated March, almost two years after she’d left us. It was one page, written in what I’d learned was my mother’s harried cursive. She seemed to always be rushed when she wrote.

  This letter was unlike the ones I’d read before. In the first set I’d found in Vergie’s house, my mother had written about leaving, wanting to go somewhere else, feeling like she was trapped. In this letter, she talked about driving to east Texas, going into the hill country to see some vineyards. I’ve discovered I have a taste for red wine and dry heat, she wrote. The expanse of sky is more soothing than I would have imagined. She’d sent a kind of travelogue to Vergie, detailing what she’d seen on her trip, and since I’d never been to east Texas, I tried to imagine just how different the hill country might have been from here. Clearly it had made an impression on her. I’ll write more when I stop again, she wrote, and I figured she was on some sort of road trip, though she didn’t mention anyone being with her.

  The second letter, dated two weeks later, was more of the same. Inside were postcards from Austin and San Antonio. My mother had been to a bar with dueling pianos, seen the Riverwalk and the Alamo. She’d seen mesquite trees with limbs that undulated along the ground like the tentacles of a giant squid. She’d been to a church service in one of the oldest missions in the state, where a mariachi band played between prayers. I had never thought of my mother as a religious person and had trouble picturing her sitting in a church.

  When I looked at the clock, it was quarter after one. I opened the next letter, torn between reading slowly, searching for subtext, and skimming through them to get to some passage that would indicate where she was now and why she was out of Vergie’s orbit.

  Part of me was interested in these little details, these detours my mother had taken as she planned a new trajectory for her life. Yet the impatient part of me just wanted to know the answers to my questions. I wanted to know if she’d ultimately left Vergie too. But I didn’t know why that mattered to me so much.

  ~~~~

  When I awoke, I was slouched on the kitchen table, my arm numb under my head. Jack’s warm hand was gently rubbing my shoulder.

  “Darlin’,” he said, his face close to my ear. “What are you doing in here?”

  I shook myself awake. “I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to wake you with all the tossing and turning.”

  He ran his fingers through my hair. “Come back now.”

  I stumbled ahead of him into the bedroom, squinting in the dim light. He climbed into bed and pulled me against him so my cheek was against his chest. I could hear the slow thumping of his heart as he wound one arm around my shoulders.

  Those heartbeats turned to footsteps as I dreamed, and in my dream my mother was walking through a field of bluebells. They were tall, as high as her hips, and she held one hand out by her side, sliding it along the tops of the flowers as she waded through the field, the sunlight striking the side of her face. Then she turned to me and held up her other arm as if shielding her face from the brightness. Her face was in shadow, but I knew it was her. I called to her, but she stayed still, her fingers frozen above the bluebells. At last she held her hand up in a gesture that almost looked like a wave, and I thought for sure she was moving toward me, finally. She would move closer, the light would hit her face, and I would see her again as I had when I was a girl. But as the moments passed, I realized it was just the opposite, that she was walking farther away from me, leaving me alone.

  Again.

  All around me, the field of flowers had shriveled to twisted gray nubs, their leaves dry and prickly, smelling not of spring but of decay.

  Chapter 4

  Kate cooked much better than I did, and she insisted on baking something to take over to Buck and Josie’s. She put together a lasagna faster than I could paint a ten-foot stretch of wall and set it inside a metal tray, on top of a couple of hot pads so it wouldn’t slide around.

  Josie met us at the door. Her hair was pulled back, and she had dark circles under her eyes.

  “How are you?” I asked, reaching for her hands. “And how is Buck?”

  She gave me a hug, squeezing me tight, and I knew she’d about worried herself sick.

  “Stubborn as ever.” She led us into the kitchen. “It’s all I can do to stop him from trying to get up and walk around, but the doctor told him he had to sit or lie down for a week and let those ribs heal.”

  Kate plopped the dish on the counter, and Josie grasped her in a bear hug before I could even introduce her.

  Kate’s eyes widened in surprise, but she patted Josie’s shoulders.

  “Josie, this is Kate. My best friend.”

  “It’s so nice to meet you,” Josie said, stepping back. “Y’all are sweet to bring this over.”

  “What else can we do?” I asked. “What do you need?”

  She shook her head, waving her hand in the air between us. “Oh, honey, not a thing.”

  “What about the store? I could fill in for you.”

  “Oh, no. Lucille’s coming in tomorrow to help us out. I’m going to the store, and she’s going to stay here with Buck and try to keep him out of trouble.”

  It took me a minute to remember that Lucille was their daughter. Jack had mentioned her a few times, but we hadn’t met. She lived somewhere a couple of hours away.

  “I can hear you in there, you know!” Buck called out from the living room. He sounded like his usual self, just gruffer. I couldn’t blame him, though, being confined to a chair and aching all over.

  “Hey,” I said, walking into the living room. “You gave us quite the scare.”

  He scoffed, and I leaned down to kiss him on the cheek, dodging the arms and chest that I knew had to be hurting.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said.

  Buck filled the recliner with his big frame. He was lying back, almost horizontal, with an afghan covering his feet. His belly looked more rounded in this position, though his overalls had become a bit looser on him with all the work he’d been doing with Jack and me. Today he was wearing pajamas, his left arm was in a sling, and he had a bandage on his brow. I’d never seen him with a five o’clock shadow before.

  “How you feeling?” I asked.

  “Like a damn bull knocked me over. But I’ll live. Who’s your friend?”

  Kate extended her hand. “Kate McDonnell. I’m a friend of Enza’s from way back.”

  “She’s here visiting for a little while,” I said. “She made you a lasagna.”

  “Aren’t you an angel. Have you had dinner yet?”

  “We won’t stay,” I said. “I know you need to rest and don’t feel like having company.”

  “Then come back tomorrow when the horse tranquilizers have kicked in,” he said. “I’ve had all I can take of them today, and Josie says that makes me insufferable.”

  “Not at all,” I said, smiling. “Have a good night, and enjoy your dinner.”

  “Kate, it was lovely to meet you,” he said. “Try to keep Miss Enza out of trouble while you’re here.”

  She laughed. “I’m the one that gets her in the most trouble.”

  Back in the kitchen, I chatted with Josie a little while longer, then told her to call if she needed us. “I mean for anything,” I insisted. “I feel terrible about all this.”

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “Don’t blame yourself for one minute. Nobody could ever talk that man out of doing something he had his mind set on. That would’ve happened whether you were there or not.”

  “Still,” I said. />
  She gripped me in another hug and kissed me on the cheek. “Don’t you think any more about it.” Her voice was stern, but her eyes were warm.

  When we were nearly out the door, I stopped. “Josie, did Jack talk to you about Christmas?”

  “What about?” she asked.

  “I wanted to invite you and Buck over for dinner at my house. I was going to ask my father here this year, and it would be so nice for all of you to meet. I thought I’d include the guys at the station who aren’t going home, and of course Lucille’s welcome too.”

  She hesitated, and for a minute I thought she might cry.

  “That might be best,” she said. “If he’s able to ride over there in the car.”

  We had nine days until Christmas. Nine days to heal, and nine days for me to learn some basic cooking skills.

  “Maybe he’ll be well enough by then,” I said. “And if not, you have to at least agree to let us come over here and do all the cooking.”

  She smiled. “OK, my dear. You’ve got yourself a deal.”

  ~~~~

  Back in the car, Kate said, “Your father’s coming here for Christmas?”

  “Yes, but he doesn’t know it yet.”

  She shook her head and laughed.

  “Why don’t you stay for Christmas too?”

  She looked at me like I’d started speaking in tongues. “Stuck in the middle between your control-freak father and your new boyfriend who can never be good enough for his daughter? No, thank you.”

  “Oh come on, Kate. Be my moral support.”

  “No, ma’am, I think I’ll take my usual trip to the coast.”

  Kate hadn’t spent the holidays with her parents since we were in college. She said it put unnecessary strain on the fragile little ecosystem that was her parents, herself and two younger siblings.

  “Please? I need you to help me cook.”

  “Oh dear God,” she said. “Don’t you remember the last time we tried?”