Bayou, Whispers from the Past: A Novel Page 8

  It wasn’t hard to see the seductive power of suddenly having the things you wanted. It would be hard for her to ignore, being so young and apparently unaccustomed to having men try to impress her. But the direction she was headed wasn’t good. Anyone could see that. Maybe even her.

  “It’s selfish,” she said. “I know that. But I met him when everything in my life was going wrong. I was working at a bar, getting shitty tips from people who were as rude to me as they could get away with. I was racking up debt, and I was about to get evicted from my apartment. And then this guy shows up and wants to fix all that to win me over.”

  She shrugged, as if that was enough explanation. She looked far younger right then, her cheeks a little flushed and a sad arch to her eyebrows.

  “I’d known him for a while, but just from classes we shared. He stepped out of the shadows when things got really bad and offered to help. I thought he was a decent guy, and it seemed there was nothing to lose.”

  “I get it,” I said. And I did.

  “He was really sweet. And still is sometimes. His parents have just been giving him a hard time lately, and he’s been stressed out with school too. It’s just made him hot-tempered.”

  I sighed, thinking this was one of those red flags everyone pointed to after violent events came out in the newspapers.

  “I could certainly do a lot worse,” she said.

  I wondered how much of this Jack knew and if this was what he and Lucille had been talking about last night that had him so aggravated. I had a feeling he only knew part of the story, because it was likely that if he had any indication Toph was making his cousin unhappy, he’d have come over here in the middle of the night and driven him out into the bayou to meet the gators.

  “Still, you deserve a lot better,” I said.

  “The thing is, he can be better. He was fine before.” She picked up the knife again. “I think when school’s over in a few months, he’ll be back to the way he was. He won’t be so ill and stressed out.”

  When I didn’t reply, she started chopping celery and said, “He got me this great internship at the local theater. His parents are huge donors, so he pulled some strings for me.”

  I wondered what he wanted in return but thought that was too crude to ask. I didn’t know Lucille that well.

  “It was a nice thing for him to do,” she said. “He wanted to help me, and yeah, show off a little too. But deep down, I still think he’s an all right guy. He’s just going through a hard time.”

  “OK,” I said, but I still thought this was pretty far from OK. She seemed to be speaking in code, and I couldn’t quite decide if she meant for me to decipher it.

  “Isn’t that what love’s all about?” she said, “Sticking with your partner when things get bad?”

  “There are a lot of different kinds of bad,” I said. “If he’s hurting you, you need to get away. Period.”

  “He’s not,” she said. “Not in the way you mean. We argue sometimes, like everybody does. I’d leave him if it was bad. Believe me.”

  I studied her, trying to decide if I could believe her.

  She must have read my mind, at least in part, because she placed her hand on my arm and said, “Please don’t say any of this to Jack. Or Mom and Dad. Toph can be a jackass, but he’s not mean to me.”

  I thought that was untrue, based on what I’d seen earlier in the day, but kept the thought to myself. It made me wonder what exactly she would classify as unkind and how far she would allow him to go before she deemed it cruel.

  “Like I said, none of my business.” The idea of keeping this information from Jack, though, made me feel a pang in between my ribs.

  She smiled then, almost sweetly, and said, “Thanks for listening. I didn’t mean to spill my guts like that.”

  “Any time,” I said. “But you have to promise me one thing.”

  She looked at me skeptically, her big doe eyes darkening.

  “If he does get mean, you say something. To me, to Jack, someone.”

  “Don’t worry, Enza. I can look after myself.”

  And in her mind, I knew she thought that to be true. But I’d felt that same way not so long ago, and it had very nearly gotten me killed in my own house, where I thought I was safest. We always think we can protect ourselves, until that time comes when we can’t.

  ~~~~

  That night, Kate declared movie night. She’d found a TV channel that was showing all of her favorite Christmas movies—the kind of comedies they just don’t make any more—and popped a gigantic bowl of popcorn.

  “Where is Jack again?” she asked.

  “Out with Andre and a couple of their buddies. Drinking beer, playing cards, whatever it is men do when they escape for the night.”

  She laughed.

  “Really, I think it’s just all-you-can-eat crawfish night at their favorite hole in the wall. He’s got an extra night off this rotation, so he’s squeezing in a boys’ night.”

  It was hard for him to find time for his friends these days, so I was glad he was making the effort.

  Kate tossed a piece of popcorn to Bella, who was lying on her feet.

  I sat sprawled on the floor, surrounded by piles of my mother’s letters and Vergie’s notebooks. Now I had a notebook of my own, where I worked to create a timeline of my mother’s travels based on what I’d read from her and Vergie. It was difficult to piece it all together, but I was slowly getting a sense of how long she had stayed here after leaving me and my dad, and where she’d gone on her road trip afterwards.

  As I read the collection of postcards, I thought of her at a mission in Texas, helping the padres cook and tend to their vegetable garden. She wrote about staying in places like that in exchange for work, learning how to garden, ride horses, lay field stone for walkways. She’d stayed in a remote part of New Mexico for a few weeks, working on a ranch that doubled as an artists’ retreat; she’d stayed at a monastery in Arizona, a hostel in southern California, a yoga retreat in Utah. In a way, it was nice to think of her wandering through the Southwest, collecting knowledge and skills, but I wondered what she was searching for. What she thought she couldn’t find with us.

  When A Christmas Story was over, Kate said, “I’m off to Bedfordshire. Don’t stay up too late, all right?”

  “I won’t.” I added a couple of postcards to the stack and made a note on my timeline.

  Kate nudged me with her foot. “I’m serious,” she said. “I don’t want to wake up and find some bizarre map on the wall with red threads and push pins like you see on all the detective shows.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Do you know how long it took to paint all these walls?”

  “Sleep well,” she said, and went upstairs.

  Bella stared at me from her spot on the couch, then helped herself to the last of Kate’s popcorn.

  I’d made it through three more letters before I saw headlights shine through the window and heard a car door slam. With the familiar sound of boots on the porch and the key in the lock, Bella’s ears pricked forward and she bounded toward the door. It was nearly midnight.

  Jack whispered, “Hey, girl,” and the dog’s toenails clacked on the floor as she pranced around him. He pulled his boots off and left them by the door, then came into the living room.

  “You’re up late, cher,” he said, sliding his fingers through my hair. “What’s all this?”

  “Just going through more letters.”

  “Ready to call it a night?”

  “In a minute.”

  “Come keep me warm.” He bent down to kiss my cheek and then padded down the hall to the bedroom.

  My eyes were tired, but I was desperate to know where my mother had ended up. Had she kept up with Vergie after all this time? Could she have been at the funeral? She could be nearby, and I’d have no idea. I could bump into her at the grocery store, at the library. I imagined seeing her at the gas station, feeling rooted to the ground as I watched her pump gas. The thought of her being so close,
and yet still outside of my orbit, made me ache with sorrow. If she had been this near to me all this time and had never reached out to find me, I wasn’t sure I could forgive her for that. Had she kept up with me all these years somehow? Did she know I went to college, worked for my father? I needed to know if she had cut me out of her life completely, or if she had watched me from afar, scared and sad and unsure of how to be a part of my life again.

  These choices mattered. If she hadn’t cared enough to look for me, then I didn’t want to meet her again. But I did want to know what had happened to her. I wanted to see the life she had, the one she’d traded us to find.

  I set the stacks of letters and postcards, now arranged in chronological order, onto the coffee table and joined Jack in the bedroom.

  As I climbed into bed with Vergie’s diary, I heard Jack brushing his teeth.

  “How was today?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he said from the bathroom. “I got a few more things from the hardware store and re-stained the kitchen cabinets. They look better lighter.”

  He stripped to his boxers and climbed into bed next to me.

  “You look beat,” I said, sliding my hand along his cheek. He had dark circles under his eyes and three days of beard stubble.

  He smiled, catching my hand and kissing it. “Glad to be back here,” he said. He kissed me goodnight and lay back in the pillows, his arm draped over my waist. Soon his breaths were deep and slow, and I turned the pages softly so as not to wake him.

  In the dim light of the bedside lamp, I leafed through the yellowed pages of the journal that picked up after my mother’s solo trip. In this one, Vergie mentioned my mother living with her again for a while, getting her bearings. Vergie was never specific enough for my taste, usually only listing Martine’s whereabouts and occasionally admitting concern about her emotional state. I struggled to decode the subtext.

  I skimmed through thirty pages or so that didn’t mention my mother at all, and then came to an entry I had to re-read half a dozen times before it sank in.

  I can’t believe she’s gone, Vergie had written.

  For a minute I thought my mother had simply left her, like she’d left my father and me. But there was more.

  I had to drive all the way to a little Texas town to identify her.

  Chapter 8

  I wasn’t going to find my mother.

  Vergie’s writing was more erratic on this page, where she described driving to a small town in Texas to identify my mother’s body, to meet the sheriff who pulled her daughter from the river. Two hikers had spotted her in the reeds on that summer morning, when the water was still warm from soaking up the sunlight the day before. Vergie’s writing, typically precise with its cursive loops, was shaky and frantic, much larger than usual, as if she could barely control the movement of the pen.

  I read the page over and over, as if I might be reading it wrong, as if I was too tired to understand the words.

  But I was not too tired. I was not reading it wrong.

  My heart felt as if it was being squeezed like a fist. I read the next few pages, feeling guilty again for reading about what must have been Vergie’s darkest days, but she didn’t pour words onto the page like I’d expected. There was only the one page about the day she went to Texas, and on it, she wrote at the end: They told me this was an accident, that perhaps she went swimming in the dark, slipped and went under. But my Martine swam like a mermaid, and I know as surely as I sit here that this was no accident. I thought she was happy.

  I missed something.

  I failed her.

  After that, there was a long break in the entries, four months until the next one. I skimmed the pages, but there was no more mention of my mother. Vergie wrote about her vegetable gardening, her visits with friends, but not Martine.

  I was sniffling, fighting back tears. Not wanting to wake Jack, I eased out of bed and went into the kitchen. I poured a glass of water and sat down at the table. How had no one told me about this? Bayou Sabine was so small, people had to know. It was impossible to keep secrets in towns like this. I thought back to Vergie’s funeral, to the woman with the gardenia. You’re the spitting image of Martine, the woman had said. I haven’t seen her in ages.

  And then there was George. Why would he not have told me? Did everyone just assume I knew?

  I sat in the darkness for a long while. It had crossed my mind of course, all those years before, this possibility. I’d told Kate once that my mother was dead to me, in one of my more callous moments, but now that it was truth, I felt like I’d somehow caused it. It felt like I had jinxed her, but of course I couldn’t have. According to the date in the journal, she had died when I was twenty-four. I’d been a couple years out of school, working for my father, getting accustomed to my new employment. I tried to think back to that year, to try to identify a time when I felt some disturbance in the world around me. They say often times twins have a bond so close that one knows when the other has been hurt. One simply feels the agony of the other through a connection that doesn’t make sense to the rest of us, separated sometimes by thousands of miles. They say that happens with spouses, with mothers and children.

  It didn’t happen for me.

  It was probably silly to think I’d have had that bond with my mother. We hadn’t seen each other in nearly a decade—how could I feel the instant she died? How could we have a connection that strong?

  But still I thought back to that year, that month, that day. In my memories, there was nothing remarkable about it at all.

  As I sat in the darkness, I thought about Vergie’s words: My Martine swam like a mermaid. I imagined my mother out in that river, in some unnamed part of Texas, and thought of her walking off the bank, wading into a river as wide and lazy as the Rio Grande. I pictured her walking as I had in my dream, with arms stretched out by her sides, fingertips stroking the surface of the water as she waded deeper, past her hips, past her waist. She ducked under the surface then, and swam out toward the middle, under the light of a full moon, her skin pale in the light that bounced off the waves. She paddled on her back, her face tilted up toward the stars, maybe naming the same constellations that Vergie had drawn out for me. She moved her arms in languid strokes, slicing through the dark water. She moved farther out toward the center of the river, and then she dove below the surface, her long hair swirling around her, blocking the last of the light.

  ~~~~

  When I eased back into bed, Jack wound his arms around me and pulled me against him.

  “What’s the matter, cher?” he asked, his lips moving against my shoulder. “Why can’t you sleep?”

  “I’ll never find my mother,” I said.

  “You will if you want to.”

  “My mother’s dead.” I sniffed. “Did Vergie never tell you?”

  I turned to face him, and he said, “What are you talking about?”

  He squinted in the light and sat up against the pillows.

  “Did you know?” I asked him. “Did you keep this from me on purpose?”

  “How do you know this?” he asked.

  “Answer my question.”

  “Of course I didn’t know,” he said, sliding his hand along my cheek. “How do you know it’s true?”

  “It’s in Vergie’s diary,” I said. “Did she really never tell you that her daughter died?”

  He looked genuinely shocked. “Of course not,” he said. “Do you think I would keep that from you? That I would hurt you that way?”

  I sighed. “No.”

  He laced his fingers in mine, staring me in the eye. “I would never hurt you, Enza.”

  “Why would she not tell anyone? How is it no one in this town knows her daughter died?”

  “Maybe she just didn’t want anyone to know. What did she say in the journal?”

  I read him the last entry about my mother, how Vergie thought her death was no accident.

  Jack pulled me close and kissed me on the forehead. “I’m so sorry, cher,” he s
aid, his voice a murmur. “But maybe that’s why no one knows. Maybe your grandmother didn’t want anyone to know she might have done it on purpose.”

  “You mentioned my mother when we first met. Vergie never talked about her?”

  He frowned. “Not really. I knew she had a daughter named Martine, but when I asked once where she was, she said she didn’t know. I could tell I’d hit a soft spot because she looked so sad all of a sudden, but I just figured they were estranged. I thought it was rude to ask anything else, and I never mentioned her again.”

  Of course. Jack was too considerate to pry.

  I leaned my cheek against his chest and closed my eyes, concentrating on the way his fingers slid up and down my back. I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t tamp down that image of my mother in the dark water.

  ~~~~

  The next day I called George right after nine, when the museum opened.

  “Can you meet me today?” I tried to keep my voice even, to stifle the panic that rose in my throat. He might not meet me if he thought I was upset, and I didn’t want to ask him about my mother’s death over the phone.

  “I have a lunch meeting today,” he said, “but we could make it in the afternoon when my shift is over.”

  At four-thirty, I met him a couple of blocks from the jazz museum. He was still wearing his uniform, so he wanted to meet off museum grounds.

  “If we meet at the museum,” he’d told me, “we’ll never get a minute’s peace for all the people coming up to ask me questions.”

  We were at a different café this time, one that specialized in cheesecake. It was packed with customers, most of them regulars judging by the way the owner chatted with them.

  “I’ve been reading Vergie’s diaries,” I said after we’d both started our coffees. “Thank you for bringing them to me.”

  “You’re welcome. I hope you found what you were looking for.” His voice ended on a high note, like a question.

  “Sort of,” I said. “But I need to ask you something.” I took a deep breath.