Ruined

by Paula Morris

  The car jerked to an abrupt stop on Sixth Street, outside a house much smaller and shabbier than either of its neighbors.

  "Home sweet home," announced Aunt Claudia, fiddling with the controls on her door: She couldn't seem to work out how to open it. "At least it's stopped raining."

  Rebecca climbed out of the car and stood for a moment

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  on the damp sidewalk. The Verniers' wooden house was not only tiny -- it leaned to one side in a perilous and possibly illegal way, almost touching the house next door. The ramshackle cottage was painted a faded yellow, and the shutters and front door were blue. A colorful hand-painted sign that read VERNIER in pink letters dangled above the door. The tiny front yard was a dense mass of greenery speckled with a few white flowers; and a banana tree, fat rain drops balanced on its glossy leaves, drooped onto the small front porch.

  "Our cottage garden." Aunt Claudia gestured at the yard, her bangles rattling. Rebecca climbed the rickety steps to the porch and walked over to the rocking chair chained to the wooden railings. She didn't know about "cottage garden": It looked like weeds. The view from the porch was of the cemetery across the street -- or rather its high, dirt-streaked walls. Just down the street was an entrance with tall gates. Aunt Claudia, fumbling inside her giant crocheted bag for the keys she'd had in her hand just a minute ago, followed Rebecca's gaze.

  "Lafayette Cemetery's not a safe place," her aunt told her. "Unfortunately. You should keep away."

  "Why?" Rebecca had a sudden vision of dead bodies reaching up to grab her, their stiff fingers dark with soil.

  "Criminals and derelicts," said Aunt Claudia, pushing open the door. "They wait for tourists to wander in so they can mug them. Some poor soul was shot there just before the storm. Unless you're on one of the big guided tours, it's not a safe place. That's why all the gates are locked every afternoon. Really, you must promise me you'll never go there."

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  Rebecca resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Aunt Claudia was just as overprotective as her father. Didn't she know that Rebecca was used to catching the New York City subway, walking through Central Park, hanging out with her friends downtown?

  Her aunt stood on the threshold, door ajar, key still in the lock, as though she was waiting for Rebecca's solemn promise before they could move inside.

  "Here's Marilyn!" cried Aurelia. A small, long-haired, black-and-white cat bounded through the doorway, past Aurelia's outstretched hands and down the pathway. As though she'd been listening to their conversation, the cat scampered down the street toward the cemetery gate. Without hesitation, she squeezed under the gate's lowest rung and disappeared into the darkness. Rebecca couldn't help laughing.

  "That cat is setting a very bad example," sighed Aunt Claudia, shaking her head. She seemed to have forgotten about making Rebecca promise things, which was just as well: Rebecca was hoping to follow Marilyn's lead sometime soon. She was from New York, after all: A small cemetery in a tiny city like this didn't frighten her.

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  ***

  CHAPTER TWO

  ***

  THIS," AUNT CLAUDIA EXPLAINED, WITH A JINGLY shake of the wrist, "is a shotgun house." They were all crammed in the narrow hallway, just inside the front door, a panting Aurelia leaning against Rebecca's damp luggage. Rain clattered onto the roof, sounding as though it was about to break through at any second.

  "It's African," Aurelia added, and Rebecca was confused until Aunt Claudia started talking about shotgun-house design coming to New Orleans with the big influx of migrants from Haiti, two hundred years ago.

  "Some people will tell you it's called a shotgun house because you can fire a gun from the front door to the back, and it would pass straight through the house," she said, flapping one hand at the long hallway that stretched the length of the house to the back door. "Actually, it's derived from a West African word for 'house.' A true shotgun house doesn't have a hallway, of course. Just one room stacked behind another, in the Afro-Caribbean style ..."

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  All the rooms of the house were off this skinny hallway, and there seemed to be a surprising number of doorways: The house looked small from the outside, but it stretched back forever.

  "It may not be big as some of the mansions around here, but it's older than most of the other houses in the neighborhood." Aunt Claudia gestured into the front room, which Aurelia called "the parlor." Rebecca peered in. Clearly, her aunt's taste in home furnishings was as eclectic as her fashion choices. The living room -- sorry, parlor -- was a chaotic, dusty jumble of Victorian sofas and Asian statues, and the ancient-looking TV was shrouded with an embroidered shawl.

  "We only get basic cable," Aurelia whispered, her mouth drooping into a pout.

  "It was built in the early nineteenth century," Aunt Claudia called, bustling down the hallway, which was lined with gilt-framed still-life paintings, bunches of wizened dried flowers, and gaudy, glossy prints of various Indian gods. "For one of the many free people of color who lived in New Orleans. There were more free people of color here then than anywhere else in the United States -- even New York!"

  Rebecca felt herself bristling: She wasn't up for months of jibes about her hometown.

  "And slaves, right?" she asked.

  "Oh, yes." Aunt Claudia paused outside one of the doors. "A huge population of slaves. They far outnumbered the white inhabitants. New Orleans was a place where people were bought and sold, I'm sorry to say -- the largest center of

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  the slave trade. This is the kitchen, where we seem to spend all our time."

  Rebecca followed Aunt Claudia into yet another cluttered space, lined with cupboards that looked as though they were last updated in the 1950s. A table topped with peeling Formica sat in the middle of the room, a battered tarot deck wedged between a saltshaker and a bottle of Alligator Bite hot sauce. Rebecca recognized it at once: Her father always kept a bottle of Alligator Bite in the fridge at home. She'd never thought about it being a Louisiana thing.

  "There are still more black people than white in New Orleans," Aunt Claudia told her, filling a battered kettle at the kitchen sink. "Or at least there were before the storm. Nobody knows how many people live here anymore. Everything is still in ... er, disarray. You hungry, baby?"

  Rebecca shook her head. She felt too churned up to even think about food.

  "I'm hungry." Aurelia pulled a drooping, chocolate-smeared box from the fridge. "Mama, can we have some cake?"

  While the others argued about whether Aurelia should wait until after dinner for some cake, Rebecca gazed around the room. It was dilapidated and messy, the exact opposite of the tidy, modern kitchen in the Browns' New York apartment. And instead of a neat calendar hanging above the phone, plastered across the peeling walls of the kitchen were ripped pages that looked as though they came from one of those page-a-day desk calendars.

  One page was for that day, October twenty-fifth. But all the other dates seemed entirely random: one in March, one

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  in December, two in February -- the twentieth and twenty-first -- another in October, and one in November. All of the pages were blank, stuck on the wall in a slapdash manner, as though Aunt Claudia was in a big hurry. Rebecca wondered if she was patching holes in the wall, or if the entire calendar had once been posted, page by page, on the wall and wilted off in the damp. Nothing would surprise her in this place.

  "Rebecca hasn't even seen her room yet!" Aunt Claudia tugged the cake box out of Aurelia's hands. "Go and show it to her, and then we'll all have a piece of cake --just a small piece!

  Aurelia grabbed Rebecca's elbow and steered her down the hallway: Her new room lay behind the fourth door on the left, between the bathroom and Aurelia's bedroom. It was not, Rebecca noticed, exempt from weirdness. The room was small with shuttered windows, quite dark because of the proximity of the house next door: It looked close enough to touch. The walls were painted a moody purple-gray color, and the bedspread was made from a sl
ippery-looking, pale blue satin. There were bookshelves but no closet: All Rebecca's clothes would have to be folded and put away in a large wooden dresser, painted in black-and-white harlequin diamonds. Aurelia swung the door shut, and pointed to a clutch of wooden hangers dangling from an antique hook on the back of the door. One bore her new school uniform -- that ugly black blazer and too-long plaid skirt.

  Everything was much more old-fashioned than her room in New York, but it could have been worse, Rebecca decided, trying not to feel too depressed. The bed was large

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  and seemed comfy, and there was enough space under the expansive dresser to line up her shoes. The worst thing about the room was the strange wall decorations. There were sinister devil masks and some kind of doll; on the top shelf of the bookcase sat a tiny skull with cavernous eyeholes.

  "It's a monkey skull," Aurelia told her matter-of-factly, flopping onto the bed. "We use it to prop up the books."

  Rebecca made a face. Aurelia leaned back, pointing to each object in turn.

  "That's a carnival mask from Haiti -- made from papier-mâché." And that's a djakout, which is basically ... "

  "A sack?"

  "Yes. It's hard to explain exactly. That's from Haiti as well. But the gris-gris bag," she said, wriggling her fingers at a little red pouch hanging from the hook on the back of the door, "that's from here. You should really carry it with you. There are herbs and things in it to protect you."

  "Do you really believe that?" Rebecca didn't want to be rude, but this all sounded like so much hocus-pocus. Just because she liked ghost stories and vampire movies didn't mean she was about to carry some voodoo pouch with her everywhere.

  "Maybe," Aurelia sighed. She scrunched up her pert nose and giggled. "Maybe not. I like the Buddhist stuff better. The statues are cooler. Sorry you got stuck with the voodoo room."

  "That's OK," Rebecca told her, startled when Aurelia scrambled to her feet and darted out the door. But within moments she was back: Her arms were full of Marilyn the cat, back safely from her cemetery adventure.

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  "Mama collects these to protect us from bad things," Aurelia explained, gesturing at the wall with an elbow. Rebecca squinted up at the demented rag doll on a stick, made from scraps of old fabric, and -- worst of all -- the rudimentary figure of an angel, hanging right above the headboard of the bed. "It's her big hobby."

  "I think I need protection from this stuff," she told Aurelia. "Especially if that thing falls on me in the night. I thought hobbies were things like stamp-collecting or keeping guinea pigs or something."

  Aurelia's eyes lit up.

  "Did you have a guinea pig in New York?" she asked, stroking Marilyn's fluffy back. The cat's purr was as loud as an outboard motor.

  "No, but I had a frog once," Rebecca told her. "And two goldfish, Leo and Orlando, but they didn't last long. My father's allergic to cats, and he says it's cruel to have a dog in an apartment as small as ours, especially with nobody at home all day."

  "Your father is ... Uncle Michael." Aurelia frowned. "And you lived on Central Park West."

  "I live there -- present tense. I'm just staying here while my dad's away."

  "And your mother was Aunt Millie," said Aurelia, her face screwed up with concentration. "She was tall, like you. But she died when you were a tiny baby, and I never met her at all."

  "You sound like you're about to take a test," Rebecca teased. She lay back on the bed, trying not to skid off the icy cover onto the floor. A water stain spread like a yellowing

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  bruise across the ceiling. Nothing here looked or felt or smelled the way it did at home: She felt an intense pang of homesickness.

  "Aunt Millie was my mama's cousin," Aurelia continued, squeezing Marilyn more tightly; the cat let out a plaintive little cry in protest.

  "I don't think she was, actually ..."

  "Oh, I know.'' Marilyn kicked free from Aurelia's suffocating embrace and tore out of the room. Aurelia made a mock-sad face. "But we have to pretend. Otherwise the school won't let you in."

  "Really?" Rebecca sat up. She knew the school was exclusive, but this seemed even more snobby than she'd feared. Aurelia nodded.

  "Mama says so. Do you have any pictures of your parents?"

  "Just one of the three of us together." Rebecca reached for her satchel and rummaged around for her wallet, flicking it open to show Aurelia the small photo tucked behind a plastic window. She took it with her everywhere. Everyone told her she looked like her mother -- tall and dark, with the same uncertain smile.

  "Dad says it was taken in Paris," she told Aurelia. "We lived there when I was small ....What?"

  Her little cousin was looking puzzled, staring at the dangling wallet.

  "There's nothing there," she said. "Has the picture dropped out?"

  Rebecca turned her wallet around: Aurelia was right. The photograph was gone. She shook everything from her

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  wallet onto the bed and flung the empty shell down in frustration. The picture was nowhere to be found in her satchel, either.

  "But it couldn't just fall out," she said, more to herself than to Aurelia. "And it was definitely there when I showed my ID at LaGuardia. I remember looking at it before I put my wallet away."

  "Maybe someone stole it?" Aurelia suggested. Rebecca shook her head, sorting through the contents of her wallet one more time, just in case.

  "Who would steal a photograph and leave all the money?" She'd had her satchel with her the whole time since she left the apartment on Central Park West, aside from ten minutes in the Atlanta airport: Her father had offered to sit with her stuff while she browsed through some magazines. Surely he would have noticed someone rifling through her bag and removing a photo from her wallet? Unless ...

  Unless he'd taken it himself.

  "It's too bad that you've lost it," Aurelia sympathized, and Rebecca nodded, unable to speak. Her father removing the picture from her wallet didn't make any sense; it was a copy of one he had sitting on the desk in his home office. He didn't need it. Why would he take away the only thing she had to remind her of home -- and of her family?

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  ***

  CHAPTER THREE

  ***

  THE WROUGHT-IRON RAILINGS SURROUNDING Temple Mead Academy were spiky -- To keep the riffraff out, Rebecca thought, walking toward it on her first day of school. Her stomach started twisting into tight knots as she and Aurelia climbed a flight of broad stone steps, especially when Aurelia stopped on the top step.

  "I'm in the junior school," Aurelia told Rebecca, her usual cheerful grin fading. "That means we have all our classes next door."

  She gestured at a modern building on the next" lot, all sheer glass and hard edges, incongruous on this oak-lined street.

  "But I'll see you at lunchtime, right?" Rebecca felt even more nervous. She didn't know Aurelia very well, but at least she knew her. And Aurelia was a friendly, bouncy little thing, clearly happy to have a visiting older cousin, of sorts, staying for a while.

  "Different lunchtimes," said Aurelia, shaking her head. Chattering girls pushed past them, hurrying through the

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  double doors. "But I'll meet you here on the steps, after school - OK?"

  Rebecca nodded mutely, watching Aurelia scamper back down the stairs and across the stone-paved yard. Another wave of girls in plaid carried Rebecca through the doors and into a cool, dark foyer. A long staircase swept up to the next floor; paintings of pale young women wearing ethereal ball gowns lined the paneled walls. From the portraits to the chandelier hung high above Rebecca's head, it felt more like a palace than a high school.

  The receptionist in the small side office told Rebecca to wait to see Principal Vale. Rebecca pressed herself against a wall to keep out of the way. Her new school uniform felt itchy and heavy. Normally in the fall she wore a uniform of a different kind to school--jeans, Converse sneakers, a sweater, and an amazing pale blue suede jacket she'd found i
n a vintage store downtown. All her books were loaded into the Chrome messenger bag her father had given her as a birthday present. But here everything was regulation, including the ugly shoes and bag. If her friends back home saw her, they'd think she was living in another era, not just another part of the country.

  No matter how hot it was, the girls of Temple Mead Academy had to wear their blazers while walking to and from school. Aunt Claudia had impressed this on her last night. Today was mild and cloudy, and even the short walk from home had made Rebecca sticky with perspiration. She didn't know how the girls here put up with it in the spring and summer. But maybe they suffered in silence, like proper little