Ruined

by Paula Morris

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  with people like this? Why did he possibly want to "move as a group" with them?

  She rubbed away hot tears with the back of her free hand, and stalked off in the opposite direction. She couldn't go to the café looking -- or feeling -- like this. There was nobody she wanted to see this afternoon, not even Lisette. And especially not Anton.

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  ***

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ***

  Rebecca! aurelia! dinner's almost ready!" Rebecca emerged from her room reluctantly: She'd shut herself away in there ever since arriving home from school. The horrible incident with Toby Sutton had shaken her, and she'd tried to distract herself with texting her friends in New York. But everyone had been too busy to talk: Ling was taking the kids she babysat to the zoo in the park; Jenny was tutoring at the after-school homework center; Miranda was at a French lesson. And then, because of the one hour time difference, everyone was at dinner. Even the time zones were conspiring against her, Rebecca thought, trying not to feel sorry for herself-- not least because if she was in New York right now, she'd be busy, too, not hiding out in some dark bedroom.

  In the kitchen, its wood-framed windows misted up with steam, Aunt Claudia was wildly stirring something at the stove. She looked frazzled, as ever, by the demands of cooking.

  "Table, please!" she said as Rebecca skulked in. Rebecca pulled a handful of cutlery from the drawer that always stuck

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  and then went about her other tasks in silence: pouring water into mismatched tumblers and plopping down a cloth napkin at each place.

  "Is everything all right?" her aunt asked, giving Rebecca an appraising look.

  Rebecca shrugged. She knew it was rude, but she was tired of everything today.

  "Aurelia!" Aunt Claudia called. "Where is that child?"

  Aurelia wandered in clutching a squirming Marilyn, showering kisses over the cat's small, pointed face.

  "Please put that animal down and wash your hands," Aunt Claudia scolded. She dolloped spoonfuls of white rice onto plates, apparently not noticing when sticky clumps dropped onto the table. The sight of more rice didn't fill Rebecca with much enthusiasm: She'd never eaten so much of it in her life. She might as well have gone with her father to China.

  Monday nights they usually ate it with a thick, sloppy sauce -- Aunt Claudia called all sauces "gravy" -- of red beans, from which chunks of spicy sausage poked like slime-covered rocks in some sea on Mars. Other nights they ate it with shrimp, or with crawfish, or stuffed into charred green peppers or something similar called a mirliton. Sometimes her aunt served up spicy "dirty rice," flecked with scraps of meat, along with fish of some kind or a roast chicken from the grocery store. There was even rice in the gumbo -- a dark, stewy kind of soup that in the Vernier household seemed to provide a watery grave for any number of unidentified leftovers. There'd probably be rice with their Thanksgiving dinner next Thursday.

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  Tonight Aunt Claudia had finished work in the Quarter early, so she'd had time to "make groceries," she told Rebecca, at the big supermarket down on Tchoupitoulas Street, by the river. From the number of pots on the stove, Rebecca had guessed her aunt was cooking Shrimp Étouffée, one of her more elaborate concoctions: This dish was actually one of Rebecca's favorites. It really reminded her of something her father made sometimes, though he called it Shrimp Surprise.

  But dinner tonight turned out to be a mysterious medley of catfish, green peppers, green onions, and a couple of cans of tomatoes, simmered in a sauce so hot and gloopy that it stuck to the roof of Rebecca's mouth.

  Aurelia seemed intent on shoveling in dripping forkfuls of dinner. Until she gave a start, as though she'd just woken up, or remembered something important.

  "Becca, are you really going to Helena Bowman's Christmas party?" she asked, scooping up a puddle of pink sauce with a sawn-off chunk of French bread.

  "What?" Aunt Claudia's fork clattered onto the table.

  "Everyone's talking about it." Aurelia grinned at Rebecca. "Are you really going with Anton Grey?"

  Rebecca shrugged, as though it was the last thing on her mind, although Toby's nasty words were still rattling around in her head. Nobodies like you. All she wanted to do was go back to New York, get away from these people and never see them again.

  "Rebecca?" Her aunt wasn't about to let the matter drop -- that was clear.

  "He might have asked me if I wanted to go," she said,

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  aware she was using the "sulky" voice her father occasionally complained about.

  "And you said no, I hope."

  Rebecca stared down at her plate, stabbing with her fork at a bloated pink shrimp.

  "Because," Aunt Claudia continued, "the less you have to do with those families, the better. As we've discussed. Aurelia, you have gravy all down your arm."

  "I don't want to go, anyway." This wasn't really a lie. The thought of being snubbed at the party by the daughter of the house and her friends wasn't that appealing, and Toby had made all those threats, hinting that something awful would happen if Rebecca showed up. And as for Anton: Maybe his silence over the weekend meant something. Maybe he'd changed his mind and realized he should take someone more socially acceptable.

  "And when is this party, exactly?" Aunt Claudia was speaking to Rebecca, but she was gazing into space or at some spot beyond Rebecca's shoulder.

  "In a couple of weeks," she said, trying to sound casual.

  "What day?" Rebecca realized what her aunt was doing -- she was scanning the blank, random calendar days hanging by the door, the humidity half molting them off the wall.

  "It's on December fifth, I think," Rebecca told her.

  "That's all right then," Aunt Claudia mumbled, speaking to herself, then she cleared her throat and dabbed at her plate with a sliver of bread. "Anyway, good. I mean, you're not going. We're agreed."

  "I'd go anywhere if Anton Grey asked me," sighed Aurelia, looking at Rebecca as though she was crazy.

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  "You would do no such thing." Aunt Claudia frowned. "Rebecca, I hope you've made it very clear to Anton that you have other plans that night."

  "I thought you liked him," Rebecca couldn't help saying. "You know, when ... when ... I mean, he was quite helpful. And polite."

  She didn't want to talk about the specifics of the cemetery lock-in with Aurelia there.

  Her aunt glanced over at Aurelia, who was now preoccupied with dropping something from her plate onto the floor where Marilyn was lurking.

  "Anton is ... well, he's who he is," she said to Rebecca, and her voice sounded sad. For the first time, Rebecca wondered if Aunt Claudia had been pushed around by these families, the way Rebecca was now. She'd lived here all her life, after all. "He's as polite as he should be. But he's no more free than any of us."

  "What do you mean, he isn't free?" This didn't make much sense. Anton was his own person, surely, just like Rebecca.

  "Free to be someone he's not." Her aunt rubbed her hands together, grinding the silver rings that adorned almost every one of her long, thin fingers. "And now, Aurelia -- please stop encouraging that cat and clear the table."

  That night, Rebecca lay awake in her room, wondering why her aunt had started talking in riddles, and whether what she'd said was right. Nobody was free, according to Aunt Claudia -- at least, not free to be someone else. But didn't people reinvent themselves all the time? Every infomercial

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  Rebecca had ever seen featured people who'd transformed themselves -- their shape, their skin, their look, their marriage, their personal fortunes. If Anton wanted to break out of the Patrician set, he should be able to. This was America, after all. Or was New Orleans its own weird country -- pagan and decadent and hierarchical, like the Roman Empire?

  On Saturday morning, Aunt Claudia headed off to the Quarter as usual. Over breakfast, she told Rebecca that there were usually a lot of tourists in town the weekend before Thanksgiving, a
nd she was hoping for a lot of business. That was another strange thing, Rebecca thought, sweeping the front porch clean of its accumulated leaves and dirt as her aunt jerked the car into the street: Aunt Claudia never offered to tell her fortune or read her tarot cards. Maybe she didn't like bringing her work home with her -- except that deck of cards was always there on the kitchen table. Rebecca wondered, not for the first time, if Aunt Claudia was really the descendant of a voodoo queen, or if she was just a crackpot who made up all her "fortunes."

  Farther up the street, at the cemetery gates, someone was waving. Rebecca blinked, and whoever it was disappeared. Then a familiar smiling face peeked around the gatepost, beckoning to Rebecca with an outstretched arm. Even at this distance, Rebecca knew it was Lisette. She leaned the broom against the porch rail and jogged down the street.

  "I'm sorry I haven't been around," Rebecca told Lisette, glancing around to make sure nobody else was anywhere nearby and sidling around to the back of the nearest tomb. Enough people thought she was strange already: If Lisette really was a ghost, visible only to Rebecca, she didn't want to

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  add "seen talking to herself in public" to her list of supposed crimes.

  "I thought maybe you'd left," said Lisette, and Rebecca filled her in, quickly, on the way Toby Sutton had accosted her outside the cemetery after school.

  "Ugh!" Lisette declared, perching on a protruding tree root. "That doesn't surprise me. The Sutton family have been horrible for more than a hundred and fifty years. And I should know!"

  "Aren't you supposed to be making your big walk soon?" Rebecca asked her. Lisette nodded, picking absentmindedly at her ripped sleeve.

  "Next Saturday. That's the anniversary of my mother's death. She died in 1853, so it's been one hundred and fifty-five years. How many years for you?"

  "Thirteen," said Rebecca, with a rueful smile: It wasn't very long at all, compared with Lisette. But at least Lisette had known her mother. At least she could remember her. "How far is it?"

  "About four miles each way." Lisette wriggled her bare toes. "It's not so bad. I get to see all the other ghosts along the way."

  "Do you talk to them?"

  "Of course." Lisette smiled up at her. "I hardly ever get a chance to talk to anyone. The night you and I met ... well, before that I hadn't spoken in months to anyone but that crazy old gravedigger."

  "There must be so many of them," Rebecca said, trying to imagine the streets of the city thronged with ghosts. It was impossible to visualize. The city of New Orleans was almost

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  three hundred years old: If Lisette was to be believed, there had to be ghosts everywhere.

  "More every year," Lisette told her, "though some disappear, of course."

  "They disappear?"

  "If they find peace. You know, if their death is avenged at last. It doesn't happen too often, though. A lot of those ghosts have been around much longer than I have."

  "I wish I could see them!" Rebecca leaned her head back against the chilly tomb.

  "You could," Lisette said casually, brushing at her legs, though why, Rebecca wasn't sure -- no insects could land on her, surely, and dirt never seemed to stick. "If you came with me, that is."

  "I could come with you?" Rebecca lifted her head.

  "It takes a long time," Lisette warned her. "Four miles there, four miles back. And some of those ghosts -- well, they like to talk. They don't have a thing in this world to say, but they surely like to talk."

  "Really--I could come with you?" Rebecca's mind was zooming with the possibilities. "And I could ... I could see the ghosts?"

  Lisette nodded.

  "Remember? When you hold my hand, nobody living can see you. And you can see all the ghosts."

  Invisible to the real world. Able to see the spirit world. If this was true, Rebecca decided, those miles would be the greatest four miles -- actually, eight miles -- of her life.

  "But maybe it's not a good idea," Lisette reasoned. "It might scare you. Some of them -- well, they don't look so

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  pretty. And sometimes they're not too happy, either. You understand."

  "I guess," said Rebecca, wondering how upset she would be if she had to wander the streets forever, unable to rest in peace. "But I want to go, Lisette. I really want to go." New Orleans was still a mystery to Rebecca, a small place that got her all twisted around, a town of neighborhoods with long-forgotten names. But with Lisette, she'd get to see much, much more of it firsthand. And even better than that, she'd be able to glimpse its lost, secret world of ghosts.

  "Next Saturday, then," Lisette said. "I'll wait for you by the Bowman tomb."

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  ***

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ***

  Four miles didn't sound like a long way. Rebecca had walked miles and miles in New York City on any given day -- when she didn't want to wait for a cross-town bus, say, or when she and her friends decided to loop the park, or go for a major wander downtown, or see how many times they could walk back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge.

  But four miles in New Orleans was another matter entirely when you were dealing with the spirit world.

  Lisette hadn't been lying: The city was thronged with ghosts. Three hundred years' worth of ghosts, all of them wearing the clothes they died in, many of them bearing -- all too visibly in some cases -- the injuries that killed them.

  That next Saturday, with her hand firmly clasped in Lisette's, Rebecca could see them all. And this sight was so amazing, so overwhelming, it was all Rebecca could do to keep her mouth from hanging open in surprise.

  Some of the ghosts were white; many more were black. Some spoke French or Spanish. A little girl in a ragged

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  dress, skipping up and down the street, sang to herself in German. Rebecca heard some snatches of languages she thought she recognized, like Italian, and others she couldn't identify at all.

  Most of the ghosts wandered around their little patches alone, but many hung out in strange mixed-century gaggles. Near the corner of Terpsichore Street in the Lower Garden District, a black man wearing nothing but a cutoff pair of torn trousers, raw marks from chains or handcuffs worn into his thin wrists, stood leaning against a lamppost. Deep in conversation with him were two white women, one in a flimsy 1920s-style evening dress with a blood-soaked back, the other a soccer mom in jeans and a mangled purple LSU sweatshirt. The man waved at Lisette as they walked by.

  "He was a slave, flogged to death," she whispered to Rebecca. "He's been around almost as long as I have. Not sure about why he was killed -- he doesn't like to talk about it. That woman in the pretty dress joined him in I929, I think. Her boyfriend murdered her in that house up there."

  Lisette pointed to a leaning house on the corner, its windows boarded up.

  "And the other woman?"

  "She's been there for the last four or five years. Head-on collision at the intersection with a drunk driver."

  Walking along the highway underpass, Rebecca saw some very strange sights. The area used to be a neighborhood, Lisette explained, until thirty or forty years earlier. Now traffic thundered above them, and the vacant space below was used as a parking lot. But the neighborhood ghosts still had no choice but to hang around, even though their streets

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  and houses were gone. A kid with an Afro and flared jeans lay back on the hood of a car, and when a curious Rebecca turned to look at him, she had to stop herself from crying out loud: His face was a red and black contorted mess. He'd been shot, Lisette told her.

  Several black men dressed kind of like Native Americans prowled around the underpass; Rebecca heard snatches of chantlike songs, and one of them drummed from time to time on the trunk of a car.

  "Mardi Gras Indians," Lisette said. "From one of the old Uptown gangs. One of them's been here a long, long time, and the other two joined him after one of those wars. Oh, which one was it? The second one, I think."

  "The Se
cond World War?"

  Lisette looked uncertain.

  "Is that what they call it? All of them were stabbed in different fights on Mardi Gras. I don't see too many of them, though, even up on Claiborne. Maybe they don't fight these days."

  A fat black woman in a long, shapeless dress, her face badly bruised and nose broken, called out to them.

  "Have you seen my baby? Have you seen my baby?"