He'd sent her off to work in the three-man accounting department. The only woman, and the only immigrant. That she was Russian, a name that sent simultaneous anger and chills through many in the country, seemed to hold double the indictment.
But each day, when the chorus of metal clasps closing on briefcases sounded through the office at just past six, Ekatherina—Catherine, though he couldn’t bring himself to call her this, just as he’d never completely thrown aside his own name—showed no signs of stopping. Long after half the lights had been turned down, and the din of a bustling office died to a quieter lull of evening, she was there, head down, with her adding machine and pencil.
Augustus glanced back at the clock. It was nearing eleven. He shouldn’t keep burning the midnight oil like this; he knew it, and yet he felt more at home here than home itself. It was safe. It was his.
Did Ekatherina feel the same way? Was this where she was safe to be herself?
He slipped his arms into his tweed jacket and tugged on the leather of his suitcase. He locked the door to his office and meandered through the growing villages of cubicles that had popped up to support his business.
Augustus stopped at her desk. When she didn’t immediately look up, he cleared his throat and shifted his briefcase from one hand to another.
“Going home?” she asked, one finger still poised over the nine on her adding machine. He nearly smiled. Her words were perfunctory. Her mind was elsewhere.
“I’ll be locking up the office on the way out.”
“Oh. I see.” Her face fell, and her hand with it. She made a notation in her notebook, and then closed it.
“Can I walk you out?”
She appeared to think about it for a moment. Then she slipped her purse over her shoulder and stood. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Deschanel.” She had no jacket, and he nearly offered his, when he remembered that what was cold for someone from New Orleans was likely balmy for a Russian.
“Augustus,” he corrected.
Ekatherina gave him the same look he had probably given when she told him to call her Catherine. I’m not calling you Augustus any more than you’ll call me Catherine.
She followed him out and waited patiently as he locked up the office doors. They descended the stairs in silence, and when they stepped into the quiet night of the Central Business District, it occurred to him that this was the last time they would see one another until the New Year. Deschanel Media Group was closed until the New Year, to allow for family time. It hadn’t been his idea—Evangeline was often the heart behind the operation, reminding him of the things he should know but didn’t.
“Can I drop you off somewhere?”
“I have a car, Mr. Deschanel.”
“Yes. Of course.” Augustus again shifted his briefcase. He should say something else. And then he remembered. “Merry Christmas, Ekatherina. Do you have family here?”
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Deschanel,” she answered, flashing a polite but distant smile. “And I will be just fine. Thank you for asking.”
Ekatherina nodded and disappeared into the night.
Twenty
Stairway to Heaven
Maureen finished the book. She set it aside, but the effects lingered, coursing through her. She was Miss Havisham; younger, yes, but the cruelty of life did not discriminate by age.
Maureen wanted to run through the house and stop all the clocks, as Miss Havisham had done in Satis House. She envisioned serving herself as the final course of Christmas dinner so that they may all feed upon her physically as they had done metaphorically.
Oh, if only she’d known reading could be like this!
But it was no escape. No, not that. No, this book, Great Expectations, had instead shown her the way to interpret all the darkness festering upon her soul like so many rabid mice. Like Miss Havisham, many had pretended to love her, from duty, like her family, or from desire, as the degenerate Mr. Evers had... as the boys had. Her invitation or acquiescence did not lessen the crimes against her.
Her voyage into the attic had not been a disappointment. Her ghosts had even left her alone when she ascended the old stairs in the dark corner of the hall. Maybe it was too haunted even for them.
Maureen found trunks and trunks of old clothing, deliciously romantic pieces with high collars and frills for days. She wanted to drag them all down and play dress-up, for there was no crime against pretending to be someone else… a kidnapped heiress trapped in a tower awaiting rescue… an escaped debutante who joined the carnival, only to find love with the lion tamer. She could still be Miss Havisham, and still be these other things, because if her ghosts had taught her anything, it was that the only escape to be found was within your own imagination.
She found what she’d been in search of in the trunk with the gold label, the words Amelia Cutright Bridal Trunk. This was her grandmother’s, and though she had never met her, Maureen felt a magnetic pull to the contents inside, as if they were linked through the generations. As if Amelia whispered across space and time, These are yours now, child.
Maureen had never cared so much about her family’s past as when she held it in her hands. Oh, to see the pictures! Had they wed here at Ophélie, under the ancient oaks? That seemed right. Felt right.
As luck—no fate, she didn’t believe in luck—would have it, the dress fit her as well as if she’d had it tailored for her. She squeezed it around her tiny curves, slipping her arms into the satin sleeves.
And then she hung it at the back of her closet, awaiting the perfect time.
She finished the book on December 23. In a couple hours, the guests would begin arriving for Augustus’ celebration party. The whole thing was ridiculous. Augustus was the last person on earth who would ever want such a thing, but no one in this family cared what others thought when they made decisions. Irish Colleen went about planning the whole soiree as if it were only her feelings that mattered.
Maureen imagined herself descending the staircase in her grandmother’s wedding gown, all eyes drawn to the spectacle of the Deschanel debutante swimming in ruffles and rotting hand-spun lacework.
It was a horrid idea, and it was a perfect idea. She smiled to herself, but the smile dropped from her face at the terrible realization that her only joys in life were found in hurting others.
No, she would have to miss out on the delicious shock on the guests’ faces. Her mother would corner her then and there, and the rest of her plan would be forfeit. She couldn’t risk it, not when she’d been planning it for months, and every day that passed, with the dead whispering in one ear and screaming in the other, brought her further confidence that this was the only way.
Maureen laid the old gown, which was no longer truly white after years of withering away in the attic, across her bed.
Tonight, she would wear the dress in earnest and float across Satis House, in search of the truth.
She would go where it led.
* * *
Charles leaned into the massive column on the front portico of Ophélie. He stubbed his cigarette on the heel of his shoe and turned against the old plaster, knowing he was needed inside.
He found he couldn’t make himself budge. Everyone would be there tonight, thanks to his mother. She’d invited Colin, though he was the last person Charles wanted to see. No, he’d be bringing the last person he wanted to see. And he’d have to smile and pretend he was happy for them. He’d have to endure her showing her ring to all the women who couldn’t help but be interested, whether they were actually interested or not. Men got a lot of shit for being cads, but women were the queens of deception.
Catherine Connelly would become Catherine Sullivan in 1973, and Charles couldn’t help but feel it was a move born of revenge. I don’t love him like that, she had assured him, whenever his own guilt moved to the forefront of the arrangement. He’s more like a brother. I would do anything for him, but he doesn’t have my heart.
Hindsight taunted him, reminding him he could have read her mind and discovered
her deception long before he’d given his heart away. But he’d never been very good at it, and maybe that was because he understood, deep down, if someone wanted you to know what they thought of you, they’d tell you.
Colin still didn’t know anything. He didn’t have to, because Rory had only threatened to spill if Cat didn’t cut off ties with Charles. For days, Charles agonized over the inevitable phone call or visit from Colin. He practiced what he would say, but everything came up so woefully short of anything even vaguely resembling justification.
Days passed, and then weeks, and he knew he’d never have to say anything at all.
And then Colin showed up at his doorstep, beaming a smile bigger than any Charles had ever seen him wear. He wanted to ask him in person to be his best man. He couldn’t think of anyone else, not his brothers, anyone he wanted to stand by him more.
“I never thought she’d come back. I tried everything,” Colin said, that day, a week past. “I thought for a while she’d met someone.”
The devil living inside Charles, the one who had pushed him in a single direction for most of his life, wanted so badly to tell him. How he’d fucked her until she screamed. How she felt when she came beneath him.
“I’m happy for you, man.” He’d taken this one as a quiet victory. Lying had never been his strength, but Colin bought it.
But then, why wouldn’t he? Why would he ever suspect Charles, of all people, to have been the reason she stayed away?
The sun painted the river red and orange. In an hour, the house would be all laughter and bright lights, Irish Colleen playing the role of hostess better than she’d ever played the role of mother.
On second thought, Charles lit another cigarette. He slipped the bottle of cognac out of his inner jacket pocket and broke the seal.
* * *
Maureen, still in her own clothes, moved quietly through the house, slipping past relatives, servants, invisible, as always. One by one, she changed the clocks to five past ten, the moment at which she had given up her child and surrendered herself to the fate chosen for her. The living dead.
She should be out of the house before the first of the guests arrived. She had no patience for their inevitable questions, which she would not begin to answer for the rest of the world existed on one plane, and she another. They were not on her level.
Maureen slipped into the dress for the second time. She fastened all the tiny pearl buttons herself, careful not to tug at the fabric too hard. Many hung by fraying threads, and she hadn’t mended any of them, as she should have.
She let her long, wavy hair hang free. The waves from her braids the night before had a hint of Hollywood glamour, and she admired herself a moment longer before she left her room. She was a vision, as Miss Havisham had surely been a vision when she’d first worn her own dress, only to be jilted.
Maureen took the servant’s stairs, so she could disappear out the back. Several of the staff did double takes when she floated by, but only Layla stopped her.
“Miss Maureen, you shouldn’t take that beautiful dress outside, not when it’s been raining.”
“Oh, it’s been raining? Even better!” She ran off, cackling, leaving the poor housemaid with a list of questions.
Maureen lifted the dress to keep the hem from dragging through the mud, but on second thought, let it sweep across the grass and collect whatever it may, just as Miss Havisham had not stopped her own dress from decaying as she did.
She made it across the long lawn, all the way to the hedges that shielded Ophélie from the prying eyes of passing cars. She looked both ways, twice, before crossing River Road and ascending the grass-covered levee.
Maureen reached the top. From here, the Mississippi raged to her left. Ophélie, all her acreages, all her glory, spread out in all directions to the right.
She threw her arms out and her head back and spun in lazy circles as the rain pummeled her face, her hands. It soaked her dress, and she laughed and laughed and laughed.
The storm pushed on harder, until she could pretend her tears were just raindrops, and that everything was just as it should be.
* * *
Charles went to light up another smoke when he saw the figure in white darting across the lawn from the side of the house.
He must be hallucinating. There was no way a woman in a wedding dress was running across his property. But he’d had no hallucinogens today, and not nearly enough Hennessy for alcohol to be behind the strange vision.
Charles strained to make sense of what he was seeing. Then he knew.
He knew who.
But he couldn’t fathom why.
He set the bottle on the steps and headed down the driveway.
* * *
Maureen collapsed at the dock. No ships would arrive here, not anymore. The river had been a different animal in the days the pier was built, at least that’s what her father used to say, when he was a man of flesh and bone and not a specter haunting her days and nights.
She extended a hand down toward the water, but she was nowhere close to touching the surface. The level was high today, probably from the storms. The end of the sleeve formed a lacy V over the top of her dainty hand, and she thought, oh how lovely this is. How lovely I feel.
Maureen practiced falling forward and catching herself. She gasped in delight at how close she came to tumbling into the river, which was unusually still for this time of day. Normally the passage was filled with barges and tankers en route to… wherever they went.
She remembered a picture Mr. Evers had displayed on the projector in his classroom. Most of the students passed notes during his Shakespeare lectures, and Maureen was no exception, but she shooed away the distractions when this image came up.
The greens on the banks, shrouding the lovely Ophelia, drowned of her own pain. Her dress was not so very different from the one Maureen wore now, though in her hands was wound the most vivid flora, reds and yellows and blues. Ophelia, hands turned up to receive her next life.
Maureen interpreted this to be a more symbolic death for the angelic Ophelia, who had seen too much in her life to be expected to continue as she had. Ophelia allowed the image of herself, the one seen and expected by others, to die while she, herself lived on.
It was a more hopeful ending than Miss Havisham’s, but Maureen didn’t have the heart to burn down the family mansion.
She didn’t want to die, in any case. She’d seen the dead and knew there was no peace for them, either. But there had to be another way… any way… and as she gazed down at the mucky reeds poking up from the riverbank, she saw the way.
Maureen, blinded by her tears, closed her eyes and pitched forward.
Her breath caught as strong arms caught her around the waist. Her first thought was that her ghosts had grown beyond their limitations, but then she was stumbling back, the smell of some strong liquor swirling in the air between her and her savior.
“Maureen, what the hell are you doing?” Charles demanded. He released her, but his arms stayed extended, as if expecting her to leap into the river anyway if he gave her too much freedom.
Maureen sniffled and spun in her dress, but the energy and enigma of the idea had dissolved with the first touch of reality. Her arms fell to her sides. “This is my life now.”
“What are you talking about?” He stepped as she stepped, moving with her. “Why are you out here, and what the fuck are you wearing?”
Maureen started to explain everything, but all her energy drained into the ground beneath her and she collapsed into a heap of satin and taffeta.
Charles ran his hands over his wet hair. He looked around, shook his head, and then fell down on his heels. “Come on, let’s get you back, okay?”
Maureen’s head shook furiously. She refused to look at him. “I can’t go back. I can’t go back there, or anywhere.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. He tugged at her hand and she pulled it right back, dropping it in her lap. “Augustus’ party is starting any minute now.�
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Maureen whipped her head up. “Do you think I care about that? About a party? About anything at all?”
“Shit, Maureen, do you think I do?”
The rain picked up, and with it, the wind. Charles pulled his jacket off and draped it over her head, a sad gesture. The thing was soaked. “You gonna tell me why you’re out here, in… in that?”
“I don’t have anyone for you to murder, so don’t get your hopes up.”
He smirked. He couldn’t help it. “Pity.”
“Not if you knew where the dead went.”
“I’ve never cared about any of that. Heaven. Hell. Who cares? We have no choice, either way.”
“It’s not heaven or hell you have to worry about, you damn fool.” She wiped her face with the taffeta.
“Look, we can have a philosophical discussion back at the house—”
“Stop talking to me like I’m a child! You don’t know who I am, Charles! None of you do!”
This shut him up. He ran his hand over his chin. “So, tell me.”
She glared through her tears. “Why should I?”
He lifted his shoulders. “Can you think of a good reason not to?”
“If only you knew…” She laughed, a cold, dark sound that echoed in the static air. “You’d know why I’ve never told anyone.”
“Maureen, if there’s anyone in this whole damn family who knows about secrets and bullshit, it’s yours truly.”
“This isn’t drugs and whores, Huck.”
“Hey, they’re not all whores.”
Maureen’s mouth twitched. Of all her siblings, it should have been Charles who would understand her. She thought she could have even told him about the Virgins Only Club, and his most likely response would have been to give her pointers. He didn’t stand on morals, or tradition. His honor was whatever he wanted it to be.
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