by Rhodi Hawk
Zenon’s current state was the result of Madeleine’s first awkward attempts at pigeonry. It had happened after Madeleine found out that Zenon had committed murder. She had gone to the police, testified against him, and afterward he’d sworn he would kill her. His briar skills were already honed sharp—much more than hers—and she’d understood that the only way to escape him was to kill him first. And so, she’d used her newfound skill of pigeonry to send a fellow prisoner after Zenon in the facility where he was incarcerated. What Madeleine had intended was that Zenon should die. Instead, the other prisoner she’d used to attack Zenon had broken his spine without killing him. An implanted thought often changed once inside a “pigeon’s” mind.
As a result of the attack, Zenon would live out the rest of his life like this, staring at the ceiling, unable to speak. Possibly not even able to think.
The stark hospital room bore no sign that Zenon existed as anything other than an extension of that institutional bed. No personal effects. Not even the quilt she’d once brought him. Even the thick curtains were drawn as though natural sunlight might bear some contaminant.
Madeleine opened the curtains and let the sun fill the room, washing over the sterile fluorescent lighting and causing her to squint. She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes for a moment. She’d at least managed to change her clothes since dealing with the matter at the levee and then going into the briar with Severin. By the time she’d returned to her body, Ethan had already finished talking to the police and had brought her home. She must have been in a rambling state before she came to. Hated to think of Ethan seeing her like that all the time.
A short blond nurse appeared in a shapeless pink uniform that looked like it was made from the same material as the bedsheets.
“Hi there!” the nurse called out as if addressing an auditorium full of people instead of one single woman and a catatonic man. “Looks like we have a visitor today! You family?”
Madeleine shrugged. “Half-sister.”
“That’s real good. I’m Vessie. We’re taking real good care of your brother here.”
Madeleine nodded as Vessie reached for the IV hook and took down an empty plastic bag.
“He looks like he’s smiling,” Madeleine said.
“Probably because he’s happy to see you. He wishes you’d come to visit more often.”
“I doubt that.”
“He does! Everyone loves visitors.”
Madeleine took a step closer to Zenon as Vessie replaced the empty IV bag with a full one. That ghost of a smile on him—and it wasn’t an illusion—was probably just a response to what he saw in his own private dream world. Maybe he was even somewhere in the briar tunnels. Unlike Madeleine, Zenon might actually like it in there.
She narrowed her eyes and touched his hair just above his right ear, pulling off a curled, dried bit of something. “What’s this?”
Vessie widened her grin. “Oh, ha ha! Looks like a leaf!”
“He’s confined to his bed. Where would he have ever been near a leaf?”
Vessie shrugged. “I thought he needed a little fresh air.”
“You took him out?”
“Just around the grounds.”
“Isn’t that against policy?”
Vessie’s grin slipped a fraction. “That’s just red tape. If it’s in the patient’s best interest, hon, they’ll look the other way. I’m just trying to give him the best care possible.”
Madeleine looked back toward the window. Cars in the parking lot, on the streets. People.
Vessie was folding back Zenon’s sheet to reveal his legs had grown thinner and paler since he’d become bedridden.
“You can’t take him out again, ever,” Madeleine said.
Vessie looked up. “What?”
“If he weren’t in this hospital he’d be incarcerated, awaiting trial for multiple murders. I’m serious about this. He can’t go out.”
Vessie’s lips parted, her brown eyes wide and livid. “You can’t be serious!”
“I’m very serious.”
The nurse gawked for a moment, then flung her arm in the direction of Zenon’s shrinking body. “Well just look at him! He can’t even go to the bathroom on his own! What do you think he’s gonna to do, rob a bank?”
“I understand that you meant well. But if you take him out again I’m going to have to report it.”
Vessie huffed, drawing herself up a notch. “Fine.” Her hand swept up and tucked a cropped blond curl behind her ear and then reached down to seize Zenon’s leg. She started moving it in bicycle circles.
Madeleine’s cell phone buzzed inside her bag, and she turned toward the window to take the call. It was Ethan.
“How you holdin up, sweetheart?”
“I’m alright. I’m here at the hospital in Zenon’s room.”
“Good God, baby, why’d you go there of all places?”
“Chloe insisted on meeting me here.”
Silence, then, “You couldn’t just get some sleep and wait until tomorrow to talk to her?”
“No, considering what happened at the levee last night, I think it’s important to talk to her immediately.”
“But they got the old woman, Alice.”
“Yes, but…”
She glanced over her shoulder where Vessie was pressing Zenon’s knee to his chest and then straightening it again, Zenon’s ghost smile still in place. Vessie laid down the leg with exaggerated care and moved to the other side of the bed.
Madeleine lowered her voice and turned back toward the window. “You know good and well there was something else going on. Something about the way that woman Alice acted.”
The windowsill was dotted with husks of flies. Two live ones were popping against the glass. In the reflection, Madeleine caught Vessie watching her. She was slowly rotating Zenon’s arm.
It occurred to Madeleine that Ethan had been silent a beat too long.
“Something wrong, baby?” she asked.
He said, “Well, I’d checked in with your buddy Vinny on the task force like you asked me to. Said they had two other murders last night. Unrelated. Both suspects confessed on the spot and got taken into custody.”
She considered this. “In New Orleans? That doesn’t seem that unusual.”
He paused. “Yeah, well, Vinny said the other two suspects were homeless folks, too. So were the victims. Homeless on homeless, three totally unrelated in the same night. No fights, nobody stole anything from anybody else, no motivation anywhere to be found. That’s never happened before.”
Madeleine tightened her grip on the cell phone. “Oh.”
“Didn’t want to tell you just yet, but I figured you’d be hot if I didn’t.”
“I appreciate it.”
Ethan cleared his throat. “Well, St. Jo’s is doing a roundup, trying to bring everyone in off the streets and keep’m safe.”
“Good.”
“You gonna get some rest once you finish up with ole Chloe?”
“No baby, I’ll just wait til tonight.”
He grunted. “What are you gonna do?”
“Better head over to St. Jo’s, see if I can help with the outreach.”
“Now listen up, Madeleine, you ain’t gonna be no damn good to no damn body if you don’t get a little sleep.”
“Not going to require too many cognitive reasoning skills. Just bringing some hard luck folks in off the street.”
“Any way I can talk you out of it?”
“’Fraid not.”
“Figures.” He sighed, then, “I’ll go with you.”
“No need, baby, you got too much work to do there at the clinic.”
“And let you run around blight buildings by yourself so you can gather up all the street folks?”
“I—I just figure you got labs.”
“I knew you’d be hardheaded and I already cleared my schedule.”
She chewed her lip. Bringing Ethan along could either be a good thing or a bad thing. But bene
ath it all, she’d be relieved to have him. “Alright then.”
“Meet you at St. Jo’s in an hour.”
“Sounds good. And Ethan?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She hung up. She could still see Vessie working Zenon’s arm in the window’s reflection. Those two other killers—she wondered if they were people she knew. And she wondered if she knew the victims. Either could have been friends of her father, or former patients from when she’d still carried on her practice at Tulane. Now she was living off what was left of her dwindling estate while she volunteered for St. Jo’s and tried to figure out how to regroup after her lost career. It had been almost two years but it seemed like a whole other life—before the river devil had made it impossible to be a psychologist.
Before she’d used the pigeon game to strike Zenon down.
Before Daddy had died from an overdose in an abandoned building in Iberville.
Before before before. So much had changed in such a short time.
Vessie laid down Zenon’s arm and picked up his other leg.
Madeleine thought of those black woods at dawn. That clicking sound.
* * *
“MADELEINE.”
She turned to see her great-grandmother, Chloe LeBlanc, entering through the doorway.
Chloe’s iron hair was puffed into a knot at the nape of her neck, and she gazed at Madeleine with black eyes and ancient dark skin, a paper napkin rumpled in her fist. Despite the heat, a white cotton quilt lay folded over her knees. Pushing her wheelchair was her attendant, Oran, an albino black man.
Madeleine looked back at the bed where Zenon lay, and saw that each time Vessie raised his leg to complete the bicycle rotation she exposed his genitals.
“Vessie, could you please continue his exercises another time?”
Vessie’s eyes snapped, her lips in a tight white line. She opened her hands with a melodramatic flourish, dropping Zenon’s leg as if it were a rotten ham bone. The room was quiet. Vessie moved for the door but then halted.
“Likes’m closed,” she said, and darted back to the window, snapping the curtains shut.
The room went dark. Where the two panels met, a white line of sunlight glowed.
Madeleine, Chloe, and Oran watched as Vessie strode out of the room. Oran shifted on his leg as though he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.
Chloe thrust a finger at the blanket on her knees and Oran took it and unfolded it over Zenon.
Madeleine recognized it. “That’s the quilt I’d brought him. The one from the cottage on Bayou Black.”
“We cleaned it,” Chloe said.
Madeleine took a corner of it and helped Oran spread it over Zenon, pattern side down. Oran moved quickly as though he wished to get it over with.
He spoke to Chloe in a whisper. “Shall I wait outside, then?”
“No. You stay here,” Chloe replied, then said to Madeleine, “What is this you must discuss? You’ve thought again about learning your devil?”
Madeleine eyed her but didn’t answer immediately. The two flies vibrated in the space between the window and the blackout curtains.
“Not really,” Madeleine said. “We have a bargain now. Severin and I. Seems to be working.”
Chloe’s face drew to a sneer, and before she could say anything, Madeleine added, “I want to know if there are any others. Something happened last night. Led me to believe that someone was using the pigeon game.”
Chloe was watching her with fascination. “Is this true? How do you know?”
“I can’t be sure. It’s why I wanted to talk to you. Do you know of anyone with these abilities, outside our family?”
Chloe spread her hands. “The only two living are right here in this room.”
Chloe didn’t know about little Cooper, Marc’s son, of course. Madeleine let her gaze fall on Zenon. She didn’t like that smile in his eyes. She wished he’d close them and go to sleep.
Chloe said, “Madeleine. You pretend so much. Why you come to me with stupid questions? You can learn answers to much better questions, in a way that no one else in the entire world can. You alone can exist in the briar with your river devil. This is a gift you squander.”
“Right now I just want to know if there are others like our bloodline.”
“Others! Stupid! No, girl, our family is all there is. You still don’t see? This is why it is powerful. If others could do what you can it would undermine you. Outside your bloodline, the lumens are the only ones who can tap the briar. That is why they weaken you.”
Chloe leaned forward. “You really want to know? You learn the ways of your devil, yanh? The river devil shows you answers even to stupid questions.”
Madeleine listened, refusing to be fazed. The bargain with Severin was working well but Madeleine knew that if she let her frustration escalate, Severin would come looking for her.
“This is serious, Chloe. There was a murder last night.”
“Listen, Madeleine, you know I can help you. We start with the stupid question, yanh? ‘Are there others,’ you ask. So. Tell me, what do you know now?”
“What do I know?”
Chloe said, “Tell me everything in your mind now.”
Madeleine blinked at her, thinking. “I was speaking to Alice, a homeless woman who’d killed a man, but she didn’t seem to be in charge of her own body and mind. And—”
“Ah, see! Look how you hold back. You talk about something that does not matter.”
“It does matter! Chloe, I—”
“Listen! It does not matter because you have already given care to this thought. You hold a magnifying glass too long and it only serves to burn the object. You drop it, and look at the rest. Forget this homeless woman.”
“I just don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
Chloe said, “What is in your mind right now, right here, as we stand in this room?”
Madeleine sighed. Still unclear what Chloe was getting at, she gave it a shot. She stepped outside her thoughts and backward-examined them. So many things there, not the half of which she cared to expose to the likes of Chloe.
Madeleine said, “Alright. I don’t like that nurse. I don’t like the look on Zenon’s face. I heard a clicking noise this morning and I can’t get it out of my head. There are dead flies in the window.”
“That’s better,” Chloe said, and waved at Oran.
He moved across to the window where the flies were, seeming to be relieved at having a task to fill. Madeleine stepped back.
Chloe said, “You are not telling everything in your mind, Madeleine. I can see there is more that is hidden.”
Madeleine did not meet her gaze.
Chloe said, “But you do not have to. Not this time. You have taken a look yourself.”
Oran was running his finger along the window track. The two living flies were buzzing and bouncing off the window, too sluggish to notice him. He retrieved the last of the dead flies from the sill and then closed a fist around the two that were still bobbing. Madeleine watched, repulsed.
Chloe said, “Now, back to the stupid question, ‘Are there others like your bloodline?’ Does it feel the same? Does this question matter to you so much?”
Madeleine threw an exasperated scowl at her. “Yes. It matters!”
But as soon as she’d said it she realized it wasn’t so.
Chloe was right. Madeleine was posing a trumped-up question. She wasn’t really looking for others like herself, not at this moment. The heart of the matter was something else. It formed a stone of dread in her stomach, and perhaps she’d been trying to deflect focus.
“Throw them away, Oran, and wash your hands,” Chloe said.
He obeyed.
Madeleine said, “It’s just that when I found the woman who’d done the killing, she recognized me even though I didn’t know her.”
Chloe sagged as if Madelei
ne had just greatly disappointed her. “You cannot let it go, eh?”
Madeleine said, “And the woman, Alice, said something about using Shalmut next time. Not sure what she meant by that.”
“You are so stubborn.”
“I was with her for a while. I didn’t exactly conduct a thorough examination, but aside from slight dissociative tendencies, she didn’t show any signs of dementia.”
Chloe waved a hand. “You always talk like a doctor of the mind, Madeleine, but you know nothing. I can help you manage your devil and learn the briar.”
“I’ve been managing on my own.”
“Ah! So, how long before your river devil takes you so deep into the briar that you don’t know where you are anymore? What will you do, hope your man can keep you on a leash?”
Madeleine balled her fists at her sides.
Oran turned away and hesitated, then shuffled toward the doorway and leaned against the wall, his golden orange hair glowing beneath the direct light from the recessed fixture. He looked like he wanted to break from the room.
Madeleine said, “We’ve worked out a schedule. Severin only comes during certain windows of time, and I give her my full attention when she does. After that, she leaves me alone so I can function in the real world.”
“Oh, you believe that, do you? Tell me, Madeleine, do you really think that river devil will continue to honor your bargain? How long do you have before you’re at her mercy?”
Madeleine frowned. “I don’t know that I have a choice.”
“Of course you have a choice! You let me help you. I have watched so many generations fall away to madness. The only one who never went mad was him.” Chloe waved at Zenon. “He kept sharp. He let me guide him.”
“He was a murderer. And he tried to kill me, too, if you recall.”
Madeleine looked down at Zenon and saw the lightness had finally disappeared from his eyes. “She took him outside. That nurse who was in here. Took him out for fresh air.”
The old woman said nothing. She coughed, bringing something forward from her lungs, and spat into her paper napkin.
