by Rhodi Hawk
But the rest of the plantationers seemed oblivious to the significance of all of this, and had only gathered to enjoy the spectacle of seeing all four children plus Francois riding around in the automobile.
A few children were walking alongside the slow-moving Ford. Patrice itched to look over her shoulder into the rumble seat to make absolutely sure that the dead man was concealed. Maybe when Rosie and Gil were hopping in and out, they might have upset the blankets that hid the stranger. But she didn’t dare tear her eyes from the road.
Eunice walked up alongside the Ford and was pulling something—a necklace, it looked like—over her head. Patrice felt like every muscle in her body had tensed to stone as she gripped the wheel and eased the lever. Eunice leaned over and slipped the necklace over Patrice’s head while she drove, then kissed her cheek.
“Go on now!” Francois was shouting at everyone.
Patrice hadn’t dared to so much as glance at Eunice when she’d put the necklace over her head. Even now, Patrice couldn’t say whether it was made of silver or gold or string. Or whether Eunice was now still watching or was walking back to her cottage. Nothing but the steering wheel and the road, which looked like a death combination if ever there was any.
They rumbled down the allée of pecans, Francois coaxing Patrice to accelerate the gas lever a bit more, more. It felt like every leaf and frog and blade of grass in all of Terrefleurs was turning to watch them go. And yet Patrice couldn’t look. She saw only the road.
Such was the way she left her home.
twenty
NEW ORLEANS, NOW
THEY WERE DRIVING TOWARD the intersection of Tchoupitoulas and Napoleon, and in her mind Madeleine was turning over the situation with Bo. She took out the paper Mare had given her and punched Esther’s number into her cell phone.
Ethan said, “It ain’t even been half an hour since we left. Maybe y’oughtta let her cool off.”
Madeleine glanced at him. The call was already giving over to voice mail. She considered hanging up but when the beep came, she stammered something out: “Please call back” and “It’s an unusual situation,” and she left her number. The phone felt limp in her hand.
Ethan shook his head.
Madeleine said suddenly, “We can’t go home.”
“We can’t?”
“No, they’ll find us. Please just pull off somewhere and let me think a minute.”
Ethan frowned but did as she asked, pulling the Lexus down a side road.
“Who’s gonna find us?” he asked.
Madeleine cut her eyes toward him and then at the road again. It had gone bumpy with potholes. “I don’t know. I think we might have led them straight to Bo.”
He pulled past a gated drive with a sign that read RESTRICTED ACCESS and kept going until the road ended in an industrial wharf. Freight containers crowded in on tracks along the waterfront. He parked along cyclone fencing in a spot where they could still see the river between two rusted freight cars.
“Why’d you stop here?” she asked.
“Lady says pull over, I got to oblige.”
“But, here?”
“What, you were thinking somewhere that serves café au lait?”
Despite herself, Madeleine chuckled, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I guess it doesn’t matter. I just need to think this through.”
“Why?”
“Because I gotta figure it out.”
“But why?”
She looked at him.
He said, “Why figure it out? What’s to figure?”
“This isn’t going to stop unless we do something. That little boy’s life is in danger.”
He pursed his lips in feigned bewilderment and for a moment it made him look like Robert Mitchum. “I don’t know, baby blue, I think we just done all we can.”
“Zenon’s fixated on Bo!”
“True. And there’s still nothing we can do about it.”
She said, “I think by tracking Bo down to that trailer park, we led Zenon straight to him.”
Ethan shook his head. “I don’t buy that. Zenon’s got his own river devil plus whatever else is crawling around in the briar with him, and he’s spendin a lot more time in the briar than out of it these days. Those river devils can find anyone they want to find and you know it. Hell, you’re even trying to avoid letting Severin locate Marc’s kid.”
He was right, of course. She felt the frown deepen around her eyes.
He took her hand and kissed it. “You think I don’t care what happens to Bo Racer?”
“Of course not.”
“So alright, then. This might be one of those situations where you gotta look away for a little while. Let your subconscious take over.”
“You sound like Chloe.”
“Well she ain’t always wrong. Let the other half of your brain go to work a while. Get your mind off it, and then boom: The answer’s right there.”
She fell silent as she watched the stratus clouds fill with golden light.
“Look on over there,” he said, pointing west toward a stack of shipping containers that rose several stories high.
Above the rail cars, Madeleine could see what looked like the top of a building, only it was gliding toward them. A ship on the Mississippi. The trains in the foreground gave it the illusion of being a kind of strange land craft—white railing and flags and a spinning sonar device all gliding along as though it were a penthouse on roller skates. Then it came into full view through the gap between the rail cars and both Ethan and Madeleine drew in. It was enormous.
“Come on,” he said, and was out of the car and striding around to open her door before she’d even unclipped her seat belt.
“Ethan, what are you—”
“Just come on, baby.”
He tugged her over weedy pavement until he found a section of the cyclone fence that had toppled and was lying flat, then helped her over it. She looked back where the RESTRICTED ACCESS sign had been and shook her head. For all his polish and upbringing, Ethan liked to take rules in stride.
Shipping containers were lined along the tracks and then beyond, stacked like walls of Pez candies. Security didn’t seem to be a major point of concern in this corner of the wharf. She and Ethan passed an enclave beneath a rusted railcar with an empty bottle of cheap gin and a stack of magazines. A view of the river. Judging from the look of the paper, someone had been camping there as recently as the past few days. Someone who was probably at St. Jo’s right now.
She said, “Ethan, what are you going to do if I really do lose my mind?”
With his gaze holding straight ahead he said, “Hook you up to my car battery with jumper cables.”
“Ethan, seriously—”
“Stop. Just stop, baby. We got a beautiful sunset here and you gonna miss it.”
She looked ahead. He was right. On many levels.
He squeezed her hand. “You know, there are people in Malaysia, sea nomads, who can hold their breath for a very long time. Like, seven minutes.”
“That so?”
Her gaze dropped to her shoes as she stepped across the hardpan. She’d been so caught up in Bo and Zenon she’d barely given the underwater breathing phenomenon much thought.
He said, “When I saw you in that bathtub like that, I figured, ‘next thing she gonna do is sprout a damned mermaid tail.’”
She laughed at the thought.
He gave her hand a tighter squeeze. “You’re like that. A magical, mythical creature. Beautiful.”
She looked up into his face and saw no intention of flattery. It made her smile.
He said, “Truth is, we humans don’t really know what we’re capable of. A runner breaks a world record and then suddenly other runners can match that same pace. Just needed someone to prove it could be done.”
“That’s true,” she said.
“This whole business with that briar world of yours, it just seems you get a shortcut on evolution.”
They neared the river and it
smelled like tar softening in the sun. The golden light in the clouds had already gone over to peach, and it reflected in shimmering stars on the Mississippi’s surface. The ship was turning in toward a pier now, a horizontal skyscraper with massive bay doors on the hull big enough for semis to drive through. Ro-ro, they called them, for the kind of roll-on, roll-off cargo they carried.
“Got a kind of an industrial beauty to it,” Ethan said.
“Mm-hmm.”
She felt small. Everything else seemed so massive—the ship, the walls of containers, the horizontal stretch of the Mississsippi, the endless sky.
He put his arm around her and she leaned into him, and they breathed the heavy river breeze together, watching the ship dock.
He said, “I want you to marry me, Madeleine.”
Her spine straightened. They both kept their eyes fixed in the direction of the ro-ro vessel, but Madeleine was no longer seeing it.
She said, “Marry?”
“Yeah, marry me. You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
She had. Distantly, fearfully. She felt his eyes on her, but she kept watching the ship.
She said, “It feels almost like we’re married already. We spend nearly every night together.”
“Nearly ain’t enough for me anymore. I don’t want to go back and forth between my place and your place, I want our place. I want us to move in together. Now. Right away. And then, aw hell, lemme do this right.”
And then to her dismay—because at that point he was practically holding her up—he let go of her and got down on his knee right there on the hardpan, and reached into a pocket for a small black box which he opened for her.
She was forced to look at him now. Couldn’t keep staring at the ship. And she had to stand on her own without leaning on him. Ironic that a proposal to unite forced her to both face him and stand strong on her own.
He said, “Madeleine LeBlanc, will you marry me?”
A thousand thoughts were ricocheting through her head. Not thoughts; worries. But she did her best to push past them and answer Ethan’s question.
“Yes.” The word tumbled out heavy and flat.
Ethan stared at her a moment, then started to laugh. Hard.
“What?” She was beginning to feel silly.
His body was quaking so hard by now that she worried he might drop that ring.
He shoved the box into her hands and doubled over fully with his palms on the packed earth, laughing even harder, his otherwise deep voice going high pitched like a female.
“Ethan!” She grabbed him by the collar and yanked him to his feet.
He wiped his eye and said, “Good God, baby, you could give an ole boy a complex. You make it sound like you’re talking to the automated system on a customer service call. ‘Are you calling about your bill? Answer clearly, yes or no.’”
She grinned. “I was just trying to focus.”
“Well you focused alright. ‘Yes!’ Lord have mercy.”
She laughed with him, then grabbed him by the neck and kissed him hard enough to shut him up. He smelled like sweat. His arms pulled her in closer and he felt strong and sturdy. He made everything seem so easy. Or maybe she just made things seem difficult.
“Well, woman, you gonna put it on or what?”
She pulled the ring out of the box and slipped it, shaky, over her ring finger. It made it as far as the knuckle and then stopped.
“We’ll have to get it sized,” he said, and started to pull it off.
“Not so fast!”
She shoved it back to the knuckle and held it up to the light so she could admire how the evening sun glittered in the stone. It was a beautiful round diamond on a platinum band, simple and elegant, not too garish and, bless him, not too small. Looking at it made her feel girly in a way she’d never been, or hadn’t seen herself as being capable of. Lots of women cared about rings and she’d never been one of them. Until now.
Ethan was telling her that he’d been planning to do this last night, over dinner, but with all that happened they never made it to dinner. So when they pulled in here he’d decided not to put it off a moment longer. She tilted the ring this way and that without listening to him, until the words “hardheaded woman” pierced through and caused her to lift her gaze.
“What?” she asked.
“You know good and well I’ve been trying to propose to you for a long time. You always find a way to thwart me.”
She tried to tune him out again and went back to staring at the ring.
He said, “We need to get it sized, Madeleine. You just gonna lose it.”
She knew it was true. Reluctantly, she slipped it off her finger and put it back in the box.
He put it in his pocket and said, “So the other thing. I want you to move in with me, sooner rather than later.”
“What, just get rid of my flat above the flower shop?”
“We can live above there instead if you want.”
She said, “No, not necessarily, I’m just trying to think this through. My place was never meant to be anything but a temporary home. It’s an industrial zone—too loud. I was going to … But I can’t go to your place! No pets in your building.”
“We’ll sneak Jasmine in.”
“Ethan!”
“Come on, she ain’t a pet. She’s a bottle rocket disguised as a Jack Russell.”
“You can’t just ignore the building covenants and regulations, Ethan.”
“Covenants and regulations? Honey, listen to yourself. You’re getting caught up in details. We’ll figure it all out later. I love you.”
The thoughts tumbled inside her: What if she got to wandering more? What if her mind vanished into the briar, like so many of her family, and left only a jabbering fool behind? He’d be seeing her at her worst. But Ethan knew all that. He was walking in with eyes wide open.
A sudden, deep horn blast came from the ship, and they both jumped.
Madeleine put her head on his shoulder. “You sure you want—all this?”
“Baby blue, it ain’t even a matter of want. I can’t stand to be without you. You’re the best part of everything.”
She felt a smile that came from somewhere deep within. They turned back to face the water. A flock of gulls cried out and lifted in unison from the near bank, veering on a diagonal so that the sun projected its colors onto their underbellies like a stretching, living movie screen.
And then: boom. A distant realization; a hatching of an idea.
She could divert Zenon’s attention away from Bo. Zenon, in his new isolation, wanted to groom her as a kind of warrior just like himself. Instead of standing by to protect Bo, she could find a way to make Zenon focus on her. She had a chance against him. She could fool him.
She leaned closer into Ethan. No point in telling him until she had a more concrete plan. They’d just decided to get married and no way was she going to ruin this moment. Bo was safe for now, at least.
“Hunter or prey,” Zenon had said. “If you don’t hunt, I’ll kill you myself,” he’d said. The thought made her mouth go dry.
She dashed away the tightness in her throat and promised herself not to worry about it until the idea had jelled on its own. Worry was a false enterprise. Like panic, it never helped.
twenty-one
BOUTTE, 1927
AS THEY TRAVELED ALONG the bumpy road, Patrice became conscious of things she wished she’d done before leaving Terrefleurs. For one, she wished she’d double-wrapped her breasts, because the car moved like a motorized pecan-tree shaker. Relentlessly. She’d gone so sore.
And she wished she’d touched the piano—just once, before she’d left, taken the ivory keys under her fingers.
She wished she could have bid farewell to Tatie Bernadette, and a proper one to dear Eunice.
She wished she’d taken at least one of the dolls Papa had carved for her—
Her thoughts stopped dead. Because it dawned on her …
Patrice hadn’t packed a s
ingle doll. But she hadn’t packed a single anything. She hadn’t packed.
She hadn’t packed!
All that fretting over Rosie’s terrible packing job and Gil’s inability to do so, but she’d never gotten around to doing it for herself.
“What’re you doin?” Trigger called over the motor from the other side of Francois.
Beneath her, the Ford choked itself out and just rolled. She must have let it slow to nothing without realizing it. The silence that rushed in after the roaring motor was so tangible it felt like cotton in her ears. She squeezed the lever for gas but it was already too late.
Patrice found the brake and stopped the dead roll.
“Eh?” Francois said, waking from sleep.
“Where are we?” Marie-Rose said from the rumble seat, and next to her, Gil asked, “Why’d we stop, hon?”
Patrice said, “I forgot…”
And let it die. No use telling the others that she’d failed to pack her belongings because they couldn’t well turn around and get them. Tatie would be home by now and she’d never let Patrice or the others leave Terrefleurs, even if it meant locking them in the cellar. Sure, the LeBlanc children may be able to fight off one of their mother’s murderous thugs. But they had no chance against Tatie Bernadette when she was in a fit.
The clothes that Patrice wore were all that she had now. Nothing else.
Patrice licked her lips and pulled her hands from the steering column. “I … I didn’t mean to let it stop.”
Her fingers had gone stiff from all that gripping. Francois blinked and looked around as though he couldn’t figure why he was riding around in a Ford with the four children. But then he paused, his gaze dropping to just below and behind him where the dead stranger lay buried under all the luggage plus Gil’s and Rosie’s buttocks.
Finally, Francois said, “Turn here.”
Patrice looked to see a break in the trees that could hardly be called a turn. “Here?”
