by Milly Taiden
“You’re going to hit your hand on a streetcar signs,” I admonished.
“Thanks, dad.”
A few people shot her dirty glances, but she defiantly kept the window open. We jumped off of the streetcar at Sixth and a man who had been sitting two seats behind made a big production of walking to her seat and slamming the window shut.
I put my hand on Adrienne’s shoulder in a gesture for her not to acknowledge the outburst. She obediently walked ahead of me and started down Seventh toward Coliseum.
Without sheltering leaves, the rain beat down heavier than it had in the park. In acknowledgement, Adrienne threw her arms out and spun herself around as she ran down the avenue.
“People are going to think you’re crazy!” I complained as I attempted to keep pace with her.
“Oz, your problem is you put too much stock in what other people think.” She stopped to wait. Adrienne had more energy than a child of nine and, despite my runner’s stride, it made me feel aged.
“So now you’re a psychiatrist,” I teased her again. I found great joy in bantering with her. It also allowed me to ignore comments that were probably meant to be semi-serious. “Tell me, Dr. Deschanel, what do I need to make my life complete?”
“Well…” she seemed to mull it over, squinting her eyes. Raindrops ran listlessly down her cheeks and off of the ends of her hair in huge droplets, but her affected version of concentration was undaunted. “To begin with, you really need to get married. You need a woman to keep you honest.”
“Women are overrated.”
“And suddenly you’re the expert!”
She ran on ahead of me, past Prytania and Chestnut. When I caught up to her, she was standing on my front porch, hands on her knees, bent over.
“What is this? Are we out of breath?”
She tried to reply but coughed and then laughed. “Can you please unlock the door?”
I swaggered past her, at a comfortable gait. Adrienne’s icy blue eyes glared at me as I asked, “What’s it worth to you?’
She balled up her tiny fists and emitted what could have been serious threats, had her current state of duress not been entirely comical.
I unlocked the door and she made a move to enter when I thrust my arm in front of the threshold. “Wait, clothes off first.”
“What!”
“I don’t want my floor and antique furniture to get all soaked.”
She shot me a look of defiance, ducked under my arm, and entered the house. I couldn’t help laughing.
I grabbed some clothes from the bedroom and went upstairs into my office to change. When I came back down, the familiar aroma of coffee and chicory filled the air. She was standing by the telephone table, disconcerted.
“What is it?”
“Oz, you have seventy new messages.” Adrienne looked up at me with fear in her eyes.
I tried to make light of it, but I was equally surprised. “When one has a daunting social life such as the one I lead, one cannot expect his answering machine will have tape left at the end of the day.”
“Oz, listen to the messages. Please.” She hadn’t found my joke funny and her voice was trembling. In an instant, the spell from earlier was broken, the easy peace forgotten.
I pressed the play button. The first message was dead silence, followed by heavy, raspy breaths. My immediate thought was a wrong number, or a crank call, but the next message was the same, and the next. We listened to twenty-five of these before she reached over and hit the button to erase them all.
“They’re all the same” she said decisively. Her voice still trembled. “Every one of them. Oz, who would do this?”
“I don’t know, Ade,” I told her and I didn’t. I honestly had no idea who would leave seventy messages worth of heavy breathing on my answering machine. The sheer number ruled out any possibility of a wrong number.
“You have to call the police,” she determined and picked up the phone, preparing to dial for me. “You have to tell them about this!”
If anyone should be worried, it was me. Yet she acted as if these messages were a direct attack on her.
I gently removed the phone from her hand and cradled it. “Calm down. I’m sure it’s only someone trying to pull my leg.”
“Seventy messages! Oz, that’s not a joke!”
I knew that, but I couldn’t let her get worked up about it because I wouldn’t get a lucid thought in. I had to think about this, clearly and without disruption. To do so I had to calm her fears and make them seem irrational. I hated to deceive her.
“Adrienne, I’m a lawyer. We get these kind of calls all the time.” I was lying to her and it was shameful. “People don’t like to be sued, or put in jail, believe it or not.”
Adrienne met my gaze. She knew I was misleading her, but she also realized I wasn’t going to get worked up about it in her presence.
“I’ll leave it alone for tonight,” she conceded and turned to walk toward my bedroom. “But tomorrow, you better address it. This is serious.”
I glanced back at the answering machine and turned it off. As an afterthought, I unplugged the phone. I wasn’t going to the police about this because they would do nothing except file a meaningless report and place it in a circular file. If I wanted to find out the source of the calls, I would need to do it myself.
“I made you some coffee,” she added and glanced at me from over her shoulder.
She knew I didn’t drink coffee. Well, used to know. “Thank you. Good night, Adrienne.”
***
21- Oz
Around six the next morning, I received the first of the disturbing phone calls for the day. Adrienne was still sleeping.
I picked up the phone and recognized first the dead silence, and then the heavy breathing. This time, though, I could tell it was a woman’s voice.
“Who is this?” I asked. Dial tone.
I looked at the dead line in my hand and distinctly recalled disconnecting the phone the previous night. I ducked my head under the table and saw it had been reconnected. So had the answering machine.
My heart raced, and a thousand horror sequences ran through my mind as to how this could have happened, before I thought of Adrienne. I checked the call history on my phone and confirmed at 11:58 PM the night before, she had placed a call to a number that looked familiar. I realized it was the number I had originally used to call her when I was in Abbeville. She’d waited until after I went to bed, so I wouldn’t ask any questions.
Jesse. Of course. I knew I should be relieved she let him know she was okay, so he and his family didn’t think I had kidnapped her. However, I didn’t like that she’d felt the need to do it behind my back.
Checking back through my call history, I saw the same number appear several times throughout the last week.
“So much for being her Big Hero,” I muttered, and went in to the kitchen to start some tea.
The phone rang again, and this time I made no move to answer it. I bowed my head over my cup, waiting for the voice with the death rattle to come on the machine. Instead it was the last person I expected to hear from.
“Ozzy! Pick up the phone, you ass! I know you’re home! It’s too damn early for you to be at the office, so get your ass out of bed and come talk to your old friend!”
I raced to pick up the phone before Adrienne could hear the message, pulling it into the dining room with me. “Yeah?”
“Is that any way to greet your oldest friend in the world?” I could hear people yelling and carrying on in the background behind him. It was evening in Japan, and I imagined the party was barely getting started.
“Nic, this isn’t a good time.”
“Don’t be a pussy. It’s only six in the morning!” He was talking to people around him distractedly in broken Japanese. I doubted he was truly interested in the conversation he was guilt-tripping me to participate in.
“Have you been reading the local papers?” I asked him.
“Why on earth would I do that
?” Nicolas retorted, obviously perplexed. “I didn’t call for a lecture on grass roots awareness.”
“Why did you call?”
When he answered he sounded wounded. “Can't I call you just to talk, asshole?”
“You never call just to talk.” I was tired, and worried I would wake Adrienne. I checked the door frequently.
“Actually I wanted to tell you I’m starting to wear down, Ozzy. I really think I’m starting to tire of Japan, and Mieko in particular. She’s beginning to show her age.” So that was her name, Mieko. “So what I’m getting at is that it might be my time to come on home to N’awlins.” He affected the worst Southern drawl I had ever heard. Painful to hear from a local.
I thought of Adrienne, and the last week. “Oh come on, Nic, a few weeks ago you were telling me how much you enjoyed putting your college days to shame.”
“Ozzy, you know my attention span was never very impressive. It’s time to move on.” He laughed, and I heard a woman’s voice whisper something in his ear, to which he replied again in his horrible Japanese.
“What about Europe? Paris would love someone like you,” I urged. I kept checking the door for Adrienne and tried to keep my voice low. Every time I lowered it, Nicolas would scold me to speak up.
“You haven’t seen me for four months and you’re already trying to get rid of me.” He feigned offense and made a garbled noise likely meant to simulate being stabbed in the heart. “I thought this would make you happy!”
The phone beeped. I had another call, but I didn’t answer it. At this hour, it could only be my creepy phone prankster, whoever she was. “You know I only want what’s best for you.”
“Ha! You wait, Ozzy, we will throw the party of the century at Ophélie when I return!” The crowd made a noise as if proposing a toast.
“When will that be?” If Nicolas was coming home, I had to get Adrienne up to speed. I couldn’t spring it on her when he walked in the door.
“I don’t know, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next month. But I have to go now. Cheers Ozzy!” He hung up.
I looked up to see Adrienne standing in the doorway.
“How is my brother Nicolas these days?” she asked. Seeing the look of panic on my face, she sat down beside me, removing the phone from my hands and placing it on the floor.
“Adrienne, I don’t want anymore secrets between us,” I said. My heart was heavy with remorse for her, for what she didn’t know, and what she would come to discover soon. I felt laden with the burden of being the one to undertake this job.
“I’m not upset with you, if that’s what you think.” Adrienne continued in an attempt to absolve me, “I planned to do this on my own, without your help. I was waiting for you to go back to work, but it doesn’t look like that’s happening anytime soon.”
“Don’t be a brat. I’m feeling so terrible right now. I don’t know what to do, and there is nothing funny about it. Nicolas doesn’t know you’re back, but he needs to find out soon. He’s your brother! It isn’t fair to let you walk into that not knowing anything.”
She sobered herself and put her hand over mine. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I want to. No, I need to. I need to do this for you but also for me, to remove this guilt that has nagged at me since the day I saw you at that shabby diner.” I turned her hand over in my own and looked at the small lines that ran from her fingers to her wrist. I was absolutely terrified of her reaction. “Nothing I’m going to tell you will be easy. I beg you not to hate the messenger.”
“Oz, I could never hate you.”
I asked her to pour us some tea, and I pulled up two chairs in the sitting room, by the hearth. When she returned with the cups, I took mine and she kept hers as she settled in a seat across from me. I took a deep sip and then began.
I brushed over the briefest details of her life: her birth, her family life, her interests; the superficial facts anyone could have told her. I didn’t want to tell her anything that might inhibit memories from coming on their own, or that might be different from how she remembered it. I told her a little about her father, and even less about Cordelia. She smiled when I mentioned how close she was with her sisters, and how she spent most of her time studying and doing things everyone else avoided. What I didn’t relay to her, and would not, was the part of her life that included me.
When I came to the accident, I hesitated. I told her the little I knew, and what the papers reported. Then, remembering our brunch at Commander’s, I cautiously went into more detail about the efforts the police and the firm had gone to in order to find her. I told her that, except for Nicolas, her family was gone.
Adrienne stared at me, wide-eyed, mind clearly racing to assimilate all of this new information. I wished for a moment she would react. I couldn’t bear the strained silence.
“So then it’s all true. I have no one.” Her eyes glistened.
“I don’t know how to make this easier for you, Adrienne.”
She fingered open the top two buttons on her nightgown, and with her hand she slowly pushed the top down over her shoulder, revealing a long, thin scar.
“So that is what scarred me. A car accident?” She seemed skeptical, but it was the disbelief of someone who could not remember something as significant as this. “Angelique told me it was a branch or something from the water; that it must have happened when I nearly drowned.”
Adrienne was remarkably calm for someone who had learned her entire family died, but then, she remembered nothing of them; to her, it was if they never existed anyway. I realized, with sadness, her memory loss had not given her the opportunity to go through the grieving process. When she finally remembered, the wound would be fresh. Adrienne deserved to be able to properly grieve the sisters and father she had loved and lost. I felt so sorry for her.
She finally asked me what I had been avoiding.
“I was Nicolas’ best friend,” I answered. I would not complicate her life with anything beyond that. “Still am.”
For a brief moment I thought I registered disappointment on her face, but then it was gone. “Where is Nicolas?”
“Japan. I think he’ll be home soon.”
She chuckled nervously. “Does he know about me? I mean, that I'm alive and living with you?”
“No. I… I didn’t know how to tell him. I still can’t quite believe this is real.”
The first tear slid down her cheek. She set her tea aside and moved out of her chair to kneel down before me. With my thumb, I wiped the droplet away as she looked up at me with her big, blue eyes and bravely asked:
“Will you take me to Ophélie?”
On the drive to Ophélie, I called the house and dismissed Richard and Condoleezza. Having lovingly served the family for decades, they had many questions, but explanations would come later. This visit would not be a social one.
The calls which previously plagued my home phone also began on my cell. Adrienne’s fear resurfaced as she correctly interpreted the look on my face. My cell phone number was not a number I shared with people I wasn’t close to.
The calls came first every ten minutes on the drive out, and then every minute. The phone rang so much Adrienne finally yelled, “Off, turn it off!
“Oz, you have to do something about this. This is harassment!” The trembling voice that moved me the night before returned. “You can’t ignore this!”
“I don’t know what to do,” I admitted.
“Talk to your father. He will know what to do.” She said this so matter-of-factly I laughed, but she was not jesting. She repeated herself, twice.
“He will tell me to do the same thing you’re telling me to do.”
“Which is exactly why you need to talk to him,” she emphasized.
We pulled off of the Expressway and within minutes we were on River Road. As we neared Ophélie, she seemed to realize its closeness, and was silent for the remainder of the ride.
When I saw the large white mansion come into view, I felt my breath catch in
my throat. It was no different than it was when I made the drive out on the way to the bayou, but now it seemed to come alive with Adrienne’s presence.
As I pulled into the long driveway that led to the house, Adrienne began to fidget nervously beside me.
“Well, here we are,” I said to her, as she climbed out of the car without a word. She looked up at the galleries that wrapped around the house, and then down again at the gardens flanking the driveway. She tilted her head sideways, fixing her eyes there for some time. I didn’t say a word to disturb her. I was in my own daze.
I imagined Jesse and Adrienne living there, together, and I felt sick. He was not one of us, this Jesse, and I didn’t care how nice he was, or that he'd saved Adrienne’s life, if that was even true. I had come to not trust anything she had been told about how she came to live in the bayou.
Adrienne turned to face the house. “Do you have a key?” she asked, shyly.
“No, but they always leave the back door open.” Yet I didn’t know if they did or not. I only knew Charles and his brood had, when they were alive and living here. “No one would dare break into Ophélie.”
We tried and it worked. Adrienne didn’t wait for me to close the door; she was already ahead of me, moving through the kitchen.
Ophélie was certainly the largest house I had ever been in, and so her awed reaction was satisfying. She slipped off her sandals and walked barefoot across the old, cypress floorboards.
Adrienne wandered, gawking, from the dining room to the double parlor and then into the receiving room. I respected her silence by keeping my thoughts to myself.
The staff kept the house exactly the way Charles and his family had left it. In the parlor, his reading glasses sat on the table next to the chaise lounge. Nathalie’s book lay on the opposite table, still folded out to mark her place.
We went up the stairs, to the second floor and the bedrooms. Ten of the twenty bedrooms were on this floor, five more on the bottom floor, and on the rest on the third and final floor. The third floor rooms were the suite Charles and Cordelia occupied during the course of their marriage.
