Bayou, Whispers from the Past: A Novel

by Lauren Faulkenberry

  Jack shot me a look that made me cringe. I didn’t want to be Toph when he came back.

  “We brought you a sponge cake with chocolate frosting,” Kate said.

  “Isn’t that delightful,” Buck said, his tone lightening and the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes crinkling. “Let’s give it a taste.”

  Jack eyed me wearily as Kate and I went into the kitchen.

  Kate cut a slice of cake and said, “Jack looks like he wants to murder that Toph kid.”

  “I hope for his sake he doesn’t come back.” I took the plate out to Buck, now semi-reclined with an afghan spread over him.

  Jack pulled his cell phone from his pocket and walked onto the porch to make a call. Through the screen door, I heard him say he’d be late, that there was a family emergency.

  When he came back inside, his face was stern. “I’ll stay here with him until Josie and Lucille get back.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “We’ll all stay.”

  Buck shoveled the cake into his mouth, giving Jack a tired look. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “This is delicious, darlin’. But I should probably have one more helping to be sure.”

  There was no use in arguing with him, so we just stayed and talked until he nodded off to sleep. Before long, he was snoring, his belly heaving up and down under the afghan.

  Kate and I stayed in the kitchen so we could talk without waking Buck. Jack sat in the living room, keeping guard. He had a book in his lap, but each time I looked in on him, he was staring at Buck, as if calculating breaths and heartbeats.

  I made some coffee and brought him a cup.

  “Thanks, cher.” He took the mug from me. “You know, you and Kate could take the Jeep and go back. I can stay until Josie and Lucille get home.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’d rather be here with you.”

  He smiled then, and nodded toward Buck. “You think we should have taken him to the hospital?”

  “I think he’s OK. He’s probably just tired.”

  “He did eat about a pound of cake.”

  Buck snored and shifted in the recliner.

  A car pulled up in the driveway, and I bristled. I hoped it wasn’t Toph, because I was sure Jack wanted to lay into him. With the slam of a car door, Jack was up on his feet, parting the curtains at the window.

  He followed me into the kitchen, where Kate was reading the newspaper. She glanced up as we heard a key in the lock.

  The door opened, and Lucille stepped inside with a grocery bag in one arm. I let out a sigh, and Lucille jumped as she saw us.

  She set the bag on the counter. “What are y’all doing here?”

  Jack leaned against the kitchen island, his arms folded over his chest. “We need to talk,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. Kate dropped the paper and walked past me toward the living room. “I’ll just be in here for a while,” she whispered.

  “Your boyfriend,” Jack said. His voice was low, but the roughness of it still set me on edge. “He left Buck here all by himself, and then he fell in the bathroom and scratched himself up.”

  “What?” Her voice pierced the air like a dart.

  “I found your father crumpled on the bathroom floor,” he said. “And there’s no telling how long he was there. He made it sound like it had just happened, but you know how hard it is for him to get up now. He could have been there for hours.”

  Her lip trembled. “Is he OK? Is he here?”

  “He’s lucky he didn’t knock himself unconscious,” Jack said. “Or maybe he did, and he won’t tell me that, either.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, moving toward the living room.

  “Don’t go in there just yet. I want to talk to you first.”

  “Is it a concussion?”

  Jack frowned. “He says he didn’t hit his head. I’ll tell you what to look out for, but that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

  “Let me just see him.” She tiptoed over to where Buck sat watching TV with Kate.

  “Hey, kid,” he said to her.

  “You OK, Pop?”

  “I’m fine. Just tripped, is all.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, and stepped back inside the kitchen. She wiped her fingers over her eyes, brushing away tears.

  “He insisted I go with Mom today,” she said.

  “He told me,” Jack said.

  Lucille peered back through the doorway to the living room. “Where’s Toph?”

  Jack snorted. “How should I know? He just took off. Didn’t even tell Buck where he was going.”

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “Not long enough,” Jack growled. “I don’t want him coming back here.”

  Lucille sighed and sat down at the bar. “I’ll talk to him. This won’t happen again.”

  Jack’s jaw was set in a hard line. “You’re damn right it won’t. I don’t want that guy setting another foot in this house. He’s trouble, and you know it. He can’t be trusted.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lucille said. “He said he’d stay until I got back.”

  “He’s not staying here any more,” Jack said.

  I frowned at him, and he shot me a look that made me reconsider saying anything. I took a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water.

  “I can’t just kick him out,” Lucille said. She was crying harder now.

  “Why not?” Jack said. “He’s a spoiled little shit that doesn’t care about anybody but himself. Honestly, Luce, you can do so much better without even trying. What are you doing wasting your time with this guy?”

  Her head dropped. I shook my head at Jack. He ignored me.

  I set the water in front of her and placed my hand on her shoulder. Her body trembled as she fought back sobs.

  “If you don’t tell him to leave, I will,” Jack said. “And I won’t ask nicely.”

  Lucille’s gaze had shifted past us, to some point we couldn’t see. She inhaled sharply, as if resetting the part of herself that kept all of the parts working together. This is it, I thought. This is her shell cracking. This is her realizing she can’t hold herself together with lies. She’ll spill everything now, and tell Jack all of the secrets she asked me to keep, and all of this can be over.

  She shifted her gaze to Jack and said, “Just go.” Her voice was low and steady as the rumbling of a train. “I should be the one who tells him to leave.”

  “He may not even come back here,” I said.

  Jack’s face was hard. “But if he does, Luce, I want him gone. And if he won’t leave when you ask, you call me.”

  She nodded, but I had a bad feeling she didn’t mean it.

  “You’re so much smarter than this, Luce,” he said. “You know that.”

  “Jack,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  He grabbed his keys from the kitchen counter and stalked to the door.

  I went back to the living room to get Kate. As we were leaving, Jack stepped close to Lucille. “If anything else happens with Buck tonight, you call me on my cell. Immediately. I’ll be at the station all night.”

  “Should I take him to the hospital?” Lucille asked.

  “I don’t think he needs that,” Jack said. “He says he didn’t hit his head. But if anything changes with him, you call. And you get that guy out of here. He doesn’t deserve their hospitality.”

  Lucille looked at him, her eyes red and puffy.

  “Understand?” Jack said, and she nodded grimly.

  “And if he gives you one minute of trouble, call me.”

  “OK,” she said, irritated. “I said I would.”

  When we’d all piled into the Jeep, with Jack at the wheel and Kate in the back, I said, “Jack, you were being awfully hard on her.”

  His jaw clenched. “She’s so reckless sometimes,” he said. “That guy’s bad news. You can’t tell me he isn’t.” He wouldn’t even call him by name. “I don’t know why she doesn’t ditch him and get on with her life.”
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  “You can’t rescue her by being a caveman.”

  “I’m not being a caveman.”

  “You’re going to scare her to death acting this way. She’ll be afraid to come to you for help.”

  He took a deep breath and flattened his hands on the steering wheel. Only then did I realize how hard he’d been gripping it. “What are you not telling me, Enza?”

  I wanted to tell him the details, so he might understand, but I didn’t want to break my promise to Lucille. Jack’s instinct was to do whatever it took to protect her, and his first instinct was to get angry at the guy he thought was hurting her. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to save Lucille, but the way he was going about it was only going to push her away.

  Lucille said she still saw good in Toph, and as long as she did, she would defend it. She was trying to save him, to bring back the man she’d loved. I thought Jack would understand that and at least sympathize with her, if he could stop thinking like he was preparing for a duel.

  “She’s in a complicated situation, Jack. You can’t bully her into doing what’s best. She has to do it on her own. Please trust me here. In a couple of days, it’ll be clearer.”

  He gave me a hard look before turning back to the road.

  “You know I want the best for her too, right?” I said.

  He sighed. “Yes.”

  “Then believe me when I say she needs you to make her feel safe and supported. She needs to know you’re going to be calm when she comes to you for help.”

  He downshifted the truck as we turned onto the winding road that ran past the canal toward our house. His shoulders relaxed the slightest bit. When I glanced back at Kate, her eyes locked on mine, and she nodded.

  I couldn’t blame Jack for being angry. Buck had hurt himself the first time when Jack had left him alone. Now he’d been hurt again when Toph had left him alone. Jack had blamed himself the first time. Now it had happened again. Jack always said it was forgivable to make a mistake once, but to make the same mistake again, to not learn the first time, was just stupidity.

  ~~~~

  That idea was stuck in my head the rest of the evening. When Kate was at work, she spent most of her time in a laboratory watching for patterns on a microscopic level. She sometimes joked that logging so many hours observing behavioral patterns of single-celled organisms had made her think these patterns were only magnified in organisms of our size.

  She’d gone into great detail about this a few years ago, as we drowned ourselves in cheap whiskey and stories of love gone awry. We were still in college then, renting a tiny house together in a neighborhood full of duplexes and tiny yapping dogs that got toted around in sorority girls’ purses. I’d just had a date that reminded me how terribly mismatched two people can be, and Kate had broken up with her boyfriend of a couple of months. Desperate for a vacation and too broke to leave the house, we’d filled up a plastic kiddie pool in the yard behind our four-room rental house and planted a couple of pink flamingoes at its edge. We’d placed two lawn chairs half in the pool so we could soak our feet in the water. As we sipped our George Dickel and ginger ale, Kate said we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves in terms of dating because our behaviors were not something we could necessarily control.

  “Behaviors are a habit.” She was only slightly slurring and referring to my tendency to get bored on Date Number Four. Every time. “The tiny habits we see in bacteria keep recurring in larger organisms too. And some of the physical traits we see in a cell, like say, a wavy pattern in a plant cell—we often see those patterns magnified in the whole organism.”

  “You’re hammered,” I said.

  “No, really.” She wore these gigantic Elvis-style sunglasses that made it hard to take her theory seriously. “That plant that has a wavy pattern in its cellular structure also has a wavy pattern in each leaf. And then when you look at the bigger shape of the leaves as a group, they make a wavy pattern too. It’s sort of like fractals and the structure of crystals.”

  I sipped my drink—we thought we were so clever to have devised the George and Ginger—and shook my head. “What cell patterns in my life would indicate boredom, Kate?”

  “I’m just saying, if amoebas have patterns in behavior, and they’re driven to replicate those patterns with their little brainless selves, then we, as more complicated creatures with more complicated brains, are most certainly also driven to replicate our behaviors. That’s not new science. I’m just saying you can’t fight it because it’s in you on a cellular level. Not just a psychological one.”

  I’d laughed a little because I was hammered too, and I was thinking of my dates as single-celled organisms. Some of them held approximately the same level of interest and complexity. Some were intriguing, though, and it made me wonder why I had such a bent toward this boredom. It made me think I was broken on a cellular level, which is how I ended up sitting with my feet in a kiddie pool, sipping cheap whiskey with pink flamingoes at my elbows.

  On that day, I’d worried that my behavioral patterns, the drive that may or may not exist on a microscopic level in my apathetic little cells, were something too ingrained for me to overcome.

  After seeing Jack so angry about Buck’s pattern of injuries and aloneness, I wondered about the same thing.

  Did all of our lives have a pattern? Repetitive behaviors that we were sometimes too close to see, but something that could both manifest on a macro level and deep within us?

  Now, as I sat on the porch of the house that had been my grandmother’s, I thought of the pattern that was becoming too evident in my own life to deny: There were too many people leaving me.

  And here I was, so angry at my father that I was pushing him away, making him leave me too.

  I took my phone out and pulled up my recent voicemails. I had three missed calls from my father and one voicemail. With all the excitement with Buck, I’d forgotten my phone at home. After staring at the phone for a long while, I pressed the button and listened to the message.

  Call me when you have time, he said. I need to explain some things.

  That was all. No apology, no explanation. Brief and pointed, typical of my father.

  I considered calling, even pulled up the number, but I stopped short of pressing the button to make the call. It was nearly nine, which meant nearly ten where my father was. He’d probably be working tomorrow since he rarely took time off and never took time for holidays any more. His voice message was from hours ago, and his last call was too. He wouldn’t appreciate a call this late, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to make the call, either.

  Instead, I went back to our bedroom and pulled the stack of Vergie’s letters and journals from the top drawer of the dresser. I’d stashed them there in the days before, when I couldn’t make myself read any further.

  Now the curiosity was eating at me again, and I found myself wondering about patterns in my mother’s behavior. Had she had patterns no one noticed? Patterns that had led her out to that remote corner of Texas, to that river in the night? Could someone have seen that end coming if they’d looked hard enough? I read and re-read the letters, hoping they’d reveal new information, more details that had been meaningless to me the first time around, but would reveal more to me now.

  There were postcards from San Antonio. Photos from Houston. The same seemingly blasé lines about her road trips. Nothing more. I hated that she didn’t write more details about her life, how she felt in these places, what she longed for, who she spent her time with. She could have had friends in these cities, or she might have only talked to strangers as she passed from one town to another.

  When I went back into the kitchen, there was no sign of Kate. I started to walk upstairs and saw what must have been lamplight pooling on the floorboards by her room. The door was cracked, typical for her when she was comfortable in a place. She said she felt too closed in with a door shut and locked, especially in a small room. I smiled, glad she was as comfortable here as she was in her own home. It had taken a while fo
r me to think of this house as my home, but now it was hard to imagine living anywhere else.

  In the kitchen, I made myself a cup of hot tea and then went back to Jack’s room to finish reading the journals. Jack had gone straight to the station when we got home from Buck’s. He’d been less angry when he left, but the situation with Toph would eat at him for sure. I knew he wanted to stay the night at Buck’s. He wanted to be there if Toph came back, and he wanted to kick the guy out himself. He knew Lucille would go too easy on her boyfriend, and he knew she wouldn’t call Jack if she needed help, even though he insisted.

  But still he left. By leaving he would give her the chance to stand up for herself.

  I told him I was proud of him for doing that when we got home from Buck’s house. He was lacing up his boots, preparing to leave for work.

  “She needs to do it herself,” I told him. “You can’t always be there to help her.”

  “I know,” he said. “But promise me you’ll call if something happens and you need me. Or she needs me.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Or at the very least call Andre and let him arrest that guy’s sorry ass.”

  “You got it.”

  He kissed me quickly and then was gone.

  ~~~~

  A little later, Kate came downstairs. “Let’s put this menu together.”

  “Now?” I said. “It’s late.”

  “We only have one more full day to prepare,” she said. “Let’s try out that bourbon chocolate pecan pie.”

  “Pie doesn’t sound like a terrible idea.”

  She opened her laptop and pulled my magnetic notepad from the refrigerator. “Let’s put a list together and find some recipes.”

  I knew she was trying to take my mind off of Lucille, Buck and Toph. She was good that way.

  “OK,” I said, looking through the cabinets.

  Kate rattled off some classic dishes, easy to make, and started filing away some recipes. About a half hour later, I took a break to call Josie and see how Buck was doing.

  “How are you?” I asked her.

  “I’ve been better.” She sighed. “Thank you for coming by earlier. We’re lucky y’all dropped by.”