I laughed for what felt like the first time in days.
Chapter 17
The motel in Green Bluff was much nicer than I had expected. It had outside doors and a lock that didn’t want to work quite right, but it was clean and quiet. It was a mom-and-pop kind of a place that had a big vintage sign with a cactus. As soon as it got dark, the neon flickered on and revealed pink neon blooms on the cactus and a gold crescent moon behind it. The green neon outline of the cactus wavered, making it wiggle like those Elvis clocks with hips that sway back and forth. If I were inclined to choose motels based on the ingenuity of their neon, this one definitely would have won my approval. Even though there wasn’t a real cactus within five hundred miles.
We had dinner at the diner, with the same waitress, and then found a grocery store to buy some snacks and wine. Back at the room, we’d popped open a six-dollar bottle of red and sat on the balcony drinking out of plastic cups.
“Thanks for coming with me,” I said. “I didn’t want to do this part alone.”
Kate tapped her cup against mine. “Here’s to finding answers.”
It was a start, I supposed. The deputy had seemed like he was telling the truth, and really, why would he lie? It still felt odd to me, though, especially since Vergie had had such doubts.
“Are you going to stay out here?” Kate said at last.
“In Texas?”
“No, I mean this thing with Jack. Are you staying in the house, or are you coming back to Raleigh?”
“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t actually thought that far ahead. “This feels like home now. Is that weird?”
She smiled. “No. But I miss you.”
“You big softie.”
“I know it.”
I poured more wine for us. “I don’t know. I guess if this thing is over, then our business arrangement is over too. I couldn’t work with Buck and Josie any more. I hadn’t thought of all that.”
She sighed. “Don’t say the town’s not big enough for both of you.”
I frowned. “It kind of isn’t.”
“You’ll figure it out.”
She said that matter-of-factly, but I thought about it the rest of the night. I’d just gotten settled in Bayou Sabine. It was starting to feel right, and I’d found a way to work on my own, out from under my father’s thumb, and now I was about to lose it all.
We sat out there until a train came past, rattling the walls so hard the picture frames clanged against the plaster. The horn blared, and the whole room seemed to vibrate.
“Well,” Kate said. “That explains why it’s forty bucks a night.”
I climbed into bed as Kate grumbled about not sleeping through the night without her ear plugs. My phone buzzed with another text, but this time it was my father. I cursed, realizing I’d completely forgotten to call him. Again. I dialed his number, considering how much to tell him.
“Hello, Enza,” he said, his voice flat. “I didn’t expect you’d call.”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I had to leave town unexpectedly. I’m coming back in a couple of days.”
“I’m at the airport,” he said. “Flight was delayed.”
Part of me felt guilty for brushing him off the way I had, but part of me thought he deserved it.
“I’d planned to come by last night,” I said, “but something happened.”
Silence.
“Dad, are you still there?”
A pause. “I’m here.”
“Can we talk when I get home?” I said.
“Fine.” He hung up before I could say anything more.
~~~~
I lay there all night listening to the trains, but they weren’t what was keeping me awake. I couldn’t fall asleep as I thought about making bourbon balls with Josie, fixing the house with Jack. My life had finally started to take a shape that I liked. I’d finally started to feel like I had a real family again, and now everything I’d worked to build was so quickly slipping away.
~~~~
In the morning, we took coffee to go and followed Highway 80 into the wildlife refuge, where the pavement abruptly ended. The road turned to packed gravel, and the manicured trees gave way to a thicket that was eerie even in daylight. The closer we came to the river, the denser the vegetation became. The dark greens of the trees began to look black.
When the road ended at what seemed like a parking area, Kate stopped the car.
“There’s a trail,” I said.
The trail quickly turned into a boardwalk. The ground beneath us was pluff mud, holding a tangle of marsh grasses. A flash of memory struck me, from being a kid and walking into the marsh grass deep in the woods behind Vergie’s house. She’d warned me about it, but I went anyway, and quickly sank to my knees in the mud. The ground would deceive you that way around here. It looked like solid earth, but as soon as you put your weight on it, you sank like your whole body was made of cast iron.
The boardwalk creaked and groaned as we followed it across the swamp. It was wide enough for two people to walk abreast, but it still felt like the swamp was too close, like it could reach up over the boardwalk in a wave and drag us down to the depths of the mire.
“Why did you want to come out here?” Kate said at last. “This is all kinds of spooky. And why is no one else out here?”
“It’s right after Christmas. Who wants to be in a swamp?”
“Just you and me, I guess.”
“They found my mother somewhere out here,” I said.
She stopped.
“I wanted to see what it was like,” I said. “So far, I can’t imagine why she would come out here to go swimming.”
Our shoes clapped on the boards and seemed to reverberate across the water. After another thirty yards, the trees opened up, and we could see sky again. The boardwalk turned into a pier as we reached the banks of the river. The pier was an elaborate structure with chest-high wooden rails. It extended into the water in a T-shape, ending in a square deck about twenty feet across. Plaques posted near each corner displayed drawings of fish and birds native to the river. The river stretched wider than I’d expected, looking more like a lake. The very middle reflected the crisp blue of the sky, but the water darkened toward the banks.
Close to the pier, the water was an odd shade of dark turquoise. I could barely see the sandy bottom at the bank’s edge, extending a couple of feet into the water. Then there was only darkness. I leaned against the rail, and a couple of plovers shrieked from the bank, bursting from the brush and rattling the branches.
“It looks deep,” Kate said. “You think she’d really go swimming out here?”
“Maybe it’s more inviting in the summer.” Looking at the shoreline, the way the marsh abruptly gave way to the river, I couldn’t imagine my mother making it to the bank easily. I thought of how I’d thrashed through the marsh behind Vergie’s house in the summer, how I’d become more tangled in the trees’ roots with every step, ripped apart by briars and thorns. “I don’t know exactly where they found her,” I said. “One of the newspaper articles said it was here in the refuge, near a popular trail.”
“What else did the article say?”
After I’d first talked to George, I’d done some digging on the Internet and found one article in the local paper that discussed the woman who’d drowned in the Trinity River. She wasn’t local, so the details were scant. It had been the only mention of my mother I could find.
“Woman drowns in wildlife refuge,” I said. “A cautionary tale for people not to swim in the Trinity. That was about the extent of it.”
She sighed, leaning against the rail. “I’m sorry.”
We walked back down the boardwalk to where we’d parked. There was a small building, a visitors’ center, but it was still closed for the holidays. Kate held her hands up to her face and peeked in the windows while I studied a map of the refuge posted at a kiosk. The refuge boasted thirty miles of walking trails, most of them ending near the water. There were no lagoons or lakes on the map, so it looked as if my mother woul
d have been found in the Trinity itself.
“You want to check out another trail?” Kate suggested.
“Sure.”
We picked up another path that started much the same as the one before. All along the way were more signs with drawings of plants and animals common to the marsh. The trail would have been dappled with wildflowers in the spring and summer, but this time of year it was mostly brown. I tried to picture what it would have looked like when my mother was here, imagining the last living things she would have seen as she walked toward the water. Had she been alone? Had someone been with her? In all of my digging, I hadn’t found any indication that someone else might have harmed my mother that day, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility. She was traveling, maybe lonely. She could have met someone in Green Bluff, in the very diner where Kate and I had eaten. That person could have invited her out here for a walk, saying he wanted to ease her loneliness. My stomach twisted into a knot at the thought of someone hurting my mother, causing her to drown—or even just being here with her and panicking, running to get help and leaving her to be overtaken by the swift waves in the river.
There was no evidence to suggest any of that, but that’s the problem with knowing so few details. Your imagination fills in the gaps, and sometimes that’s far worse than any facts you might unearth.
We soon came to another boardwalk and followed it to the water’s edge. This walkway opened into a structure more like a dock. There were no boats around, and there was only a thigh-high rail around the structure. It would be easy to jump into the water here, easy to slip under the rail. Off to our right, a clearing led to a sandy area, almost a beach, that was easy enough to access from where we stood. It made me wonder if locals came to swim here. The water in this part would be cooler and probably have fewer alligators lurking under the surface.
It would be an oasis in the spring and summer, touched by sunlight and tucked away from the rest of the world.
Kate sat on the railing, holding a hand up to shade her eyes from the sun.
“This could have been the place,” I said.
Kate just nodded.
A flock of ducks chattered in the distance, growing louder as they cut a path across the clouds and splashed down near the sandbar.
I sat there for a long while, staring at the water until I started to see white spots and had to look back at the trees to give my eyes a rest. I could understand why my mother might have liked it here. One of the few things I remembered clearly was how much she enjoyed sitting outside to paint. She would never call herself a painter, and certainly not an artist, but as a kid I thought it was magical the way she brushed paint onto canvas and captured what it felt like to be outside, seeing what she saw. She loved the water and loved to swim. As Vergie had written in her diary, she was like a mermaid.
It wasn’t hard to picture my mother here, walking out on that sandbar barefoot when the river was quiet, listening to the chatter of the birds, watching the ducks bob up and down as they fished in the water. Had she come out here in the daytime, or at night when the gates were closed and you had to sneak in to reach the trails?
“Vergie seemed to think my mother took her own life,” I said at last.
Kate was quiet, then said, “But the sheriff told you it was accidental. Right?”
“He did.”
“You don’t believe him.”
“It just seems so unlikely.”
Kate slid over and draped her arm around my shoulders. “Honey, a lot of accidents seem very unlikely. That’s what makes them so heartbreaking.”
Then she continued, “You read all those letters from your mother. Did she sound depressed?”
“No.”
“Did Vergie say anything in her diary about her leaving a note? Did she say what made her think it was suicide?”
I shook my head. Now I wanted to re-read every word. But I knew I wouldn’t find anything different from before. “There was no note, and Vergie didn’t say anything specific. I think she just found accidental drowning to be unlikely too.”
Kate plucked a piece of grass and twirled it in her fingers. “Seems to me most people say goodbye in some way, if they’re going to do that,” she said. “My dad’s uncle Carson did that. Went to see my dad—he was twelve or so—and gave him his old Army rucksack. He said, ‘I took this on all of my adventures, son. Thought you might need it for yours.’ Then he went home and shot himself in the barn.”
“Jesus,” I said. “You never told me all that.”
She shrugged. “Nobody saw that one coming. Or at least that’s what they said. But it was the sixties. People didn’t diagnose depression so much back then.” She tossed the grass into the water. “Dad told me once he felt strange that day, almost like Uncle Carson was telling him goodbye.”
“Vergie didn’t say anything like that in her diary.” And I felt sure she would have, since she made her other thoughts known.
“I don’t know why I can’t let this go,” I said.
“How would you feel about her if it were true? If it hadn’t been an accident?”
“I think I’d hate her. It’d be like she found a way to leave me a second time.”
Kate locked her arms around me and rested her chin on my shoulder, her eyes still fixed on the water.
“You think that’s it,” I said. “That I want to make her the bad guy.” I felt the tears then, streaking down my cheeks.
“I don’t think that.”
“Maybe I do.”
“You never got to say goodbye,” Kate said. “That’s more important than you realize, sometimes.”
“I told my father, back when she first left us, that I wished she were dead.”
Kate was quiet for a while, and then gave my shoulder a squeeze.
“Then I had a panic attack at Vergie’s funeral when I thought I saw her. I couldn’t stand the idea of running into her after all that time.”
“And both were perfectly natural reactions,” Kate said.
“I love you for saying that, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.”
She sighed and stared over the water. “Sometimes we don’t get all the answers. You just have to make peace with what you have.”
I nodded, although that didn’t seem one bit fair.
“How’d you get so goddamned wise?” I said.
“It took me way too long to make peace with some things,” she said. “And I wasted a hell of a lot of time agonizing over things I imagined to be true, but weren’t. You’ll drive yourself nuts that way.”
“I know.”
“You can’t let this consume you, Enza. This is the sort of thing that will eat away at you the rest of your life if you let it.”
I nodded.
“I’m serious,” she said. “I’m going to need you to promise me, right now, that you won’t let it eat you up. You have to find a way to let this go.”
“I know.”
“I need to hear you say the words.”
“OK,” I said. “I promise.”
When I turned to look at her, she gave me a serious look, then nodded.
“I may need you to help me though,” I said.
“You know where to find me.”
We sat like that for a while, shoulder to shoulder, as the clouds drifted over the sun and veiled us in shade. Toward the middle of the river, the water was still. The current was swift near our feet, but the surface was smooth out near the horizon. The sunlight didn’t bounce off it in the same way, and I pictured my mother paddling on her back, drifting out to the center toward the calm, tilting her head back toward the first rising stars of evening. I wanted to think of her as moving toward solace, smiling as the day ended around her, content.
~~~~
We stayed one more night in Green Bluff. Kate and I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around town, and I was lost, imagining we were retracing my mother’s footsteps every place we went. I pictured her sitting at the counter in the diner, stopping in the post office, r
eading in the library. She haunted that town like a ghost, and no one but me had any idea.
That night, I took a hot bath in the motel room and heard Kate talking on her cell phone. After a few minutes, there was a ripple of laughter, and she went outside so I couldn’t hear her.
When I got out of the bath, she was propped up on the bed watching TV.
“Who called?” I asked, slipping into my pajamas.
“Andre. He says he hopes you find your answers.”
Sometimes I thought that man was entirely too nice to be carrying a gun. “He say anything about Jack?”
“Just that he wanted to know where we were, and if we were all right. Jack told him why you were out here.”
I fluffed the pillows behind me and lay back in the bed.
“That man’s not acting like he wants this to be over,” she said.
For an instant, I imagined Jack driving across the bayou, fueled by a conversation with Andre, coming out here to make some grand gesture. But then I thought of the way he’d said he was disappointed in me, his expression as he’d said he wanted to take a break.
He’d looked like he’d already given up on us.
As hard as it was letting go of my mother, it was even harder to imagine letting go of Jack.
“Kate,” I said.
She was sending a text on her phone.
“I want you to promise me something.”
“What?” she said, her fingers still tapping the screen.
“No matter what happens, what stupid things we might do to each other, promise you won’t ever leave.”
She smiled, glancing up from her phone. “Hate to tell you, but you’re stuck with me until the grave. Maybe even past that.”
“You swear?”
“If I go first,” she said, “I’ll totally haunt your ass. You can count on that.”
“I certainly hope so.”
I crawled under the covers and set the alarm on my phone. I checked my messages, but there were no more missed calls from Jack. No texts. He must have given up on saying whatever he wanted to say to me.
I fell asleep quickly, tired from all the walking. I dreamed of the Trinity, the way the light bounced off the waves near the shore. I was floating on my back, relishing the warmth of the sun on my skin, the feeling that everything around me was golden. I could understand then why my mother might like to swim there, in the calmness. My arms moved in lazy arcs as I skimmed the water.
Bayou, Whispers from the Past: A Novel Page 20
