Whispers of the Bayou

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Instead, I realized as I read these letters, the money had come to her in various amounts over the years, apparently depending not just on what our current expenses were, but on how much AJ had written in the previous month’s letter. Each note started the same, with a thank you for the bank deposit. But as I read my way through the years, I saw that whenever there was an extra long missive, quoting cute things I’d said or one that included photos of me or drawings I had done, then the next month’s letter used the words “very generous,” as in “thank you for the very generous bank deposit.” Even when she was furious at them over the discovery of the tattoo on my head and the resulting custody battle threats, she continued to write each month, reporting the latest news laced with a few jabs about “the hideous mark” that had been inflicted upon me and the “vicious blackmail” they were using to keep her from reporting it.

  I might have been able to understand why she had invaded my privacy and sold my soul, for surely a young woman alone in the city with a child needed a lot of money to stay afloat. What I didn’t understand was why she had told me for years that the people down here didn’t care about me, that they weren’t interested in knowing me anymore, and that I should have nothing to do with them. She’d been lying. It was a lie. They did care. They did want to know. They wanted to know so badly that they were even willing to pay for the information.

  I paused in my readings to clear my head. I brushed my teeth and changed into my nightgown, then I got back in the bed, intending to sit there and read every single letter in this box, even if it took all night. As I did, I was astounded at the amount of information and insight they contained, almost like a diary of my life. As angry as I was at AJ, I also couldn’t help feeling that at least she had been a perceptive parent to me, relating thoughts and impressions that were frequently dead-on. She described at length my first real boyfriend, sharing her concerns that we were lingering too long in the stairwell when he brought me home and we said good night. When I was a senior in high school, she talked about my single-minded devotion to a career in the arts, dissecting my potential talents as a painter and sculptor with a fair amount of accuracy. Later, near the end of my freshman year in college, she rejoiced over my announcement that I didn’t want to be an artist after all but an art restorer instead. She was thrilled, the letter said, as that guaranteed me a much more secure financial future.

  Don’t you find it interesting, a later letter said, that Miranda has chosen to go into a field where she will take beautiful things of old that have been neglected and hurt and will lovingly restore them, setting them right again? I have to wonder if deep in her heart she will always want to go back and make things right in her own life—which of course is not an option.

  Several paragraphs down in the same letter, she apologized for being so maudlin, saying that it was the twentieth anniversary of my mother’s death, which was making her feel very reflective. Yasmine has been gone twenty years today, it said, and I still expect her to call me on the phone any moment. I still miss her so much I can’t sleep sometimes for the ache deep in my chest. Having lost so much yourselves, especially Cassandra, I’m sure you understand.

  It wasn’t the first mention of this Cassandra person, whoever she was. All I could gather was that she had died young, and that she had been important to my grandparents. I wondered if maybe she was my aunt, a sister to my father and his brother, despite the fact that no one else had ever mentioned her to me. I had obviously known and loved her myself when I was small, because the earliest mentions of her in these letters were about how I had forgotten everything and everyone from my first five years, even my mother and Cassandra.

  It was almost four a.m. by the time I got to the description of my wedding. Through tears, I read about the beautiful ceremony and my gorgeous dress and the way I had gazed at my new husband as we said our vows. After my wedding, the letters grew more infrequent, and I realized that at that point she was no longer writing for money but simply to stay in touch. Her last note was the only one written just to my grandmother, with condolences on the loss of her husband:

  As you know, I have been very conflicted about you and your husband’s actions for many years. Now that he has passed, I think perhaps I have judged too harshly, for what parent wouldn’t move heaven and earth to protect their own, regardless of the circumstances? At least I was given the chance to parent Miranda, and for that I will always be grateful to you both, not just for your financial support but for your willingness to come to an arrangement in the first place.

  Tears filled my eyes as I continued reading.

  Miranda is now pregnant, news that fills us all with great joy as I’m sure it will you too. Despite having made a good life for herself, I don’t think she has ever really let anyone past those walls that were so carefully constructed during the trauma she suffered as a child. My hope is that when this baby is born, he or she might finally be the one to open up Miranda’s heart and show her that real love needn’t be feared but embraced, even at the risk of great pain.

  With that, I began to cry in earnest, for AJ’s hopes had been short lived and sadly misguided. I saw now what she had known all along, that I was incapable of truly loving anyone, even my own child. Holding back my sobs for fear of waking Deena next door, I continued to read that last letter to the end.

  I’m sure you are feeling great pain now yourself, with the death of your beloved Xavier. I can only offer the hope that you will survive this, and I pray that eventually the joy of having had him to share your life will outlive the pain of loss. It is my understanding that you are quite ill yourself and maybe can’t even comprehend the words in this letter. I shall leave you at this, then, with one thought, that out of much grief and sorrow also came, in the end, much good. Miranda Fairmont Miller is a lovely young woman, generous of spirit and gentle in nature. If you could know her, you would be so proud. As your only living grandchild, she may not remember her past, but she carries within her womb the future. And in the end, that’s what matters most, that life goes on, that hope gives birth to hope.

  With love—and yes, finally, with forgiveness—I remain…

  Yours,

  Janet

  TWENTY-THREE

  Is it a foolish dream, an idle vague superstition?

  Or has an angel passed, and revealed the truth to my spirit?

  Pounding. Someone was pounding on my door.

  I opened my eyes to see that it was morning. I had cried myself to sleep amidst the letters, which at some point during the night had spilled out of the box and were now scattered all over the bed.

  The pounding wouldn’t stop, and I felt sure it was Deena, rudely waking me up, probably so that she could start complaining about something or gossip more about Lisa, just as she had last night. I threw aside the bedspread and jumped up, not even bothering to dig in my suitcase for my robe. I flung open the door as I demanded “What?”

  Deena was not at my door. No one had been knocking.

  Instead, several feet away, Aaron West was perched atop an aluminum stepladder, hammering at a place on the wall near the ceiling. He had paused, mid-hammer, the moment I opened the door, and now we stood staring at each other like two idiots.

  “I, uh, I’m so sorry,” he said, taking in my rumpled hair and my flimsy nightgown. “I didn’t realize anybody was in there.”

  I could feel the heat practically burning through the skin of my face and neck. Quickly, I jumped behind the door and leaned outward so only my head was visible.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m checking for rot. You got a pretty nasty leak upstairs, and I’m trying to figure out how far down the damage goes. But look, I’ll come back. I can do this later.”

  He was halfway down the ladder before I spoke.

  “Aaron, wait. Just because I keep unintentionally flashing you is no reason to run away. I’m fine. We can pretend that this, too, didn’t happen. I’d rather you keep working.”

  “You don’t,
like, go around completely naked at any point, do you? A man can only be a gentleman for so long.”

  I laughed.

  “I promise, from now on, only turtlenecks and burlap sacks.” Smiling, I shut the door. A few minutes later, as I pulled on jeans and a comfortable shirt, the hammering finally stopped. By the time I had the bed made and the letters returned to their box and tucked away beside my suitcase, I opened the door to see that Aaron and his ladder were gone from the hallway. Relieved, I walked down to the bathroom with my toiletries and makeup, where I showered and got ready for the day. With my damp hair in a ponytail rather than a fancy twist or a bun, the first item on my agenda, after grabbing some breakfast, was to make several very difficult telephone calls.

  Deena was in the kitchen cleaning out the refrigerator. She greeted me with a grunt, waving toward a plate of bacon and eggs that was sitting on the counter, covered with a paper towel.

  “Didn’t know you were gonna sleep half the day away,” she grumbled, and I glanced at the clock on the stove to see that it was only nine thirty. I wondered what she would make of some of my friends back home, who would sleep until two or three in the afternoon whenever they had the chance. “You’ll have to heat that up.”

  I thanked her for the breakfast as I ran it in the microwave. I realized I would either need to visit a store soon or give her some cash to cover the cost of having me here. No doubt she had already added the two eggs and two strips of bacon to my tab alongside the Benadryl and paper towels. She suggested I make myself some toast as well, which I did, mostly so that I could assemble a breakfast sandwich with the eggs and bacon and carry it outside to eat while I made my calls.

  “Deena, I need to ask you a favor,” I said as I waited for the toast to pop out. “I wonder if you might be willing to walk through the rest of the house with me later and tell me how it used to be laid out when I was a child. I would like to know whose room was where and so forth.”

  “Why on earth do you want to know that?” she demanded, emerging from deep in the fridge with a questionable pack of meat in one hand and some wilted lettuce in the other.

  “Because I’m curious,” I replied, removing the toast from the toaster and putting together my sandwich. “The only other person around here who might know that is my Uncle Holt, but with him in a wheelchair he wouldn’t be able to get up there anyway.”

  She snorted. “Sure,” she said. “Just tell me when. I’ll be around, packing all day. Packing and cooking. I hate to see this food go to waste.”

  I reached for the salt and pepper, asking her about the strange light I had seen last night from the upstairs window. She had no idea what I was talking about, so I quickly changed the subject and asked how well she knew my Uncle Holt.

  “Well enough. Why?”

  “I just wondered about the wheelchair. What’s the story there?”

  “Same as a lot of boys his age. Went to Vietnam as a handsome young soldier, came back lucky he was in a chair and not a box.”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised I hadn’t calculated his age and thought of that myself. I wrapped my sandwich in a paper towel and set the plate in the sink. “So how come he went to war but my father didn’t?”

  Deena huffed.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably because your father used every bit of his parents’ influence to pull some strings and keep himself stateside. I seem to recall that when Holt was drafted he gave in to the inevitable without as much of a fight.”

  “I see.”

  I thanked her for the food and excused myself to go outside, thinking about the two brothers, Richard and Holt, as I walked. Judging by what AJ had written in her letters, they had both been spoiled and indulged by their parents while growing up. Ultimately, I realized, one of the brothers had ended up emotionally handicapped but physically whole, while the other was physically handicapped but emotionally whole, at least as far as I could tell. I wondered what had made the difference, why my father had remained so immature and unevolved while Holt had managed to grow up and become a man of character. Facing his responsibilities as a soldier had probably been a good start.

  With my breakfast in one hand and my cell phone in the other, I made my way down to the bench at the trailhead so that I could look out at the bayou as I ate and made my calls.

  When I turned on my phone, a message was waiting from Nathan, sent earlier this morning. I dialed into voice mail and took a bite of my sandwich as I listened. He was sorry we hadn’t been able to talk last night, but he was glad I had called and maybe we could connect tonight. He went into more detail this time about the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the church yesterday morning, but I could tell from his voice that there was something he wasn’t saying. He warned me that the next three days were going to be crazy busy for him as he and the engineer worked to close out the project completely, but that I could call whenever I needed, even if I needed him to come down here.

  I erased his message and called back to leave one for him, telling him to focus on his job and not worry about me, though I appreciated his concern. After hanging up, I thought about calling AJ, but I wasn’t up to that conversation just yet. Instead, I dialed in to my boss at the museum and explained that I had gone out of town this weekend to visit an old family friend who was dying, but that the friend had died while I was here, so I was going to stick around for the funeral and might not be back in this week. I rarely missed a day of work, but suddenly my job there felt a million miles away and not nearly as important as I had always felt it to be.

  After disconnecting I realized I had lost my appetite and tore up the rest of my breakfast into tiny bits and tossed them toward the water, hoping the heron would return.

  “Better be careful. You might draw alligators that way.”

  I turned around to see Aaron West, smiling at me from a few steps behind.

  “Are there really alligators in there?” I asked.

  “I imagine so,” he replied, “but I wouldn’t worry about it. I don’t know of any that hang out around this part of the bayou.”

  “That’s good. I hope.”

  He moved forward, his eyes on my face.

  “I’m sorry to bother you. I just have a quick question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I finally figured out the problem with the attic. The reason I couldn’t figure out where to get up into it was because there’s another whole floor, a third story, and then the attic is on top of that.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, twisting around to look at the house in the distance.

  “You can tell from out here that there’s something up there just by looking at those dormers,” he said, pointing to the highest, smallest windows of the house that ran just below the roof line. “I had figured those dormers were a part of the attic, not more living space, but I was wrong. They’re a part of the third story rooms. I guess the attic is pretty small and doesn’t have any windows.”

  I was stunned.

  “You’re telling me this house has a third floor of living space?” I asked, heart pounding. “How do you get to it?”

  “Apparently there’s a flight of stairs from the second floor.”

  “I never saw one,” I said, certain that I had peeked inside every door and closet up there and had come across nothing of the kind.

  “I know, me neither. But Miss Deena told me where they are. She said that her husband put up some Sheetrock to hide them a long time ago. She said he had to do it to keep your grandmother from wandering up there after she began to show signs of senility. They were afraid she might fall back down. So he walled them off and after a while she forgot they had been there.”

  I could just picture it, this poor, senile old woman insisting that she be able to go up and down at will, testing the limits of her caregivers. No wonder they had walled it off. I could only imagine her confusion after that, no longer being able to find something that she felt sure had been there before.

  “Anyway,” Aaron continued,
“I need to get up to the attic, but that means I’ll have to take down that Sheetrock to get up to the third floor first. I asked Miss Deena if that was okay, but she sent me out here to check with you.”

  “This Sheetrock you want to take down,” I said, my spine tingling, “is it along the back hall, near the bathroom?”

  I was thinking of when I had been up there last night, of the place that for some reason just hadn’t looked right to me.

  “Yeah, exactly. The stairs are there, behind that wall.”

  As he said it, I could picture it, but as I did I felt vaguely unsettled, as if taking down that wall would take away a layer of safety as well. A big part of me wanted to go with Aaron right now and watch him break through. But a bigger part said I needed to proceed more slowly, that another panic attack like the one on the plane might be waiting right behind that wall.

  Still, that didn’t mean he shouldn’t prepare the way for the moment when I would feel ready to take a look. I felt a surge of excitement, knowing that there was a chance my grandmother’s paintings could be up there.

  “Yes, please,” I said resolutely. “Tear it down. While you’re at it, would you please go through the whole house and take down every board and every plank off of every single window and door? It’s time to throw this place wide open.”

  Judging by his expression, I think he didn’t know whether to be amused by my fervor or alarmed by it.

  “Sure,” he said. “Whatever you want.”

  He started to walk away but I called after him.

  “I don’t suppose you could recommend a good local cleaning service, could you? I’m not just ready to bring in the light, I want to get rid of the dust and dirt too.”

  “No, but my sister will. I was about to call her anyway, so I’ll ask and let you know.”