Whispers of the Bayou

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “It’s your daddy,” Deena said, returning to me. “Says he’s come to town for Willy’s funeral. I didn’t even realize he was all that fond of Willy.”

  Suddenly, my father bounded up the stairs and into the room. I was so surprised to see him that I nearly spilled my soup.

  Coming on the heels of my revelations about Cassandra, my father’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Still, he was here now and seemed happy to see me. He leaned down and placed an awkward kiss on my cheek, telling me how much he missed me, that he couldn’t believe our paths had not crossed for several years. I tried to smile in return but wasn’t very successful.

  Once Deena left the room, my father pulled over a chair and sat near the bed, asking about my fall and the lump on my head. I assured him it wasn’t anything serious. We made small talk, me asking about his flight, him asking what I was doing here. I wasn’t sure how to explain, so I just said that Willy had wanted me to come down so he could see me all grown up before he died.

  Ignoring the suspicious expression on his face, I asked if he’d brought Abby and the kids, but he said no, that he had come alone. To my mind, it was just as well. He had remarried when I was seven years old to an Arizona divorcee with two surly children and a big mansion in Tucson. Though he played the dutiful stepfather to her children, she had no interest in reciprocating with me, though I’d always had the feeling she encouraged him to maintain those ties himself. Eventually the contact between father and daughter had dwindled down to a single, annual phone call on Christmas Day. Considering how very little he and I had to talk about, it seemed to be enough.

  Now, in this moment, with me feeling so emotionally vulnerable, I wondered if I dared bring up the subject of Cass. I had so many questions, and I realized that this might be my first real opportunity to connect with my dad in years.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said, feeling inexplicably nervous, as I handed him the tray.

  “Sure,” he replied, taking it from me and setting it on the floor out of the way.

  “Would you mind talking to me about Cassandra?”

  He seemed startled, to say the least. Eyes wide, he hemmed and hawed.

  “I didn’t know…I thought…You weren’t…”

  “You thought I didn’t remember,” I said for him.

  “Yes. Janet always said you had forgotten her and that we were never supposed to bring it up.”

  “That was true,” I replied, “until today.”

  I went on to explain how I had found out, passed out, and thus turned out with a bump on my head. When I finished, he stood and went to the window, looking as though he’d rather be anywhere but here. He didn’t reply for a long time, and as I waited for him to speak, I just sat there and watched him.

  Richard Fairmont had always been a handsome and sophisticated man, with a chiseled jaw, perfect hair, and the elegant yet aggressive carriage of someone who knows what he wants and is determined to get it. In the few times I had seen him in the last ten years, he had always been perfectly groomed, a Southwest tan lending a healthy glow to his angular face. Looking at him now, I decided that he was all polish, no substance, a very handsome, sophisticated, empty shell of a person.

  “What would you like to know?” he said finally, turning back to look at me.

  “Anything,” I replied. “What was she like? What were we like? Were we close? Do you still miss her? How did she die?”

  “Ah,” he said, moving back to sit again in the chair. “Just a few simple questions like those, huh?”

  We shared a sad smile and then I sat back and waited for him to speak.

  He talked, slowly at first, describing his beloved daughter who had died. He said that we had been mirror image identical twins, which meant that we were the same, but opposite. She was the left-handed one, the aggressor, the braver soul. I, on the other hand, had been much more timid, less gregarious, less verbal. He said that we were together constantly, often living in our own separate world, speaking our own unique language. Our favorite game was follow the leader, with her always the leader and I the follower. We also had another game, he said, a trick of sorts that we were so good at that they would troop us out at parties to entertain the guests.

  “What trick?” I interrupted, goose bumps rising up on my arms. “Where?”

  “One of you would stand in front of that long mirror near the front door and make some motions one after the other, like raise your hand, wiggle your fingers, stick out your tongue. Then you’d turn around and do more things like that toward the doorway, which was directly opposite. Only that time you weren’t doing them facing a mirror, the other one would step out and stand there so that you were doing them facing each other. It was uncanny. No matter how long it went on, it was like each of you knew what the other was about to do and they would match it, movement for movement, so closely that it was just like you were still doing it with the mirror. The first few times, I thought your series of movements was all choreographed and memorized, but then one day I realized it wasn’t. You just knew what to do, exactly when the other one did what they did. It was bizarre.”

  I closed my eyes, the mystery of the mirror in the front hall now solved.

  “How did she die?” I asked softly.

  “It was so ridiculous, so tragic. Her favorite little nightgown was too long, a hand-me-down from a cousin that she insisted on wearing whenever she could. One night, she must have had a bad dream, because she got up to come in our room or go get the nanny, we were never sure. Anyway, she must have tripped on that stupid long nightgown, because she fell down the stairs to the second floor and broke her neck. She died instantly.”

  I shook my head, unable to fathom the heartbreak that must have resulted from such a tragic incident. Even now, my father’s words sounded removed somehow, like a well-rehearsed speech that he’d learned to give in order to assuage the pain.

  “And that’s why my mom killed herself?”

  “Yasmine was never all that strong of a person anyway,” he said, “but after we lost Cass, she really went off the deep end. Her grief was unbearable. I always said it would have gotten better if she just could have held out, but she wouldn’t. The very night after the funeral, she went outside to the garden and hung herself from a tree.”

  I gasped. “And just like that, in one fell swoop I lost a child and then a wife,” he added.

  How utterly unsurprising that he’d put it that way in this moment, rather than saying the other truth, which was that in one fell swoop, I had lost a sister and then a mother.

  “And so it was,” he continued, “like dominoes falling, one tragedy in my life creating another. First Cassandra, then Yasmine…”

  “Then me?”

  He shrugged.

  “In a sense,” he said. “For a while at least, you were so far gone you were as good as dead. I didn’t know if we would ever get you back.”

  I sat up straighter, leaning toward him.

  “Then explain something to me,” I said, the question suddenly filling my mind, pounding out all others. “How is it that after losing your wife and daughter so tragically, you chose to let me go off to live with AJ? Didn’t you want to keep me with you? Hadn’t you already lost enough?”

  He ran a hand over his face.

  “I knew how much your aunt loved you. I knew she could do a better job of raising you than I could—especially considering the condition you were in.”

  “Any other reasons?” I asked, feeling suddenly as though I needed to press him for more, for the self-oriented bottom line that always guided everything that he did.

  “Sure, fine,” he snapped, rising to the occasion the way I knew he would, “what do you want me to say? That I had lost a child who looked exactly like you? It was easier for me to get over it if you weren’t always around, where I would have to see you and remember her.”

  He left me by myself after that, saying he needed to run an errand in Baton Rouge that might keep him there for the night, but that
he would see me at the viewing tomorrow. Errand or not, I knew that his departure was more about getting away from a tense and sad conversation, more about getting away from me.

  The story of my life.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Feeling is deep and still; and the word that floats on the surface

  Is as the tossing buoy, that betrays where the anchor is hidden.

  Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.

  I laid there and thought about what I could accomplish with the balance of the day. Though I wanted to search the top floor of the house for my grandmother’s paintings, I didn’t think I was up to going there again just yet. I needed to talk to Lisa, to update her on Colline d’Or and find out if she’d had any luck asking around about Jimmy Smith or the symbol of the cross in the bell, but according to Deena, she’d left earlier this morning and said she wouldn’t be back until dinner.

  That left the issue of AJ and the difficult conversation we needed to have, but my cell phone had been conspicuously silent all day.

  Thinking of last night’s letters and of today’s discovery about my twin sister, I realized that most of all I had the overwhelming urge to go back and see my Uncle Holt and maybe talk to him about some of what was going on. We still didn’t know each other all that well, but we had made a connection yesterday, and I felt sure that he was as eager to spend time with me as I was to spend time with him. I went downstairs and freshened up, and though Deena wasn’t crazy about the idea of me going for a walk in the woods with a head injury, she didn’t try to stop me.

  Despite the late afternoon heat and humidity, the walk to Holt’s house did me good. By the time I got there, my stride was strong and the pain on my forehead had lessened. Were it not for the bruise and slight swelling at my hairline, I might have put the fall out of my mind completely.

  Just like yesterday, I could hear Holt before I saw him, though this time there was no banging pot, just his voice. Afraid I might startle Duchess again, I cupped my hands around my mouth and called out the news of my arrival. By the time I reached the clearing, Holt was sitting there waiting for me, his hand on the collar of a massive blond-colored dog.

  “Miranda!” he cried, his eyes crinkling in delight. “I’ve been hoping you’d pop in today.”

  I gave him a hug and then with his permission greeted the dog, asking about Duchess. He said she’d been sent on her way this morning with a recommendation for search and rescue training, replaced by this new candidate, Sugarpie.

  “Sugarpie?” I asked with a chuckle. “For this big lug?”

  “Yeah, kind of humiliating, isn’t it, especially considering he’s a male. Anyway, help me out a sec, would you? I want to try something.”

  “Sure.”

  “Hold on here and walk him over to that post, and then on the way back, act like you’re losing your balance. I want to see what he does.”

  Gripping the handle of the dog’s harness, I did as Holt instructed. When I started to wobble, I was surprised to feel the dog’s big body move right up against me and steady me in place.

  “Good,” Holt said calmly, though whether to me or to the dog I wasn’t sure. “Now do it again, but this time wobble a little longer.”

  I repeated the steps, walking to the post and then turning around and coming back. This time, as soon as the dog braced against me, I noticed that Holt took a shiny red ball and rolled it along the ground so that it passed right in front of us. Sugarpie whimpered, but he stayed where he was until I finally stopped wobbling and stood up straight. Even then, he didn’t dart away, though I could tell he wanted to.

  “Excellent. You can let him go.”

  Sugarpie bounded away, retrieving the object of his affection, and then the three of us headed for the house, the dog carrying the ball in his mouth. Holt said my visit was perfect timing as he was ready to take a break and have something cold to drink.

  Soon Holt and I were relaxing on the porch with our cups of sweet tea, looking out at the lazy bayou, and I asked him how he had landed into this whole dog thing in the first place. He said that it started when he was about six months sober and volunteering down at the VA hospital. A patient there had one of the very first “PTSD Dogs,” who had been trained to help her owner manage the challenges of his post-traumatic stress disorder. Holt said this dog could do everything from retrieving the guy’s medication to crowd control to panic management, and watching her work had inspired him to launch a new career in the field.

  Despite his handicap, Holt went back to school to become an animal behaviorist. After graduating, he worked as a trainer, but soon it became obvious that his real gift was for evaluation and placement. Eventually, he founded his own nonprofit organization that did just that. Currently, he had two employees, dozens of volunteers, and a waiting list for his services that could keep him busy around the clock seven days a week, if he let it.

  “So do you have this same sort of gift for evaluating people?” I asked.

  He laughed.

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it,” he said. “I suppose if somebody stayed here for a week like the dogs do and let me run them through a bunch of tests, I just might.”

  We both smiled, gazing out at the water.

  “If I were a dog, where would you place me?” I asked.

  He rubbed his beard, considering.

  “Well, let’s see, you didn’t lick my face when we met,” he quipped, which made me laugh, “you take direction well, and you’ve obviously got the ability to focus.”

  He had started out teasing, but now he grew more serious.

  “You’re tall,” he continued, “and strong, I imagine, but I wouldn’t want to depend on that strength too heavily because you’re so slender. I’d say, considering your warm nature, your obvious loyalty, and your high intelligence, I’d start by testing you for medical assistance tasks. Depending on how calm you remain in a crisis, you could work with someone who has anxiety or depression or even a chronic pain disorder. I don’t think I’d recommend you as a guide dog because recovery time might be a concern.”

  “Recovery time?”

  “That means how long it takes you to bounce back and get to work when you’ve been thrown for a loop. Fast recovery is vital for some areas, but you strike me as the type of person who might need to absorb things for a while. Maybe mull them over before you can move on.”

  I met his eyes and then looked away. “I’d say,” I told him, “that your talents give you insight into both man and beast.”

  “Thank you,” he replied, and then we just sat there, the only sounds the hum of crickets and the gentle rocking of my chair. Finally, he spoke. “So what is it that you’re bouncing from right now, Miranda? If you feel like talking about it, I mean.”

  I did feel like talking about it, and I was so glad he had asked.

  As Holt sat and listened, I began to unburden myself, telling him about the letters I had found from AJ to my grandparents, my learning of Cassandra just today, and the conversation I’d had with my father afterward. Holt offered an ear and a shoulder and a lot of wisdom, and as I shared what I was feeling, I decided that it really wasn’t all that difficult to be the one on the telling side of a heart-to-heart rather than taking my usual stance as the listener. Holt said he had known about my erased memories, which was why he’d been so surprised yesterday when he thought my daughter was named Cass.

  The only time he contradicted me was when I described my anger at AJ for keeping me so isolated from the rest of this family.

  “I understand that she wanted to give me a fresh start,” I said. “I even kind of get why she never told me that I had a sister, much less one who had been my identical twin. But why keep me from having a relationship with my grandparents? Why keep me from having a relationship with you?”

  “I can’t speak for her motives with my parents,” he said, “but I’ll tell you exactly why she kept you away from me. When the two of you left here, Miranda, I was a m
ess. I didn’t deserve to be a part of your life. I was drinking, doing drugs, all kinds of stuff. That’s who I was to her at that time. I don’t blame her one bit for cutting off that tie.”

  “But what about later, once you got sober?”

  He shrugged.

  “I contacted her once, to see if maybe you and I could establish some sort of relationship. She said it was…complicated. In the end, she felt it best if things stayed as they were. I couldn’t blame her. She didn’t know the man I had become.”

  I understood what he was saying, but still I didn’t agree.

  “How did you become that man, Holt? Why are you so very different from my father?”

  “Why don’t we take a walk? Or rather, you can walk, I’ll roll. I’ll answer your question as we go.”

  I wasn’t sure what our destination was, but I had a feeling we weren’t just aimlessly wandering the countryside. We put Sugarpie on a leash and brought him with us, heading up Holt’s driveway for a while and then diverting onto a wide, well-worn path that led us alongside the bayou. As we went, Holt told me his story, how he and my father had been raised with every advantage, every indulgence. Their parents, he said, were experts at getting the two mischievous boys out of trouble. When Richard was drafted, they managed to protect him from going to Vietnam, but two years later when Holt faced the same problem, things had changed, and finding a way to remain stateside wasn’t quite as simple. He ended up having to serve in combat, where he fought for nine months before getting caught in an ambush that obliterated most of his platoon and left him paralyzed from the waist down. By the time he got back home, he was a bitter, angry paraplegic with no hope for the future. Regardless of his parents’ money or power or influence, the wheelchair was something he knew they would never be able to bail him out of.

  Meanwhile, his brother had moved back home, taken a job in their father’s company, and married the beautiful Yasmine Greene. Holt tried to figure out how he, too, could create some semblance of a normal life, but that all began to fall apart within a year or two, about the time the perfect couple, Richard and Yasmine, announced they were expecting their first child. Holt had been using drugs since Vietnam, but at that point he turned to the bottle too. By the time Cassandra and I were born, he was such a drunk, in his words, that when my mother brought us home and he held one of us in his arms—he was sorry, but he couldn’t even remember which one—he nearly dropped that baby on the floor. Five years later, by the time Cass and my mother died, he said, he was living in an adapted trailer at the foot of his parent’s property, either drunk or stoned around the clock and of no good use to anyone.