“You just got to town?”
“Yes. I flew to New Orleans this morning and rented a car.”
We both looked at the car, as if it were the most fascinating thing to come along in a while, the air nearly crackling between us. I wasn’t sure how to act, because I wasn’t sure how I was feeling about her right now, and I certainly had no idea how she was feeling about me. Was she angry? Scared? Concerned? All of the above?
“Well, I’d better head out,” Holt said, obviously sensing the tension. “I’ll see y’all tonight at six, ‘less I hear otherwise. Hope you don’t mind, but I mentioned dinner to your dad and he’s coming too.”
“Sure. The more, the merrier,” I lied.
AJ offered to help him get into his van, but he waved her off and said he had it under control. Sure enough, we watched as he opened up the sliding side door and pushed a button so that a small elevator began lowering to the ground.
“I guess you and I should head out to the house?” I asked her, reaching for the car door.
“Eventually. There’s somewhere I want to take you first. You want to know the truth? Fine. I’ll show you some truth.”
I got into her deluxe rental and waited as she started the car. Holt was just getting himself situated as we pulled out, and I glanced his way to give a wave, only to catch him looking longingly in our direction. Quickly, I turned to see AJ, and I realized that the look he’d been giving her was mutual. She was staring back at him with some emotion I didn’t recognize on her face.
“He looks good, don’t you think?” she asked as we pulled out of the parking lot onto the tree-lined street. “Older, of course, but still quite handsome, as always.”
“I wouldn’t know. I only just met him, remember?”
She nodded and continued driving in silence, heading toward a part of town that I had not yet ventured into.
“He said you were a little upset about that.”
“There’s an understatement if I ever heard one,” I said, surprised at the anger suddenly boiling up inside my chest.
Again, she simply nodded and kept driving. “There’s one thing you need to know, Miranda, about your ties to the people down here.”
“Ties? Or lack of ties, you mean?”
“Whatever,” she replied. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I had my reasons. Good reasons. I’m sorry you lost an uncle in the process, but if you had been in my shoes you would have done the same.”
“And here we go again, as Janet explains why everything she has ever done was purely for my own good.”
“Not everything,” she replied, glancing at me. “Not Holt.”
“What do you mean?”
She put on a blinker and turned into a neighborhood filled with small houses and scraggly lawns. The farther we went down the street, the scragglier it got.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see in a minute.”
“What do you mean by ‘not Holt’?”
She placed a high-heeled foot on the brake, slowing to cross over some railroad tracks.
“I kept your grandparents out of your life for your sake. I kept Holt out of your life for mine. I’m sorry if that cost you an important relationship, but tough. A person can only handle so much.”
I looked out of the window as she slowed even more, finally coming to a stop in front of a ramshackle home so small it couldn’t have held more than two or three tiny rooms, total. A busted chain-link fence surrounded the overgrown yard. In the front window, what looked like a bed sheet tacked up behind cracked glass was pulled away from the window, and a beady pair of eyes looked out at us, though I couldn’t tell if they belonged to man or woman.
“Take a good look,” AJ said, “because I’d better get moving again soon.”
“Where are we?” I asked, studying the creepy house and yard, hoping someone didn’t pull a gun out soon and start shooting. From the backyard a mangy dog was barking furiously, throwing himself against the gate.
“Home sweet home,” Janet said. “My home. Yasmine’s home.”
I didn’t reply but merely looked at her in alarm.
“It was just a rental,” she continued. “Lord knows how many people have lived there since my dad died and my mom moved up to Ruston twenty years ago. But from the time I was small until I left home at seventeen, this was where we lived. And yes, it was just as bad then as it is now.”
I knew that AJ and my mother had come from modest beginnings. I hadn’t realized those beginnings were quite this modest. Our fancy car was starting to attract attention, curtains parting up and down the street and two kids stopping short on their bikes just to stare.
“Start moving,” I told AJ. “I get the point.”
“Do you, though?” Janet asked as she put the car in gear and slowly pulled out. “Can you imagine the life we lived here, all four of us squeezed into that one horrid little house, my father’s body slowly degenerating from Parkinson’s disease? My poor mother had it worse than any of us, caring for two kids and an invalid husband, working full time on an assembly line to bring in enough money to feed us, and then once she got home having to cook and clean and help us with our homework and empty my father’s bags and feed him his supper like he was a baby. That was our life, Miranda. That’s how I grew up.”
“I’m sorry, AJ,” I said softly. “I didn’t know it was quite that bad.”
She turned out of the neighborhood and back onto a main street.
“As soon as your mother and I were old enough, we had to go out and get jobs too. One year, we both worked the counter at an ice-cream parlor across town. Most of the teenagers who hung out there went to St. James, the private school nearby, so they weren’t fully aware of our situation. That whole summer we were simply the Greene sisters and treated like part of the crowd, even if the two of us were behind the counter rather than in front. Yasmine set her eye on one guy who came in all the time: the rich and handsome Richard Fairmont. She knew all the tricks for reeling him in, and she went at it full steam ahead. She didn’t love him, but she liked him okay, and he was smitten with her. He was going to be her ticket out.”
I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear all of this, but AJ kept talking.
“As it happens, I had a major crush on Holt. He wasn’t quite as good looking as Richard, but he was sweeter, a real heartbreaker. I was too young for him, though, so he barely even noticed me. Yasmine knew I liked him, and she used to spin dreams on our way home on the bus, describing the lives we would live as the beautiful Greene sisters married to the wealthy Fairmont brothers.”
AJ glanced at me and continued.
“When Holt got shipped off to Vietnam, I cried for two weeks straight. He missed his brother’s wedding six months later, where he would have been best man to my maid of honor. If he’d been there, he might finally have noticed me. I had hit a tad of a growth spurt, shall we say, and a lot of guys were starting to pay attention. I didn’t return their affections, though. I was waiting for my conquering hero.”
She turned onto a road I recognized and began to head back toward town.
“When Holt Fairmont finally made it back home from the war, he was paralyzed from the waist down.”
I looked at AJ’s face, which was now shiny from tears.
“I still loved him, so I started visiting Yasmine at Twin Oaks almost every day, mostly as an excuse to spend time with Holt. After a few weeks, he started to fall for me too, but it wasn’t an easy time for either of us. He was bitter and hopeless and not at all the guy he had been before he went away. Worse, every time I tried to picture our fantasy future together, all I could see was my mother and what her life had been like, married to a man who was handicapped and bound to a wheelchair. I’m not proud, Miranda, but I couldn’t handle it. I tried, but finally when I realized that he was getting serious about me, I got scared and I ran. People had been saying I was pretty enough to be a model, so I took all my savings and went off to New York City.”
This part of the sto
ry I already knew, how she soon realized that modeling didn’t interest her—but that working for a modeling agency did. She became a receptionist and worked her way up to a position as a director in the same company where she still worked today.
“Your mom got pregnant pretty soon after I went away,” AJ said, her eyes looking glassy and cold, “which was really hard for me, considering that I had always thought we would live near each other and raise our kids together.”
I knew the next part of the story too, how my mother had seized her last bit of freedom before she was too pregnant to travel, coming up to visit her sister AJ in the big city. She took the train from New Orleans and had begun to bleed somewhere around New Jersey. By the time she got to New York, doctors there took one look and put her on complete bed rest for the remainder of the pregnancy. That’s when they learned that she was carrying twins.
“Your father, he never came up once to see her, not even when you were b—” She stopped her story to correct it just a bit. “Not even when you and Cassandra were born. When y’all were finally cleared to travel back home, I came down too, just to help out on the airplane with the babies, though I couldn’t stay for long. I saw Holt only once during that visit, and he was hopped up on drugs, acting crazy. He almost dropped little Cassandra on her head. Your poor mother, here she had a husband she couldn’t stand, an addict of a brother-in-law, two babies to raise, and a mother- and father-in-law who ruled with an iron fist and lived right downstairs. It was not a happy time.”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
“After a few false starts, at least she found some good help. And Yasmine was a great mom. She was used to mothering, because she had mothered me for so many years. It nearly broke my heart to leave y’all here and go back to the city. I never felt so alone.”
We made a turn and I realized that she had taken a back way around to Serein Highway.
“Flash forward five years,” I said softly, still hoping she would get to the point before we reached Twin Oaks.
“Five years later your mother called and told me that Cassandra had died in a horrible accident. She was nearly out of her mind with grief.”
“My father told me all about it,” I said. “How Cassandra died, I mean.”
“Or his version, at least. Your mother had a different story.”
I looked at Janet in alarm.
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is that I’m not at all sure how your sister really died. The family had their neat, sad little tale, but I didn’t buy it. On the phone, all your mom told me was that there was ‘more to it’ than anyone was saying. I thought I would find out the full story once I got down here for the funeral. But by then Yasmine was so drugged up on tranquilizers she could barely get out a coherent sentence, much less tell me what was really going on. Once we got through the funeral, I was going to take her away for a while, maybe get a place over in Biloxi where we could just rest at the beach and she could try and recover from the shock of losing her child. But she killed herself before I ever had that chance. I never learned the full story.”
AJ put on her blinker, slowing as we neared the entrance gates.
“In your letters to my grandparents, in the last one, you said you were forgiving them. Forgiving them for what?”
“For covering up the truth, whatever it was. For closing ranks. For making me cut a deal just so I could take you away and try to give you a more normal life.”
“If they were so strong willed, then why did they let me go?”
“Because they knew I knew something. I promised them my silence in exchange for custody and those monthly letters in exchange for money to help raise you. It actually worked out well for all involved, in the long run at least. I got a daughter. They got to protect their family name. You got someone to raise you who actually cared more about you than about appearances or their own selfish interests, which is what you would have had if I had left you here to be raised by them. Even your father made out okay, moving out West and starting a new life. The Fairmonts restructured their entire will so that their sons got their cut early and you would eventually receive the house and land. And then there was old Willy, who had worked so hard and faithfully for so many years. They gave him a life estate, as you know. And that’s how you ended up here now, the owner of a home that probably took you by surprise, as it was more magnificent than I had ever led you to believe.”
“You can say that again.”
“I didn’t want you to know, because I didn’t want you to come.”
She reached the end of the driveway, but rather than turn off her car, we just sat there for a while, some of my questions now answered, others still rolling around in my mind.
“But why?” I pressed. “Why didn’t you want me to have anything to do with them? Despite their faults they were still my grandparents.”
“They were hiding something, Miranda, something big. They didn’t deserve to know you. Worse, they twisted things around so that somehow Yasmine was the one who came out looking bad in all of this—stupid, weak, nutty wrong-side-of-the-tracks Yasmine, who was such a basket case that eventually she took her own life. I didn’t want you to ever have that picture of your mother. She was nothing of the sort. She was smart and funny and ambitious and kind, and if she killed herself, she had to have had a pretty darn good reason. I just didn’t want them to poison you against her.”
I put my hand on the latch but didn’t open the door, still struggling to understand.
“Bottom line, I didn’t trust them one bit,” she said finally. “Not for a minute. I was afraid if I gave them an inch, they’d try to find a way to take a mile. It was easier, safer, and just plain smarter to keep you apart. I’m sorry you didn’t know them, Miranda, but trust me, theirs was the greater loss. They never knew you, and that was the price they paid for my silence.”
Nodding, I opened the door and started to climb out, then I stopped.
“And Holt?” I asked. “Why did you keep me from him?”
She was silent for a long time.
“Because I loved him. It nearly killed me to get over him. I’m sorry, Miranda, but for my own sake, it was just too difficult to let him back in my life.”
THIRTY-THREE
Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted;
If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning
Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment;
That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.
Patience; accomplish thy labor; accomplish thy work of affection!
The air now cleared between us, I carried AJ’s bags from her trunk up to the bedroom just down the hall a bit from mine. As she settled in, I changed into more casual clothes and then took out the brochure for the Cajun museum to study it more closely. I opened it up and one of the pictures immediately caught my eye: It was a painting of an Acadian village, the design of the wood-and-thatch house in the background looking very similar to the house in my grandmother’s mural. The artist’s painting style was different, of course, but the subject matter seemed identical. Was it possible that I had been right about the mural, that my grandmother had painted scenes on those walls that told a story?
I brought the brochure into the room and held it up to compare. Sure enough, these houses were from the same era, of the same construction.
Furiously, I went back to work. By the time AJ joined me, I had managed to reveal several more chunks of the scene, mostly sky but also what looked like a person over on the left. Eager to make some real progress, whenever I reached a particularly stubborn area that would need more time, I simply picked up and started again a few inches over, trying to remove the easiest parts first.
While I carefully chiseled away, AJ sat nearby and pored over the books I had picked up at the museum today, searching for something about a bell. I decided to tell her most of the things Willy had said on his deathbed, only because sh
e already knew about my tattoo and therefore I wasn’t exactly breaking my oath. Unfortunately, once I finished the story, she couldn’t make any more sense out of it than Lisa and I had.
“But this is interesting,” she said, holding one finger on a page as she looked up. “Do you know how chucotement du bayou translates?”
“How?”
“It means ‘whisper of the bayou.’ Isn’t that lovely? A myth that gets passed along among the Cajuns, person to person, is a whisper of the bayou.”
A whisper of the bayou. I thought about that, about how the gentle breezes rustled through the reeds along the waterway, a sound that was indeed similar to hundreds of whispering voices.
“I just wished we knew what our whisper was, the one that would make sense of all this,” I said.
Then I went back to work. Soon, I had managed to uncover a young man wearing a tricornered hat and carrying some sort of handle in his fist. I took a break to shake out my arms, feeling frustrated and tired.
Suddenly, AJ looked up and gasped.
“What is it? Did you find it?”
“No, she said, standing. “You did.”
She walked forward, holding out one hand until she reached the wall, her finger touching the foot of the young man. In the shadows, on the bottom of his bare foot, was a tattoo of the Cajun cross inside the shape of a bell. I had been so consumed with removing the paint that I hadn’t even noticed it.
“What’s he doing here, in this scene?” AJ demanded.
I stepped back to see it in context. At this point, all we could tell was that the young man I had uncovered was walking barefoot on a path through what looked like woods. The item in his left hand was obscured, so I concentrated my efforts there, until I revealed what he was holding: a shovel.
“He was burying something,” AJ said. “Work this direction.”
My energy renewed, I began scraping down the path until I came across a mound of dirt. It was obvious that he had come from there, having just buried something, for his footprints led the way down the path.
Whispers of the Bayou Page 27
