A Twisted Ladder

by Rhodi Hawk

  Sam smoothed back her hair. The knife clattered to the floor, and Madeleine cradled her wounded hand, now slick with blood.

  The room went dark.

  Madeleine looked up.

  The kitchenette was choked with bramble but for a pool of light in the living room beyond. In the haloed glow, a small girl played with a tiny gray kitten. Madeleine watched.

  Still crouched in the center of the kitchen, Madeleine sat back heavily on the tile. She gave Severin an icy look.

  That was very ugly, she thought.

  “I gave you what you wished on!” Severin said.

  Madeleine reached out with her good hand and held Samantha’s, her arm resting on her knee where she sat on the floor.

  “You were very young, Sam. Two or three years old. You had a little gray kitten that you loved, and you hugged it. You squeezed it . . .”

  Sam’s face froze.

  “It was an accident,” Madeleine continued softly. “The kitten died.”

  Now Samantha sat back on the floor, her hand still gripping Madeleine’s. Her eyes were unfocused, gazing into the distance. Madeleine’s glanced back to the vision in the living room, where a young Samantha now sat sobbing over the little cat. Mercifully, the scene faded away and the kitchen was once more bathed in natural light.

  “Now don’t you feel bad for being mean to me?” Severin whined.

  Madeleine shot her a look, and she lowered her head in a silent pout.

  “I’d forgotten.” Sam stopped, then swallowed. “I’d forgotten all about that.”

  She looked at Madeleine, eyes confused, and then her gaze wandered back to the vague distance.

  “My mother and I had gone to the grocery store,” Sam said. “Where they were giving away free kittens. She let me pick one out. I felt so bad when it happened, I cried all night. And we never talked about it again. I . . .” She swallowed. “I guess I somehow purged it from my memory.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam.”

  Samantha looked at her fully, searching her face as though she were a stranger. “Tell me exactly what’s going on. What’s this—person?”

  sixty-two

  NEW ORLEANS, 2009

  MADELEINE HOISTED HERSELF UP from the floor, and Sam did the same. Together they bound Madeleine’s wound as she began to describe the events that led to Severin’s first appearances. She put on some coffee and they sat at the kitchen table. Severin crawled under the table and sat at Madeleine’s feet.

  Samantha listened carefully, offering no words of judgment, though Madeleine was certain she was not convinced. Sam gently asked Madeleine what she meant earlier about having exhibited “beginning signs of schizophrenia,” aside from Severin and the visions.

  Madeleine told her about the little indications, such as losing the ability to tolerate radio or television, and wandering concentration. She confessed that schizophrenics are prone to grandiose delusions, thinking they have been “specially chosen” by the alien ship or the CIA or whoever was communicating with them. In Madeleine’s case, Severin provided glimpses into the lives of others, or little hints of events that had not quite happened yet, such as the gouge on the cabinet.

  “You have to understand,” Madeleine told Sam. “She guided me out of the bayou in the middle of a storm the night I found Anita’s body. And she showed me where Zenon was hiding. How could that be a figment of my imagination?”

  Sam’s face held no expression. She was obviously still making up her mind.

  “Have you seen a doctor?” she asked quietly.

  Madeleine shook her head slowly. “No. And if I do, it won’t be until after the trial. I have to appear clear and in control of my faculties until it’s over.”

  “Maddy, I think you should see a doctor. To hell with the trial.”

  “No. I can keep a lid on this. The only reason you found out is because you walked in on me when I thought I was alone.”

  “The doctor can put you on medication and keep this at bay.”

  “I know that better than anybody. And I also know medication won’t keep Severin away. Daddy told me as much before he died. But if they find out, I’ve lost all credibility as a witness. I won’t risk that. And besides, Sam, she showed me where Zenon was hiding! There is no way I could have otherwise known that. These aren’t just random hallucinations. Don’t you want to find out what this is about?”

  “I just don’t want anything to happen to you. Whatever it is, I just want it to end.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  “Where is the little girl now?” Sam asked. “Can you see her?”

  Madeleine looked down at Severin under the table. “She’s sitting right here at the table with us. Oddly enough, she’s been behaving since we sat down. Probably because we’re talking about her. She likes to be the center of attention.”

  Severin’s brow furrowed. Sam followed Madeleine’s gaze to the floor where Severin sat, and then looked back and shivered.

  She asked, “What have you told Ethan?”

  Madeleine’s mouth went dry. She could only shake her head.

  “Nothing?”

  Madeleine lifted her shoulders helplessly. “I wanted to. I’m going to. There just hasn’t been the right moment. I was going to maybe tell him tonight. But then Daddy . . .”

  Samantha nodded and squeezed her arm. “If you want, Maddy, I can tell him first. I can tell him about this, and about Daddy Blank too. It might make it easier for you to discuss it with him.”

  Madeleine looked at her, thinking it over. “Yes, Sam. I’d like that.”

  She nodded, tears still flowing freely down her face. “Anything.”

  “But I want to tell you,” Madeleine said. “That you’ve been such a good friend to me. I can’t imagine what I would have done if it weren’t for . . .”

  Her words caught, and the muscles seized in her face as tears spilled afresh. Sam leaned over and wrapped her arms around her, and together they wept. They clung to one another for a very long time.

  MADELEINE SAT ON THE couch, sipping water and listening to the endless ringing of the telephone. Jasmine slept stretched across her lap. Severin sat on the floor and sang softly. Madeleine rubbed her hand over her raw, wet eyes. Her stomach churned.

  “It gets easier, a little some.” The little girl hugged her legs. “People going through. Sometimes it’s fun.”

  Madeleine looked at her. “What makes you think I would ever enjoy watching people die?”

  Severin shrugged. “That man who sent your father through, you wish on him to die, yes?”

  Madeleine stared. “My father died of a drug overdose. He did that to himself.”

  Severin pressed her lips together and cast her eyes downward.

  “Well . . . some yes, but not very.” She looked up at Madeleine. “You wish to see?”

  Madeleine felt a blanket of cold settle over her, emotions turning to crystal. She nodded.

  The room transformed into that now-familiar dark, tangled cave and Madeleine recognized a section of the Iberville ghetto. She saw Carlo Jefferson selling his wares. She watched her father emerge from a black car with gold hubcaps, and wondered who might have driven him there. She watched.

  She saw.

  Rage mounted inside her. While her father lay unconscious in filth, his face streaked with his own vomit, she watched Carlo go through his pockets to see if he had any more cash on him. Apparently he was angry at having lost money on a bad supply of China White.

  Madeleine saw Carlo walk away, leaving her father alone in an abandoned building, even as the very life drained from him.

  SHE FELT A COLD anger permeate her blood, spidering through her veins until it crackled in her throat. Of the awful things that had occurred in the past year, here was one event where she could pin blame squarely upon a single person’s shoulders. The sensation grew inside her, an almost delightful hatred that she explored and coddled as if running her tongue over a canker sore inside her mouth. Carlo. He had done more than enable her f
ather’s death; he had made it certain.

  Violent fantasies flickered through her mind.

  In the kitchen, her cell phone stopped ringing.

  “See?” Severin said. “Now you wish on him to die, yes?”

  Madeleine looked at the little girl. “Yes, Severin, as a matter of fact I do wish him dead.”

  Severin looked satisfied, and she nodded with a smile. “And so you have a chance. To send him through, yes. A good exercise to start.”

  But as Severin spoke, she conveyed the full embodiment of her thoughts, not just by means of her jumbled speak. Madeleine saw a crisp image of the shotgun inside her mind. Severin communicated in 360 degrees, and speech and imagery comprised just one segment of that.

  Madeleine had to chuckle. So this was it. This was madness. Pure, simple, tongue-wagging insanity. About to become criminal insanity. She had always been on the outside looking in, the lofty daughter or aspiring psychologist, passing judgment. And now it was she who was insane, knocked off her pedestal and into the abyss.

  Severin was real; Madeleine believed that. But the devil-child brought with her a miasma that distorted and spun the filters that looked out to the rest of the world. More than ever before, Madeleine understood her father’s clarity beneath the confusion and violence.

  But it didn’t matter. Severin was right; it had gotten easier already. Maybe being insane wasn’t so bad. Madeleine felt her conscience turn to granite, and there was freedom in it. She could dance across that shelf of granite and act upon any inclination without moral care.

  Severin went back to singing to herself in the corner.

  Madeleine’s upset stomach threatened to become a handicap. She went to the bathroom and purged, brushed her teeth, and washed her face. From the cedar chest in the living room, she retrieved the shotgun her brother had used to kill himself.

  She walked out the door with the shotgun tucked neatly within the folds of her long coat.

  Behind her, Severin whispered in a sickly sweet voice: “I’ll come with you.”

  sixty-three

  HAHNVILLE, 1927

  THERE HAD COME A day when Ulysses began to drift away. Not completely at first; he would linger nearby as Rémi carved dolls from alder wood or tupelo gum, but he’d let him alone. Sure, he’d call over to Rémi from time to time, interjecting an opinion or unsolicited advice, but nothing like his usual taunts. The moment Rémi finished carving one doll, Marie-Rose would beg him to carve another. He could not deny her. And so in one stretch, he’d carved enough dolls for Marie-Rose to match Patrice’s collection.

  Gradually, Ulysses’s presence had become sporadic and more distant. Rémi would catch sight of him wandering the avenue of field workers’ cottages, or standing in the shadows outside a bon-fire. Rémi would be working the fields with Francois and the other laborers, and from time to time, he’d catch sight of Ulysses harvesting cane in the distance. Rémi had no idea what caused this freedom.

  As Ulysses’s presence faded, so too did the anxiety and confusion that had plagued Rémi for the past several years. He found himself once again able to concentrate on his surroundings, and he even found he could attend to several things at once; he could put on his shoes and talk to Patrice at the same time, even if a radio was playing nearby.

  In fact, he found he loved the radio. It brought him amazing news such as the Intracoastal Waterway undertaking, a path of artificial and natural canals that ran from New Jersey to Florida, and around to Texas, a massive toll-free shipping channel that had been under construction since Rémi and Chloe were wed.

  He was mystified when he realized that private civilian groups, not just the government, now occupied the radio waves. Rémi had heard that the radio stations would become available to private industry after the war, but he could not remember whether the war was even over. He had a vague memory of discussions of its coming to an end around the time he married Chloe, but that had been several years ago, and he could not well remember anything that happened outside the bramble in the interim.

  At some point over the last year, Patrice had purchased a brand new radio with vacuum tube receivers. It could pick up signals from both Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and beyond. Rémi had previously not allowed the radio to play while he was nearby, as the sounds would send him into a tailspin of confusion, but now he was fascinated. He listened to news, music, editorial commentary, and even the Sunday night program that broadcast children’s stories, a favorite of Marie-Rose.

  Indeed, Rémi was fascinated with the world around him. It felt as if he had been away on holiday for a very long time, or had slept for years like the mythical Rip van Winkle, awakening in a world he did not recognize. He was shocked to see his own reflection in the glass: His hair was unruly, he had lost more teeth, and he was sharply thin.

  When he came across a chest full of relics from the Great War, he realized that his last surviving brother was dead. Tatie Bernadette informed him that it had happened nearly ten years ago, on the night he and Chloe were married.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Rémi asked her.

  “Chloe told you,” Bernadette replied. “You don’t remember?”

  It wasn’t so much that Rémi did not remember; he simply had not been listening.

  Rémi, your brother is dead. You are the only LeBlanc now. You and your children. You are the sole heir. I have helped you.

  Chloe’s words had been a tiny filament in a vast tapestry of sights and sounds that enveloped him, most prominently the face and voice of Ulysses. Constant noise; constant distraction. And the more he struggled, he would slip further into that place. The place where the trees grew black and the earth wobbled beneath him when he walked, as if the weeds formed a blanket over water. The place where the indigents lived, drawing him away, deeper into the woodland of eternal night.

  But the most amazing aspect of Rémi’s awakening was the presence of his children. Patrice, Guy and Gilbert, and little Marie-Rose seemed to spring to life before his very eyes. When Rémi was under Ulysses’s bewitchment, the children scuttled about his periphery like spring hatches over water. With his newfound clarity, they became little people to him, with individual personalities and boisterous manners, and they were thrilled to have his notice.

  Indeed, it was Rémi’s pleasure to notice them, but he feared he might at any moment lose himself in Ulysses’s world again. And so he savored every hour. He tilled the fields of sugarcane with worshipful hands. He fished and trapped with his sons in the swollen river, for it was a wet year, and he listened, mesmerized, as Marie-Rose read aloud from her books, in both French and English.

  And Patrice—sharp-witted and already a striking beauty—with Patrice he could converse through the night, until dawn misted the river. They discussed the radio programs, how the Johnson grass threatened the sugarcane crop, Rémi’s state of mind, the rumors of a bad flood year, anything and everything. She was now a young lady of fourteen, and though Rémi had lived in the same house as she, he had missed half her childhood. But Patrice was strong, wise beyond her years and with a baffling intelligence. She reminded Rémi so much of Chloe.

  And in those weeks of awakening, Rémi longed for Chloe. Tatie Bernadette had told him that Chloe had gone to New Orleans to manage business affairs. She was in the habit of staying in the house on Toulouse where his brother used to live, and tending to the new distribution venture that had brought Terrefleurs back into financial buoyancy. And so, Rémi waited for Chloe to return. In the meantime he delighted in the company of his children and the serenity of Terrefleurs, which was, for the moment, innocent of her demons.

  IT RAINED FREQUENTLY THAT spring. Sometimes it came in the form of a violent deluge, sometimes a gentle shower. When it was the latter, the workers tended the fields as usual, well-accustomed to Louisiana rains, and Rémi worked alongside them. He listened and worked in time with the cadence Francois chanted. His hoe gouged the earth in rhythmic thrusts, keeping time, and the workers answered the leader’s call in
one deep, unified voice.

  But when the rains poured with intensity, the fields lay silent. The workers confined themselves to more domestic chores, making repairs on their own cottages, or telling tales and singing in the dining hall. Rémi was surprised to see that Chloe had outfitted even the workers’ cottages with indoor plumbing, another testament to the wealth she had brought Terrefleurs with her keen business sense. She had also greatly improved the plantation school so even the workers’ children, who could not afford to take the boat down the bayou to the school in Vacherie, were now well-learned.

  How Rémi longed for Chloe, and wished she would return from New Orleans. With the rains confining him to the main house, he was left with little to do but think of her. And wonder how long before Ulysses would return.

  What kind of life is this? Why do I bother?

  It occurred to him that were it not for his wife and children, he wouldn’t.

  RÉMI SPOKE WITH PATRICE one afternoon as they sat in the shelter of the gallery while rain shrouded Terrefleurs in curtains of gray. He smoked tobacco while Patrice sipped her first taste of cherry bounce, though it seemed not a taste that agreed with her much.

  Patrice told Rémi that her mother had expanded the distribution end of the business, and that she was routinely needed at the warehouse. Rémi listened and nodded, though he could not imagine what business matter would occupy Chloe so. He also noticed a hint of bitterness in his daughter’s voice. He realized that the children must have been lonely with an absent mother and father, being raised instead by a nanny and tutors. He explained to Patrice that he himself had gone away to France for his education, and he knew how alone Patrice must feel at times.

  Patrice shrugged with apparent indifference. “As I see it, Tatie Bernadette is my mother, and as for you, well, you are here now, at least.”