Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  She did. And so a few days after, we three sat on the couch. Picture but no sound came from the giant Zenith TV. We were listening as Georgia-Lynn sped off on another excursion.

  “Al’wight, less go,” Monica barked. “Fooltime’s over.” She glared at Lucy.

  Monica headed the posse as we filed quietly upstairs and into Jean’s room. I was so nervous. I only agreed to do this on condition that we all did. Now I pathetically brought up the rear. Not so Lucy; she’d been imagining this moment ever since she’d seen my face after my first encounter. New Orleanians love the grotesque. They crave it. It’s the bird they flip to their dull detractors. If you can’t join em, gross em.

  “He ain’t no critter,” Monica scolded us as we stood there. “I heard Annie Gert tell Momma. He just got summin they call gen’sticks. He fine mostways.”

  Monica parted the net. I could hear the odd apnea in Jean’s irregular slumbered breathing and I held back. Monica beckoned me over, clearly agitated by my reticence. Somehow, by this one thing, I had lost my supremacy in the group and now I resented her for daring to seize the mantle. I had engineered Monica’s return. I was supposed to be in charge. Even Lucy could keep it together. What was wrong with me? I shouldered Lucy aside and leaned over the crib.

  “His hands didn’t grow right,” Monica whispered. “Feet neither. Ain’t claws, just kinda funny.”

  She gently lifted Jean’s wrist. His fingers were stunted, the thumb too; not gnarled, just short and swollen. The digits didn’t have any distinctness because all five were fused together. The middle three were as one thick finger, right to where they shared the same single strip of nail. You couldn’t make out any joints; his hand was little more than a stub, its fingers a stunted extension of the same flesh, like a baby trotter. My heart broke for the shame of my earlier reaction. He was still only a baby, but he was never going to fill a catcher’s mitt or make a cat’s-cradle or clasp a pretty girl’s hand to put a ring on her finger. The simplest things—holding his bottle, sucking his thumb—were beyond him even now. But I wasn’t going to cry, not for Monica and Lucy to gloat. No way.

  Monica showed me his feet. His toes were even less developed, little more than a tiny ridge of muscle at the end of his foot, five distinct toenails closely bunched.

  “Is that why he keeps crying?” I asked. “It hurts?”

  “He’s crying cause God put the mark of my foolishness on him steada me.” The stranger’s voice came from behind us, and scared stupid, we all turned.

  The light fabric of her shabby pink night gown billowed around her knees as Lirienne Almonester came unsteadily into the room. The feather curls of her long blond hair might once have been an expensive styling in the Farah-Fawcett mold. Now they hung in filthy strands across her gaunt and ashen face. She thrust an empty baby bottle at me, and stupefied, I accepted it.

  Lirienne said to me, “You want im? Good luck,” and she shuffled out of the room. None of us moved until we heard her own door slam shut. I looked at the bottle, sorry now to presume I’d ever wanted to be in charge.

  That was how we became caregivers for Le Fil Jean. We prepared his bottles and nursed him, and though he took little, it was something. We changed him, burped him, rocked him, came to see that he cried less often and less harshly. We grew to love him and to believe that he gave it back. As I’d watch him sleep, I saw contentment in his funny face. He was still a sickly child, always worryingly warm to the touch, his skin blotchy and rashed. He would convulse for long periods as I cradled him and his slight body wasn’t growing as it should.

  In the years since, I would often accost some expert or other that I’d meet through work and describe Jean, in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way, and invite their conclusions. Aperts and Pfeiffers kept cropping up, as did fetal alcohol syndrome. Or maybe it was worse. Knowing the time and the people, I wonder… was Lirienne using heroin, cocaine, or God-knows-what while she carried him? I always remember the reference she made that day, to her ‘foolishness’. Did she mean Henry? Did she mean her drug use? In the world of her choices, I could never be sure if Henry led her down that road or if that road led to Henry. No matter. She continued using within the privacy of her room, because of or in spite of the child who needed her most. I know this because she OD’ed that same summer. While Georgia-Lynn rushed her to the ER or, knowing Henry, some off-the-books physician, we got our one and only glimpse inside the gilded cage of her bedroom. Amid the stench and filth and neglect, we discovered her junkie’s kit tossed on the floor. I thought the needle was Henry’s insulin syringe but Lucy took a forensic delight in describing what each item was actually for. After a spell at a private clinic in Baton Rouge, Lirienne returned to her seclusion and macabre normality resumed within the grand house on Iona Street.

  You might think, Scott, just how… screwed-up it was. And yes, by any measure, it was—by anywhere else’s measure. But in that city, absurdity is like the humidity. It permeates everything, until you stop noticing it. It connects everything and everyone in its oddness and the climate of convention has no place within it. That’s how it goes there. You live, breath, and feel the life that finds you. Thinking’s not required. Thinking can come later, when the weather breaks and you need some saner shelter.

  Those final weeks, with Monica back, were the happiest of my life. She couldn’t get her lisp around ‘Le Fils Jean’ so we tried ‘Baby Jean’. That was no good either and when I suggested ‘BJ’, Lucy delighted in sharing what she’d heard that meant. So we compromised with ‘BG’ and BG he became.

  Afternoons, we’d crank Henry’s Sherwood amp as high as we dared and dance around the living room as Chuck Kirr kicked out his music jams on WTIX, vying to outdo each other’s Belinda Carlisle moves whenever Our Lips Are Sealed came on. Whenever BG cried, we put on the Saturday Night Fever album and sneaked upstairs to lullaby him, adding our own whispered accompaniment to How Deep Is Your Love coming from below. What a sight we must have made to him, the three of us hovering above his gently rocking crib, our voices almost falsetto in hushed harmony (well, a kind of harmony!) But it worked. In those moments, we took away his anguish, however briefly. We did that, perhaps the one good thing to come from the absurdity which bound us all to the house on Iona Street.

  The terrible thing happened on the hottest day of the summer, the kind when the city feels like it’s been dropped into a gumbo pot and old folk sit still, moving only their mouths, mostly to whine about how it’s ‘Hot as Hades’.

  Georgia-Lynn was awol as usual. Monica was dozing on the couch and Lucy had planted herself inches from the massive TV, immersed in As The World Turns.

  I loved the heat. It drained everyone else but it soothed me. I lay in the back garden and looked at the sharp sky above me. I turned on my side and watched the butterflies carousing above the scarlet sage at the boundary fence. I slept for a time and woke to hear BG crying through the upstairs window. Creeping inside, seeing the others oblivious to it, I quietly made my way upstairs.

  You could hear the AC straining deep within the walls of the house. The fan above the crib was whipped to a blur, but the humidity—Scott, you could almost wring it from the air with your hands! BG was burning up, alarmingly hot to touch, with a pink bloom on much of his skin. The cloying atmosphere could barely feed his little lungs, reducing him to infant barks.

  I considered waking Monica but dismissed it immediately. Monica came from an extended family, with plenty of baby nephews and nieces. Where it concerned BG, she was always bossing us on the issue of his care. I could do this. I didn’t need to be her helper. I was the one who found him. He was mine.

  I had to take him out of that stifling room. I wanted to rub him down with a cool cloth in the bathroom but I was terrified Lirienne would hear. She might be capable of anything. She might kill us both in some drug-crazed rampage. I lifted BG from the crib and cradled him, cooing him, waiting for his cries to settle before I dared remove him. His body was like a coal ember against me and even I bega
n to see little starbursts before my eyes as we stood there. I had to get us both outside.

  I tip-toed downstairs and cut through the kitchen into the back garden. The pool was near the corner of the house. If Lucy cared to looked through the French doors of the lounge, she’d see me. If I waded far enough in and stayed low, she might not.

  With BG in my arms, I toed my sneakers off and stepped onto the sunken steps of the shallow end. The cool water lapped around my ankles, its relief enticing me farther in. As my feet found the pool floor, the giddy chill had already crawled under my shorts. I waded into the bliss until it came chest high, almost touching BG where I held him. Slowly, I lowered his back to the surface, waiting to see how he took to it. He baby-coughed but no cries; his distress was easing. Emboldened, I lowered him a little more, watching the water rise about his feet and shoulders as I minded to keep him held safe.

  A breeze washed across the garden. BG laughed. I rocked him, letting the water flow across his arms and legs. As we swayed, I whispered soft ‘Yay’s to each back and forth, my voice the only rhythmic sound against the murmuring leaves and the cicadas’ clicking.

  “Yay.” The water gurgled.

  “Yay.” The sunlight splashed on the ripples.

  “Yay.” BG was never happier. I hold that belief in my heart now.

  “Juliana!”

  I flustered at the yell. I let go. I turned. I let go of BG, my heart racing. I waded forward, trying to hide him. I was trying to save my own skin so I let him go.

  Lucy was standing at the pool steps, a popsicle in her hand. “You can’t be bringing him outside,” she said.

  Angrily, I pushed toward her. “Lucy!” I hissed. “Gosh y’all! Don’t do that to me. Lirienne’ll hear. Quiet up.”

  Lucy wasn’t looking at me though. She was looking behind me, her face a spook-stare. I turned. BG was afloat on the water, but barely. Water licked over his face as his arms pin-wheeled weakly. He was halfway out into the pool.

  “Oh no!” I put my leg forward to start out but I was back on the steps. Beneath me, my footing feel away and I lurched head-first under the shallows. Jets of water shot up my nose, then down my mouth as I gasped. I could feel the bottom under my hands and I pushed against, broke the surface, my eyes stinging. I couldn’t see BG. Then there he was, a foot and arm visible farther out. I ploughed toward him. I couldn’t swim but I was still touching the bottom, thank God. As I reached for him, my fingers brushed his tummy. I reached with my other hand. His head; if I could just grab onto his hair.

  I clawed to have him, my one hand groping him for purchase, the other thrashing to keep me upright. As my panic swelled, I thrashed more and, the more I fought for him, the more it pushed him away.

  When I realized I no longer felt the bottom under my feet, explosive terror erupted in my chest. I clutched the water with both hands now. In that instant, I forgot all reason but my own survival. I want to say that I remembered BG. I want to lie to you and myself, claim that I did everything I could to keep him up, that vainly I tried to pull us both back to the shallow end. But I can’t lie, Scott, God help me now. I can’t! I struck out. I hit BG, my instinct seizing the only lifeline it could find. It got him and held him and used him to boost me. But it was futile, and deservedly, I began to drown. In the end, he might still have lived but that I wouldn’t let go.

  Lucy screamed, a sharp screech across the water from where I saw her one last time, then muted as I went beneath, a low faraway drone. I could still see the sunbeams high above me, in the other world from which I was retreating. With BG in my arm, I reached one last time but there was only water. Water was my everything and all I seized was the nothing of it. Even when I hit the bottom, my mind was still falling and the silence was beautiful.

  And then I felt a force pulling me back; the Angel, taking me to Heaven, like Mama said he appeared when you died. I reached for his face. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to know his beauty before I was bathed in God’s.

  The next thing I remember, I spluttered, coughed. A retch seized me and I vomited bilious water on my face. When my eyes opened, the day blinded them until slowly I began to make out the dark shape above me. Not an angel: Monica.

  Hearing poured into my head and, with it, her voice calling my name again and again. I sat up with a jerk and looked to the pool. A tiny pearl-white corpse floated on its back near the side.

  “No!” I cried. I tried to scramble up but Monica shoved me back down. Beads of water ran off me, like lice across my skin.

  “No! Monica! BG! No!” I bleated, over and over. Lucy stood by the kitchen door, shock-seized rigid, eyes locked on the pool. The orange popsicle was melting down her arm. I looked at Monica, my face questioning, my heart hoping. To this day, more than the water gems on her skin and in her curls, I remember the stony calm in her face.

  “Don’t look, Juju. Matter what, don’t, ok?” she snapped.

  I couldn’t speak. My mind was numb. The silence stretched between us, Monica’s face hovering over mine, her wide eyes screaming ‘Don’t!’, waiting for me to accept.

  “We have to call 9-1-1,” I babbled.

  “No!”

  “Monica? BG?”

  “Won’t do im no good.”

  “You can call Gert—”

  “No!”

  “Henry—”

  “He gone kill you.”

  As I began sobbing, she stung me with a slap and clenched my head in her hands.

  “Is an acc’dent but we has to go, Juju. He’ll kill you. He’ll kill us all.”

  “We can’t… can’t leave him.”

  “Ssh. Ssh. Ssh.” Monica looked up at Lirienne’s window. “Is all we can do, all we oughta do. You un’stand me? Ain’t no other way. But you gotta be with me.”

  I struggled to comprehend. In the whirlwind of shock, my reality had been blown away.

  Monica pulled me to my feet and bustled me toward the kitchen where Lucy was still catatonic. Only when Monica tore the popsicle from her grip and tossed it aside did she snap out of it.

  “Ju… Juliana, she… I…” Lucy stammered.

  Monica grabbed my sneakers and herded us inside.

  “Nufink happened, lameass!” she hissed at Lucy. “Ya got it? Missy Pissy upstairs, she come out all crazy and scat’d us home.” Monica looked to me. “We went home. That’s it! Whatever happened after, we’d no parta.”

  I nodded eagerly, seizing the lie because there was nothing better to be had right then.

  “We’s going!” Monica decided.

  So we fled; Lucy her own way, Monica with me, to sit with me as I waited for my bus. I held her hand throughout, and when the bus arrived, she had to pry herself, finger-by-finger, from my desperate grip. In my heart I knew it would be the last meaningful contact I would ever know so I fought the end of it.

  At home, I changed my clothes and spent that evening sat on my bed, still as a statue, though my heart leaped every time I heard a car door slam. It wasn’t the thought of the cops coming to the door and politely ringing the bell. I wasn’t even afraid of Henry bursting in, eyes blazing, a flick-knife in his fist and a murder on his mind.

  It was my father; my soul was sick thinking of the look my father would give me when he got home, knowing what I’d done. If God owed me one thing—or I owed Him—it was that He spare my father that look, by striking me dead before he needed to give it. So I sat and waited for whomever got to me first.

  Sometime in the night, I heard Papa arrive, and fully-dressed, I wormed under the blankets and pulled them to my chin. I shut my eyes and feigned sleep. My heart thudded with each step of his approach. I held my breath as my door opened and I cursed God in my mind. What couldn’t He take me now, just quietly pluck my soul from my terrified body and end me?

  Instead, it was Papa’s hand that found me, stroked my hair, then my forehead. He sighed. Maybe it was relief. Maybe disappointment. I cannot ask him now he is dead. As he closed the door, I opened my eyes but I didn’t move. I didn�
�t care to know what time it was anymore. That was another life, one I dared not recall ever again. Memory is how the past finds you, the trail of crumbs you leave, no matter how far you run, no matter how hard you hide.

  After Papa turned in, I got up and resumed my vigil. Under the bed I had my new Wonder Woman backpack ready. I’d been saving it for school but now it held only clothes, shoes, and three candy bars, my Tuesday Taylor doll and her outfits. I tried to put her bed in too but I couldn’t fit anything more in. I cried when I explained that to her.

  There was $200 stuffed in my sock, from Mama’s old red coffee tin. I was waiting til it got light, when I could sneak out and run away. I figured I could get a bus straight to Union Station and then to anywhere. I thought I could even get a train to Paris. I was six years old. I didn’t know any better.

  But I fell asleep waiting for my moment, until the sound of the running shower woke me next morning. My chance had passed so I crept into the kitchen and waited. When Papa appeared, he looked drawn. I didn’t say a word as he sat at the table and blew his cheeks out.

  “Juliana?”

  I knew I was done for. “Uh-huh?”

  “Next few days, I want you to pass by the Delamare’s place.”

  I remembered the resolve in Monica’s voice and I summoned it to myself now.

  “Why, Papa? Can’t I go back Mister Henry’s?”

  “It’s just for a little while. School’s startin soon anyway. Won’t be needin to go by Iona Street no more.”

  “Did something—” A knock on the door saved me from the hole I was digging. Papa rose and handed me a $10 bill.

  “That’s Mister Frank. You go on across and make your breakfast there. Tell Missus Delamare I’ll be over tonight to get you.”