A Density of Souls (13 page)

Cameron leapt back, breaking the huddle. The players on either side of them stumbled to right themselves. Brandon shot a glance at the sidelines. Coach Stubin was eying the huddle suspiciously.

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“Twenty yards?” Cameron bellowed. The other players started backing up. Greg was still crouched, paralyzed with indecision. Brandon straightened, mirroring Cameron’s posture and ready to fight. If Greg wasn’t up to a fight, he sure as hell was. “I can run it!” Brandon growled.

“Bullshit. Jordan Charbonnet maybe. But we’re not throwing this play just because you and Darby here are blow buddies!”

Brandon slammed into Cameron Stern, their helmets cracking together loud enough for Brandon to think he’d gone deaf. He jabbed one hand into the face guard of Cameron’s helmet and as Cameron’s arms flailed like propellers, he yanked his head three feet from the cleat-trodden grass where they had fallen before slamming it back to the earth. Brandon could hear his mother screaming at him from the stands just as Cameron got one hand around Brandon’s face guard and twisted his helmet against his neck, sending him stumbling side-ways where he crashed into Greg’s stomach.

He saw Coach Stubin running across the field toward him.

Thibodaux Boilers watched as the other Knights backed away from Brandon’s and Cameron’s kicking legs.

Coach Stubin grabbed Brandon by the back of the neck, yanking him off Cameron, the boy’s legs still pumping empty air before Coach Stubin threw him to the side. Brandon collapsed into the mud. The other players glared, their shoulders hunched, as peals of laughter tore through the Thibodaux stands.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Charbonnet?” Coach Stubin roared.

Brandon opened his mouth. No response came. He spat at the mud clinging to his face guard, angrily wiped at it with one hand. One of the players knelt down next to Cameron Stern.

“Coach?”

Stubin whirled around.

“He’s not moving, Coach!”

Stubin studied Cameron as he lay prone against the grass, his helmet listing to one side.

“Get your ass to the bench, Charbonnet!”

Brandon struggled to right himself. He held his helmet up, averting his eyes from the angry glares all around him—except for Greg Darby, who had bowed his helmet. Two medics dashed across the field. As Brandon neared the sidelines, the Cannon stands fell into silence. He saw his mother sink back to her seat in the bleachers. The look on her face was something between anger and shame.

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Humiliation welled inside of him and he felt an urge to rush to the stands, to tell his mother what Cameron had called him. But she had already looked away from him, shooting nervous glances at the disapproving glares of surrounding parents.

When he realized embarrassed tears were moistening his eyes, Brandon ripped off his helmet and slammed it into the bench. Nearby cheerleaders jumped.

“Brandon!” he heard Elise shriek.

But he was charging down the sidelines, bound for the locker room.

No one could talk to him like that. No one.

And as he had learned early on, rage was the best weapon against pain.

Silent shock fell in his wake. Cheerleaders turned away, embarrassed. But Meredith approached the bench, staring down at where the two pieces of Brandon’s helmet lay on the grass. He had slammed it against the bench hard enough to crack it in two.

“Shit!” Angela hissed before she could stop herself.

The stadium was a halo of light thrown against the night sky. The stands grew visible up ahead, along with the shadows of a hundred bodies sitting in them. Andrew slowed the mini-van as he pulled down along the side road that ran behind the stands. The parking lot was choked with cars.

“Just pull over, Andrew!”

“Oh, God!” Alex wailed from the backseat, “They started! Mom, they staaaarted!”

“Andrew, pull over!” Angela shrieked.

She heard her husband whisper a “Goddamn it” under his breath as he nudged the steering wheel to the left and the mini-van’s tires thudded into the mud on the shoulder of the road. The van rolled to a halt.

“Next time, Andrew! Consider me your watch!” Angela shouted.

“We’re not getting into this now . . .”

She reached for her seat belt buckle. “Okay. We’ll wait until after your ninth scotch and water. How about that?”

“Angela, I swear to God, if you don’t . . .”

Andrew stopped, anger drained from his face. Angela’s next thought The Falling Impossible

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came in the form of a question—What was that woosh? And then she thought what a funny, made-up words woosh was. What did she mean, woosh? She was more frightened by the sudden fear on her husband’s face than the sound she had heard. Woosh. Air. The sound of air. The sound of a door opening.

“Baby?” Andrew whispered. He had not called her that in ten years.

They both heard the screech of brakes. Angela glanced over to see the fractured word —ANITATION perfectly framed in the driver’s side window. She heaved against her seat belt without unbuckling it, looked over her shoulder, and saw the arc of her son returning to the earth through the two-foot crack in the mini-van’s back door. The brakes of the Thibodaux sanitation truck hissed as Alex Darby’s neck gave way under the weight of his upturned body.

It started as light.

A swath of red danced across the field, followed by a swath of blue.

Meredith and the other cheerleaders had just led the crowd in a triumphant roar as Cameron Stern got to his feet with the help of two medics, before walking across the field on his own. She had watched grimly as he removed his helmet. The hair on the back of his head was matted with blood and his jaw was bruised.

Light erupted from beneath the stands. The younger Cannon fans climbed up onto the highest rail, craning their heads over.

Meredith Ducote had no idea what had happened, but what she saw amazed her, as three hundred fans rose numbly to their feet and turned their backs on the field. She stared dumbly at the sea of backs—the blue and red flashes of police lights throwing them into silhouette.

Then Meredith heard it. A human, female wail, a torrent of vocal pain she had never heard given breath before. Meredith felt the wail pass through her body. She trembled. For a brief instant, it was as if the sound had ripped back the veil across Meredith’s own grief.

An ambulance’s siren devoured the woman’s screams.

The pieces of the tableau were falling into place and a voice inside of her spoke, assuming the tone of her mother’s voice, all gravity.

Something just broke, it said. Something that can’t be fixed.

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T
he sun had set by the time Elise Charbonnet left Alex Darby’s funeral at Bishop Polk Cathedral and drove to the EZ Serve on Prytania to buy a pack of Parliament Lights, her first in fifteen years. In a black cocktail dress, which even with the matching scarf was more appropriate for dinner with Roger’s clients than for funerals of seven-year-old boys, Elise stared into space. The cashier slid the pack in front of her.

“Three-fifty,” he said.

Elise did not react. Over the cashier’s left shoulder she reran, like a video loop, the image of Andrew Darby dragging his wife out the cathedral’s side door as four hundred mourners watched in horror after Angela had jumped from her pew and slugged her husband in the shoulder. “They did it! They did it!”

“Three-fifty, ma’am,” the cashier repeated.

When Elise looked back at the woman, her eyes were filled with tears. The cashier’s annoyed glare softened a little, and she bowed her head. Elise fished the money from her pocket book and nudged the Parliaments into her purse with her free hand.

“You just come from a funeral?” the cashier asked hesitantly.

Elise nodded.

At home, Elise double-checked her house even though she knew Roger had hurried from Alex’s funeral to a meeting with a potential client. Brandon, she assumed, had left with Greg. At first, she was glad that there would be no one around to see her smoke the first of her cigarettes. And then a hollowness settled over her and she shuffled into the kitchen. She pondered calling Jordan.

Elise cracked the kitchen window, revealing the spire of the Bishop Polk bell tower over her backyard. Twilight threw the portico’s windows into deep silhouette. She lit the Parliament and took her first drag.

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• • •

Monica and Stephen had walked the four blocks from Bishop Polk Cathedral to their house. Stephen had not cried during the funeral, and Monica did not cry until they were a block away from the church.

Stephen curved his arm around her shoulders, walking her the rest of the way. They were almost to their corner when Monica said, “There’s nothing worse than losing a child.”

She looked up at Stephen and he took her face in his hands. He seemed strangely detached.

“I promise to live longer than you do,” he whispered to her, and kissed her gently on the cheek.

Once inside the house, Monica went to her bedroom, Stephen to his. It would be the last time she saw her son that day.

Later that evening, Monica sought comfort in Jeremy’s study. Her husband had kept meticulous records of the progression of each of his poems. First drafts had their own notebooks. January through August, 1976 contained one of her favorites, “To a Child Not Yet Born”, but Monica could not locate the first draft. Monica believed Jeremy had written it for Stephen but she had never told her son about it. She found herself reading through Jeremy’s poetry for the first time in a long while. When she heard Stephen’s door open and shut, she assumed he was going to the kitchen for something to drink.

Roger Charbonnet returned home around eight P.M. By then, Elise had sprayed the kitchen down with Lysol until she was confident there was no lingering cigarette odor. Roger set his briefcase down on the counter and moved toward the living room, where Elise was watching the rebroadcast of the Channel 4 evening news. The funeral for Alex Darby was the lead story. Elise watched the footage of confused children—Alex’s classmates gripping their parents’ hands—and teenage mourners leaving Bishop Polk in angry silence. Roger sat next to her on the couch.

“Classes at both Cannon School and Bishop Polk Elementary, where Alex Darby was in the second grade, were suspended so that students could attend the funeral. There’s no word yet on whether or not the playoff game between the Cannon Knights and Thibodaux Boilers, interrupted by tragedy, will be rescheduled . . .”

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“Jesus Christ,” Monica muttered. She watched the same report at ten P.M. that night as she sat propped up in bed, a Chambord and Absolut on the bedside table.

“Mourners told reporters outside Bishop Polk Cathedral that the boy’s mother was so distraught she had to be removed from the service by her husband,” the reporter continued.

Monica sipped her drink, praying it would help sleep to come. She heard what sounded like a bell—a strange metallic note with an echo that was drowned out by the anchor’s amplified voice. She ignored it.

She often found herself mistaking background noises on television for sounds in her own house.

Roger was in bed by the time Elise took a pen to a pad of floral-bordered stationery. In an hour, she managed to compose two lines.

Dear Jordan,

Things are bad here.

She sat in her nightgown at the kitchen table, staring at her pad. A Parliament Light smoldered in a coaster. The back door was open to a night that had gone quiet following the strange noise Elise had heard moments earlier. She assumed the noise belonged to a ship’s horn on the nearby river.

She dragged on her cigarette and lifted the pen again. “Sometimes nightmares come true,” she wrote.

She studied the words. She was disgusted with herself for being so melodramatic. After all, she had not lost a child. But the sight of Angela Darby being dragged from the church, screaming and clawing at her husband’s arm, had somehow struck something inside of her with more force than the sight of Alex Darby’s miniature coffin draped in the Episcopal flag had. Angela Darby’s screams had convinced Elise that they could all lose a child at any moment. But wasn’t this a fact of life? How foolish I am, Elise thought, to realize it only now. She ripped the piece of paper from the pad, crumpled it, and tossed it into the kitchen wastebasket. She massaged her forehead with her hands and inhaled.

Elise jumped when the phone rang.

“Elise?”

“Trish?”

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“Did you hear?” Trish Ducote asked her.

“No,” Elise responded, with quiet dread.

“Angela Darby’s in Bayou Terrace. Andrew just admitted her. My cousin Missy works over there and she’s on call tonight. Missy told me they put her in confinement. Seems she went nuts!”

“Jesus,” Elise whispered, leaning against the side of the cabinet with the phone pressed to her ear.

“Meredith isn’t over there, is she?” Trish asked.

“I don’t think Brandon’s around,” Elise responded weakly. She took another drag off the Parliament.

Elise dropped the phone. A loud crack sounded. The reverberation had made it seem so close that she instinctively hunched her shoulders and bent down over the counter. She heard Roger’s footsteps barreling down the stairs. She groped for where she’d dropped the receiver on the counter. “God! Did you hear that?” Trish practically shrieked through the phone.

Roger appeared in the kitchen doorway in his T-shirt and boxers.

He noted the cigarette in Elise’s hands.

“The Projects?” Elise asked Trish.

“Too close,” Roger answered.

Elise had only one thought. No. It isn’t possible. The anguish of the day had been complete already.

Roger drifted to the open back door.

“I’ll let you go . . .” Trish said weakly.

Elise mumbled something inaudible and hung up the phone. At her husband’s side, she followed his gaze toward the night sky where she assumed he was trying to trace the origin of the sound.

“Put it out, Elise,” Roger commanded, and she complied.