A Density of Souls (22 page)

“I’m sure she wasn’t proud of it.”

“And she wouldn’t want to ruin your new friendship.”

“We’ve known each other for a long time, Jordan,” Monica said.

“But you weren’t always friends,” Jordan said, sprawling into a high-backed antique chair against the far wall.

“No . . .” she answered weakly.

“I want to talk to you about my brother,” Jordan said firmly.

“I don’t know anything about your brother other than what your mom’s told me—”

“And what he did to Stephen,” Jordan finished.

Monica glowered at him. She turned to the wet bar and began pouring her own drink. “You know you’re a very handsome young man, The Bell Tower

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don’t you?” It wasn’t really a question. She turned, took a sip of her drink. “People usually defer to you, don’t they?” The bite in her voice was evident now. “Have you had a lot of experience at intimidating women twice your age? Do you practice on your mother?”

She was watching the impact of her words, so Jordan did not move or flinch. “You were a freak, weren’t you?” Jordan asked quietly.

“That’s why you were never friends with my mother. Because you were from the wrong side of Magazine Street, and to make it all worse you were ten times prettier than she was.”

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave . . .”

“I remember thinking, even when I was a kid, that she didn’t like you because you were different. When you came along and moved into this house, you upset her equation. Threw things out of . . . balance. Well, that’s what I’m doing. Because I have questions and I want them answered, but we both know the only way people in this neighborhood deal with anything difficult is to smile and offer it a drink.”

Jordan could not read the expression on Monica’s face. Maybe she was mildly impressed.

“What has my mother told you about Brandon? Did she tell you he was—”

“Camp Davis. Yes.” Monica said, swallowing some of her drink.

“Did she tell you it was a three-month program?”

Monica furrowed her brow, looking genuinely puzzled, then drank.

“He was admitted four years ago,” Jordan added quietly.

“What do you want, Jordan?” she asked.

“I want to know what’s wrong with him.”

“Then you’re asking the wrong questions,” Monica whispered.

He sat forward in his chair. “What should I be asking?”

She crossed the room to the window. Beyond her profile, through the gaps in oak branches, Jordan could make out the spire of the Bishop Polk bell tower.

“You should be asking about the night Greg Darby killed himself,”

she said to him.

“It was the worst thing I had ever seen. And my mother was a drunk who used to shit the bed so I’ve seen some things, let me tell you.”

Monica laughed bitterly and brought her third shot of Chambord to her lips. “It was horrible, not just because we all had children and 160

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we all knew we could end up like Angela Darby in one second, with just one wrong turn, or one cross of the street. But because it made the adults and the children the same. At the funeral, the parents . . .

They didn’t know what to do. I watched them. Stephen and I sat in the balcony and I saw all those parents trying to comfort their children and doing such a bad job of it . . .”

She paused, sipped her drink.

“She won’t talk about it now,” Jordan interjected. “But when she first called me after it happened, she told me she thought she heard the gunshot . . . when he did it.”

Monica locked eyes with his. “We all heard it,” she corrected. She went to the wet bar, pouring herself another tumbler of Chambord.

With her back to him she continued. “I heard two things that night, actually. The first I only remembered later, but it sounded like one of the bells . . . You know, the bells haven’t been used in years. They use some recording or something—that’s what Stephen told me.”

“They don’t sound like real bells,” Jordan agreed.

Monica swayed back, her chair tipping slightly as she settled into it.

“Well, earlier that night, I guess it was about—oh, God, I don’t know . . . It sounded as if one of the bells had tried to go but couldn’t.

It was like this strange hum. I remember because that’s when the dogs started barking.” She looked out the front windows again. “I don’t know. For a while I thought I might have imagined it. It could’ve been something else. A plane, or I don’t know, a truck on Jackson.”

She went quiet, either drunk or pensive.

“And the gunshot?” Jordan asked gently, urging her to go on.

“I’d say around ten or eleven.” Monica fingered the hem of her dress. “It was loud. Too loud. I mean, you should know a lot of the times we can hear guns from over in the St. Thomas Projects. They’re a few blocks away, but this was . . . I knew it was too close the minute I heard it.” Monica looked at Jordan and for a moment her eyes couldn’t focus. “Stephen wasn’t home.”

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“My husband. Jeremy. He used to have this office on the third floor.

It’s still pretty much the way it was. He was a writer and there’s so much . . . Anyway, when the gunshot went off, that’s where I was. I was flipping through books.”

Jordan figured she was diverting him. “He wrote this poem many years ago, one of my favorites. It’s called ‘To a Child Not Yet Born’.

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But for some reason I’ve never been able to find the first draft.” She waved her hand and let it flop. “This is all very boring, but Jeremy was quite detailed with his notes. He’d take notes, hammer out a first draft, and then polish a final for submission. He kept them all in notebooks.

Anyway, the only copy I have of his poem is the final, and I keep it in his study.”

Her eyes closed. “. . . I was reading it when I heard it. You see, Stephen was having a rough time in high school . . . Your brother.”

Monica glanced at Jordan, who smiled wryly and bowed his head.

“ ‘What fires burn the heart,’ ” she whispered. It took Jordan a second to realize she was quoting the poem. “ ‘From which God did these agonies start . . .’ ”

Monica halted and said, “I thought about reading it to Stephen.”

She shook her head slightly. Slower. Drunker.

“I heard someone in the house. After I heard it, I waited on the porch for a while. I heard the sirens. I went inside and . . . Stephen wasn’t in his bed. I went back to the study. I was trembling. I thought that . . . Well, I was waiting for the phone to ring. I was waiting for the police to call and tell me . . . Then I heard footsteps. But I wouldn’t leave the study. I wasn’t even thinking. I remember, I got Jeremy’s old pistol out of his desk drawer. It was the same one he used.”

Monica stared out the window as she whispered, “I found Stephen in bed.”

Jordan felt a twinge of disappointment tug at his shoulders. “But you said he wasn’t home?” he asked gently.

“I don’t think he was . . .”

“But you heard footsteps?” Jordan asked again, a note of insistence in his voice. Careful, he told himself, don’t blow this.

Monica stood and wobbled, clutched the chair’s arm to steady herself, and wafted deliberately from the room. Jordan sat confused as he heard her climb the stairs. A few moments later, she returned, carrying a bundle of fabric. He had a faint memory of his grandfather’s funeral. His grandfather had fought in World War II and at the service Jordan had accepted the flag that had draped his grandfather’s casket, folded into a tight triangle, just like the flag Monica set on the coffee table in front of him. This one was not American.

“Stephen was lying wrapped in that,” she said quietly.

“Wrapped?” he asked incredulously.

Monica nodded. Her hand quivered, sloshing the liquor in her 162

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glass. “I was able to get it off him because he wasn’t just asleep. He was unconscious,” she said, her voice thick.

Jordan traced a hand over the flag.

“That’s the Episcopal flag. Bishop Polk is an Episcopal cathedral, of course,” Monica said. She downed another slug of Chambord. “Do you think I’m a bad mother?” she asked, her voice tinged with grief and rage. “No, I never asked him about it. I stayed up all night checking his pulse. Making sure he was breathing. But I never asked him about it, do you want to know why?”

Jordan couldn’t answer.

“Because he was alive. Because he’s still alive. And I spent half of his life thinking that he would either be killed by your brother and Greg, or he would end up killing himself just like his father. But he didn’t. Whatever happened, he lived through that night. And Greg Darby didn’t. And he can never do anything to harm my son again.”

Monica drained her glass and banged it down on the table. She walked toward the door.

“My brother’s still alive, Monica,” Jordan said.

She paused in the doorway, shock creasing her face.

“And no one knows where he is,” Jordan added quietly.

“That’s why you’re here then?” she asked, as if speaking from a realm where no fresh pain could occur.

“Meredith Ducote told me that if my brother ever went near Stephen she would hurt him. Hurt him badly, she said.” Maybe this would console Monica.

“Meredith Ducote has not seen my son in years. I’m not willing to bequeath to her what I consider to be my responsibility,” Monica said tightly. She shuffled up the stairs. “Take the flag if you want,” she called down the staircase. Jordan left it on the coffee table.

“I guess in the end it wasn’t that hard. I mean, I figured out early on what I had to say for him to hit me, so as long as I didn’t mention Stephen’s name it was all right.” Meredith guided the brush through Angela Darby’s hair in a clean sweep. “He only hit me twice. I guess I’m kind of surprised.” Angela sat motionless on the edge of the bed. It had taken Meredith less than a week to figure out the guard’s schedule. He made rounds in his white pickup truck every twenty minutes. There was a shift change at midnight, during which time the parking lot outside the Bor-The Bell Tower

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deaux Wing was empty for a full twenty minutes, which gave her ample time to dash across the parking lot and scale the chain-link fence. Once over the fence, darkness camouflaged her as she approached the windowsill. A nurse always turned out the light at eight-thirty each night.

By the end of June, Meredith had visited Angela four times. Angela had not said a word or acknowledged her. Meredith got drunk on the way to Bayou Terrace, and by the time she was safely ensconced in Angela’s darkened room her words flowed easily, more effortlessly than they had in years, even since she was a child, in fact. Meredith felt strangely comforted, as if visiting Angela had become a more powerful addiction than her drinking.

“The strange thing about it, though,” Meredith said, drawing the brush out of Angela’s frayed ends, “was that he never seemed angry when he did it . . . I mean there was no, like . . . I don’t know. He always hit me in a panic. I know it was meant to make me shut up, but there was always this look of pain on his face. It was so sad.”

She broke off, a hot rush of tears stinging her eyes. She breathed deeply, collected herself, and continued. “Brandon’s brother is back in town.” She worked the brush just above Angela’s forehead, tossing her red bangs back over her scalp. “I don’t know if you ever met him.

He was always just a picture before now.”

“Baby—”

Meredith let go of the brush, where it dangled for a second, twined in the hair just above Angela’s left ear, before it fell to the floor. Angela didn’t move. Meredith recoiled, flattening her body against the wall.

She sank to the floor, pulled her knees to her chest, and held them.

“Baby.”

Meredith tapped her feet on the floor, mystified. “Greg used to call me baby,” she whispered. She rocked forward on her heels and crawled across the floor to where the brush lay next to the stool. She stood and with a steady hand she threaded the brush through Angela’s hair again. After a half hour of silence, she set the brush down on the bed, checking the window for the guard before jimmying it open.

One leg craned over the ledge when Angela spoke again.

“. . . ’e called me baby well de truck it,” she said.

Meredith had no time to turn back. She landed, both feet in the mud, rose, and slid the window shut. Halfway to the car, she deciphered Angela’s slurred speech. “He called me baby when the truck hit.”

Angela Darby was teaching herself how to talk again.

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J
eff had to report to work by ten. At nine-thirty, he knew he and Stephen were never going to make it in time. Jeff’s Honda was in the shop so Stephen had offered to shuttle him in from Baton Rouge.

Jeff had to work the entire Fourth of July weekend at Sanctuary, since a lot of out-of-towners came in for Independence Fest, a gay block party that sent most of the straight tourists into self-imposed exile from the Quarter. Jeff was trying to earn extra money so they could get an apartment together after he graduated that winter. Stephen was speed-ing.

The French Quarter was a traffic nightmare. The Independence Fest merrymakers mixed with two conventions—one for optometrists and the other for Internet design consultants—plunged the labyrinthine network of narrow French Quarter streets into near gridlock. It took Stephen twenty minutes to travel four blocks from Rampart to Bourbon Street. Jeff offered to get out and run.

“I can make it,” Stephen insisted. “Besides, it gives us more time together.”

They finally reached Bourbon, blocked by a throng of gyrating and shirtless gay men. Devon leaped out of the crowd and bounced on the car’s hood. “Asshole!” Stephen cried out. Shirtless and drunk, Devon rapped his fist against the window. “I gotta go, babe,” Jeff said, leaned over, pecked Stephen on the cheek, and climbed out of the car. “Don’t wait up!” he called after he disappeared into the crowd.

Devon leered through the window. “So tell me all about it!”

“I’m sending an account to Jock magazine. You can read it then!”

“Are you keeping the part about the snow falling on his humpy football shoulders, or is that too literary?”