A Density of Souls (25 page)

When she glanced up from her empty cup Stephen was leaning against his father’s grave, the moonlight outlining his profile. He told her about what he called the light in the darkness. Life, according to Stephen, was not a journey out of darkness into light. In fact, darkness and light were two arbitrary categories applied to the human spirit in a vain hope that it, too, with all its fleshy influences, would be as orderly as the rise and fall of the sun. The light in the darkness, as Stephen explained it, did not chase away the shadows of fear and regret: it merely illuminated the fears worth fighting. It lit the paths dictated by fate and choice, rather than casting a celestial glow on the way to a better and more perfect world.

Although he did not say it outright, Meredith knew Stephen was talking about the events of that winter five years before, the deaths of Alex and Greg Darby. There between the tombs, Stephen was explaining how everything that had happened—that horrifying chain of events culminating in Greg’s suicide—had acquainted them with the truth of the world: how dark and light overlapped, pulled at the soul in intermittent, unsatisfying tugs.

Death, tragedy—whatever you wanted to call it—gave human be-ings the opportunity to absorb the world’s true nature. Many people ignored this chance. Most people opted for denial and despair. Stephen had chosen neither, and in a subtle way he was asking Meredith to do the same. Meredith vowed to herself that she would.

They talked for hours, the only voices among the city of the dead.

Elise had managed to strip Monica down to her bra and panties and ball her into the bed, draping the comforter over her. She stood over Monica for several minutes, checked her pulse twice. It wasn’t good for middle-aged women to drink this much, Elise thought.

Finally, Monica let out a sob. “Drunk crying”, Roger called that sound—tears that came at a point of utter inebriation and exhaustion, The Army of God

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when anything could provoke a rush of sorrows. Elise placed a hand firmly on Monica’s forehead.

“He was a bad man . . .” Monica stuttered, not bothering to open her eyes all the way. “Why can’t I just admit he was a bad man?”

Elise’s hand against Monica’s forehead went rigid in the minute before she brought it away.

“I’m cold . . .” Monica whispered.

“Do you have another blanket?”

“Closet . . .” Monica said, shivering, gathering the comforter around her neck. Elise opened the closet door.

Her oldest son stared back at her. Elise almost screamed.

Monica began to snore. Elise looked away from Jordan’s picture and tossed the blanket over Monica’s body. Grabbing her purse from the nightstand, she left the room. She climbed the staircase to the third floor and entered Jeremy’s study. With nausea rising in her throat, she dropped the envelope containing the first draft of “To a Child Not Yet Born” on Jeremy’s desk and left the study before her own memory of it could return.

Elise ran at full gait across Third Street, eyes stinging with tears of both guilt and grief. She would probably lose the woman who had convinced her she had a soul.

Jordan could smell the vodka before his mother opened the door all the way. He sat up in bed as the sliver of hallway light fell across his bare chest. Elise was a dark shadow framed in the door. He had been half-asleep. A silly thought seized him as the comforter fell down to just above his navel: She doesn’t know I sleep naked.

“Stay away from Stephen Conlin,” she said.

Jordan caught another whiff of the vodka as she spoke. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his mother this drunk. “Go to bed, Mom,” he said and burrowed himself back into the comforter.

She finally closed the door.

3

“H
ave you ever had to nurse your mother through a bad hangover?”

Meredith could hear Stephen chewing between his sentences.

“No,” she told him. She shifted the phone to her other ear.

“It’s not fun. She didn’t get out of bed all day. And she’s watching soap operas, which is always a bad sign.”

Meredith laughed. “You want to go for coffee later?” she asked.

“Sure. But later, because I have something I have to do today,” Stephen said, more distant now.

“Just call me. When, do you think?” she asked.

“I don’t know . . .” Stephen paused. Meredith detected the click of a cigarette lighter and then a sharp exhalation of breath. “I go to the Fly every day for, like, an hour.”

Meredith almost dropped the phone.

“It’s where Jeff and I first . . . Going to a tombstone isn’t like real to me. So I go there.”

“I used to go to the Fly,” she said.

“Really?”

“In high school . . .” She stopped. They were wandering into dangerous territory.

“Listen, I still want to read your notebook, if that’s cool,” Stephen said, obviously changing the subject.

“Sure,” Meredith said. She would have to ponder that more.

“Cool. I’ll call you when I get back, all right?”

“Sounds good.”

“Okay . . . Bye.”

“Later.” Meredith hung up. She knew they still had a long way to go.

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• • •

Jordan Charbonnet watched from his father’s Cadillac as Stephen slipped out of the front gate of the Conlin residence, a lit cigarette in his mouth. In one fist, he held the stem of a dead white rose as if it were the handle of a shovel.

Stephen backed the Jeep out of the driveway and pulled off down Chestnut Street, unaware that Jordan Charbonnet was tailing him.

Jordan’s strategy was haphazard, rushed. When the Jeep made a drastic right turn through Audubon Park, he knew where Stephen was headed. He, too, had visited the Fly in high school, mostly to drink stolen beers after practice. Jordan parked the Cadillac in the Audubon Zoo’s lot. It wouldn’t be wise to tail Stephen right onto the riverbank.

Jordan was wearing Umbro shorts because the afternoon heat was pushing ninety degrees. But he was also wearing a polo shirt, which wasn’t appropriate if he wanted to look like he had casually gone running. Jordan stepped from the car and shed his shirt. A mother shepherding her two toddlers from the zoo glanced at him lasciviously as she passed, and he jogged toward the Fly, acting on instinct and affirmed by the power of his exposed torso.

Stephen made his way down the rocky steps toward the river’s edge and tossed the rose into the muddy water. A while after Stephen had told Jeff about Greg Darby’s suicide, Jeff had surprised him with a bouquet of white roses. By the time of Jeff’s death half of them had already withered. Stephen had resolved to throw the dead roses into the river one by one.

Stephen sat on the last bank of rocks before the water. He thought about how hard it was to think about Jeff. Not because it was painful, but because since the catharsis of the vigil, it was now more difficult to single out one memory and allow it to make him cry. When he heard the footsteps come to a stop behind him, he didn’t turn around.

Then he heard panting breaths.

When Stephen turned he saw Jordan Charbonnet bent at the waist and grabbing his ankles to stretch. His breath clenched in his sternum.

Jordan Charbonnet straightened and met his gaze. Shirtless, glisten-ing with sweat, and trying to catch his breath, Stephen’s god of the Cannon corridor stood before him in three dimensions.

“Hey,” Jordan said nonchalantly.

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Stephen said nothing.

“Oh . . . hey!” Jordan said again. “Stephen?”

Stephen nodded.

“I’m Jordan. Elise’s son.”

And Brandon’s brother, both of them thought at once.

“Hey,” Stephen managed.

“What are you doing?” Jordan asked in a friendly, even tone of voice.

“My friend was at that bar. We used to come here.”

Jordan remained a few feet away. If he approached Stephen he’d be crossing an invisible line; Stephen made that clear by his stance.

Jordan was wearing penny loafers. No one went running in penny loafers.

“Our mothers are friends now,” Stephen said, to see what reaction he might get.

Jordan nodded and attempted a smile. “You said your friend was . . .”

Jordan began and then stopped as Stephen’s chin jerked back to the river. This was too much—a Charbonnet asking about Jeff Haugh.

As if sensing he had upset Stephen, Jordan stepped down over the curb, maneuvering down the slope before slowly sinking to his haunches several feet from Stephen. Stephen directed his gaze back out at the river, and Jordan joined him, as if they had the water in common.

“I’m sorry,” Jordan whispered.

Stephen turned his head to him. “He worked there. At the bar,” he said, as he tugged a pack of Camel Lights from his jeans pocket. “You want one?”

Jordan took one and Stephen produced a lighter from his pocket.

Stephen kept his eyes from Jordan’s while he lit the cigarette. Jordan inhaled. The runner was not only wearing penny loafers, but smoking; Stephen had to smile a little bit at the curious transparency.

“He was just your friend?” Jordan asked.

Stephen’s eyes narrowed. He felt gooseflesh spread across his arms and back. He looked hard at the boy who had first struck him in Cannon’s Administrative Hallway. If he answered Jordan’s question then he would be confessing his true self—who he had been on the day he’d stolen the picture. Who he was now.

“No.” Stephen said, “not just a friend.”

Jordan put a hand on Stephen’s knee. “I didn’t mean to upset you,”

he said, his voice low and conciliatory.

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The hand felt familiar, awful, warm. No man had touched him since Jeff had an hour before he was murdered. Stephen knew he had to keep talking.

“He got me through a lot. I went through some shit in high school and he helped me more than he knew.” Stephen took a breath. “Jeff.

His name was Jeff.”

Jordan turned to face the river as Stephen wiped tears from his cheeks. Focusing on a distant point across the Mississippi, Jordan squinted, and Stephen realized that this encounter was beyond him somehow. He had not come here just to convey his sympathy.

“You went through some shit in high school?” Jordan asked, not looking at him.

Stephen didn’t answer.

“Since I kind of ruined your day, can I take you out for a beer or something?” Jordan’s gaze returned to Stephen. “We could talk about it.”

“Talk about what?” Stephen asked, an edge in his voice.

“What you went through.”

“He’s still not back yet,” Monica told Meredith for the third time that evening, her voice icy with irritation. Meredith wasn’t sure if her tone signified anger at the fact that this was Meredith’s third call or was a product of her nasty hangover.

“He told me he was going to call. We’re supposed to do something.”

Monica sounded more put out. “Well, I’ll ask him to call you when he gets in, Meredith, but I don’t know when he will. He didn’t even say good-bye before he left.”

“He doesn’t have a cell phone?” Meredith asked.

“No, he doesn’t,” Monica answered, tersely.

Meredith found no way to articulate the fierce protectiveness that had welled up in her since last night. She had spent the afternoon rearranging the furniture in her room and smoking her mother’s cigarettes. “I’m sorry. I’m just worried,” she told Stephen’s mother.

“Stephen’s a big boy now, Meredith,” Monica declared, and then hung up.

“Bitch,” Meredith whispered into the phone.

4

T
he Sunday night crowd at Fat Harry’s was thin. Jordan held the door for Stephen, who ducked clumsily through it. The jukebox was playing Matchbox 20 and the sounds of Tulane frat boys shooting pool in the back was a muted clamor.

“I’ve never been here,” Stephen said as they perched on stools at the bar. He ordered a Corona, Jordan a Crown and Seven.

“How’s your brother?” Stephen asked, after an awkward pause.

He glanced up from his beer. Shouts erupted from the back of the bar as someone sank the eight ball prematurely.

“How well do you know Brandon?” Jordan asked.

Stephen leaned away, snake-bit. He clasped his hands around the bottle. “My opinion of your brother isn’t very high,” Stephen said before swallowing a third of the Corona.

“Nobody’s is,” Jordan said quickly.

Stephen looked at him again, trying to gauge him. Jordan sat with one elbow on the bar, fist pressed against his chin, his brown eyes leveled on Stephen with a reporter’s intensity.

“I know what he did to your car,” Jordan said.

“He didn’t do it by himself,” Stephen replied.

“Greg?” Jordan asked. “Do you think that’s why my brother lost it?

Because of Greg Darby’s suicide?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“You knew my brother.”

“I didn’t know your brother!” Stephen snapped. “I was hated by your brother. There’s a difference, all right?”

A few feet away, the bartender watched them as he polished glasses.

“What do you despise?” Jordan asked, in a low, conspiratorial tone.

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“By this you are truly known,” Stephen said. “Frank Herbert.” He raised his beer bottle in a mock toast.

Jordan knew the quote because the Cannon senior whose picture had been right above his in the yearbook had used it as an epigraph.

He guessed that Stephen had learned it from the same place.

Stephen straightened himself on the stool. “Football players and fags,” he said in a forced singsong voice. “It’s a common phenomenon.

You went to Cannon. Hell, you played football. You should be able to figure it out. We need each other.” He lit another cigarette.

“Need each other?”

“Symbiosis,” Stephen said.

“Stop fucking around with me, Stephen.”

Stephen smiled wryly as if savoring Jordan’s frustration. “Give and take. In high school, football players are this iron wall of perfection.

They’re everything a male is supposed to be. So naturally, fags like me, who have no way to prove their masculinity, who might not even have any, begin to worship them . . .”