A Density of Souls (27 page)

“But I followed him to the cemetery. We made it there, but the gates were already locked so Greg said we could hop the wall on the other side, the side on Coliseum. We left our bikes under a bush and helped each other over the wall, onto the top of a mausoleum.

“I knew Greg wanted to show me something, but I wasn’t sure what.

Finally he brought me to this really old tomb and showed me where the wall had been cracked near the platform.

“ ‘What’s in there?’ I asked. I was imagining skeletons and rats. I was totally freaked out when Greg crawled through the opening. For a moment I thought he had hit his head or something because I couldn’t hear anything. ‘Greg?’ I asked. And then his voice rang back from inside: ‘There’s nothing in here. It’s all gone. Just some dirt.’

“I crawled in after him and found myself in total darkness. I panicked before I felt Greg’s hand on my shoulder.

“ ‘I want to do it again,’ he said.

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“My hand groped for something to hold onto, and it hit his chest

. . . or shoulder . . . I can’t remember, but he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

We did like he wanted to only this time he held the back of my neck and slapped my back during it. He was into it. He loved it. But he didn’t do it to me and I didn’t ask.

“Afterward, we hardly said a thing. We used the same mausoleum to climb over the wall. Greg went over first and his foot landed on something big and metal. He tripped and fell flat on his ass. I was on top of the wall still and I could see what he had fallen on before he could.”

Stephen paused. From the look in his eyes, Jordan could tell he was seeing it again.

“It was the wheel of his bike. Brandon had found our bikes and torn them to pieces—pulled out the spokes, shredded the seats, pried the gears apart. Sliced the tires into flaps. The frames, or what was left of them, were bent. I remember thinking, How could he do that without tools or something? How could he just rip them apart like that?”

“Like your car,” Jordan said.

Stephen’s head jerked slightly. Jordan bowed his head. “Can you turn that off?” Stephen asked, pointing to the lightbulb overhead. “It was on when . . .” Stephen halted, guided the bottle to his mouth.

Jordan got up and yanked the bulb’s chain. The portico was plunged into blackness, until the dim light through the slatted window carved shapes across the floorboards and threw Stephen into silhouette.

“Better?” Jordan asked quietly, taking his seat on the ledge again.

“He called me,” Stephen whispered. “The day of Alex’s funeral.”

Stephen turned his gaze from the window to Jordan. “I was happy that day,” he whispered. “I was happy. Not because Alex was dead but because . . . Because I thought that somehow all of Cannon had been made to feel for at least one day what I had felt ever since I started school there. I remember how at the funeral Mom and I sat in the balcony because there was no room below. I watched Greg the entire time. Even when Angela lost her shit, Greg didn’t even move. He couldn’t. He just sat there with his head forward. It looked like someone had clubbed him in the back of the neck and it was too painful for him to lift his head up.”

Tears dribbled from Stephen’s eyes. “So when he finally called me that night in this weird way, I thought I’d won.” He swigged from the bottle again.

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“ ‘For passion, like crime, does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life,’ ” Jordan recited softly. When Stephen’s tear-filled eyes met his with a flicker of recognition, Jordan finished.

“ ‘It welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for passion sees in such disorder a vague hope of finding advantage for itself.’ ”

Stephen managed a swallow. “Where did you hear that?”

“It’s from—”

“I know what it’s from. Where did you hear it?”

“My mother gave me a copy of Death in Venice as a gift when I graduated from high school. She said it was her favorite book. She had underlined that quote.” He pulled his eyes from Stephen’s.

“My father had that quote on his study wall,” the other boy said.

Silence fell again. Stephen hunched slightly over the gin bottle, his head now inches from where Jordan leaned against the window frame.

“I was so stupid,” he whispered.

“What did Greg Darby do to you, Stephen?” Jordan asked, trying to keep his voice as neutral as a doctor’s.

Stephen leapt off the window ledge onto the floor, clutching the bottle of Bombay in one hand. He lingered before the bells, brought the bottle to his mouth, and turned to face Jordan. “When the phone rang that night, I knew it was going to be him. I just knew. I answered and he said, ‘Stephen?’ I could tell he’d been drinking since the funeral. ‘My mom’s in the hospital, Stevie,’ he said. ‘Did you know that?’

“ ‘No,’ I said. I didn’t know.

“And then he didn’t say anything and I could hear him rapping a beer can against the kitchen counter. He started asking me all these questions. Did I remember Alex? Did I know what he looked like?

Was I at the game? I kept answering no. But I was trying to be, I don’t know, sympathetic. And then finally he asked me if I had ever been inside the bell tower. He said he’d been up there once when he failed Physical Science and had to work in the chaplain’s office during summer He said the view was awesome . . .”

Stephen took another drink, paced between the window and the bells. His free hand went out and traced the metal flank of the nearest bell.

“We met just outside the fence. He showed me how to get in. He even helped me over. They don’t lock the basement windows because The Army of God

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they figure the fence is high enough. He led me . . . downstairs, you know, through the offices . . .”

“I know,” Jordan said, nearly breathless.

“We made it up the ladder. He had me go first. It was pitch-dark up here and I remember not being able to see . . .” Stephen stopped, took a deep, labored breath.

“I remember thinking something was weird when he didn’t switch on the light right away. But when he did, his hand was already on the back of my neck. I remember seeing . . .”

Stephen’s fingers trailed down the bell’s curved skirt. “This is where he slammed my head into the bell. I couldn’t see anything after that.”

Jordan felt himself stand up from the window ledge and move to Stephen. Steadying himself with one hand on Stephen’s shoulder, he reached out with his other, his fingers probing the bell.

“I remember. He told me, ‘You wanted me this way! You wanted me to lose!’ He kept saying it over and over again. I could hear him even as I . . . I couldn’t see. I’d hit the bell so hard I could see just black and bright swaths of colors. I didn’t know which way was up or down. I just knew he was on top of me. Pinning me to the floor. ‘You wanted me this way!’ he kept saying.”

Stephen withdrew his hand and backed away from the bell. “He was right. I did want him that way. I wanted his trophies broken at his feet.

I wanted him to lose a parent. I wanted him to lose a lot.”

Stephen raised the bottle to his mouth, spat in sudden protest, then hurled the bottle at the far wall.

“But the next morning, it felt like he was still inside me. That’s how I knew what he’d done. I woke up and my mom was there, and she told me he was dead, but I could still feel him inside me.”

“You didn’t do it?” Jordan asked firmly. “Because I would understand if you had.”

“I couldn’t have,” Stephen said, his voice soft. “I could never have done . . . that.”

He slowly knelt on the floorboards. When his arm shot out to steady himself, his hand glanced off the floorboard from under him. As Stephen erupted into sobs, Jordan’s arms encircled him, lifting him to a seated position. Jordan felt Stephen’s tears like a heartbeat within his own body.

Jordan held Stephen without rocking him. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, again and again, a refrain meant to lull Stephen into the present.

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• • •

Moonlight glazed the oak branches overhead and a low fog ushered the sounds of the river through the Garden District. Their footsteps echoed as they walked down Chestnut Street. Neither man had said a word by the time they came to the corner of Chestnut and Third, outside the Conlin residence.

“You going to be okay?” Jordan asked hesitantly.

The expression on Stephen’s face was inscrutable. His eyes had gone cold, but they were still bloodshot.

“Why did you have to know?” he asked, his voice low and urgent.

Jordan shook his head.

Stephen bristled. “Good-bye, Jordan,” he said, and crossed the street.

“Stephen . . .” Jordan called after him.

“I’m going to bed,” Stephen said, unseen on the front porch of the house. Jordan lifted one arm as if he were about to begin a final entreaty, but he stopped as he heard the sound of the front door shutting behind Stephen. “Shit,” he whispered.

Stephen strode up the stairs too quickly to see Monica sitting in the darkened front parlor. She turned her gaze back out the window, where Jordan’s shadow dwindled down Chestnut Street. She clutched the contents of the envelope Elise had left on Jeremy’s desk.

The first draft of “To a Child Not Yet Born”, dated August 1976, was legible in the dim moonlight through the front windows.

6

“W
here’ve you been?” Angela Darby asked Meredith.

Meredith eased herself through the window and knelt down on the floor, surprised. Angela sat primly on the edge of the bed, hands folded across her lap. It was the first question Angela had ever asked Meredith.

“I was trying to find Stephen,” Meredith answered. She had left the house and driven blindly across the city, checking Fat Harry’s, where she suspected Stephen might be, but finding no one. Her journey had finally led her down to the French Quarter around dusk. The Sanctuary bar was a pit in the earth bordered by several charred, skeletal timbers. The pit was littered with rotting flowers. The few standing timbers were plastered with notes to loved ones, some pasted with smiling photographs of the dead. An old woman stood at the edge of the crater, studying the pool of muddy water. Meredith remembered why the dead were entombed aboveground in New Orleans. The water table is so high that coffins would float to the surface.

She walked down Bourbon Street, desolate beneath the halos of street lamps. A few bars were open. Most had been boarded up with plywood, their side walls gouged by the blast. The filigree ironwork of their balconies had curled and melted where it had not been blown free in huge chunks.

“Stephen,” Angela was saying. Her cadence was drunkenly slow, her eyes sluggishly scanned the room. She effortlessly tugged out a large clump of hair.

Meredith jumped to her feet. Angela did not flinch as Meredith took her hand and gently pried it open. The strands fluttered from her palm to the bedsheet. Could this be the medicine? Meredith thought.

Is it making her hair fall out?

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“He pulled it,” Angela said.

“Who pulled it?” Meredith asked.

“He . . . He doesn’t hit here. He only pulls . . .”

Andrew Darby had somehow pulled out an entire clump of his wife’s hair. Meredith made for the window before halting, feeling as if she had nowhere to go. She began to cry.

“Crying’s what we do before we’re broken,” Angela answered. “Have you ever been to El Paso?”

Meredith shook her head numbly.

“. . . lights . . .” Angela said. “. . . so many lights . . . just over the border. Andrew said we couldn’t go there, ’cause it was Mexico. We were going to California . . .”

Her memories are coming back first, Meredith thought. Maybe if I come back again and again she’ll realize where she’s ended up.

“Andrew used to get lost all the time . . .” Angela said.

Her words were still labored, but her reactions were quicker, more natural. The medication, Meredith thought again. “No one noticed that he pulled out your hair,” she said, rocking forward onto her thighs. Angela didn’t look at her, but shook her head.

“I’ll be back,” Meredith said as she rose.

“Tonight?” Angela asked.

“Yes. Tonight. I’m going to try to come back tonight . . .”

“Please come back,” Angela said as Meredith swung one leg over the sill. Meredith squinted at the disappearing taillights of the security truck as it left the parking lot and swerved right, down the hospital’s private side street. Meredith’s Acura was parked in the rear lot of a strip mall, separated from the Bayou Terrace parking lot by a line of shrubs.

“Please . . .” Angela said.

Meredith turned with one leg jutting over the window ledge and nodded. Angela nodded in return, but Meredith could tell she was just mimicking her. She clambered out the window and sprang to the earth, then bolted across the parking lot, already calculating how long it would take her to get home, steal her mother’s diet pills, and return to Bayou Terrace.

“She’s dancing,” Thelma said.

Dr. Horne gazed at her, baffled.

“Angela Darby,” Thelma repeated. “She’s dancing.”

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The nurse led him into The Bordeaux Wing, where he peered through the window in Angela’s door. She was now standing with one foot propped on the edge of the bed, having lifted up her robe to reveal the hair on her legs. She was rubbing her hand up and down, and then slapping her palm to her face.

Oh shit, Dr. Horne thought.

“She was dancing earlier,” Thelma insisted.

Dr. Horne thought of Andrew Darby in his office, his face red at the sound of his wife’s first words in years. “How?” he asked the nurse.

“She was . . . twirling,” Thelma said. The doctor smiled wanly through the window at Angela. Thelma squeezed beside him, as if to make sure Angela was not smiling back. She was twirling again.

“Let her dance,” Dr. Horne said. I hope Andrew sees it and pisses his pants, he thought to himself.

Holding the phone between chin and shoulder, Jordan sat forward in Roger’s desk chair as the rental information he had requested an hour earlier streamed out of his father’s fax machine. Jordan watched the real estate agency’s emblem appear inch by inch.