A Density of Souls (33 page)

“Yeah,” he said, “as if you could ever get away.”

When the news cut to a shot of lightning spider webbing over the downtown skyline, Stephen sat up in surprise. Ensconced inside the shuttered house, he hadn’t known night had fallen so quickly.

“Jesus . . .” he whispered.

“How old is this house?” Jordan asked.

“Old. It was in my dad’s family for like a century or something.”

“That’s good. It’s survived a storm before, then.”

“This isn’t just a storm.”

Jordan’s face was bright with excitement. “You love this, don’t you?”

he asked Stephen.

“It’s kind of thrilling.”

On television, the next report showed crowds of people huddled along the Superdome’s stairwells. Children skipped and played before the cameras. An angry woman complained that all they were serving was hot dogs.

“Stephen?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you tell your mom about it?” Jordan asked.

“About what?”

“Greg?”

Stephen propped his elbows on Jordan’s chest, puzzlement in his eyes. “She knows . . . She brought me home that night.”

Before Jordan could ask more, they heard what sounded like giant fingernails scraping across the façade of the house and then the study Heaven's Answer

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window upstairs shattered. Monica screamed. Stephen leapt off the bed and bolted up the stairs.

He found her cowering against the far wall. Splinters of glass had fanned out on the floor. The wind was whipping through the study.

A piece of paper blew past him and he grabbed it. At the top of the page of writing entitled “To a Child Not Yet Born”, Stephen glimpsed Jeremy Conlin’s severe cursive: “Elise—Give this to him.” A shard of glass pierced Monica’s bare foot as she crawled toward him. She tried to snatch the paper, but the wind danced it out of Stephen’s fingers and through the splintered window.

“Help me get the boxes downstairs!” she screamed as her right foot trailed blood on the floorboards.

The front door was the only unbarricaded entrance. Blindly obeying Stephen helped Monica carry the boxes down the stairs before setting them in the open doorway, where, to Stephen’s astonishment, Monica wrestled them out onto the porch. The rain was falling in torrents that shook the branches. Monica moved to the edge of the porch, wind whipping her dress up from her waist before she caught it with her fists.

Four feet of water swelled across the front yard, flowing through the wrought-iron fence. Through curtains of rain Stephen could see that Third Street was flooding.

“Not high enough yet!” Monica pronounced.

“Mom, this is insane!” Stephen barked from the doorway.

The wind tore across the flood, whipping the surface into erratic rippling footprints. Across the intersection of Third and Chestnut, the water had swallowed five feet of the transformer pole. With silent awe, Stephen saw that the water seemed to be swallowing everything at various depths—the pole, the fence across the street, the oak trunks: The flood revealed the unevenness of the earth it covered.

“Mother.” Stephen moved to her and gently took her shoulders.

“Go be with Jordan,” she said. “Let me do what I have to do.”

“Don’t do this because of me!” Stephen cried out. “I don’t need you to erase him for me!”

“You deserve the room!” Monica shouted back evenly.

“I don’t want it! The only reason—”

An enormous oak branch splashed into the intersection. A whirl-pool sucked it down.

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“It’s different for me, Mom. You knew him. He betrayed you, but you knew him at least. Not me. The parts of me that come from him—he was never here to tell me which ones they are.”

“They aren’t in these boxes!” Monica answered. “You won’t find anything in these boxes!” She raised a hand to pull her windblown hair from her eyes.

Stephen released his grip, backing away from the veil of rain. He retreated into the house where the roar outside was softer. The chandelier in the foyer rocked slightly, its crystalline light scattering over the floor and staircase.

Stephen was halfway up the stairs when he saw Jordan waiting at the top.

“Is she all right?” Jordan asked.

“We won’t have power much longer. It’s flooding.”

“What’s she doing?” Jordan asked.

“Just what she said she was going to do. Let’s go to bed,” Stephen said, taking Jordan by one arm. Jordan flinched and made as if to descend the stairs. His eyes were locked on the open doorway and the stormy chaos beyond.

“We need to leave her alone right now,” Stephen said, his voice insistent, irritating. Jordan brushed past Stephen into the bedroom.

Stephen followed. He had stopped locking the bedroom door behind him weeks ago. Within an hour, Stephen and Jordan had drifted into a sleep shaped by the hammer of branches against the side of the house.

4

T
he lightning kept Roger and Elise in the Cadillac even as other motorists abandoned their vehicles, their arms full of clothing, precious framed pictures, and stuffed animals, some of them bearing guns and all of them darting into the shadows on either side of the Interstate. One bolt struck, erupting from the center of Green Lawn Cemetery in a perfect blossom of blue sparks.

“Roger!”

Elise saw it first. In front of them, the dip beneath the train trestle was swelling with water. A station wagon rose up suddenly in front of them before pitching forward. The flooded dip in the road swallowed it up to its doors as the water surged up the slope in the Interstate toward the Cadillac’s front tires.

“We can’t . . .” Roger barked.

“Roger, please!” Elise wailed. “We can’t stay here!”

Roger shook his head vigorously. They were staying put. Elise released her grip on his arm and kicked open the passenger door. The wind shrieked through the car. Needles of rain stung Roger’s face as the wind hurled the passenger door shut behind her.

When Roger flung open the driver’s-side door, he was wrenched from the car and thrown against the hood. The water rose to his ankles. He spun around, confused for a moment. Then he made out cars surrounding him and the train trestle looming down the highway. He could hear car doors being slammed repeatedly by the wind. Detritus lapped at his feet: smashed milk cartons, water-soaked clothes, swollen loaves of bread.

Roger climbed onto the Cadillac’s hood. He saw Elise crawling up the grassy rise on the side of the freeway through the mud toward the railroad tracks. She was heading for Green Lawn Cemetery. When he 248

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called out her name, his voice was muffled by a roar of thunder. The lightning was so bright he shielded his face with his hands, almost losing his balance. When he parted his fingers, a jet of sparks was spiral-ing downward. The bolt had struck a crossbar of the railroad tracks.

Elise was nowhere in sight.

Roger splashed to the side of the freeway, hesitated a moment, and then leapt across the tracks. A gust of wind tripped him and he somersaulted through the mud before colliding with a chain-link fence. He reached out and pulled himself to his feet.

The field of mausoleums stretching before him was roiling with black water. Roger saw coffins riding the flood. He sank to his knees and squeezed through the torn opening at the fence’s hem, the tattered chain-link raking his back like claws. When he emerged on the other side, he could make out the distant silhouette of Elise, wading between mausoleums, hunched over, reaching out to the side of tombs for support. It looked as if she were knocking on them for admittance.

Roger tried to follow, lurched, and fell headfirst into the water. He began to swim, stroked into the mahogany flash of a coffin, gasped for breath, and was inside a mausoleum before he realized Elise was sitting next to him. He groped her trembling jaw. His other hand felt the floor of the mausoleum and noted that only several inches of water seeped through the broken door.

Elise was shivering. Roger backed into the opposite wall. “Elise?”

he called out to her. “Grab my hand!” he shouted.

She found his wrist and yanked him close. His cheek brushed the soft swell of her breasts. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t think pe-people were pun-punished like this . . .” Elise stammered into his ear. “I th-thought people just had to live with what they had d-done!”

Both of them relaxed in their embrace. As Elise’s hands slid down Roger’s back, he found her face in the flickering stormlight.

“What did you do, Elise?”

Elise began to speak. Roger could not hear her over the roar outside. He craned his ear to her lips, catching her in mid-sentence.

“. . . she-she asked me if-if I wa-wanted to go in and lo-look around and I said ye-yes . . . Na-Nanine did-didn’t wa-want me to . . .”

“I kept the knife in my pocket during the whole funeral,” Meredith said.

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Angela and Meredith heard the groan of the furniture downstairs as the water crept in under the guest house doors. “I knew that he was going to . . . I knew he was going to snap,” Meredith said, eyes focusing on a flurry of tree branches outside the window. “It was my weapon. It belonged to my dad, actually. He left it behind when he moved. I never gave it back to him. He said it was his grandfather’s and that he had used it in World War Two . . .”

She paused and inhaled the electric air as if it were the drink she was craving.

“At the reception . . . At your house, Mr. Andrew told us that you had gone to the hospital. Greg didn’t say anything. He just took me up to his room. I was supposed to be at his side again, you know, the comforting girlfriend or whatever. Once we were in his room, he tried to . . .”

Her eyes locked on Angela’s. “He was mad. About you being sent to the hospital. At the funeral he’d been crying, but he hadn’t been mad . . .”

“Did he hurt you?” Angela asked.

Startled, Meredith shook her head. No. They heard a tinkle of glass as one of the French doors downstairs collapsed from the pressure of water. Neither of them moved. “I had the knife,” Meredith said. “He wanted to have sex. Right there. He was like . . . an animal and when I told him no he pushed me onto the bed. He didn’t know I already had my hand on the knife. When I got it . . . When I got it to his throat he looked so shocked. I almost, I don’t know, lost my nerve. I wasn’t going to hurt him . . .” She curled herself into the chair, to feel her own body warmth.

“He hurt you,” Angela answered.

“I think he was going to.” Her words made a knot in her chest.

“Afterward, are you going to take me back there?” Angela asked.

“After the storm’s over?”

“Do you want to go back, Angela?”

There was a long pause before Angela Darby made her first real decision in five years. She shook her head. No, she didn’t want to go back. “I like talking to you . . .” Angela said, her eyes darting to the window. With this wind the X of duct tape would not hold the glass in place for long. “I’m starting to remember you,” Angela said.

Meredith lowered her legs to the floor. “What do you remember?”

“You always seemed so sad.”

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Meredith ground her teeth together to stop her jaw from trembling.

“Keep talking to me,” Angela said gently. The wind blew open a shutter.

“I put the knife to his throat and I told him he couldn’t hit me anymore. Ever again. I told him I was sorry about Alex but that didn’t give him the right to . . . hurt me. And I told him . . .” She had to stop.

On the night of Alex’s funeral, Meredith Ducote had told Greg Darby that children die all the time, that there was nothing special about Alex Darby. Meredith held the knife to his throat. He had cursed and spit, but his words had been clipped by the blade against his Adam’s apple.

When she withdrew the knife, Greg reared up and leapt across the room. She rose from the bed, still gripping the knife, her black skirt hiked over her thighs. Greg flexed his arm to hit her. She had not relied on the knife to shield herself. Instead, she had said, “I know what you and Stephen used to do.”

Greg’s hand had frozen. Meredith watched with sick fascination as his face blanched.

“If you ever hit me, if you ever hurt me, I’ll tell people. I’ll tell everyone.”

Before he could react, Meredith sprinted out of his bedroom and down the staircase. She had not stopped running until she reached her house. She secluded herself in her room. Several hours later, when the phone rang, she answered the call. Meredith listened as Brandon vented his rage through the phone. “He’s fucking lost it!” Meredith had listened quietly. She had envisioned Greg’s world crumbling; one more question would destroy him.

“Do you know what he and Stephen used to do together?” she asked Brandon.

Brandon hung up, a response Meredith had not expected. The triumph had soured inside her chest as she returned the receiver to the cradle. Bad, she thought, I just did something . . . bad.

Meredith surfaced from her memory when she heard a faintly familiar noise. She shut her eyes, believing she was caught between the present and her memory. But she had not imagined the metallic bang that resonated over the howl of rain and wind. Meredith stood abruptly.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Meredith?”

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She dashed downstairs, answering the chimed call of the Bishop Polk bell tower.

Jordan awoke to the hiss of the transformer ramming into the spokes of the front fence. His eyes opened into pitch-blackness. He noticed the absence of the bedside clock’s green glow. The power had gone out.

He sat up in bed suddenly.

There was no tug of weight next to him. He patted Stephen’s pillow.

When he called out Stephen’s name, he couldn’t hear his own voice over the wind against the shuttered window. A glare he took for lightning briefly illuminated the bedroom.

He felt his way to the top of the stairs where he saw the front door yawning open. A thin sweep of water blew in through the front door, soaking the Oriental rug on the foyer floor. He descended the stairs blindly, missing the last few steps, then fell against the doorframe before another shock of yellow light illuminated the front yard. The water was lapping at the porch. Ink-smeared papers rode a current past his feet and into the house. Third Street was a river with tiny rapids around the topmost spokes of the front fence. In the middle of it all, Jordan saw a patch of floating cloth.