A Density of Souls (35 page)

Jordan studied the remaining scab of the portico atop the thirty-foot shaft. It looked like a gnawed fingernail. The metal skeleton of the bell’s holdings jutted out from the concrete walls. The three bells rocked, out of synch with one another. Impossibly, two forms clung to the left bell: Meredith and Stephen.

Above, flocks of seagulls shrieked and circled, caught in Hurricane Brandy’s eye.

Jordan sloshed through the waist-deep water that had flooded the church foyer. The cry of seagulls guided him to an open patch of gray sky, obscured by the skirts of the bells. The ladder was partially intact.

Jordan scaled it.

The only recognizable part of Stephen was his face pressed to the metal flank, an oval of pale skin, one cheek and shut eye visible to Jordan as he gripped the last rung of the ladder, several feet below.

Twine had trapped him and scored his flesh.

He reached for the metal crossbar, the only remaining piece of the portico floor. He balanced himself with one foot on the ladder’s top rung and one hand on the bar, leaning over the thirty-foot drop. “Meredith!”

he screamed. From below he saw her gripping the top of the bell, her teeth gnawing the twine that looped around the bell’s lug nut. Jordan realized she could not hear him. The bell’s gongs had deafened her.

Meredith extracted the last coil of twine from the lug nut. She slid down the side of the bell, the end of the twine in her teeth. He watched, giddy, as the twine whipped around the lug nut in a metallic swirl, hitting Stephen’s body. Her crotch banged into Stephen’s head.

His limp body peeled off the bell’s flank. Jordan screwed his eyes shut, one arm shot out. He felt the sudden tug of loose twine.

When he opened them he saw Stephen, his body dangling like a rag doll, still bound by the twine, the end of which Jordan held in one tense fist. Above him, Meredith had struck the metal crossbar, her bloodied hands pressed between the bar and her breasts as if she were about to do a series of mad pushups. The weight of her legs pulled her backward across the bar. She swung with both arms holding to the single crossbar, thirty feet in the air.

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Stephen’s body swayed in the twine net. Jordan gripped the loose strands of twine even as Stephen’s weight threatened to pull him off the ladder. Jordan’s other hand clung to the ladder’s top rung. He knew he could not help Meredith if she fell. He looked up at her gouged wrists.

Meredith let go of the bar.

She fell cleanly down the thirty-foot drop, splashing into the dark water below. Jordan could see the white froth foam up in her wake.

With Stephen dangling from his right arm, Jordan began to descend, holding each descending rung with his left. Halfway down the ladder, he saw Meredith standing in the waist-high water below, arms raised toward him. He continued. Stephen’s body rocked in the twine encasement dangling from Jordan’s fist.

Jordan lowered Stephen’s body into Meredith’s arms. When Meredith secured one hand under Stephen’s neck and the other under his feet, Jordan jumped into the water beside her.

“Like this!” he cried to her. They held Stephen above their heads, Meredith with both hands on Stephen’s shoulders, Jordan with one hand holding Stephen’s ankles and the other pressed against the small of his back. Held aloft, the rank and polluted water could not touch Stephen’s lacerated flesh.

He swayed on the platform of their arms. The water rose up to their chins. A plastic garbage can slid past Meredith’s chest. Somehow they buoyed Stephen out of the building and toward the drowned intersection of Chestnut and Third Street.

Monica Conlin fell to her knees at the sight of Jordan and Meredith carrying home Stephen’s lacerated body. They passed through the front gate. Monica waded toward them. The cry of sea-gulls had died and the wind was picking up again. The eye was leaving New Orleans behind. But Stephen was home.

6

J
ordan and Meredith sat on the front porch watching the sun rise.

As the water ebbed, the front gate emerged inch by inch. Meredith rocked gently, holding her bandaged wrists to her knees. Jordan did not disturb her, but sat several feet away at the porch’s far corner. The first light of dawn revealed the devastated neighborhood. Upstairs, Stephen slept with Monica’s head to his chest, ear monitoring the rhythm of his strained heartbeat.

“I have to go,” Meredith said. She stood unevenly as Jordan nodded.

“I have to get Stephen something,” she said, then waded through the waist-high water toward the gate, and down Third Street.

Meredith found Angela floating on her back. The turquoise blue of the swimming pool had faded into a muddy green. Angela suddenly reared up when she saw Meredith make her way around the corner of the driveway. She swam to the pool’s edge and rose to her feet on the submerged flagstones, her breasts visible through the hospital gown.

Angela gestured and Meredith followed the quick movement of her hand. An oak tree had crashed through the second floor of the guest cottage, its lacerated trunk disappearing through the side wall. Angela shrugged, as if the sight alone would explain why she was floating la-zily in the backyard. She had disobeyed Meredith and she was sorry.

Her eyes narrowed on Meredith’s crudely fashioned bandages. She splashed toward her and took Meredith’s hands in hers, studying them intently. Slowly, she lifted her hands to Meredith’s head and ran her fingers through Meredith’s disheveled hair. She combed it back into place, finding the natural part.

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Meredith’s sobs finally came to her. Angela embraced her and Meredith cried bitterly into her shoulder.

Angela held her. “I can’t remember their faces . . .” she whispered.

Meredith craned her head and gazed at the older woman. Angela’s eyes were bright and animated. “I can’t remember,” she said again, and a faint smile played at her lips.

Meredith nodded, wanting to believe her. “Can you remember anything?”

Angela thought a moment before answering. “El Paso.”

Monica found Jordan on the front porch and put a hand on his shoulder. It was the first time she had ever chosen to touch him.

“He’s awake,” she said. “The wounds aren’t that deep. They just bled a lot. If we keep cleaning them he should be fine. If not, then we’ll try to get him to the hospital. He’s awake, though.” Monica summoned the strength to say it. “He’s asking for you.”

Upstairs, Jordan slid into the bed next to Stephen and tossed the blanket away, studying the cuts and abrasions. Stephen stirred and eased back against Jordan, concealing the wounds he had been examining. Jordan held him tentatively, with one arm draped across Stephen’s side.

“Did you see him?” Stephen whispered.

“Yes,” Jordan answered, and realized that was all they were ever going to say about Brandon.

A fetid odor of mildew settled in the house. Three days after the storm, they still lacked water and power. Despite the stifling heat, the doors and windows were kept shut. Monica had spotted snakes swimming down Third Street the day after the hurricane. Stephen drifted in and out of sleep. Every couple of hours Monica would walk him to the back porch, lean him against the rail, and allow him to relieve himself into the four feet of water that filled their driveway.

Jordan and Monica cleaned out the house. Monica collected glass shards and wadded paper while Jordan attempted to reassemble the furniture. Most of the rugs could not be salvaged. He threw them out.

On the third day after Hurricane Brandy, Stephen awoke and sat up in bed, alone. He heard the sound of footsteps before he noticed 262

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a tattered blue spiral notebook on his desk. It was labeled Meredith Ducote—Freshman Biology. Stephen slung one leg to the floor, fer-vently hoping that the lacerations would not burn again. He eased into the desk chair, flipped open the notebook, and began to read about the first time Greg Darby hit Meredith Ducote.

Jordan cracked the bedroom door. Stephen look up at him briefly and held the notebook so he could see the name on the cover.

Meredith sat on the front porch watching the street take solid form, waiting for Jordan.

7

“A
fter your brother called me, I knew Greg was going to do something to Stephen,” Meredith said. Her legs dangled over the edge of the porch, the soles of her bare feet almost touching the muddy water. Jordan leaned against the Doric column next to her. Dread filled him as Meredith continued.

“When we were little, I was the only girl. I was always afraid the boys were going to run off and leave me. So I figured out where everybody’s hidden keys were, just in case. Angela always kept one in the geranium pot outside the back door. Monica keeps hers in the flower bed inside the driveway.” Meredith paused, took a resolute breath.

“The night of Alex’s funeral, after your brother hung up on me, I went to Greg’s house. No one was home. Andrew was taking Angela’s things to the hospital. I took the key, got inside, and went to Greg’s room . . .”

Jordan watched as Meredith’s eyes went distant. An oak branch splayed across the spokes of the wrought-iron fence directly in front of her, but Jordan knew she was back in Greg’s bedroom. “It was a

. . . mess,” she said. “He’d torn open drawers. Thrown shit everywhere.

Obviously he’d been in some kind of a rage. And then I saw the picture. It was on the bed. I had a copy, too. We all did. Your mother took it and gave us all copies. Greg had blacked Stephen out with a marker. That’s when I went to look for the gun.

“Greg had always bragged about his dad’s gun when we were kids.

I remember I used to tell him not to, because of Stephen’s dad. But he did anyway, and he used to always say he knew where it was. He’d never tell us, but I think that’s because we all knew that if Brandon found out where it was he would go shoot birds or something.”

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thickened the air between them. Jordan glanced away, tried not to remember his brother’s body wedged on the lamppost, sinking beneath the water.

“I went to his parents’ bedroom next. The closet door was open and for a second I thought maybe Greg had torn apart the whole house.

But everything was in order except all of Angela’s clothes were gone.

Andrew had taken them to the hospital with her. I found the gun in the nightstand; it wasn’t even hidden.”

Jordan straightened against the column. This was getting real.

“I sighed. I remember. I sighed out loud when I saw the gun sitting there. Greg didn’t have it. But it only lasted for a second. Because I knew I should probably take the gun myself and find him.”

Meredith’s jaw went rigid. Jordan heard the gurgle of water past the front porch.

“I was going to the cemetery. And then I heard it.

“The bell. The bells hadn’t rung in years. When we were at Bishop Polk everybody used to talk about how fake the bells sounded. It’s because they were a recording. Only this sound was real. Metal. I could hear it from outside Greg’s house.”

“Everyone heard it,” Jordan whispered.

“Yeah,” Meredith said sharply, “but nobody bothered to figure out what it was. It was Greg slamming Stephen’s head into the bell.”

Jordan felt his throat constrict. He lifted one hand and massaged his neck. Meredith did not move, her bandaged hands folded across her lap.

“I couldn’t see anything. I was holding the gun in front of me.

Letting it bump into walls. I ripped the shit out of my pants when I jumped the fence and my leg was bleeding. I didn’t know how bad, but I could feel it. And then I heard Greg’s voice somewhere over my head and he kept saying, over and over again, ‘You wanted me this way!’ ”

Tears trickled down Meredith’s cheeks, but her voice remained even. Jordan watched her, gripping the column.

“Greg was naked. He didn’t even hear me. I held the gun in front of me with both hands and I remember not being able to decide whether I was going to look at the muzzle or at him. Stephen was underneath him. I thought Stephen was dead. I had never imagined what Greg was doing to Stephen. I thought if boys were going to fit together that way, then one of them would have to die in the process.

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“For a long time I tried to convince myself that’s why I did it. That I pulled the trigger as a reflex when I thought he killed Stephen. But that’s a lie.”

Hot tears blurred her vision.

“Why did you do it, Meredith?” Jordan asked

“Because we’d been lied to,” Meredith said. “Because a part of us would die each day after we started Cannon and Brandon and me and

. . . Greg. We lost whatever we had.” Meredith paused and wiped her forearm across her nose.

“But not Stephen. Stephen got to keep it. He paid the price. But no matter how hard Brandon and Greg tried to, and no matter how many times I stood back and let them, they couldn’t kill that part of Stephen. The part that told me not to be afraid of the rain.

“And Greg was going to take that from him. And I couldn’t let that happen.”

Meredith’s mouth trembled, like a little girl’s. “I fired,” she said. She brought one hand to her mouth and held it there, breaths whistling through her knuckles.

Jordan stood still. There was no comfort he could offer her. Her crime was hers alone, as it had been for the last five years of her life.

The details of the killing itself she told him dispassionately, like the plot of a novel she had read years before. Greg hadn’t seen her, even after she brought the muzzle of the gun to his temple, just above his left ear. This random position had saved her. Without realizing it, she had mimicked the position of a suicide bullet by firing at close range on the left side of the body. The muzzle flare blinded her and the sound rang in her ears. She dropped the gun and it thudded to the portico’s floorboards. She moved to Greg and pulled on his shoulders, trying to pry him off of Stephen. After some effort, Greg’s body rolled onto the floorboards on its back. Then she noticed the rise and fall of Stephen’s back. Meredith took Greg’s T-shirt and wrapped it around the handle of the gun before placing the trigger in Greg’s hand. With the shirt she wiped the slick puddle of Greg’s semen from his belly.