A Density of Souls (36 page)

“There was only one way to get Stephen out of there,” Meredith went on.

Jordan had moved closer to her. Meredith had not turned to look at him.

“I slid myself underneath him and managed to grab his arms. I pulled them around my neck, and I remember saying over and over 266

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again, ‘Please, Stephen, please, Stephen.’ He didn’t make a noise, but I could feel him breathing against my back. To be safe, I took his shirt and tied it around both his wrists, sliding them over my head, so his hands held onto the back of my neck. I had to keep him between me and the ladder. I got his head on my shoulder . . .”

She pointed to where Stephen’s head had rested on the nape of her neck.

“He was naked, so I laid him down in the lobby and stole one of the flags off the wall. I wrapped him in it. I went out the front doors.

There was no way to get him over the fence. I wasn’t even thinking. I carried him home.”

Jordan sat down on the porch next to Meredith. Neither of them spoke as they surveyed the ruined neighborhood around them. In the near distance, the remains of the Bishop Polk bell tower jutted up among the splintered oak branches.

“It’s all in the notebook,” Meredith finally said. She rose from the edge of the porch.

“Where are you going?” Jordan asked.

She lingered on the top of the steps. Faced him for the first time that morning. Her eyes were now dry. “I did what I wanted to do that night,” she said.

Jordan nodded in weak agreement.

“You tell Stephen that I love him,” she added.

“You love him,” she ordered quietly before walking down the steps and into the black water.

By dusk, Stephen had read the last pages of Meredith’s notebook.

When he finished he let out a sound Monica could not interpret when she heard it all the way from her bedroom. She went to his door and found him sitting at his desk, the notebook open in front of him.

As he cried, she strode to the desk and picked up the notebook. She read the last words.

You told me about what you called the light in the darkness.

About how life was neither good nor bad, but a combination of both and occasionally good things pop up in the middle of tragedy, but they still don’t make tragedy go away.

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They can’t protect you. They’re just light.

But what you didn’t say is that sometimes, certain people can be a light in the darkness.

There are some people in this world who are worth saving when other people decide they shine the wrong kind of light on the wrong kind of things.

You have been and will always be my light in the darkness.

I love you,

Meredith.

8

J
ordan awoke to the drone of the National Guard Hummers winding their way through the streets. A week and a half after Hurricane Brandy, the water had receded enough to allow people to return to their homes. At the window, Jordan watched as a Hummer loaded with returning evacuees crunched through the debris over Chestnut Street. New Orleans was coming to life again, in a clamor of engines and propellers.

Trish Ducote knelt on her front porch and tried not to cry as the Hummer pulled off down the street. Her house was intact. Only one of the shutters had been torn free and miraculously the window had not broken. Trish had been almost thirty miles outside New Orleans when she abandoned her car. The stranded evacuees were picked up by National Guard envoys that had rushed them to nearby shelters. She’d spent the past week eating cold red beans and rice in the cafeteria of Destrehan High School, sharing conversations with strangers and clustering around a few television sets, where they all silently watched the aerial footage of a drowned New Orleans, the city built below sea level.

Roger and Elise Charbonnet had left the mausoleum once Brandy passed for good. Without touching, they waded through Green Lawn Gemetery. Roger led Elise all the way to the gates, not waiting for her to catch up or extending an arm to help her. A harbor patrol cruiser ferried them to the Superdome downtown.

When they were bused back to Jackson Avenue, Elise disembarked first, leaving Roger behind in the crush of passengers desperate to see if their homes had survived. She walked back to her house quickly.

Roger found her standing in front of the gate of their house, one hand gripping a post. The Charbonnet residence no longer had a roof.

Through the skeletal timbers Elise and Roger could discern the Heaven's Answer

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remnants of their bedroom. The mattress and box spring, stripped of their sheets, leaned against the doorframe. Roger realized that there was no possible way he could leave his wife.

The cleaning of Stephen’s wounds had evolved from dreaded task to a solemn ritual. Monica handed over the job to Jordan several days after the storm. Stephen lay on the bed. They heard the clatter outside, the hiss of truck brakes. Stephen chuckled as Jordan dabbed the rag down the back of his naked thigh.

“What?”

“You always do that,” Stephen murmured.

And then Jordan understood. When he cleaned the wounds, Jordan instinctively followed the path of the twine, from the top right cleft of Stephen’s butt to the back of his left thigh.

“The water’s gone?” Stephen asked.

“Yeah . . .”

Jordan thought of his parents and paused in his ministrations.

“Where’s Mom?”

“She’s downstairs. She’s turning everything off because if the power comes back on it’ll blow the wiring,” Jordan said, swabbing the back of Stephen’s right knee down his left calf, and then his ankles.

“I can go outside then,” Stephen said, sighing. He had not been permitted to leave the house.

Jordan finished, dropped the rag on the bedside table, bent down and nibbled Stephen’s earlobe. Stephen laughed.

Jordan found Roger on the front porch with his head propped in his hands. Roger regarded him as if he were a stranger.

“Mom?” Jordan asked quietly from the front walk.

“Inside. Taking it all in, I guess,” Roger said, patting into place a few moist strands of hair on his head. “Obviously we won’t stay here.”

Jordan nodded.

“I assume you won’t come with us?” Roger asked.

“I need to be with Stephen now.”

Roger glared at Jordan, a look Jordan assumed was hatred. Roger rose, turned, and disappeared through the front door, shaking his head. Jordan waited, hearing the sound of his father’s choked crying 270

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coming from the welter of demolished walls and broken glass. He gripped the gate, unable to pass through it. The fact that it was destroyed only made the house seem less like his home.

Trish Ducote was planted on the porch, struggling to get the shutters open when she saw the tall blond man walking down Chestnut Street toward her house. She stared at him. “Stephen?” Trish finally managed. “Stephen Conlin?”

Stephen smiled slightly and nodded. Trish shook her head. She had not laid eyes on Stephen Conlin since he was in high school.

“Is Meredith here?”

Trish’s face darkened. She remembered the note on the counter.

House is fine. I’ll be fine, too, if you don’t try to find me. Love, Meredith.

Trish shook her head.

Stephen didn’t say anything. Trish looked away from him and back to the jammed shutters.

“Thanks, Mrs. Ducote,” Stephen said, and turned from the gate.

Stephen was halfway down the block when Trish’s voice called after him. “Stephen!”

He halted.

“You’ve really grown up,” Trish said loudly.

She felt immediately ashamed that she had said it.

Angela was asleep when Meredith saw the lights. Blossoming on the side of the interstate, stretching out for miles in a glittering blanket.

Meredith reached over and touched Angela’s shoulder. Angela stirred and awoke, the lights of Mexico playing across her face.

“El Paso,” Angela whispered. She locked eyes with Meredith, desperate to see if Meredith was serious. Years earlier, Andrew Darby had told his wife there was no way in hell they would cross the border, not for a minute. It wasn’t on their way.

“Mexico,” Meredith responded.

Meredith looked back to the quilt of lights, impossibly close, piled on the roofs of shacks, the fires of oil refineries stretching out through Ciudad Juárez. A glittering star marked the dark presence of moun-tains. Meredith was no longer sure whether she would tell Angela that she had killed her son.

E p i l o g u e

October brought the first chill, blotting the summer’s lingering heat.

In the month since Hurricane Brandy’s landfall, seventy thousand dollars has been raised to reconstruct the Bishop Polk bell tower. The shell of the Charbonnet residence had been demolished at the beginning of September and the lot on Philip Street was sold.

Stephen had finished repainting his father’s study when the postcard from Meredith arrived. It featured an anonymous beach and a seashell. On the back she had printed, Writing . . . Love, Meredith.

He tacked it to the study’s bulletin board.

Monica checked for Stephen in the study. He was gone. She noticed that the space reserved for his new desk was directly opposite where Jeremy’s had been. She wondered if Stephen had done this consciously. She noticed the postcard. At five forty-five, she left the house, bound for the cemetery.

Halfway through her drive into New Orleans, Elise realized she had forgotten her sweater. She could not go back to get it, as she had promised Monica they would meet at Lafayette Cemetery at six. In her later years, Nanine Charbonnet had returned to her native town, Convent, thirty miles north of New Orleans. Her last home, a two bedroom cottage, had remained in the family for years, and now Roger and Elise had moved in.

The tombs slanted the sunlight as Elise walked toward the Conlin mausoleum. Monica did not turn as Elise sat down on a cold slab of stone across from Jeremy’s tomb. The inscription, once a plate of white marble, was still covered with silt. Elise tugged a pack of Parliament Lights from her pocket. Monica flinched at the sound of her butane lighter.

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“Give me one,” Monica said.

“I didn’t think you smoked,” Elise replied. She extracted a cigarette and handed it over. Monica turned and took it, then extended her hand for the lighter. She lit the cigarette without returning the light, avoiding Elise’s eyes.

“He said he might tell you,” Elise said, her voice low and reveren-tial. Monica faced Elise now. She was not startled. She didn’t even seem offended. She seemed impressed that Elise had immediately broached the reason for their meeting.

“Was he drunk?” Monica asked.

Elise locked eyes with her for a beat, then she looked to Jeremy’s epitaph. Beloved Husband, Beloved Father. She inhaled a whiff of smoke, trying to summon petulance. An apology for what she had concealed for twenty-three years would not come easily now. Too much else had happened to grieve over. Brandon’s body had been identified among scores of corpses pulled from drainage canals and pumping stations.

Roger had refused to give him a marked grave.

“Why do you think he didn’t tell me?” Monica asked, her tone flip.

“I don’t know,” Elise mumbled before taking a drag off her cigarette.

She exhaled, leaned against the tomb. “He said he might tell you to prove a point. That there was no need to be afraid of women like us because we could be fucked just as quickly and just as easily.”

Monica’s laughter sliced through Elise’s chest, cleaving the icy resolve Elise had hoped would get her through this. Monica shook her head slightly, as if aware she was laughing at a crude joke. Elise felt tears salt her eyes. The cigarette in her hand quivered.

But even as her rage surrendered to dread, Elise knew that she deserved Monica’s laughter. It dispelled the mystery from that moment in Jeremy Conlin’s study when the Mahler had drowned out her moans as Jeremy guided her across the top of his desk, running her skirt over her thighs, growling into her ear. She had foolishly believed he was discovering parts of her she didn’t know existed. Any presump-tion that they had actually made love on that summer afternoon died with Monica’s laughter.

“What do you want me to say, Monica?” Elise said, her voice thick with tears.

“Nothing!”

Elise’s mouth opened onto silence. She could feel tears trickling Heaven's Answer

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down her cheeks. Monica saw them. She did not soften, but she backed away, glanced at Jeremy’s epitaph again.

“We never tell them,” Monica whispered.

Elise nodded. She forced her lips to move. “We’ve lost too many children.”

Monica looked at her again. Elise saw something in Monica’s eyes, a flicker of recognition behind the veil of rage. Elise knew she was surveying her for the last time, weighing whether or not their newfound, fragile friendship would survive this revelation. When Monica turned and moved off down the alleyway, Elise realized that the other woman was already attempting to forget her.

“I’m sorry.”

Monica paused. “What for? It’s only a memory now.”

Elise waited until Monica had rounded a bank of tombs before she let the sobs wrench free from her. She cried for an hour in front of Jeremy’s tomb. It was the first time she had visited him.

Monica had easily repaired the picture frame Elise had broken that afternoon more than two decades before. She had glued the wooden sides back together and kept the picture on her nightstand. In the photo, she and Jeremy smiled in front of the Reno wedding chapel where they were married before a lattice altar strung with plastic flowers. She angled the picture so she could see it from bed.

Down the hallway, Stephen emerged from the shower, the towel around his waist failing to conceal the red scars that striped his skin like the map of a road . . . only without a beginning or end. Jordan flipped over Meredith’s postcard and examined the postmark as Stephen slid into bed next to him.

“Mexico?” Jordan asked, replacing the card on the nightstand.

“They’re not fading,” Stephen said.