Eye of the Cricket (20 page)

Very strange to have this house full of life again.

I'm sitting here in the slave quarters looking across to the house, thinking about past months.

David stayed over a week, then another, and before long without ever discussing it we all knew he lived here. Goes off to
work in the morning and comes home every night just like a businessman, taking care of the city's wounded and walking dead.
Some days I go along with him.

Walsh even moved in for a while there, most of a month, when nights got too hard, shadows too deep and thoughts of Danny crowded
close. Eventually he pulled things back into place and went home. But while he was here, evenings after dinner we'd sit outside
talking. Remembering back to when wefirstmet, recalling our search for the sniper, how Don had pulled me out of the first
of many hells I'd made for myself, the late-night call when I learned that Don's wife had left him and taken the kids, David's
disappearance, Danny. Beneath it all, tacitly, the way men our age do, I'm sure we were asking ourselves how all those years
had got by us.

David, Zeke, Walsh. A couple of others too—but I'll save that.

Meanwhile, something extraordinary sits on the desk beside me. I've spent almost six weeks, night and day, working on this,
and now I have no idea what I'll do with it.

Look tiirough the published books and you'll find much the same.

What I did here, in this extraordinary thing sitting beside me, is this: I quit trying. Quit tiying to finesse the failures
and forfeitures of my life intofiction. To tuck people I'd loved safely away in the corners of novels. Quit trying to force
patterns, however comforting and fetching and artistic these patterns might be, onto the catch-as-catch-can of what I actually
lived, the rigorous disorder of my days.

This extraordinary thing is my autobiography.

And I've no idea what to do with it, no idea at all.

Maybe best that I simply file it away with all the other papers, all those fat files neither I nor anyone else will ever read
again, its frail purpose served.

Six-forty. Almost dark. Zeke walks into the kitchen to start dinner, snaps the lights on and waves through the window above
the sink.

Minutes later David shows up, home early ("misery down thirty percent in New Orleans today"), and knocks at the door with
camomile tea. Dinner in an hour, he says—"Zeketime, of course," which means closer to two.

I loved you, Vicky, and you, La Verne, and yes, you, Clare. Loved you all and still do. All so much a part of me now.

Like Deborah.

Home from theflower shop she stands just past the window, tall and willowy and swaying slightly (or so I will always imagine
her), calling, Does Lew want to come out and play.

She showed up at the door one morning days after I came back from Nighttown.

"If it's okay with you, I thought I'd just drop my things off here and go on to work."

She handed a suitcase through the door.

"I'm running late, though—what else is new? See you tonight, Lew."

"You sure about this?"

She looked at me for a moment and nodded, then turned and broke for her car. We never spoke about it again. It's her home
now as much as it's mine, David's or Zeke's.

There's another as well.

I was in the slave quarters working on this extraordinary thing, this book or whatever it turns out to be, almost done with
it in fact, when David came to the door. One of those drawling New Orleans afternoons that looks to go on forever. I had door
and windows propped open, a glass of iced tea close by. Flies were doing head-ons all around.

"Someone to see you, Dad."

I waved my hand, a little impatiently, I'm sure, to indicate that I was working and didn't care to be bothered.

"I know. You'll want to see her. I wouldn't interrupt you otherwise. She's in the front room."

I read the last couple of paragraphs, hit Save. Got up and went in through the kitchen. Bat appeared from nowhere, buzzed
first my feet, then his nearly full bowl, urgently remonstrating. When I stepped into the front room, just past the sill,
her face turned to me, and for a moment irrational fear flooded me.

It could have been, for that moment I almost believed it was, her mother watching me.

Then teal's welled behind my eyes.

"Hi, Lewis," she said. "Looking pretty good for an old fart."

She stepped towards me on the bare wood floor, one step, then another. Had her mother's easy grace.

"Probably I should have called. But these days I've got in the habit of doing things on a little more personal level. If you
want me to leave, I will."

I shook my head.

Mute with the beauty of the world again, with its simple pleasures, I took those three necessary steps and took Alouette in
my arms.

Neither of us spoke for a while.

"When I was in the hospital, on the breathing machine, you sat beside me, for hours it seemed, and you told me about when
you first met my mom, how much you loved her, and how you'd never been able to tell her that.

"Whatever the cost?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Welcome back," I said to Alouette. "Welcome home."