Sweet Unrest (2 page)

From the back of the hall, I heard my parents talking in that way that means they’ve forgotten about the kids and were busy with something else. Political moves or forging bonds or whatever.

“Come on, Teej,” I said, flipping him up over my shoulder like a rag doll. Soon he’d be too big for me to lift like this, I realized.

Things change too fast.

Two

I’m falling, sinking.

There’s something heavy dragging at me, pulling me down into the blackness. The water is cold around me, filled with dirt and the muck of something putrid that makes the dirt seem almost clean. I struggle up, frantic to get to the surface, but every move brings pain. Sharp, ripping pain. So sudden and absolute that I almost gasp. Almost, because the moment my mouth opens to scream, the cold, fetid water rushes in and I clamp down instinctively.

I have to survive this. There’s someone who needs me. I can’t die here.

But I’m still sinking. I’m heavy. So heavy. Something is dragging me down to the bottom, like cruel hands that won’t let me go. Pain and darkness and the cold wet of death surrounding me.

I’m sinking.

I look up, and the dim light of the surface gets farther away.

My lungs are burning and I know I only have moments, seconds, to think about what it is that brought me here. To remember.

But before I can, my lungs spasm with my body’s instinctive need for air, and I feel the water rush in. Burning and heavy, it fills me. And the darkness takes me in.

And then I’m sitting up in bed, clammy with sweat, my face wet with tears.

The Dream is back. Waking me with a feeling of such utter terror and regret that it leaves me gasping and shuddering. Waking me in a cold sweat, tears burning my eyes, knowing that drowning is so much less than I deserved.

And I have no idea what it means.

Three

On the second day of my new life, I watched the sun rise over the Mississippi. It came up slowly, struggling through the dense trees, painting the sky with orange and crimson before it made its appearance on the horizon. I used to watch it come up over Lake Michigan when the Dream woke me back in Chicago. Even on bitterly cold days, I’d bike down to the shoreline and watch the sun transform the polluted lake into a pool of diamonds. Watching the sun climb into the sky and erase the darkness had always helped to ease the tightness in my chest left by the Dream.

I’d been having the Dream ever since I could remember, but right about the time my parents decided to take the job at Le Ciel, the Dream stopped. It had been a couple of months now since I’d had it. Months since I’d woken in a silent scream, unable to go back to my bed. I thought maybe I’d finally grown out of it.

I thought wrong.

The Dream came roaring back my first night at Le Ciel, and with it came a reminder of the countless nights it had happened before. The darkness. The soul-chilling cold. And the terrifying knowledge that there was something else, something that made the drowning feel like a walk in the park.

I shook my head and finished the last of the coffee I’d brought out with me. It had grown cold and bitter as I waited for the light to peek up over the tops of the distant trees, but I choked it down anyway. I was running on only a few hours sleep and needed every bit of the caffeine it provided.

From where I was sitting on the grassy levee, I could see miles of fields on the distant bank gradually emerge from the shadows of night. The rising sun glinted off the river but didn’t transform it. As the sky lit up, the water remained a muddy brown, and the tightness I’d been fighting remained lodged solidly in my chest.

Suddenly, I was angry. Livid.

I flung away the mug I was holding and watched it thump onto the ground without shattering.

Figured. I couldn’t even throw a fit properly.

My camera was sitting next to me, and I picked it up, the familiar weight in my hands calming me as nothing else could.

I’m not sure what drew me to photography, but I’ve loved taking pictures ever since I can remember. When I was little, before digital cameras were as cheap as they are now, my parents would buy me those disposable cameras to play with. They weren’t much more than a piece of plastic wrapped in cardboard, but I liked the way the viewfinder narrowed the world down into a neat little square. It became like a game for me to find the perfect combination of things to put inside that square—the right arrangement that could encapsulate a story.

When I turned twelve, my parents gave me a real camera—a thirty-five millimeter—along with art classes at the Institute and all the equipment for a real darkroom, so I could work on my prints. When I turned sixteen, they gave me my baby. She was a thing of beauty, a professional-grade Canon SLR model. I carried her everywhere with me, even though she was a lot heavier than the smartphones that everyone seems to think are cameras. They’re not. Real cameras aren’t point and click. They certainly don’t ring or text or let you play games on them. They take pictures. Period.

Just holding the camera up to my eye made me feel better. I aimed it at the sunrise. I knew exactly how I wanted the picture to look: I’d overexpose it, so the sun would be a white-hot hole in the page, obscuring everything else.

Later that morning, I learned that the heat of summer in Louisiana was different than any other heat I’d ever experienced. No matter how clear the night, the sticky warmth never really dissipated. In the glow of the early morning, it still radiated up from the pavement, out from the walls. It swirled through the ancient trees and hung heavy in the air. By mid-morning, the day was already as hot as any August afternoon in Illinois had ever been, and it only promised to get worse.

Walking to the mansion, I was infinitely thankful that the bargain I’d struck with my parents didn’t include the hoop skirts and bonnets the tour guides and other historical interpreters were required to wear at Le Ciel. I was doing an internship, or what my dad had called an internship, with the preservation expert. My uniform consisted of my camera, my gear bag, and whatever I happened to throw on for the day—some shorts, a graphic tee that a guy in my art class had made for me, and my favorite plaid Chucks. I’d given up trying to fight the humidity and settled for pulling my unruly auburn hair into a messy knot.

People were already milling around the yard in front of the big house, waiting for my dad to get the staff meeting started. If I hadn’t grown up around the strangeness of re-enactments, seeing twenty or so people standing around in wide skirts and old-fashioned suits might have been odd. For me, it seemed almost normal, and with the house lurking above us, it felt a little like stepping back into the past.

I lifted my camera and captured a few shots of the crowd. If I did the final images in a sepia tone, maybe burned in and blurred it a bit, it probably would look like it had been taken on a day more than one hundred and fifty years ago. Past and present colliding on the same ground.

I found a place on the outskirts of the crowd and gazed up at the house again. It stood at the end of the wide alley of gracefully twisting trees like a silent monument in the morning sun, but I knew the only thing it could be a monument to was greed and death.

The plantation had been established in the early 1790s, by a Frenchman who had come from a family of sugar growers in Haiti. Jean-Pierre Dutilette was close to forty when he came to Louisiana, bought his first plot of land in the Delta region, and started to cultivate it. He soon learned that growing sugar in Louisiana was a trickier proposition than it was in the Caribbean, but he was ruthless enough to be successful. By the time his son, Roman, took over in the 1830s, the Dutilettes owned the most property in the area, and by 1840, Roman had become wealthy enough to build the mansion his wife eventually named Le Ciel Doux. The name roughly means “Sweet Heaven,” and looking up at the gorgeous old structure, I could see why she picked it.

After the South lost the Civil War, the original family struggled on for a while, losing bit after bit of land before they lost the house, too. It sat empty for a long time, and then it was purchased by a series of private owners, but none of them seemed able to hold on to the property for long. Then, about five years ago, the house and remaining land were purchased by the University of New Orleans.

That’s where my dad came in. Under the university’s guidance, the plantation was going to become a living history museum, complete with researchers and historians to study the social and economic conditions of the Antebellum South. There would also be actors working as interpreters, who would live on the plantation most of the year and perform the work that needed to be done to keep it running. The goal was to eventually get the place to function as a real, working sugar plantation, just like it had been before the Civil War.

Well, almost like it had been. This time, the workers would have the option of quitting.

My dad gave a shrill whistle to get everyone’s attention. After introducing himself, he launched into his plans for the property, the new developments that would be coming, and some of the changes the university was going to make.

I couldn’t help but grin as I watched him go on and on. My dad had been waiting for an opportunity like this since before I was born, and I could tell by the way his whole body seemed to come alive as he talked that he was finally where he needed to be. My own discomfort this summer, I realized, was a small price to pay for the happiness we were giving him.

I lifted my camera to document the moment, but as I centered him in the viewfinder, my vision blurred, and for a moment, the picture changed. My dad’s lanky body and mop of reddish hair shifted … into someone else, someone broader, with dark, hooded eyes and a tight, angry mouth. I blinked and the scene shifted back.

Dizzy, I put the camera down and stared at my dad again, but everything was as it should be. The sun was hot and the sky was a clear blue. Yet a feeling of dread still pricked across my skin. I shook my head to clear it, and then I looked over the crowd to see if I could find any better shots to distract myself from the strange sensation that had washed over me.

That’s when I saw him.

He was standing slightly apart from the rest of the employees, leaning against one of the ancient, tangled oaks that lined the wide alley leading out to the Mississippi. Maybe it was the way he held himself, apart and confident, but where most of the other guys in the crowd wore the styles of an earlier century like kids playing dress-up, this guy’s clothing seemed to suit him.

And then I really looked at his face, and my breath caught in my throat. Above sculpted cheekbones, his eyes were fringed by dark, thick lashes that softened his otherwise angular face. His lazy tumble of honey-colored hair glinted like molten gold in the sun. He had an almost aristocratic beauty. It might have been a cold beauty, but the warmth of his sun-bronzed skin balanced the rest of his features.

But he was tense. The slash of his mouth, set in a hard line over his strong, sharp chin, was completely at odds with the way he casually lounged against the tree. Occasionally he would grimace in what might have been irritation … or maybe pain.

Then he looked up and saw me, and our eyes locked.

And I felt my world shift. I couldn’t look away from him.

His face softened then. The tension left his jaw, his lips parted slightly, and he tilted his head to the side as he examined me. He seemed confused, like he was trying to put together a difficult puzzle as his gaze swept slowly over my body—down my rumpled outfit to my worn shoes and then back up again. His eyes narrowed as they met mine again. I was about to turn away, uncomfortable under his scrutiny, but all at once, his eyes—a green so vibrant and true that the color was clear even from that distance—danced with amusement.

Embarrassed to be caught staring, and even more embarrassed by the laughter in his eyes, I turned away so I could breathe again. I willed my heart to slow back down, took a few deep breaths to steady myself, and turned back.

But he was gone.

My dad’s voice droned on in the background as I looked around for the guy. Suddenly, the day felt too bright, the crowd too close. No matter where I looked, I didn’t see him. His absence felt like I’d just lost something important, but I didn’t know why. I was so lost in my thoughts, I didn’t hear my dad finish or notice the crowd begin to disperse. I was too busy thinking about the guy with the startling green eyes.

He’d looked a year or two older than me, which made me wonder if he was one of the college students my dad had invited down from Chicago to work on the plantation for course credit. If that was the case, maybe I’d seen him before—maybe on campus?—which was the only way I could think of to explain the strange sense of familiarity I’d experienced when he looked at me. That would also go a long way toward explaining his small smile and the laugh in his eyes when he caught me staring. He probably thought I had a crush on him. Some silly high school girl shooting higher than she had any right to aim.

But a guy that striking … It seemed like I would’ve remembered him.

I was berating myself for my own stupidity at looking so, well … stupid when I realized my dad was trying to get my attention. I mentally shook myself and headed over to him.

“Lucy, I want you to meet Chloe. Mina’s daughter,” he added, in case I’d forgotten. “She works here at Le Ciel as a tour guide.”

Chloe had the same wide mouth and dazzling smile as her mother, and when she turned it on me, I couldn’t help but smile back. She was every bit as beautiful as Mina, and almost as tall, too—much taller than my average height. Her skin was a bit darker than Mina’s, and she wore her hair braided into long, smooth dreadlocks that moved like water when she turned her head. Some were tipped with silver beads that chimed happily when they clinked together.

“I’m here to rescue you for the day,” she told me, never breaking her smile, her eyes shining impishly with delight.

“Rescue?”

“It’s my day off, and I’m heading into the city. I thought maybe you’d want to come.”

I looked up at my dad. Heading off to the city sounded wonderful. I’d never been to New Orleans, and after the night and morning I’d had, I wanted to get away from the plantation. But that wasn’t the deal—I expected to start working that day. Surely my dad would want me to start cataloging things with my new boss, and I had every intention of fulfilling his requests to the letter. It was my ticket home.

That’s why it surprised me when he smiled and said, “Well, you girls have fun.” He kissed the top of my head and walked off.

“Quick,” I told Chloe. “Get me out of here before he changes his mind.”

She laughed, a musical sound that reminded me once again of her mother. We took off for her car, and I resisted the urge to look back.