Taltos (5 page)

She looked at the wall, or the flowers, or the yew trees. She never looked down at the ground.

Perhaps she’d forgotten that the double grave was right beneath her feet. The grass was growing over it, quick and wild, as it always does in spring in Louisiana. There had been rain aplenty to help it, and sometimes the glory of the sun and rain at the same time.

She ate her meals—approximately a fourth to one-half of what they gave her. Or so Michael said. She didn’t look hungry. But she was pale, still, and her hands, when she did move them, would shake.

All the family came to see her. Groups came across the lawn, standing back as if they might hurt her. They said their hellos, they asked about her health. They told her she looked beautiful. That was true. Then they gave up and they went away.

Mona watched all this.

At night Rowan slept, Michael said, as if she were exhausted, as if she’d been hard at work. She bathed alone, though this scared him. But she always locked the bathroom door, and if he tried to stay inside with her, she
merely sat there on the chair, looking off, doing nothing. He had to leave before she’d get up. Then he’d hear the lock turn.

She listened when people spoke, at least in the beginning. And now and then when Michael pleaded with her to speak, she clasped his hand warmly as if comforting him, or pleading with him to be patient. This was sad to watch.

Michael was the only one she touched, or acknowledged, though often this little gesture was made without a change in her remote expression or even a movement of her gray eyes.

Her hair was growing full again. It was even a little yellow from her sitting in the sun. When she’d been in the coma, it had been the color of driftwood, the kind you can see on the muddy riverbanks. Now it looked alive, though if memory served Mona correctly, hair was dead, wasn’t it? Already dead by the time you brushed it, curled it, did stuff to it.

Every morning Rowan rose of her own accord. She would walk slowly down the stairs, holding the railing to the left, and leaning on her cane with the right hand, placing it firmly on each tread. She didn’t seem to care if Michael helped her. If Mona took her arm, it didn’t matter.

Now and then Rowan stopped at her dresser before she went down, and put on a bit of lipstick.

Mona always noticed. Sometimes Mona was waiting for Rowan in the hallway, and she saw Rowan do this. Very significant.

Michael always remarked on it too. Rowan wore nightgowns and negligees, depending upon the weather. Aunt Bea kept buying them and Michael would wash them, because Rowan only wore new clothes after they had been washed, or so he had remembered, and he laid them out for her on the bed.

No, this was no catatonic stupor, Mona figured. And the doctors had confirmed it, though they could not say what was wrong with her. The one time one of them, an idiot Michael had said, stuck a pin in her hand, Rowan quietly withdrew the hand and covered it with her other one. And
Michael went into a rage. But Rowan didn’t look at the guy or say a word.

“I wish I’d been here for that,” said Mona.

Of course Mona had known he was telling the truth. Let the doctors speculate and stick pins in people. Maybe when they went back to the hospital, they stuck pins in a doll of Rowan—voodoo acupuncture. Mona wouldn’t have been surprised.

What
did
Rowan feel? What did she remember? Nobody was sure anymore. They had only Michael’s word that she had awakened from the coma fully aware, that she had spoken with him for hours after, that she knew everything that had happened, that in the coma she had heard and understood. Something terrible on the day of her awakening,
another one
. And the two buried together beneath the oak.

“I never should have let her do it,” Michael had said to Mona a hundred times. “The smell that came out of that hole, the sight of what was left … I should have taken care of things.”

And what had the other one looked like, and who had carried it down, and tell me all the things that Rowan said—Mona had asked him these questions too often.

“I washed the mud from her hands,” Michael had told Aaron and Mona. “She kept looking at it. I guess a doctor doesn’t want her hands to be soiled. Think about it, how often a surgeon washes her hands. She asked me how I was, she wanted …” And there he had choked up, both times that he told this story. “She wanted to take my pulse. She was worried about
me.”

Wish to God I had seen it, what they buried! Wish to God she had spoken to me!

It was the strangest thing—to be rich now, the designee at thirteen, to have a driver and a car (vulgate translation: flashy black stretch limo with disc, tape player, color TV, and lots of room for ice and Diet Coke), and money in her purse all the time, like twenty-dollar bills, no less, and heaps of new clothes, and people patching up the old house on St. Charles and Amelia, catching her on the fly with swatches of “raw silk” or handpainted “wall coverings.”

And to want
this
, to want to know, to want to be part of, to want to understand the secrets of this woman and this man, this house that would one day come to her. A ghost is dead beneath the tree. A legend lies under the spring rains. And in its arm,
another one
. It was like turning away from the sure, bright glitter of gold, to take dark trinkets of inestimable power from a small hiding place. Ah, this is magic. Not even her own mother’s death had so distracted Mona.

Mona talked to Rowan. A lot.

She came on the property with her own key, the heiress and all that. And because Michael said she could. And Michael, no longer looking at her with lust in the eye, had practically adopted her.

She went back to the rear garden, crossed the lawn, skirting the grave if she remembered, and sometimes she didn’t, and then she sat at the wicker table and said, “Rowan, good morning.” And then talked and talked.

She told Rowan all about the development of Mayfair Medical, that they had chosen a site, that they had agreed upon a great geothermal system for the heating and cooling, that plans were being drawn. “Your dream is coming into being,” she told Rowan. “The Mayfair family knows this city as well as anybody. We don’t need feasibility studies and things like that. We’re making the hospital happen as you wanted it.”

No response from Rowan. Did she even care anymore about the great medical complex that would revolutionize the relationship between patients and their attending families, in which teams of caretakers would assist even the anonymous patients?

“I found your notes,” said Mona. “I mean, they weren’t locked up. They didn’t look private.”

No answer. The giant black limbs of the oak moved just a little. The banana leaves fluttered against the brick wall.

“I myself have stood outside Touro Infirmary, asking people what they wanted in an ideal hospital, you know, talking to people for hours.”

Nothing.

“My Aunt Evelyn is in Touro,” Mona said quietly.
“She’s had a stroke. They ought to bring her home, but I don’t think she knows the difference.” Mona would cry if she talked about Ancient Evelyn. She’d cry if she talked about Yuri. She didn’t. She didn’t say that Yuri had not written or called for three weeks now. She didn’t say that she, Mona, was in love, and with a dark, charming, British-mannered man of mystery who was more than twice her age.

She’d explained all that several days ago to Rowan—the way that Yuri had come from London to help Aaron Lightner. She’d explained that Yuri had been a gypsy and he understood things that Mona understood. She even described how they’d met together in her bedroom the night before Yuri went away. “I worry all the time about him,” she had said.

Rowan had never looked at her.

What could she say now? That last night, she had some terrible dream about Yuri that she couldn’t remember.

“Of course, he’s a grown man,” she said. “I mean he’s past thirty and all, and he knows how to take care of himself, but the thought that somebody in the Talamasca might hurt him.” Oh, stop this!

Maybe this was all wrong. It was too easy to dump all these words on a person who couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.

But Mona could swear there was a vague acknowledgment in Rowan that Mona was there. Maybe it was only that Rowan didn’t look annoyed, or sealed off.

Mona didn’t sense displeasure.

Her eyes swept Rowan’s face. Rowan’s expression was so serious. Had to be a mind in there, just had to be. Why, she looked twenty million times better than she had looked in the coma. And look, she’d buttoned her negligee. Michael swore he didn’t do those things for her. She’d buttoned three buttons. Yesterday it had only been one.

But Mona knew that despair can fill up a mind so completely that trying to read its thoughts is like trying to read through thick smoke. Was it despair that had settled on Rowan?

Mary Jane Mayfair had come this last weekend, the mad country girl from Fontevrault. Wanderer, buccaneer, seer,
and genius, to hear her tell it, and part old lady and part fun-loving girl, at the ripe old age of nineteen and a half. A fearsome, powerful witch, so she described herself.

“Rowan’s just fine,” Mary Jane had declared after staring and squinting at Rowan, and then pushing her own cowboy hat off her head so it laid against the back of her neck. “Yep, just brace yourself. She’s taking her time, but this lady here knows what’s happening.”

“Who
is
this nut case?” Mona had demanded, though she’d felt a wild compassion for the child actually, never mind that she was six years older than Mona. This was a noble savage decked out in a Wal-Mart denim skirt no longer than the middle of her thighs, and a cheap white blouse that was much too tight across her egregious breasts, and even missing a crucial button. Severely deprived, and playing it off beautifully.

Of course, Mona had known who Mary Jane was. Mary Jane Mayfair actually lived in the ruins of Fontevrault Plantation, in the Bayou Country. This was the legendary land of poachers who killed beautiful white-necked herons just for their meat, alligators that could overturn your boat and eat your child, and crazy Mayfairs who’d never made it to New Orleans and the wooden steps of the famous New Orleans Fontevrault outpost, otherwise known as the house on St. Charles and Amelia.

Mona was actually dying to see this place, Fontevrault, that stood still with its six columns up and six columns down, even though the first floor was flooded with three feet of water. Seeing the legendary Mary Jane was the next best thing, the cousin only recently returned from “away” who tethered her pirogue to the newel post, and paddled across a stagnant pool of treacherous slime to get to the pickup truck she drove into town for her groceries.

Everybody was talking about Mary Jane Mayfair. And because Mona was thirteen, and the heiress now, and the only legacy-connected person who would talk to people or acknowledge their presence, everybody thought Mona would find it especially interesting to speak about a teen-aged hick cousin who was “brilliant” and “psychic” and wandered about the way Mona did, on her own.

Nineteen and a half. Until Mona laid eyes on this brilliant bit of work, she had not considered someone of that age a true teenager.

Mary Jane was just about the most interesting discovery they had made since they’d started rounding up everyone for genetic testing of the entire Mayfair family. It was bound to happen, finding a throwback like Mary Jane. Mona wondered what else might crawl out of the swamps soon.

But imagine a flooded plantation house of Greek Revival grandeur, gradually sinking into the duckweed, with globs of plaster falling off “with a splash” into the murky waters. Imagine fish swimming through the stairway balusters.

“What if that house falls on her?” Bea had asked. “The house is
in
the water. She can’t stay there. This girl must be brought here to New Orleans.”

“Swamp water, Bea,” Celia had said. “Swamp water, remember. It’s not a lake or the Gulf Stream. And besides, if this child does not have sense to get out of there and take the old woman to safety—”

The old woman.

Mona had all of this fresh in her memory this last weekend when Mary Jane had walked into the backyard and plunged into the little crowd that surrounded the silent Rowan as if it were a picnic.

“I knew about y’all,” Mary Jane had declared. She’d addressed her words to Michael too, who stood by Rowan’s chair as if posing for an elegant family portrait. And how Michael’s eyes had locked onto her.

“I come over here sometimes and look at you,” said Mary Jane. “Yeah, I do. I came the day of the wedding. You know, when you married her?” She pointed to Michael, then to Rowan. “I stood over there, ’cross the street, and looked at your party?”

Her sentences kept going up on the end, though they weren’t questions, as though she was always asking for a nod or a word of agreement.

“You should have come inside,” Michael had said kindly, hanging on every syllable the girl spouted. The trouble with Michael was that he did have a weakness for pubescent
pulchritude. His tryst with Mona had been no freak of nature or twist of witchcraft. And Mary Jane Mayfair was as succulent a little swamp hen as Mona had ever beheld. Even wore her bright yellow hair in braids over the top of her head, and filthy white patent leather shoes with straps, like a little kid. The fact that her skin was dark, sort of olive and possibly tanned, made the girl look something like a human palomino.

“What did the tests say on you?” Mona had asked. “That’s what you’re doing here, isn’t it? They tested you?”

“I don’t know,” said the genius, the mighty powerful swamp witch. “They’re so mixed up over there, wonder they got anything right. First they called me Florence Mayfair and then Ducky Mayfair, finally I says, ‘Look, I’m Mary Jane Mayfair, looky there, right there, on that form you got in front of you.’ ”

“Well, that’s not very good,” Celia had muttered.

“But they said I was fine and go home and they’d tell me if anything was wrong with me. Look, I figure I’ve probably got witch genes coming out the kazoo, I expect to blow the top off the graph, you know? And, boy, I have never seen so many Mayfairs as I saw in that building.”