The Heavens Rise (24 page)

While Nikki kept her head turned to the window so she could chew her fingernails without fear of parental disapproval, her father gently tapped his fingers atop the steering wheel, keeping time to Louis Armstrong’s
“A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” It was the official song of her parent’s epic, enduring love affair, the song her father had played on a cheap old stereo the night Millie had accepted his marriage proposal in a shadowy cathedral of cypress and string lights. The song of Elysium, and the song of their lavish wedding, still spoken of in ecstatic terms by the close friends who’d been in attendance. But Nikki always found Satchmo’s voice to be haunting and mournful, and this piece of music relegated her to the sidelines of a mythic romance she feared she’d never be able to live up to in her own life.

She kept telling herself she should be grateful for how quickly things had worked out, and part of her was: Ben’s detective work, the confession from Brittany Lowe, all of it was miraculous, really, and now Anthem, the only man she’d ever loved, had been returned to her after days of darkness and grief and worst of all,
uncertainty
, days of having her carefully crafted life plans blown to the winds like dust from her palms. But there was one loose end, and it was a big one.

The pool.

It hadn’t been touched since her terrible night with Marshall Ferriot, and odds were it was still swarming with those awful little nameless things. They’d been all over her skin as she’d run for her 4-Runner and she was willing to bet the little creepy-crawlies were the cause of the terrible headaches she’d suffered for days after. They weren’t excruciating; it was the brief, distortions of her vision that had frightened her the most. A pressure would start in her temples, and then for a few seconds, everything was grayscale, and a little twinkly around the edges, like she was looking at the world through a fish tank stained with ash. But she hadn’t said a word about them to anyone. How could she?

Any mention of the headaches or the stuff in the pool and suddenly one question from her father was sure to turn into two and then her mother would get involved, her mother who could never keep a secret, and then they’d both be demanding to know why she’d gone all the way out to Elysium without telling anyone, and swimming? Had she
really gone
swimming
out there by herself? . . . Time. That was what she wanted. Just a little time to let everything settle, to let the reconciliation between her and Anthem become a solid, reliable thing before she had to answer any questions about Marshall Goddamn Ferriot.

But she didn’t have time.

Ben, Anthem, her own parents; she had no right to let them become victims of her secret. She couldn’t let them get anywhere near that stuff, whatever it was. Tons of Google searches had given her all kinds of images of bacteria and parasites and microbes but none that matched what she’d seen floating through the flashlight’s beam that night. So a nickname had come to her unbidden, and she couldn’t manage to shake it no matter how hard she tried.
Swamp sperm!
And the real reason she couldn’t get the words out of her mind was obvious; they were part of her not-so-subconscious belief that the headaches were divine punishment for what she’s done—what she’d
almost
done. Even though she’d read tons of pamphlets on domestic violence, even though she’d rolled her eyes at plenty of TV shows where battered women blamed themselves for the abuse heaped on them by their lovers, her thoughts about what Marshall had done to her always reset at the blame game.

If you hadn’t kept it a secret. If you hadn’t been so quick to believe Brittany Lowe’s story about Anthem. You knew something was wrong with Marshall. You’ve always known. But you ignored it because he was so handsome and because he made you feel special and valuable and worth going to North Carolina for if it ever came to that.

A better person than her would have gone back to Elysium on her own and drained the pool before now. But she’d barely gone anywhere alone after Marshall had slammed her into the side of the pool; she’d never been subjected to that kind of violence before, had never even been threatened with it. It left her feeling so timid, broken down. And yes, a little privileged not to have known that kind of fear before, but still terribly ashamed at how badly it had sidelined her. Of course, she
had gone to replace her water-ruined cell phone on her own, but that had been a real struggle. As she was standing in line at the Sprint store, her hand had traveled reflexively to the welt on the back of her head, and as soon as her fingers grazed the enduring soreness there, she found herself in a panic, looking over both shoulders, convinced that Marshall was about to come barreling into the store, a semiautomatic pointed at her head.

Just point.
Divine inspiration. This is what she’d been looking for ever since they’d pulled away from the house.
First thing, walk to the pool, turn on the light and point and say, “What the hell is that stuff?” You’ll have warned everyone, no one will get exposed without their knowledge. And it won’t be a lie because fact is, you still don’t know what that crap actually is.

It was perfect. She’d been overthinking everything. What else was new?

Just point.

She was on the verge of laughing aloud at this simple revelation when a pickup truck flew past them going in the opposite direction, and in the rearview mirror, Nikki saw the truck’s headlights illuminate the large black snake sliding across her mother’s chest.

Darkness descended. She told herself it was a trick of the eye. But she could hear its scales rustling against her mother’s blouse.

Her lips parted; she heard herself wheeze. She went to reach for her father’s arm and saw the speedometer. They were hurtling down the highway at seventy-five miles per hour. And so she froze. She froze because the snake she’d seen had been huge, body almost as thick as her wrist, scales the color of smoke. A water moccasin, it had to be. And yes, yes, yes, snakes only attack when their territory is threatened, but this bastard had been removed from his territory and placed in hers and so there were no rules. There were no rules and oh my God it was huge and her mother couldn’t wake up because she’d scream and if she screamed, what would she—

“Dad,” Nikki whispered.

The head. She needed to see the head. Her father had taught her everything about snakes when she was a little girl. Too many things, in fact. He’d scared her so badly that she’d never after ventured farther than a few yards from the trailers at Elysium without Ben right beside her. She had to see the head. If it was rounded, they were okay. They would be fine. But if it was flat and pointed, then—

Millie Delongpre stirred, let out a soft grunt, the same kind of sound she made when she took an unexpected bite of cilantro. She hated cilantro. Then, her eyes still closed, she lifted one hand toward her chest and that’s when Nikki screamed, “
Mom! Don’t!”

Ear-piercing screams. Her father shouting “
Hey hey hey what?
” And suddenly her mother was a dancing silhouette in the backseat, arms pinwheeling, the snake lost to shadow, no way to tell if she’d been struck. Dancing up and over the backseat, onto the bench seat behind it, still screaming, still oblivious to her daughter’s cries.

Then Nikki saw it. The snake was coiling up on the floor of the backseat, all five feet of it, poised to strike. And her mother was still screaming and screaming. All three of them were now. A deranged blend of pure fear and desperate cries for calm.

Then they hit the guardrail.

There was a deafening pop that was louder than the rest of the chaos and it felt as if Nikki’s wrists had caught fire; she’d thrown her hands out in front of her just as the air bags had exploded. Shards of glass skated across her cheeks and nose. Her father was thrown backward against his seat, tongue jutting lewdly from between his teeth, eyes slits. Then came the water, a great, dark green curtain of it that turned milky in the plunging headlights before slamming into the spiderwebbed windshield. Everything shifted underneath her; the tail of the giant SUV was spinning outward from the bank, and they were floating. Floating under the highway bridge, the nose of the Lexus dipping further below the surface, floating past dark banks of knotted cypress branches and
nothing else, no boathouses, no lights in the dark. And in a deranged instant, Nikki felt as if the shattering glass, the exploding air bags, her broken wrists all amounted to a blessed thing, because they had all brought an end to her mother’s terrible screams.

Her father was out cold, slumped forward against his seat belt in the space left by the rapidly deflating air bag. Lukewarm water rose over her ankles as it poured in through the door frame. Behind her, the snake was swimming in frenzied circles in the flooding backseat. But when she went to reach for her seat belt, her broken wrist sent rings of fire up her arms and she cried out in agony. The pain triggered something else; a headache, just like the one she’d suffered for days after her awful night with Marshall. Only this one was stronger, much stronger, and for a few seconds, she feared she’d broken part of her skull along with her wrists.

Then Nikki Delongpre lifted her eyes to the rearview mirror, and that’s when she saw that the world had changed.

It was worse than the brief, grayscale distortions the headaches had brought on previously. The world itself had gone silvery and luminescent, and where her mother was crouched and frozen in the very back seat, her form seemed to be shedding tendrils of bioluminescence. It was as if the intense pressure inside her skull had given way, and left her seeing invisible threads of . . . she didn’t know what, so the words that danced through her brain next were
stroke, aneurysm, cerebral hemorrhage
. But there was another feeling, and it was in her chest, and it was pure pleasure. A sense that she was taking in great, greedy gulps of the purest oxygen she’d ever inhaled, and it was cleansing her, dousing the pain in her broken wrists, numbing her to slick swamp water crawling up her legs.

And then she heard her mother say, “Stroke. Aneurysm. Cerebral hemorrhage.” But Nikki was allowed only a second or two of realizing that her mother had just spoken her thoughts aloud before it felt as if she was thrown from her body. Suddenly, she had only the
vaguest sense of her back resting against the wet leather seat. Up and down had become relative terms, and the hallucinations that gripped her were more than vivid, they were multidimensional and she wasn’t sure if they were passing through her or she was passing through
them.
Cypress branches and string lights and the voice of Louis Armstrong coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, and then her father down on one knee before her, crying, extending a ring in one hand. But her father’s face was so intricate, so vivid, so
real
, that Nikki knew this couldn’t be the product of her own mind—she had never known her father’s face that well when he was so young. No, some fundamental piece of her mother’s memory, of her mother’s very
soul,
was passing through her. And then when her young father leapt to his feet, screaming, and the tall grass all around them began shifting from the motion of a hundred approaching serpents, Nikki realized that her mother’s soul had been irreparably damaged by what had just happened in the concrete world. That what was pushing through Nikki was a terrible hybrid of her mother’s greatest joy and her greatest terror.

And then the hallucination was over, but the delicious, unzipped feeling was still in her chest, the world still swimming in silvery luminescence that both mirrored and danced gracefully with all the solid elements of the ordinary world.

Nikki imagined the fish-skinning tools she’d seen her father load into the back of the SUV, and her mother turned, pulled the case out from between two suitcases.

Nikki envisioned one of the curved steel blades and her mother, who was miraculously and entirely under Nikki’s control, unzipped the set and withdrew the tube skinner.

Then, before she could think twice, Nikki drove her mother to reach down and seize the snake by the neck, and because she had been drained of all life, Millie Delongpre did so without a moment’s fear or hesitation.

She lifted the snake from the rising water, its body whipping like a horse’s tail. Then she slammed it against the back of the seat in one hand, plunged the tube skinner into the center of its fat body and dragged the blade down its length. The snake’s breaking ribs made a sound like glass crunching under a boot heel. Once it was filleted, Nikki forced her mother to cast the limp, scaled body into the cargo bay and crawl forward over the backseat, through the water, then over the armrest, until her breasts were resting on Nikki’s lap and her legs resting across her father’s.

There was a gun in the glove compartment, but there was no way Nikki could manage it with her broken wrists, not without possibly killing one of them. She drove her mother to stretch across her lap, and as her hands struggled with the latch, her eyes were wide but vacant, her face betrayed no frustration. The door wouldn’t budge. The window was closed and intact and the pressure of the water was holding the door shut from the other side.

There was no other choice. Still shrouded in silvery, shifting halos, her mother opened the glove compartment and removed the black pistol inside, unsnapping it from its holster, raising it and pressing its barrel directly against the glass; all of which Nikki commanded her to do with a series of simple visual images she had placed in her own mind.

Then she forced her mother to fire. While the word had been visually altered in ways previously unknown to her, the sound of the gunshot was deafening and vicious. Her father jerked awake next to her. And it was only then that Nikki realized she’d never heard a real gunshot before, and certainly never so close. The muzzle flare blinded her, seemed to scald her face with flecks of white-hot powder. When she screamed, so did her mother, only Millie’s sounded like a mute’s pantomime.

Then it felt as Nikki’s entire rib cage had been pulled on by a giant hand. The impossible connection she’d forged with her mother had
been disrupted in the blink of an eye, and she could feel it being yanked away from her now. Her instinct was to pull back, but when she followed it, there were searing flashes of pain inside her skull, and after a white flare that wiped her vision, the normal, shadowed world and all its gory, wet darkness returned.