Chapter Twenty-Seven

Joanne only forgave me because I’d gone to the airport after Cordelia. And, as she said, “We’re all crazy now. This was yours.”

The police found Carmen a good hour after I’d chained her in the garbage can, in the company of a very dead pigeon. She’d screamed and yelled and claimed just about any and everything she thought might work. Still stupid, still desperate. But Nathalie and I had bruises and she didn’t, so her claim that we’d kidnapped her was given the attention it deserved—a derisive guffaw. Shep and Petey turned into choirboys—singing all day long. Carmen had killed Alma Groome; they weren’t going down for that, so they were more than willing to testify against her.

Her name really was Carmen Gecklebacher. She really did grow up in some small farming town in Wisconsin and was really related to the Overhills. But the money that had been split up a few generations back had disappeared into gambling and get-rich-quick schemes long before the sperm and eg. met to create her. Carmen had been an only child, treated as if she could do no wrong to the point she believed it. She’d passed herself off as eighteen to get taken in by the church group, but she was really twenty-five. She’d become quite adept at church scams—pretending to be a holy woman, telling congregations that a very religious man was ill; he collected cars and wanted them sold only to other true believers at very discounted prices, like a two-year-old, loaded Lincoln for a thousand dollars. Carmen got half up front and claimed that she’d get the other half when she delivered the cars. Which, of course, never happened. There were no cars, no ill rich man, just a greedy woman who would do anything to get what she thought she deserved.

Nathan got busted, too, and spent about a day being the gallant man who would stand by his woman, until the cops played him the tape of Carmen trying to blame him for as much of everything as she could. Of course, by that point she’d tried to blame me, blame Shep and Petey, blame her parents, blame the church, so the police gave little credence to anything she said other than her claiming he was stupid and immature. Poor Nathan got a walloping dose of reality between jail and seeing his lady love lie and lie again to protect herself, even if it meant leaving him to rot in prison. Shep’s brother was the dope dealer Joanne and I had encountered out in Kenner. He managed to stay out of jail—this time. It was an all-in-the-family affair. Petey’s older brother, Paul, was the man I’d seen with Carmen in the SUV and at Alma’s house with Shep during my roof sojourn. He was smart enough to avoid the dirty work, telling Carmen he’d meet them later, in time to collect the money. He was rounded up, and it seemed there were limits to brotherly love, as Petey sang a song about how his brother and Carmen were the ringleaders; he didn’t know half of what they did.

Nathalie had made it to the bridge with no one chasing her; my ruse had worked. But she needed more than that to keep her safe. The Wisconsin public-health workers got an answer to something that had been troubling them—a woman in Nathalie’s church with a pregnancy complicated by syphilis. They couldn’t figure out how a woman like her could have contracted an STI, until Nathalie let them in on the secret of how girls were married into the church. Not that they got much cooperation from the church elders, but it seemed that one of them had fallen into sin and temptation in the wicked city of Milwaukee, had sex with a prostitute who’d been infected, and he took it back and passed it on to at least five other girls, including Nathalie. Of course all the elders claimed that she was a delusional girl, making things up, but no insanity can create a microbe, especially something like a syphilis infection. Her father was one of the church elders. She told me she really believed that he hadn’t done anything with her. I wanted to believe it, too. That sounded too horrible to contemplate. But he sided with the church that gave him power, not the daughter who was trying to take it away. His wife stayed with him. Nathan went back to Wisconsin.

I talked to Marilyn Overhill. They looked perfect on paper to take in a young girl. And more importantly, they were perfect in real life. When I told Marilyn I thought Nathalie might be a budding lesbian, her only comment was, “That saves worrying about her getting pregnant.” They took her in, ostensibly until something could be decided, but Brooke confided that it would probably be until they could argue that Nathalie had been with them long enough that she should stay.

The Overhills were pretty happy with me—I’d caught the blackmailer and the killer. Brooke was right about Jared. Once he realized that I was gay and had a partner, he relaxed around me and dropped the jerk shtick. We got along quite well, so well that he hired me to do a lot of work for them. They wanted me to track down the people who had worked for them, find out what had happened to them, to see if they wanted to come back to New Orleans.

I hired Alex to help. She was smart, learned quickly, and was good on computers. Joanne didn’t want her working on their house alone, which was understandable, and Alex needed something to do besides sit alone in their temporary apartment. She was doing better. It helped her to have something to do every day, something that was important, helping reconnect the scattered people. I think it also helped that Cordelia had returned. She and Alex had known each other since high school, had been maybe ten minutes’ drive away from seeing each other for decades.

On the last evening Liz was in town, Torbin and Andy had a big shrimp boil for Liz. (No crabs). We were all there, even Hutch, although he still mostly sat in the corner and nuzzled a beer. Late in the party, Torbin told Joanne, Danny, and Hutch that they needed to go watch TV while the rest of us went on a beer run, and that as we might have to go to the suburbs, it could take us a while. It just wouldn’t do to have law enforcement along on this ride.

Elly elected to stay with Danny, but the rest of us piled into one car. Andy grabbed a pound of bait shrimp from their new freezer and we somehow managed to put shrimp in all four of Patty What’s-Her-Name’s hubcaps without being caught or even causing a light to come on. We even drove about five blocks away before we started hooting and laughing so hard we started crying.

Danny was recovering nicely, especially after Joanne and I dragged her to a mega-hardware store and forced her to buy the ultra-super mask and filter, plus just about every piece of protective gear they sold. Elly was making sure she used it.

Cordelia and I spent most weekends helping either Joanne and Alex or Hutch and Millie or other friends as they cleaned and gutted their houses, trying to reclaim a part of their lives that had been washed away.

Cordelia found work. A number of the hospitals had been destroyed and few would come back any time soon, but many doctors had also left. As she said, “I need something to give me routine and pull me through the days.”

The nights were harder. She had nightmares, waking in a sweat as if she was still sweltering in Charity. I held her, told her she was safe, repeated it until she finally fell into a fitful sleep again.

I had my own nightmares. The days weren’t easy and I wasn’t perfect, and at times I wondered if all my promises to be a better person were made only in darkness and desperation and wouldn’t hold in the day after day after day. I didn’t have to castigate Cordelia; she did it to herself. All it took on my part was to hint that she’d hurt me, or held me to standards she didn’t hold herself to. Until the day I looked in the mirror and understood that just because I wasn’t screaming at her didn’t make me the better person I promised I would be.

That night I looked at her face after she finally fell asleep, the lines that life had given her, gray in her auburn hair. As fragile as she was, it would have been easy for her to let my anger drive her away. That anger was a fury I’d conflated with my inchoate rage at the horrors of Katrina, building it to a conflagration far beyond anything Cordelia deserved. She’d been the one who picked up the phone and called me. Called again when I didn’t answer and didn’t call back. Come back to New Orleans when she was scared and desperate and didn’t want to, one last attempt to see and talk to me. We both had our sins. We both needed forgiveness. I curled around her, holding her as she slept.

The better person cleaned the cat box without saying anything. The better person cooked and then helped clean up as well, also without pointing out what a nice person I was for doing so. The better person didn’t complain about losing sleep to her nightmares. A shoulder rub without her having to ask for it. Taking her hand as we walked in the evening.

The better person I wanted to be remembered that she might not have survived Katrina, that Carmen might have killed me and Nathalie. That it was a profound kindness and grace that I could hold her hand as we walked in the twilight, lie beside her at night.

The change was slow, like the rebuilding of New Orleans. Another working stoplight. The reappearance of a smile I hadn’t seen since before the storm. A grocery store opened. Cordelia standing behind me, her arms loosely around my waist as I cooked and we talked of the mundane details of our day. A night, then another when she didn’t wake from nightmares.

We stayed in New Orleans over Christmas and New Year, despite invitations to go other places where even a short trip didn’t require driving by black lines, the mark of water on houses where people used to live, buildings where they worked. Where you had to look and let your heart break or look away because you could no longer bear to see it. People outside New Orleans didn’t understand. We stayed to be with the ones who had been through what we’d been through.

All our different stories, those who stayed and witnessed, and those who left and watched from afar. We all wondered, would New Orleans survive, would we? Ultimately for all of us, it was the same story: the levees failed and our lives changed. The water marked us.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14