A Summons to New Orleans (22 page)

But penance need not be paid in suffering,
she thought, the idea occurring to her like a peaceful revelation.
It can be paid in forward motion. Correcting the mistake is a positive move, a nurturing move.
Unlike the fierce, angry religion she had been raised in, this new religion she was discovering was nurturing and hopeful. You get better by being better. Doing better. Forgiving yourself and moving on. Could she do that? Did she have the courage?

My God, she thought, Simone was raped, violated and nearly killed. And she, Nora, had wasted all this time on details, clamoring for the truth, struggling with her disbelief. She doubted because it was safer than believing. She had spent her life in the false safety of the middle ground. Was she brave enough to leave it?

The way her heart was speeding up, the way she suddenly felt giddy and drunk, told her that she was. She wanted to try. It was a lesson Simone had desperately been trying to teach them, but they had been too paralyzed by fear and dread to learn it. Simone had faced death and discovered the secret to life. And the secret to life was so simple and pure. The secret was simply this: You’re alive. Do something.

“Are you okay?” Adam asked.

She looked at him and realized that quite some time might have passed while she was contemplating all this. She realized, too, that she was wearing a detached, mysterious smile, and that that might have frightened him.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m really fine. I just feel like going home.”

“Let me get the check.”

“No, I mean home. Virginia. My children. My life.”

“Oh. Well, you should probably wait until Sunday.”

“I will. I just mean . . . the fact that I want to go home is a new thing. To be in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to be home. I didn’t know what it meant. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to ramble.”

“You’re not rambling,” he said. “I know just what you mean.”

He paid the check and they walked to the hotel in silence. Nora had so many thoughts racing through her head, she couldn’t process them all. At the same time, she managed to glance around her and really see things. She saw the old, un-even sidewalks, and the stagnant rain puddles, and the trash collecting in the gutter, and the horse manure in the street, and the lovely old buildings in crumbling pastel shades, and the black night sky, and the wilting trees, and the lights in the distance, across the river, and she was aware of Lake Pontchartrain behind her, and she was aware of the music sifting down the street, bending around the corners, the lost laughter and fractured conversation, and all the business of life, falling like an unexpected snow, a common and uneventful and purely miraculous gift from the sky.

15

T
he sun raced through the windows early, before seven, and Nora groaned and rolled over, pulling the sheet over her head. She had forgotten to draw the curtains. Now she was paying for it. So excited by her recent revelations, she had simply undressed and crawled into bed, hoping to ruminate further. Instead, she had fallen asleep almost instantly. She was paying the price. But she wanted to pay the price. She was surprised and pleased to discover that her epiphany was still strong and valid. She still understood and believed in all the conclusions she had drawn the night before. She lay awake, running them over in her head, expecting to deflate and devalue them, but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to. She remembered her days in college, when she would smoke pot at night, have some great awakening, only to find in the
morning that it was silly and specious. But that didn’t happen this morning. She still believed in the plan she had formulated: You’re alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative (if there was one, and she wanted to believe there was), was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.

That was an easy enough course of action. She thought she could do it. She really thought she could survive.

So she sang in the shower and smiled while she brushed her teeth, and she thanked God, or some such Higher Power, for her children, and for her awareness, and for her chance to begin again. But the thing she did not count on while she prepared for her day was that there were people out there who were invested in her not moving on. Not discovering the meaning of life, not paying penance, not doing better. There were people who were invested in her staying exactly as she was.

The first such person was her mother, who called just as she was stepping out onto the patio to have breakfast.

“You need to come home,” her mother said.

“Yes, Mother, I’m coming home on Sunday.”

“No, I mean today. Your children are in trouble.”

“What’s wrong?” She felt dizzy again, and she thought,
No, of course you aren’t going to get away with this. There is further punishment to be had.

“Well, your daughter cried herself to sleep because she misses you so much, and your son claims you’re the reason that the marriage broke up, which is why he wants to go live with his father.”

Nora sighed. “These aren’t problems, Mother. They are simply the truth. Annette misses me, which is normal, so she cries, which is also normal. Of course Michael blames me, because
I am partly to blame, and I just haven’t had the awareness to realize that, or to explain it to him.”

“You’re
to blame? That man is a criminal. Have you forgotten he is wanted by the state of Virginia?”

The hallowed state,
Nora thought, and smiled.

“Yes, but Mother, I chose him, and I elected to stay with him, knowing all this. Why did I do that?”

“Because you don’t know a fool when you see one, that’s why.”

“But why don’t I recognize a fool? Is that a lesson you forgot to teach me?”

“Oh, so now it’s my fault?”

“It’s everyone’s fault. Human beings are faulty.”

“I told you not to marry him.”

“You wasted your breath. I needed to do it. And yes, I contributed because how could Cliff really respect someone who would indulge his vices? Of course he loved me, because I could not make him stay. I couldn’t because I didn’t care enough. It’s complicated, Mother.”

“You talk like a train hit you,” Boo said.

“I don’t expect you to understand. I’ll be home on Sunday, as planned. I’ll drive down and pick up the kids.”

“You don’t care that your daughter is weeping in misery?”

“Yes, I care, but it’s an experience she needs to have.”

“She needs to suffer?”

“She’s going to suffer whether she needs it or not.”

“I believe you are on drugs,” Boo declared. “Has that Simone put you up to something? Has she gotten you on drugs? I never trusted that girl.”

“I know, Mother. You don’t trust anyone. And neither have I, for a long time. But I have decided to trust myself. I know I’m going to do the right thing.”

“You have lost your damned mind.”

“If my mind was damned, it was worth losing.”

“You’re going crazy,” Boo declared.

“No, Mother, I have been crazy. I think I am going sane. Sometimes it feels like the same thing.”

“You make me tired,” Boo said, and Nora suddenly remembered a bizarre statement her mother used to make whenever anyone frustrated her. She’d say, “You make my ass want to chew a tobacco.”

She giggled, thinking of it.

Then she said, “Tell the kids I love them and I will see them on Sunday.”

“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

“Good-bye, Mother.”

“Listen, sister, if you think you can get off that easy, you have another thing coming.”

“Think, Mother,” she said. Boo was always getting clichés wrong. “You have another
think
coming.”

“If you had survived the death of a child, you wouldn’t be so careless with your own.”

Nora thought about letting that remark pass. Through the years, she had practiced that approach with Boo. But suddenly she didn’t feel like doing that anymore. The remark was careless and cruel, and it fed the lie that Nora had lived for years.

“I did survive the death of a child. I survived Pete dying. And I always blamed myself, but it wasn’t me. It was you.”

She thought she heard her mother catch her breath, and she felt frightened by what she was saying, but with her new-found resolve, she could do nothing but keep going.

“I heard him fall out of the bed that night, but I was just a child. I assumed the grown-ups would have taken care of it. And I’m sure he cried, and I’m sure you heard it, but you ignored it. Because that is what you do when children cry. You
get enraged, and you wait for it to go away, and if it doesn’t, then you punish.”

“I cannot believe you are speaking to me this way. He was my child . . .”

“Yes, I can imagine the guilt you must feel.”

“You are going to hell, young sister,” Boo said, and her voice was tight with anger.

“Maybe you just ignored Pete crying all night, or maybe you went in there and gave him a good spanking, and threw him back in his crib.”

“Are you saying I killed my child?”

Nora sighed and prepared to reassure her mother, as was her old habit, and then she realized that she was saying it, did believe it, had always secretly believed it. It might not be true, but it had settled in her heart like an infection. And rather than face the possibility that her mother could do such a thing, she had taken on the blame herself. She would rather live with the guilt than the realization that her mother was probably a monster.

But it was consistent, wasn’t it? She remembered, as a little girl, the times she would have an ear infection, and would try to stifle her cries because if her mother came to see about her, she would berate her or possibly spank her to make things worse. She would take her to the doctor only when things got so bad they couldn’t be ignored. And any inconvenience at night was not to be tolerated. What was her father doing all this time? Ignoring them all, no doubt, the way he did, denying that he even belonged in this life.

She was about to accuse her mother, then realized that her children were still in her care and she couldn’t afford to alienate her. Besides, she was tired of accusing.

“No, Mother, of course not. I’m just tired and under a lot of stress. Maybe I will try to come back early.”

“That’s more like it,” Boo said, sniffing. She paused and made a choking sound. Nora could picture her manufacturing her tears. For some reason, Nora pictured her mother young again, as she was when Nora was a child, with her thick black hair and black eyes and beautiful olive-toned skin. She was smoking then, always, though Boo didn’t smoke anymore. She saw her sitting at the kitchen table of the old house, where they lived when Nora was little, all dressed up for a day on the town, pacing in the kitchen as she talked on the wall phone. The telephone number was Hemlock 8071. This was in the days before prefixes were attached. They used code words. But Hemlock? Why would a whole town choose a poison to represent them? It was fitting, but scary, nonetheless.

“I’m sorry I said that about Pete,” Nora repeated, though she had every intention of saying it again, when her children were back in her care.

“You should be.”

“I’ll work on getting an earlier flight. Just take good care of them. And whatever you’re angry about, even if it involves me, don’t take it out on them.”

“I swear, you are plumb losing your mind.”

Nora hung up and sat there breathing hard. She should definitely try to get an earlier flight. She had to get her children back. But it wasn’t that easy. She had to answer to her friends. She had to make sure they were all right, too.

When she came out into the courtyard, she found all of them except Poppy sitting at a table, staring distractedly into their coffee or up at the trees. They looked as if they had received bad news, and Nora wondered if somehow a verdict could have been returned.

It took her a moment to realize that Leo was with them.

He lifted his coffee cup to his lips with a shaking hand. He did not look at her.

“Did someone die?” Nora asked.

Simone blew cigarette smoke at the clouds and said, “This is Poppy’s friend, Leo. He’s here to tell us that Poppy’s gone crazy.”

“Poppy’s
been
crazy,” Nora said.

“Yeah, but now she’s really done it.”

Nora looked at Adam, simply wanting to know the facts, but he seemed to think she was asking for an explanation. He only shrugged and stared at his lap.

“She called,” Simone said, “a few minutes ago. She’s out at her house. And if her story is to be believed, she has dug up her basement floor.”

“And found a body,” Leo said, finally letting his eyes meet Nora’s.

“A body?” Nora asked, her heart speeding up. She looked at Leo and waited for him to go ahead and confess.

Leo read her expression and said, “Nora, there is no god-damned body. There is no dead baby. We’ve been over this.”

“Well, we should go out there,” Nora said. “We should find out what’s happening.”

“We were just waiting for you.”

Simone drove, with very little urgency. Nora wanted to take
control of the car. She felt panicked. In her imagination, she pictured Poppy down on her knees in the basement, clawing up the dirt with her bare, white hands. At the very least, she pictured her crying, hysterical, letting her paranoid fantasies get the better of her. Why was everyone else so unconcerned? Nora wondered, looking around her. Simone drove with one hand, the other massaging the back of her neck. Leo sat next
to her, leaning over occasionally to change the radio station. In the back, next to her, Adam at least had the good sense to fidget. But he didn’t make eye contact with Nora. He stared at the scenery and chewed a nail.

Finally Simone pulled up in front of a sprawling Creole mansion, with a wraparound porch, ornate wrought-iron balconies, gables, an enormous magnolia tree in the front yard and an even larger weeping willow beside it.

It was beautiful, but Nora had no trouble believing that the house had a few secrets.

They knocked on the door, but no one answered. Then Leo opened the door with a key. No one asked where he had gotten it. Nora assumed he had had it since high school.

“Poppy? Where are you, sweetie?” Simone called out.

Her flippant term of endearment made Nora feel annoyed.

“We should check upstairs,” Adam said.

“No,” Leo said. “Downstairs. That’s where she thinks the body is.”

The house had the curious quality of being crowded with furniture, yet feeling completely unlived in. Not as if its owners had abandoned it, but as if they had never really lived there. Like a museum house, like Monticello, where, try as she might, Nora never could picture Thomas Jefferson living. Couldn’t picture it as anything but a place crowded with European tourists and American schoolkids on field trips.

The furniture was not unlike that style—Regency, or whatever the hell it was, with all those curled legs and fancy designs, dark wood, damask upholstery, floral prints, so vivid they were almost obscene, and lots of pewter everywhere. The main room was a double parlor, typical of the era. A writing desk sat at the window, facing out. Nora pictured the legendary Judge Marchand sitting at it, working, scheming.

Leo opened the door to the basement, and Adam preceded
him down the stairs. Nora and Simone hesitated, as if they didn’t want to know.

Nora said, “How long have you known that Poppy was crazy?”

“Always,” Simone said.

“So why did you ask her to come here this weekend?”

“Because,” Simone said, “she was the only person I knew who had seen worse than a rape trial. I knew it wouldn’t faze her. With you, I couldn’t be sure.”

They stood there for a moment, and Nora didn’t know how to respond. She looked at the wooden stairs leading down into the basement, a bare bulb swaying overhead.

“Should we go see?” Nora asked.

“Yes. We should.”

They walked down the wooden stairs, their footsteps echoing off the bare cinder-block walls. When they got to the bottom, Nora saw Leo and Adam standing next to a mound of dirt. A pick and a shovel were propped against the wall. Poppy was sitting in a chair across from them, legs crossed, hands in her lap. She was smiling.

Leo was holding something. A small, decomposed skull sat in his palm, no bigger than a potato.

“Oh, my God,” Simone said.

Nora felt dizzy. She thought about throwing up, but it was a thought rather than a feeling. It was a notion, something it seemed like she should do, though her stomach was too cold and tight to feel anything like nausea.

“His name was Christopher,” Poppy said.

Leo shook his head slowly, staring at the skull. “But it’s impossible. He took the baby away. This can’t be true. I went with him. We took it away.”