A Summons to New Orleans (23 page)

“He was so little,” Poppy said, “I could hold him in the crook of my arm. He liked it there.”

Now a real sensation clouded Nora’s head, and she thought she might faint. She couldn’t imagine how she had gotten to this place, in some basement in New Orleans, with a man who had saved her from being mugged holding a baby’s skull in the palm of his hand. How could this have happened? She had played her life out so carefully. Nothing had ever indicated she would end up in this place.

She saw Simone wipe away a tear. But Poppy showed no emotion, except for that strange, stalled smile.

“Oh, God,” Simone said. “Poppy, this was real. All this time, it was real.”

“What made you think it wasn’t?” Poppy asked.

Adam took the skull from Leo and examined it, turning it over in his hands, inspecting it like the scientist that he was, looking for clues. No doubt he was trying to figure out how the baby had died, looking for some evidence of trauma. After a second, he put the skull down on the ground, then looked over into the hole that Poppy had dug. He scratched his chin, thinking.

Leo said, “Oh, God, Poppy, I don’t know what to say. I had no idea. You have to believe me.”

Adam walked over to Poppy and knelt down in front of her. She smiled at him and ran her fingers through his hair, as if the horror of it all was finally mitigated by the proof, and by the fact that her friends believed her.

Adam said, “Sweetheart, this is not a baby.”

She blinked languidly at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s not a baby’s skull. It’s a small animal. Probably a cat. It looks like a cat. And those other bones, in the hole there . . . they look like animal bones.”

She didn’t stop smiling at him. She said, “No, dear, you’re wrong. It’s a little baby boy.”

He shook his head and reached for her hand. The way he was kneeling there, it looked as if he were proposing to her. And he talked to her in the same sweet, solicitous tone.

“It’s not a human skull,” he said. “I promise you. I know what they look like. I’ve seen a lot of them.”

She shook her head. “No, Adam. This is one time when you’re wrong and I’m right.”

Adam did not take his eyes away from her. She finally looked at the rest of them.

“You believe me now, don’t you?”

Simone took a step forward to peer into the hole. Then she said, “You’re sure it’s not a baby’s skull?”

Adam stood, went over and picked up the skull again. Tracing an index finger along its edge, he said, “Most of the jaw is gone, but you can see how it protruded. There’s only enough room here for a tiny set of teeth. Look, at the top here? This is where the ears were. A human’s ears are on the side, of course. It’s clearly a cat’s skull.”

Poppy stood and walked over to him. She looked at the skull for a moment, then her face lit up and she said, “Oh, that must be Prissy!”

“Prissy?” Adam asked.

She nodded. “My favorite cat. She liked popcorn. She’d chase it around the floor and then she’d eat it. It was so funny to see. She was black and white. Daddy hated her.”

“How did she die?”

“She died,” Poppy said, “when I got a B in French. Was that it? No, that was Lucky. I think Prissy died when I got a B in algebra. Or maybe it was because I talked back. It’s hard to remember.”

“What do you mean?” Adam asked. “I’m trying to understand.”

She leaned over the hole and made a gesture toward the rest of the bones. “There are a lot of cats in there, aren’t there?”

“A lot of bones, yes,” Adam said. “I can’t swear they’re all cats.”

“They are. We never had dogs. But see, Daddy thought it was the best way to teach me a lesson. If I did anything to disappoint him, the punishment was I’d lose my pet. I knew that the stakes were high. I knew the consequences. That was what he told me. So, in essence, I was the one killing the pet. He didn’t make me kill them, of course. He did it with a nylon. But I had to watch.”

Simone looked at her, as if this fact were even more disturbing than the dead baby. “He killed your pets?” she asked.

Poppy shrugged. “If Daddy hadn’t pushed me, I wouldn’t have amounted to anything. He said women never amounted to anything without men pushing them. He pushed my mother. Pushed her too hard, I think, right down a flight of stairs. But he was trying to help, you know.”

“Oh, God,” Leo said.

“Don’t act surprised, Leo. You knew him,” Poppy snapped, her voice taking on a different tone.

“I knew he was hard on you. I didn’t know he was a monster.”

“Of course he was a monster. He killed everything that I loved. He wanted to break my spirit. My spirit would be the death of me, he claimed. And he knew how to succeed, because he ran the whole town. People came here all the time, with their offerings, and he did them favors. That was why he wanted you to get rid of the baby, Leo. If you had done that, you would have won my hand, wouldn’t you?”

“I couldn’t do it, Poppy. I didn’t think it was my job . . .”

“So you let him kill the baby. Because that’s what he did when I disappointed him. He killed whatever I loved.”

“He didn’t kill the baby,” Leo kept insisting.

“Well, we’ll see about that.”

Poppy dropped to her knees and started digging in the hole again, using a gardening spade. Adam knelt beside her and tried to take the tool away from her.

“There’s no baby here, Poppy.”

“There has to be. There must be.”

She kept digging, and finally Leo joined in the effort to stop her. But she wouldn’t quit, so Simone and Nora pitched in, and finally they all managed to tear her away from the grisly pile of bones, the graveyard of her failures, living right below her all this time, all these years, haunting her every move.

They finally got Poppy upstairs, and she lay down in her old
bed. The room still looked like a teenager’s room, with white frilly curtains and a handmade quilt on the bed, framed photos of the prom and other high school memories on her .dresser, a bulletin board with dried corsages tacked onto it. There was even a yellowed note saying, “Call Louise about graduation Barbeque.” Nora had an eerie feeling as she stood in the corner of the room, watching the others tuck Poppy into her bed, as if they were transporting her back to a better time. It seemed to be like some kind of antiquated treatment for insanity, surrounding the patient with evidence of her more stable life, going back to the point where it all began to unravel and plugging the holes as they appeared.

Nora watched and thought,
I hope I never go crazy.

She thought of her own mother’s dalliance with mental illness and wondered if she were destined to repeat it. How
could she ever hope to be better than the sum of her parts, which in her case wasn’t a hell of a lot? But then she looked at Poppy, who was clearly raised by an evil man, and she was fighting his influence to the bitter end. In fact, it might have been in deference to this cause that she had surrendered her sanity. If that were the case, Nora had no choice but to respect her.

Leo sat next to Poppy once she was tucked comfortably in her bed, and he lovingly smoothed the hair out of her eyes.

“I wish we could see him, don’t you?” Poppy said to him. “Our baby, I mean.”

“It wasn’t our baby, Poppy.”

“How old would he be now? Would he be grown up?”

“Yes,” Leo said. “He is grown up. He is nearly twenty, I imagine. Probably in college. He’s fine, wherever he is.”

“I wonder if he remembers me.”

“I’m sure he does,” Leo assured her.

Adam stood watching the two of them, knowing he didn’t have a place there.

“Should we call somebody?” Simone asked.

“Who would we call?” Nora asked.

No one had an answer to that.

Finally it was decided that they would leave her there with Leo. He would spend the night there, and in the morning they would try to find a doctor.

Adam said, “I want to stay, too.”

“No,” Poppy said, looking at him with a clear expression, as if she suddenly understood everything. “I want you to go. You should be in New York.”

“But you’re my wife, Poppy . . .”

“Oh, but that was just a way to pass the time. I was putting it off. I was trying to keep it from happening.”

Adam seemed confused, but Nora understood what she meant. She had seen this day coming, the final reckoning, the merging of all her tortured moments, coming together in a frenzied confrontation. It was a long-held appointment with the truth.

Adam gave in because he didn’t know what else to do. Simone leaned over and gave Poppy a kiss on the cheek. Nora did the same. Poppy smiled, but her eyes were on Leo. She couldn’t seem to think of anything else.

“Good-bye, Poppy,” Simone said.

“Don’t worry about anything,” Poppy told her. “My father is a judge. It’s all going to be fine.”

“What do you mean?” Simone asked.

“I know how it works. I called the judge and I explained it to him. Daddy helped him get his start, you know. He owes Daddy a lot. He has to return the favor. There is a code of ethics here, you know. It’s a strange one, but it exists. There are people you can appeal to.”

Nora looked at Simone. She thought perhaps there might be a translation forthcoming, but Simone just shrugged and headed toward the door. Adam waited for a second, then followed.

The ride back to the hotel was eerie and silent. The car moved as if in slow motion past all the beautiful homes in the Garden District, past the streetcar line, past the universities, and finally into the Quarter, which gave off a pale yellow glow and a distant clamor of music and laughter, like a radio with a blanket thrown over it.

Suddenly Adam said, “Did you see how many bones there were in that hole?”

Simone shuddered. She said, “It seemed like a lot.”

“At least a dozen,” he said. “Could that man really have
killed a dozen cats? Could he really have strangled them, with his daughter watching?”

“I think he could have done anything,” Simone said. “I think anything could happen here. The harder it is to imagine, the more likely the scenario.”

Nora said, “That’s probably true of any place.”

“No, it’s especially evil here.”

Nora stared out the window. She thought it was especially evil everywhere.

16

N
ora and Simone shared a cab to the airport the next day. They didn’t talk much. They mentioned the weather and speculated on how long it would take them to reach their destinations. Simone’s plane was leaving at ten
A.M.
, and she had to change in Denver. Nora’s plane left at noon and was a direct flight.

“Oh, God,” Simone said. “I have to put on my wig and do a restaurant review tomorrow. No rest for the wicked.”

Nora watched the scenery shoot past. Once they got out onto the highway, New Orleans began to look like any place. Interstates crisscrossing, intermittent stretches of green broken by occasional factories, junkyards, warehouses, chain stores. It made Nora feel as if she and her friends had all been part of some collective dream.

“I wonder what Adam is going to do,” Nora said, surprised that she had given voice to that thought.

“Whatever Poppy wants him to do, I expect.”

The airport was not crowded, and they both checked in with ease. Simone took time to make small talk with the sky-caps, and Nora watched her charm them, wondering how her friend could recover so quickly. She thought that Simone had been transformed by her tragedy, but it seemed she had not changed very much at all. Maybe that had always been wishful thinking on Nora’s part. She remembered the equation that was used in creative writing class to describe the nature of storytelling. The main character starts at point A, encounters an obstacle, overcomes the obstacle to arrive at point B. At which point, the character changes, or does not change.

“People would rather die than change,” her therapist used to tell her, back when Nora was hanging on to the hope that Cliff would see the error of his ways.

“But he did change,” Nora argued, always resistant to her therapist’s logic. “He changed his whole life to be with that woman.”

Her therapist considered that for a moment, then said, “Then you might have to confront the possibility that what Cliff did actually took some courage.”

Nora felt, for the first time, that she might be on the verge of understanding this concept. And that she might be on the verge of seeing her tragedy as something else—an opportunity, perhaps. A new lease on life. A reason to start over.

But if Simone did not want to change, that was certainly a valid option, wasn’t it? There was something to be said for picking up where one left off, the odd comfort of the old familiar. The terrible reassurance of the devil you know.

Simone said, “This is one of the few airports where you can still smoke. Let’s go to the bar.”

They went to the bar and ordered Bloody Marys. Simone smoked, one cigarette after another, proudly and defiantly, as if she were the sole protector of a sacred American tradition. Nora said nothing and secretly wished that she wanted a cigarette. Simone’s defiant nature, as usual, seemed so appealing.

Sitting at the smoke-filled bar, sipping her spicy red drink, Nora wondered if she could be having an epiphany. All her life, she had wanted one. People had them in literature all the time, and she had yet to give up on the idea that hers was a story worth telling. If Leo were here, he would tell her that this sudden awareness, this clarity of purpose, was something that was inside of her, not a vision that would be bestowed upon her by an indifferent Universe. Was it really that simple? Could she really be in charge of it all, down to the tiniest detail? And if she wanted to have an epiphany in the bar of the New Orleans airport, was there really nothing to stop her?

Suddenly Simone said, “Not guilty. How do you like that? All that time and effort, and the bastard is going to get off.”

“We don’t know that,” Nora said.

“You heard Margaret.”

“Well, it doesn’t change anything. You were raped, regardless of what they say.”

“Still, you expect closure,” Simone said, savoring her cigarette, twirling it around in the ashtray. “Well, if nothing else, I guess it was a great chance for us to get together. We wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

“Really? You think that?”

“Of course not, Nora. Why would we?”

“Because we’re friends.”

“Let me ask you something,” Simone said. “Why is it that we can’t support each other?”

“Who? Us?”

“Well, us, specifically. But women in general.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you?” She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another one. “You know what men say about war? They say that when they are in the trenches, they don’t think about defending their country or any sort of larger ideal. They are defending their buddies in the trenches next to them. This idea of personal loyalty is what makes war work. And I think the events of this week have proven why women don’t make good soldiers.”

Nora felt her back stiffen. The old familiar tightness in her throat returned, and she fought the impulse to cry.

“Well, I don’t think that’s true. And it’s not fair,” Nora said.

“Jesus Christ, that’s my point. Only women care about what’s fair. Men succumb to loyalty. Blind faith.”

“Simone, honestly. I left my children with my mother to be here. That was a very big sacrifice.”

“You had your doubts, though. And Poppy never really believed me.”

Nora sighed. She felt exhausted, as if the whole ordeal had been some tiresome initiation.

“Oh, come on, what’s the big deal about belief? We were there for you. I can’t account for your expectations. No one can.”

Simone shrugged, studying her cigarette as if it were her source of power, or her only friend.

Nora said, “Look, what happened to you was wrong. I’m sure of that. Nothing can change it. And probably no one will ever understand it.”

“I guess no one can ever follow me to where I’ve been,” Simone admitted.

“Would you want them to?” Nora asked.

“Of course I would. Nobody wants to fight their battles alone.”

“But there’s no other way,” Nora said, with a confidence she did not realize she possessed.

Simone slid off her barstool and swayed on her feet for a moment.

“I’m going to make a phone call,” she announced.

“Okay, I will, too.”

They went to a bay of pay phones, all of which were empty. They were the only people in the airport without cell phones, it seemed. Pay phones were one of many concepts which would soon be rendered obsolete, like typewriters and record players, checkbooks and, eventually, cash. Nora’s head was swimming from the Bloody Mary, and she thought, the world is changing faster than I can keep up with it. How can I have an epiphany at this pace?

Nora dialed the number of her mother’s house. But Boo didn’t answer. It was Michael who said hello.

“Hi, honey. It’s Mom. I’m at the airport. I’ll be home soon.”

“Oh, good!” Michael said, not bothering to hide his excitement.

Nora thought she must have heard him wrong.

“Good?” she questioned.

“Yeah. We’ve missed you.”

“We?”

“I mean, Annette has. Mom, when you get home, can I buy a Telecaster?”

“What’s that?”

“An electric guitar. They’re cheap, like four hundred dollars. The kid who lives next door to Grandma has one. It’s so cool. You could take it out of my allowance.”

“But four hundred dollars. That’s a lot, Michael.”

“You bought ice skates for Annette.”

“We’ll talk about it when I come home.”

“It’s an activity, you know? It’s like, learning something. You were always bugging me to take piano lessons. So why is this different? You know, if I have an interest, like music, it reduces the chances of me getting involved with drugs.”

Nora laughed. “Oh, yes. Rock musicians are famous for staying away from drugs.”

“Come on. Really. I want to do this.”

“What does your father say?”

“Forget that,” Michael replied. “He’s an asshole.”

“Since when?”

“I called him to talk about moving in . . . or at least spending the summer with him. He says he’s going to be very busy. He doesn’t want me.”

“Well, I’m sure he doesn’t mean that.”

“Yes, he does. And I’m thinking if I had a Telecaster, I could be happy living with you.”

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

“Look, it isn’t so bad living with you. I mean, I’d kind of miss Annette. She’s a goofball, but she’s okay. I pulled her tooth, did she tell you? It was really loose, and I tied a piece of dental floss around it.”

“So you really don’t want to live with your father?”

“No. It was just an idea. Hey, Grandma Boo is crazy. Did you know that? She made me get up in the middle of the night to clean the cat’s litter box. Did she ever do that to you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“So, can I get the Telecaster?”

“We’ll talk about it.”

Of course she would get him the Telecaster. She would get him a thousand guitars, she thought. She’d drive him to his lessons, and years from now, she’d sit in the front row at his concerts. She’d do anything for him.

“Did you have fun in New Orleans?” he asked.

“It was interesting,” she admitted. “I went to the bayou. I saw an alligator.”

“No shit!”

“Michael.”

“You say shit.”

“Yeah, but I’m the parent.”

“Okay, well, I’ll see you when you get here. Don’t let the plane crash.”

“I’ll do my best.”

She hung the phone up and stood there for a long moment, smiling at the ground.

Simone approached her, looking dazed, her eyes fixed on Nora’s face but not really seeing it.

“You want to do this all over again?” she asked.

“This what?”

“I just talked to Margaret. The judge wants to declare a mistrial. Seems one of the jurors forgot to disclose the fact that he’s distantly related to the defense counsel.”

“You’re kidding.”

Simone shook her head.

“How did he find that out?” Nora asked.

“An anonymous tip. It checked out.”

They looked at each other. Was it possible that Poppy had managed to intervene? And if so, did it even matter?

“Well, what does that mean?” Nora asked.

“Margaret said that they would pursue charges again, with my consent.”

“And if you don’t consent?”

“It goes away. Quentin Johnson walks, I go about my business.”

“At least it would be over,” Nora said.

Simone shook her head. “Not for me.”

“You’re willing to do this all again?”

Simone stared at the tiles on the floor for what seemed like an eternity. Then she looked up at her friend. “You have a daughter. What would you want?”

“I’d want him to go to jail. I’d want him to pay,” Nora said. “But that’s my tragic flaw.”

Simone stared at the strangers moving past them, as if they might somehow provide the answer.

“Fuck it,” she said. “Let’s do it again.”

“All right.”

“Will you come back?”

“What do you think?”

Simone smiled and squeezed her friend’s hand. “Okay. I need a cigarette.”

They drank two more Bloody Marys, and then Simone’s plane started boarding. They hugged at the gate, and Nora stood back and watched as her friend walked through the metal detector. Simone paused to chat with the security guards, and their laughter echoed down the corridor. Nora smiled. So much good will, purchased with charm. Simone was still looking for an ally in the eyes of a stranger. This was part of the lesson she had not learned. And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing at all.

Nora glanced at her watch and saw that she still had more than an hour to kill before her own flight boarded. She wandered around the food court but decided she wasn’t the least bit hungry. It occurred to her that she had not bought anything for the kids, and they would be expecting something, so she made her way over to the gift shop.

Suddenly she saw Adam at the counter, buying a newspaper and a bag of peanut M&Ms. He was counting coins out of the palm of his hand, carefully, like a child parting with his hard-earned allowance.

She stood still until his eyes met hers, and he smiled.