A Twisted Ladder (22 page)

She felt his breath at her neck. It sent a feathering ripple down the length of her throat, to her collarbone, to the stretch of skin at the opening of her blouse.

“You fight the people that belong to you and then go looking for a beau like that trust fund fool.”

Madeleine stiffened and jerked her arm, returning her gaze to him.

He held her. “Yeah I know all about him. Tell you what else. You don’t mean nothing to him because he can’t begin to understand you. You think that mooncalf have any idea what a hard life is like? Me, I know. I had to fight just to survive. Just like you.”

“Let go of me, Zenon.”

To her surprise, he did. He let her go. Released her wrist and raised both hands, fingers open.

He said, “There you go. See how that works? You asked me to let go and I did. You’re free.”

But no, she wasn’t free. That horrible something now clamped into place. Every bit as strong and fierce as the physical grip had been. Her body, all at once, did not belong to her. Her mind burned to release from the lock. She felt the impulse to reach out to Zenon, an impulse that seemed to come from somewhere outside of her. She fought against it. Her hands lifted and then balled into fists. He watched her intently, saw her hands. She felt like a sugar ant who’d traversed a sand trap, and any effort to climb out served only to call the ant lion.

“Madeleine. Fightin, fightin. I’d say you look like you want to kiss me. Go on ahead.”

Eyes wide, she felt the first sickening wave of desperation. Her body had become her cage. She managed to prevent it from acting on these foreign impulses, but she still could not make it do what she asked: to push him away. To
get herself
away, far away, and to reclaim herself.

“Come on then,” he said, and he leaned forward to kiss her.

Her stomach rolled. She managed to turn her face away again. She at least could do that. Her fists were still jammed at her sides, her eyes wide with panic. His lips brushed her neck, and then his hands lowered to her blouse.

No
.

Her skin bristled at his touch. She lifted her arm to knock his hands away, but her arm moved only a few inches. He paused, eyes watching her with a darkened intensity. But he seemed to be watching with much more than his eyes. An electromagnetic web that entangled her, drawing her forward.

His fingers released the top button of her blouse. She flinched.

“Oh, you want me to stop? Just say the word, Madeleine.”

And his demeanor darkened so profoundly it made her catch her breath. No longer any pretense of benevolence.

“Stop me Maddy. Go ahead.”

But that word, that one single syllable, refused to form on her lips. She tried then to say something, anything.

She finally managed, “What are you doing, Zenon?”

His eyes gleamed, his voice soft and rough. “Don’t you know?”

And then he released the second button, and she felt the evening breeze whisper across the tops of her breasts.

Knock his hands away and tell him to stop! Tell him to leave!

Why couldn’t she do this? He wasn’t going to stop on his own. She was trembling, not from fear but from rage and the effort of trying to make her arms move. But they had stopped obeying her. They were listening to that other thing that was not of her. The same thing that moments ago had caused her to tell him about the severed finger even though she didn’t want to. The paralysis was horrifying. She felt sweat aspirating into her hair.

She said. “I don’t understand what’s happening. Are you doing this?”

He said nothing, but his smile caused her heartbeat to accelerate.

She tried again to tell him to stop, but she could not do that. She couldn’t even say “wait.” She could speak only of things that didn’t matter. She said, “What are you doing, Zenon? Tell me!”

He put a finger to her lips, and whispered, “Evolving.”

She caught her breath. She tried to shake her head. Panic engulfed her.

And then he said, “Shh,” and she was no longer able to utter another word. She gasped, that horrible bramble sprouting in her throat, but she couldn’t make a sound. She shook her head, wildly.

“What’s that, Madeleine?” he whispered. “You shakin your head? You have something to say to me?”

His fingers grazed the skin above her bra, and moved down between them to the third button. She shifted, twisting her torso as if to escape. She sensed the foreign ideas, to beckon his hands to her, all over her. The wrongness of it. The shattering alarms in her head. She closed her eyes and retreated a step within herself.

He freed another button.

Something broke through in her. She managed to grip his forearms.

Their eyes locked. He was watching her. She struggled to maintain whatever part of her mind had managed to recapture this control. But it was already slipping away. . . .

He smiled. He gently disengaged her grip on his forearms, and he moved his hands lower. And then he yanked the top of her jeans and hoisted her off her feet. Her hips slid backward onto the table. The cloth tarp slid with her. A sandal fell from her foot and clattered to the floor.

She shook her head furiously, but the word still refused to form at her lips.

Both of his hands pulling at her blouse. “Go ahead and tell me to stop. That’s all you gotta do,
chère
. You’re a fighter, yeah.”

And she was, at her core: fighting, clawing, raging. At her core she was breaking free from him and running for the door. If only her physical self could carry out the orders her mind had issued. It had disengaged from her, mutinous.

Her breath ripped from her in gasps. Her lips formed on the word “stop,” but she managed only an “s” sound that fell backward and drowned inside her lungs.

She needed to make him stop. Had to make her body belong to her again.

A heavy breeze rushed from the magnolia outside to the ficus near the wicker chair. A hissing, swelling wind that sought each leaf and stem, shaking them.

She realized her struggle was futile. Her panic engulfed her more deeply into this awful sand trap. And so she sent her mind away, escaping, traveling with that wind that stirred the ficus, bringing that wind back to herself, flowing through her lungs. She closed her eyes. Accepted. She saw herself with a scientific eye, observed the situation, the subject’s behavior. Her eyes opened again.

She said, “Stop.”

Zenon’s hand froze at the top button of her jeans.

And at once her body belonged to her again. She felt strangely calm, and her mind created no thought. She held onto this vast blank, the sense of self-abandonment. No emotion—not even revulsion or hatred for Zenon. He stared at her.

Madeleine pulled her blouse together. “Take yourself off of me Zenon. And leave.”

The wind fell, not so much retreating as settling, and the ficus leaves grew still. Madeleine felt equally as connected with the wind and those leaves as with her own reclaimed body. She even felt aware of all the plants and the clay pots and the cat and the soil, as if every element in the flower shop, living and innate, played a role in diffusing the grotesque hold Zenon had had on her.

He said, “It would have been the right thing, Madeleine.”

She stared at him, still and quiet as stone, holding strong to her senses.

Zenon backed away. And then he turned away. And left.

HAHNVILLE, 1912

R
ÉMI’S FAMILY ONLY HAD
seen Helen twice. First at the wedding, and now at Helen’s funeral. Rémi’s mother and his brothers Didier and Henri lingered at Terrefleurs for three days of polite. Then, as though overcome with collective agoraphobia, they retreated to their more plush, gay homes in the city where they could enjoy the LeBlanc fortune without having to smell the burning cane fields that fed it. Rémi was once again alone with Terrefleurs. He leaned on the gallery, smoking tobacco and gazing at the row of workers’ cottages.

He couldn’t accept that Helen was truly gone. That she would not step out onto the gallery and slip her arm into his, and ask him to walk with her in the garden.

He blamed himself. She had been too fragile for plantation life. So naïve that while she assisted the physician at the tent city, herding evacuees into queues to receive vaccinations, she didn’t see fit to receive those vaccinations herself. And when the flood brought its disease, Helen had no defense whatsoever.

The voice of a lone soprano drifted from the cottages, rising above the chirping of crickets and frogs. Her song rang with such loneliness that it caused Rémi’s skin to tingle. Other voices joined her, not in the usual blend of folk song that filtered through the plantation in the evenings; these sounds combined to become many facets of a single voice. Rémi realized, then, that he was listening to a prayer.

He wondered whether they were praying for Helen’s soul, and felt a small comfort despite the heaviness in his chest. But then, as a single thread to the chorus, he heard someone crying.

Rémi walked to the gallery and looked. He saw the workers gathered around one of the cottages. The song rose and fell and the weeping rose and fell, each in its own course of waves. He listened intently. He picked out the lyrics, a plea to the Lord to accept their son into heaven, and Rémi’s palms grew slick under his grip on the railing.

He descended the steps, making his way toward the cottages even as the workers were forming into a procession, their bodies huddled around someone who’d emerged from the little cottage at the end of the row. They were moving in the direction of the chapel.

Francois appeared and put his hand to Rémi’s elbow. “I didn’t want to tell you yet because of Miss Helen’s passing. There was another sickness.”

Rémi looked at him in a daze. Standing at Francois’s side was Tatie Bernadette.

She said, “I told him to stay close when the water rises. He goes off to play with his sling shot and only the good Lord knows what he gets into.”

Rémi saw the procession approaching the chapel. He strode toward it. Leading the mourners was the gardener, and he was carrying his son Laramie in his arms. The child with the permanent harelip smile.

Rémi stepped forward, and the procession stopped in front of him. The gardener’s eyes were rimmed red. Rémi put his hand to Laramie’s forehead, and found it still damp from the fever that had killed him. Rémi let out a gasp of shock.

Even in death, the boy’s face looked delighted. Cheeks plump and mouth wide, as though he’d discovered the angels and tossed his head back in joy. Laramie’s mother, weeping and keening, leaned against her husband and kept shaking her head as the women huddled close to her.

Rémi slipped his arm around the mother’s waist, and she turned and leaned on him. The father resumed his grim walk to the chapel while Rémi supported Laramie’s mother. He watched the gardener’s back, and saw Laramie’s lifeless hand dangling below his father’s powerful arm. The workers’ voices continued their lamentations, musical ointment for the grief-stricken.

They stepped inside the chapel, stark, wooden, and damp-smelling. Too small to accommodate much more than the immediate family. Rémi released Laramie’s mother to the care of her sister and cousin and stepped outside where the plantationers formed a halo around the tiny structure. He kept swallowing, but his throat felt crowded with something that refused to go down.

Rémi remembered that stranger who not long ago, had walked through the garden and had whispered to Laramie, and then to Helen. And now both were dead.