Club Storyville (29 page)

“I love you, Ariel,” I whispered, the fear of saying it trumped by the fear of her never knowing, and I waited, not sure if she wanted to hear it. Secretly hoping she might say it back, and strip me of all fear in three words.

“I know,” she said instead, but it was enough, somehow, for her to know.

“But I’m not strong enough.” My hand moving to clutch her side, I pulled her closer, refusing to let my tears fall. She needed no more proof of my frailty.

“You are strong,” Ariel declared, her hand moving up and down my back in a torturous caress that could never last beyond the night. “Whatever you do now won’t make you weak. You have to go against society or go against yourself. There are no good options for us.”

Not a minced word amongst them, for once, Ariel wasn’t trying to uplift me. Yet, it was the flicker of hope in what she said that was the most painful. Because it didn’t sound like Ariel meant ‘us’ as in ‘people like us’. It sounded like she meant ‘us’ as in ‘us’.

As a pair.

As a unit.

As a couple.

And, lying there against her, listening to her breathe, I knew that could never be.

Chapter Twenty-Six

T
he sinking sun failed to hold its heat as we got off the train in Richmond. Looking to the sky with a racking shiver, I wondered if rain was coming in, or if I had just become that quickly acclimated to New Orleans’ sultry nights.

“Here put this on,” Ariel said, and, turning to her, I watched her zip her suitcase closed as she handed me the heavier of her sweaters and stood to pull the thinner one over her head. Too cold to argue, I accepted the offering, more warmed by Ariel’s smell than the knit as I pulled it onto my shoulders.

“Where’s Daddy?” I questioned after I had scanned the platform twice and found him nowhere. Worried Ariel had forgotten we would also need a ride home, I wondered if I should have called him myself before we left New Orleans.

“He agreed it would be best for us to get a car.” Although she declared it with measured calm, as if it was a strategic decision to save time and resources, Ariel wouldn’t quite meet my eyes, and I knew I was being protected, that I had been since we left New Orleans.

“Why?” I asked with the sticking feeling of knowing something was gravely wrong before I knew what. Like mud, closing in at my knees.

“I don’t know,” Ariel softly replied, meeting my gaze with concern, and I could tell she was telling the truth. “Let’s just get to the house.”

With no questions left she could answer, I followed Ariel’s lead, climbing into the car of yet another stranger to let him carry us back to a life we’d left behind only a few days before.

Through the streets of the city and out onto the old county road, Richmond felt more claustrophobic than I remembered. The way looking narrower with each passing mile, I couldn’t find the courage to be myself there. More scared coming home than I had been leaving, I didn’t even have the courage to reach across the car seat and take Ariel’s hand.

T
he crackle of gravel beneath the tires as we turned up Nan’s drive, I listened to individual stones ping the undercarriage and stared up at the house that had often been more like home to me than the house I grew up in. Porch light on, Nan’s old farmhouse stood darkly behind it, only a single dim light streaming through a window, and, when the driver stopped and Ariel and I got out of the car, no one rushed to greet us or even stood on the porch in more subdued welcome.

Our footsteps echoing our lonely approach, the front door swung wide when I turned the knob, the only part of the house excited to see us, but, more darkness waiting beyond it, it felt so deep even Ariel’s sweater couldn’t protect me.

It wasn’t just a physical darkness, it was a spiritual darkness. Recognizing it as the same heavy air that had been in the house the day my friends dropped me off and I walked in to discover Edward was gone and my life would never be the same, I felt the mud form around my knees again so I couldn’t take another step.

Taking my bags from my hands and setting them on the floor, Ariel came to face me in the hush of the foyer. Her hands on my shoulders too light in their touch, I wished she would handle me as she had in New Orleans, and, when those hands moved to the front of her sweater, barely brushing the body that yearned for her beneath, I thought, for a moment, Ariel wished the same.

“Okay,” she uttered at last, her touch falling away, and I realized with disappointment I was just being made presentable for the world in which I belonged.

“D
addy,” I said when we found him a few seconds later, sitting alone in the living room, listening to Mozart instead of news for once and nursing a whiskey like he might any normal night.

“Elizabeth,” Daddy stared across the room for a moment, before pushing at last from his chair. He didn’t seem aware the sun was almost down, and the room dark, until I reached for the light, and, blinking rapidly against the sudden brightness, Daddy’s bloodshot, unfocused eyes made me wonder how many whiskeys he’d had before we got there.

“Nan?” I asked because I didn’t need to ask if something was wrong.

“She’s still alive,” it took Daddy a moment to answer me. “Just barely.”

Walking toward us, his eyes never left my face, and there was something different in them that made the room feel like a dream as he raised his hand to me in an uncharacteristically clumsy touch that stroked down my hair. Letting forth a short burst of breath, he sounded surprised to find me tangible, as if he thought I was a hallucination, or a ghost, who might vanish at any moment.

“What else?” I asked him, and Daddy sobered some at the question. Dropping his hand, he seemed to realize he was being abnormally affectionate as he took a few steps back.

“You should go see your grandmother,” he said.

“What else?” I demanded, and Daddy looked shocked by my tone, squinting my way as if he didn’t know whether to scold me for breaking the fourth commandment or obey.

“We heard from Jackson,” he answered at last, and, trying not to flinch at Jackson’s name, I glanced to Ariel, doubly pained when she showed no reaction. “He’s being awarded a medal. Their platoon was part of an operation that went… well, it went right,” Daddy’s jaw tightened, “but there were a lot of casualties. When their sergeant was killed, Jackson stepped up. He acted heroically, got a lot of men to safety. You should be proud.”

“Scott?” I felt no pride or even concern for Jackson in the face of what Daddy wasn’t saying. Because Scott and Jackson were in the same troop. If Jackson was under attack, Scott was under attack, and it felt like Daddy was burying the sharp point under a mound of flowers.

“He was injured,” Daddy shook off all emotion to respond. “He lost a leg, took some shrapnel. He has an infection. If he survives, he’ll come home.”

“If he survives?” I was certain the floor actually shifted beneath my feet, only realizing it was I who was fading when Ariel caught me, her strong hands on my back the only things keeping me standing.

“You should go see your grandmother,” Daddy refused to discuss Scott any further. Looking to his glass, he determined he’d had too much, and I watched him slide what was left onto Nan’s side table through distorted vision. “Go now, Elizabeth,” Daddy got enough mind back to order. “She doesn’t have long.”

“Come on,” Ariel’s encouragement was more sympathetic. Her hands, though, were complicit as they turned me out of the living room.

C
ast between the light from the hallway and the small yellow lamp next to Nan’s bed, Mama was no more than an outline where she sat, head-bowed, in the chair next to Nan, and, for a moment, I was certain we were too late.

“Mama?” I asked helplessly, and when she turned to Ariel and me in the doorway, she looked years older than when we left.

“Elizabeth?” It was Nan’s voice that responded, feeble and failing, and, though it looked as if it took all the strength she had just to open her eyes, she smiled for us. “Ariel.”

“How are you feeling?” Ariel softly questioned, dropping me off next to Mama to move to the other side of Nan’s bed.

“I feel good,” Nan’s breath came in ragged bursts, and, looking down at where her hand was in Mama’s, I wondered how long Mama had been sitting there without moving. “My daughter’s taken wonderful care of me. And, you know what?” she asked in a conspiratorial whisper. “There is some ease in dying.”

Despite seeing it coming with my very own eyes, hearing Nan say it out loud started my tears at once.

“Come here,” Nan said. Taking her hand from Mama’s with effort, she gave it to me, and I held back a sob at how cold and lifeless it felt as I took it. “I need to talk to these girls alone,” she declared, and, though I expected her to argue, Mama got up, so tired she staggered to the door, but I knew she wouldn’t go far.

Touching the back of her hand to Nan’s wrinkled face, Ariel reached for the stethoscope dangling on the hook where she’d left it.

“No time for fuss,” Nan grabbed Ariel’s hand too, as I felt what was left of the life in her hold on with all its might. “How was New Orleans?” she asked, and not sure who she wanted to answer, I looked to Ariel. The yellow light shining against the side of Ariel’s face, it cast the other side into near darkness, so she looked like some of the masked statues we’d seen on our drive through the streets with Desmond.

“It went well,” Ariel said, producing a genuine smile for Nan.

“Did you see Desmond?” Nan asked, and truth coming at once to my lips, that her Desmond had died, but we met his grandson, I bit it back when I realized Nan didn’t need to know all that, that lies were sometimes kinder.

“Yes, Ma'am,” I responded, and, at Nan’s bright smile, I knew it was the right thing to say.

“Was he still handsome?” she asked.

“So handsome,” I whispered. Remembering the picture in my bag, that, at least, I could say with some honesty.

“Did he play for you?” Nan wanted to know, and, glancing up at Ariel’s soft smile, I knew we didn’t have to push the lies too far.

“No,” I answered. “We didn’t get the chance.”

“That’s too bad,” Nan gasped for breath. When Ariel tried to pull away to ease her pain, though, I could see her surprise as Nan found a reservoir of strength to hold her in place.

“I’m glad Heaven isn’t segregated,” Nan went on as if there was nothing more pressing than what she had to say. “When Desmond makes it there, I’m going to introduce him to your grandfather. I think they’ll like each other.”

“Me too,” I laughed through my tears, and, though I had never met him, I could picture my grandpa as Nan had always described him to me, with his booming laugh and big arms to match his heart.

“Ariel,” Nan said.

“I’m right here,” she stepped into Nan’s gaze, though I got the sense Nan could no longer see us.

Tugging me closer too, Nan guided my hand until I felt the familiar, welcome sensation of Ariel’s palm against mine, as Nan’s hands closed around ours, holding them together.

“You take care of her,” Nan said. “That is your job now.”

“I will,” Ariel responded, and, as I watched the tears finally spill onto her cheeks, I didn’t know if she was more upset that Nan was dying or that she had to lie to her in her final moments.

Nan’s eyes drifting closed, she left us, and I thought it was the end. At the small smile that came to her face, though, I realized Nan hadn’t traveled onward, but had traveled backward, to a place I had seen her go so many times before, a place that was old and romantic and seductive.

“Do you hear it, Elizabeth?” she whispered, and, desperate to follow her, to know where it was she had always gone when she left us, I closed my eyes, listening past the pounding of my heart until I could hear it, a single note somewhere off in the distance.

Focusing on it, I beckoned the sound toward me, hearing other notes join in, growing in volume until there was a song in my head so loud it blocked out everything else. Recognizing its melody, I knew it couldn’t be Nan’s song. When I shut my eyes and opened my heart and listened for music, it seemed, it was the song from below ground in Club Storyville, the one Ariel and I danced to, that I would hear.

“Yes,” I breathed. “I hear it.” And, opening my eyes to meet Ariel’s across Nan’s bed, I was sure she could hear it too, that she was back there with me in New Orleans, where we were free and love had no boundaries.

“That’s Desmond,” Nan sighed. “He sure knows how to play.”

Nan’s hands falling suddenly from ours, Ariel was quick to catch them, her thumbs stroking tenderly against Nan’s skin as she crossed Nan’s hands over her stomach, and I knew it was just that fast, that Nan had sprinted forward, out of the past and beyond us, and she would never talk to me or hug me or argue with my parents on my behalf again.

Sobbing, I could feel the room starting to crumble, as if Nan’s house didn’t want to stand without her in it, and I knew I would be next until I felt Ariel’s arms around me, so tight they held my pieces together.

One hand covering my ear, she called Mama back into the room, but I couldn’t let go as Mama came in, paying only passing interest to us as Ariel moved me out of the way, and I wasn’t sure if we had protected her from those last moments or had stolen them from her.

My mind going to Scott, lying in some foreign hospital unit, I wondered if he would die too, as Edward had, away from home and everyone who loved him, with no one to sit beside him and hold his hand and remind him he was loved.

“Go tell your Daddy,” Mama said, and, accepting that there was no one else to do it, I nodded and forced my feet to move, pulling Ariel with me as I left the room, unwilling to let her go when she was the only thing that still felt real.

T
he medical examiner arrived quickly to pronounce Nan’s death, but, late as it was, and the temperature moderate enough, Daddy decided to wait until morning to call the coroner.

I sat with Mama for a while when she refused to leave Nan’s room for bed, but it didn’t feel like Nan was there anymore, so I went to make Mama some tea and asked if she was okay before going off in search of Ariel.