Lies Agreed Upon (5 page)

“Stay here and watch the poles, Little Gal,” he ordered
over his shoulder.

Tess had abandoned trying to figure out the strange emotional currents that eddied around the adults. She dutifully remained in her chair and watched the lazily swaying bobs a few minutes more. Then she got up and defiantly tossed a couple of pebbles in the water to see if a splash would startle the fish into doing something more interesting. When nothing happened, she turned to see if there was any sign of the adults’ return.

There was a soft splash and movement at the edge of her vision. She whirled around to see one of the fishing rods slowly slipping down the bank, following the line as it was pulled into the murky bayou. She ran and grabbed the pole. As soon as she picked it up, she realized she was no match for the strength at the other end.

“Mommy! Mommy!” she screamed, clutching the rod as she was dragged with it toward the brown water, her heels finding no traction in the slick mud bank. She heard the screen door bang and her mother’s gasped, “My God.”

And then her mother was beside her, grabbing the rod and struggling with the unseen opponent in the water – reeling, pulling and panting. The pole bent and arched in resistance. “Oh, no, you don’t” said her mother through gritted teeth, and she hauled harder on the shortening line. Suddenly a great thrashing and splashing broke the surface, and Tess gaped to see the writhing back of a giant fish.

Suddenly
Dad was there, too, yelling, “My God, it’s the Gar.” He tried to wrest the pole from her mother, who resisted angrily and shouted, “I almost got him.”

The old man
roughly yanked the rod away from her mother. “You’ll lose him. You’re not strong enough. He’s mine.”

The old man fought grimly with the fish, until the great gar finally was dragged, twisting and flapping, onto the shore. It was a prehistoric horror, and Tess scrambled back, terrified by the flailing, snapping jaws. The fish stilled at last. Gills pumping hopelessly, it stared with glassy eyes into the face of its killer as Dad stood over the fish and grinned widely.

“I caught you, you old son of a gun,” he crowed to the dying creature.

“Well, I think I should get some credit,” declared Joanne Parnell. “If I hadn’t stopped him from dragging the pole in the water, you wouldn’t have fish or rod.”

The old man was enraged. “I’ve hunted that fish for years. It was caught by my rod in my bayou backa my house. You can’t claim it ’cause you held a pole a minute.”

“The Donovans always claim more than their due,” retorted her mother.

There was dead silence for a few heartbeats. Then her mother stalked into the house. Bang went the screen door. Dad stood brooding over the fish as it quivered and gaped at his feet. He sighed, took out a knife and cut the fishing line.

“This gar’s no good for eatin’. Here, Little Gal,” he said placing the fishing line in Tess’s surprised hand. “Take it to ole Ti-Jean
, and he’ll make use of it. He lives over there.” He flapped his hand toward a nearby shack of weathered boards. A dirt path led to it through a lea of the forbidden high grass. “Don’t worry. You can’t lose that fish. The hook’s right through his jawbone. Maybe he was chasin’ a catfish and got hooked by accident. His time had come, I reckon. Drag that fish there and don’t step off the path. You knock on Ti-Jean’s door, and he’ll take care of it.”

The old man walked off without a backward glance. Bang went the door a final time, and Tess was alone with the dying monster.

She hesitated and thought of disobeying Dad by going to her mother. But the angry voices could still be heard inside, and it did not seem like the time to seek more confrontation. So Tess began to slowly drag the heavy fish down the path, using first one hand then the other as the nylon line cut into her fingers and palms. The weeds, high as her head, rustled all around her with hidden life. She tried to reassure herself that the butterflies dancing above would not be so nonchalant if a snake were below.

Just as she began to emerge into the clearing in front of Ti-Jean’s house, the gar gave a last convulsive shudder and snapped its teeth with a loud click. Tess squealed and dropped the line, panting with exertion and fear. Long
minutes passed, but the fish was completely inert now.

Her destination was only yards away, yet the silent shack looked unfriendly with its dirty windows and dilapidated porch. Dad had told her to knock on the stranger’s door, but Tess d
ecided that she could fulfill her duty by leaving the fish at the bottom of the porch steps. The occupant would surely see it soon enough. She picked up the line and trudged forward.

Then she heard the telltale screech of rusty door hinges. She looked up in panic. A dark form was emerging. A man
moved toward her with a crabbed-joint shuffle and grumbled words unintelligible to Tess, like a troll awakened from sleep.

Tess dropped the line and ran. With her heart in spasm in her throat, she did
not slow until she was safely inside the old people’s house. In the interior gloom, it was strangely quiet. The door to the bedroom of Dad and Cee was closed. The door to Bee’s room was closed. Her grandmother was knitting silently in a saggy old armchair. She barely looked up as Tess entered. She murmured distractedly, “Why don’t you go lie down with your mommy. She’s taking a nap.”

Tess tiptoed into the “guest room” where
she slept with her mother and grandmother. She took off her muddy tennis shoes and lay down next to her mother on the bed with its nubby pink chenille bedspread. Her mother was stretched on her side with a rigid back to the room’s door. She did not speak as Tess curled up beside her. So Tess’s courage and cowardice became her secret. The visit ended the next day, and Tess never saw the place or its inhabitants again.

Now she was convinced the old people were
involved in the mystery of her legacy in some way, were related to her no matter what her mother said.

She got up once more, turned on the bedside lamp and sat on the edge of her bed, pulling the ancestr
y chart from Dreux’s envelope. She had a clue in the surname Donovan—the people her mother accused of always claiming “more than their due,” whatever that meant. So she looked for male Donovans in the family tree, and quickly found several. The second marriage of the 48-year-old widower Antonio to 26-year-old Thérèse Arnoult had produced a son Louis and a daughter Elaine, who had married a man called Charles Donovan. This Donovan marriage endured a long barren span until the arrival of a son, Daniel Aiden Donovan, in 1912. Studying the name Daniel A. Donovan, Tess suddenly guessed that she had found the Dad of her bayou house memory. Dad was probably a nickname based on his initials D.A.D., not his paternal status.

Her suspicion was confirmed when she saw that Daniel A. Don
ovan had married Cecilia Cowell—thus the “Cee” of memory. After three years of marriage, Cee and Dad had produced two sons, apparently twins with the same birth date in 1934. The couple expressed an odd obsession with initials by naming them Desmond Aaron Donovan and Dylan Arthur Donovan. There were no other children, and Dylan had died at age 23 and Desmond at 29, without descendants. This surely explained the sad withdrawal of Cee and angry intensity of Dad when the child Tess met them in the 1980s.

So how did “Bee” come into the picture? Scanning the names of Cabrera family r
elatives for contemporaries of Dad and Cee, Tess quickly noted a Beatrice Landry. She had married Michael Cabrera, the younger brother of her great-grandfather Roman Cabrera, in 1945. Surely, this was Bee, or rather Bea, of the long-ago bayou house visit. The happiness of Bea and Michael was short-lived. Michael died in 1952, and their only child William passed away in 1957, shy of his tenth birthday. Tess now felt a pang of sympathy for the sternly aloof Bea of her memory. Pacing alone by the darkening bayou, she had been a childless widow for close to 30 years by then. Strangely, the bayou house trio—Dad, Cee and Bea—had all died in 1992. Tess wondered if it was a coincidence or a tragic accident involving all three.

But why the strange tension in the bayou house? It was
not due solely to the tragic losses of Dad, Bea and Cee, Tess thought. There was some other issue that pulled her grandmother and mother into the unhappy, contentious atmosphere. Dreux had said that there was “a dispute” between her grandmother and her in-laws. It would have to be something momentous to cause her grandmother and mother to drop use of their Cabrera surname, Tess decided.

Now that she knew more about her family’s history of tragic early losses, Tess had to think that it was one cause of her Grandma Emily’s clinging melancholy
, too. Tragedy clearly had pushed her mother’s character in the opposite direction; Joanne Parnell prided herself on her tough, cool efficiency. She calculated and she acted. She tried to never let emotion cloud her judgment. She weighed everything and everyone, including herself, in her own black and white balance—asset or liability, right or wrong.

Tess did
not remember much about her father, Peter Parnell. He had been a college professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, where he met her mother, one of his brightest and loveliest students. Her mother always said that Peter Parnell never stood a chance once she decided to woo him. Tess had no insight into whether they were happy in their marriage, but, for whatever reason, her mother never felt the need for a new marital partner after her husband’s death. She focused her energies on her work instead.

Joanne Parnell’s climb to the top at her company had required frequent moves. For Tess, it meant that, every few years, she had to
walk to a new school bus stop where she would confront a crowd of unknown children, some with curious eyes who would become playmates and some with hard excluding eyes who would be tormentors.

“Are you feeling sorry for yourself? I made you self-sufficient and adaptable. Alone doesn’t have to mean lonely
—
unless you choose to be.”

“It’s hard to be a stranger and make new friends,
Mom,” retorted Tess as she never could have done when her mother was alive and gazing at her with her piercing hazel eyes.

“You always cared too much
about what other people thought. You are the only person whose respect you need.”

“Well, the person I wanted to please the most, to impress the most, was you,
Mom. And I never got the feeling you were very satisfied with me. You certainly never believed in coddling,” Tess shot back. “I’m as alone now as I was when you were alive—except I can’t seem to escape your nagging.”

“Oh, boo-hoo, poor little you.
”

Tess sighed and wondered now
whether there was more to their constant moving than her mother’s ambition. Could her mother and grandmother have been running away from something? She suddenly recalled an incident with her grandmother in her last days, which seemed to jibe with a fugitive status.

At the end of her life, a “good day” for her grandmother was to sit propped up in bed, lost in recollections of people and events unkno
wn to Tess or even her mother. During the visit in question, Joanne Parnell had become exasperated and left to get a cup of coffee. The old lady fell quiet, her fingers plucking fretfully at the bedding.

“We are a haunted family,” she suddenly announced, startling Tess into
looking up from a worn copy of
People
magazine that she had found on her grandmother’s bedside table.

Emily trained a direct and lucid gaze on her granddaughter. “It doesn’t help to run away. The ghosts always follow you. Now I’m like a ghost, too.
I think that by trying to escape the past, I lost the present. Every move packed away some part of me, erased some part of me. That’s OK if you’re like your mother Joanne. She reinvents herself. I just vanished bit by bit. The past is still dangerous, only now I’m too weak to fight it.” Her grandmother sighed and her gaze clouded. She retreated into a melancholic inward musing, silently plucking at her blanket again. At the time, Tess had dismissed the monologue as senile ramblings, but she now re-inspected the remembered words.

Tess’s mother had bustled back into the room at this point. “What are you two talking about?”

“She’s talking about ghosts and something bad in the past,” Tess piped quickly before her grandmother could speak.

“G
ood grief! I think it’s time to go. Grandma’s getting tired,” sighed Tess’s mother.

“You can’t risk the truth, Joanne, no matter how long ago it happened,” said Tess’s grandmother, staring intently at her daughter. “Everyone will lose if there’s a day of reckoning. Tess inherited more than those green eyes of hers from Louisiana.”

Her mother’s lips compressed tightly against any comment. Instead, she leaned over and placed a farewell kiss on the older woman’s crepe cheek. “Good-bye, Mom, we’ll be back next weekend,” she said and hustled Tess out of the room.

“What was
Grandma talking about?” Tess asked her mother as they walked away.

“I have no idea. Your grandmother doesn’t always make sense,” her mother replied with a dismissive
shrug.

But Tess decided that her mother had lied
—again.

4
puzzles

“I don’t know why you’re so anxious.
Hop on a plane, go to New Orleans and collect a check. Focus on the adventure, on the mystery,” Katie Haimovitz declared to Tess over lunch at a busy restaurant near Katie’s work in Burbank.

After her meeting with Dreux the day before, Tes
s had wakened with a queasy headache and burning eyes from too little sleep. Her brain felt bruised by the thoughts that still fluttered and bumped inside her skull. So she decided to meet with friends to try to get some perspective on her situation. And Katie was her oldest and closest friend.

Tess had outlined for Katie the family tree, Dreux’s stories and her discovery of her grandfather’s murder. To Tess’s surprise, Katie was not in the least disturbed by these revel
ations. She simply considered the sudden inheritance as a serendipitous escape from the doldrums of Tess’s current life.

“I mean you should be thrilled,” Katie argued. “No more worrying about money. Now you have time to look for just the right job, or maybe go back to school and change careers. Or, and this is what I would do, forget the whole work ethic thing
for a while and travel around the world having adventures until you meet some fantastic guy.”

“Well, you’re not me,” Tess retorted with an exasperated look. It was easy for Katie to be flip when she was drop-dead gorgeous. She had tall model-slim grace, and her gleaming blunt-cut black hair was the perfect frame for creamy, unblemished skin and clear Caribbean-blue eyes. Plus, Katie made friends quickly and easily. Coming from a large supportive family, where every talkative member seemed to be a sunny optimist or a boisterous activist, she had been e
ncouraged in her natural warmth. She moved with happy energy, and when she walked into a room, people welcomed her.

Tess was objectively a pretty girl as well
. She was of medium height with a trim but nicely curved figure. Her long, red-brown hair framed a triangular face with a full-lipped mouth that smiled shyly above a dainty cleft chin. High cheekbones and arched brows highlighted large, dark-lashed eyes with irises of an unusual clear green. 

But years in the harsh glare of her mother’s critical eyes had faded her confidence, and a gypsy life had convinced her that blending into anonymity was be
tter than risking the alienation of being “different.” She dressed conservatively and drably and kept herself on the social edge, in shadow. Her purposely muted personality cast a veil over what could have been an exotic allure. She worked very hard at camouflage and often succeeded with the less observant. When people described her, they used vague words like “nice.”

“
It’s hard not to worry when so many bad things have happened all at once,” Tess continued with a frown. “My mom died six months ago, and then I got laid off four months ago, and I just broke up with Mac—”

“Hooray,” interrupted Katie with a fist pump
. She was no longer a fan of Tess’s ex-boyfriend.

Tess shrugged off the interruption as she struggled to articulate the source of her anxiety. “Now, out of the blue, a weird old guy appears and tells me I’m the long lost heiress of Tara or something. Well, it’s great to suddenly come into money
, but
I also find out that my grandfather was murdered and my family purposely hid their past from me. I feel like I’m on a roller coaster. I’ve been careening around the track, and now I’m teetering at the top of that last big drop, and the end’s in sight. I should be relieved, but I feel panicked, as if the worst is still to come.”

“Well then, since you can’t climb off, the only thing to do is close your eyes and hang on,” responded Katie. She took a bite of salad and chewed calmly, waiting for Tess to digest her tart words. “You know, there’s no real risk. You’re assuming your family was covering up the past because they were ashamed or afraid.
Maybe they just wanted to avoid telling a small child something upsetting. Once you were old enough to understand, there probably didn’t seem to be much point in dredging up sad memories that didn’t really impact your life.”

Tess poked morosely at her taco salad, where lettuce and fried corn strips were sin
king into a soggy mire of salsa and guacamole. “You always walk on the sunny side, Katie.”

“Well, I’d rather think positively. I know it’s hard to believe in this good luck, especially given the string of disasters you’ve had, but you need to stop trying to turn a windfall  into a curse,” Katie declared with a
disapproving shake of her head and the license of an old and trusted friend.

Tess and Katie h
ad been friends since high school, weathering college, boyfriends and first jobs. Katie worked in the accounting department of a local hospital and was planning her wedding to long-time boyfriend Trevor, a human resources director at an insurance firm.

“I hope you’re not thinking of putting off your trip because of some vague negative vibes,” Katie commented.

“No, I feel an almost urgent need to go,” mulled Tess. “Of course, I don’t want to be cheated out of my full inheritance. I also don’t want to be tricked into selling some heritage spot to an oil refinery that plans to pollute the environment and melt the ice caps. But, most of all, I feel compelled to find out about the family history my mother and grandmother hid from me. My mother and grandmother were my whole world growing up, and now I don’t even know who they were.

“
Besides, I don’t have anything happening here on the job front, and it would be great to get away from the stress,” she admitted. “I might as well treat myself to a little R&R in a nice French Quarter hotel room. Then I can explore my newly revealed Southern gothic roots.”

“So what’s your worry? Go. This is karma. You definitely need to change direction
and stop moping. You need to stop being a bystander,” said Katie drawing deeply on the straw in her raspberry ice tea.

“What the hell does that
‘bystander’ remark mean?” protested Tess.

“Well, a high
school teacher-librarian is pretty far from adventurous, don’t you think?” replied Katie without looking up from her drink. “Your old job was handing out books to the ever-shrinking number of kids who read print. You’re too comfortable walled in by books. Sure, with the flip of a page, you can travel through time, tour the world, experience thousands of imaginary lives, and yada yada. But it’s no substitute for really traveling or feeling—for really living.”

“I disagree that helping kids discover the joy and value of reading, of learning, isn’t more important
and necessary to our society than a lot of other careers I could have chosen,” insisted Tess. Then, after a couple more disheartened jabs at her salad, she sighed, “OK, maybe lots of kids don’t want to read more than a few characters of text message. Maybe education is the first casualty when money gets tight. Maybe it’s time to get into something with a future, like energy or YouTube or Chinese imports.”

This lament over a stymied career did not distract either woman from the
deeper sting in Katie’s remarks. Katie started to respond and then determinedly clamped her lips around her straw and gurgled up the last of the tea from amid melting ice cubes.

“You think I chose library work out of cowardice? Because I was afraid to compete in the rat race where people like my mother always ran the maze and got the cheese?” Tess finally asked. She hesitated, and her brows pinched tensely. “That’s what my mother always said. She believed I picked my caree
r because I wanted to ‘hide out’ from her. I admit I was glad to escape her ambitions for me. So maybe I’m dreading this trip because I’m suffering from a kind of stage fright. I’ll be out of my comfort zone in a strange place. I had enough of that when I was a kid.”

“Well, I refuse to agree with your mother, but I do think you should be more positive about your sudden good luck,” replied Katie, setting aside her empty glass and leaning her e
lbows on the table. The rattle of cutlery and chiming crystal punctuated the steady murmur of voices swirling around their quiet table. Katie watched sympathetically as her friend twisted the stem of a wine glass fretfully between thumb and index finger.

“I know your mom’s death was traumatic, and you don’t like to talk about it, and then the layoff and Mac’s lousy behavior, but you need to move on,” Katie continued.

“You’re right. I don’t want to talk about my mother,” snapped Tess, “or Mac.” A brief silence followed during which Tess frowned at her empty wine glass and Katie watched her with concern.

Finally, Tess looked up at her friend. “But, yes,
I admit that a lot of my ambivalence is because of my mother’s death. The initial property offer and her death coincided. What if there’s something about the past, about this property, that tipped my mom over the edge to suicide?”

“I can’t see your mother killing herself over
some piece of land! The past? You can’t solve that mystery unless you go face it,” insisted Katie. “So go to New Orleans and get out of this misery rut. You’ve got romance, murder and even voodoo. How can you resist?” she concluded with a grin.

“Don’t joke, Katie. It’s not a novel,” reproved Tess. “It’s about people I loved, people who hid their past from me. I don’t know why. No matter what you say, I have to wonder if maybe there’s something very
sad or shameful or even dangerous about their secrets. My mother’s suicide was so unexpected that it defies understanding. I admit I felt—I still feel—very angry and betrayed. I’d love to find an explanation in the past to help me accept it, but I’m also afraid I’ll find out something even more upsetting.

“
In fact, I really am beginning to think my mother and grandmother were running away from something. They were always on the move and purposely…” Tess frowned and searched for a word to define the essence of the family trait she was beginning to see as a clue to a hidden past, “…disconnected. I guess that’s the way I’d describe their behavior. Am I making sense to you?”

“Your mom was the most ‘connected’ lady I know,” snorted Katie.

“In a business sense, in a practical way, sure,” agreed Tess. “But I don’t think she was ever deeply attached emotionally, socially or even physically to anything or anyone besides me and my grandmother. And Grandma just drifted where my mom towed her.”

“Well, your grandmother was definitely a Blanche Dubois,” Katie remarked. “Maybe that’s a common type in the South. And your mom was one fierce lady. Do you think she was a throwback to that Josephine you mentioned, the independent plantation mistress?”

“Josephine Chastant did not contribute to my mom’s genetics, remember. But my mother would have run an efficient plantation, I’m sure,” laughed Tess, yet there was a brittle quality in her voice, a thin veneer over a darker emotion that caused Katie to bite her lip in guilt over her repeated reference to the taboo subjects of Joanne Parnell and her death.

Tess caught the fleeting distress on her friend’s face and quickly turned the conversation
. “Speaking of inheritance, there’s something that’s been bothering me since I began thinking about this whole legacy thing. It’s a remark my grandmother made once. She told my mother that I inherited ‘more than green eyes from Louisiana.’ I shrugged it off back then, but I’m pretty sure now my grandmother was talking about my grandfather’s family. My grandfather had dark eyes according to his photo, and the old Louisiana relatives I met when I was a kid had brown eyes, too. So, there must have been some green-eyed ancestors I don’t know about. I’ve been wondering who had those eyes and what else they passed on to me. ”

“Wow,
that remark could mean anything. Maybe good old Antonio was a green-eyed Spaniard, so it’s the property you already know about. Maybe it’s some cool trait like the ability to wiggle your ears or psychic powers. Any of those fit?” teased Katie.

“No, not a one,” Tess smiled
with a ruefully shake of her head.

“Look, Tess,” said Katie and placed a hand on her friend’s arm, “there are a lot of traits that make you special. First of all, I envy those
beautiful green eyes. But you’re also compassionate, honest, intelligent and loyal. Plus, you’re more resilient than you know. You’re doing pretty well given the six months that you’ve just endured.”

“Think of all the more exciting adjectives your friend did not choose to use
.” Tess ignored her mother’s sly whisper and focused on Katie’s warm touch.

“Maybe you
need to get out of your comfort zone to appreciate who you are under that ‘librarian’ disguise. Go to New Orleans and get a new, positive start,” Katie urged.

Tess pondered Katie’s assessment of her character as she navigated onto the 405 fre
eway, sighing as the flow of red brake lights was pinched and clogged by the high sides of the Sepulveda Pass. All the words of Katie’s praise seemed to be elaborations on “nice.” Looking up, she caught sight of a faint half moon in a notch of afternoon sky. “Am I like that, like the moon in daylight—just a faint reflection beside more dazzling personalities like my mother or even my friends?” she asked herself. Was it possible for her to earn descriptors like dazzling, daring or inspiring?