Paula Morris (15 page)

Her aunt glanced over at Aurelia, who was now preoccupied with
dropping something from her plate onto the floor where Marilyn was lurking.

"Anton is ... well, he's who he is," she said to
Rebecca, and her voice sounded sad. For the first time, Rebecca wondered if
Aunt Claudia had been pushed around by these families, the way Rebecca was now.
She'd lived here all her life, after all. "He's as polite as he should be.
But he's no more free than any of us."

"What do you mean, he isn't free?" This didn't make much
sense. Anton was his own person, surely, just like Rebecca.

"Free to be someone he's not." Her aunt rubbed her hands
together, grinding the silver rings that adorned almost every one of her long,
thin fingers. "And now, Aurelia -- please stop encouraging that cat and
clear the table."

That night, Rebecca lay awake in her room, wondering why her aunt
had started talking in riddles, and whether what she'd said was right. Nobody
was free, according to Aunt Claudia -- at least, not free to be someone else.
But didn't people reinvent themselves all the time? Every infomercial

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Rebecca had ever seen featured people who'd transformed themselves
-- their shape, their skin, their look, their marriage, their personal
fortunes. If Anton wanted to break out of the Patrician set, he should be able
to. This was America, after all. Or was New Orleans its own weird country --
pagan and decadent and hierarchical, like the Roman Empire?

On Saturday morning, Aunt Claudia headed off to the Quarter as
usual. Over breakfast, she told Rebecca that there were usually a lot of
tourists in town the weekend before Thanksgiving, and she was hoping for a lot
of business. That was another strange thing, Rebecca thought, sweeping the
front porch clean of its accumulated leaves and dirt as her aunt jerked the car
into the street: Aunt Claudia never offered to tell
her
fortune or read
her
tarot cards. Maybe she didn't like bringing her work home with her --
except that deck of cards was always there on the kitchen table. Rebecca
wondered, not for the first time, if Aunt Claudia was really the descendant of
a voodoo queen, or if she was just a crackpot who made up all her "fortunes."

Farther up the street, at the cemetery gates, someone was waving.
Rebecca blinked, and whoever it was disappeared. Then a familiar smiling face
peeked around the gatepost, beckoning to Rebecca with an outstretched arm. Even
at this distance, Rebecca knew it was Lisette. She leaned the broom against the
porch rail and jogged down the street.

"I'm sorry I haven't been around," Rebecca told Lisette,
glancing around to make sure nobody else was anywhere nearby and sidling around
to the back of the nearest tomb. Enough people thought she was strange already:
If Lisette really was a ghost, visible only to Rebecca, she didn't want to

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add "seen talking to herself in public" to her list of
supposed crimes.

"I thought maybe you'd left," said Lisette, and Rebecca
filled her in, quickly, on the way Toby Sutton had accosted her outside the
cemetery after school.

"Ugh!" Lisette declared, perching on a protruding tree
root. "That doesn't surprise me. The Sutton family have been horrible for
more than a hundred and fifty years. And I should know!"

"Aren't you supposed to be making your big walk soon?"
Rebecca asked her. Lisette nodded, picking absentmindedly at her ripped sleeve.

"Next Saturday. That's the anniversary of my mother's death.
She died in 1853, so it's been one hundred and fifty-five years. How many years
for you?"

"Thirteen," said Rebecca, with a rueful smile: It wasn't
very long at all, compared with Lisette. But at least Lisette had known her
mother. At least she could remember her. "How far is it?"

"About four miles each way." Lisette wriggled her bare
toes. "It's not so bad. I get to see all the other ghosts along the
way."

"Do you talk to them?"

"Of course." Lisette smiled up at her. "I hardly
ever get a chance to talk to
anyone.
The night you and I met ... well,
before that I hadn't spoken in months to anyone but that crazy old
gravedigger."

"There must be so many of them," Rebecca said, trying to
imagine the streets of the city thronged with ghosts. It was impossible to
visualize. The city of New Orleans was almost

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three hundred years old: If Lisette was to be believed, there had
to be ghosts everywhere.

"More every year," Lisette told her, "though some
disappear, of course."

"They disappear?"

"If they find peace. You know, if their death is avenged at
last. It doesn't happen too often, though. A lot of those ghosts have been
around much longer than I have."

"I wish I could see them!" Rebecca leaned her head back
against the chilly tomb.

"You could," Lisette said casually, brushing at her
legs, though why, Rebecca wasn't sure -- no insects could land on her, surely,
and dirt never seemed to stick. "If you came with me, that is."

"I could come with you?" Rebecca lifted her head.

"It takes a long time," Lisette warned her. "Four
miles there, four miles back. And some of those ghosts -- well, they like to
talk. They don't have a thing in this world to say, but they surely like to
talk."

"Really--I could come with you?" Rebecca's mind was
zooming with the possibilities. "And I could ... I could see the
ghosts?"

Lisette nodded.

"Remember? When you hold my hand, nobody living can see you.
And you can see all the ghosts."

Invisible to the real world. Able to see the spirit world. If this
was true, Rebecca decided, those miles would be the greatest four miles --
actually, eight miles -- of her life.

"But maybe it's not a good idea," Lisette reasoned.
"It might scare you. Some of them -- well, they don't look so

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pretty. And sometimes they're not too happy, either. You
understand."

"I guess," said Rebecca, wondering how upset
she
would
be if she had to wander the streets forever, unable to rest in peace. "But
I want to go, Lisette. I
really
want to go." New Orleans was still
a mystery to Rebecca, a small place that got her all twisted around, a town of
neighborhoods with long-forgotten names. But with Lisette, she'd get to see
much, much more of it firsthand. And even better than that, she'd be able to
glimpse its lost, secret world of ghosts.

"Next Saturday, then," Lisette said. "I'll wait for
you by the Bowman tomb."

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***

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

***

Four miles didn't sound like a long way. Rebecca had walked miles
and miles in New York City on any given day -- when she didn't want to wait for
a cross-town bus, say, or when she and her friends decided to loop the park, or
go for a major wander downtown, or see how many times they could walk back and
forth across the Brooklyn Bridge.

But four miles in New Orleans was another matter entirely when you
were dealing with the spirit world.

Lisette hadn't been lying: The city was thronged with ghosts.
Three hundred years' worth of ghosts, all of them wearing the clothes they died
in, many of them bearing -- all too visibly in some cases -- the injuries that
killed them.

That next Saturday, with her hand firmly clasped in Lisette's,
Rebecca could see them all. And this sight was so amazing, so overwhelming, it
was all Rebecca could do to keep her mouth from hanging open in surprise.

Some of the ghosts were white; many more were black. Some spoke
French or Spanish. A little girl in a ragged

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dress, skipping up and down the street, sang to herself in German.
Rebecca heard some snatches of languages she thought she recognized, like
Italian, and others she couldn't identify at all.

Most of the ghosts wandered around their little patches alone, but
many hung out in strange mixed-century gaggles. Near the corner of Terpsichore
Street in the Lower Garden District, a black man wearing nothing but a cutoff
pair of torn trousers, raw marks from chains or handcuffs worn into his thin
wrists, stood leaning against a lamppost. Deep in conversation with him were
two white women, one in a flimsy 1920s-style evening dress with a blood-soaked
back, the other a soccer mom in jeans and a mangled purple LSU sweatshirt. The
man waved at Lisette as they walked by.

"He was a slave, flogged to death," she whispered to
Rebecca. "He's been around almost as long as I have. Not sure about why he
was killed -- he doesn't like to talk about it. That woman in the pretty dress
joined him in I929, I think. Her boyfriend murdered her in that house up
there."

Lisette pointed to a leaning house on the corner, its windows
boarded up.

"And the other woman?"

"She's been there for the last four or five years. Head-on
collision at the intersection with a drunk driver."

Walking along the highway underpass, Rebecca saw some very strange
sights. The area used to be a neighborhood, Lisette explained, until thirty or
forty years earlier. Now traffic thundered above them, and the vacant space
below was used as a parking lot. But the neighborhood ghosts still had no
choice but to hang around, even though their streets

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and houses were gone. A kid with an Afro and flared jeans lay back
on the hood of a car, and when a curious Rebecca turned to look at him, she had
to stop herself from crying out loud: His face was a red and black contorted
mess. He'd been shot, Lisette told her.

Several black men dressed kind of like Native Americans prowled
around the underpass; Rebecca heard snatches of chantlike songs, and one of
them drummed from time to time on the trunk of a car.

"Mardi Gras Indians," Lisette said. "From one of
the old Uptown gangs. One of them's been here a long, long time, and the other
two joined him after one of those wars. Oh, which one was it? The second one, I
think."

"The Second World War?"

Lisette looked uncertain.

"Is that what they call it? All of them were stabbed in
different fights on Mardi Gras. I don't see too many of them, though, even up
on Claiborne. Maybe they don't fight these days."

A fat black woman in a long, shapeless dress, her face badly
bruised and nose broken, called out to them.

"Have you seen my baby? Have you seen my baby?"

Her voice was so plaintive, and her smashed-in face so grotesque,
that a chill shuddered down Rebecca's spine; for a moment she was tempted to
let go of Lisette's hand, just to make the awful faces of the ghosts disappear.
She didn't know what she was expecting of the spirit world, or even if she'd
truly believed she'd see
anything
out of the ordinary -- but here, on
the streets of New Orleans, there were too many sad and ugly sights. History
was a mess, thought Rebecca.

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"No, Miss Ella, I haven't seen your baby," Lisette
called back, pulling Rebecca's arm to hurry her up and leaning close to
whisper. "She's been asking me that for seventy years."

In the Warehouse District, Rebecca didn't know where to look:
Nineteenth-century dockworkers with rope burns around their necks mingled with
a businessman who'd been killed by gunmen robbing his office ten years ago, and
a gaggle of brassy prostitutes -- from a variety of different eras, judging by
the various lengths of their skirts -- who all waved and hooted at Lisette. A
man dressed in the style of an eighteenth-century fop, complete with
white-powdered wig and silk breeches, paced up and down the cobbles of Julia
Street, gazing into the windows of art galleries.

"He was visiting from Havana, when this was all still
someone's plantation," Lisette told her. "They said he caught yellow
fever, but actually he was poisoned by his cousin, because they were fighting
over some land. He told me the story when I was first a ghost -- he'd already
been here for a hundred years then. He's been much happier since all the art
galleries moved in. Now he has something new to look at."

Crossing busy Canal Street was hard, because Rebecca couldn't tell
who was a ghost and who wasn't. Nobody could see her, but she could see
everybody.
And, unlike Lisette, she had to dodge the real world: They couldn't just
walk right through Rebecca any more than she could walk through walls -- or
locked cemetery gates.

She wildly ducked past anyone walking her way, sometimes noticing
only at the last minute -- to her horror -- that the Asian guy in green
hospital scrubs had a small wound in

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his chest -- stabbed during a carjacking, Lisette told her -- and
that the nun pacing the neutral ground wasn't waiting for a bus or a streetcar:
It was a man dressed as a nun, and he'd been strangled late at night one
Halloween sometime in the 1980s.

In the Quarter, with its Saturday crowds, Rebecca couldn't help
it: Her invisible self was bumping into startled people all over the place.