Remember the Future (14 page)

19

Maddy let out an audible gasp when the slowly growing parade turned from Toulouse onto Chartres Street and the spires of St. Louis Cathedral became visible just over the rooftops of the buildings up ahead of them on the left.

For the last ten minutes, their small group had grown from a small annoying group of seventeen to a massive traffic-congesting crowd of thirty-eight.  Instead of attempting to dissuade them, the French Quarter patrolmen simply held traffic at intersections in an effort to get the procession through as quickly and safely as possible, causing the least amount of problems.

Law enforcement around the Big Easy had learned the best way to manage chaos sometimes was to simply go with the flow.

At Maddy’s gasp, Beth and Grant traded a look between them.  Beth had become fiercely protective since leaving Our Lady of Guadalupe, and without an available target, her anger and frustration had landed conveniently on Grant.

Grant had chosen the high road of simply ignoring her altogether, but now--out of the blue--he had suddenly gotten a very strong feeling of direction, which clearly veered off the path the parade had been following.

“Maddy,” he called out before he had even attached a motivation to his compulsion.

But she was too busy looking around in wonder at the wrought-iron balconies and the smiling waving people looking down on them, plastic cups in every hand.  “Y'know, there's a museum that has Louis Armstrong's first cornet.  Oh, and I want to try absinthe and have a hurricane at Pat O'Brien's and of course, I want to hear some live Dixieland Jazz.”

“Maddy,” Grant said more urgently, garnering an intense look of contempt from Beth.

“I want gumbo and Bananas Foster and a muffuletta.”

“Central Grocery on Decatur makes the best,” Beth exclaimed above the noise and chanting of the marchers around them.  She glanced at her watch and shook her head.  “Though, they’re probably completely sold out by now.  You’ve got to go first thing in the morning.”

“Maddy,” Grant snapped, grabbing her arm.  “We’ve got to get off this street.  Now.”

Maddy gave Grant the same wide-eyed look of confusion she would if she had been awakening from a dream and found a man serenading her with a ukulele.  She gave a simple nod and allowed him to pull her out of the crowd as the parade continued down Chartres Street.

Beth rushed after them.  “Hey!  Where are you taking her?” she yelled at Grant, following them down Wilkinson Street, which branched off to the right of Chartres.

Grant glanced back at Beth without slowing.

Maddy turned and grabbed Beth by the shoulders.  “Beth,” she started, then closed her eyes a moment.  When she opened them again, the eyes seemed not only calmer to Beth, but filled with a depth that threatened to spill from her soul like tears from a broken heart.  “Theo might seem like a real jerk sometimes but he honestly respects you, and trust me when I say that he will treat you like a princess if you give him a chance.”

Beth just stared at the other woman with a confusion that was so profound she couldn’t find an appropriate response.  Instead, the words that exploded from her mouth were, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Maddy nodded sagely and continued in a calm unemotional tone.  “Things are going to go from bad to worse with me very soon, and you don’t want to get involved.”

“Maddy,” Beth chuckled disarmingly, “I’m going with you and there’s nothing you can..!”

“You can’t come with us,” Maddy snapped flatly, giving Beth a firm push away from her.

Beth’s eyes reddened then hardened a split second later.  “Fuck you, you crazy bitch!”

Maddy drew a hand to her mouth as she continued to back away from the teen.

Standing in the street a few yards away, Grant rushed back and tugged Maddy down Wilkinson Street after him.  “Now, Maddy!  Now!”

Mere moments after Maddy and Beth parted company, two darkly-dressed men wandered casually up to linger in the exact spot where the others had just been standing.  One of the men lifted his chin in the direction of the departing girl in the St. Louis Cathedral t-shirt. Trading looks with the shorter man at his side, they followed her discreetly for a half a block until the parade reappeared, continuing up Chartres.  When the girl had rejoined the crowd marching toward the cathedral, the taller of the two men immediately stopped and shook his head to the other.

Together they turned in slow but opposite circles like sonar dishes searching out an elusive signal.  If anyone found good reason to focus on them, he would have immediately recognized the frustration on their faces.

But in the center of the sensory hurricane that was the French Quarter, everyone was adrift on their own island.

After rushing the full length of Wilkinson Street at a steady clip, Maddy stumbled and went to one knee.  She ripped the shoe off of her foot and threw it as hard as she could against a street lamp, then began to sob uncontrollably.

Grant glanced back down the way they had come, toward the sound of the fading trumpets of the parade.  He put her at his back almost defensively, resting his hand on her shoulder instinctively without a look back at her.

He knew he would have to wait this one out, but it would be okay now that the threat had been alleviated.  The anxiety he had felt earlier like a prickling heat-rash itch at the base of his skull had subsided.  He had never felt anything like it before.

“I’m done,” she managed unevenly between her choking sobs.  She dropped to her bottom and scooted back away from the street lamp until her back was to a building wall.  She buried her face in her hands and began to sob with abandon.

Retrieving the shoe from the sidewalk where it had fallen, Grant dropped back against the wall himself and slowly lowered himself down beside her.  He kept his silence, ignoring the looks of passing tourists and considering the shoe he held in his lap.

“Why can’t I be more like you, Grant?” she asked in a small voice.  “No attachments.  Pushing everyone away.  It’s easier that way.  Neater.”

“You can’t.”

Maddy peered up, her face reddened and tear-streaked.

“That’s not you,” Grant told her.  “You want to be happy.  You try.”

Blotting her eyes with her sleeve, she stared up at him.  “But don’t you want to be?”

He sighed and gave her a sad smile.  “That’s… a very good question.”

Maddy gave a short uncertain laugh and took a deep hitching breath.  She looked back toward Chartres, her eyes squinting with emotional pain of her memory.  “Wow!  That hurt more than it should have.”

“Well, what did you expect,” he replied, handing her the shoe.  “You hurt her and she was just lashing back at you.”

Maddy considered him.  “Yeah, but I did the right thing by her by making her go,” she murmured, casting a quick look at Grant.  Slipping the shoe back on, she slowly gathered her legs beneath her.

Grant leapt up and gave her his arm as she rose.

She looked up at the intersection up ahead and nodded.  “I think that’s Decatur,” she said with a gasp.  “Oh, Café Du Monde’s up there!”  Giving his arm a single tug, she started around the corner.

Grant shook his head and trotted after with a smirk.  “See that’s exactly what I was just saying.”

“What?” she asked innocently, craning her neck to look across Decatur Street at a set of steps leading up between two buildings.

“You were just crying and now look at you.”

Ignoring him, she pointed to the steps opposite them.  “Oh, the Riverwalk!  Ah, hell, we have to see Old Miss, don’t we?  I mean, it’s an imperative!”

She rushed toward the crosswalk up ahead at St. Peter and turned to beckon Grant expectantly.  “Sorry, but if I have less than twenty-four hours left, I only get one chance at this.”  The crosswalk changed and she sprinted across, turning to wait for Grant who was moving at a trot.

Looking back across the street, Maddy gazed at the fence-line of Jackson Square and at the bevy of horse-drawn carriages awaiting passengers, the street vendors, the painters, the musicians and rising above it all was the legendary triple steeples of the St. Louis Cathedral.  She froze, blinking back a sudden overwhelming wave of emotion.

“This is it,” she said in awe under her breath as Grant reached her side.

“What?”  He turned and looked back at Jackson Square and found himself smiling in spite of himself.  It was a postcard image of the square and the cathedral.  “Wow, huh?”

Maddy nodded and swallowed the emotion back, trying to fight the urge to cry knowing that he wouldn’t understand what she was feeling and misinterpret entirely.

“I spent my whole life just a few hours away from this place and this is my first time here,” Grant said to her in frank wonder.  “What took me so long, right?”

“The timing was never right,” she said softly. “I think we were meant to share this.”

Grant glanced over at Maddy but her glistening eyes were focused in the distance beyond him.

“It was on my bucket list of places to see before I died,” she said.  “And here I am.”

“Okay, don’t get all morbid on me, kid,” Grant said with a dark chuckle.

Finally, she looked at him and gave him a sad smile.  Blindly, her hand reached out and found his.

“No, you don’t understand.  In the same way I get short glimpses into the future, I’ve been seeing this moment all my adult life.  Me.  Here.  Looking back at the cathedral, hearing the Dixieland jazz, and smelling the fried food and the musk of the horses.  And there was always someone standing by my side.  But I never saw his face.”  She looked around and found his face.

Grant swallowed awkwardly, his eyes flittering away and his hand letting go of hers self-consciously.

Maddy lowered her head slightly and nodded to herself.  “You’ve got to give me a moment here.  I’ve been running my whole life to catch up to this moment.”

Somewhere behind them a soulful voice began to sing an old blues song.

“Maddy, I-I gotta say,” Grant sighed.  “This is the weirdest damn day of my life.”

“Join the club,” she replied with a dark smile.  “And I do the impossible on a daily basis.”  A mounted police officer clip-clopped by them along the curb, his head slowly scanning the street before him.  Maddy absently reached out and ran her hand across the horse’s flank, almost as if to assure herself that this was not a dream.

“When we were on Chartres, I had this overwhelming sensation to get off the street,” he told her.  “That’s why I was so insistent.”

She reached out and squeezed his arm.  “Good.  You communicated perfectly.”

“Yeah.” Still hearing the blues, Grant looked around and spotted a street musician sitting in the shade along the corner of the building behind them.  “It was an odd feeling.  Like an irresistible force.  Like a storm at sea.”

“And now?”

“I’m perfectly calm.  Not even a ripple on the surface of the water.”

Maddy nodded and studied Grant.  “Interesting.  And you never felt this before?”

“Not that I’m aware,” he answered.  “What do you make of it?”

She shrugged, casting an almost playful smile at him as she turned, then almost as an afterthought she stood on her tippy-toes and kissed him on the cheek.  “I’m just glad we’re on the same side.”

She paused to listen to the musician behind them.  Dark glasses obscuring his eyes, the aging black man played that blues standard “It Hurts Me Too” on a twelve-string, its open case lying invitingly next to him.  A passing man dropped some assorted change from his pocket, seemed to think twice then tossed a single wadded dollar bill in as well.  Lying in the shade next to the man and assessing everything happening within his sphere of influence was a grey and white terrier, who gave the old black man a nudge with his nose at the appearance of the dollar.  The man simply nodded and continued playing.

Grant joined Maddy who stood at the musician’s feet and listened.

As he sang about things going wrong, they turned to look at each other at the same moment and spontaneously chuckled.

Grant reached out and took Maddy’s hand.

Her eyes lit up briefly.  Then she felt the wadded bill in her hand a moment later as his hand released hers.  She held the bill out over the guitar case and let it roll off the tips of her fingers, trying not to express the disappointment she felt that the man beside her was only letting go of money instead of something more important.

But it’s progress
, she told herself.

The terrier blinked down at the bill and turned its head slightly in confusion, giving a tiny whine.  He gave the musician a nudge then a gentle scrape of its paw.

“Gimme that,” the blues man said, reaching out and holding his hand out as the dog scooped up the bill in its teeth and gently dropped it in its master’s palm.

Maddy gave a hop and clapped her hands in elated surprise.

The old man held the bill between two fingers.  “Nah, it’s real alright, Gus, but you don’t recognize it, cuz you done never seen one before.”  He turned his head up as if to look at them.  “A hundred is more than generous.  Brings an honest man to look for strings.”

“Okay, that was impressive,” Grant admitted with a grin.