Something Rising (Light and Swift) (30 page)

A light, an effervescent light, seemed to fill Cassie's body until she thought she might rise and float away. She tipped her head back and looked at the ceiling, which the sisters had painted lime green, and heard Laura say to Jimmy, heard her whisper in the fierce tone children can pick up from miles away, “Do you have any idea what sort of life I would have had if I hadn't married you? Do you know? Do you know what I could have given my
children?
You took my life and you
squandered
it.” Cassie wanted to go home now, she didn't want to wait, she could imagine herself bursting through the door, calling to Belle, asking Belle to summon Edwin, because Listen to this. Edwin would give his
small, sweet smile, and in it Cassie would see all the years he'd counseled Laura and tried to track down Jimmy, tried to make things right. But it was Belle whose face she was most anxious to see. Belle, who was a student of history, and thus well acquainted with irony.

“Did he look like a killer, Cassie?” Marcelle leaned close.

Cassie shrugged, still smiling. “Everybody looks like a killer to me.”

Martine lowered her paper. “You got that right.” She raised it again.

Marcelle looked out the window, tugged at her napkin. “Not me,Martine. I'm not a killer. I'da kilt you by now if I was.”

The cabdriver said a storm was coming up, and Cassie said she'd just be a minute. He waited at the curb as she walked to the front of the house on Rendon Street, a lovely house painted gray and yellow, a marmalade cat asleep on the step, a spider plant dying in a pot by the door. A driveway led into a one-car garage, Cassie hadn't pictured that, and part of the house was built on top of the garage. The backyard was fenced in, but she didn't see a dog. Neighbors were out; one man was scraping a window frame and listening to salsa music, children were riding tricycles across the street. A mother, likely their mother, sat on the porch and watched them, her expression both loving and bored. The sky was very dark, and the air felt progressively denser, almost solid, but Cassie knew it was only weather, it had nothing to do with grief or the passage of time or a woman's failure to ever make it home. She would be falsifying everything if she turned this street, this sweet house, into something it wasn't.

Back in the cab she asked the driver to take her to the Quarter, then mentioned to him that her grandfather had been a cabdriver.

“Yeah? What was his name?”

“Stanley Dubuisson.” He left his daughter, she didn't say, when she was just five years old.

The driver thought a minute, shook his head. “Don't know him.”

“I didn't, either.”

She barely found a seat at the Café Du Monde; there were tourists everywhere, and the rain had started to fall. She ordered a coffee, then sat very still, there were so many voices rising up, and the rain on the awning, but she let the warm humid air enclose her and listened to nothing in particular. For years she had tried to imagine her world without her mother in it, or without Belle, and had assumed that everything would stop, we don't know how to go on living except by going on. She had seen Laura do so after Poppy died: she got up the next morning and put the coffee on and smoked a cigarette, and they put him in the ground. There were still library books to return, so they returned them, and a garden to plant, so they planted it, but Cassie had known that for her, as much as she had grieved for him, Poppy's death was an intimation of the Larger Death. It is one thing to lose a grandfather, but something entirely different to become a woman without a mother. A woman without a mother. Cassie could almost hear the whistle of that arrow as it shot past her. The rain came down so hard she could no longer see the sidewalk, a few feet
away, and the tourists got louder, as if in a contest. She would go home and say to Belle, Our mother was poisoned. Laura was poisoned by her inability to give herself over to her own life, the life she made and shored up every day, and I, Cassie would say to Belle, will not do the same. Belle was Cassie's responsibility now, and she accepted it; one can't be everywhere, Laura couldn't be both at the kitchen window and in New Orleans. I will
stand
, Cassie practiced saying in her head.

And then a man stood up from his table near the street, he walked out into the pounding rain, turned and faced the crowd of diners. He threw his arms out in surrender, he let the rain hit his face, began to sing “Amazing Grace,” it rose up from him and rang out in a deep baritone that silenced everyone. The servers in their striped polyester shirts stopped moving, the restless children stopped, all the tourists with their blank expressions turned toward him. Cassie closed her eyes and decided to take it personally, four verses bright shining as the sun. She sat and let the singer grant his benediction, and when he was finished, in the burst of applause that followed, she headed out into the rain herself; as she passed the man, she thanked him and dropped five dollars in the bucket at his feet.

On the flight to Atlanta, Cassie looked at the Los Angeles guidebook she'd purchased at the airport; the history of the city was rich with dramatic and frequent suicides. Laura would have loved it. The flight reached a cruising altitude, and Cassie closed the book and thought of Belle. When Cassie got home, Belle would ask her questions about her trip, and all of them would be punctuated by a certain look Belle had, a kind of knowing sneer. Laura had asked
Cassie once, “You know that face Belle makes?” and Cassie had said yes, she certainly did, and Laura said, “Why is it so
dear?”

Belle would ask, Did you eat well?

And Cassie would say she did.

Did you see interesting things?

Yes, very.

Did you bring me any presents?

Cassie would give her the Vishniac collection.

And then Belle would ask, in Laura's place: Did you meet the Minor Criminals of Louisiana?

Cassie opened her eyes. She would answer: I met a Minor Criminal, yes. And I met an Innocent Man.

She didn't have to wait long for her suitcase in Indianapolis, and she was in her truck by eight o'clock, saying a prayer that it would start. It started. She drove gingerly out of the airport and on to 465, the loop around Indianapolis, soon to be named after David Letterman; she headed for Highway 69 North, and every gear that took, every mile she covered, was a relief. By nine-thirty she was in the dark driveway of Billy and Patty Poe. Their ranch house was dwarfed by Billy's body shop, but all the lights were shining, and she could hear their kids yelling in the living room. She knocked on the front door and disturbed two coon hounds in a kennel between the house and shop; when Patty opened the door, she looked worried and frazzled. She looked like a mother, overweight, her hair untended, drying her hands on a dish towel.

“Cassie? Is everything okay? Come in,” Patty said, and through the doorway Cassie could see three children jumping on the living
room furniture and gradually destroying a pop-up tent set up on the floor.

“I don't mean to bother you,” Cassie said, “is Billy around? I just need to see him a minute.”

“Sure, he's in the shop. Go to that side door, he might not hear you knock.”

Cassie walked across the gravel driveway, past the barking dogs, the doors closed on Billy's two hydraulic lifts. Around the corner she found an open door; Billy was sitting on the floor organizing and cleaning parts of a dismantled engine, listening to Led Zeppelin so loudly the speakers of his small stereo were rattling. Cassie walked in slowly, trying not to startle him.

“Hey! Cassie!” Billy jumped up, wiping his hands on a dirty shop rag, then turned off the stereo. The buttons were thickened with dust and grease. “I won't hug you.”

“Hey, Billy.”

“What brings you out here so late? You in trouble?” He was a thin, rangy man with a long face. Cassie hadn't seen him clean in years.

“Naw, not really. Josh says you've got a Ford Ranger for sale.”

“I do. He told you it's rebuilt? I got it for nothing.”

“A salvage title's okay with me. Is it out here?”

Billy turned on a floodlight, and they walked back out to the yard where ten, twelve vehicles were parked. Right in the middle was a black truck, tall, shiny, immaculate. “This is it?” Cassie said, surprised.

“That's it. I got it at auction. A tree fell on it, I did all the body work myself. Engine was fine, untouched. Everything under the hood is original.”

Cassie opened the driver's door. The inside was tan, the upholstery looked new.

“It's full size, with an extended cab. Four doors.”

She opened a door on the cab's extension. There were two jump seats, folded up.

“It's got air, a CD player, cruise control, five-speed stick. A bed liner.”

“How much?”

Billy scratched his head. He hated to talk money. “The Blue Book is ten. I put four in it, and I'll sell it for five.”

Cassie nodded. “I'll give you cash, and you can have the Mazda. The title's in the glove box.”

She had to admit, driving home, having long been a person to whom vehicles meant nothing, that she was not altogether immune to the charms of being the owner of a big black truck. Every mile of road felt good; this was Information. Billy had lent her a CD, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, and the combination of the early warmth of the night, the air coming through the truck, the music, made her remember how it felt to be high, the bounty of perception. She had once told Laura that pot made her realize she lived in an analogous world; that all the connections had already been made, the architecture was laid bare, the whole plan was shining up in everything, and all she had to do was look, name it if she wanted to. Laura had said those were the world's riches.

The King's Crossing was as wide and dark as any road. She passed the Taylors', the trailers, the pond, and pulled in to her driveway. The house was lit up for her arrival, and Edwin was there, his used Taurus, a dull and institutional blue, sitting in front of the garage where Jimmy used to park the Lincoln. Cassie carried
her suitcase and Belle's book through the screened porch, the front door. From the living room a man's histrionic voice said,
Ivan had seen the woman before, but he couldn't remember where
. Cassie left her bag at the foot of the stairs and went into the kitchen. Belle and Edwin were at the table, side by side, looking at a stack of documents.

“Look who's here,” Edwin said, standing. He had aged well; his Lovely Face was unlined, his eyes were clear. Maybe his shoulders slumped a bit more, his clothes hung loose, but on the whole he seemed the same to Cassie as he had twenty years before. “Welcome home,” he said.

“Cassie,” Belle said, not standing. And then she burst into tears. She sat straight up, let her head fall back, and wailed.

Cassie sat down across from her sister. “Belle.”

Belle had on one of Laura's sleeveless shirts, red, and she wore a white sweater around her shoulders. She sobbed, she gasped for air.

Cassie said, “Belle.”

Edwin finally reached out and put his hand on Belle's back, and she cried even harder. She cried much harder than she had when she was unable to attend Laura's funeral, harder than when Poppy died. She cried freely, she was liberated from the world of noncryers.

“Cassie!” she wailed. “I have! something! to tell you!”

Edwin said, “Do you want me to—”

Belle nearly shouted, “No! It's my duty! She's my sister, my life would be a great deal easier if someone in this house would read the
Oresteia.”

Cassie said, “Belle. Is Jimmy dead, are you ill, are we bankrupt? Because all you have to do is tell me.”

Belle looked up, gave a last, brave sob, and said, “Edwin. And I. Are married.”

They were wearing rings. Thin gold bands that Cassie could plainly see, now that she was looking. She sat back against the chair.

“We did it as soon as you left for New Orleans, I was afraid I'd chicken out if I had to tell you ahead of time, a judge came here to the house, we had the ceremony in the backyard.”

Cassie said nothing.

“It was beautiful.”

Belle, a mess, tear-streaked; Cassie could see what she had been afraid of, that the two of them, the sisters—who had so little left!—meant nothing to Belle, that Cassie had been excluded. Cassie saw, too, that all the time she'd been in New Orleans, making her pledge to her sister to
stand
, Belle and Edwin had been right here, sanctifying their own pact. In this very house. They seemed so precious to her suddenly, like newborn babies, their unscuffed rings, their subtle glances. Edwin was smiling at Cassie, his same sad, small grin, and that was what finally did it, Cassie opened her mouth and began to laugh, and she laughed and laughed and laughed, tears running down her face, and Belle stood up and they danced around the kitchen, Edwin turned on Howlin' Wolf, and Cassie laughed and laughed.

In the morning Edwin and Cassie left Belle at the kitchen table looking at the Vishniac photographs. She was still crying, had cried all night. Cassie couldn't begin to unravel what her sister was crying about; she let it lie.

Edwin and Cassie took the documents he and Belle had been studying and headed for Laura's attorney in Hopwood, an old man named Harold Piper; he preferred to be called Hal, but no one did.

“Let's take my truck, Edwin,” Cassie said, not giving him the option of saying no. Edwin in a truck. He looked miserable and shy.

“Cassie,” he began, clearing his throat, “is there anything you want to, would you like to ask me—”

“Nope,” Cassie said, shaking her head.

“Because it seems as if maybe you'd have questions about—”

“I don't.”

“I appreciate that you're a private person.”

“Thank you.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence.

Harold Piper's office was in downtown Hopwood, in a building that was probably a bribe away from being condemned. His office was above a restaurant where Cassie had gone a few times with Jimmy, the Top Lunch and Cigar, a broken-down cafeteria where every day they served the same thing, beef and noodles with a slice of white bread and butter and a cup of coffee. Two ninety-five. Only men ate there. Harold Piper ate there every day. In the back room a card game ran indefinitely, had for decades, low-stakes stuff. High enough, though, to make Harold the sworn enemy for life of Jimmy, which is how Laura had chosen him in the first place.