Unbroken (9 page)

Rather than just take the next right into the Quarter, and wend through the one-way grid of streets, Aunt Claudia pulled one of Miss Viola’s maneuvers and performed an abrupt U-turn on Rampart. Aurelia, who was squashed in the middle, lurched into Rebecca, and Rebecca banged her forehead on the window.

“Ouch,” she said, staring ruefully over at the other side of Rampart Street, where they should have been driving. There was their corner, with the four grand town houses in a row. Well, three grand town houses and one unloved, derelict one at the end, screaming out for paint and tenants and new window shutters.

Except tonight the top-floor gallery was illuminated by an eerie, silvery glow, stronger than candlelight but not bright enough to be electricity. Rebecca looked closer. It was almost like a mist, or maybe like smoke — but neither of those things made sense, because Rebecca associated mist and smoke with darkness, and this was a soft, wispy light.

She craned her neck, trying to see where it was coming from. Had someone found their way inside? She’d heard about
vagrants and squatters colonizing empty houses, but it seemed strange they would head for the very top floor.

Then a girl appeared — practically
wafted
to the gallery’s railings — and leaned out. Rebecca gasped.

“What is it?” Aurelia wanted to know.

“Up there — look.” Rebecca pointed to the town house. The girl was dark-haired and wore a white dress of some kind, maybe a nightgown. She gripped the railings, looking up and down the street.

“That old house.” Aurelia seemed disappointed. “Is it falling down?”

Aunt Claudia made another one of her wide U-turns, and Rebecca couldn’t see anything anymore.

“Aunt Claudia!” she called. “Would it be OK if you let us out on the corner of Orleans?”

“That’s a good idea,” her father said, probably worried they’d spend all evening driving up and down Rampart.

When all the good-byes were said, and they were standing on Rampart waving as Aunt Claudia’s car made its dramatic swing into yet another U-turn, Rebecca inched her way to the curb. From here, looking upward, she could still see the silvery light, but to see the girl on the gallery she’d need to walk into the road.

“What is it?” Ling walked over.

“I think there’s someone up there. You know, in the empty house. I saw lights up on the gallery.”

“You can see lights?” Rebecca’s father stood with them now, squinting up. “Really? It looks dark to me.”

“And me,” agreed Ling. “Maybe we could go stand …”

“In the neutral ground — I mean, the median — OK.” Rebecca checked for oncoming cars and then bounded toward the neutral ground, before her father could say no.

“Just be careful!” he called, looking up and down the street before he crossed with Ling. “It’s getting kind of late to be running around on Rampart.”

Rebecca’s eyes weren’t tricking her: The top gallery was lit in some way, and the girl with dark hair — long curls, Rebecca could see now — was still leaning over the railings. When she noticed Rebecca gazing up at her, she smiled, raising one bare arm in a slow wave.

“Nope,” Rebecca’s father said. He was standing right next to her on the grassy verge, looking straight at the building. “I can’t see any lights on, honey.”

“Neither can I,” said Ling. “Maybe it was a reflection from car lights or something? It’s a shame that building is so messed up. It looks like it’s about to fall down at any minute.”

“Just as well there’s nobody there,” said her dad. “If we really did see lights on, I’d have to call the police.”

Rebecca stared up at the girl nobody else could see. Her heart was pounding. She opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again. There was a girl up there, waving at them, and
there were lights probably visible from the other side of Armstrong Park. But Ling couldn’t see anything and neither could Rebecca’s dad. All they could see was a beaten-up town house with dangling rusted galleries and broken shutters. That’s why the girl wasn’t really waving at
them
. She was waving at Rebecca.

Rebecca’s dad urged Rebecca and Ling to come along and head back to the compound. Rebecca complied, but her thoughts were racing. Whatever Anton said, whatever he might choose to believe, ghosts were everywhere in New Orleans. Yet another one was trying to get Rebecca’s attention. What was
her
story? Was
she
going to ask for Rebecca’s help, too?

O
n Tuesday afternoon, Rebecca stood outside the house on St. Philip Street where Lisette used to live, wishing she could go inside to take a look. But that wasn’t possible, because it was private property.

“Someone from North Carolina owns it now,” her father was saying. He’d been investigating the house through one of his contacts at City Hall. “I guess they only visit during the holidays.”

“At least it wasn’t demolished,” Ling pointed out. All she knew about this house was that it was one Rebecca had worked on. She didn’t know about the personal connection. She also didn’t know that Rebecca kept looking up and down the street waiting for Frank to show up, so he could point out the house where the locket lay hidden.

There were too many ghosts around here, Rebecca thought. Too many secrets.

The first time Rebecca ever saw Lisette’s house, it was in a terrible state. It looked as though it had been painted with dirty
water, and the roof had buckled. Weeds as big as bushes grew up through cracks in the foundation. It was one of the oldest houses in Tremé, and years of neglect had left it on the verge of collapse.

Eventually she’d been able to go back, with Anton, and help one of the rebuilding crews turn the crumbling, moldy, bug-bitten shell into a house again. Now it looked as fresh and neat as it must have to Lisette and her mother, back before the Civil War, when they lived there.

The stuccoed brick was painted pale blue, the way Lisette had described it, and the shutters were bright yellow. Every slate on the steep roof was new and firmly fixed in place, and the guttering and sawtooth detail across the façade were white. New concrete steps, low and broad, led to the front door.

“It’s a genuine Creole cottage,” Rebecca’s father told Ling. “Built back when this was a brand-new neighborhood, and many of the people living here were the community known as free people of color.”

People like Lisette’s mother, Rebecca thought. She’d come to New Orleans during the revolution in Haiti, and built her own little business as a seamstress, making beautiful clothes for the rich Creole families in the Quarter and on Esplanade Avenue. This neighborhood must have looked so bright and promising then.

Now some of the houses on St. Philip Street looked on the verge of collapse. Three houses in particular were in a terrible
state, overgrown with vines, their windows either boarded up or smashed. One was leaning sideways and looked as though one push would topple it completely. Parched boards hung loose from the frame, and the collapsing house had been tagged with black paint. It was amazing those three houses were still standing at all.

“There are more than six thousand blighted properties in the city right now,” her father told them. “Some were ruined by the flood waters after the levees broke, but some were in a bad state for years. It’s a difficult issue, because people feel really strongly about it.”

“They think all the houses should be fixed up?” Ling asked.

“That would be ideal, but it’s not really possible. Not here, not anywhere. But some people, naturally enough, don’t want to see their neighborhoods decimated, with all the old properties pulled down and replaced with something new that doesn’t have any character or history.”

“That sounds pretty sensible to me,” Ling said. “I think I’m on their side.”

“But,” warned Rebecca’s father, “there are other equally sensible people who don’t want their streets ruined by boarded-up buildings, or houses that are dangerous and decrepit. They don’t want their kids playing there. They want to live in a neighborhood where they can feel proud and safe and happy, not one that looks empty and unloved.”

Empty and unloved
, Rebecca thought, thinking of Frank, and his sad-eyed expression.

“How do you think people feel here?” Ling asked him. “Here in Tremé, I mean.”

“I think a lot of people probably feel both things,” Rebecca’s father said. “They don’t want the neighborhood stripped bare, with all its history removed. All its
soul
. But you don’t want to feel as though you’re the only one who cares. You don’t want to live in a place that’s been left to rot or fall down around you.”

Rebecca thought of what Lisette had said to her, the day they walked together to Tremé. Rebecca had been talking about the way people knocked down old buildings and just swept the past away. “The past doesn’t go away,” Lisette had told her. “You just can’t see it anymore.” They were standing right here on St. Philip Street, just as she and her father and Ling were doing today.

Rebecca looked at the three falling-down houses. Soon those houses would be gone, and their histories — everyone who’d lived and died there — would be invisible.

“You buying that house?” Someone was shouting at them from the steps of the next house. It was an old black lady, her face poking around her screen door.

“No, ma’am,” Rebecca’s father said. “We’re just looking.”

“Looking to buy another house around here?”

“No, ma’am,” he said again, walking toward the lady’s steps. She pulled the screen door closer, like a shield.

“Good. We don’t need any more people like you coming here
and buying up our houses. How can
our
children afford to live here when you trying to make it like the Quarter?”

“I hear what you’re saying, ma’am, but really — we’re just tourists.”

“Tourists?” She humphed. “The man who owns that house now, he’s no different from a tourist. Here five minutes at Mardi Gras, and you never see him out sweeping the street. Only time you ever hear from people like him is when they’re calling the police, complaining the second line’s making too much noise. Complaining when the kids practicing after school! They want the pretty house, but then they decide everyone else in the street too ugly.”

“I’m real sorry about that, ma’am.” Her father looked quite chastened, as though he were a kid caught doing something wrong.

The screen door closed, and then opened again. This time a teenager stood in the doorway, and Rebecca recognized him right away.

“You’re Raphael, right?” Rebecca asked. “We were with your aunt on Sunday. In the car on Rampart Street?”

“I remember,” he nodded, smiling. “I’m Raf. My aunt is the only person who calls me Raphael.”

“Raf,” repeated Rebecca, smiling back at him. “I’m Rebecca, and this is my friend, Ling. And this is my father, Michael Brown.”

“Maw-maw, they friends of Aunt Viola!” Raf called into the house. He stood for a moment, a mischievous grin flickering on his face, then stepped out onto the small porch.

“My grandmother says you all should go ahead and buy the house next door, but don’t go calling the police when someone plays their trumpet too loud!”

Rebecca laughed, liking Raf immediately.

Raf explained he was on his way back to school, so they agreed to walk together to Basin Street High. Raf and Ling strolled ahead, Ling asking a million questions a minute.

“It didn’t sound like Raf’s grandmother was too pleased we fixed that house up,” Rebecca whispered to her father. “Or maybe she just doesn’t like the people who bought it.”

“Well,” Rebecca’s father said, “gentrification improves neighborhoods, but it also changes them. House prices go up, rents go up, and the people who live here, maybe for generations, can’t afford it anymore. What makes Tremé a distinctive neighborhood may disappear altogether.”

“Becca — I was just telling Raf about the second line we saw here on Sunday,” Ling called over her shoulder. “I can’t believe some people complain about them.”

“Haters always trying to close things down,” Raf told them. “The police don’t want to give permits. TV news people saying that there’s a shooting or a stabbing, or people jumping on cars, and the whole thing has to end. My other grandmother, she says that as well. She says Sundays are for church, not running with
second lines. ‘One minute they dancing, next they drinking, next they fighting.’”

“Are they really dangerous?” Rebecca asked Raf.

“Sometimes there’s trouble,” he admitted, shrugging his shoulders. “But sometimes there’s trouble at a Mardi Gras parade, and nobody ever says
they
should be stopped. Anywhere you have people, you have trouble. And sometimes people just looking for a time and a place to make it.”

Rebecca thought about Toby Sutton, lying in wait for her somewhere in this city. At least, she thought, he wouldn’t think to look for her in Tremé.

The ghost girl on Rampart Street was nowhere to be seen, Rebecca was very relieved to observe, when they crossed back into the Quarter. She and Ling were signed up to start work later that afternoon, though even Ling’s enthusiasm waned when they were told it was less about gardening and more about clearing rocks and digging up weeds.