Whispers of the Bayou (31 page)

I had a sister. A twin. An identical twin.

Her name was Cassandra, and we shared a bedroom and a playroom and a nanny and a whole family.

I called her Cass.

She was my constant companion.

One by one, things began to click into place, little clues and hints that somehow I had known this all along.

Was that why I had insisted on naming my child Tess, because it sounded much the same? Tess, Cass. No wonder so many people had been confused about the name since we got here.

How could AJ never, ever have told me?

The ice bag began to slip, so I reached up and moved it back into place, finally understanding why she had warned me about coming here. How else could you safely tell someone news that was this big?

How else could you tell someone that truly half of who they were had been cut out of their life in an instant and then erased from their mind?

Holding the ice bag, I rolled onto my side and drew up my knees, a deep overwhelming sadness piercing my heart. I didn’t remember Cassandra, not yet, but even so I missed her, not to mention that I selfishly missed that other part of who I was. Tears filled my eyes and slid sideways down my face as I thought of yesterday’s memory at the mirror in the hall. How many times as a child and a teenager had I stood at a mirror and looked at myself and felt somehow a little less lonely, a little less alone? I wasn’t some pathetic egotist who found pleasure in looking at herself. I was a girl who was trying to bring back someone she forgot she had lost.

I wanted to know more. I wanted to know how she died. I wanted to hear everything, down to the most seemingly insignificant detail. I wanted to learn how life could end for one of us and not the other.

Somehow, still overcome with the shock of the sudden revelation, I must have simply shut down or either drifted off to sleep. I came back to awareness with a start when Deena returned, a tray in her hands, my nostrils filling with the smell of soup. Chicken soup.

I sat up, startled, realizing that something had changed, that the lighting in the room was different than it had been before I closed my eyes.

“What time is it?” I asked. Rubbing my face, I felt frightened, as if I had just been not in sleep but in some altered state, some other reality.

“Almost four. You been sleeping for hours. I was getting worried so I just called my doctor and he told me the symptoms to watch for, in case you
got a concussion.” She went on to list them—headache, abnormal sleepiness, dizziness, confusion, lack of feeling or emotion, anxiety, blurred vision, and vomiting—concluding with the suggestion that she take me to the hospital.

“No,” I said, assessing my state. “Except for the long nap, I don’t have any other symptoms. I’m fine, I’m sure.”

I didn’t add that I
was
feeling a weird combination of confusion, a lack of emotion, and anxiety—but I felt sure that had nothing to do with a concussion and everything to do with the revelation that had come just prior to it.

“Well, at least you ought to eat something,” Deena said, placing the tray she was holding on to my lap, a simple arrangement of soup, spoon, crackers, and juice. Though I wasn’t hungry, I took a bite of the soup to be polite. “I also got a surprise for you.”

“It seems to be my day for surprises,” I replied, pulling away the cracker I’d been about to bite into.

“You’ll never guess who just showed up at the back door.”

“Who?”

She walked to the banister and leaned over the side, calling down for whoever it was to come on up.

“It’s your daddy,” Deena said, returning to me. “Says he’s come to town for Willy’s funeral. I didn’t even realize he was all that fond of Willy.”

Suddenly, my father bounded up the stairs and into the room. I was so surprised to see him that I nearly spilled my soup.

Coming on the heels of my revelations about Cassandra, my father’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Still, he was here now and seemed happy to see me. He leaned down and placed an awkward kiss on my cheek, telling me how much he missed me, that he couldn’t believe our paths had not crossed for several years. I tried to smile in return but wasn’t very successful.

Once Deena left the room, my father pulled over a chair and sat near the bed, asking about my fall and the lump on my head. I assured him it wasn’t anything serious. We made small talk, me asking about his flight, him asking what I was doing here. I wasn’t sure how to explain, so I just
said that Willy had wanted me to come down so he could see me all grown up before he died.

Ignoring the suspicious expression on his face, I asked if he’d brought Abby and the kids, but he said no, that he had come alone. To my mind, it was just as well. He had remarried when I was seven years old to an Arizona divorcee with two surly children and a big mansion in Tucson. Though he played the dutiful stepfather to her children, she had no interest in reciprocating with me, though I’d always had the feeling she encouraged him to maintain those ties himself. Eventually the contact between father and daughter had dwindled down to a single, annual phone call on Christmas Day. Considering how very little he and I had to talk about, it seemed to be enough.

Now, in this moment, with me feeling so emotionally vulnerable, I wondered if I dared bring up the subject of Cass. I had so many questions, and I realized that this might be my first real opportunity to connect with my dad in years.

“Can I ask you something?” I said, feeling inexplicably nervous, as I handed him the tray.

“Sure,” he replied, taking it from me and setting it on the floor out of the way.

“Would you mind talking to me about Cassandra?”

He seemed startled, to say the least. Eyes wide, he hemmed and hawed.

“I didn’t know…I thought…You weren’t…”

“You thought I didn’t remember,” I said for him.

“Yes. Janet always said you had forgotten her and that we were never supposed to bring it up.”

“That was true,” I replied, “until today.”

I went on to explain how I had found out, passed out, and thus turned out with a bump on my head. When I finished, he stood and went to the window, looking as though he’d rather be anywhere but here. He didn’t reply for a long time, and as I waited for him to speak, I just sat there and watched him.

Richard Fairmont had always been a handsome and sophisticated man,
with a chiseled jaw, perfect hair, and the elegant yet aggressive carriage of someone who knows what he wants and is determined to get it. In the few times I had seen him in the last ten years, he had always been perfectly groomed, a Southwest tan lending a healthy glow to his angular face. Looking at him now, I decided that he was all polish, no substance, a very handsome, sophisticated, empty shell of a person.

“What would you like to know?” he said finally, turning back to look at me.

“Anything,” I replied. “What was she like? What were we like? Were we close? Do you still miss her? How did she die?”

“Ah,” he said, moving back to sit again in the chair. “Just a few simple questions like those, huh?”

We shared a sad smile and then I sat back and waited for him to speak.

He talked, slowly at first, describing his beloved daughter who had died. He said that we had been mirror image identical twins, which meant that we were the same, but opposite. She was the left-handed one, the aggressor, the braver soul. I, on the other hand, had been much more timid, less gregarious, less verbal. He said that we were together constantly, often living in our own separate world, speaking our own unique language. Our favorite game was follow the leader, with her always the leader and I the follower. We also had another game, he said, a trick of sorts that we were so good at that they would troop us out at parties to entertain the guests.

“What trick?” I interrupted, goose bumps rising up on my arms. “Where?”

“One of you would stand in front of that long mirror near the front door and make some motions one after the other, like raise your hand, wiggle your fingers, stick out your tongue. Then you’d turn around and do more things like that toward the doorway, which was directly opposite. Only that time you weren’t doing them facing a mirror, the other one would step out and stand there so that you were doing them facing each other. It was uncanny. No matter how long it went on, it was like each of you knew what the other was about to do and they would match it, movement for movement, so closely that it was just like you were still doing it with
the mirror. The first few times, I thought your series of movements was all choreographed and memorized, but then one day I realized it wasn’t. You just knew what to do, exactly when the other one did what they did. It was bizarre.”

I closed my eyes, the mystery of the mirror in the front hall now solved.

“How did she die?” I asked softly.

“It was so ridiculous, so tragic. Her favorite little nightgown was too long, a hand-me-down from a cousin that she insisted on wearing whenever she could. One night, she must have had a bad dream, because she got up to come in our room or go get the nanny, we were never sure. Anyway, she must have tripped on that stupid long nightgown, because she fell down the stairs to the second floor and broke her neck. She died instantly.”

I shook my head, unable to fathom the heartbreak that must have resulted from such a tragic incident. Even now, my father’s words sounded removed somehow, like a well-rehearsed speech that he’d learned to give in order to assuage the pain.

“And that’s why my mom killed herself?”

“Yasmine was never all that strong of a person anyway,” he said, “but after we lost Cass, she really went off the deep end. Her grief was unbearable. I always said it would have gotten better if she just could have held out, but she wouldn’t. The very night after the funeral, she went outside to the garden and hung herself from a tree.”

I gasped. “And just like that, in one fell swoop I lost a child and then a wife,” he added.

How utterly unsurprising that he’d put it that way in this moment, rather than saying the other truth, which was that in one fell swoop, I had lost a sister and then a mother.

“And so it was,” he continued, “like dominoes falling, one tragedy in my life creating another. First Cassandra, then Yasmine…”

“Then me?”

He shrugged.

“In a sense,” he said. “For a while at least, you were so far gone you were as good as dead. I didn’t know if we would ever get you back.”

I sat up straighter, leaning toward him.

“Then explain something to me,” I said, the question suddenly filling my mind, pounding out all others. “How is it that after losing your wife and daughter so tragically, you chose to let me go off to live with AJ? Didn’t you want to keep me with you? Hadn’t you already lost enough?”

He ran a hand over his face.

“I knew how much your aunt loved you. I knew she could do a better job of raising you than I could—especially considering the condition you were in.”

“Any other reasons?” I asked, feeling suddenly as though I needed to press him for more, for the self-oriented bottom line that always guided everything that he did.

“Sure, fine,” he snapped, rising to the occasion the way I knew he would, “what do you want me to say? That I had lost a child who looked exactly like you? It was easier for me to get over it if you weren’t always around, where I would have to see you and remember her.”

He left me by myself after that, saying he needed to run an errand in Baton Rouge that might keep him there for the night, but that he would see me at the viewing tomorrow. Errand or not, I knew that his departure was more about getting away from a tense and sad conversation, more about getting away from me.

The story of my life.

Feeling is deep and still; and the word that floats on the surface
Is as the tossing buoy, that betrays where the anchor is hidden.
Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.

I laid there and thought about what I could accomplish with the balance of the day. Though I wanted to search the top floor of the house for my grandmother’s paintings, I didn’t think I was up to going there again just yet. I needed to talk to Lisa, to update her on Colline d’Or and find out if she’d had any luck asking around about Jimmy Smith or the symbol of the cross in the bell, but according to Deena, she’d left earlier this morning and said she wouldn’t be back until dinner.