Chapter Twenty-Five

twenty-five

BEFORE brEAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, after a night of uneasy, broken sleep, Jemma knocked on Russell's bedroom door. Honorine surprised her when she opened it.

"I need to talk to him," Jemma said.

After his awakening and outburst the previous night, and after the partygoers had escaped, Honorine had hustled her son back to his room, ignoring Jemma's pleas to ask him what he'd meant by "It's not over!"

Her grandmother stood aside and let her in.

Russell sat up in bed, looking nothing like the lunatic who'd ruined what was arguably not a great party last night. He appeared a little tired but otherwise fine.

Jemma sat on the side of the king-size bed, the silken covers rustling expensively beneath her.

"You said ‘It's not over.' What did you mean by that?"

Russell's gaze dropped to his lap. "I don't remember saying that."

"What do you remember about last night?"

"Nothing. One moment, I was in the dark, and the next, Maman and Simone were helping me into bed."

"You were in the dark? Where? Do you mean when we couldn't wake you?"

He struggled to find words, but Jemma refused to let him squirm his way out of this. He knew more than he was telling. She was determined to get the truth.

"I was in a dark place. I don't know where. It was cold."

It burns yet, one of the ghosts had said at the séance, followed by a confusing contradiction from another: So cold, so cold.

"Was anyone with you?"

"No," he answered too quickly.

The doctor then bustled his way in and Jemma was shunted out. She knocked on Fosette's door, and concluded that her cousin was probably still asleep when she didn't receive an answer. It was still very early, but after debating with herself for a moment, she went to Laurence's room. He opened the door immediately when she knocked.

Jemma grabbed his arm. "Russell said something last night. He said, ‘It's not over. They're coming.' Did you hear it?"

Laurence shook his head just as an enormous yawn escaped him.

"Something's not right."

"Look, he was in a coma or whatever it was for weeks. He wakes up, sees all the people…He was probably scared and confused. Wouldn't you be if something like that happened to you?"

When Laurence said it like that, Jemma wondered whether he was right and she was simply overreacting. After the doctor pronounced Russell healthy, she convinced herself everything was fine and they were all safe. Perhaps she'd been too hard on Russell when she questioned him that morning. More than anything else, Jemma wanted to believe Laurence when he said everything was okay.

With Russell awake and claiming he couldn't remember what had happened to put him in his comatose state, plans to flee New Orleans and head to Europe were renewed. Simone took the lead, as she'd been doing for weeks now, on scheduling shopping trips and organizing the extended vacation. A simple trip to Paris turned into a tour of the European continent, from England to France and Spain, and then perhaps to Germany and Italy.

Even the daily papers didn't hold their usual sway, pictures from a debutante cotillion in the society pages ignored.

"We're going to make up for lost time," Simone said at breakfast.

All they talked about was the party, the guests, how many men had watched Fosette in fascination, how many women had looked at Laurence with naked longing, how Russell had recovered with no ill effects and of course the upcoming trip.

Jemma wondered how the rest of the Duchons hadn't noticed what she had: the shrinking away, the unnerved expressions loosened by liquor. Thinking about Simone, how her aunt's face had worn triumph on it no matter how frightened anyone else appeared, Jemma asked her, "You don't remember how the night ended?"

"With my brother waking up?"

"With him screaming that ‘it's not over'? Am I the only one who heard it?"

Jemma looked at each of them, but her questions were quickly dismissed.

"Do you know how much luggage we'd have to pack for such a trip, Simone?" Honorine asked, her attention focused on the bread in her hands before the morsel disappeared behind her small smile. "They won't let us on the plane with all of it."

"We won't pack everything. That's the whole point of this overdue vacation. We're going to buy enough clothes and trinkets and souvenirs and furniture to have to ship it back on its own cargo liner, Maman!"

"But there's Mardi Gras to look forward to first," Russell said.

"You two have never been!" Simone screamed to Fosette and Laurence. "Oh, just you wait!"

The wait wasn't long, as Mardi Gras was the following week. Had Jemma thought the St. Patrick's Day parade in Chicago was a spectacle? She'd never been downtown for it, but she had heard stories of the green river, had seen the pictures of the crowds in the newspaper. Being in the thick of Mardi Gras had to be like that, she first thought, as her family found a tight spot that afforded them a view of the parade. No, St. Patrick's was nothing like this. Men dressed in tight sequined tops and fur-lined skirts threw beads from passing floats. Women in red-and-white-striped clown outfits danced on the sides of the streets. Despite the slight chill, other women marched in skimpy outfits with fringe on short skirts. People covered from head to toe in blue or green or yellow paint smiled down from balconies, their eyes hidden behind masks both beautiful and grotesque. And everywhere, people drank, poured drinks from their cups into their neighbors' mouths or held bottles high above their heads, using their open mouths as targets. The air was perfumed with liquor and smoke and the river, with Avon Persian Wood and Old Spice.

The Duchons were more subdued than Jemma expected, and she imagined that was an aftereffect of the big party. Even Simone wasn't crowing to the sky, simply watching the passing floats and krewes with silent, greedy interest. Jemma realized it was her first time being out in public with them all, save her mother. They'd squeezed themselves into an open spot as if they'd been coming to the parade for years, their mundane scraps of conversation as normal as any other family's.

"You're on my foot."

"That's not me—that's the man in front of you, with the huge hoofers."

Whispered giggles followed, making Jemma smile. This was the closest she'd felt to her family since she'd arrived in town.

A float carrying a Black krewe, white paint around their mouths and eyes, passed by. Feathers and horns adorned their hats, grass skirts their bodies. They grinned and waved, coconut shells sailing through the air to grabbing fingers.

Honorine tutted, hands folded tightly in front of her. Jemma looked for what was coming next, only to see a lone Black woman following the float. She wore a long dark blue dress with a ragged hem, a belt slung low on her hips. She kicked her booted feet up in an offbeat dance while twirling a chain of white beads around one arm.

"Magdalene!" Jemma yelled.

Magdalene stopped at the sound of her name, looking into the crowd. At the sight of Jemma's waving, she ran over. Before Jemma could ask what in the world she was doing in the parade, her friend's gaze stopped on Honorine, whose face held unfriendly recognition.

"Why, if it isn't one of the monkey krewe members putting on a one-woman show," Jemma's grandmother said.

Magdalene laughed. "Look at you, the Great White Twat! Get yourself inside before you tan." She then turned to Jemma. "You coming with me or you staying here with these sticks-in-the-mud?"

The nasty exchange happened so quickly that Jemma didn't have time to react, so when Magdalene put a hand on her arm to steer her away, she froze. Her friend's eyebrows rose as Jemma first looked to her cousin and brother. Before she could say anything, could decide whether to go with someone she cared about or stay with the family she felt a connection with—however new and tenuous—the woman backed away, blending into a passing group of musicians before she disappeared completely.

"How dare she?" Honorine muttered.

"What?" Jemma asked, her face burning with shame as she watched the magic of the day evaporating and felt powerless to stop it. Why had she hesitated when Magdalene reached for her? "How dare she ? Did you hear what you called her? Why would you say something like that?"

"It's all right, Jemma," Fosette started, grabbing her hand.

"No, Fosette. Not this time." Jemma shook her cousin off and backed away from the group. Matching grimaces marred Fosette's and Laurence's features, while Russell's, Simone's and Honorine's faces could have been carved from stone.

—

THE NEXT MORNING, JEMMA STARED down into her half-empty plate, passing time until she could escape and look for Magdalene. Her friend's expression just before she left Jemma standing in place at the parade had danced through her mind all night. In it was the unspoken accusation that Jemma was just like the rest of her family. But she wasn't. Surely Magdalene knew that. As she planned her next move, the scent of smoke rushed into the room.

"Is something burning?" she asked.

All conversation ceased, Simone glaring at her as if she'd just uttered a curse word at the table. Jemma looked at each of them in turn, their bland faces.

"Don't you smell that?" She stood up, dropping her napkin on her chair.

"Smell what?" Russell asked.

"The smoke." But as she looked at them, it was clear they smelled nothing unusual. She headed to the kitchen, where Inès stood at the sink, washing dishes, nearly elbow deep in suds. Jemma looked to the stove, which was off, and then back to her mother, who gazed at her with raised eyebrows. "Mama, is something cooking somewhere? I smell smoke."

Inès shook her head, returning her attention to her task, but in the brief second her mother had met her eye, Jemma sensed the lie. Her mother did smell the smoke and was pretending she didn't. She saw no point in questioning her about it, so she followed the scent to her mother's small sleeping space. She'd been in here only once before and hadn't taken in any of the details then, like the thin gingham curtain next to the bed. It was not an outside wall, so Jemma couldn't imagine what purpose the curtain served. Just as she reached out to move it aside and see what was behind it, a hand slapped her arm.

She turned to find her mother there.

"What's back here?"

Inès shook her head, pulling Jemma away, but she did it without much strength.

"Mama, I know you smell it. Ever since I came here I've smelled smoke in the air, and I think I got used to it. Maybe no one else in the family smells it anymore because they've lived here for so long. But you smell it, too, although you just act like you don't. It's gotten worse these last weeks, and it's strongest in here. Is that why you sleep in the washhouse so much now, because of the smell?"

When Inès said nothing, simply dropped her hand, Jemma leaned forward and snatched the curtain, revealing a small window, just big enough for her to fit through. She glanced back at her mother, whose blank expression revealed nothing, even as Jemma clambered over the bed. Right before she put her face up to the opening, she had an unpleasant vision of skeletal hands reaching through and pulling her inside.

And then she was staring into a black void, a burnt smell stinging her nostrils.

She strained her eyes but couldn't see anything. The next few minutes were a bustle of Jemma running back to the kitchen and rummaging through several drawers before finding a half-burnt taper candle and matches. When she entered the small sleeping room again, Inès had already moved the bed away from the wall, and Jemma scooted into the space between.

She lit the candle and thrust it through the window, the weak light exposing a plain room. It was windowless and slightly smaller than the home's kitchen. And there was nothing in it—no furniture, no forgotten detritus. Against one side wall, a shape jutted out. Years of dirt and grime had built up over a brick fireplace that hadn't been used in a long time. And yet something was burning, because the smell was thick and strong.

Jemma turned back to her mother. "Did you know about this room?"

Inès remained still for several moments, but finally gave a short nod. Before Jemma could say anything else, Honorine appeared. Jemma had the brief but horrifying thought that her grandmother would try to push her through.

"What are you doing here? You just leave the table in the middle of a meal and go wandering around—"

She cut Honorine off. "What is this place?"

"How should I know? I wasn't even aware this room existed."

"And you don't smell the smoke? It's damn near making me choke in here, and you're telling me you can't smell it?"

"That's exactly what I'm telling you. Do you want to join us at the table and finish your meal or not?"

Jemma exited the space, taking several deep breaths and still tasting the smokiness in the back of her throat. Although it was worse in the room she'd just left, it permeated the entire house.

"I don't believe that you can't smell it. Maybe you'd gotten used to it because you'd been trapped here for so long, but since you've all been able to go into the city proper, you have to smell it once you come back inside."

Honorine's pressed lips didn't bother opening with a reply. She simply followed her granddaughter back to the dining room. But Jemma had had enough. She walked through, ignoring the open stares on everyone's faces, and hurried out the back door, hoping that Magdalene was home. Even if she wasn't, Jemma vowed to lose herself in that damp wooded environment full of sweet air.

—

"THE WAY YOU LOOKED AT me," Magdalene said. "For a quick flash, it was just like the old lady looking at me."

"I'm sorry." Again, the fear of catching the insanity—the rot that plagued her family, the very grounds on which they lived—clawed at Jemma's insides. She couldn't be like them, and yet she'd been comfortable enough with them at the parade to hesitate when Magdalene had tried to take her away.

The two walked the trails with no destination in mind, until Jemma stopped and faced the older woman.

"Am I really like them?"

Magdalene took her time answering. Jemma was disappointed that her friend didn't immediately dismiss her fears, but then again, she felt she deserved the woman's ambivalence.

"Of course you're not just like them. But sometimes nastiness can rub off. Oh, don't look like that. You'll never be as awful as your grandma, no matter how hard you try. You've been living in that house for months now, and I know how much you wanted to be part of them, even though you can't really. I see it in you, how much you want that, how much it hurts you not to have it. They're your blood, but do they treat you like family, like they love you?" Magdalene took both of Jemma's hands in hers, as if trying to minimize the sting of her words. "When I'm hard on you about family, it's only 'cause I know what it's like. I don't mean the light-skinned thing. My family all looks like me. But my mama didn't like how different I was. If everybody else was going right, I went left. I couldn't stand getting my hair straightened and wearing stockings and gloves and all that. They wanted me to be a lady and I just wanted to be…me. So I left my home in Laurel when I was fifteen and bounced around for a while. I worked in a white lady's house until she kicked me out when I cussed at her for talking to me worse than she talked to her dog. I worked in kitchens, washing dishes, and worked on farms, picking oranges. When I got tired of that, I tried to go home. And my mama told me she thought I'd died and as far as she was concerned, I was dead." Magdalene leaned back against a tree, her gaze far away. "When she died, I went back to see her buried, but do you know I didn't feel anything?"

After that, only birdsong, far-off howls and nearby screeching accompanied the soft crunching of grass, dirt and leaves under their bare feet.

In the late afternoon, as Jemma, muddy and tired, made her way toward the house, she looked up to find Laurence walking out the back door, a dark smudge in the center of his forehead. So they'd been to Mass for Ash Wednesday. He leaned against a column, his arms folded.

"Congratulations. You've done it again," he said.

Fatigue made it difficult for Jemma to do much more than glare at him. All she wanted was to get upstairs and clean up before dropping into bed; she was too tired to eat dinner. But her brother seemed to want something from her.

"What are you talking about?" She sighed.

"You managed to piss off Grandmère by leaving the breakfast table and then disappearing for the whole day. If there's one thing she cannot stand, it's rudeness."

"She'd be better off getting mad at people's lies. Oh, never mind. How can she get mad at that when that's all she does?"

Jemma reached for the door, but Laurence put a hand on her arm, stopping her in place. "I know they've been awful to you. And you haven't given them back nearly as much as they deserve." At her curious expression, he went on. "It would drive Tante Simone absolutely insane if you went to Europe with us."

Jemma scoffed, moving toward the door again. "You'll have to give me a better reason to go with you than getting on that bitch's nerves. Why would I want to be stuck on an airplane for hours with this family and then stuck in a hotel or on a train for even more hours? As much as I'd love to visit Europe, I'll do it on my own, now that I have the money to do it."

"Just by yourself?" His scandalized expression amused her.

"I would think that after being trapped in this house for so many years, the first thing you'd want is to escape everyone. Go off on your own, see the city, the state, the world, without your grandmother and aunt and uncle and cousin all stuck to your side."

Laurence looked down at the ground. "It makes sense when you say it, but it's not easy. It's like we have some glue holding us to each other. Fosette can hardly go into town without wanting Grandmère or her maman right there beside her. Even the few times I walked down the lane for no other reason than that I could, I felt…strange. Uncomfortable. I'm not used to being on my own."

"I guess you'll adjust eventually. As for me, I'm fine coming and going on my own."

"So you won't reconsider coming with us? Sure, you could go anywhere you wanted now, but would you get the same satisfaction as from seeing how much your very presence annoys someone who doesn't want you to be there?"

"Is that supposed to make me want to go? Feeling hated? I get that here." Jemma looked at the sky, nearly free of clouds, wanting to avoid looking at her brother.

When Jemma examined her feelings for her family, her emotions ranged from heated disdain (for Russell), to pity (for Fosette), to loathing (for her aunt and her grandmother). Only Inès and Laurence prompted any affection at all.

"I'm going to be leaving soon, but maybe…we can keep in touch."

"I'd like that." A genuine smile touched his lips, free of his usual smugness. "You better get washed up for dinner."

"I'm really tired. Can you make an excuse for me? Please?"

"After what happened at breakfast? No way our grandmother is going to accept that. Besides, I wanted to talk to you about the ledger. I'm still wondering about that missing page."

After dinner, as much as Jemma would have enjoyed a discussion with her brother, she begged off. She was barely able to keep her eyes open through the meal.

"Tomorrow," she told him at the foot of the stairs.

"Tomorrow," he echoed.

—

THE NEXT MORNING, JEMMA WOKE feeling as if she rose from the dead. Glancing at the clock, she realized she'd slept right through breakfast.

Faint sounds reached her through the closed door. Voices from downstairs, some high-pitched laughter from Fosette. Yes, there had been so much more laughter lately.

Jemma climbed out of bed and opened the chifforobe. Unlike everyone else, she hadn't bought a trunkful of new clothes, but maybe today she'd go into Tremé and visit a few shops. Just as she was opening the door, a loud noise from outside froze her in place: a car horn and a long screech that assaulted her ears, even over the distance from the street and through the walls. She rushed downstairs as Fosette and Honorine came from the parlor and Simone and Russell hurried in from the dining room, followed closely by Inès. They gathered on the porch. Dennis stood in the middle of the front lawn, a pair of garden shears in one hand. When he looked back at the family standing together outside the front doors, his expression told Jemma everything.

On the other side of the wrought iron gate was a pickup truck carrying a load of cut logs. Or what should have been a load. Two dozen or more littered the road, several having rolled all the way against the fence.

That captured only cursory attention.

It was the car behind the truck that the Duchons stared at, because they recognized it.

The family car, its front connected to the truck's back end. Laurence, in the driver's seat, couldn't have been going that fast, because the hood was only slightly crumpled, not destroyed.

What killed him was the log that had shattered its way through the windshield, straight through his throat, nearly severing his head from his body.