Darkest Fear

  Her brow furrowed. “I wonder . . . maybe Mom would let me come to New Orleans to see you?”

  “That would be awesome. You could stay here. I would love that.” Of course, as soon as the words left my mouth, I wanted to smack myself: I was living in a house of . . . aberrations. “Freaks” seemed too mean a word for the people I was enjoying living with, even Suzanne. But we were not normal.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry. Mrs. Hirsch was sympathetic, but she didn’t want Jennifer to come to New Orleans and stay with people she didn’t know. I was hugely, hugely relieved.

  It was obvious that Jennifer was really hurt I wasn’t coming back to see her, but every time I tried to psych myself up for it, I felt panicky. I did not want to go home. She tried to be understanding, but she couldn’t believe she had to get ready for college without me. We’d always planned to do it together, had talked about it a million times. Even two years ago she’d been planning her college wardrobe, pulling things out of her closet and examining them with an eye toward being a college freshman. I would lie on her bed, reading a magazine while she held up one outfit after another and asked my opinion.

  “Yeah, that seems okay,” I would say, or “No, that doesn’t seem New York-y, you know?” But more often than not I just had no idea, and she’d finally gotten exasperated.

  “Vivi, it’s not a good sign that your dyke best friend has more fashion sense than you do,” she’d pointed out, and I’d laughed.

  “I promise to let you go through my clothes,” I’d said. “Make sure they’re college-worthy.”

  Back when I was planning to go to college.

  I still planned to go. Someday. I wasn’t up for it now. Probably next year. Tia Juliana had tried to talk me into sticking with my plan, but in the end I’d convinced her that there was no way, and she’d notified Seattle University.

  Conversations between me and Jennifer became more strained the closer she got to leaving for school. I knew part of it was me and part of it was her going to a school that she didn’t want to go to.

  “So, they’re putting me on a plane in a couple hours,” she told me toward the end of August.

  “You and Helen?” I asked.

  “Yeah. We took all my boxes to UPS yesterday. They should get there soon.” She tried to look positive.

  “It might surprise you,” I said. “You might like it more than you think.” Our eyes met, and we both knew I was saying lame stuff a parent might say, because it was better to say that than something like, I know it’s going to suck. Wish I could help.

  • • •

  In Sugar Beach, my days had been all melty and surreal as I wandered through our house. I hadn’t begun to process what had happened—Mrs. Peachtree next door had offered to help me clean out my parents’ clothes, to take them to her church’s yard sale, but I’d just looked at her blankly.

  Now that I’d been here almost two months, my days had acquired a somewhat amorphous form: I woke up, had a cup of coffee with Matéo if he was around, and puttered around the house. Sometimes I’d clean the kitchen or vacuum or something, since no one else really seemed to. Twice a week Matéo made pickups and deliveries of the instruments he repaired, and I often went with him.

  One day we were eating fast food in the car, in between a delivery uptown and a pickup from a school in the Lakeview area, when he asked a question out of the blue:

  “Will we ever know?”

  I knew what he meant. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like we can go back to the Everglades and look for clues.”

  “Let’s go over what we know,” he said, and I stifled my impatience. We’d done that so many times already.

  “Your parents were killed a year and a half ago,” I said. “There was nothing special about the date: It wasn’t a holiday. It wasn’t your birthday.”

  “Right.” Matéo bit into his hamburger fiercely.

  “It looked like an accident. But because they weren’t positive, the police did an autopsy.” Keeping my voice gentle didn’t make these harsh facts any more bearable.

  “Right.”

  “They found that both of your parents’ hearts were missing. When they reexamined the car, they found that there was nothing wrong with it—no reason for it to catch on fire or explode.”

  “So the cops thought maybe my folks were killed somewhere else, then put in their car, and then the car was burned to hide the evidence.” Matéo stuffed his burger wrapper back into the bag and started the engine. “But they never found any other clues.” He let out a heavy sigh and headed down Carollton Avenue toward the lake. “Okay, now your parents.”

  “We’ve been over this a bunch.” And it still wasn’t easier to talk about.

  “I know, but what gets me is, you were gone for a while, maybe an hour, maybe more,” Matéo said.

  “Probably a couple of hours. The sun went down,” I remembered.

  “Then you came back and waited to see if there was any danger.”

  There had been a large azalea bush, I remembered. Despite the smell of blood and death and fear, I’d remained there silently for minutes, my animal instinct taking over.

  “Yeah.”

  “But your mom was still alive,” Matéo went on. “She still had her heart. So the guy must have stopped long before you came back. It wasn’t you coming back that made him run away, right? Because by the time you got there, he was gone. You didn’t see anything while you waited.”

  “Right,” I said slowly, thinking.

  “So what stopped him? Or her, or them,” Matéo amended.

  “Maybe my mom fought back too hard? Maybe my dad had really injured him, before . . .”

  We sat there silently for a minute; then Matéo said, “I think you should ask Tia Juliana. See if there are any other instances in our family or in a haguari community where someone’s heart got stolen.”

  The idea was reasonable but not appealing. I still hadn’t told her I was in New Orleans. Basically, I was lying to her every time we talked.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “And what about all the people you know? You said there were a million haguari here. Can’t you ask around?”

  “I’ve thought of that,” said Matéo. “But is it safe for me to do that? What if the murderer is connected to us somehow, or is here in New Orleans? If I start asking around, will it be dangerous?”

  “I don’t know. But yeah, it might be.”

  “We gotta think of something,” he said. “We just need to . . . think of something.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BUT WE DIDN’T GET VERY far. I tried to call Tia Juliana, but her housekeeper told me the family was at the beach and wouldn’t be home for a few days. Sometimes I was sure that if I thought hard enough, the answer would come to me, and sometimes I just wanted to never think about it again. We didn’t want to give up, but right now we seemed to see nothing but blank walls in front of us.

  About a week after Jennifer left for Columbia, Aly came home from work and tossed a flyer onto the kitchen table.

  “TGIF! And ooh, it smells good in here,” she said, giving Matéo a kiss. He was making pork chops for dinner, and I was about to faint from the delicious aroma. Dana was peeling sweet potatoes, and I was shelling fresh lima beans, which I’d never known existed. My mom had always made the frozen kind.

  “What’s this?” I asked, wiping my hands on my shorts.

  “It was on the bulletin board at the dry cleaner,” Aly said. “I don’t know, I thought you might be interested. Okay, let me get out of my work clothes and I’ll set the table.” She breezed out of the kitchen, her heels clicking on the wooden floor.

  I looked at the flyer. It was a HELP WANTED sign for a coffee shop. Tink leaned back in his chair and read it over my shoulder. Tink Owens was the last live-in member of the household, and was a total sweetheart. He worked for the Department of  Wildlife and Fisheries, patrolling the millions of Louisiana’s bayous and lakes for people hunting or fishing illegally, or pol
luting, etc. He was an enormous blond offensive-lineman kind of guy, really nice but really big and loud. When he was home, the energy in the house totally changed. Matéo had told me Tink had lived here last year for several months, then with his boyfriend for a couple months; then the boyfriend had kicked Tink out, and now he’d been back for about six months.

  “I’ve gone past that coffee shop,” Tink said. “It’s uptown, in the Garden District.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But why did Aly give this to me?” I already paid rent, and I didn’t actually need more money. The insurance company had tried to suggest my parents had done a murder-suicide situation, but in the end, faced with a lawsuit by a lawyer Ms. Carsons had hired, had been forced to pay up. It still amazed me how people could put a dollar amount on a life. I would give all the money back, and a million times as much, to have one more day with my parents.

  “It was just an idea,” Aly said, coming into the kitchen. Her ponytail, tank top, and cutoff shorts made her look more like herself. The first time I’d seen her work persona, all polished and in grown-up clothes, I’d barely recognized her. “I thought you might be tired of watching Téo sand things. You could get out into the world, meet some people.”

  Now I was mortified. Of course I was here too much. I was here all the time. Everyone else came and went because they had actual lives, but I was just . . . always here. I opened my mouth, starting to stammer, and Aly smiled and put her fingers against my mouth.

  “Don’t even go there. We love having you here. I hope you stay here as long as you want, for years and years.” She brightened, hit by a sudden thought. “You could be our live-in nanny.”

  Matéo nodded in approval and leaned over to kiss Aly’s dark hair. “Thinking ahead. Smart woman.”

  “But working in a coffee shop would be a relatively low-pressure way of dipping your toes back into society.” Aly pulled open a drawer and grabbed some silverware. “Anyone know who’s home right now and wants dinner?”

  “I’ll go bang on doors,” Tink said, and lumbered out of the kitchen.

  “Get out into the world?” I asked.

  Aly nodded, and Matéo went back to the stove. “You don’t leave the house much, sweetie. New Orleans is such a neat place; there’s so much to explore. Seems like it might be good for you.”

  Well, that was putting a fine point on it.

  “I go running sometimes,” I said. “I’ve run all the way to Bayou Saint John. That’s miles.”

  “Did you interact with anyone?” she asked kindly.

  “Um.”

  “Uh-huh.” She gave me a knowing look. I considered mentioning going to the grocery store with Matéo, or going out to dinner with them, but the look on her face stopped me.

  I thought about it all through dinner. Tonight it was six of us sitting around the long wooden kitchen table: Matéo, Aly, me, Dana, Suzanne, and Tink. My whole life, dinnertime had been the three of us: Mami, Papi, and me. We had always eaten at the dining room table with a tablecloth and candles and wine for the grownups, except for movie night, when we ate on trays in the living room. Papi and Mami both cooked, and in the last couple of years I cooked sometimes too. Jennifer loved eating at our house, with the table set and the candles lit. At her house people ate when they wanted, wherever they wanted, and Mrs. Hirsch hardly ever made an actual dinner. They had a lot of takeout. So mealtime at Jennifer’s house was fun for me.

  Now dinner was different almost every day—sometimes just me, sometimes all of us, sometimes just a few. Sometimes we would go out—there were so many great, not too expensive restaurants. But nights like this were my favorite: people sharing in the cooking, a bunch of us here. Mostly I ate quietly while my roommates took turns talking about school or work. At twenty-four James was the oldest, and though he was kind of shy, he told amazing stories about the weird stuff he encountered during his various medical rotations. I loved hearing about his hospital shifts, but he was rarely here for meals. Suzanne was twenty-three, and had stories of her own about law school. She was in her second year, but had already decided to focus on business law, which I thought sounded intensely boring. But after hearing about some of her international cases, I decided that even business law could be fascinating.

  Coco was twenty-two and had been working in restaurants since she was fifteen. She was already saving money to open her own café someday, and we’d had a lot of fun conversations where we planned the seasonal menus.

  Then there were Aly and Tink, whose jobs had the most potential for drama. Aly’s office had just raided a Mardi Gras krewe for undeclared taxes, but it had turned into much more when they’d found drugs hidden inside some Mardi Gras floats. Aly had actually had to pull her gun, and my mouth dropped open as she described slamming a guy against a wall, kicking his feet apart, and cuffing him.

  And just last week Tink had busted some Vietnamese fisherman netting undersized alligators. It was legal to take alligators of a certain size, but apparently some Vietnamese restaurants thought younger gator meat was more tender.

  Aly, Tink, and Matéo were only three years older than me, but next to any of my roommates I felt like a lost kid, not knowing what I wanted to do or be. I had no direction, as if the death of my parents had permanently derailed my future and made all my plans pointless. Now I realized that living in a house of interesting people had made it less necessary for me to be interesting myself. Not that working in a coffee shop would make me interesting. But being here all the time felt like hiding, and was definitely not putting me on the path to having a life. And I needed to make a life—re-create it. My life had gotten stripped away. I didn’t have any choice—I needed to create a new one.

  The next day was Saturday. Bravely I plugged the address of the coffee shop into my GPS and headed uptown. I’d driven around with Matéo, but uptown was still new to me. New Orleans reminded me of the Roman two-headed Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, past and future. So much of this city seemed to look to the past: the beautiful Victorian houses, cute streetcars, Southern graciousness, and old-world charm. But there was also a modern sensibility and an acceptance of differences that helped me understand why so many haguari would want to settle here.

  Like Matéo’s neighborhood, uptown was a collection of grand streets with large, beautiful houses next to streets with small, sometimes run-down houses. They were stitched together block by block, all kinds of people living literally next door to one another. In Sugar Beach, neighborhoods had been more all of one thing or all of another. New Orleans was less homogenous.

  The coffee shop, Ro’s, was on the corner of Magazine and Leevey Streets, about six blocks from the Mississippi River. It was much bigger than I expected and had its own parking lot in the back. It looked like it had once been a store, a grocery store maybe, with large plate-glass windows and weather-beaten doors with glass insets. Two bow windows in front had tables nestled in them, complete with comfy-looking padded chairs.

  My chest started to feel fluttery as I circled the block and parked in the parking lot. “Quit being such a weenie,” I told myself. “You’re eighteen and this is a coffee shop, not NASA.”

  Before I had time to chicken out, I got out of the car and headed purposefully for the sidewalk. The low idling of an engine made me pause, and I looked back to realize with amazement that I hadn’t turned the car off. I grabbed the door handle and found that I had hit the lock switch on the door without thinking. For a moment I stood there, stunned at my stupidity, and then I remembered that unless I clicked the lock thing on the key fob, not all the doors would be locked. Sure enough, the back passenger side door opened, and I climbed in, reached to the front, and turned the engine off.

  I locked the car and put my keys in my purse. Once more into the fray. My first big step forward was marred by the long strap of my purse getting caught on the side mirror and yanking me back.

  Vivi, please, I thought. I stood quietly for a minute, getting a grip on myself. I’d never applied for a job bef
ore. The only summer jobs I’d had were for my parents, working in their offices or helping them around the house for minimum wage. Once Jennifer and I had tried to open our own snowcone stand with her dinky toy snowcone machine. We tallied up how many snowcones we’d have to sell before we’d be rich enough to retire forever. It was five hundred. At ten dollars a snowcone. We were nine.

  Our business was ill-fated.

  There was a back door leading off the parking lot, but I didn’t know if it was for customers or just employees. Probably safer to go around to the front. The sidewalk leading to Magazine Street was narrow and broken, disrupted by thick tree roots that made the concrete buckle dangerously. A thin strip of neglected grass separated the sidewalk from the street, and I thought how pretty it could be if someone planted something there.

  At the front doors at last, I took a deep breath and stepped inside. The scent of coffee tickled my nose, along with the smells of cinnamon, floor cleaner, and sugar. There was one main room, filled with small, square, dark tables, each with two or three chairs. Most of the tables were filled. Some people had pushed two tables together to sit in a group.

  The back wall was divided in half by a hallway that I guessed led to the parking lot. It was painted with warm ocher tones, stippled and overlaid with darker colors to make it look old. On the left-hand side was a long counter framed by glass-fronted display cases of baked goods: muffins, cakes, pies, scones. The wall behind the counter was mirrored, and What We Got was written on the mirror in colored markers. Beneath that was a list of drinks and food items and their prices. A heavyset girl with short, dyed black hair and a nose ring smiled at me as she wiped the counter. Several tattoos showed from beneath her striped T-shirt. “Hi. What can I get you?”

  I held up the flyer. “I’m here about the job?” My cheeks burned, and I felt awkward and inexperienced.

  But she just nodded. “Cool. I’ll get the manager.” She lifted a hinged part of the counter and went down the hallway toward the back of the building. A minute later she returned and smiled again. “Manager’s office is the second door on the left.”