Paula Morris (2 page)

"You work in the French Quarter, right?" asked Rebecca.
Her father had given her a few pieces of information, in his usual scattered
way. He'd been completely distracted for the past two weeks, ever since he announced
that he was pulling her out of school and sending her to the Deep, Deep South
for months on end.

"In Jackson Square." Aunt Claudia nodded, breathless
with the exertion of walking to the one baggage carousel surrounded by waiting
passengers. "I read tarot cards. It was a quiet summer, but things are
starting to pick up again. Tourists and conventions and all that."

"Oh," said Rebecca. Suddenly her aunt's outfit was
making sense: It was her office wear, in a way. Though why her decidedly
nonsuperstitious dad thought Aunt Claudia would be an ideal guardian was even
more of a mystery.

"Your father called me from Atlanta," Aunt Claudia was
saying while Rebecca hauled her heavy black duffel from the carousel, blinking
hard so she didn't embarrass herself by crying. It was too soon to be missing
home and missing her father, but she couldn't help it. They'd flown to Atlanta
together, because he had to check in with his head office there before he
traveled to China. They'd said a miserable goodbye, her father flagrantly
sobbing like an overgrown baby.

Rebecca had to stop herself from thinking about how much she'd
miss him and how useless he'd be without her.

10

Why he'd agreed to this stupid posting, she didn't know. Usually,
he never went away for more than a week. The year she spent two weeks at summer
camp in Maine, he looked like a crazy person, deranged with worry, by the time
she got home.

"He goes to China on Tuesday," she managed to say.
Traffic was hissing past the glass doors, rain thundering onto the road between
the taxi stand and the parking garage. Aurelia helped lift the second of
Rebecca's bags onto the cart, and they walked outside. Despite the rain, it
wasn't cold at all, Rebecca realized, peeling off her NYU hoodie -- her dad had
promised her she could go to NYU for college -- and looking around.

So this was New Orleans -- small, wet, hot. The waiting cabs were
black-and-white, really beaten up. Rebecca's father told her once that all
airports looked the same, but she could tell she wasn't in New York anymore.

"Mama, should we wait for you here?" asked Aurelia, as
springy as a raindrop herself. Aunt Claudia looked puzzled for a moment and
then horrified.

"No, no! I don't want to leave you here alone! We'll all run
across the road to the lot together. It's only a little ... wet."

A grumble of thunder announced an even more intense burst of rain.
Rebecca could barely see the grim concrete walls of the parking garage across
the street. Her aunt was bedraggled as a patchwork rag doll by the time they found
cover in the garage.

"Best to stay together," her aunt said in a quiet voice,
almost to herself. She flashed Rebecca a bright smile. "Best

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to keep close. Only a little rain. Now, Aurelia, what does our car
look like? Is it blue or black?"

During the drive in from the airport, the city didn't look
promising. An empty, sand-colored canal ran alongside the highway for a
stretch, and there were billboards -- one for Louisiana seafood, one for a
strip club in the French Quarter -- that were obviously local, if kind of
tacky. But much of everything else looked like most other American cities.-
signs along the highway for fast-food restaurants, tangles of on- and
off-ramps, a clump of tall glass buildings downtown. In the distance, the
white-lidded Superdome looked like a bright bulb on this rainy night. Strange
to think of it as a place where thousands of people had been stuck, with very
little food or water or hope, for a whole week after the hurricane.

But once they were off the highway and the crowded main roads,
Rebecca could see something of the place her father had told her about. The
Garden District looked as beautiful as he'd promised, its narrow side streets
shadowed by giant oak trees, its houses pristine and picturesque. Many had tall
white pillars, painted shutters, and black iron gates and railings. Some had
long porches -- galleries, Aunt Claudia called them -- on their lower and upper
stories, extending down one whole side of the house.

"And this street we're driving along is Prytania," Aunt
Claudia explained.

"Britannia?"

"With a
P
--from the old
rue du Prytanée.
Based
on the ancient Greek Prytaneum, the place they honored Hestia,

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goddess of the hearth. The sacred fires were kept burning at the
Prytaneum. It was the center of village life."

"Here it's just the way we walk to school," Aurelia
added. She tapped Rebecca on the shoulder, pointing to a magnificent
coffee-colored mansion, set back from the street behind tall, wrought-iron
gates. "That's it there."

Temple Mead Academy was grand all right, Rebecca thought,
straining to get a good look at the sprawling pillared mansion. Although the
building was only three stories, it seemed to peer down at its neighbors, calm
and imposing, and a little snooty. It might be beautiful and old and all, but
Rebecca wasn't especially looking forward to her first day there.

Now they were passing a small old cemetery, the domed roofs of its
tombs visible above the cemetery's crumbling, mossy white walls. In New Orleans
the dead were entombed in aboveground vaults like these, Rebecca's father had
told her, because it was the French and Spanish custom, and people in New
Orleans liked anything that involved showing off their money. He also said the
city had a high water table: Bodies buried in the ground might bubble to the
surface after a heavy rain. Rebecca shuddered, thinking of corpses peeping out
of the wet soil like inquisitive worms.

The car jerked to an abrupt stop on Sixth Street, outside a house
much smaller and shabbier than either of its neighbors.

"Home sweet home," announced Aunt Claudia, fiddling with
the controls on her door: She couldn't seem to work out how to open it.
"At least it's stopped raining."

Rebecca climbed out of the car and stood for a moment

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on the damp sidewalk. The Verniers' wooden house was not only tiny
-- it leaned to one side in a perilous and possibly illegal way, almost
touching the house next door. The ramshackle cottage was painted a faded
yellow, and the shutters and front door were blue. A colorful hand-painted sign
that read VERNIER in pink letters dangled above the door. The tiny front yard
was a dense mass of greenery speckled with a few white flowers; and a banana
tree, fat rain drops balanced on its glossy leaves, drooped onto the small
front porch.

"Our cottage garden." Aunt Claudia gestured at the yard,
her bangles rattling. Rebecca climbed the rickety steps to the porch and walked
over to the rocking chair chained to the wooden railings. She didn't know about
"cottage garden": It looked like weeds. The view from the porch was
of the cemetery across the street -- or rather its high, dirt-streaked walls.
Just down the street was an entrance with tall gates. Aunt Claudia, fumbling
inside her giant crocheted bag for the keys she'd had in her hand just a minute
ago, followed Rebecca's gaze.

"Lafayette Cemetery's not a safe place," her aunt told
her. "Unfortunately. You should keep away."

"Why?" Rebecca had a sudden vision of dead bodies
reaching up to grab her, their stiff fingers dark with soil.

"Criminals and derelicts," said Aunt Claudia, pushing
open the door. "They wait for tourists to wander in so they can mug them.
Some poor soul was shot there just before the storm. Unless you're on one of
the big guided tours, it's not a safe place. That's why all the gates are locked
every afternoon. Really, you must promise me you'll never go there."

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Rebecca resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Aunt Claudia was just
as overprotective as her father. Didn't she know that Rebecca was used to
catching the New York City subway, walking through Central Park, hanging out
with her friends downtown?

Her aunt stood on the threshold, door ajar, key still in the lock,
as though she was waiting for Rebecca's solemn promise before they could move
inside.

"Here's Marilyn!" cried Aurelia. A small, long-haired,
black-and-white cat bounded through the doorway, past Aurelia's outstretched
hands and down the pathway. As though she'd been listening to their
conversation, the cat scampered down the street toward the cemetery gate.
Without hesitation, she squeezed under the gate's lowest rung and disappeared
into the darkness. Rebecca couldn't help laughing.

"That cat is setting a very bad example," sighed Aunt
Claudia, shaking her head. She seemed to have forgotten about making Rebecca
promise things, which was just as well: Rebecca was hoping to follow Marilyn's
lead sometime soon. She was from New York, after all: A small cemetery in a
tiny city like this didn't frighten her.

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***

CHAPTER TWO

***

THIS," AUNT CLAUDIA EXPLAINED, WITH A JINGLY shake of the
wrist, "is a shotgun house." They were all crammed in the narrow
hallway, just inside the front door, a panting Aurelia leaning against
Rebecca's damp luggage. Rain clattered onto the roof, sounding as though it was
about to break through at any second.

"It's
African,"
Aurelia added, and Rebecca was
confused until Aunt Claudia started talking about shotgun-house design coming
to New Orleans with the big influx of migrants from Haiti, two hundred years
ago.

"Some people will tell you it's called a shotgun house
because you can fire a gun from the front door to the back, and it would pass
straight through the house," she said, flapping one hand at the long
hallway that stretched the length of the house to the back door.
"Actually, it's derived from a West African word for 'house.' A true
shotgun house doesn't have a hallway, of course. Just one room stacked behind
another, in the Afro-Caribbean style ..."

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All the rooms of the house were off this skinny hallway, and there
seemed to be a surprising number of doorways: The house looked small from the
outside, but it stretched back forever.

"It may not be big as some of the mansions around here, but
it's older than most of the other houses in the neighborhood." Aunt
Claudia gestured into the front room, which Aurelia called "the
parlor." Rebecca peered in. Clearly, her aunt's taste in home furnishings
was as eclectic as her fashion choices. The living room -- sorry, parlor -- was
a chaotic, dusty jumble of Victorian sofas and Asian statues, and the
ancient-looking TV was shrouded with an embroidered shawl.

"We only get basic cable," Aurelia whispered, her mouth
drooping into a pout.

"It was built in the early nineteenth century," Aunt
Claudia called, bustling down the hallway, which was lined with gilt-framed
still-life paintings, bunches of wizened dried flowers, and gaudy, glossy
prints of various Indian gods. "For one of the many free people of color
who lived in New Orleans. There were more free people of color here then than
anywhere else in the United States -- even New York!"

Rebecca felt herself bristling: She wasn't up for months of jibes
about her hometown.

"And slaves, right?" she asked.

"Oh, yes." Aunt Claudia paused outside one of the doors.
"A huge population of slaves. They far outnumbered the white inhabitants.
New Orleans was a place where people were bought and sold, I'm sorry to say --
the largest center of

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the slave trade. This is the kitchen, where we seem to spend all
our time."

Rebecca followed Aunt Claudia into yet another cluttered space,
lined with cupboards that looked as though they were last updated in the 1950s.
A table topped with peeling Formica sat in the middle of the room, a battered
tarot deck wedged between a saltshaker and a bottle of Alligator Bite hot
sauce. Rebecca recognized it at once: Her father always kept a bottle of
Alligator Bite in the fridge at home. She'd never thought about it being a
Louisiana thing.

"There are still more black people than white in New
Orleans," Aunt Claudia told her, filling a battered kettle at the kitchen
sink. "Or at least there were before the storm. Nobody knows how many people
live here anymore. Everything is still in ... er, disarray. You hungry,
baby?"

Rebecca shook her head. She felt too churned up to even think
about food.

"I'm
hungry." Aurelia pulled a drooping,
chocolate-smeared box from the fridge. "Mama, can we have some cake?"

While the others argued about whether Aurelia should wait until
after
dinner for some cake, Rebecca gazed around the room. It was dilapidated and
messy, the exact opposite of the tidy, modern kitchen in the Browns' New York
apartment. And instead of a neat calendar hanging above the phone, plastered
across the peeling walls of the kitchen were ripped pages that looked as though
they came from one of those page-a-day desk calendars.

One page was for that day, October twenty-fifth. But all the other
dates seemed entirely random: one in March, one