The Heavens Rise (7 page)

When Ben didn’t respond, Brittany Lowe let out a long, pained sigh and hung up, leaving Ben staring at the hardwood floor, rings of sweat beading in between his face and the phone that was now trembling in his right hand.

Y
ou’re a liar
!”

The boy couldn’t have been any older than sixteen, but his outburst left Marissa Hopewell standing gape-mouthed a few steps from the entrance to her office building.

She was as startled by the kid’s physical appearance as she was by his shrill accusation. Business-casual pedestrians weaved around him as his thick patch of sandy-blond hair danced in the hot wind, the same wind that kept turning her breasts into a boat’s prow under her flapping peasant dress. He was older than he looked at first glance; it was his height—five foot two, tops—that made him look like a child, and an angry one at that. The rest of him was all milk-white skin, a small, round face dominated by huge blue eyes—bloodshot from hours of crying, it looked like—and a full-lipped mouth so generous it made him look like he was constantly sneering.

He looked vaguely familiar, too. Like a child actor she’d seen play bit parts in movies over the years.

Bev Legendre,
Kingfisher
’s ad sales director, put a protective hand on Marissa’s shoulder, while the other ladies they’d just had lunch with hovered close by, deciding whether or not to call the security guard.

“I’m sorry. But I don’t know who you are,” Marissa tried in her best maternal voice. But the kid screwed his eyes shut and shook his head as if her soothing tone was enough of an accusation to rival the one he’d just made.

“You had a fight with him. Before he did it. Before he jumped. But you just left that part out, didn’t you?”

“
Young man,
how ’bout you calm yourself down and—” Bev cut in, with a tone of whiskey-voiced authority. Marissa placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder and gave her a slight nod. Bev withdrew and went to join the other women, a few of whom were now stationed inside the lobby doors, pretending not to stare and doing a bad job of it.

“You’re a friend of Marshall Ferriot’s?”

Instead of answering, the kid said, “I talked to everyone who was at the table that night and they said your column was crap!”

“Well, there’s no accounting for taste.”

“How about lying? Is there any accounting for
lying
?”

She’d regretted her wisecrack as soon as it was out of her mouth, but when the bundle of hostility a few feet away reacted with that dreaded accusation yet again, she had to work to unclench her fists. She’d averaged three hours of sleep a night since the horrors she’d witnessed in the Plimsoll Club, and reliving it all again for the column her editor had leaned on her to write certainly hadn’t helped much. In fact, it had resulted in her first visit to Sunday services in months, which had thrilled her mother no end, but left Marissa feeling a little desperate and weak.

But one thing was for sure; the teenager before her was in a lot more
pain than she was, and she was willing to endure another few insults to find out why.

But had she
lied
?

It was an op-ed column, for Christ’s sake. Teen suicides had been the focus, not the gory blow-by-blow of Marshall Ferriot’s horrific and fatal jump. Not
her
. But maybe that was just it. Lies of omission were the worst kind, really, maybe because they were so damn prevalent. Was that what he was accusing her of? Some unpleasant words exchanged with the victim before his leap and suddenly she was, what? A part of the story?

Come on, girl. Don’t act like you haven’t thought it yourself over the past few nights, staring up at the ceiling, remembering the soullessness in his eyes when he hit that window. Wondering if maybe you’d tipped a crazy man over the edge with that cute little line about having dinner with snakes.

“I’m very sorry about what happened to your friend,” she said.

“He wasn’t my friend,” the kid muttered. And something about this admission seemed to make him more present; he registered their audience inside the lobby and his eyes widened with embarrassment. And there was that wet sheen again, but he quickly blinked it away.

“Then what was he?” she asked.

“His mother, she was being rude. Asking you questions about your family. Your
people
. Some of the other people at the table, they thought it was racist.”

Well, glad I wasn’t the only one,
Marissa thought.

The boy continued. “But then Marshall . . .” And Marissa saw for the first time that uttering the guy’s name seemed to make her surprise visitor sick to his stomach. “Marshall . . . he asked you something about snakes . . .”

“Yes. He did . . .”

And it pained her to answer. It made her realize that yes, there was plenty of weirdness before Marshall’s big leap, and she’d left it all out.
Maybe if she’d taken a deep breath while she was writing the damn thing. If she hadn’t rushed through it and let her sleeplessness get the best of her. And maybe she’d left out those pesky details because she didn’t want to be writing the damn column in the first place. The whole thing felt gruesome and invasive and she couldn’t find the right words to describe that mind-bending night. Hell, she’d also left out the part about how Marshall’s mother, a woman who had radiated contempt for Marissa just moments before, had somehow ended up sobbing in her arms, sobbing for a son who would be declared brain-dead when he was wheeled into Ochsner Medical Center an hour later, and for a husband who had died breaking their son’s thirty-one-story fall.

“And you said something back,” the kid said, only his voice had gone soft, and maybe that was because Marissa couldn’t look him in the eye anymore.

“He asked me if I could recognize certain snakes in the wild and I said I was more worried about the snakes I might have to have dinner with.” And as soon as the words left her mouth, she saw the soulless look in Marshall’s eyes again, the lattice of cuts on the boy’s face. And . . .
Oh my God. Holy mother. He’d
said
something! He actually said something and I plum forgot it with everything that—

She didn’t want her struggle to remember Marshall Ferriot’s last words—
maybe
they’d be his last words; he wasn’t technically dead yet—to show on her face, not with her tiny accuser still standing right there, looking calm and focused now that she’d been thrown off her game.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” The boy said. “That he said something . . . before the window gave way . . .”

“I put . . . That was it. He said,
I put a
 . . . And then. That was it. The window gave and he was gone. He and his father . . . just gone.”

His slight nod told her she’d just given him what he’d really come for, that her sudden recollection matched what the other guests at
Table 10 had told him. And only then did she stop to consider how remarkable it was that this quaking teenager had managed to get to all of those people in just a few day’s time. Her column had gone up on the website just the day before, and it wouldn’t be in the print edition until Monday. So, either he’d done his investigative work in a day, or he’d been working this since it happened. Working it, or living it, she wasn’t quite sure, given that the kid’s connection to Marshall Ferriot still wasn’t clear. Either way, holy crap! Who
was
this little guy?

“Is that why you went to church with your mother last Sunday? ’Cause you feel responsible for what happened to Marshall Ferriot?”

“That’s stalking, son.”

“Oh, but if I was you, it’d be journalism, right?”

“It’ll
all
be semantics when my mother pulls the pepper spray.”

“And you still won’t have answered my question.”

“I went to church because I haven’t been sleeping well since it happened and I believe in
something,
so I thought it might help.”

“Did it?”

“Yes. But so did wine.”

“My mother drinks wine to go to sleep too.”

“Yeah, well, if I had to deal with your mouth every day, I might need wine to get up in the morning.”

“That’s nice.”

“I see. So
nice
was your objective here?”

“Well, if your objective is
not
to answer my question, then—”

“Tell you what. If one of those nice ladies over there steps in front of a truck by mistake later today, you gonna feel responsible because you shot off your mouth at them before they had time to digest their lunch?”

“It’s not the same thing and you know it—”

“Don’t tell me what I
know,
young man.”

“He bashed out a plate-glass window with a metal folding chair and threw himself against it. He took a
running start,
for Christ’s sake!”

“I know what he did. I was there. I saw it!”

“Yeah, but you didn’t
write
it. No, you wrote all about teen suicides and mental health resources in high schools. Oh, and you took a bunch of pot shots at
my
high school because everybody who goes there is rich—”

“Rich
and
?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“The answer’s no. I don’t feel responsible. I think Marshall Ferriot was clearly unbalanced and it wasn’t going to take much to tip him.”

“I’ll say,” the kid growled under his breath.

“But you’re asking the wrong question.”

“How so?”

“You should ask me if I regret saying it.”

He was regarding her for the first time without open hostility, and she felt the tension in her chest turn into a vague wash of heat that ran down into the pit of her stomach.

“Do I think he tried to jump out that window because of me? Hell, no. But what I said to him that night might be the last words he ever hears. And they were unkind and they were meant for his mother. So yes, I regret saying it. I do. But if you’re after some kind of truth with me today, son, let me tell you the only thing I know to be true, one hundred percent. Nothing in life is under our control except how we treat people. Nothing.”

It didn’t look like she’d knocked the wind out of him, but those big, bloodshot eyes of his had wandered to some point just behind her, and she realized he had the look of someone reading off a script. And when he spoke again, she was startled to stillness by how devoid of emotion his voice was.

“Junior year we had a transfer student come to Cannon named Suzy Laborde. Her parents didn’t have two pennies to rub together, but Suzy was a killer math student so she got a scholarship and she worked her ass off to stay there. She was from outside Thibodaux, so
that was about a two-hour drive each way. Her mom would have to drop her off near school at six in the morning so she could get back to Houma in time for her first job. So Suzy would have to wander the neighborhood for a couple hours, maybe hang out at gas stations ’cause those were the only places open that time of day. Sometimes Mom and I would see her on the way in and we’d give her a ride. But most people just ignored her.

“She didn’t care that barely anyone would give her the time of day. She didn’t care that she couldn’t afford the nice clothes the other girls wore. She didn’t ask to be invited to anyone’s parties and she sure as hell didn’t expect to be Homecoming Queen. And I don’t think she gave two shits when Marshall Ferriot started spreading rumors that he’d seen a roach crawl out of her shirt during assembly.

“Then she made a mistake, see. We were all in American History class and the teacher had put Marshall on the spot. I can’t even remember what the question was but Marshall didn’t know the answer and the teacher was letting him hang himself. And then Suzy jumped in and corrected him. And she was right. And I remember thinking,
Oh shit, Suzy. Now he’s really going to come for you.
”

A sudden spike of emotion caused the kid to suck in a deep breath. Marissa watched, silently, as he gritted his teeth in an attempt to get his composure back.

“Cannon has this big courtyard in the middle of school. And there’s a giant oak tree right in the center with these benches all around it. Suzy and one of the art teachers built this birdhouse for the doves that used to nest in the tree. It was like her thing. She was out there every morning and every afternoon, feeding the birds. Making sure the house was still in one piece.

“One morning, when everyone was in the courtyard before first period, Suzy went to check on the birdhouse and she saw someone had nailed a piece of wood over the opening. And there was a smell coming from inside it, a bad smell. So bad, nobody was sitting near the tree that
day. So she ran and got some maintenance staff and they pulled the board off . . . and I just remember her screaming. Screaming so loud everyone in school could hear. See, there was a security light in the tree right over the birdhouse and whoever had nailed the birdhouse shut had replaced the bulb in it with a heat lamp. The doves had cooked to death overnight.”

“And you think Marshall did it?” Marissa asked.

“I
know
he did it.”

“How?”

“Because I went to every hardware store in Orleans
and
Jefferson Parish before I found the clerk who sold him the bulb. And I took what I found to Suzy and I told her we had to go to the upper-school principal. And she begged me not to because if her parents found out that anyone that
crazy
was threatening her at Cannon, they’d pull her out in a heartbeat. Because they were tired of driving her two hours every day, tired of her needing to be too good to wait tables like her mother. And that’s the only reason Marshall got away with it.”

“Because Suzy asked you not to do anything,” Marissa said.

“All I’m saying, Miss Hopewell, is that maybe you should let yourself off the hook if you were
unkind
to Marshall Ferriot. Also, they say most coma patients can hear everything that’s said in the room with them. So that comment you made to him in the Plimsoll Club. It’s not like it’ll be the last thing he hears. Not until he decides to die.”