The Storm and the Darkness (2 page)

“Well, I reckon I stand corrected,” Alex said with a blush.

Though he was peculiar, Ana appreciated him, and she didn’t realize just how much until after she had been on the island for a week. She ventured into town daily, exploring before heading home with groceries. She noticed that everyone took the time to wave at each other, or flash a welcoming smile to their fellow islanders. Many stopped to chitchat, and share stories about their children, or the weather; with dark clouds looming on the horizon, everyone’s thoughts turned to the timing of the first big storm. Ana felt as if she were watching one large, ongoing family reunion. Her heart ached for New Orleans, and her own people.

She tried to embrace her new home with enthusiasm, waving at the same people she saw waving at others. But they did not wave back, and most of them dropped their eyes, pretending not to see. No matter where she went–the grocery store, the library, restaurants–the reception was the same. The lack of returned smiles, and the downturned eyes, left a sinking feeling in her stomach. She was unwelcome here.

When she told Alex about her experiences, a blush rose in his cheeks. “Miss Deschanel-”

“Alex, you can call me Ana.” With a laugh, she added, “You might be my only friend here.”

“O’right, Ana then. Forgive me for just coming out and sayin’ it, but everyone
knows
who ya are.”

“What does that mean?” Her eyes narrowed. It was just not possible that anyone here knew anything about the reason she had left New Orleans. She had told no one.

“Your father, Miss,” Alex said with a guilty look. “It’s just, being locals and all and not having the money that yer family has…it sometimes rubs people the wrong way when people see their town as a vacation home. It isn’t to say...I mean...that, you know, yer family has done nothing
wrong
, exactly...oh geez, listen to me....”

He kept rambling and stumbling over his own words to correct himself, but Ana got the general idea. Ana’s father was Augustus Deschanel, of the
Deschanel Media Group
, and there were very few people who didn’t know that name. He was a local legend in New Orleans for having started his media business on money he earned from a summer job, which was a remarkable accomplishment since he came from a family of millionaires who could have funded it without a second thought. Augustus had wanted to do it alone, though, and the business turned into an international empire within ten years.
I wanted to prove that the talent brings the money, and not the other way around,
he was famous for saying. While the people of New Orleans were proud of Augustus for his humble start and work ethic, the rest of the world just saw him as another money-hungry businessman. It never occurred to her to consider that the islanders might have an opinion of the distant family who owned the stately house on the bend of Heron Hollow Road.

As Alex showed her how to use the generator–
trust me, you’ll use it
, he had said–he assured her he would talk to people and that things would get better. “They’re good folk,” he kept saying. “Truly they mean no harm.”

Ana thought then of Nicolas. Her students at Tulane. Of late nights in the Quarter, the singing of cicadas, and sunrise on the Mississippi River. Her father. The homesickness flooded her and a sinking flutter rose to her chest as she realized all she had left behind.

How long am I going to do this?
When will things be fixed? How will I even know? And how long will it take?

“As long as it takes,” she whispered, and waved at Alex as he drove away.

People always said it was difficult to startle Nicolas Deschanel; that he was not easily unnerved. He had been through more craziness in thirty years than most see in an entire lifetime, and for the most part, he was always calm.

He lived alone in the old plantation of
Ophélie,
just outside New Orleans. There was not much left of it anymore. There was the Big House; that giant Greek Revival monster with columns running two stories high. Beyond that, there were some buildings that had fallen into disrepair, including the old slave cabins that now overlooked miles of oil fields which backed the property. He’d never lived anywhere else, unless you counted his random, extended disappearances over the years.
 

The plantation was big, and it was lonely, and Nicolas Deschanel was exactly the opposite of big and lonely.
 

He was loud, foul-mouthed, and obnoxious, spending most of his time surrounding himself with people just like him. He loved the French Quarter, and still spent many nights enjoying its debauchery and enticements. He was slender of build, but could drink as much as someone double his size. He was fair of face, but the first thing people noticed when they met him was his overwhelming personality. At thirty years of age, Nicolas was still, always, the life of the party.

He was unmarried, and never planned to be otherwise. It did not take more than a few nights–a few weeks at most–before he would tire of a girl. He had sampled a variety of them: sexy, smart, dimwitted, adventurous, boring. There always came a point where Nicolas realized that the specific charms of the specific girl were no longer so specific or charming.

When Nicolas was not out socializing, partying, or womanizing, he did not mind the quietness and seclusion of
Ophélie
. The estate was rightfully Adrienne’s, but Adrienne had let him do what he wanted with it, leaving to live with her husband Oz in the Garden District. She said she didn’t want the same upbringing for her own children, but Nicolas didn’t see what was so bad about it, really. Then again, he hadn’t had to experience the wrath of Cordelia Deschanel day in and day out; Cordelia, who was his mother but was
not
the mother of Adrienne and her three older sisters. His mother could be mercilessly cruel to anyone she thought minimized her own place in the household. To Nicolas, she had been loving, but she had been a nightmare for the four girls. The father they all shared more than compensated for it in the way he ostracized Nicolas, while placing his daughters on pedestals.

But they were mostly gone now; a part of his past that seemed almost unreal. His mother, his father, and three of his half-sisters. They perished in a car accident, heading for a family vacation that Nicolas had not been invited to. Adrienne had escaped, but she had disappeared entirely, along with her memory. When they found her several years later, living a new life with a family in the bayou, she was no longer the same person. Rebuilding her life had not been simple.

If Nicolas had to pinpoint it, this was probably where things began to change in his friendship with Oz. Oz had loved Adrienne. Oz still loved Adrienne, and now was finally sharing his life with her and their two children as he always wanted, but it had not been easy. Although there was still love between Oz and Nicolas, there was also a darkness–the kind that comes with sharing the burden of a tragedy together–that might never go away. Oz was the brother Nicolas never had. But, Oz and Adrienne’s relationship had always been a point of contention, because each man saw Adrienne through very different eyes.

There would always be invisible walls in his friendship with Oz, but there was one person with whom he shared everything with; someone who, no matter what happened, loved him without judgment, or darkness: his cousin Anasofiya.

No one but Ana knew, or understood, what it was to have everything and still be empty inside. Nicolas had never really been a part of his family. He was only a baby when his father decided to rut with the maid and have four daughters with her instead of his wife, Cordelia. His father’s bitterness toward Nicolas’ mother flowed the only way it could when it had to run over, and that was toward him. Likely Charles had not realized how unkind he was to his only son, or how unfair. Someone more sensitive than Nicolas might have taken that bitterness and then turned on the four sisters, blaming them for it, using that same rotten sort of deflection he had learned from his father. But instead, he was indifferent. Nicolas and his sisters were always divided by the ugliness that festered between Charles and Cordelia, and while he cared for them, he didn’t care enough to be a part of them.

Ana and Nicolas had been born a few months apart. When Ana’s mother died giving birth, Ana was taken into the same nursery as Nicolas, and they shared nearly everything–from their toys to their solitude–from that point forward. They had even shared their friendship with Oz. As they all grew older, Ana and Oz grew apart when an attempt at dating soured, and Nicolas grew to love Ana even more when she was solely his. In many ways, Ana was the reason Nicolas never wanted to marry. She was the one person that knew him–truly knew him, not the person he projected to the world–and he didn’t want there to be anyone else in the world who had that knowledge.
 

And now she was gone, and he did not know for how long. He supported her stated reasons for going. He knew her quiet anguish. He felt the build-up and the boil-over. They could speak without speaking, so no words were necessary. Nevertheless, he had said out loud that he supported her, just as her father had, though they both knew Augustus Deschanel had no idea. He didn’t know who Ana was; what burned inside of her, and what haunted there. Nicolas’ only regret was not offering to go with her. The only reason he could ever give himself for not doing it was that he was afraid she would turn him down. Ana was the one person he could not handle rejection from.

Yet...something was bothering Nicolas. At first he chalked it up to his sadness at her leaving, but it started to develop into a feeling that was almost worse: doubt. Doubt that she was being completely honest with him about her reason for leaving. Maybe
he
was the real reason. He had never really given thought to what their friendship would mean as they grew older and started settling down into their permanent lives, but was it possible she felt trapped? That his friendship was somehow stifling her or keeping her from growing into the person she wanted to be?

He was a Deschanel; a member of one of the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful families of New Orleans. It was a family of telepaths, telekinetics, healers, and seers. But Nicolas’s power started and ended with his occupation of the family seat,
Ophélie;
he would never see the future, or read someone’s mind. He was benign, and that never bothered him until now, when he wanted nothing more than to see into Ana’s thoughts.

Nicolas shrugged off the worries, as he often did whenever something unpleasant dared to cross his mind, but they would come back to him from time to time.  To make matters worse, Oz was acting strange–strange for Oz, anyway–and had blown off every invite Nicolas had extended. He said he had ‘family stuff’ going on, but Nicolas was starting to wonder if he hadn’t done something to piss him off. It wouldn’t be the first time. But Nicolas could not recall a single obnoxious thing he had done to Oz in quite some time. He hadn’t even blessed him with one of his famous practical jokes, or poked fun at what Nicolas called his “unfailing hero complex.” He thought about just asking him what was wrong, but in Nicolas Deschanel’s experience,
what’s wrong?
never led to anything good.

Although he would never admit it, with the only two people he had ever related with acting distant and strange, Nicolas felt lonely for the first time.

Ana had many talents, but cooking was not one of them. This fact had nothing to do with her privileged upbringing. When it came to most things, she was surprisingly self-sufficient and she enjoyed figuring challenges out on her own. But a relationship with the kitchen was not meant to be for Ana; she had no culinary vision, and any attempts to make anything interesting typically resulted in a call to the fire department. Most of the items in her pantry involved complex instructions such as “just add water,” or “microwave for ninety-seconds.”

Ana realized it was better to admit defeat than starve, so she decided to brave the lack of hospitality from the locals and try takeout.  Alex recommended Jack’s, which he said was the best burger joint in the state of Maine.
And better custard than anything on the mainland, either
. He said that about most things on Summer Island, that it was the best in the state. But she knew it had to be an improvement from what she was eating at home, so she decided to try it.

Androscoggin Avenue, the island’s main street, started at the North end of the island and broke off into two roads about a half-mile from the South shore: Chickadee Lane to the West, and Heron Hollow Road–where Ana lived–to the East. If the weather were warmer and the skies not so dark, Ana would have enjoyed the walk into town, but instead she fired up her father’s old car.

The old ’76 station was the first indication that she had left the residential area and entered town. Just past that was Flanders Grocery, and then further down on the right side were all the official buildings: Post Office, Library, Police, and City Hall. The rest of the “town” consisted of two unnecessary stoplights and a series of bars, shops, and empty buildings along the mile-long Androscoggin Avenue. In the center of a roundabout was a large Civil War-era fort. No one could say what the name of the fort had been or what glories it had seen, but the wood was rotting and putting it on such crude display only called attention to the strange marriage of the town’s pride with its unwillingness to spend money to fix anything.
 

“Mayor Cairne’s been askin’ for money from Portland but e’er since we broke free they ain’t fixin’ to give us a dime,” Alex had complained to her. “Anyhow, drive the strip nearly all the way to Edgewater’s at the South Shore, and just ‘fore the road turns into a private drive you’ll see Jack’s. It’s small, but the red, white and blue stripes are hard to miss.”

Ana was surprised to see so many people there. Jack’s was no bigger than a shack, with two windows–one for ordering, one for pick-up–and just as Alex had said, the building was painted in large, patriotic stripes. The parking lot was small and half the spots had erupted cement, rendering them useless. With the crowd gathered, she had to park down the road.