by Paula Morris
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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
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That afternoon, rebecca decided to skip her usual café routine and walk home with Aurelia. At home, she dumped her blazer and bag in her room and sat down at the kitchen table. She wasn't in the mood for homework just yet, so she had a yogurt and idly picked at a box of crackers, flicking through that day's copy of the Times-Picayune.
The society pages were a gallery of debutantes, clusters of tight white gowns and severe updos and anxious smiles, the pictures taken at balls held by various krewes or social clubs. Some of the groups of girls were white and some were black, but -- even though their gowns and tiaras were interchangeable -- they seemed to belong to segregated clubs and attend entirely separate social events. Rebecca scanned the captions looking for names she recognized, and there were several -- probably the older sisters of girls at Temple Mead Academy.
Aurelia had scurried out to the backyard, clapping her
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hands to summon the elusive Marilyn, but now the younger girl was back, on the hunt for cookies.
"Re-bec-ca," she said, in a tone that Rebecca had come to know: It was always a prelude to Aurelia wanting to borrow something or beg a favor.
"Au-re-lia," Rebecca croaked back. "What do you want this time?"
She was only teasing, but the look on Aurelia's round, angelic face was quite serious. Her cousin leaned against her, gazing down at the beaming faces of the debutantes.
"Wouldn't it be nice," Aurelia said, "if we took Helena some flowers?"
Rebecca shrugged.
"I'm sure she has lots of flowers already. Don't worry about Helena, Relia."
"I know we're not supposed to be friends with her," Aurelia persisted. "But I feel bad about her being sick and all. She's missing all the fun."
Rebecca breathed out a long sigh. Maybe her little cousin was right. Helena wouldn't get to ride in Septimus, and a privilege like that meant everything in the world to a girl like her. Maybe Rebecca was being hard-hearted, only thinking about herself, just as Anton had said. Helena was too sick to go to school, too sick to leave the house. It couldn't be much fun, stuck in that quiet house all day, obsessing about the ghost who crashed your Christmas party and wondering if you were about to die some sudden, mysterious death. Marianne was clearly pretty worried about her, so her condition had to be serious.
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"I don't even know where we'd buy flowers," she said, thinking of her walks to nearby Magazine Street: She'd never spotted a flower shop.
"We can take some from the garden." Aurelia sounded excited, realizing, perhaps, that Rebecca was going to give in.
"I don't think there's much in the way of flowers...." Rebecca began, but her cousin had already fished a pair of rusty scissors out of a drawer in the kitchen and was on her way out the back door. A few minutes later she was back brandishing some hacked-off branches, all waxy green leaves and drooping red blooms from the camellia bush.
"So I guess we're doing this," sighed Rebecca, using the society pages to create a taut newspaper cone: The heavy flower heads would plop off en route to the Bowmans' if they weren't supported by something. Aurelia rummaged in the Christmas-wrap box -- housed, inexplicably, in the pantry -- for a suitable red ribbon, and then raced off to retrieve her collection of glitter pens to make a card.
The warmth and light were already seeping out of the day by the time they walked back up Sixth Street. For once, Rebecca was grateful for her woolen blazer.
"We could just leave them on the front porch if nobody's home," she told Aurelia, half hoping that this would be the case. Rebecca didn't particularly want to see Helena herself, or her mother, both of whom would treat them, no doubt, with pained condescension.
On the sidewalk outside the mansion, they paused, looking up at the somber gray house. Without its Christmas lights, it didn't seem quite so festive. The only concession to
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Mardi Gras decorations was the Septimus flag flapping in the breeze. Like many of the grand houses around here, in Rebecca's opinion, the place looked shut up and empty.
The outside iron gate was closed, and when Rebecca tried unlatching it, she realized it was locked. Aurelia rattled the black handle and then, before Rebecca could stop her, leaned on the bell. Almost instantly, the big front door swung open and out stepped the elderly black butler Rebecca had seen for the first time that rainy morning at Temple Mead.
He might have been old, but he was light on his feet, hurrying down the broad brick steps to unlock the gate. But he only creaked it open a little way, blocking their entry, one hand firmly clapped on the gatepost.
"We've brought these for Helena," Aurelia breathlessly announced, thrusting the floppy bouquet up at him as though it were the Olympic torch.
"That's very kind of you, young lady. I'll make sure she gets them." He nodded, lifting the bouquet from Aurelia's clammy grasp, and started pushing the gate closed.
"Can't we see her?" Aurelia squeaked.
"No, Relia," Rebecca said quickly. She didn't want the butler to think they'd come to stare at poor, unfortunate, sickly Helena. "She doesn't want to be disturbed."
"That's right, I'm afraid." The butler shook his head, his face solemn. "Miss Helena needs complete quiet right now. But I'll take your flowers up to her right away, and I'm sure she'll be real pleased to get them. You have a card here, too, I see."
On the card -- a square of cardboard cut out from an old cereal box -- Helena's name was spelled out in large
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sparkling letters, with LOVE FROM AURELIA VERNIER AND REBECCA BROWN scrawled along the bottom in gold. Rebecca wondered if Helena would even know who they were.
"Thank you," they chorused, and waited -- Aurelia gripping the locked gate as though it was the barred door of a jail cell -- until the butler had disappeared back inside the silent, shuttered house. Then they strolled off toward home, crossing the road to walk in the shadow of the cemetery walls. Aurelia was disappointed about being turned away at the gate, Rebecca could tell: Her usually bumptious little cousin wasn't hurdling sidewalk cracks as usual or chattering about her day at school. She was walking slowly, scuffing at the occasional twig dislodged from an oak tree by the brisk wintery wind.
"I've never been in that house," she muttered. "Not like you."
"There's nothing much to report," Rebecca said, trying to sound blithe: When Aurelia had asked her about the Bowmans' Christmas party, wanting to know if all the reports about Helena's hysterical fit were true, Rebecca had played dumb. She hadn't heard anyone screaming, she said; people must have been exaggerating. It was a lie, of course, but Rebecca felt the need to try and protect Aurelia -- from what, she wasn't entirely sure. Most of the time, Aurelia seemed so blissfully removed from all the nasty dramas and secrets seething in Temple Mead.
"I heard that Helena has a big bedroom on the third floor," Aurelia said, turning around to point back at the Bowman mansion. "It has its own walk-in closet, and ... look! There she is!"
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Rebecca spun on her heels and looked up, following the line of Aurelia's pointed finger. Her cousin was right: Helena was standing at a third-floor window, gazing down at them. The pink tips of the flowers they'd left were just visible; she must have had the bouquet in her hands. Aurelia started waving.
"She wants to say thank you," Aurelia told Rebecca, but although Rebecca murmured her agreement, she wasn't at all convinced that the look on Helena's face was remotely grateful or friendly. In fact, for a moment Rebecca wondered if Helena was going to lift the window sash and hurl the flowers onto the street below, so strange was her expression. She was staring down at Rebecca so intently, the way Marilyn looked when she'd cornered a bird in the yard and was getting ready to pounce.
Helena smiled, much to Aurelia's delight, but it was an odd, tight smile. There was something almost sinister about it, Rebecca thought, shivering as the cold breeze whooshed through the trees. He
lena turned her head a little, talking to someone they couldn't see, and then another person appeared at the window alongside her.
Anton.
"I thought that man said nobody was allowed in!" Aurelia was indignant. Suddenly breathless and light-headed, Rebecca grabbed for Aurelia's hand.
"Come on, Relia," she said, tugging her cousin's arm. "We should get home."
Aurelia would have stood there all afternoon, waving up at the local royalty, but Rebecca was taller and stronger than
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she was, and dragging her around the corner, out of sight, wasn't hard.
This was just horrible: The last person she wanted to see was Anton. Especially in these circumstances. How humiliating, standing around in the street, gazing up at Helena and Anton like peasants gawping at members of the royal family.
No wonder Helena had that strange, thin-lipped smile on her face this afternoon. Rebecca was out in the street; Anton was standing right by Helena's side, exactly where he belonged. Helena wasn't smiling because she felt friendly, or grateful, or touched. There was something cool and spiteful about the way she looked. It was a smile, Rebecca realized, of triumph.
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***
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
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"It was a week before the septimus parade, I and Rebecca couldn't help getting caught up in all the excitement about Carnival. She stood in the lunch line, waiting for her chicken fajita wrap, wondering how crazy it was all going to be. Tonight, she and Aunt Claudia were planning to walk up to St. Charles to watch three parades in a row: Aurelia was going separately with Claire, because they had some giggle-fest of a sleepover planned that began the second school finished and lasted until they finally conked out, exhausted with chatter, probably sometime around dawn. On the way to school that morning, Aurelia had explained how Rebecca had to take a bag with her to the parades, so when she caught beads and other "throws" she could stash them safely away. What she was supposed to do with all this plastic stuff when they got home, Rebecca wasn't sure.
Aurelia had also whispered that Aunt Claudia always took a plastic cup with her, half filled with bourbon and Coke. It was legal to drink in the streets in New Orleans, Rebecca knew, as long as people drank from a plastic cup or
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a can rather than a bottle. But the thought of her aunt guzzling bourbon in the street seemed both bizarre and hilarious. It was another reason to look forward to her first Mardi Gras.
"Are you going to the parades this weekend?"
Rebecca was so unused to anyone talking to her, she ignored the question at first.
"Rebecca?"
It was Marianne Sutton, standing right behind her in the line, smiling wanly.
"Oh! Sorry. Yes," Rebecca burbled. "I didn't realize you were ... talking to me."
"It'll be kind of cold," said Marianne, with a little sigh. "Though you're probably used to the cold, being from New York and all."
"Yup." Rebecca grinned. Their exchange was, again, almost civil. In fact, it was civil. Just as Jessica was much nicer without Amy around, Marianne seemed to be sort of human without Helena's influence.
"I'm not used to anything real cold," Marianne was saying. "In December it snowed that one day. It's only snowed here three times in my entire life."
"I missed it," Rebecca said, not sure if she should explain that she'd flown back to New York the day after the Bowmans' party. She was so out of the habit of just talking. It was all lies, secrets, and accusations these days. Chatting about the weather with Marianne, even if it was just for a few minutes, made Rebecca feel like a normal person again.
That day after school, Rebecca walked home past the cemetery, letting her fingers drift along the rough iron bars of
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the Prytania gate. She hadn't caught even a glimpse of Lisette in days and days. Possibly she was lying low in the cemetery or hanging around the Bowman mansion driving Helena out of her wits. Or maybe she was avoiding Rebecca, for some reason. After all, if Lisette wanted Rebecca to see her, all she had to do was sidle up to one of the gates. It wasn't as if Rebecca could break into the cemetery or hang around the Bowmans' front porch.
Rebecca paused for a moment, peering through the bars and into the quiet cemetery. The breeze blew an unidentifiable piece of litter along the main avenue, and the trees rustled, papery and agitated, as the wind picked up. Rain was coming: Rebecca could almost smell it in the air. She'd learned this trick here in New Orleans, learned to interpret the strange colors of the sky.
"Rebecca?"
She turned her head sharply, guiltily dropping her hands from the bars, though she'd been doing nothing wrong-- not chatting with a ghost, at least. Marianne stood a few feet away, swinging her leather schoolbag. Rebecca couldn't help feeling nervous. The last time she'd been confronted by a member of the Sutton family outside the cemetery, it hadn't gone very well.
But Marianne was smiling again. That was the hardest thing to get used to, Rebecca thought. Apart from acting like a decent person to Marianne that day in the library, Rebecca hadn't done anything to deserve all this friendliness, any more than she'd done anything to deserve the hostility of last semester. She was the same old Rebecca. It was Marianne who'd changed.
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"I think it's going to rain," said Rebecca, hoping that Marianne wouldn't ask her why she was staring into the closed cemetery. "It's pretty windy already."
"I guess." Marianne shrugged. "As long as it doesn't rain next Friday night, I don't mind."
Rebecca smiled at her but said nothing. There was only so much weather she could discuss.
"You will be here, won't you?" Marianne continued. Her blue eyes widened. "For the Septimus parade?"
"Oh, sure," said Rebecca. She was kind of looking forward to it, despite herself. Jessica had told her that the costumes were amazing, and that the special throws were as sought-after as the hand-decorated shoes bestowed by the Muses krewe, or the famous Zulu painted coconuts. None of this meant much to Rebecca yet, but she got the general idea: You could catch good stuff at Septimus.
"Great!" Marianne beamed at her. "Because I had this idea and ... and I don't know what you think about it, and I know it's not much notice, but ..."
Rebecca followed Marianne's gaze. She was looking over at the Bowman mansion on the other side of the street. There was no sign of Helena in the window today, Rebecca was relieved to see.
"What?" she prompted. The oak trees shook in a sudden burst of breeze, and the noise seemed to break the spell; Marianne snapped back to attention.
"My mother and I were talking, and I was telling her how you're a really similar height to Helena."
Rebecca raised her eyebrows. Where was Marianne going with this?
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"And usually, it's a superbig deal to be picked as a maid, because you get to go to all these parties and the queen's luncheon, and things that have already happened. So it's not really fair for a girl to just get asked at the last minute like this, because then she's missed ninety percent of the honor. But then we thought that may be you wouldn't mind, because you don't really go to the balls or anything, do you?"
"No," Rebecca replied, puzzled, not sure what she was agreeing to, or disagreeing with. Marianne wasn't making herself very clear.
"That's what I thought." Marianne looked relieved. "You're just visiting New Orleans and all, right? So it's not as though you could get this chance again."
"This chance to do what?" Was Marianne really asking her to be a maid -- to be Helena's stand-in? Marianne went a little pink, swinging her bag even harder.
"Would you like to ride on the float with me next week? You just have to stand there and wave and throw beads. There'll be someone to hand you the beads, because you won't be able to move much -- they have to anchor our gowns and headdresses, because they're so big and heavy. You'll see. Maybe you could come over now to take a look? We have our own dressmaker, and she's been working on the two costumes at our house f
or, like, months. She's there right now -- that's why I thought it would be a good time to ..."
Marianne was talking on and on, which was just as well, because Rebecca didn't know what to say. She and Marianne appeared to be walking along the street together, back in the direction of Temple Mead. This was the most bizarre
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turn of events. She, Rebecca, would be riding in the Septimus parade. Wearing Helena Bowman's costume. And right now she was walking to the Suttons' house for some kind of fitting.
"I'm not sure about this," she told Marianne, her heart thumping. "I've never even been to a parade before. I don't know that I could do ... whatever it is I have to do."