Unbreak Me

by Michelle Hazen

  She nodded. “Right. Second line. Isn’t that what you said you were doing a couple of days ago?”

  He threw his head back and laughed, the sound deep and sexy enough to distract her from the fact that he was laughing at her. “Girl, a second line isn’t about actually standing in line.”

  “Okay.” She gave his knee a little push, embarrassed but also pleased she’d gotten him to tease her again, a change from his strained thank-yous for her help when he left to find work each morning. “So stop being smug and tell me what it is.”

  “It’s sort of like a marching band, but wilder. Less uniforms, more dancing. It started out as a funeral thing.” He put the truck in gear and pulled out into the wide, empty street. “You’d hire some musicians to lead the walk to the cemetery. After that, it would move to a bar, and people would tell stories and laugh and get drunk. So on the way between the cemetery and the bar, you needed the music to cheer people back up again, remind them they were alive. People had so much fun we started doing second lines for everything. We protest with music; we celebrate with it; we grieve with it. It’s our language.”

  He shifted in his seat and smiled.

  “Music runs in the family. First bunch of Delisles came from Saint-Domingue to Louisiana, running from all the violence of the revolution that changed the name of the island to Haiti. Best job for a free man of color back then was a musician for parties and such.”

  “Of course it’s in your blood.” Andra smiled. “And a second line sounds exactly like the kind of thing you’d do. Go dancing and playing music through the streets, making folks forget they were supposed to be sad.”

  “Oh! You said ‘folks.’” He grinned and squeezed her knee. “You’re going to sound like a regular southern belle by the time you go on home.”

  She turned to look out the window, hoping he wouldn’t pursue the topic. They hadn’t talked about when she should go back, and she didn’t want to, because she didn’t like any of the answers.

  She’d barely been a block from LJ’s house in the week she’d been here. Except for walking down to the corner store now and then, where the music was always loud and unfamiliar and the conversations sputtered out when she walked in the door. She thought he might have stalled about taking her out because he thought New Orleans was too different from the mountains and open skies of Montana for her to enjoy it.

  “I like it here, you know,” she ventured. He glanced over at her and away, so quick she knew she’d been right that it was something he needed to hear. “How it’s filled to bursting with color and history and sound. How every third person on the street has an instrument case and how everything I eat is delicious. The whole city smells like you.”

  He laughed. “You saying I smell like mule shit and river water?”

  “No.” She poked him in the side. “Shut up. It’s more like you always smell like you’ve been cooking something amazing, and it’s always different. Spicy crawfish, cracked wheat bread, grilled corn on the cob.” She shrugged and looked out the window. “It’s nice.”

  A woman watering her plants nodded as they drove past. Andra blinked and turned her head for a second look, because she thought the woman had been white. It was too late to make sure she’d seen right, though, because LJ was already turning the corner.

  This was a new street she hadn’t seen before, but there were just as many weed-choked vacant lots as on his street. One held only a sun-faded old sign with a church logo that said, “With God’s grace, we will rebuild.” A little farther down, there was a foundation with the floor still intact. Linoleum gave way to a square of bathroom tile with no walls to guard it from the weather.

  Andra’s fingers started to hurt, and she loosened them where they were clenched too tightly in her lap. LJ took a right, and a second later they rumbled over a bridge and crossed back into the main city. The houses grew bigger and closer together, porches shrinking to painted concrete stoops, with colorful doors and shutters fronted by lines of tightly parked cars.

  “Can I ask you a horrible question?” she said quietly.

  He glanced over, then returned his attention to traffic. “You can ask me anything you want to, Andie-girl. You know that.”

  She hadn’t meant to bring it up, but it had been nagging at her mind every time she went outside, and she couldn’t keep it in anymore. She took a breath. “Did you ever think it might be easier to get past everything that happened during Katrina if you moved? Even just to a different part of town?”

  He tapped his palm on the steering wheel, but otherwise there was no indication he’d heard her. His face looked the way it had when she’d brought him his old, spray-painted half door: as if he didn’t quite know if he was happy or sad.

  The Datsun engine went quiet, then loud again as he shifted gears, and his dark eyes flicked to the side mirror.

  “Stubborn part of me says no.” He leaned back into the seat until it creaked, draping his wrist over the steering wheel. “That place is my family. My big family, you know? They all raised me up. And the Lower Ninth needs people who remember what it was, or it really will be lost. The city wanted to give up and turn the whole thing into a park, you know.”

  He frowned at the knot of traffic at the next light and whipped a quick turn down a side street, bombing down a couple of blocks until he found a one-way with the right direction of arrow. The tires stuttered and bumped over rough pavement, and Andra grabbed the door handle to brace herself when he wove around one of the bigger potholes.

  “I never wanted to give up on New Orleans. But then I left, didn’t I?” His sensual lips pulled tight into a grimace of a smile. “It’s been a long time, but sometimes it still hurts looking down the street. The Graviers’ house is gone. Aimee’s house is falling down. There are people from Alabama living in LaToya’s place. Most folks never came back. They just washed on down the river to someplace where the water didn’t run so high.”

  He stopped in the middle of the block to let a kid on a tricycle pedal across the street.

  “I almost don’t want to say this, you know?” He let out a breath of a laugh, rubbing at his lower lip. “But it was easier in Montana.” He put the truck back in gear and hit the gas. “I was easier. I didn’t spend so much time filling out paperwork: trying to get insurance to pay, trying to get Road Home money to come through, doing everybody’s Make It Right applications, wrestling building permits.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean? Your house has been done for years, hasn’t it?”

  His shoulders hunched, and he glanced out the side window. “Everybody knows I went away to college. Some of the older folks around here can’t read too good, and the schools in the Lower Ninth didn’t reopen for two years after Katrina, so the rest of us were a little behind, too. Those insurance companies want to keep their money and say no, your papers weren’t right. They don’t help you out none.”

  He swapped hands on the steering wheel, lifting two fingers to wave at a guy crossing the street with a cello-sized music case in a trailer behind his bike. The biker grinned back, and she couldn’t tell if they knew each other or were just being friendly.

  LJ looked over at her. “You asking about moving away from memories for me or you?”

  She let out a breath and watched as they passed by a watermelon-pink house. “I don’t know. I think I might be easier away from home, too. Like everybody knowing what happened to me locked me into being that girl.”

  “Did it, though? When I moved there, you didn’t talk to anybody. You just rode. Now I hear you laughing from the barn, and I don’t know if you’re messing with one of the ranch hands or Stacia or Jason. They look at you different, too, at Sunday dinner. Brighter. I think they’re starting to see you the way I see you.”

  She peeked over at him. “Oh yeah? And how’s that?”

  His eyes flickered away from the road and stroked down over her bare legs. “We
ll, maybe not all the ways I see you.” He smiled, and a wave of tingles sparkled through her.

  The street they were on ended, and LJ dodged through several turns at odd angles before they found another continuous street. The houses were getting taller now, porches stacked two stories high and bordered with cast-iron frames dripping with flowers, like arbors frozen in black-painted metal.

  “Katrina wasn’t the only storm, you know. Sure not the only time we’ve almost lost the city. Look at this.” He spun the wheel and rocketed down a block, dodging the increasing flocks of pedestrians, then turned again and slowed down, leaning into the wheel so he could point up through the top of the windshield. “See that building? It used to be all tile on the roof, because some governor from Spain required it after everything burned down a couple times in the 1700s. Then in the next hurricane, those tiles all went flying off, breaking people’s windows and heads and things.”

  Andra cringed. “Oh God, I didn’t even think of that. They’re as bad as bullets, aren’t they?”

  “Bigger and heavier than bullets.” He pointed to the left side. “See the watermarks on that brick? That place is two hundred years old, and I promise you those marks are older than Katrina. We’ve had floods and fires, yellow fever and locusts. Might as well be a paragraph out of the Bible.” He shook his head. “But we’re still here. Nobody with the spirit of this place in them ever quits. We just turn a funeral into a second line, dancing away from the graveyard. All the time knowing it ain’t our last trip.”

  She shook her head, trying to imagine rebuilding a house you expected to flood, just because it was near the place and the people you loved the most. And suddenly it seemed like the most human thing she had ever heard.

  LJ whipped the truck into a tiny parking spot along the curb. Once they were stopped, he reached out and touched her hand with the backs of his knuckles, sweeping his thumb over her wrist.

  “It’s why I get mad at these reporters for coming around, taking pictures of what’s still broken, when they weren’t here for all the fixing. You got to stick around with the ugly if you want it to make you strong.”

  Andra’s shoulders tensed. “I don’t know about that. I tried. I stayed in Bozeman after I was attacked, all the way until the trial was finished, and it didn’t help a thing.” Maybe he could draw strength from living here amid the reminders of the past, but it didn’t seem to work that way for her. “It’s been five stupid years now, and I’m still so messed up, you’re sleeping on the floor in the kitchen because you’re afraid you’ll jar me into a panic attack just by rolling over the wrong way.”

  “More like I’m afraid Mama would find a shotgun if she caught us in bed together before I put a ring on your finger.”

  “Don’t try and put it on her, LJ. She asked me yesterday if you were in the doghouse for something and that’s why I won’t ‘let’ you share the bedroom. You don’t even have a couch to sleep on, for crying out loud.”

  “We’ve never had a couch. Who would want to stay inside when you’ve got a perfectly good porch to sit on?”

  The weak attempt at humor sagged in the air between them. Andra stared out the side window, the beautiful historic street starting to blur with tears. “It’s bullshit,” she muttered. “All those ‘time heals’ platitudes. History fades, but it doesn’t disappear, and I don’t know if it ever stops hurting.” She turned and narrowed her eyes at him. “You didn’t stay, either, LJ. Not in the end.”

  “No, you’re right—I didn’t.” He rubbed his hands down his thighs, glancing at the rusting cast-iron swirls of the balcony they were parked next to. “It’s hard to love something so much and see it hurting when you can’t fix it. After a while, it starts to eat you alive inside.” He met her eyes. “Maybe that’s why I left.”

  Her shoulders drooped, and she wondered if he was talking about leaving New Orleans or Montana.

  She blew out a breath. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m sick of feeling like we’re walking on eggshells around each other. I came here because I wanted to fix things with you, and I just . . . I don’t know where to start.”

  He caught her hand. “Hey. We ain’t broken. The way I feel about you—” He shook his head, dark eyes soft on her face. “There’s nothing you need to fix about that.”

  Her skin tingled as if there were some kind of magic in the way he was looking at her. In having a beautiful man like him say those words to her and mean them.

  “Maybe not about that,” she whispered. “But what about everything else?” Like the pile of quilts in the corner of his mama’s kitchen that he spread out to sleep on every night. Or the suitcase in his room where she kept her clothes, because she was going to have to zip it closed and go back home soon. The pot of gumbo, unfinished because some of his friends didn’t feel comfortable coming over when she was there.

  LJ glanced away and coughed, like his throat was tight. “Andra . . .” He dipped his head and kissed her hand. “Let me take you out, okay? Show you a good time in my city.” He flashed her a smile so charming it hurt to look at him, because she knew how hard he was trying to be just that. “Forget those eggshells we been tiptoeing on and just be easy with each other again.” The confidence in his smile cranked up another notch, but his thumb was sweeping a little too fast over the back of her hand, like it was stealing the last taste it was likely to get. “Can we do that?”

  “Yes,” she promised, and prayed she wasn’t lying. “Of course we can.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Andra fell in love with the city all over again with every scrollwork balcony and mule-drawn carriage they passed, but LJ seemed determined to seduce her even further. For his first offering, he bought puffy French doughnuts he called beignets, dusted with a weightless cloud of powdered sugar. She enjoyed the way his tongue wrapped around the word almost as much as the pastries themselves. From there, he walked her past a sunny square full of artists’ stalls to Royal Street. It was blocked off from cars to leave room for musicians to play and tourists to dance, drink, or stroll past the broad windows of bright shops.

  They passed a gallery filled with paintings of haunting, skeletal silhouettes of trees, then one featuring photos of naked women, their skin painted with tigers or tree frogs. Drums beat from down the street, and when LJ took out his saxophone and began to play, it curled around the whole tableau like a perfectly fitted embrace.

  She’d never tried playing music in the street before, and at first she wasn’t sure what to do with herself. She felt out of place, sitting beside LJ’s open saxophone case as tourists tossed small bills and sometimes change into it on their way past. But then a young girl wearing an out-of-season bunch of Mardi Gras beads stopped to dance, and an older couple paused as well, tapping their feet as they listened. A guy with some form of trumpet came and played alongside LJ for a while.

  Between every song, LJ stopped to wave and tease other musicians he knew, joke with the tourists and tell them crazy stories, getting more outrageous every time he won a smile from her. He introduced Andra as his muse, his trophy wife, a mermaid he’d hauled out of the Mississippi and washed off with a garden hose. She told them he was secretly her bodyguard, a vampire, a famous musician whose name she was sworn not to tell.

  When anyone started to dance, LJ’s song changed. It swooped to fit the beat of their feet, the shake of their hips, and then it urged them faster, more upbeat, until they always ended up laughing and more out of breath than he was. He thanked everyone who came by, but never glanced at his saxophone case, even when the tens and twenties started to outnumber the ones and fives. Whenever the wind blew a bill away, she chased it down, but he never budged, seemingly happy to let the world give and take away at will.

  When he finally stopped to take a break and a sip of water, the shadows slung long and low between the buildings and she was more relaxed than she’d been in days. She stret
ched her legs out in front of her, leaning her head against the bricks at her back, and smiled. “I always thought the saxophone was supposed to sound sad. The blues and all that.”

  “You want sad?” He arched his eyebrows at her, then swept his arm out at their current audience: three teenagers and a pair of tattooed girls with their hands locked so closely together that it looked like they were made as a set. “Let the record show the lady asked for sad.”

  The girl with the scorpion tattoo on her neck laughed. “Don’t do it, LJ! Have mercy!”

  Andra shook her head. She hadn’t even realized he knew these girls, too, but of course he did. Every time they left the house, people would stop to hug him and ask, “How’s your mama and them?” Since he was an only child, she wasn’t sure what “them” they were asking about, but they all asked it just the same. He was so popular, she wouldn’t have been surprised if the statue in the square was of him, too.

  She could picture how it would look: him curled forward into his saxophone so every muscle stood out, his eyes closed as he poured his heart into the music. Watching him play made her miss her horses so bad it ached all the way into her teeth. With reins in her hands and a thousand-pound animal between her knees, she was poised and confident, focused and utterly free. She knew what needed to be done, and she knew she was the best person to do it.

  And just like with her and a horse, LJ’s gift needed its match, too: the music and an audience. It wasn’t for the attention, though he seemed to thrive on it. It was the way he saw the tiniest hints of emotion on their faces and translated them into his songs until each listener’s expression blossomed into something different. It was the near-supernatural push and pull between him and dozens of strangers.

  She couldn’t imagine how he’d survived through the months in Montana, only practicing alone in his apartment with no band, no spectators. It twisted her stomach to think of it. She could no longer imagine her life without LJ in it, but the longer she was here, the more she realized how much of him had been missing when they lived in Montana.