by Karen White
The hour-and-a-half drive to Biloxi was silent except for Trey’s constant flipping of the radio stations, alternating between classic rock, country, and talk radio. It seemed less to do with his listening tastes and more to do with his reluctance to speak with me.
I spent the time staring out my open window, appreciating warmth in September and scenery that I hadn’t completely taken in on my previous trip, because I’d been behind the steering wheel.
We crossed over Lake Pontchartrain, a name I wanted to know how to pronounce but had made up my mind not to ask Trey, and then we were passing through swamps and pine forests as the interstate followed the line of the coast. At one point, on an isolated stretch of highway to which I could see no beginning or end, something long and narrow lay up ahead by the roadside that reflected the sunlight. As we neared I squinted, trying to get a better look at what lay on the side of the road, thinking for a moment it was a large deer.
I craned my neck as we passed it, startled to see the long snout and ridged back of an alligator, a smear of blood on the pale and partially exposed underside. Trey didn’t even turn his head.
“Was that alligator roadkill?”
Trey nodded, taking a sip from the coffee he’d stopped to get at a McDonald’s drive-through. “We get that from time to time.”
I sat back, my head pressed against the seat back. “Up north, we only have deer and the occasional dog or cat on the side of the road.”
The side of his face crinkled. “Yeah, well, things are a little different down here.”
My chest squeezed as I remembered Monica saying the same thing.
We passed signs for towns with familiar-sounding names: Waveland, Long Beach, Bay St. Louis. I wasn’t sure why they were familiar to me but figured Monica had mentioned them, or I’d heard them on post-Katrina television coverage. But when I read them, I wanted to say them out loud, to let the names roll from my tongue like a favorite recipe long savored and eagerly anticipated. Instead, I remained silent, aware of Trey’s brooding presence in the seat beside me, and of how very out-of-place I felt amid the alligators and strange place names.
I allowed my eyelids to drift closed, my body lulled by the rhythm of the tires against the road. When I awoke, I was unaware how long I’d slept or why Trey and I weren’t supposed to be speaking. But I did remember what I’d been dreaming about, and it was still so vivid upon waking that when I looked out the truck window, I expected to see the house, its white columns reflecting the sunlight so that it was nearly blinding.
“Why was the house called River Song?” I asked, closing my eyes to shield them from the dream light.
He didn’t answer right away. Finally, he said, “Monica named it. Thought that it needed one, I guess. The house had survived since the eighteen forties without a name, but that didn’t sit right with Monica. And it wasn’t all that grand a house, either, or one that you would think required a name. Just a typical raised cottage built more for comfort than show.”
“That’s what she loved about it,” I said, forgetting for a moment whom I was talking to.
Trey looked at me, his eyes questioning. “Yeah. That she did.” He focused on the road ahead when he spoke again. “She told you a lot about herself and her family, I guess. Lots of personal stuff.”
I shifted in my seat. “Yes. She did. And I told her a lot about me and my family. We both led pretty isolated lives. I guess that’s what drew us together initially. But we always seemed to understand which things we could share, and which things we didn’t discuss.”
He was silent for a long moment. “Did she ever tell you why she left?”
We sped by a highway sign indicating the East Beach Boulevard exit. I shook my head. “No. I asked her—many times. She never wanted to talk about it.” I stared hard at the side of Trey’s face. “I know the two of you were close. And that Aimee and Monica were more like mother and daughter, and that Aimee practically raised the two of you. I can’t believe that neither one of you would know why Monica would just pack up one day and leave without explanation.”
“Me, neither,” he said quietly. Without looking at me, he said, “It’s interesting, though. Because I also find it hard to believe that somebody she knew well enough to trust with her own son, she didn’t trust enough with the truth.”
I felt the familiar anger begin to burn again in my throat like bile, but I held it back. “I guess that makes us even, then, doesn’t it?”
He took a sip of his coffee as if he hadn’t heard me. When he finally spoke again, it was about the house. “The Pascagoula River, not too far from here, is called the Singing River. That’s where the name came from.”
“That’s beautiful. But why is it called that?”
“Because near dusk in late summer and early fall, it makes the sound of a swarm of bees. Nobody’s been able to come up with a scientific explanation, so people think the legend’s true. I know Monica did.”
“The legend?”
He turned on his signal and merged into the far lane, preparing to exit the interstate. “They say that the Pascagoula Indian tribe chose to drown themselves by walking into the river rather than be killed or enslaved by their mortal enemies, the Biloxis. They chanted as they walked to their deaths, men, women, and children, and it’s that chant that people claim to hear.”
“And Monica believed that?”
“She said she did. When Ray Von told her the story, it made her cry for days. It was only after Aimee allowed her to name the house in their honor that she stopped. But that was Monica. Couldn’t tolerate injustice or dishonesty in any form. Guess we had our parents to thank for that.”
“Because of their divorce.”
He glanced at me briefly. “Yeah, and all that stuff that came before it. They never held anything back, even with Monica in the room. I reacted by punching out the first guy who looked at me the wrong way. Monica reacted by . . . well, by becoming a real good kid. Honest and fair. It was as if she felt that if she was good, they wouldn’t scream at each other so much.”
I rested my head on the seat and closed my eyes for a moment, remembering my own family, and how each member reacted so differently when confronted with the same calamity. “She was still like that. In New York. Even when she couldn’t make her rent, she never passed a panhandler without giving him something.”
He pushed the “off ” button on the radio, then waited a moment before speaking, as if each word had to be measured and weighed first. “Did you ever share with Monica about your sister?”
I felt as if a stone had rolled over on my heart, seeing for the first time the man next to me not just as an adversary, but as someone who’d known a missing girl, and searched for her, not knowing for years where she’d gone.
“Yes. I did. A lot at first.”
A tic started in his jaw. “And yet you couldn’t persuade her to call us?”
The heaviness inside was pushed aside as I turned on him. “Of course I did. That’s why we stopped talking about it. There was nothing I could say or do that would convince her otherwise.” I was embarrassed to feel tears pressing against the back of my eyelids, and I turned my head to the side, watching as tall pine trees slid past us. But as angry as I was, I could hear the desolation in his voice, the complete loss and lack of understanding, and for the first time I began to believe that maybe Trey really hadn’t known why.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice quiet.
Too close to tears, I just nodded.
We exited the interstate and made our way onto Beach Boulevard, the divided four-lane highway that ran parallel to the beach. On my trip before I’d been too nervous and exhausted to notice much more than street names and the address for a house that I hadn’t yet known no longer existed. I didn’t remember seeing the white sand or the gleaming water, or the stately homes that defiantly faced the shore—homes that were sandwiched between empty lots with steps leading to nowhere.
I turned to Trey. “Are we going to the home site f
irst? We still have over an hour before our appointment with the builders.”
“Eventually. I just figured you needed to see more of Biloxi to really appreciate what you’re getting into.”
I stared at the side of his face, the determined set of his jaw reminding me so much of Monica and Beau. Once they’d made up their minds, there was very little hope of dissuading them. But I was from New England, and I knew a thing or two about stubbornness that even mules hadn’t yet discovered—something Detective Kobylt had told me more than once.
“If you think that showing me hurricane damage is going to change my mind, you’re wrong. I’ve already determined that rebuilding in a hurricane zone is shortsighted and somewhat egotistical at best. I’m doing this for Monica. She had dreams of bringing her children here one day, and she was unable to fulfill those dreams. So she entrusted them to me, for whatever reason. When it’s done, I’ll go away. I don’t think she ever meant the house to be mine, but for me to hold it for Beau. But I figure you can do that, too.”
His jaw hardened slightly as he pulled the truck to a stop. “‘Short-sighted and somewhat egotistical’?” He jerked his seat belt off. “I can’t believe that I have waited all of this time to rebuild River Song with my sister, and I’m rewarded for my patience with having to deal with somebody who doesn’t understand what it’s like to live here. Or what it is to be a part of a place that has survived far worse than people like you who want us”—he swept his arm, encompassing the boats out in the sound, the cars, the oaks, the lighthouse, the houses—“to go away. Let me tell you—we’ve been fishing, building, producing, growing, living here for hundreds of years. And I’m not going to let somebody like you, somebody without roots, without a home, without any understanding of what it’s like to have either, tell me that I’m being ‘shortsighted and somewhat egotistical.’” He opened his door and slammed it shut behind him.
I scrambled out after him, feeling ambushed. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. I realize I’m an outsider, and I suppose that makes me a bit insensitive. I promise I’ll keep my feelings to myself while we attempt to work together on this project. I’ll do my best to try to think as Monica would have and leave my thoughts out of it.”
“What about Beau? You’ll just walk away when the house is finished?”
“I don’t . . . no. I could never do that. Could I raise him by myself? I don’t know. I need you to accept that we’re all in a holding pattern right now, with no clear answers. I can’t tell you that leaving Beau with his family instead of his staying with me is the right choice. Not until I know you better. But even then, Beau will always be a part of my life.” I took a deep breath, tasting salt, and feeling the truth of my words. It was the first clear thought I’d had in months.
He didn’t say anything, but folded his arms across his chest and stared out over the open water as gulls screeched above us searching the water and sand below. We stood in a “U”-shaped parking lot that jutted out onto a nearly deserted beach. I knew that even though the early fall temperatures were relatively warm, the water would not be. Behind us, in the median between the divided highway, stood the Biloxi Lighthouse. I recognized it from the pictures Monica had shown me: the photographs of a laughing Monica as a young girl with her brother and cousins.
“Monica loved this lighthouse. She said that on her trips to the coast, as soon as she saw it she knew she was home. I can’t believe it survived Katrina.” I looked over my shoulder, remembering what Ray Von had told me about not speaking the name out loud, wondering who else might have heard.
“It survived Katrina. And Camille. And all storms since it was built in the mid–eighteen hundreds. It leans now because of the thirty-foot storm surge after Katrina, but it’s still standing.” He slid on a pair of sunglasses, twin lighthouses visible in the lenses. “They just finished a major restoration, so I imagine it can withstand more hurricanes. And an oil spill.”
I looked at him sharply. “I guess you guys down here didn’t need that on top of everything else.”
“No, we sure didn’t.”
He pointed to a construction site across the street. “That’s the new history center. A house that was built in the eighteen fifties used to stand there.”
“Before Katrina.”
He nodded. “All that was left was eight stained-glass windows they found intact in the middle of a pile of rubble. It’s amazing what survived and what didn’t. No rhyme or reason, it seems.”
A strong breeze pushed at me, making me pull my sweater close to my neck. I looked away, toward the water, seeing a faint and distant stretch of land. “What’s out there?”
“Ship Island. Actually West Ship Island. It used to be one big connected island until Camille in ’sixty-nine cut it in half so that we now have East and West. Katrina pretty much took out what was left of East Ship. There’s an old fort on the end of the island, and you can take charter boats out there to see it. It was one of my favorite things to do as a boy.”
I studied Trey, trying to picture him as a boy like Beau, excited to get on a boat to see a fort, but couldn’t. Nor could I imagine the kind of a storm that could rip an island in half. “Do we have time to take a walk?”
He shrugged. “Why not?”
I stared at him for a moment, wanting so much to like him, to remember the kind of brother he’d been to Monica, how all of Monica’s stories and good memories revolved around him.
He slid out of his topsiders as I took off my ballet flats, then followed his lead as he stepped over the short barrier at the edge of the asphalt and onto the sand of the beach. I stood still for a moment, remembering the long-ago day when I’d stood on the beach in Cape May with Chelsea. But the surf here was gentler, the water browner, the sand whiter. It was familiar but not the same, like biting into chocolate ice cream to find out that it tasted like strawberry instead.
“What’s wrong?” Trey had stopped to look back at me, his face wearing an unexpected grin under his sunglasses.
“Nothing. It’s just that . . . the sand. It’s so white. And fine—almost like salt.”
Nodding, he turned and began walking west down the beach. “Yeah, it’s kind of a specialty here. Like alligator roadkill.” I could hear the smile in his words.
I caught up with him, and we walked for a short distance, past a closed Jet Ski and beach umbrella shack, keeping away from the surf on the wide beach and staying near Beach Boulevard. I kept my head down, looking for shells, occasionally stopping to pick one up and slip it into the pocket of my sweater. Always collecting things. Monica had said that to me so many times that I had stopped hearing it. Or wondering why I felt compelled to gather objects in small collections.
I stopped for a moment, brushing off the fine sand from my hands. “Can you build sand castles with this stuff ?”
He cocked an eyebrow above his sunglasses. “Absolutely.” He took a couple of steps. “Maybe Beau can show you someday.”
I looked at him to see if he was offering an olive branch, then stopped, noticing some kind of a sculpture up on the median of the road. “What is that?” I asked, pointing.
He followed my gaze, then began walking toward the road. “It’s a Katrina tree. Come here; I’ll show you.”
I quickened my steps to catch up, then quickly wiped off the sand from my feet before putting my shoes back on when we reached the road. We waited for a car to pass before crossing to the median, where I found myself standing beneath what appeared to be a pod of dolphins carved from raw wood, now stained and sealed in brown.
Trey stood next to me and looked up at the sculpture, his face expressionless. “This used to be one of the hundreds of oaks that lined Beach Boulevard before the hurricane. A lot of them died because the storm surge brought in the salt water and killed them. And the ones that survived were stripped down to the wood. Eventually, the leaves grew back on the live ones, but the dead ones were too painful to look at.” He slid off his sunglasses and tucked them into the coll
ar of his shirt. “A guy from Florida came up and decided to transform the dead trees into different sculptures. And I know at least one other artist has joined in and transformed a bunch of the dead trees. There’re over a dozen of them—mostly on Beach Boulevard.”
I examined the sculpture more closely, the graceful arch of the backs of the dolphins as they swam through invisible waves, reaching for sky. The pod was split in a low vee, each leg a string of connected dolphins, the ones on the tips balanced on the wooden nose of the dolphin behind them. The sculpture exuded an odd mixture of fragility and strength, like a spiderweb spun from steel. “And this isn’t too painful to look at? ”
He faced me, his eyes cold. “What do you mean?”
I closed my mouth, unsure. I didn’t understand the need to cling to remnants of a painful memory, considering them an unnecessary detour. Like my father, who would sit in Chelsea’s bedroom for hours, just crying. It was my mother, and then me after she’d died, who’d pressed on in the search, knowing that our family could be complete again only once we’d found her.
“I would think that people would want the trees cut down, and new ones planted. Or to build a tall wall or . . . something. Maybe plant the trees on the empty lots instead of rebuilding houses that are liable to be blown away again. Anything, really, that would help people solve the problem instead of re-creating it.”
He looked at me as if I’d just suddenly spoken in fluent Mandarin with no hope of translation. “Why are you here, Julie? What do you want?”
I stared back at him, trying to think of a way to explain how I’d eradicated the word “want” from my vocabulary long ago and replaced it with “need.” It made life so much easier that way, blowing away all the unnecessary and distracting clutter from a life of purpose, much like I imagined a storm sweeping away anything not strong enough to withstand the struggle.