In the years to come, Marissa would try to convince herself that it was the impact with the window that had knocked Marshall Ferriot’s senses from him, but that look—the emptiness of it, its soullessness—would stalk most of Marissa’s quiet moments for the rest of her life.
The group of tuxedoed men who had gathered behind her and Donald Ferriot froze where they stood. The glass Marshall was plastered against was too fragile for anyone to make a sudden move, she realized.
Marshall’s jaw went slack. His Adam’s apple jerked in his blood-splattered throat.
“I . . . I . . . put a . . .”
And as soon as his son’s words seemed to sputter out into ragged breaths of delirium, Donald Ferriot broke free from the group and lunged for his son. And even though the men all around him could sense Donald’s terrible mistake before he made it, none of them got to him in time.
Donald crossed the carpet with too much speed and force. He stumbled in his final steps, pitching forward into his son’s body. And for a few seconds, it seemed like it would just be a slight nudge, that’s all. But as Donald Ferriot threw his arms around his son’s waist and prepared to pull him free of the glass spiderweb he’d hurled himself into, the window gave way right in its weakened center and both men became a single tangle of limbs that vanished in an instant.
Then it sounded to Marissa like all the chairs in the room had gone over at once. Silverware and glasses were knocked from the tables as everyone jumped to their feet at the same moment. The screams came next; a single piercing wave of them that said the shock of what they had all witnessed had worn off almost instantly.
To Marissa it felt like a stampede, and in the midst of it somehow, Heidi Ferriot ended up in her arms, her knees going out from under her, the bellows coming out of her a blend of rage and agony. Marissa wanted to lift her hands to her ears to blot out the terrible sound; instead she held tight to the shuddering wreck of a woman who was making them.
8
* * *
The oak branches outside Ben Broyard’s window cast dancing shadows on his bedroom ceiling. Night had fallen hours ago, but he was too exhausted to reach for the bedside lamp. This wasn’t just exhaustion, he knew, but a bone-deep sense of loss that felt completely alien. Not just alien. Adult. That was the thought he kept returning to; that what had happened this week to him, to Anthem, to all of them, was an adult thing, more significant and lasting than graduating high school or having sex for the first time.
Loss. Grief. Words that had tumbled off his tongue too easily over the years but which he’d learned the real meaning of only that week, when his best friend was replaced by a yawning, fathomless darkness surrounding miles of empty swamp road. He’d always been the mature one, the one who said the adult thing in every situation, but now he realized that to be mature, you had to know more than the dictionary definition of words; you had to know what it felt like when those words hit you in the gut.
Ben was only ten when his father died, an aneurysm during dinner that dropped the man to one knee next to the kitchen table, and then face-first into oblivion. And what he remembered most about that time was how Nikki’s parents let her sleep in his bed because her prolonged embrace was the only thing that allowed him to get through the night without waking up in tears. He could remember how everyone had closed in around him en masse; his best friend, aunts, uncles, cousins, even his mother, who’d just been made a widow in her late thirties—they had all worked in concert to protect him, the baby, the only child of a good man gone too soon.
How many times had he heard those two words back then? Too soon, too soon. Well, eighteen was also too soon, right?
Still, everything about this week was different. He wasn’t the baby anymore, for one, and he had no special status amongst all those who had gathered on the banks of Bayou Rabineaux, spreading grid maps of Tangipahoa Parish across the hoods of their sun-baked cars, loading into fantail boats to assist in the fruitless search. No one left behind was special or more significant than any other. That’s what the sudden disappearance of an entire family could do; it sent out a pressure wave that leveled all their loved ones with the same explosive force, rendering them incapable of caring for the man, woman or child standing next to them.
At times, he’d found himself praying to a God he wasn’t sure he believed in and asking the simple question, Is this how you would have me grow up? Not with a great love or some accomplishment, but the sudden unexplained absence of the person I cared most about in the world? Is this how you would have me start in the big wide grown-up world?
Nikki, the only person in his life who’d taken him aside and told him she would always be there, no matter who he turned out to be. No matter who he fell in love with. And what had he done? Just nodded and smiled as if she’d offered him a ride home after school that day, as if he didn’t understand what she truly meant. Yeah, thanks, Nick. Hey, that new cheerleader’s kinda hot, maybe I should ask her out, huh?
Down the hall, his mother had turned up the volume on the TV just enough to let him know she was parked in the living room a few feet from the front door. And because their house was a small shotgun cottage, that meant she had the back door in plain sight as well. So he was basically under house arrest. Again.
If she hadn’t called and made them come home when she did, he and Anthem would probably still be traveling back roads, hanging missing-persons flyers all over the state. But it had been a hell of a first day, that was for sure.
They’d started around dawn and managed to hit every gas station window and restaurant bulletin board from Madisonville to Gonzales. They had a flyer for each of them. Nikki, Mr. Noah and Miss Millie. And for most of the day, it had felt good. They were doing something. Being proactive, as Ben’s mother liked to say.
But after she ordered them home, their adrenaline surges subsided, and as they were driving back on Interstate 10, the setting sun a blood-orange bonfire behind them, each too consumed with thoughts to turn on the radio, that’s when Anthem exploded with the first sobs he’d let lose since Nikki vanished. And they were snotty, choked things, desperate wheezes combined with terrible, gut-clenching whines, and Ben could only rest his hand on Anthem’s shaking knee lest he lose control of his car. And after a while, he managed to speak again. “I was going to go. I was going to go with her, to North Carolina. That’s what I was . . . That’s what I was—” going to tell her that night, Ben knew; Anthem didn’t need to finish.
Now, as Ben watched the dance of shadows on his ceiling, he envisioned the flyers the two of them had left all over the state that day. He saw the black-and-white faces of Nikki, Mr. Noah and Ms. Millie staring out at night-shrouded highways, their frozen smiles abandoned to the reluctant company of bored gas station attendants and grimy shelves of junk food.
Better to see these things, he guessed, than to imagine what might have become of their SUV that night. The scraps of evidence they’d been left with could be easily assembled into a nightmare: the mangled guardrail scraped with banners of black paint that matched their Lexus, two cracked pieces of rear bumper, one half of the SUV’s rear window that had been recovered from the mud a good distance from where they went off the road. All he had to do was run through this list in his head before he saw Nikki trapped inside the sinking car, fists pounding the windows, black water rushing in to fill her screaming mouth.
It was the third or fourth ring, he couldn’t be sure which one exactly, that stopped his tears.
“It was him,” the girl on the other end said as soon as Ben picked up.
Not Nikki. And he wondered if he’d be sidelined by this realization for the rest of his life, whenever the phone rang unexpectedly. But he did recognize the girl’s voice. After the hell he’d put her through, and the confession he’d wrung from her, he figured Brittany Lowe would never speak to him again, but here she was.
“You asked me why I did it,” Brittany said. “The story, about hooking up with Anthem. You asked me why I—”
&
nbsp; “Why you lied. Yeah, I remember.”
“He wanted me to.”
“Anthem?”
“No! Jesus. Aren’t you watching the news?”
“I’m kinda tired, you see, my best friend, she disappeared last week and we’re still looking for her so—”
“Marshall Ferriot,” she said, unwilling to be the victim of his sarcasm. “The guy who just jumped out a window at the Plimsoll Club?” Ben was stunned silent. “He’s the one. He’s the one who asked me to lie, all right? I figured I’d just tell you now since, you know, it doesn’t look like he’s going to live and all.”
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.
9
* * *
You’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.”<
br />
“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.
The Heavens Rise Page 5