The Incident Under the Overpass

by Anne McClane

  She didn’t feel like she could trust her senses anymore. Not after the weekend.

  What would Marva and Roland think about Trip’s logo? she thought.

  Jesus, Angele is right, she thought immediately afterward. She stepped away from Trip’s desk toward the doorway.

  I am in a fugue state, but I lost my mind long ago, even before Fox died. I have got to find another job.

  It had started as another game. The name on the door read Carriere & Associates, plural; yet she was the sole associate, single. Thus, the invisible associates had been born. Marva was an older woman, brash with a foul mouth, and Roland was a young man of little means who had taken the job to help pay his way toward his Tulane MBA.

  Get back to reality, Lacey, she thought. Make a plan. Make yourself useful.

  She would punctuate her day by going home during her lunch break. And she would call her brother sometime in the afternoon. But there was still at least another hour to kill before lunch.

  She suddenly remembered why she had gone into Trip’s office. The settee. She desperately wanted to lie down. Trip used his settee for naps all the time, but she would never allow herself the luxury. She had thought that by staring at it, and picturing Trip there, she could will herself to stay awake, so repulsive was the image of Trip sleeping.

  It sort of worked. The picture had distracted her instead.

  She had never wanted to get too comfortable in this job. Nine years in, she realized how stupid it seemed to keep telling herself that.

  She could afford to go a while without work. Between the life insurance and trust funds, she wasn’t in dire need of money. The dread of nothingness was the only thing keeping her at Carriere & Associates. Having someplace familiar to go, and work that was rote, had been a blessing early on, in the throes of her grief. But now, especially after recent events, continuing in this torpor just felt ridiculous.

  Make a plan, she thought. She considered looking for a new job, but didn’t trust herself. If she went onto any search engine, she would start searching “healing powers / healing ability / superpowers” again. That was the rabbit hole she had fallen down last night, with her head ending up more muddled than it had been when she began. She’d found a wiki listing a bunch of superheroes she had never heard of, and plenty of websites for psychics.

  She had promised herself that when she went to work, it would be business as usual; she’d put the supernatural stuff on the side. Easier said than done.

  Lacey checked the time. She really wanted to talk to someone. She would risk a pre-lunch call to Jimmy. It was nearly eleven a.m.—nine a.m. for him—if he was home. If he’d had a show the night before, it would definitely be too early to get any coherent speech out of him.

  Opening with a movie quote might be a safe bet. Neither the years nor the distance had diminished their fluency in their Esperanto-like language of film references.

  “Hey, Budgie!” her brother answered. He sounded alert.

  “Mav, you still got that number for that truck driving school?” Lacey asked.

  “One-eight hundred-truckers, I think?”

  “I know it’s a little early,” she said. “You sure I didn’t wake you?”

  “Nah, we’re on the road. Actually I think it’s almost ten here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Denver?” he answered. “So, what’s up, Budge? How the hell are you?”

  Lacey felt tears well up at the question. Ever since Fox had died, she’d found herself missing her profligate, rock’n’roll brother as acutely as she had when he’d first moved away fifteen years before.

  She paced in front of the picture window, phone to her ear. She ignored the container ship headed upriver.

  “Never been better, Chump,” she answered with a lump in her throat. “Career is great, love life is on the mend, so at least I have that going for me.”

  “Which is nice,” they answered in unison. Lacey choked out a laugh.

  Jimmy picked up on her discomfort. “Trippy up to his usual shenanigans?” he asked.

  “Nothing worse than usual,” she answered. “No, it’s not that. I had a weekend.”

  “Really? Ooh, I’m practically giddy,” he said with the affectation of a teenage girl. “Do tell.”

  “No, nothing like that. I mean, nothing girly. Well maybe a little, but that’s not the important part.”

  “Okay, so a weekend that’s got you worked up in some other way. Did you finally get blotto like I’ve been telling you to?”

  “No, not that. Well, yeah, sort of, but not due to alcohol.”

  “Budgie! Do we need to have the drug talk?”

  She laughed. “No!” One of Jimmy’s many talents was that he could get her from crying to laughing in under a minute.

  “No,” she repeated, more relaxed. “Like some really weird, eighth-dimension stuff. Angele thinks I went into a fugue state.”

  “Are you okay? You didn’t kill anyone, did you?” he asked, sounding a touch more serious.

  “No, I’m fine, and no one’s dead.”

  Thanks to me? she thought.

  “Okay, that’s a start,” Jimmy said. “’Cause dead’s pretty permanent.”

  “I know,” Lacey replied, thinking of Fox.

  “So give me the nickel version.”

  “All right.” Lacey took a breath. “I met a guy, and I might have helped him out of a pinch, but I’m not sure how I did it, and I’m just kind of freaked out by it.”

  Jimmy took a few moments to respond. “You know, there’s a lot of ways I could take that. Do you like this guy?”

  “No! Well, yes, but I barely know him, and he’s married, and I didn’t help him out like that.”

  “Hmm. Seems like you definitely have more to tell me.”

  “Yes, definitely,” she said. She turned her back to the window. “But I’d just rather not do it on the phone. It’s been too long since I’ve seen you. It feels weird.”

  As close as they were, and as much as she trusted him, he was still her big brother. The naked-in-a-public-space part of the story was something she would have to tell him about in person, if at all.

  “Well, I guess it’s good I’m going to be home in a few weeks, then,” he said.

  “Really?” It was the best news she’d heard in months. “Ma hasn’t said anything to me.”

  “Reeney doesn’t know,” he said. “I’m not telling her or Joe.”

  Jimmy had never called their parents by anything but their first names. Lacey had never felt it was something she could pull off.

  “Unscheduled tour stop,” Jimmy continued. “We’re doing a surprise set at the Publiq House. I won’t have time to make it to New Roads, just in and out of NOLA in thirty-six hours.”

  “Okay, I’ll keep it under wraps,” Lacey said. “It’ll be really good to see you. It’s been way too long, and even longer since I’ve seen you play. What’s the date?”

  “Hold on.” She could tell he was looking it up on his phone. “June twenty-fourth.”

  “Good. Good. I can’t wait.”

  “You sure you’ll be all right, Budgie?”

  Lacey turned back to the window. She tried to make out the ship’s registration, but it was too far away.

  “I will be, Chump. I’m finding my way. I’ll give you more details when I can. It’s just really good to hear my big brother’s voice.”

  “You can hear me in the backup vocals on our latest release.”

  “That’s not what I meant, fool.”

  “I know. I was just trying to make you laugh.”

  Lacey set the phone on her desk after their call and stared at it for a few moments. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to make her brother materialize immediately, or speed up time to June twenty-fourth.

  Speed up time, she decided. Pulling a person out from where they were and what they were doing seemed inconsiderate. She closed her eyes and thought hard about June twenty-fourth.

  She opened her eyes and looked at
the date on her phone. Still June twelfth.

  I guess that’s not my power, she thought.

  She threw the phone into her purse and left the office, deciding it was time to start her lunch break. Marva said she could.

  8

  “I’m fine, Ma, really,” Lacey lied as her mother busied herself around her kitchen. Three minutes earlier, Lacey had shaken her head when she’d turned off Florida Boulevard and seen her father’s truck in her driveway. She’d considered turning around and going back to work.

  When Ambrose had met her at the laundry room door, she’d scolded him. “I thought we talked about not letting them in the house,” Lacey had said as she gave his massive neck a strenuous scrub.

  “I heard that!” her mother had yelled from the kitchen. Lacey had smelled the dreadful hazelnut-infused coffee her mother insisted upon.

  Her parents had become very liberal with surprise visits. They at least had the decency to call first if they popped in on a weekend, apparently assuming if their daughter were to “entertain”, it would only happen then. But weekdays were fair game. The excuses varied: sometimes her house was a pit stop on the way to one of the Gulf Coast casinos; sometimes her dad just wanted a safe house if her mom visited her aunt in Gentilly.

  Ambrose left her to rejoin her father in the living room. He had found Touch of Evil on the TV and settled in to watch it from the recliner, the dog at his feet.

  “Hey, Pop,” Lacey yelled from the kitchen as she gave her mother a hug.

  “Hey, pumpkin,” he yelled back, not taking his eyes from the television.

  Her mother broke off from the hug, returned to the sink, and started in.

  “Everything in this kitchen is too neat. You’re not eating.”

  “No, Ma. Do I look like I’m not eating?”

  Irene Campo stopped rewashing the perfectly clean dishes from the dish drain and looked her only daughter over.

  “You look too skinny. Beautiful, but too skinny.”

  “Ma, you know, I like to keep things tidy now,” Lacey said, grabbing a towel. She reached for the as-yet unmolested dishes from the rack to put them away. “I never realized how much I detested the mess that Fox seemed to leave behind in whatever room he entered,” she continued.

  Her mother responded by putting her hands on her hips.

  “I promise you, I’m eating,” Lacey said. She flexed a gym-toned bicep for her mother. “Look, healthy as a horse.”

  Irene sighed and shook her head. It was the exact same gesture Lacey had made five minutes earlier, turning into her driveway.

  “Still, you spend too much time alone,” she said. “Your Aunt Sue and half your cousins are right across the park in Gentilly. You could reach out to them, for company, you know.”

  Lacey smiled. She relaxed as she settled into the well-rehearsed blocking of a familiar argument.

  “Ma, you can’t pin your sister down with all the running around she does for those grandkids. And the girls are all pretty busy. They all work, and they all have multiple kids.”

  Lacey wasn’t sure what prompted her to go off-script. “And honestly, I think they find me threatening.”

  Irene looked aghast, as expected. “That’s a terrible thing to say about your dear cousins! They love you!”

  Lacey put an arm around her mother’s shoulder and gently nudged her out of the way of the refrigerator. She grabbed an apple and a hard-boiled egg.

  “You want anything?” she asked.

  “That’s all you’re eating?” Irene asked, aghast expression renewed. She shook her head and grabbed a cup of freshly brewed coffee.

  “I had a big breakfast,” Lacey lied.

  “You want some coffee with that?” her mother asked.

  “That stuff?” Lacey asked. “No thanks.”

  “You’re being so rude. What’s gotten into you?”

  Wish I knew, Lacey thought. “Sorry, Ma,” she said.

  They moved to the kitchen table, taking seats opposite each other. Her mother sat where Nathan had, just thirty-one hours earlier.

  Lacey peeled the egg, placing the shell parts in the dish towel. She picked up the thread of Aunt Sue and her three cousins.

  “Look, Ma, you know I love them all. We used to be pretty close. I just think they haven’t figured out how to deal with me yet. With my situation, I mean.”

  “They should be sympathetic to your situation.” Her mother dumped three packets of Splenda into her already sickeningly sweet coffee. Lacey wondered if Splenda ever went bad. She never touched the stuff, but she kept an ample supply on hand for these pop-ins.

  “I’m sure they are,” Lacey said. “But a young, childless widow is threatening enough. Add a cuckold to the mix, and I think it’s all a little too close to their deepest fears.” Lacey added a dash of Crystal hot sauce to the two halves of her egg.

  “You’re not a cuckold,” her mother corrected. “A cuckold’s a man. Fox would have been a cuckold if you had cheated on him.”

  “Really, Ma? That’s what you’ve got for me?”

  Her mother smiled, as sweet as the coffee in her cup. “Oh, La, in some ways I think you are your own worst enemy. And that only gets worse the more time you spend alone. Are you sure you don’t need me to move back in?”

  The script had circled back into familiar territory.

  Lacey aimed her voice toward the living room. “Pops! Ma’s threatening to move back in!”

  “Get in here, both of you,” Joe Campo hollered. He had a way of yelling without either elevating the volume or changing the inflection of his words. But you would still know it was yelling.

  Lacey popped the second half of the egg in her mouth as she got up to humor her father. She and Irene smiled at each other, each of them thinking the same thing: You’re in trouble now.

  They stood together in the archway between the kitchen and the living room. Lacey and her father shared a sly smile. Ambrose was content at Joe’s feet.

  “Ree,” he addressed his wife without taking his eyes from the TV, “I told you I’d divorce you if you didn’t leave this girl alone and come back to take care of me. I still mean it.”

  “You’d never divorce me. You’d flounder without me around!” Irene returned.

  “Exactly. That’s why you can’t stay with Lacey.” He gave Lacey a wink. She rolled her eyes in response.

  “Is that all?” Irene said.

  “Yep.”

  Lacey and her mom returned to the table.

  “Oh!” Irene looked as if she had just remembered she’d won the lottery and forgotten to tell anyone. “I actually spoke to your brother a few days ago. No emails, no messages!”

  “Really?” Lacey decided not to mention that she had just talked to him.

  “And, he actually told me about a girl he’s been seeing, no prompting!”

  Lacey raised her eyebrows. She was a little surprised that Jimmy had not said anything to her. But he was infamous for feeding their mother red herring.

  “He said she has a good job, and doesn’t seem to mind him going out on the road, and is very down-to-earth and not too California flaky. Has he said anything to you about her?”

  Lacey’s interest was piqued. This sounded like more than Jimmy just throwing Irene a bone.

  She covered with more off-script dialogue. “No, but I’m not surprised. If he really likes her, he might not want to tell me about her yet. Because I can’t be happy for other people who are happy.”

  Her mother’s face fell. “Criminy, Lacey. Is that true?”

  Lacey laughed. “Look at your face! No, Ma, it’s not true. Listen,” Lacey continued, “it’s just that Jimmy has been really good about checking up on me, and I’ve been really good at dumping on him. That’s been the tenor of our recent conversations. I can see how this might not have come up.”

  “Well,” her mother continued, “I have to admit it has me mighty curious.”

  Lacey left after a half hour. Her parents were still there—her father wan
ted to finish the movie—but she knew they’d be gone by the time she got home from work. The Silver Slipper Casino was calling out to them.

  As annoying as their unannounced visits were, Lacey felt this one had been particularly well timed. It was the first time since the incident that Nathan, and the mystery of whatever had happened, had not occupied one hundred percent of her thoughts. The reprieve had lasted only moments, but she was still grateful for it.

  When Lacey returned to the office, it took her more than an hour to complete another set of statements for Trip’s properties. She was grateful for that, too. It was close to three p.m. before she found herself wandering the office again in a daze.

  Screw it, she thought. It’s late enough, and Trip’s not coming. Time to be productive.

  She sat at her desk, grabbed her phone from her purse, and had every intention of seeking new employment. But the specificity of her intended search made her think of something. Something about narrowing parameters for better results. Maybe it was because her brain and her fingers weren’t communicating well, but instead of typing “production accounting California”, she typed “Louisiana healers.” And some light permeated the rabbit hole.

  Amongst the results for voodoo practitioners and more psychics, she found a series of stories about a woman in Galliano, purported to be some sort of Cajun faith healer, or traiteur in the local dialect. Her name was Emmaline Bergeron, and she had died nearly twenty years ago. But Fox, and Fox’s father, and all his aunts and uncles were from Galliano. Suddenly, tomorrow night’s dinner with Tonti didn’t seem so burdensome. She could ask Tonti about Emmaline Bergeron.

  She would have to mention it casually, so as to not arouse any suspicion. That wouldn’t be difficult—the challenge would be finding space to ask the question. Tonti talked a mile a minute.

  Lacey read on about prayers for curing warts and healing hernias. Some accounts claimed the traiteur’s abilities passed between generations from female to male to female and so on. That detail piqued Lacey’s interest, though she couldn’t explain why. She couldn’t find any stories about Emmaline Bergeron waking up naked with amnesia or saving someone from the brink of death. But she figured healing was healing. It was a start.