“That’s right kind of you, but trust me, Deena Pedreaux is counting the days until her husband is gone and she can start packing her bags. All she talks about is moving to the retirement community in Florida where her sister lives. Frankly, it’s an embarrassment to behold when she does it in front of her husband. It’s downright cruel.”
“That’s just a coping mechanism,” I objected, thinking how hard it must be for her to watch the man she loves die. I might want to murder my husband sometimes, but I would never, ever wish him dead! “It must be very hard for her to cope.”
“Cope, schmope. Deena’s a real piece of work. A very bitter woman. She hates Twin Oaks and always has. She calls it the millstone around their necks.”
“But why?”
Charles shrugged.
“That much land, that much house, it’s a lot of work. Being given a life estate in such a massive place like that can be a mixed blessing. The electric bills alone are astronomical. Considering that the house is in the Louisiana Historical Registry, a certain level of care must be maintained. Willy has worked hard at it for many years. As the trustee, I’ve been in a difficult position as well, balancing the need to keep the house in good repair with the fact that it’s currently inhabited by a couple who doesn’t own it or pay rent to live there. I’m afraid since Katrina I’ve only done the minimum, just to keep things from getting worse. But you’ll see, it needs some work. A lot of work, actually, before you would want to put it on the market.”
Astronomical electric bills? The Louisiana Historical Registry? For the first time, I began to wonder if maybe I had been underestimating the size of my inheritance. I knew the house was large, but I had never gotten any real statistics on it, nor did I know how much acreage came with it. Somehow in my mind I had been picturing the ramshackle house from Green Acres reruns, tucked away on a couple of woodsy rural acres along the bayou.
“The place is…big?”
Charles just looked at me, a mixture of surprise and something else, something like pity, on his face. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.
“You really don’t know anything about your old family home, do you, Miranda?”
For some reason, his question made me catch my breath. There it was again, though to a much less degree, that same surprising onslaught of emotion that I had experienced on the airplane when I realized we were getting ready to land. Tears filled my eyes, and with an embarrassed apology, Charles handed me some tissues from the console and then discreetly turned his head toward the window as I dabbed at my face and pulled myself together. I was glad it was just tears this time and not the racing heartbeat and the difficulty breathing I’d had on the plane. Still, I felt like an idiot.
“Don’t apologize,” I replied softly, my voice hoarse. “The truth is, I know less than nothing. For all of these years I have been at the mercy of my aunt, who wasn’t willing to talk about this place or the people here. If not for Willy’s urgent pleas, I don’t think I ever would have come back.”
“Not even when it was time to sell?”
“No. I was just going to let your office handle all of that.”
“You mean just sell it on your behalf and mail you a check?” he marveled. “Without even coming back to see your family home? That’s so cut-and-dried.”
I nodded.
“AJ, uh, my Aunt Janet has always been opposed to my connecting in any way with my…with the people here.”
“But why? I mean, I understand when you were younger. The situation was complicated and very tragic. She did what she thought she had to do. But you’re a grown woman now. I can’t imagine she still expects you to stay away.”
I swallowed hard, reluctant to tell him about my emotional state as a child or the psychiatrist whose advice had guided AJ’s actions with me ever since. Suddenly, despite all of that, I felt a wave of anger sweeping over me, anger at AJ for keeping me in the dark for so long. Charles was right: She had no right to expect me to stay away forever.
“So you’ve never had any contact with your relatives here?” Charles prodded. “Ever?”
I shook my head.
“My family consists of Tess, my husband, Nathan, and Aunt Janet. That’s been enough for me. Nathan’s parents and brothers and sisters in Texas are all the extra relatives I need.”
“What about your heritage?”
“My heritage?”
“Pardon my saying, but you’re Louisiana born, Miranda, descended from Louisiana gentry on all sides, not to mention a grandmother who was full Cajun. There’s bayou water running through your veins, girl, and jazz music framing out the cadence of your words. I don’t know you that well, but it’s not hard to see that you’ve got the dark eyes and beautiful features of your mamere, and I would imagine the intelligence and resourcefulness of she and your papere. You might not recognize it, Miranda, but there’s more of you here than you can imagine.”
He words hung between us, the weight of them palpable to me. I felt a stirring deep inside, the awakening of an ache that had been hibernating for decades.
“But my Aunt Janet—” I protested weakly. “Out of respect to her—”
“What about respect for all of the others, for those who have passed, for those who are still alive? You’ve got an uncle here, Miranda, and some cousins, not to mention your other grandmother, your mother’s mother, up in Ruston.”
“None of whom I have spoken to or heard from since I was the age that Tess is now. To be honest, Charles, I have no recollection of my time here at all. It’s hard to miss people you can’t even remember. AJ and I started fresh the day she took me away to live with her in Manhattan.”
Charles glanced almost tenderly at my sleeping daughter.
“So you’re telling me this place and these people having nothing to do with you and who you are? I’d venture to say they’re probably at least half of who you are. Just because you don’t remember doesn’t mean it isn’t so. Think of your own child. Would you erase every day of her life up to now and tell her she’s better off starting fresh, that the past five years don’t matter? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
Before I could form a reply, his cell phone rang. He excused himself to take the call, and I was glad because it gave me the chance to think about all that he had said. I turned my body toward the window on my right, stroked Tess’s hair in my lap, and gazed out at the landscape. It was utterly foreign to me, the open water having been replaced by swampy, tangled jungle. The road was still elevated, but now we were driving along the treetops, with another big, white bird skirting the tips of the leaves off to our right.
Bayou water in my veins? My grandmother’s dark eyes? Again, those eyes filled with tears for a reason I couldn’t begin to understand. Part of me felt defensive of my Aunt Janet and her stance against this place.
The other part of me hungered for it, hungered for something I couldn’t even put into words.
EIGHT
Over their heads the towering and tenebrous boughs of the cypress
Met in a dusky arch, and trailing mosses in mid-air
Waved like banners that hang on the walls of ancient cathedrals.
When Charles hung up the phone, he apologized both for the interruption and for what he had been saying when it had come.
“Before your aunt took you away from here, your family suffered immeasurable tragedy,” he told me, the passion now withheld from his voice. “I have no right to act as if that wasn’t relevant to all that’s happened since. Your aunt did what she thought was best in the raising of her late sister’s daughter. It’s presumptuous of me to impugn her character without taking that into consideration.”
I shook my head.
“You don’t have to apologize, Charles. My aunt did the best she could. But perhaps you’re right. Maybe keeping me completely in the dark about my past and isolated from family here was a mistake.”
At least I hoped it was a mistake. Despite some misgivings, suddenly what I wan
ted most in the world was to see these people again and find out more about them—and about my own past, the past I didn’t know.
As for my mother’s death, I had always been told it was a terrible accident, but I had my suspicions that it was a suicide. When I was about ten, I found a letter from Louisiana hidden in my aunt’s closet, which referred to my mother’s “death by her own hand.” I knew no other conclusion I could draw from that.
Now, after a lifetime of conjecture, of knowing nothing about what had really happened here, nor about the relatives we had left behind, I felt a sudden and insatiable hunger to learn. I wanted to ask Charles a thousand questions, but even as those questions formed in my brain I remembered the warnings of AJ to take it slowly, not to mention my panic attack on the plane. Perhaps my brain wasn’t ready to learn everything all at once. But I couldn’t resist throwing out one single question, the one that had been rolling around in my mind for years.
“Charles, how did my mother die?”
He met my eyes, pity again evident on his face, and I felt embarrassed that I’d even had to ask that question. What kind of person doesn’t know the details of her own mother’s death? Uh, maybe the same kind who doesn’t know she has a tattoo hidden on the back of her head?
He took a deep breath, obviously trying to form his words with care, and then he gave up and said it like it was.
“She hung herself.”
My pulse surged.
“So it was a suicide?”
He nodded and then said, “You mean you didn’t even know that?”
“No,” I replied. “All I was ever told was that she had died in a ‘tragic incident.’ ”
“Oh, it was a tragedy. She was so beautiful, so young. Her life was filled with promise. That funeral was one of the saddest affairs I have ever been to. The family couldn’t take much more.”
I turned to look out of the window again, trying not to picture the scene as it must have been the night she died. Was she in her nightgown? How long did she hang there, dead, before someone found her? Did she leave a note?
The most important question, of course, was why did she do it—why, when she had a little girl who needed her?
“Was she…” I hesitated, afraid to ask if she was somehow mentally unstable, especially in light of what I now knew about my own childhood craziness. “Did she suffer from depression?”
Charles shrugged.
“It was a very sad time, yes. No one could blame her, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but suddenly I felt the vague stirrings of panic again, that distinct pressure at my diaphragm. Hoping to ward off another attack, I clasped my shaking hands and took a deep breath and changed the subject, asking Charles about the region in general and the beautiful but unusual terrain.
He seemed to welcome the change of subject too, and his face lit up as he answered my questions and pointed out various sights and talked about this place he called home. He was winding up a story about “bayou life,” as he called it, when he interrupted himself to point out the town we were passing through.
“This here is Oak Knoll proper,” he said. “You can’t see the water from where we are now, but the town sits right along Bayou Serein.”
We were on what looked like the main drag, and though it wasn’t exactly New York City, it didn’t seem as out-and-out rural as I had expected. There were a few strip malls, a library, a post office, and more.
“If you need anything while you’re here, this is your closest bet,” Charles said, waving his hand toward the stores that lined the road. “My secretary printed out some maps and basic directions for you. I’ll give ’em to you soon as we reach the house.”
“Great. Thanks.”
We continued down the road a bit further, where the stores thinned back out to an occasional bar, an auto body shop, and a dusty, run-down motel with a faded sign that labeled it as the Stay-Bay-ou Inn. We made a left turn and passed clusters of modest brick homes, the yards growing more expansive the further from town we went. As we drove I found myself getting used to the scenery, even thirstily drinking it in. We were almost there. Almost home. I half expected to see something familiar, to feel the spark of a memory, but nothing registered at all. Perhaps that was for the best, at least for now.
The houses also were bigger and nicer as we continued, though some couldn’t be seen at all, save for a fancy entrance gate through which passed long driveways that wound out of sight in the distance. Occasionally, breaks in the trees revealed glimpses of the houses themselves, and from what I could see they were beautiful.
“Before we turn in,” Charles said suddenly, “I almos’ forgot to warn you ’bout the trees.”
“The trees?”
“The twin oaks, after which the estate was named. As you may recall from the report I sent you a few years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit pretty hard around here. One of the oaks was struck with lightning. We did everything we could to save it, but I’m afraid in the end it was lost. We had to have it taken down jus’ a couple months ago.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. With so many huge trees around here, I couldn’t imagine how one less tree could make that big of a difference.
“I understand,” I said finally, though I really didn’t.
The driver turned on the blinker and slowed to make another left onto a wide, paved driveway between two beautiful stone columns that were joined by an arching wrought iron header curving high above the driveway. The welcoming stone-and-iron structure looked quite old, and I stared at it for a long moment, trying to see if it brought back any sort of memory from when I lived here as a child. It did not.
Still, it was a beautiful introduction to the estate. The house number was engraved into the column on the left, the street name into the right, and the iron arch revealed the words “Twin Oaks” in an elaborate script across the top.
Very impressive.
We pulled forward slowly, following the driveway as it curved off to the right. As we did, we rounded the stand of trees that had blocked the house from the road, and suddenly the view unfolded before me in its full magnitude. I gasped as the scene was revealed: acres and acres of gracious, wooded lawn; and in the distance a house that looked like something from an “Antebellum Homes of the South” calendar. Across the front were four big columns flanking porches on two levels. The house was an imposing white, its windows highlighted by black shutters, and across the front, on each side of the cement stairs, were banks of pink and maroon blooming bushes.
Closer, off to our immediate right, was a massive tree, the most beautiful I had ever seen, its limbs so fat and huge that they literally rested on the ground like tired arms at the elbow, only to rise back up again to extend more branches toward the treetop, forming a massive canopy of leaves that covered the driveway and the surrounding grass in shade. From the limbs hung lacey gray clumps of threads that I realized must be Spanish moss.
“That was the lucky one,” Charles said, nodding, then he pointed to the other side of the driveway. “That’s the one that didn’t make it.”
I looked to where he pointed on our left. All that remained now was a giant stump, the last remaining trace of what had been the other oak, the twin.
“That’s so sad. Kind of throws the whole place out of balance.”
“Not to mention, the name ‘Twin Oaks’ no longer applies.”
“We can plant another,” I said, surprised by my feeling of possession, of protectiveness. Somehow, I wanted to make things right.
“Sure,” Charles replied. “It’ll only take ’bout a hundred years ’fore it’s as big as the one that was lost. Imagine that, a hundred years of history snapped clean by one single mighty act of God. I guess worse things could’ve happened. At least the main house is still standing, and no one here got hurt.”
Charles pressed the button to lower the opaque glass separating us from our driver.
“Emmett, pull on around to the garage. We’ll go in the ba
ck way.”
My eyes were wide as we continued along the driveway, going straight rather than curving left to pull in front of the house. From a distance, the house had been huge and imposing and beautiful, but the closer we got the more I could tell that it was in a terrible state of disrepair. Paint was peeling from under the eaves, the banister along the front porches were missing half of their ornate spindles, and the surrounding shrubbery was nearly overtaken with vines and weeds. Within the curve of the front driveway sat a crumbling, cement circle, which I had to assume was a dormant fountain.
“I’m afraid Willy hasn’t been keeping up with things very well since he got sick. He was diagnosed with a lung disorder just a few months before Katrina, and by the time the storm had passed he was having a lot of complications and in no condition to make the kinds of fixes that were needed. At least you had good insurance, so my office took care of the most important things, like the section of the roof that got ripped off and the windows that were blown out. But the dock’s never been repaired, and a couple of the outbuildings were either completely destroyed or damaged so badly that they could no longer be used. That’s when Willy and Deena moved into the house proper, after the caretaker’s cottage was torn up so bad in the storm.”
I just shook my head, dismayed that the damage had been left to sit like this for so long.
“Why were they living in a little side cottage when this big house was completely at their disposal?” I asked, thinking of the terms of the life estate. My understanding was that once my grandparents were both dead, Willy had been given free reign of the entire property for the rest of his life.
“Willy’s tightwad wife,” Charles said with a wink. “Shoot, Deena rubs those nickels so hard, the Indian rides the buffalo.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s just an expression. She’s cheap, cher, so tight with the pennies that when they finally moved into the house she only let them live in a little part of it in the back. Except for Willy’s room, she keeps the air conditioner at ’bout ninety. Otherwise, she’s got the house completely sealed off. Like I said, she’ll be happy when she’s done with this place and can get out of here.”
Whispers of the Bayou Page 7