Whispers of the Bayou

by Mindy Starns Clark

  She peered at me, the crease in her forehead easing just a bit.

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way. You might be right.”

  She seemed to relax somewhat, though she didn’t exactly turn warm and fuzzy. Instead, she began to complain about everything from the cost of the casket to the rudeness of the florist to the care given to Willy in his final days by Lisa. According to Deena, she just found out that Lisa had misrepresented herself when first coming there to work.

  “What do you mean?”

  Deena leaned forward, speaking just above a whisper.

  “I mean, she took this job saying she was a nurse. Turns out, she weren’t nothing of the kind.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Silence reigned o’er the place. The line of shadow and sunshine

  Ran near the tops of the trees; but the house itself was in shadow,

  “What do you mean? It’s not like you hired a stranger. Lisa is Willy’s niece. Wouldn’t you know if she was a nurse or not?”

  Glancing down the hallway, Deena continued.

  “Yeah, but he hadn’t seen her for about five years, not since before she went off to California to try and become an actress.”

  “An actress?”

  “Yeah, she was going off to become a star, but then after she got out there she met up with that Creole boy, gave up acting, married him, and moved back to New Orleans. Next thing we heard, they was living in Chalmette and she was going to school for nursing. I figured she was at Tulane or LSU or something. Turns out, she just went to some Vo-Tec place, taking a three-week course on how to change bedpans.”

  I sat back, considering this information, thinking how professional and competent Lisa had seemed when working with Willy.

  “How did she end up here, caring for Willy?”

  Deena shrugged.

  “She and Junior lost their home and all their stuff in the hurricane and didn’t have no insurance, so they had to move in with her mama and them down in Houma. Pretty soon after that, Junior got a job on an oil rig and Lisa started taking work as a private duty nurse. When Willy got so sick that we had to hire somebody to help out, he told me to give his niece a call and see if she wanted to do her private duty nursing for him over here. Never crossed my mind to ask her if she really was what she said she was.”

  “So you never actually came out and ask what her qualifications were? Never saw a résumé?”

  “Nah. She said, yes, ma’am, she had herself a nursing certificate and took the job right over the phone. Got here two days later and been living with us ever since, ’cept for every few weeks when Junior gets back on shore and she runs down to stay with him at some boarding house in Grand Isle.”

  I took a bite, thinking about it. Though I understood why Deena felt she had been conned, the situation seemed perfectly innocent to me. I asked what Lisa’s hourly rate had been, and when Deena told me the amount I knew that that was her answer right there. No RN or LPN would ever have done home care for that low of a figure. Deena should have known that she was getting exactly what she paid for.

  “So what’s so bad about her being a nurse’s aid?” I asked. “Didn’t she do a good job?”

  “I guess, but I let her make a lot of decisions that maybe I shouldn’t have. I trusted that she knew more about medical things than I did, but now I realize she didn’t know squat.”

  Taking the last bite of my dinner, I suddenly felt bad for Lisa, who was being unfairly judged here. I had a feeling that the only misleading thing she had done was to be so competent at caring for Willy that Deena had made some assumptions she shouldn’t have. Having lost her home and possessions in the storm, at least I understood now why Lisa had bristled when I’d made an insensitive comment about the Katrina victims who hadn’t had the sense to come in out of the rain. I felt bad about that too.

  “So how did you find all of this out exactly?” I asked, running the napkin across my mouth as Deena’s cheeks flushed a deep red.

  “It’s this house,” she said finally.

  “The house?”

  “I found out a while back. It has something to do with the vents.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you go stand in the laundry room, you can hear every word that’s said in the library. I overheard her on a phone call today, trying to sign up with a home health agency now that her job here is done.”

  I sat back, glad that the calls I had made from there had been relatively benign, for no doubt Deena had run down the hall to eavesdrop on me too.

  “But that doesn’t mean you have to go in there and listen,” I scolded, thinking that Jimmy Smith with his bug on my home telephone had nothing on her. “Shame on you.”

  “Hey, your grandma’s the one who showed me. She figured it out about ten years ago, when they had some work done on the house. She was in the early stages of dementia then—”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “What? My grandmother had dementia?”

  “Oh, sure, by the time she died she was completely senile. Anyway, everybody else thought she was just talking crazy when she said there were people living in the new washer and dryer. I told her to prove it to me, and sure enough she did. Turns out, all she was hearing that day was your grandpa and a couple of his friends chatting in the library, which isn’t all that close to the laundry room, but for some reason the voices come there.”

  I tried to digest the news about my grandmother, though it was hard to reconcile the image of a beautiful young woman I had been building in my mind with the picture of the senile old lady I was getting now. Hoping to find out more about that in a minute, I tried to stay focused on the subject at hand.

  “So you just happened to be in there doing laundry today when Lisa chose to go into the library to make some private phone calls?”

  “Sort of in reverse,” Deena replied sheepishly. “I saw her go into the library with her phone, so I decided to do some laundry.”

  “I see.”

  “Hey, I don’t have to defend myself to you,” Deena said, folding her arms across her chest with a huff, clearly sorry that she had taken me into her confidence. “I didn’t do nothing your grandma hadn’t done.”

  Trying to smooth over the awkward moment, I invited her to tell me more about my grandmother. Though I was hoping to hear some tales of long ago, like Willy had given me, instead Deena chose to talk about the last few years of my grandparents’ life, when my grandfather hired a round-the-clock staff of nurses to care for his wife here at home rather than put her in an institution.

  “He moved into a bedroom down here so that she and her caregivers could have the run of the whole second floor. They say by the end all she did was paint those crazy pictures from morning to night, on and on and on, talking ’bout ‘history can’t repeat itself.’ It was nuts.”

  I felt the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

  “What history?” I asked. “What paintings? Are they still around somewhere?”

  Deena dismissed my questions with a vague wave of her hand.

  “I don’t know what happened with all that. Willy took care of it somehow.”

  I tried a few more questions, but Deena was obviously finished with the subject of Portia Fairmont and ready to talk more about herself. I tried to steer her back, asking questions about my mother and the rest of the family, but finally Deena pushed herself away from the table and announced that she was tired and going to bed. Seeing the look on my face, she must have felt bad for being so abrupt.

  “You gotta remember,” she told me, her tone softening, “I wasn’t never as involved with your family as Willy was. Until about eight years ago I had me a job in town as a secretary. My husband might’ve spent his time taking care of the house and the grounds around here, but when I was home at night and on the weekends, I mostly kept to myself. The cottage was pretty separate from this house, especially with the garages in between.”

  “I see.”

  “Once I was retired, I would come over here som
etimes, to help out or whatever, but your grandma was losing it by then, so it’s not like we became good friends or nothing. Sorry.”

  And with that the subject was apparently closed.

  Deena went on to bed after that, leaving me alone in the quiet kitchen. If I hadn’t been so wide awake, I might have opted for an early bedtime myself. As it was, however, I decided that I had an important task to do first, one that involved paying another visit to the second floor.

  Just so I wouldn’t have to explain myself, I decided to wait until I could hear Deena’s snores coming through the wall before I made my move. In the meantime, I went to my tiny bedroom and retrieved the Bible I had shoved in the drawer last night. My mind had been working on the message from the old man all day, but I still didn’t know what his biblical clue had been about. Getting comfortable on the bed, it took a while to find the section called Psalms, but once I had it I read number 141 and then a bunch of the other numbers too, enjoying the poetic cadence of the words but finding no new significance to the phrase he had muttered to me last night.

  Finally, when the rumble of the dragon began, I closed the Bible and padded out of my room. I didn’t know if Lisa was also asleep yet, but it didn’t really matter. Her room was down the hall in the other direction, so I doubted she would hear me anyway. Just to be sure, I walked softly as I went, opening the door to the front of the house as slowly as possible so that it wouldn’t squeak.

  I flipped on the light once I had shut the door behind me, glad when the room with its creepy shadows was fully illuminated. I didn’t know why this felt different now than it had just a while ago, but for some reason I didn’t approach this task with the enthusiasm I’d had when I first thought of it.

  The paintings, I told myself. You need to see if you can find the paintings. That was enough to get me across the room, around to the entryway, and halfway up the stairs. There, I hesitated, looking up at the darkness, listening to the creaks and moans of the old house above me.

  This wasn’t that big of a deal, really, just a matter of walking up some stairs, turning on some lights, and poking around in a couple of closets. When I had been upstairs earlier, I had been more concerned with the layout of the rooms and recapturing some memories than with looking for anything specific. Now that I had been told, however, that my grandmother had left something of herself behind—something specific and tangible and possibly even related to the same matters that had obsessed Willy in his final days—I was driven to find them. Somehow, I also knew that holding my grandmother’s original artwork in my hands would help me feel that there really was a connection between us, that the skills I possessed actually did have their genesis in my family tree and weren’t just some unrelated talent tossed out to me at birth.

  Mostly, I wanted her art to speak to me, to tell me things I did not know.

  With that thought in mind, I summoned my nerve and walked up the rest of the stairs into the darkness, running my hand along the wall until it found the light switch. With a click, the shadows there were banished and my pulse could return to normal.

  It wasn’t until I was crossing the hall that I saw the movement, a flash of something filmy and light in the darkness of a bedroom. With a choking gasp, I turned and dared to look again—and that’s when I realized that I had spotted my own reflection in a mirror hanging over a dresser. Swallowing hard, I told myself to get a grip, that if I really was this creeped out, I could always wait and do this tomorrow. It’s not as though someone was holding a gun to my head.

  Taking the plunge, I proceeded for now, moving into one of the front bedrooms and taking a look in the closet there, finding only some discarded lamps and a few wicker baskets. I was hoping to spy a stack of canvases or a box of watercolor paintings or a portfolio case of loose pages, but there wasn’t anything of the kind in there. I moved on to the bedroom next door and tried again, searching first the closet and then the bureau.

  Still coming up empty, I moved to a sitting room, which had no closet but did have a trunk and a desk. Though I didn’t find what I was looking for, it was interesting to see the sorts of items that had been left undisturbed, from the old clothes neatly folded in the trunk to drawers of office supplies sorted in the desk. I found a roll of 12¢ stamps there, and I wondered if that had been the cost of first-class postage the last time this desk had been used.

  The back bedroom on the right was completely devoid of anything, so I crossed the back hall to the other bedroom, pausing as I went. There was something different there in the hallway, something wrong or changed or altered. I turned in a circle, looking at the perfectly normal walls that surrounded me, unable to put my finger on what was bothering me about it. With a shrug, I moved on to that bedroom and then the bathroom, coming up with nothing of importance in either.

  There was only one room left, and I entered it with a heavy heart and not a lot of optimism. There were boxes in the closet there—including one box of what looked like letters—but no paintings at all. I grabbed it anyway and set it near the doorway to take with me when I went down. Then I moved to the biggest piece of furniture in the room, a beautiful French-Liege wardrobe against the far wall. I reached for the double knobs and pulled both doors open with a loud creak.

  I gasped. I hadn’t managed to find the paintings but I had discovered the next best thing: my grandmother’s painting supplies. There on the neatly hand-labeled shelves sat an assortment of brushes, papers, art tools, and even a few ancient dried up tubes of acrylic paint. Just standing there, I inhaled deeply and picked up the scent of an artist’s lair that I knew so well, mixed with dust and aged wood. Carefully, I reached out and lifted a paintbrush from its wooden Winsor and Newton box, marveling at the sable brush that was of such high quality that it still held its spring and point all these years later. Enthralled with my discovery, I hoped to come back up here in the daylight and go through the cabinet more thoroughly.

  For now, I closed the cabinet doors, retrieved the box of letters, and left the room. Turning off the light, I moved out into the hallway, disappointed that I hadn’t accomplished my main goal, but glad at least that I had found the cabinet.

  I was moving past the back bedroom when I spotted a soft glowing light from inside. Stepping backward, I hesitated at the doorway looking into the darkness, and when the light appeared again I realized that it was coming from outside, that I had seen it through the window.

  Curious, I crept across the room in the darkness and made my way to that window, standing in the shadows and peeking out between the curtains. Orienting myself, I realized I was almost directly above the room where Willy had died, facing in the general direction of the bayou.

  I thought maybe the light had been from a passing boat on the water, but when it glowed again I was startled to see that it was higher than that, shining from somewhere up in the trees, two flashes and then it was done. I stood there and watched, but after several minutes the light did not come on again.

  Finally, I gave up waiting and continued downstairs, trying not to assign some sinister or threatening source to what could have a perfectly logical explanation. I would ask Deena or Lisa about it tomorrow. For now, I had some letters to read.

  Down in my tiny bedroom, I sat on the bed and opened the box, hoping this was some sort of personal correspondence and not just a cache of business communications.

  As soon as I got a good look at the handwriting on the envelopes, I knew who had written them. Flipping through the box, I realized that every single letter had come from the same person, the same place: Janet Greene in New York City. Though they were addressed to my grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Xavier Fairmont, I assumed they had been my mother’s, communications from her sister in the big city. I pulled one letter from the box at random, feeling guilty for invading their privacy—especially on the same night I had scolded Deena for doing the same to someone else—but the temptation was too great to resist. Opening the letter, I began to read.

  It didn’t take long to realiz
e that I had been wrong. This letter wasn’t written from AJ to my mother. It really was written from AJ to my grandparents, several years after my mother had died. It was dated July 1985, and all it contained was a chatty description of a Fourth of July trip AJ and I had taken to the Statue of Liberty. I reached for another letter and pulled it out, skimming to see that it was almost as mundane. Dated January 1987, it discussed my schoolwork and a recent problem I’d had with a classmate—private stuff of monumental importance to an eleven-year-old that I very well remembered having shared with AJ in confidence.

  Heart pounding, I took a closer look at the whole box of letters, realizing that they were in chronological order, all from AJ to my grandparents.

  Shaking my head, I had to think about this for a minute. AJ’s sister Yasmine had been married to their son Richard. Other than that, the only connection that AJ shared with Xavier and Portia Fairmont was the fact that she had been given custody of their granddaughter: me.

  With a dark sense of foreboding, I pulled out the very first letter in the box, dated ten days after my mother’s death, and proceeded to read four pages of description about our traumatic flight home from New Orleans—which apparently I had spent staring out the window for three hours—AJ’s attempts to get me settled into her apartment, and her concerns for my mental health. She still hasn’t spoken a word, the letter said, and spends most of her time huddling, rocking, etc., like she did down there, so I have made an appointment for next week with a good psychiatrist. I’ll enclose his bill with my next letter. I’m not sure what it will cost, but no doubt you understand the necessity and would approve the expense. I looked up, trying to figure out what I had stumbled upon. AJ had never made any secret of the fact that she received money from my grandparents to help her with the expenses of raising me. Because of them, I had been able to attend the best schools in Manhattan, take private art and music lessons, even go on a graduation cruise with AJ and two of my best friends through the Greek Isles. But I always assumed the exchange of money had been a one-time thing, like a trust set up in my name that AJ administrated for me.