Whispers of the Bayou

by Mindy Starns Clark

“Excuse me?” Charles asked.

  “Get him here, right now. Get Richard. I can stop this before it even starts. I can tell him exactly what it is he wants to know.”

  Charles and I looked at each other.

  “You want my dad to come over now?” I asked.

  “Yes,” AJ replied. “I have something to say. It’s time for the light to be shone on every dark corner of this family.”

  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get another word out of her. As Charles got on the phone trying to track down my father, I thought I might go crazy trying to figure out what she was about to say. To be polite and kill time, I offered to make Charles a sandwich and ended up eating one myself. Within twenty minutes, there was a knock at the door, and it opened to reveal my father with Holt behind him.

  AJ was waiting in the living room, so Charles led the way there, my father falling behind, not even meeting my eyes.

  “Are you taking his side in this?” I asked Holt softly as we brought up the rear.

  “No way,” he replied, rolling through the doorway. “I was with him when Benochet called, trying to talk some sense into him. I thought I might come along and help out if I could.”

  We entered the living room, AJ standing at the window, her back to us.

  “Present and accounted for,” my father said dryly. “What do you want to say, Janet?”

  She spun around looking almost confident until she spotted Holt. That caused her to falter for a moment, but she seemed to regain her composure.

  “I have to tell y’all something,” she said, “and when I’m finished, more than likely three of the people in this room are going to hate me. Before I start, I ask only that you look at the actions of the past through the eyes of someone who was very young.”

  I exchanged glances with Holt and then Charles. My father kept his eyes on AJ, though I thought I could detect a smirk turning up the edges of his lips.

  “You’re right, Richard, you were not Miranda’s father,” AJ said. After a moment of stunned silence from the rest of us, she added, “That’s because Yasmine was not the twins’ mother. I was. I am. Miranda, I’m your natural mother.”

  In a flash, I wasn’t sure if I was even in the room anymore. It felt more as though I were somewhere up around the ceiling, simply floating, wondering if I had heard correctly.

  “How is that possible?” Charles demanded, as shocked as the rest of us.

  “I found myself in trouble right about the same time my sister desperately wanted a baby and couldn’t seem to get pregnant. She and I figured out a way to make things work out best for everyone, considering the situation. Put simply, she and I pulled off an elaborate deception.”

  Charles and Richard both had a lot to say, but mostly it came out like white noise to me. I was still lost somewhere up there around the ceiling, wondering what universe I had just wandered into.

  “If you’re her mother, then who’s the father?” I heard Charles say.

  At that, AJ turned and looked directly at Holt. Only then did I see the expression that had been on his face all along. He was a pale white, stricken with shock. My father also followed AJ’s glance, but when he saw Holt’s face, he jumped up from the couch.

  “This is impossible!” he cried, looking from his brother to AJ. “Holt was back from the war by then. He was a paraplegic.”

  AJ didn’t reply but merely kept her eyes on Holt.

  “There are…” Holt said, struggling to get out words. “There are ways.” He seemed unable to look at AJ or me or his brother, so he settled for Charles as he tried to explain. “I always knew pretty little Janet Greene had a big crush on me. When I came home like this, in this chair, I took advantage of her affections. I told her I needed to feel like a man again.” He looked at Richard. “Sorry, brother, but it’s not impossible.”

  Holt looked down at the floor and then back up at Charles.

  “I thought that being with someone would make me feel better about myself,” he continued, “but actually it made things worse. Janet was just so beautiful, so loving, so innocent. Afterwards, I was disgusted with myself for having taken advantage of her feelings. I know I wasn’t kind. I was demanding and irritable and impossible to be with, probably trying to punish us both. That’s why she left and ran away to New York. I have never blamed her for going.”

  “That’s not why,” AJ said, her voice breaking as she stepped toward Holt. “That’s not why I left.”

  “Why then?” Holt asked, finally looking at her.

  “Because I fell in love with you. I could see beyond all the meanness and frustration to the man you were inside. The problem was my life, my parents…I’m sorry, but I couldn’t end up like my mother, chained forever to a man who might need me too much. So I ran away to the big city. Three months later I realized the shocking truth: I was pregnant.”

  She began pacing as she talked, describing the story for all of us.

  “I had a friend who said she could get me an abortion, but I couldn’t do that, I just couldn’t. There weren’t many other choices available to me though, because I knew that if Holt found out he would convince me to come back here, and I’d get stuck in the very situation I had run from. I considered adoption, but I just didn’t think I could bear to give up a child and never know what happened to her.”

  My father sat again, momentarily silent.

  “When I told Yasmine what was going on, she had a better idea. She wanted the baby for herself. She’d been trying to get pregnant for so long and couldn’t. She planned it all out, she would pretend to be pregnant, she said, and when the time came she would come up for a visit with me and ‘accidentally’ have to stay until the baby was born. So that’s what we did.”

  “How could the two of you pull off something as elaborate as all that?” I demanded. “No one in the family ever caught on?”

  “Yasmine thought up all sorts of ways to keep her husband from getting too close, so he wouldn’t realize that the bump under her clothes was fake. But once he learned she was pregnant, he didn’t come near her again for at least a year, so it didn’t matter. I felt terrible about the deception, but when I learned I was carrying twins, I knew it was the right thing to do. How could I raise twins as a single mother, all alone?”

  “But the labor and delivery—” Charles cried.

  “When it got close, Yasmine came up for a visit. When I went into labor, I used her insurance and checked into the hospital as Yasmine Fairmont. A few days later, Yasmine Fairmont came back out with her twin daughters. Because they were twins, they were tiny, so saying they were premature wasn’t hard to believe. I recovered for another week or so, then she and I flew back down here together to get them settled. When I left, I knew I had done the right thing—even though it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.”

  We all remained where we were, the silence louder than any noise I had ever heard. I didn’t even know what I was feeling, other than shock. Words bubbled out of my mouth unheeded.

  “You’ve made me call you ‘aunt’ for thirty-two years!”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. Never hearing my own children call me ‘mommy’ was one of the hardest parts of all. But at least it was a choice I had made. Poor Holt, you never got to hear the word ‘daddy,’ either, even though you were one. I made that decision for you. There’s nothing I can say except that I’m so, so sorry.”

  Again, the room went silent. Holt’s face was so drawn and pale that I was afraid he might actually pass out. Concerned, I scooted closer to him and put a hand on his arm.

  My father’s arm.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  From the corner of my eye, I could read AJ’s body language, could see that she wanted to step forward and join us. I tilted my shoulder to indicate that she wasn’t welcome right now; Holt and I were the injured parties here and she’d do best to leave us alone.

  “Well, this sure was a fun little story,” said the man I would have to begin thinking of as my Uncle Richard, ra
ther than my father. “But now it’s quite clear that the house is mine. The will left it to my child. Miranda is not my child; therefore, it is invalid.”

  Charles cleared his throat.

  “Not so fast,” he said, putting on his glasses and pulling a file from his briefcase. “I believe from the wording in the document that they make it very clear that Twin Oaks is to go to their granddaughter Miranda. It never refers to her as Richard’s child, only as their grandchild. I seem to recall Xavier tinkering with the wording a bit so that there would be no question.” He looked up at us, pulling off his glasses. “To be honest, I have to wonder if they knew all of this.”

  “No, they couldn’t have,” AJ said. “Yasmine never told a soul.”

  “How well did you know Portia?” Charles replied. “She was very sharp, very perceptive. Here you had two women living in the same house, one of them pretending to be pregnant? I’d put money on the fact that Portia figured out the truth and simply kept her mouth shut. Mothers-in-law know all sorts of things that husbands are too stupid to figure out.”

  Next to me, I could almost feel the anguish radiating out of Holt. I looked at him to see that he was even more pale and drawn than before.

  “I, uh, I have to get out of here,” he said.

  He looked so lost, so shocked, but then his eyes finally focused in on me. Without saying a word, he reached up one hand and tenderly cupped it to my cheek. Through tears in both our eyes, the look we shared spoke volumes without saying a word.

  Then he simply lowered his hands to the wheels of his chair, spun around, and rolled away. Moments later, I heard the back door close, and I turned to Charles in alarm.

  “Charles, maybe you should—”

  “I’ll go see about Holt,” he said, understanding my intention. “You folks excuse me.”

  He hurried out of the room, leaving the three of us there together. After an awkward silence, I spoke.

  “Well, this is interesting. Ordinarily, I’d say I was sitting here with my father and my aunt. But as it turns out, I’m sitting here with my uncle and my mother. Gosh, but a few well-placed words sure can turn things upside down, can’t they?”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t become you, darling,” AJ scolded.

  “A lifelong deception doesn’t become you, either, Mother.”

  I’d said the last word to sting, but when it hit its mark I felt a rush of pain flowing from my heart straight to hers. Yes, I had a right to be angry. But maybe I didn’t have the right to lash out so fiercely. I thought of Holt and his reaction, and I respected his discretion and restraint. No doubt, he would go home and take out his frustrations on a big pot with a spoon or something, rather than causing verbal damage to someone who was important to him.

  “I’ll leave the two of you to hash this out,” Richard said, standing up. “But trust me, this is not over yet.”

  With that, he strode from the room. I heard him reach the back door and throw it open, but suddenly I could not resist jumping up and running after him. I realized that my anger at AJ paled in comparison with my anger to this man who had pretended for more than thirty years to be my father, knowing all along that there was no way he could be. When I reached the back door, it was to see him just reaching his car, the vehicles of Holt and Charles both gone already.

  “At least I finally understand,” I said, blood pounding between my ears, “why you spent thirty-two years ignoring me.”

  Richard spun around as I came toward him.

  “My whole life,” I yelled, “making me feel like I was worth nothing, that I was less than nothing!”

  I didn’t know where my rage was coming from, but it was from somewhere deep inside, the inevitable release of a lifetime of built-up hurt and rejection.

  “You knew you couldn’t have children and yet you never said a word! You knew I wasn’t yours but you never did a thing about it! Now here we are all these years later, after a lifetime of you making me feel like I was worth less than dirt. Well, you know who the dirt is? You are. You are!”

  Unable to stop myself, I stepped forward with fists raised, trying to pound at him in my fury. As AJ stood nearby, yelling at me to stop, Richard caught me by the arms and held me off. In the struggle he had to turn his face away so that I couldn’t scratch at his cheek, and in that position, his head bowed, I saw the cut on his scalp, a distinctly fresh scab right at the top of the back of his head.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  As, when the air is serene in the sultry solstice of summer,

  Suddenly gathers a storm, and the deadly sling of the hailstones

  Beats down the farmer’s corn in the field and shatters his windows,

  Hiding the sun, and strewing the ground with thatch from the house-roofs,

  Bellowing fly the herds, and seek to break their inclosures;

  So on the hearts of the people descended the words of the speaker.

  “Help! Miranda! Help!”

  Before I could react to the sight of the cut on my father’s head, I heard Lisa’s voice, coming from somewhere beyond the garage. I stopped struggling and we all turned to look in the direction it had come from.

  “Please! Help me!”

  I didn’t know what was going on or why Lisa was calling for me, but I didn’t think she was just being a drama queen now. Richard, AJ, and I all took off after the voice, my mind spinning with the implications of the cut on my father’s head. As we ran I was afraid we would find Lisa at the bottom of a well or bitten by a snake or half eaten by an alligator. Instead, as we rounded the corner of the canning shed, it was to find her being held at gunpoint there by Jimmy Smith, who had one arm clutched around her neck, the other with a gun barrel pressing against her head.

  “There you are,” he said to me, smiling eerily, the caterpillar on his lip glistening with sweat. “Took you long enough.”

  At that, two more men stepped out from the shadows of the building behind us, also with guns, essentially cutting off all escape routes and making us their prisoners.

  “Who are you, Jimmy Smith?” I demanded. “What do you want?”

  I glanced at the two men who stood behind us, guns raised, and with a shiver I knew they were the ones who had attacked me in the alley, looking for my tattoo.

  “What do you think I want? The bell. Tell me where I can find it. ”

  I looked at AJ, who was stricken and pale, and Richard, who was merely confused. Then I looked back at Jimmy Smith, whose eyes were black and cold as onyx.

  “Trust me. I would if I could. But I don’t know where it is.”

  “Try, Miranda,” Lisa whimpered. “Just last night you remembered something. You remembered seeing Willy outside with a shovel in the middle of the night.”

  “I don’t know if I did or not,” I said. “Besides, it was just a shred of a memory, just a trace of something bigger that made no sense at all.”

  Jimmy repositioned the gun against Lisa’s face and pressed harder as tears filled her dark eyes.

  “I think it’s time for you to find that memory,” he said. “Or the little spitfire here gets shot.”

  “No!” Lisa sobbed, her hands clutching powerlessly at his arm.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, my mind racing. “I’ll try.”

  Richard was angry and frightened, demanding to know what was going on here. As AJ gave him an abbreviated version, I moved several feet away and closed my eyes, hands to my ears. I simply needed to think, to clear my brain and maybe, just maybe, bring back the memory that had almost resurfaced last night.

  At first in my mind I listed the things that I had remembered: I had that feeling that I was up high but I wanted to go even higher, that the stairs had no backs and were frightening. I kept trying to imagine the view of this yard from the house upstairs, but it didn’t work—until I realized that I hadn’t been looking down at this yard from the house, I’d been looking down from somewhere else, somewhere close by and just as tall.

  “The building beside the water,” I said suddenly.
“That’s where I was when I saw him, not the house.”

  I could see myself running there in the night, running across the lawn in my nightgown, my bare feet getting wet in the dewy grass.

  “The tallest one?” Lisa asked.

  When I nodded, her captor barked, “Then let’s go there now.”

  We crossed the yard as a group. Jimmy dragging Lisa in front, AJ and Richard and I following behind being herded at gunpoint by the two goons. As we neared the building by the water, the one that towered over this part of the yard at three stories tall, I again felt that rush of danger and attraction. I knew that even if this quest did not lead us to the bell, it was still of some importance to my mind, to my past.

  The door to the building wasn’t locked, and it squeaked open on its hinges, the sound echoing against the walls inside. We stepped inside, and with a gasp I saw that the stairs from the first floor to the second were indeed metal stairs with no backs, the kind that you could see through to the ground while climbing.

  “Move.”

  Prodded onward, we stepped inside, and though I know AJ was probably concerned about rats and Richard was no doubt looking for some way that he could get free and run, I was focused on the stairs that I knew I had taken at some point in my youth. Why would I have been out here in the middle of the night, just a little girl all by myself?

  I began to lead the way, weaving past the refuse of this old agricultural building to get to the steps.

  “It wasn’t like this here,” I said, looking around at the mess. “There were machines, all sorts of machines.”

  “My father sold off the equipment from this building years ago,” Richard replied.

  “How do we know the stairs are strong enough to hold?” AJ asked. “They’re so old.”

  “I been living out here all week,” Jimmy replied. “They’re fine. Now go.”

  I climbed the steep stairs, stunned at the thought of this man being here all along, so close to where we were. Had he been watching us? Watching me? Coming out at night to peek in the windows of the house?

  “The light!” I said suddenly, remembering the view from the upstairs window. “A light shining through the trees! That was you?”