“We’re going to have to jump,” AJ said, eyeing the distance between us and the grassy ground below. “We have no choice.”
“That’ll kill us, AJ. It’s just too far.”
“What if we tied our clothes together and climbed down them like a rope?”
“There’s not enough. We’d still be badly hurt when we hit bottom.”
I caught sight of a movement in the distance, and after a moment I realized I was seeing a big truck pulling up the driveway. Hope filled my heart for only an instant, until it got closer and I saw that the truck held a large piece of construction equipment; it was Jimmy’s two goons, finally returning with the backhoe.
They didn’t stick around for long. Obviously spotting the burning building, they used the front loop around the fountain to make a U-turn, rumbling away much more quickly than they had come.
We really were alone.
We really were going to die. “If only there were an opening on the other side of the building,” AJ cried. “If we could jump out that way, we’d land in the water.”
I inhaled deeply, looking at her.
“There is, AJ,” I gasped. “I know there is.”
Running across the hot floor, the heat of the encroaching fire licking at our heels, I raised my hands in front of me, remembering what it was that my sister and I had loved about this building. Our grandfather had let us come up here with him sometimes, whenever the loft storage had been newly emptied of its bounty. As he supervised the workmen sweeping up the last traces of sugar from the floor, he would let us peek down the long loading tube that hung out over the bayou, the one that the sugar was poured through for filling the containers on the boats. If he was in a really good mood, he would even have let us bring up handfuls of pecans gathered from the ground outside, and we would take turns rolling the pecans down the tube and listening as they splashed into the water far below.
“It’s here,” I cried, running my hands over the irregular surface of the wood-and-steel outer wall. “I know it is. Look for a door.”
The ground under my feet was hot, so hot that I knew any moment it was going to burst into flame and swallow us down whole. As it was, the fire was now raging so fiercely underneath us that I couldn’t understand why the entire structure hadn’t begun to buckle.
“There!” AJ yelled, spotting a handle alongside a beam.
Together we gripped it and pulled, and with a mighty creaking groan the metal covering swung open to reveal the loading tube. Like a giant blow drier, a burst of hot air shot from the tube and slammed into our faces.
Ignoring the heat, I looked down the tube to where it ended, the bayou sparkling in the distance below.
The tube might not be sturdy after all these years. Even if it was, the flames might catch up to us when we were halfway down. Even if we made it to the water without the tube collapsing or burning, the bayou might be so shallow that we would break both of our necks on impact.
Still, we had no other choice.
“Just a second,” AJ said and before I could stop her she turned and ran through the thick smoke to the edge of the loft and looked over. She ran back to me twice as fast, her face reflecting the horror she had just seen, saying “Go, go, go! It’s too late. They’re all dead.”
As if to punctuate her words, the wooden edge of the loft sprung up into glorious orange flames. Now we really had no choice.
At least the tube was wide enough for us to go down it together. We climbed in and wrapped our arms around each other and pushed off, leaving our stomachs behind as our bodies plummeted in a steep angle toward the water. We both screamed all the way down, locked together in a death grip, eyes shut tight, awaiting the jolt of either death or life.
Finally, we felt the tubing disappear from under us and then we were airborne, flying through the sky in slow motion until we crashed into the black bayou, its deep waters sucking us in and pulling us down to the muddy bottom. With a mighty push, it released us again, popping us both toward the surface, our eyes wide open now, our lungs screaming for air, our hands still clenched together.
We had made it.
We had survived, my mother and I.
FORTY
Whither my heart has gone, there follows my hand, and not elsewhere.
For when the heart goes before, like a lamp, and illumines the pathway,
Many things are made clear, that else lie hidden in darkness.
As always, AJ processed herself through the aftermath of the trauma differently than I did. When I went looking for her the next morning, I found her sitting on the front porch swing, staring out across the green, shady lawn and weeping into a lace handkerchief. She’d been so brave as we managed to escape the burning building, float down the bayou to the beach at Little Tara next door, and climb out to get help. But even as Livvy and Big Daddy and Melanie and Scarlett had buzzed around us with towels and blankets and hot tea and kind words while we waited for the police and fire departments to arrive, AJ had finally broken down and sobbed.
She continued to cry all through her statement to the police. She did manage to pull herself together at the hospital where we were both treated for smoke inhalation, minor abrasions, lacerations, and, for her, a sprained wrist acquired during our ride down the tube. At Livvy’s insistence, we spent the night at Little Tara, where we had been lovingly pampered and made to feel safe. But this morning, when AJ and I had returned to Twin Oaks, she had burst into fresh tears the moment she caught sight of the smoldering building by the water. The estate had still been crawling with authorities as well as reporters, so I had ushered AJ into the house where she could deal with her emotions in private and I could go upstairs to be by myself for a while.
Now here she was just two hours later, sitting on the porch and crying again. At least the reporters that remained were all around back and hadn’t realized we were out here. Personally, I hadn’t even felt the urge to shed a single tear. As usual, my emotions had receded somewhere deep inside, though this time I was determined not to let them disappear in there completely.
“Coffee?” I asked, handing her a cup fixed just the way she liked it.
She took it from me with a sad smile, motioning for me to sit next to her. I did, grateful for the comfort of her presence, even if it did include a little waterworks. There were details to discuss, so many details, but for now we just sat there, side by side, and rocked. I asked if she had heard from Holt, and she said no.
Last night he and Charles had stopped by Little Tara just to update us on the police activity at Twin Oaks and to make sure we were both okay. That visit had been brief and strained, with Holt speaking almost exclusively to me, unwilling even to look AJ in the eye. As soon as they left, she had gone up to bed, and I had to wonder at this point if her tears were less about processing the general trauma of what had happened to us and more about the pain of lost love, not to mention the guilt of what she had done to him by withholding the truth for so many years.
Strangely, I wasn’t all that angry with her myself, despite the fact that she had forced us to live a charade of aunt and niece since the day I was born. Though I wished she had acted differently from the beginning, I could also understand the youthful fears that had driven those original decisions. In a sense, I couldn’t help but feel that she had already been punished enough—by losing one child in death, by living such a tremendous lie, by hearing her own children address her as aunt.
“I’ll probably never call you ‘Mommy,’ ” I said to her now as we sat there on the swing, “but I want you to know that I forgive you. As much as anyone can forgive something like that, I mean.”
That sent her into more sobs, and I put an arm around her and pulled her close, wishing for a moment that I could cry that hard too.
Once her tears had subsided somewhat, she began to talk about Yasmine, about their childhood together, about the incredibly strong bond that they had shared, about the astonishing deception they had managed to pull off. As AJ talked, I remember
ed with a start that I had had a sister too: my sister Cass, my mirror image, my deepest loss.
We were silent again, each of us occupied by our own thoughts, when a car came slowly up the driveway. Thinking it was another reporter, AJ said that sooner or later we were going to have to talk to them. They had so many questions—about the deaths of Jimmy and Lisa and Richard, about the capture of the two goons by the police twenty miles out of town, about the whole angelus-bones-Cajun myth thing, which was still totally up in the air and garnering more and more attention from the media. In my statement to the police, I’d had no choice but to tell them everything, and that information had been leaked to the press.
Some gardien I had turned out to be.
“I’ll wait until after we find out more about the bones,” I said. “Then, if they really do turn out to be something important, I’ll have a better idea of what I should say.”
The car continued up the driveway, but as it drew closer, my heart moved into my throat. There, behind the wheel, was my husband.
Nathan.
So much for not crying. Suddenly, deep heaving sobs rose up from my chest as I jumped up from the swing and ran. I ran across the grass toward the car he was climbing out of. I ran into his arms.
I never held on to anyone so tightly.
I never needed anyone so mightily.
I had never missed anyone so badly.
He must have thought I was crazy. As I gripped him with every shred of strength I possessed, he held on to me strongly in return, burying his face into my hair, whispering gentle words of love. I don’t know how long we remained there like that, but at one point I could hear the sound of excited voices as the reporters spotted us and the click of cameras as they photographed us and then the scolding tones of a policeman as he ushered all of them away. Finally, I felt Nathan pull back a bit. Quietly, he suggested that we go to some place more private where we could talk.
Taking him by the hand, I led him around the far side of the house, past the police barricade, and down to the stone bench, which was now in an area protected from reporters. Though we had passed several cops on the way, none were near us now. We sat on the bench, and as Nathan seemed to be taking in the beauty around him, I moved even closer into his muscular embrace, wishing he could hold me forever and ever.
How had I ever risked what we shared by keeping myself so distant from him? Though I would probably always have to fight that tendency within myself, what I wanted most now was closeness and sharing. Even if I ended up having to go into counseling for a while, to work through all that I had learned on this trip, I knew that our estrangement was officially over. All that remained was to tell him so—and then prove it to him day after day after day.
Nathan already knew everything that had happened here, thanks to a marathon telephone call we’d shared last night before I went to bed. Our plan had been for him to fly to Houston to pick up Tess today and then bring her with him here to join me at Twin Oaks tomorrow. As he explained now, however, he’d made an impulsive, last-minute change at the airport early this morning, canceling the flight to Texas and booking one to Louisiana instead. He said he couldn’t wait one more minute to be with me and that of course his parents hadn’t minded the switch at all as it bought them more time with their granddaughter.
“I just needed to be with you,” he said. “I couldn’t bear to be apart any longer.”
I sat up and looked him in the eye and told him that I felt exactly the same. I told him that I wasn’t sure how or when or where it had happened, but somewhere amid all this drama, I had broken down that Plexiglas wall and found myself ready to let him in. All the way in.
“Plexiglass wall?”
“Long story,” I said, tears filling my eyes. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want what we had before, Nathan. I want to be close. I want that same bond you want. I want to be united.”
At that, his eyes filled with tears as well.
“You have no idea how long I have waited to hear you say those words,” he whispered, reaching up with both hands to grip the sides of my face.
Leaning forward, Nathan brought his lips to mine, the heat of his mouth seared with passion and promise. I kissed him back deeply, wishing we could become one person instead of two, one single-but-incredibly-strong entity, a cord of three strands.
“I have to tell you something important,” he said as we pulled apart. “Something I couldn’t explain over the phone.”
“What is it?”
Slowly, gently, my husband explained to me that while we were apart one thing in his life had drastically changed.
“It’s all been so amazing, but it’s hard to explain,” he said earnestly. “It started Sunday morning at that service, which didn’t go exactly as I had expected. There I was, representing our big fancy firm, looking around at this magnificent structure we had designed, and all the preacher could talk about was how none of it was of any real or lasting importance. I was so offended by his words that I waited until after the service and confronted him about it.”
Not being a very confrontational guy, I knew that Nathan must have been extremely upset to do that.
“The preacher said he appreciated my candor, and he invited me to join him in his study for lunch. I ended up staying there and talking to him for almost three hours.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. You know how he’s been trying to share his Christian faith with me in subtle ways for months throughout this entire project. Once he finally got the opportunity to say everything he wanted to say, it all began to make sense. Our conversation left me with a lot to think about, and by the next afternoon I was back there at his office again with about a hundred more questions.” Nathan smiled, and there was something so peaceful, so otherworldly about that smile, that suddenly I realized he’d found what I had been searching for too, almost since the moment I had arrived here. “I realize now that the Holy Spirit had been working on me for a while. Late that afternoon I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. Now it’s just like I had heard it would be. I’m a new person, Miranda. And even if this bothers you and even if you think I’m nuts, I’m going to show you that this change is a good one, good for both of us. To be honest, I’ve already started praying that eventually you’ll make the same decision I did.”
His speech complete, Nathan sat back, looking both nervous and settled at the same time. I knew that he was expecting me to protest or make fun or play it all down, but instead I took a deep breath and looked into his eyes, feeling kind of shy.
“This path you went down,” I said awkwardly, “I think it’s a path I might have started on too. At least, I’ve been thinking about God more and hearing about the Holy Spirit through talking to Holt. He even gave me a Bible.”
At that moment, we were interrupted by the arrival of several police cars. We both stood and headed back to the house, where a full contingent of officials in suits were climbing out of their vehicles and posturing for the press.
“What’s going on?” AJ asked me as she came out the back door. I just shrugged and pulled her close while we waited to find out.
“Miranda Miller?” one of the officials asked, stepping forward.
“Yes?”
“I’m with the Louisiana State Medical Examiner’s office, here with the results of the bone analysis.”
Nathan and I exchanged glances.
“Our office has determined that the single bone you found here the other day came from the same source as the rest of the bones discovered here last night.”
I nodded, as that had been my thought too, that the first bone had become separated from the rest in the hurricane, but that they all belonged together.
“Of course, we will be conducting extensive tests on the whole lot, but at this point we do have a positive identification based on DNA analysis from that first bone.”
“You have a name?” I asked. “You know whose bones they are?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, going
on to tell us that the DNA results showed a 99.92% accurate match to a known person. From his pocket, the man produced an envelope, which he held up and opened with all the drama of an awards ceremony. “The bones in question are those of Miranda Fairmont Miller. Young lady, I don’t know who you are or what kind of scam you’re trying to pull here, but you’re under arrest for false impersonation, attempted theft, and possible murder.”
If the scene hadn’t been so ludicrous, it might have been terrifying. Suddenly, the reporters went wild, snapping pictures and asking questions as two uniformed cops headed toward me with handcuffs.
“This is insane!” I said, not knowing whether I should laugh or cry. “I’m not impersonating anybody. I am Miranda Fairmont Miller. Ask her! She’s my mother!”
They didn’t seem impressed by that, so I tried again, shouting to be heard over the cop who had begun to read me my rights.
“Ask Holt Fairmont!” I cried. “He’s my father!”
That seemed to do the trick. The speech ceased right after I had the right to remain silent, and the cops on each side of me hesitated, turning back to look at the official in the suit for direction.
“If she’s really Holt’s daughter,” one of the cops said, “then I’m not going to arrest her. Can somebody go get him?”
“Look here,” the official said, stepping closer. “These are official DNA test results.”
Frantically I glanced from AJ to Nathan to Charles Benochet, who had arrived amid the melee and was making his way through the crowd.
“Wait!” Charles cried, stepping in to take charge. “Scooter, what are you doing?”
“Stay out of my way, Charles,” the official said. “DNA doesn’t lie.”
“It doesn’t always tell the whole story either, now, does it? Miranda Fairmont had a twin sister. Scooter, you know as well as I do that identical twins have identical DNA. Those aren’t the bones of Miranda Fairmont. They must be the bones of her twin sister Cassandra Fairmont, who died many years ago.”
Whispers of the Bayou Page 34