The heels I wore to the funeral are starting to hurt, so I take off my shoes and walk barefoot toward Evangeline Oak Park. The light has gone that soft, late-afternoon orange. There’s a walkway up to the tree, so massive and ancient-looking, its broad branches stretching out, ivy crawling up its trunk. I was here many times as a kid, when we visited St. Martinville with Mamere and Grandpere. “Not every girl has a tree named after her,” Grandpere said. “You and your mamere, you’re special.” It did make me feel special to see my name on the sign:
There’s a gazebo across from the tree and a bust of Longfellow nearby.
I wander for a few minutes, go look at the Bayou Teche, the river that brought my ancestors, depositing them here from Canada, the way the Mississippi brought all those little bits of Iowa and Missouri down and deposited them in Bayou Perdu. All those currents flowing, never stopping. I imagine seeing those rivers from above, the way a bird does, seeing the way they connect and flow together and empty into the ocean. But from here, it’s so hard to see anything more than what’s right in front of you.
I hear a car door shut in the parking lot and start back toward the tree. I see him coming down the path. He’s wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. His hair has gotten longer. He waves and I start to move toward him, not really running, but not slow. His pace quickens, too, and then we are together, like two puzzle pieces finally fitting seamlessly.
His arms are around me, lean and strong, and I bury my face in his chest.
That storm, that big, swirling cloud, is inside me. As I hold on to him, it rips through me. It tears down every wall I’ve built up in this last horrible year and I fall to pieces, sobbing. Every disappointment, every dashed hope, every failure, every loss is flooding out of me. It overtakes me. I couldn’t stop it if I tried. But I don’t try. I let go. I let it out. I hold on to him. He holds on to me, and strokes my hair. He doesn’t say anything. We sit on the steps and I keep crying, and he keeps holding on to me. It keeps coming and coming, and then it eases up. It slows to a trickle and I can breathe again.
A strange feeling comes over me — emptiness, but not a sad one. An emptiness that is newness, that’s ready to be filled up with something else now that all that pain has come out. I look up at Tru. My face is puffy, probably hideous. I’ve never felt so naked. And he kisses me, softly, the kiss that I imagined so many times, much stronger than I ever imagined it. We still haven’t said a word to each other. But we look into each other’s eyes, his eyes so warm, so real. I feel like we don’t have to. “I know,” he says finally. “I know.”
We walk down to the river, arm in arm, still not saying a word, but it doesn’t feel awkward. It’s like we have to let the physical presence of each other settle in for a while. My shoulder fits perfectly under his arm. We walk at exactly the same pace, completely in sync, and we stop and look out over the river.
“So much happened when we left Atlanta. You know, I tried to reach you. I sent you a bunch of e-mails.”
“I just got them. I wrote you back.”
“My e-mail was disconnected when I left school. I’m not in school. I’ve been working, washing dishes and driving a forklift, so I could help make money for a new boat.”
“Then how did you . . . ?”
“My dad was talking to his cousin, Hip’s mom, last night. Hip got on and asked to talk to me. He said you called. He gave me your number.”
“That was back in December. He told me Kaye Pham was in Baton Rouge. I called her to ask if she’d seen you. . . .”
“I see her every week at church. She never told me you called her.”
“Her friend Elly told me that you two were together and I should stop trying to contact you.”
“What?” He looks furious. “I’ve barely even had a conversation with her. Did you believe her?”
“For a while. I thought you had just left and moved on. Until I got your e-mails.”
“Never,” he says. “I never stopped thinking about you. I never wanted to be with anyone else.” He shakes his head.
We look at each other with this sort of sad, disbelieving look. A big, destructive swirling cloud tore our families apart and brought us together. I believe right now that we both believe that nothing can keep us apart. We belong together.
He looks away for a moment. “I wish I could stay. I don’t want to leave. At all. I have to work tonight though. But I would drive all night to see you again.”
“That sounds like a line from a song.”
We kiss again. “Hang on,” he says. “Stay right there. I’ll be right back.”
I watch him run off to the parking lot, feeling the peace of the wings of a big white bird folding over me. He comes back a few minutes later, his guitar strapped over his shoulder. I can feel my face stretching into a smile.
We sit down by the river, and I dip my sore feet in the cold water. The sky is bruised purple and blue now as the light fades.
“Remember I had that song that I was going to play for you that night?”
“When I didn’t show up?”
“No, it’s OK. Besides, I think that happened for a reason. So I wouldn’t play you that awful song.”
“It couldn’t have been awful if you wrote it.”
“No, it was. It’s that thing that I told you. I was imitating the style and the lyrics, all the music I knew from Mr. Monks and from my mom’s records. It didn’t sound quite right because it wasn’t from me.”
He pulls his guitar into his lap and he’s looking down at the strings. “Everything that’s happened since the storm . . . it’s like the greatest material for a blues song. Losing the house, the whole town, moving, again and again. Everything. Being apart from you.” He holds me in his gaze, so serious. “There were some nights when I thought I couldn’t go on anymore. I’d pick up the guitar and play and try to write songs. You’d think that the blues would fit me more than they ever have, but what came out was different.”
He strums a little and that look comes over him, like I saw that night at Chase’s house, like he doesn’t notice anyone else around him. He’s consumed in his thoughts. “So I wrote this new one for you.”
It is soft, gentle, like a boat rocking on water, over the waves, with a sureness, a rightness. It is that beautiful sadness that pierces your heart but makes it soar at the same time. It’s about a sailor who’s lost at sea. He’s drifting, and all he can think about is the girl who will be waiting when he finally gets back to shore. Because he’s decided that she’s his home now. Every chord rings with this fierce, fierce love. The kind of love that would hold you up your whole life no matter what came along.
It’s called “The Ballad of Evangeline.”
I’VE NEVER FORGOTTEN that conversation about fate I had with Tru when we were in Atlanta — that maybe fate was catching up to the things you love. I’m one of the six thousand freshmen at LSU this fall. Tru is one of the others. And we are together.
I have a collection of heavy and expensive books about marine biology and ornithology. I’ve got the Mississippi River flowing close to me again; close enough that when I walk out of my dorm, I can feel the breeze off of it, walk to the levee, watch the barges go by and scan the sky for birds heading down the flyway. And I’ve got plans. Big plans. Next summer, I’ll be an intern for one of my professors, working on a project looking at how coastal erosion is affecting migratory birds.
I still see Kendra, who’s at Southern on her amazing basketball scholarship, although not as much as I’d like to. I can feel life pulling us apart, but she will still show up at my door and come in without knocking, throw herself down on my bed, and say, “I’m hungry. Anything to eat around here?” So far we have gone home two weekends together, once for Bellvoir homecoming and once just because. Our next trip to New Orleans is scheduled for November, when the Derek Turner Project will be playing at the Royal Sonesta in the Quarter. Guess who’s playing piano with him?
Mandy will be back from Atlanta next month for the Orange Queen
competition. She thinks she’s really got a chance this year.
Every once in a while I’ll get a call or a text from Danielle. She’s going to a community college in Salt Lake City while she tries to decide what she wants to major in. She sends me pictures of her cute little sister, whom she adores and who clearly adores her, too. I am so glad she has a real sister to love her like that. I know that we are not going to get back what we once had. I know we may never be in the same place again. But I also know that for each of us, the other is part of what we’ll always call home.
Our family’s home now is a duplex on the outskirts of Bellvoir. It went up at the end of last year, brand new, granite countertops and all. It takes Mama less time to get to work in New Orleans than it did in Atlanta. Daddy can be at the marina in about an hour and when I visit home, I’m always there helping him, getting out on the water or fixing up boats, which I’ve now become pretty good at. Shrimping is the same as it’s always been, up and down, scraping by. But it’s in him. I can’t say that Mama and Daddy are who they used to be. But they are trying. Maybe that’s all anybody can do.
Ground has been broken on Evangeline Beauchamp Elementary near Bayou Perdu. Not enough kids have come back to make a whole new school, so all the kids from the south part of the parish will go to this one. When they do the ribbon cutting, the superintendent says that we can plant an orange tree out front. Mamere would have liked that.
Sometimes I take out the copy of Evangeline she gave me on my sixteenth birthday and leaf through it. It can’t replace her warmth or the comfort she always gave me, but it feels like a part of her that I can still hold in my hands. When she gave it to me, she didn’t know that it would be one of the only material things I’d be able to keep from my old life. I always thought she wanted me to have it so that I’d be proud of my heritage and my name — the girl in a book. But now I think it was to remind me that loss and longing are a part of everyone’s story. And that no matter how broken I might feel, I can still find the inexpressible sweetness that the first Evangeline found, even when things seemed the darkest. Maybe it will come like it did for her, in a moment when the setting sun turns the sky and the water golden and a birdsong pierces through the silence right into my heart. Or maybe it will come with a kiss after an impossible-to-bear separation. But in all the low times, and the in-between times, those moments will echo through me like a melody.
I wish I could be like Tru and write a song of love and gratitude to all those who helped me all the way through my first thoughts of trying to write fiction to finishing this book. It would be a lengthy ballad, with high and low notes and occasional dissonance, ultimately with a happy ending. But I’m no songwriter, so I’m just going to have to break this down into parts.
The chorus of this song I’d write is full of supporters who were encouraging from the earliest drafts, especially my writing group: Bethany Dellinger, Susan Stewart, Susan Lefler, Art Grand, and Karen Miller, to whom I’m extra grateful for reading multiple drafts and for providing insightful comments without which I couldn’t have gone forward. My brilliant cousin, Sue Corbett, had the thankless job of reading awful first drafts of multiple efforts and gave me some of the best advice; I am grateful for her encouragement, her time, and for inspiring me to try to do this in the first place. Thanks, too, go to Anne Slatton for reading a draft and teaching me everything I know about writing dialogue and to Dawn Cusick for being my sounding board.
My agent, Claire Anderson-Wheeler, saw potential in a not-quite-ready story and with incredibly sharp vision helped me shape it into something that works. Her support and belief in me means everything. I am the luckiest author I know.
Thank you to my brilliant editor, Katie Cunningham, for her insight and understanding of the story I was trying to tell and for making it better. Thank you for believing in this book and bringing it into the world. And thank you to Hannah Mahoney and Maggie Deslaurier for their keen eyes, Sherry Fatla for the interior design, Matt Roeser for the cover, and the whole crew at Candlewick.
Thank you to my family and friends.
Finally, to Andrew for always supporting and believing in me and never asking to read it. And to Maeve and Finn for inspiring me to stick with it. This little family is the sweet melody in my life that makes my heart sing.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2017 by Joanne O’Sullivan
Cover illustration copyright © 2017 by CSA Images/Mod Art Collection (Getty Images)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2017
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number pending
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