When Josephine reached Lisette she pulled her head out of the water and screamed. When I saw why, I screamed, too. Lisette’s head was split almost clean in half at the forehead. Her eyes were open, and Josephine forgot to continue treading water. She panicked and started to sink. Clem jumped into the water after her, and I ran to the back of the boat to grab a life preserver. When I came back, Clem was pulling Josephine and Lisette towards the boat and failing almost as miserably as Josephine to stay above the water. I threw the life preserver to them and told Clem to let Lisette go, she was weighing them down. They weren’t all three going to stay afloat on the preserver meant for one. I pulled them back to the boat, and we left Lisette in the water. During this chaos, Jimmy made his way back, and I remember helping to pull him up out of the water too.”
Banyan asked, “How long did it take you to drive from Clem’s house to Jimmy?”
I said, “Maybe five minutes, including time to unhitch the boat from the dock.”
“How long do you think it was between when you heard that first slam until you were at the scene?”
Abolina said, “It was about ten minutes from when we heard it until I heard the yell to call the police.”
“So in ten minutes it never occurred to Jimmy to swim over to see if Lisette was okay?”
“I remember thinking about that at the time,” I said to Banyan. “I recall how scared he looked. He was white as a sheet when we got there, and I thought well, I still do think he was just too afraid to see what happened to her. Once everybody was out of the water he said she hit the tree, and he was afraid he’d be in trouble for it.”
“When you saw Lisette did she look bloated or was her coloring distorted?”
I looked to him and said, “No, why?”
“I want to know how long she was in the water. Bodies left in the water a long time become bloated and their features look different.”
“Not that I remember,” I told him.
“So here is the big question. Is Jimmy a coward?” Banyan asked in a matter of fact way.
I responded, “I don’t know if I would say a coward.”
“Yes,” Beau jumped in. “I would say he is a coward.”
I asked Beau why he thought Jimmy was a coward. He told me that men know these things. He said there are men you want backing you in a fight, and Jimmy wasn’t one of them. Banyan told me it was true and said, “If he is a coward then he is a coward, maybe he was really afraid to check on her. If he’s not, then there was some other reason he made sure he was far away from her.”
“Maybe that’s where they both fell out of the boat, and he was too shocked to swim to her,” I added.
Banyan stood up and sat down his pen. He placed his notepad on my tray table and sat the salt and pepper shakers from my untouched hospital dinner on top of it. He slid the piece of paper forward fast then abruptly stopped it. The salt and pepper shakers flew off of the front of it and both landed dead center in front of the pad.
He looked to Abolina and said, “There’s no scenario in which two people, about the same height and weight fly out of a moving boat and one lands dead in the center and the other lands off to the side. So either Jimmy swam away from Lisette, or he did not go off that boat with her.”
Abolina’s lower lip began to shake and her expression turned serious. She opened the piece of paper in her hands, read it over again, then walked around to the other side of my bed where Banyan had laid his pad and pen. She grabbed the pen and signed the bottom. She folded the paper back up and held it out to Banyan.
“I have only one request,” Abolina said. “I want to be there when you talk to that son-of-a-bitch Jimmy.”
Banyan asked us questions into the night, until the nurse finally kicked the three of them out. Before they left, they told me that they were staying in my rented room at the hotel. Banyan had helped set them up there, and he said the hotel manager felt so bad about my situation he stopped charging me for my stay.
My mind was troubled that night, but with the help of sleeping pills I fell into a deep sleep and was haunted in my REM cycle by visions of a girl floating face down in the water. She looked like Lisette from the back, but Josephine, Lisette and I all looked the same from the back, so I did not know which one of us it was supposed to be. I tried to wake myself up, so I did not have to look at her, but the drugs had put me too far into a stupor, and I was trapped watching her. When I tried to get close something would hold me back. It was a vague dream, and all I could see was pale white skin and swirling dark hair.
I awoke to full daylight outside and Abolina and Beau were sitting in my room watching “Deadliest Catch” with the sound muted. I lay in the bed for a moment without moving, and I heard Beau say, “You know she’s gonna have to come back with us, Lina. How she going to get around this city in a wheelchair? She can’t even cook food. There’s no kitchen in her hotel room. You need to talk some sense into her.”
I started to sit up, and Beau stopped talking. Abolina came over to me and gave me a kiss on the forehead. She acted as if nothing had just been said. “Glad to see you are up, sweetie. I have good news for you. The doctor said we can take you out for a walk. They have a garden up on the roof, and he said we are welcome to go up there for a little air and sunshine.”
I told her I wanted to go right away. I wanted the fresh air, but just as much I wanted to talk to her away from Beau. She wheeled me up to the roof where we had a beautiful, private perch from which to watch the city. The view was comparable to those from the Empire State Building. We stood in the breeze and I told her I still wanted to go to my audition. I had come back to New York from the comfort of the bayou, because I had a chance to play the piano in a real Broadway theater. I did not know if the people back home understood the significance of an opportunity like that. Abolina replied that she knew my music was important to me but left it at that. The breeze on the roof turned cold and I had said my piece. I asked her to take me back in.
When we settled back in my room the doctor came to visit. He stood at the end of the bed and started flipping through his clipboard. He looked at me and let out a long huff of air. “Well, let’s talk about this leg young lady.”
He walked around to the side of the bed and put a hand on my cast. “You are going to be out of commission for a while. We have inserted a long rod into your shin to stabilize your tibia. There are also pins in the side to keep it stable. The reality is you had a nasty open fracture that was almost bad enough to say let’s forget the whole thing. It’s being held together for now with mesh. You are going to need another surgery to repair the overlay with skin from your back.”
The conversation was making me woozy. I pictured them peeling the skin away from my back with a potato peeler. I continued listening, but my eyes must have betrayed my thoughts.
The doctor tried to comfort me. He said, “It will be fine. You won’t even notice. We will get this overlay underway, make sure a good pulse is getting to your foot, and once that is accomplished you will be free to go. You are going to be limited. First crutches, then you will be in a boot, and you are going to need physical therapy. You aren’t going to be walking on that normally for at least a year and after that, you won’t be running any marathons, but it should get you around.”
I did not know what to say. I was still processing the information. Finally, I asked “When are you going to be skinning my back?”
“It’s just a small patch of skin to place over the affected area. We are going to take care of that this afternoon, and we should have you out of here in just a couple of days.”
The Big Apple
After the surgery, Banyan stopped by with flowers and a “Get Well” balloon. I recall him holding my hand and asking me how it went, but I was too groggy to talk. I still thought it was nice that he stopped by.
I stayed in the hospital for three more days and at long last the surgery was deemed a success. Though I thought the doctor used the word ‘back’ too liberally when he sai
d from where they were taking the skin for my wound. It would have been more accurate to say they were going to skin my hide. When I left, my leg was covered with roughly six inches of my ass. The doctors handed me a bottle of pills and sent me on my way.
Beau and Abolina brought me back to the middle-of-the-road hotel I had been living in. This presented a special kind of problem, as New York hotel rooms are so compact there is barely space outside the bed to walk. The three of us were tripping over each other in a room meant for two. Beau took it upon himself to make a bed on the floor, and Abolina and I lay on the bed most of that first day watching TV. After a full day of lying around, watching junk and eating rice peppered with seasonings from Abolina’s purse, I was going stir crazy. When it was finally dark, I decided to practice my audition song on the piano in the hotel lobby. I collected my folder of sheet music from the bedside table and told Abolina and Beau I needed to get ready for my audition.
Beau was clearly not a fan of this idea. He said, “Why you going to that audition? It’s not like you can stay here even if you get it.”
I was annoyed by his question. Beau had made it clear to me last time I was in Louisiana that he didn’t think much of me trying to make a career out of music. Just like my father, he thought my life would be better if I lived it on the bayou making babies like the other Cajun Queens.
I told him,” I don’t care how injured I am. I still want to play, and if I get the job I will find a way to make it work.”
He finally sat up from his nest of hotel blankets and said, “Who’s gonna care for you and feed you in this New York, cher? Who gonna help you wash around that leg? You don’t know one person around here.”
“I will figure it out, Beau,” I said. “And I have friends. I had neighbors back at my apartment. I am sure one of them could set me up with some help.”
He made a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh.
He wanted me to ask him why, so I did. “What?”
“Where were all your city folk friends while you spent a week in the hospital, Fanchon Deveroux? Tell me dat.”
I had no good response. I tried to storm out of the room, but with crutches I could only hobble out the door in a huff. I dropped my sheet music in my attempt to make a scene and it flew to the floor.
Beau did not make a move to help me and in a high-pitched mocking voice said, “City friends, will you please help me pick up my papers?”
Abolina, without taking her eyes off of the TV reached her hand over the bed and smacked Beau on the back of his head. “Pick up those papers, boy. Where’s your damn manners?”
He wordlessly collected my papers from the floor, stood up, and handed them to me.
This time I wedged the folder between my leg and my cast and without saying anything hobbled out the door and down the hall. On the elevator ride to the lobby I thought about the logistics of being in New York alone with a very broken leg. I knew Beau was right. Something in me still wanted to see if I would get the dream job and if I did maybe the universe would open up some way for me to stay, like Abolina would know how important it was to me and stick around, or maybe the job would pay enough that I would be able to afford to hire help.
When the doors opened I made my way over to the piano. Thankfully the lobby was empty except for the two guys who worked the desk at night. They gave me a wave as I hobbled by and one said, “You playing the song from that movie again tonight?”
I nodded my head at him as I sat down and arranged my music. My long slender fingers found the keys, and I started to rock them back and forth thinking about the gentle rocking of the sounds in “Hallelujah.” I thought the words as I tapped the rhythm gently with my leg. I always kept time by tapping my leg, my right leg. I tapped gently so I wouldn’t hurt it. I was starting to feel the song. It was bringing back the memory of my deceased friends, Josephine and Lisette. I was nearly moved to tears when it was time to touch the pedal to draw out the last note, and out of habit I swung my bad leg forward and heard the cast make a clinking sound on the pedal. Pain shot up my leg, and I immediately took my hands off the keys and moved them protectively down to my leg.
When I did, I heard a slow clap behind me and turned to see Beau sitting on the sofa in the lobby watching the basketball game that was muted on the TV. One of the guys from behind the desk had come out to sit with him.
I yelled to Beau, “Shut up.”
“It was good Fanny, keep it up.”
“Don’t call me Fanny. It makes me think of a fat woman’s backside. Why are you down here, Beau?”
“Abolina told me to keep an eye on you cause you is injured,” said Beau. “So play on.”
I turned back to the piano and started to trudge through the music again. This time I could not find the feeling. I had to concentrate on using my left foot. I played through it a couple of times and thought the fingering was easy enough. I would just have to capture the feeling. After my second pass the other guy on the couch said, “It was good that time.”
I flipped through my folder for another song. Beau yelled from the couch. “Hey, you know the other song from dat movie, de one about being a believer? Play dat one.”
The other guy on the couch nodded his head in agreement.
I rolled my eyes and continued looking through my folder. I saw the music for “Flight of the Bumble Bee,” my musical nemesis. Every piano teacher I ever had tried to drill that one into me. I hated that song with a passion. I flipped past it and found one that I knew would be good for a laugh.
I started it slow and jazzy then picked up the pace to “When the Saints Go Marching in.” It was practically our national anthem in Louisiana.
When Beau realized what I was playing he raised his fist in the air on the couch and said, “Hell yeah!”
It was a fun fast version the way I played it. And when I was done I could feel my heart beat. The guys in the lobby all clapped and whooped and my face had inadvertently taken on a smile. It was just the right song for the moment, and it reminded me why I started playing in the first place. When my heart was hurting I could mend it with my music.
The next day Beau and Abolina wanted the tourist experience. We all chipped in for a cab. I was not going to navigate the subway on crutches. Luckily, my financial situation was unharmed by recent events. Josephine and I had a cushy savings, thanks to spending our teenage years working and saving. The New York City Victims Fund picked up the tab for my leg. On top of that the hotel staff felt so bad about the whole mess that they refused to run my credit card.
First, I took Abolina and Beau on the Ellis Island and Statue of Liberty Ferry. The nice people from the company traded me my crutches for a wheelchair, so I felt nice and conspicuous. We rode the boat out, sitting on the outside viewing decks and letting the wind blow through our hair. Abolina seemed very excited to visit Ellis Island in particular. The building there was beautiful with elaborate tile work. We especially liked the second floor lobby. It had high vaulted ceilings with large arched windows. The bright room once housed immigrants stuffed shoulder to shoulder, but during our tour it looked grand with just a few visitors stepping around the room. The patter of shoes echoed off of each wall.
Abolina wanted to hear about the history of the people who came through there to become citizens. She was so excited she even took the audio tour. When she found the ancestry computer she stood in line to get a chance to use it. Abolina was Creole and told us she was descended from a family of mixed races, the girls got their dark hair from her and their green eyes from Clem’s side. Beau had the green eyes from Clem’s family line as well. Abolina ran her family name through the computer. Her only result was an old record that said her family came in from Acadia, then straight on to the south. It was the same for Beau. That would be the history for most Cajuns, and they were both happy to see their family origins confirmed.
“Try your family,” Abolina urged me.
“My family history will be the same,” I told her, but stepped up to the
kiosk anyway. I typed in my family name, “Deveroux” and was surprised to see a few familiar names with entry points of New York City next to them and places other than Acadia as points of origin.
Beau looked over my shoulder and said, “I knew you must be a Yankee.”
Being told you are a Yankee is like being called a sinner.
I said, “It doesn’t mean anything, Beau. Deveroux is a common name.”
“You tell yourself that, cher. But those is some might familiar names to me.
Abolina shrugged it off. “You always Cajun to me anyway.”
I wasn’t that concerned about being a Yankee vs. a Cajun. And even if your ancestors went through Ellis Island, it didn’t mean you weren’t Cajun. It just meant you did not come in on the same ships as the rest of the Acadians. I knew my family would not be happy to hear that any of our ancestors came in through the North. Heritage is a very serious subject in my family.
We walked through the rest of the exhibit and looked at the clothing and luggage of the people who once immigrated through those halls. Beau made multiple jokes about how each item could have once belonged to my family. After exploring every exhibit we went back to the Ferry and got ready to see the Statue of Liberty.
All Saints' Secrets (Saints Mystery Series Book 2) Page 2