Lagniappes Collection II

by Cradit, Sarah M.

  Then, at that precise moment, I was aware of my own coming death. Nothing flashed before my eyes. No treasured memories. My mind, I learned, was not wired to look back. Only forward. My fight-or-flight was set firmly to fight.

  So, yes, I was eighteen when I died.

  But then, at eighteen, I was reborn.

  Giselle Adele Deschanel is the name I was given at birth. It’s a fine name; a lovely, lyrical-sounding moniker that might lead you to believe the wearer was a creature of exquisite beauty and refinement. If I told you I was all these things, and now am no longer any of these things, would you believe me?

  Does it matter?

  Do you care?

  Whoever was in charge of this intelligent design didn’t. My life was only beginning. I was only a few weeks shy of stepping foot on the campus of Tulane, where I would make mistakes, yes, but where I would become… There isn’t an end to that sentence because I never made it far enough to decide.

  And now here I am.

  Here we are, as you’re still listening.

  Shall we begin?

  II

  Let’s return to the scene of the accident.

  If you’re at all aware of the news in South Louisiana, you’re familiar with the basics already: Charles Deschanel, heir to the vast and unending Deschanel estate; his wife, Cordelia; and daughters, meet their untimely end in a tragic car accident en route to a family vacation in the Gulf of Mexico.

  All but one.

  The youngest, Adrienne, disappears without a trace. She doesn’t re-emerge for three years, and when she does, she comes with an unbelievable story about a covert rescue and eons of memory loss. She becomes the next, and always, darling of the media where the Deschanels are concerned, eclipsing even our half-brother, Nicolas, who was not on the trip and inherited everything.

  But this is not Adrienne’s story or Nicolas’. It is mine.

  In the future where we now live, I’m a faded memory, a sad shake of the head when someone new in town hears the story of how the most treasured family in greater New Orleans came to an unspeakable end.

  My body, or most of it anyway, was never recovered. I’m not here to tell you I miraculously survived, living off nutria and prolific bayou flora. Pieces of my body are interred in the family tomb at Ophélie, our family’s plantation. Enough of me for my brother Nicolas to feel right in paying respects when he lays flowers at the base of our crypt. The rest of me found home in the bellies of gators and snakes or dissolved in the gasses of the unforgiving swamp.

  Now might be the time to share that my family comes from a long line of witches and warlocks. Mind readers, yes, but also healers, elementalists, telekinetics, and all manner of amazing and talented creatures. Yet, through some ironic twist of fate, none of my immediate family was granted such gifts. Or any gifts. Benign, the family calls those of us who can do nothing amazing and wonderful, those of us who cannot move objects across the room with a simple flick of the mind, or lay hands on the injured and see them whole.

  So imagine my shock when I found my soul could exist wholly detached from my broken body.

  I’m not speaking of the existence of the soul as a unique entity. Most believe this is so, especially if one believes in an afterlife, which I do. I went to Catholic school. I said the vows to my Sacrament of Confirmation in earnest. But I watched my sisters and parents separate from their own bodies, as I did… and then slowly disperse until there was nothing but the stench of death and my own confusion.

  They went on to wherever they went, and I was still there. I tried to re-enter my body, but the sensation was akin to slamming into a solid wall. Not an option. That door was closed, but, then, why was I still at this juncture?

  I learned quickly that while I may still be around, I wouldn’t be for long if I didn’t find a new home. My family was gone. My father, then my stepmother, followed in short order by Nathalie. Lucienne was the last to pass on to the next life, and I chanced a wave as I watched her spirit soar by. She didn’t see me. Maybe she couldn’t. Perhaps wherever she existed was purer than my location at that moment, homeless and hungry for a host.

  Adrienne, though… her body, while injured, remained strong. Her heartbeat, which I never could have heard under normal circumstances, thumped in my head like the low, repeating rhythm of club music. I tried to talk to her, to beseech my youngest sister and see if she could see me, or even hear me, but the shock of the accident had rendered her unconscious.

  Drawn to her… I was sick with need, mingled with pleasure… at the prospect of occupying her. Even then, I knew I could fuse myself into every last corner of her, fitting as neatly as a boat mooring into port.

  I wondered… could I, really? More, should I?

  A gust of wind, at first light, but slowly escalating, tore at my ephemeral extremities. I had to do something. Quickly. I may have been strong enough to withstand death, but I had little doubt I could exist like this for long.

  Then the old Cajun came by in his pirogue, following the smoke of the accident. The story in the paper, the one accompanying the interview he gave following Adrienne’s re-appearance, told of how he rushed forth without hesitation, intent on helping the sole survivor of the horrific crash.

  In fact, the old coonass froze up like a mannequin in a Weatherly Department Store.

  Maybe you’ve guessed what spurred him into action. How action preceded thought and I floated through the space between us until I was upon him like a parasite, invading every corner of his body and mind as if I’d done it a hundred thousand times before.

  The heaviness of his old frame weighed upon me. I looked down at my calloused hands, felt the pain in my ancient knees, and knew this would have to be temporary. I couldn’t bear another hour in this skin, let alone the next decade or so he might have left in him.

  It was I who lifted my baby sister in my arms and laid her in the pirogue. Me, who took her to the Fontaine cabin where the old Cajun knew we would find medical assistance. So I also knew it.

  I saved Adrienne, my darling sister and best friend, ensuring her survival and granting her promise of a future none of the rest of us were given.

  Yet, as I backed my new vessel away from the Fontaine dock, it was not relief or happiness I felt knowing she would be okay.

  I’ve been honest with you so far. No point in putting on pretenses now.

  Truth is, I resented her. All our lives she had been the cherished baby of the family. The darling of our father, getting away with anything with her magnetic smile and childish giggle. None of this had mattered to me throughout our childhood because I could coddle and love her, too. She was my pet, my sweet little Adrienne, who read Chaucer when she should have been building forts and playing with dolls. Even when she stole my boyfriend, Oz, I knew it was her natural charisma, and not her intention, at fault.

  Now, she was none of these things. She was the one who lived.

  I forced myself to flee far from the Fontaine house before I found myself unable to withstand the building rage within.

  Far as I know, the Deschanels have never had their own family ghost. This isn’t a surprising absence for most “normal” families, but mine being so shrouded in magic, it’s notable. Not sure if that actually matters, except in the way all seemingly trivial things lacking strong consequence do.

  It begins to matter to me, as I search for individual purpose in this new landscape of shifting skin.

  But first, there’s still some catching up to do.

  III

  I was tempted to stay. To watch over Adrienne, even crawl inside her and see the world from her freshly-rescued-from-the-brink-of-death eyes. Was she grateful? Would she ever know how close she’d come to joining Nathalie, Lucienne, and our parents?

  You probably think I did enter her, despite my protestations of innocence. It’s not that I hadn’t wanted to, or hadn’t seen intrinsic value in molding myself into the DNA of my own flesh and blood. I’d have found a good home there, maybe even a permanent one.
But in those last moments, as I floated away from the Fontaine shack, I still possessed enough of my inherent humanity to understand the gift of life was Adrienne’s, not mine.

  Sometimes I still wonder how the path would have veered had I stayed.

  As soon as the old Cajun found port, I skipped to the nearest young woman I could find, relieved to be shed of his aging, palsied frame. As with the first time I’d done it, hardly an hour before, seeding myself within her felt like an old trick, not a new one. Unlike my short journey in the old man, being within Mary Jane’s skin was not uncomfortable, but I very quickly understood, after a brief search of her thoughts, that MJ was not keen on venturing beyond the small world she’d occupied for the short sixteen years of her life.

  Well, that wasn’t going to work. I needed out of the bayou. Fast.

  I stayed inside Mary Jane long enough to get a brief lay of the land. Abbeville was a small community, wrapped up in the same constricting package as all small communities. Those born there, stayed there. It reminded me of Vacherie, the nearest town to our plantation, Ophélie. I’d never considered Vacherie my hometown, despite New Orleans, the one I did and always would claim, being almost an hour east. Girls like me were not meant for country living. We bought our groceries at Whole Foods, not Piggly Wiggly, thank you very much.

  As Mary Jane went through her day, I found my experience within her had variable returns. For instance, I could choose whether to take control of the vehicle and drive, or sit back and observe. I’d driven the old Cajun out of sheer necessity, but if I were to find a way out of the sticks, I’d need Mary Jane’s fount of information to determine just how to do so.

  She led me through the banal steps of her day, from the washing of linens to the preparation for dinner. I related to none of these things. I’d never done my own laundry, not once. I didn’t even know how to turn on the stove (or stoves, plural; Ophélie had two kitchens).

  Not information I ever wanted a use for, either.

  Patience eventually paid off when she ventured into town after dinner for groceries. She stopped first by a shabby bar called the One Horse Tavern (yes, really) to pass a message from her mother to her pa. We found the latter at the end of the bar, chatting up a greasy patron whose clothes should have won an award for still hanging on. His stench was worse, even than the ones swimming by me as I watched, listened, and smelled my family die.

  I zoned out here, temporarily, until I heard the magical words: New Orleans.

  Mary Jane had inadvertently led me to my ticket into town.

  As you may have guessed from my glowing assessment of the trucker, this was to be the longest ride of my life. For the sake of humanity, I won’t attempt to describe even a moment.

  But then, ah, I was back in New Orleans! I had no plan, no earthly (or unearthly) idea of what to do with myself, but stepping foot—even when those feet belonged to walking death—on the broken cobblestones of the Quarter—even if it was closer to Rampart than Royal—had a calming effect on me.

  I was here. Life had afforded me a second, albeit unorthodox, shot at living.

  I could do this.

  Whatever happened, I could do this.

  IV

  From the trucker, I went from body to body like a game of ghostly leap frog.

  Proximity was the first rule of this new life, I learned. Slipping inside someone was easy, but only if they were nearby.

  I skipped from my trucker to a delivery man happening by with a dolly full of crates. From him, I traveled to a homeless man hocking old, reeking Mardi Gras beads. Next I saw a mother pushing a child in a patched together stroller, and I jumped to her.

  As we drew closer to a cemetery—one I immediately recognized as St. Louis No. 1, thereby helping me ground myself further to my surroundings—I found a middle-aged man in a blue vintage seersucker suit as he prepared to enter a car door held open for him by a valet.

  This was way more my style.

  Mr. Masters, the valet called him, but I soon learned, after rooting around upstairs, that his first name was Duke. As in Duke Masters, the cigar magnate from Metairie, who had been long suspected of illegally trafficking with Cubans, but had somehow avoided any real consequence. More importantly, a man who had once called my father friend, and whom I knew to have a daughter only several years older than me.

  Somewhere, fate smiled down on me.

  The Masters’ Spanish villa, with its terra cotta arches and golden tiles, seemed like it would have been more at home in a Southern California suburb. It was built to stand apart from the Greek Revival ladies lining the avenues.

  An elderly woman with dark, suspicious eyes took Duke’s—my—coat and traded him for a Bellini. “Can I get you anything else, Master Duke?”

  Master Duke? I couldn’t decide if this was a not-so-clever play on his last name, or if this man seriously had his staff refer to him as master.

  “Master Duke?”

  Oh, yes. That’s me. “No, nothing.”

  “Very well,” she said, backing away, affecting a slight curtsey.

  I tried to imagine Condoleezza, our head of staff, doing any of this and choked back a laugh. She’d have poisoned our jambalaya first.

  Though I was itching to find a permanent host and thought I knew just the person, I was out of my element in someone else’s household, particularly one built on the back of a massive ego. Where my father had treated everyone under his roof as a treasure, Duke Masters took his surname to heart.

  So, I sat back and let Duke take the controls for a bit.

  If you’ve grown up in privilege, as I have, and you have no point of contrast or comparison, it’s challenging to describe how privilege looks. Should I tell you the house had eight bedrooms and six baths? That the pool was designed as a multi-tiered oasis, with a steam room and glassed porch overlooking the man-made waterfall? That all floors were Italian marble, and the trim had been imported from Spain? What details are important to you? Which are not?

  In the end, do any of them matter?

  No, not to this story. This recounting, as you’ll soon see, is a fractured tale of love and loss. And in the end, it is my story, and so I choose to share the details that matter most to me. The precise floor plan and materials ledgers weren’t important in my past life, and they sure as hell aren’t now.

  Anyway.

  The Alcazar, as I came to call it, was nothing like Ophélie, of course. My childhood home was an old plantation house built from property-grown and milled cypress that creaked with every step. Original parlor furniture, and sixth and seventh generations of the same family still occupying the same halls as the ancestors who’d build it.

  In other ways, The Alcazar was everything like Ophélie. I would be sheltered from the outside world, exposed only as much as I chose to be. Never need for anything. Never want for anything.

  Except, of course, a body I could call my own.

  For two months, I lived within the physical body of a textbook narcissist whose idea of fealty was raising a hand. Any tempering of his natural sadistic tendencies had flown when his wife passed a few years earlier from an aggressive form of cancer. Nothing at all about Duke Masters appealed to my senses, fine or otherwise. To remain within him for too long would have long-term effects on me. How I knew this, I couldn’t say, but I did. I understood a lot of things that had never occurred to me when I was a teenager on the verge of the rest of her life. Sometimes, when I’m especially introspective (when time stands still for you, there’s little else to do), I wonder if the truths I knew now were ones I’d always known and just never needed to access.

  Anyway. The point is, I hadn’t come here for Duke.

  Or at least, he wasn’t why I stayed.

  V

  Janie, born Janette, was the only child of Duke Masters and his late wife, also named Janette. She’d been away at Yale pursuing a degree in criminal justice and was only home for the summer, the latter I immediately picked up on to be a cause of genuine distress for her.
It took little time, and only surface level observations, to realize she was uncomfortable around her father. Shocking, right? Later, once residing within her, I would understand Janie chose Yale as a means of escaping him. She planned to move to New York and never return.

  Duke Masters had vastly different ideas and arranged for her to have a cushy job as a forensics detective for the New Orleans Police Department, despite being fresh out of school. Part of me—the part who sometimes still observed the lives of others without identifying an opportunity for myself—wanted to see her refuse to acquiesce to this manipulation, to run away and never come back. Janie was generous and unselfish, the opposite of her father. Her actions were purposeful. She always thought of others. Never looked for her own benefit first. I didn’t relate to this but admired it, and, in an odd way even wanted to protect it, the way those not elbows-deep in the oil industry want to preserve our disappearing coastline.

  But I also needed something she had, and I needed it very badly. The toxic spew of thoughts bleeding from her father’s mind was haunting my already damaged psyche. To protect myself, I’d sometimes fled to the valet, the gardener, one of the housemaids. Not having had a permanent home in months left me lost and detached.

  I needed time to observe Janie and understand her better if I was to become her. I had few intentions of being just like her, but I didn’t want anyone seeking out a priest to strike me out, either. A seamless transition was key.

  Janie was, in so many ways, the perfect candidate. She was lovely on the eyes—not striking or intoxicating as I had been, but pretty in an effortless way—with a pale blonde bob and eyes as gray as burnt coal. She was in excellent physical shape, having taken rowing in high school and college. Also, money would never be a challenge for her. You can spout on all day about how money doesn’t cause happiness, but it prevents a hell of a lot of problems.