“Well, indeed,” I agreed, and we both laughed.
I’ll give you one guess where I ended the night and woke the following morning.
You’d have thought I was a debutante, fresh off her first cotillion, with how nervous I was. Stepping across the oak floors of his cottage on Seventh, gasping as his arms came around my waist from behind, his lips hot against the side of my neck.
We didn’t even make it to the bedroom. Our first time was a mess of sweaty limbs, tangled together, pressed into musty book spines on an antique bookcase. I’ll bet his version of the story didn’t mention the destruction of family heirlooms.
Afterward, he led me to the couch. With a gentle look I couldn’t forget even if I bleached my thoughts, he said, “I don’t know what this is, but I’m glad you’re here.”
“Your smile…” I let the end of the thought trail off. He couldn’t know his smile had been in my dreams for almost four years.
“Because of you, Janie,” he answered, the last of his words lost behind the gentle force of a fresh kiss. “Because of you.”
Was he thinking of Adrienne, then? I’ll never know for certain, but I suspect Oz Sullivan was doing everything in his power to not think of my sister.
Whether or not I’d actually earned the honor of being the happiness behind his smile was another matter.
But he was the first real happiness I’d known since becoming someone other than myself.
IX
Oz and I spent almost every night of every day together for the next few weeks.
Surely, I don’t need to tell you how blissful this made me.
I thought I’d known everything about Oz. My surprise came in the form of realizing how little I actually knew about him.
For instance:
He was a distance runner and rose before the sun.
He loved old kung fu movies.
He secretly always wanted to be a writer.
He couldn’t cook a meal to save his life but could creatively construct a recipe that, in the right hands, came out brilliantly.
He was a lawyer, in a family of lawyers, but had no passion for law.
His favorite spot to be kissed was in the hollow between his collarbone.
None of those things are interesting, except to you and the one who loves you. Well. I loved him. I’d loved Oz Sullivan since the summer that ended with what could have been instead of what was.
He was my reason for pushing forward, a literal specter of my former self, in a life I’d convinced myself was quite nice from fear of seeing it for what it really was: a hollow consolation prize.
Don’t roll your eyes from the other side of the page, and label me a cliché. You’ve never walked in my shoes—either when I walked as Giselle or as Janie. You can’t know what it is to be brought to the brink of death, shown the door, and then given another chance. One you look at and think, hey, it’s better than dying. But is it? You, from the privilege of the safety of your cozy bed or living room couch, will never know. You cannot ever possibly know what it is to realize all it would take is the loss of one thread of stability to send the entire set careening into the abyss.
For someone struggling with crippling depression, sometimes the reason is as simple as wanting to live to see the next episode of Law and Order… or to watch the Saints win another Super Bowl. I’ve learned a lot about the human mind as a forensics investigator. The brain makes concessions, and deals, and promises—knowing that, deep down, we all want a reason to fight. Mine has said, carry on. Oz will be yours. It will be enough. It has to.
Oz was my reason.
I never got the chance to figure out if I, alone, could be his.
I started having sex when I was thirteen and never stopped. Growing up in a household where my real mother—a housemaid my father fucked to escape his wife, my stepmother—died when I was two. The only maternal figure I had, loathed the sight of me. Avoiding bringing my own offspring into the world was a top priority. Cordelia took me to see her own ObGyn less out of support and more from the desire of not having to look after another child she didn’t want. Never so much as gave me a lecture about it. To do so would have meant she cared.
As I added more notches to Janie’s belt, I’d made sure to stay current on her contraception, those fears as alive in me now as ever.
At this point, you may have guessed where my story is heading: I found myself pregnant.
You might be thinking I planned it as a way of keeping Oz under my thumb. For some women, this might be an acceptable tactic, but I’d seen that backfire way too many times. An unwanted child made relationships worse, not better, almost every single time.
I didn’t plan this. Far from it! In fairness, contraception was not the only thing that slipped once Oz and I fell into a steady rhythm together. I began using sick time at work more frequently and stopped attending the sailing club altogether. Couldn’t remember the last time I read a book. All these things were part of Janie’s life, and they no longer mattered now that Janie had secured the one meaningful thing Giselle had ever wanted.
With Oz, I didn’t have to be Janie as I did with her family and friends from the past. I could be Giselle, in Janie’s body, and his response to that showed me what I believed all along: Oz could have loved me before. Adrienne had distracted him, but now she was gone, and there was no one but us to answer for our feelings.
And now a child.
Oz, of course, New Orleans’s Resident Good Guy, asked me to marry him. I, of course, said yes, though with some degree of resignation. He wanted this baby and made it clear from the moment I broke the news. I couldn’t get rid of the child. Walking away from Oz was an impossibility, not when a life with him was all I’d ever wanted.
Besides, he was my reason. Without him, the veneer would shatter and I would be left with my own melancholy and realizations. So many twisted understandings. Enough for many lifetimes.
The problem was, I would never, ever know if he could have loved me as he did without the promise of a child.
I would never know if I had succeeded in being his reason.
X
We married soon after Naomi was born. Oz wanted to do it right away, but I wanted to look beautiful in my wedding dress. Not only for my own vanity but with the knowledge that this would be the photo to survive as the existence of who we were, long after we both were gone.
Naomi was a lovely baby. All smiles and squinty eyes. Everything about her was something worth loving, and I did, in a way. But I could never love her as a mother because she wasn’t mine. Even more so than anything else I’d experienced while living as Janie Masters-now-Sullivan, this child was a reminder that I was no better than a parasite who stubbornly refused to leave its host.
Nonetheless, I was happy. And I think Oz was, too.
Catherine and Colin watched Naomi while Oz swept us off to Corsica for a brief honeymoon. His skin took on the golden hues of a fresh tan, and I chased him into the surf, desiring him as if from the first time I saw him. That was the beauty of loving Oz. I could catch him at a different angle, see him from a new lens, and love him all over again.
You might think me a romantic, but I’m far from anything of the sort. If I were, this story would be far more colorful, and I’d have rambled on for a hundred pages about the smell of his hair or the curve at the small of his back. I loved him. I wanted him. I finally had him. He’d been the longest and most meaningful chase of my short life, and the chase was over.
And that was that.
Our last night in Corsica, Oz wanted to order room service instead of going out.
“I want to remember you like that, twisted in the sheets. The way you look at me,” he said as if it was the last opportunity for such a thing.
I kicked the sheet halfway off, revealing my back and thighs. “Like this?”
Carrying a flute of champagne, Oz approached me with a special look in his eyes, recalling our first night together, when he hadn’t been able to control his desire. M
y own rose up from within, catching in my chest.
Moments before he reached the bed, though, he stopped, and his expression changed to one far more serious.
“Janie,” he said, perching on the edge of the bed, “I need you to know something.”
I propped up on one elbow. I couldn’t guess his thoughts. “Okay.”
His hand moved to my ankle, where his fingers passed delicately back and forth over my skin. “You’ve never asked me about Adrienne, and I know why. I can guess why, is what I mean, and I want you to know you’re wrong.”
“Sorry?”
His hand traveled to my calves, where he traced lazy shapes. “I did love her. Very, very much. And then I lost her, and everything changed for me.”
“I know this,” I said warily. Tensing.
“We got together so soon after that, and then you got pregnant,” he went on. “I didn’t want you to think… that is, I truly hope you don’t think… that she in any way still haunts me. I didn’t marry you to forget her. You make me happy in a way she never did.”
His words gave me less comfort than he intended. He acted as if Adrienne had been hanging over my head all this time, but all that told me was she’d been hanging over his.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Oz crawled up in bed lying parallel with me and wrapped me in his arms from behind. “This marriage is for the two of us only. No ghosts of our past lingering to create questions or doubt.”
“I know, darling.” But did he?
“I do love you, Janie.”
The addition of the word do made it seem as if he was seeking to convince himself more than me. As if answering an unspoken question.
“Well, I should hope so,” I answered, with a lightness I hoped masked my suspicion.
“Only you,” he whispered, pressing the assurance into my hair with a tight kiss, his voice directed somewhere far away, a place I could never go.
XI
In spite of the uncertainty in which we left our honeymoon (in my mind at least; to Oz, the matter was settled, at least on the surface), we returned home tanned and happy. I was even thrilled to see little Naomi.
Oz’s attentiveness to me never waned. If anything, it burned brighter. I quit my job to care for Naomi—who was, thank the heavens, a truly easy little baby, as those things go—and Oz was always home by dinner. I noted the stark contrast to my father, who had used work as a means to avoid my stepmother.
Saturdays were for games and movies. Sundays, we went to the park.
He was never too tired to love me in the bedroom, no matter what he dealt with in the office.
It was not the exciting life I imagined for myself, but I knew how fortunate I was.
And then I learned the third rule of my new life.
The cancer was a rare and aggressive type. Six months, the doctor said. His eyes added if you’re lucky.
I knew, deep down in the pit of my stomach, I’d caused this. It wasn’t that healthy people didn’t get cancer. The disease was indiscriminate.
It was that I had been a cancer all along. More than a parasite, I’d multiplied and mutated within Janie until there was nothing left of her.
The only thing left to do was confirm it.
One woman I knew would have the answer to my question. My aunt Colleen, who led the Deschanel Magi Collective, a family hive of occultists who studied those with Deschanel blood, cataloging abilities and making decisions for the supernatural side of our lives. If the knowledge existed, she would possess it.
Yet, I couldn’t go to her and say, Hey, Auntie. It’s Giselle. More, the woman couldn’t be deceived. A lie wouldn’t do.
I considered my options. Mulled over the other names on the Collective Council, the esteemed body of leadership under Colleen’s counsel.
Most would run to her, flapping their jaws.
But there was one. A cousin on the Broussard side of the family tree. Jasper. I didn’t know him well, but I knew something very important about him: His desire to be the most knowledgeable in the room would always outweigh any of his other sensibilities.
Jasper was ridiculous by the common standards of most occultists. A peddler of fake magic, when he possessed plenty of the real deal in spades.
He owned a shop in the Quarter, one I’d be ashamed to enter under normal circumstances. A plastic, chirping Marie Laveau greeted me in an artificial West Indies accent. The scent of too many incenses nearly knocked me over.
A young woman greeted me and ushered me through a curtain of beads, toward the back office, where Jasper awaited.
I remember so little about Jasper himself. His jeweled hands weighed mine down when they shook in greeting. I was blinded by his gold lamé pantsuit.
“Tell me everything,” he said, and I did.
“Who am I truly speaking with?” he asked when I had finished.
“I can’t say.”
“You knew to come to me.”
“Isn’t this what you do for a living?”
Jasper smirked, flipping a hand toward the front of the store, an apparent acknowledgment of the ridiculousness surrounding his public profession. A removal of pretense. “You knew to come to me,” he repeated.
“I can’t tell you,” I said again, rising. “It isn’t that I’m playing coy for my amusement, it’s that the stakes are far too high. If you can’t tell me what I need to know, I’ll move down my list until I find someone who does.”
“Sit, sit.” He flashed his hands again, motioning toward my chair, too curious to call my bluff. “If you won’t tell me, then fine. Fine. But answer me one question, at least. You must, if you desire an honest answer in return.”
I nodded.
“Is the woman whose body you now occupy a blood relative?”
“No. We had no relation whatsoever.”
Jasper frowned, considering. “Why didn’t you seek one of your own?”
“Should I have?”
“Do you really know so little about this gift you possess?”
I sighed. “I wouldn’t be here if I did.”
Jasper’s head bobbed in a slow, deliberate fashion. He bowed over his hands. “You can live forever like this, Miss... Sullivan. Or whomever you are.” He flashed me a knowing look and then leaned back in his chair, folding his hands over his chest. “But you’ve broken the most important rule of possession. Committed the most cardinal sin.”
I already knew the answer, but I needed to hear him say it. I swallowed and gestured for him to go on.
“Possession is a family business.”
XII
Janie died, but I was no longer around to experience it with her. How confused she must have been, in those final days, when she found herself married to a man she’d never met before, with a child said to be her own. Oz probably assumed the cancer had eaten through her memories, too.
I wouldn’t have chosen her if I had known. I wouldn’t!
How I wanted to comfort Oz. And Naomi, too. I missed her! This shocked me, and I wondered if the old Giselle would have felt this way. I knew I’d changed Janie, but I understood, now when it was too late, how much she had changed me in return.
Oh, Oz. I’d done all this for him. Okay, for the sake of him, and a future together. I never wanted to hurt Oz. When I saw he could love me—not lust after me, as he had that summer at Ophélie—I began to view our new life not as a deception, but a clear path to happiness for the two of us. We had both lost so much. I never meant to take more. Not from him.
I could have found another path to Oz Sullivan’s door, but the greatest kindness, the only kindness, was to walk away.
When I left Janie, I became a drifter of sorts, floating from person to person, often several in a day, not willing to risk the long-term effects of possession. I couldn’t let this happen to another person. I would not have another innocent life on my hands.
I didn’t know!
No manual was given to me at the time my body died. I had no spirit leader to guide
me, and teach me right from wrong. Everything I had done, I’d done out of my own need to survive. How was that a crime?
It made me feel like a criminal. That’s all I knew.
Never mind the moral dilemma I’d embroiled myself in the moment I possessed her. Whether she lived or died, hadn’t I stolen her life either way?
I spent months pondering this.
Wandering.
Wondering.
In the end, the answer was simple. Dwelling on a crisis of conscience this large was simply not in my makeup, and it had to end. If I was to survive, I had to have a vessel, there was no way around that… fact. In doing so, I would steal the life of the host. No way around that, either.
But I could prevent my possession causing their death.
As Jasper had said, there was only one way to ensure it.
Thirteen-year-old Violet Dubois exited Sacred Heart Academy on St. Charles, a ream of books clutched tight to her chest. She looked right and left before crossing the street, twice, then headed over toward Napoleon Avenue, toward home.
I bade the soccer mom I was driving to follow her.
I had never met Violet, but I knew her. Her mother, Imogen, was Jasper’s sister. That meant we shared a great-grandmother, which made us second cousins. The same blood ran through both our veins.
Possession is a family business.
I scrutinized her as she moved down the avenue, shoulders slumped in shy retreat. Violet had likely never kissed a boy. Never known heartbreak. Her words, probably, had never voiced a curse word; telling a lie, not once crossed her mind. She would be scandalized should she ever venture too far north of Rampart, or find herself lost in the Lower Ninth Ward.
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