by Zan, Koethi
At the words New Orleans, I bolted upright. Something was ringing a bell. Tracy had been from New Orleans originally, and she’d also had a rough childhood, so maybe that was all it was. I took out my notebook and jotted down a reminder to think about it when I got back to the hotel.
As I slipped the notebook back into my bag, a car pulled up, and the waitress waved to the man in the driver’s seat. She turned to me, as he approached us, and said, “I’m Val, by the way. Val Stewart.” She extended her hand to shake mine, saying, “Honey, I don’t know your name.”
I saw her hand coming toward me and froze. I had to respond normally. This would not be the only time someone would want to shake my hand, now that I was corresponding with live people and not just the ghosts in my head. I braced myself, but as she was about to make contact, I lost my nerve. I dropped my notebook and bag, in what I was sure seemed an obvious ploy to avoid her touch. As I bent down to pick up my things, I nodded up at her and told her, in as friendly a tone as I could muster, that my name was Caroline Morrow. She smiled back warmly and pulled out another cigarette. Disaster avoided.
Val’s husband, Ray, was a small man, a few inches shorter than she was. He was very trim, in his sixties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a twinkle in his blue eyes. You could see right away what Val meant when she said he could talk your ear off. When he heard from Val that I was writing a book about the Derber story and specifically about Sylvia Dunham, he invited me home for dinner without hesitation. I begged off, even though I wavered. I wanted to go but couldn’t bear the thought of driving back to the hotel after dark. Instead, Ray insisted we go into the diner for a quick coffee.
Val rolled her eyes, “See, I told you, sweetie. Listen, I’ve seen enough of that place today. You two get coffee, and I’m going to run over to Mike’s and pick up a few things.”
Back inside, we sat at a booth, and as soon as we’d settled in, Ray started talking.
“Sylvia moved here about seven years ago. You probably know she’s from the South. Nice girl, but quiet, you know. It was a shame she took up with that Church of the Holy Spirit. It’s nothing but a cult, if you ask me.”
“Why do you say that?”
He hesitated, his eyes sweeping the room before he went on.
“Well, Noah Philben wasn’t always religious, I can tell you that.”
“You know him?”
He put his elbows on the table and bent his head toward mine, a conspiratorial look on his face now. “I went to high school with his cousin, so I knew the family. A sorry one, that Noah. He drank a lot, did some drugs. Left town after graduation and was gone for several years. No one knows what went on then. Nearly drove his family crazy, but they didn’t like to talk about it. When Noah came back, he seemed a little off. Went back to work at the quarry for a few months but couldn’t keep that up. Then he started his ‘church,’ if you want to call it that.” At that moment, he pointed out the window of the diner.
“There they go.” I looked over and saw a white van with tinted windows pull around the square. “Church van.”
“The lady at the church on the square seemed pretty dismissive of it, to say the least.”
“Oh, that woulda been Helen Watson. You met her? Ha. Friendly one, eh? Well, she wouldn’t be too happy about anything having to do with Noah, that’s for sure. He was her high school boyfriend. She ran off with him when he left. She came back two years later with her tail between her legs. Never talks about those days. She says it’s none of anyone’s business. Later she married Roy Watson, who became the pastor at that church about ten years ago. People say she pushed him to go to seminary school. She always wanted to be a preacher’s wife, I guess. Now she thinks she rules the roost of this town.”
Not seeing how the town gossip was getting me any further, I tried to redirect the conversation back to Sylvia.
“I went by Sylvia’s house today. There was no one there—doesn’t look like anyone has been home for some time.” I didn’t want to admit I’d riffled through her mailbox, and felt a blush of shame creeping up my neck.
“Come to think of it,” he said, “I can’t remember when I last saw her. She keeps to herself, but usually comes in to the diner just about now, when I’m picking Val up. Maybe comes in once or twice a week.”
“Does she have a job? Anyone else I could check in with?” I felt I was hitting a dead end.
“Not that I know of. Not around here anyway. Guess I’m not as helpful as I thought I’d be.”
“What about her family? Did she ever talk about them?” I wasn’t used to asking all these questions. The last thing I ever wanted to do was engage people more; usually I wanted interactions to end as quickly as possible. Even my voice sounded strange to me, foreign, remote, like a bad recording of the way I imagined it in my head. I noticed I almost couldn’t formulate the right lilt at the end of a question.
“No, that was the strange part too. If I had to guess, I’d say she was running away from something down there, but she never really talked about it. She was from somewhere around Selma, Alabama. Town with a history. Maybe she just wanted out of there.”
It was on the drive back under the darkening sky that it hit me. I nearly veered off the road. New Orleans. Where Val’s friend had moved. It reminded me of something in Jack’s letter. Ignoring the fact that the sun was fading over the horizon, I pulled over onto the shoulder and hit my hazards.
My heart pounding, I pulled the letter out of my bag. The lake. The lake was Lake Pontchartrain. I reread the line. It still made no sense to me, but I knew now it had to be that lake, and if so, then it meant only one thing: this was part of Tracy’s story.
I went through the whole letter again. I needed Tracy. I needed her to tell me how this fit in with her past, to tell me what it meant. Somehow I would have to make her talk to me, maybe even meet me face to face, to think with me to see if there was meaning in this madman’s words. To figure out if he was leading us somewhere, and whether he meant to or not.
CHAPTER 7
Tracy’s story had come out slowly over the years, a little here, a little there. I pieced it together out of small details that slipped out, mostly when she was feeling particularly low, desperate and hopeless down there in the cellar. For the most part, she tried to keep her life locked away from us. Her head was a private area where she could escape from him and from us too, I suppose. She was paranoid about each delicate shred of information she told us being used by Jack to manipulate her mind. That was their battle.
He always had Jennifer to use against me, so he didn’t need to rely on my memories, at least not while she was alive. I suppose that was why at the time I didn’t understand how high the stakes were for Tracy, how critical it was for her to keep her previous life as a sacred place. It was a mistake that would cost me dearly in those later months of captivity. Nevertheless, we spent so many countless hours together, it was impossible not to get a pretty vivid picture of her life on the outside.
Tracy was born to an eighteen-year-old high school dropout in New Orleans. Her mother was a heroin addict, with all the pain and suffering and horror that comes along with it. Men wandered in and out of their filthy apartment on the first floor of a Creole townhouse on Elysian Fields, one that looked like a crumbling cake that had hardened with age on somebody’s countertop.
When Tracy was five her little brother, Ben, was born right in the apartment. Tracy watched his birth from the corner and saw her mother take a massive hit of heroin during labor, an anesthetic so powerful that she barely moved as Ben’s head emerged. It was a miracle the child survived, and an even greater one that Child Protective Services managed to forget about this little corner of the world. Apparently the city of New Orleans had chaos enough to deal with elsewhere, and after a brief, perfunctory interview, the social workers had left them alone.
For years that brother was just about all Tracy had in the way of familial love and affection, and she fended for the two of them with all the fierceness I c
ame to know was in her. Her mother provided little if anything for them. She rarely ate, so consumed was she by the drug, and there was never much food in the house, certainly not enough for both kids. So Tracy had gone out onto the streets of New Orleans to build an entirely different sort of life for them. In any other city, that might not have been possible, but in New Orleans, alternative lifestyles took on a new meaning.
Over time Tracy ingratiated herself into the world of street performer culture—would-be life dropouts and buskers looking to get discovered, while making their daily bread in service of the tourists who swamped the streets. Tracy and Ben became their orphaned mascots, and they in turn protected the children from the horrors of nightlife in the city.
Tracy was a clever young girl who learned all the tricks—magic, juggling, acrobatics. She also had a gift for storytelling and charmed tourists and fellow street performers alike with her precocity. The other minstrels built a special dais for her in a back alley of the French Quarter. She would stand and recite poems or tell stories to the gathering crowd. Inevitably, as her audience dispersed, Tracy would overhear the wife in a couple saying they ought to call someone, someone ought to adopt her. Tracy used to dream of that—that some rich tourist would come along, fall in love with her and her brother, and take them away from their pathetic little strain of existence.
Sometimes they would stay out all night in the Quarter, Ben tucked away in an alley on a pile of dirty old blankets, but never out of her eyesight. She’d watch the drunks scuffle home and the prostitutes she mostly knew by name wandering back from their johns. Eventually the city would go quiet in the hour or so before dawn, and only then would she gather Ben up, sleepy-eyed, and trudge back to their grimy apartment. Their mother never asked any questions.
Tracy rarely went to school, and after a while the truant officers, just as overwhelmed as Child Protective Services, didn’t even bother her. But she read like a maniac. Autodidact, she would always say, and I’ve never seen a more perfect example. The owner of a used book store on Bourbon Street would slip her books as long as she returned them quickly. She read everything, from Jane Eyre to The Stranger to The Origin of Species, waiting out the long days on the sidewalks of the city, oblivious to the noise and smells around her.
She and Ben just barely managed to stay alive with the coins they gathered over the course of the day. They supplemented their meager food supply by grabbing scraps of beignets tossed by tourists or stopping in at the transvestite bar around the corner after hours for leftovers. Tracy put up a strong front, seeming to take it all in stride, and even handed over to her mother a share of their money when they had a little extra. That at least kept her quiet and out of their hair.
When Tracy became a teenager, her crowd morphed into the street kids her own age. The Goth kids. They dressed in black and dyed their hair dark shades of red, purple, or black. They wore chunky jewelry dangling from black strips of leather, bold rings with bloodred fake gemstones, and from their piercings hung silver-plated skeletons or crucifixes. Tracy’s favorite symbol, ironically, was the ankh, the Egyptian symbol of eternal life.
Some of the kids got into heroin. Tracy wouldn’t touch the stuff, associating it with her mother. She drank a little and got into some trouble, but nothing that would get her locked up where she couldn’t protect Ben.
By then he had taken up the charge on the performer front. He was a talented acrobat, having befriended one of the Quarter’s old-timers who mentored him. Some days he could collect ten full dollars, and then they’d go into a bar and order a giant plate of fries and two half-pints. Those were the good days.
Unfortunately, the bars of New Orleans had everything to offer. Straight, gay, transgender. Dancing, leather, S&M. No one carded. In the strange trajectory of Tracy’s life, I suppose it was inevitable that her crowd started gravitating toward the darker side of the city, the parts the bus tourists avoided. Her favorite bar had no sign, just a black door against a black wall throbbing with the beat of industrial music. Nine Inch Nails. My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. Lords of Acid.
The door creaked opened on its rusty hinge to reveal a dark cavernous interior, like a black hole, with threads of cigarette smoke unwinding out into the night air. That was it. The bouncers, with their slow-healing cuts in the shapes of slave markings, knew Tracy and stepped aside for her to enter.
Later she would admit she’d been naïve. At the time she didn’t understand where this life could lead. All she knew was that she felt like a part of something, something secret, something that gave her a sense of belonging. The rich tourists coming through the city had nothing on them. This was an empire. And the angry music that pounded in her head every night almost matched the anger she felt at her mother and at the world. This was a strong empire they’d built, and she felt its strength coursing through her veins, more powerfully than any Class A narcotic ever could.
Tracy spent four years in that scene. On the rare occasions when she talked about that life, I almost grew jealous of it. The freaks and weirdos had all congregated in the church of New Orleans, a privileged spot in the world of outsiders, and they lived together on the streets, in disintegrating rooming houses, in group apartments, all hanging with bright scarves, cheap jewelry, and unclean sequined garters, in a strange community of acceptance.
Nothing really mattered there: age, appearance, gender, preference. It was all one big melting pot of aberration, and the sex and drugs and occasional violence were only small pieces of the picture, pieces that helped them all live through the experience of being misunderstood, used up, and broken but still deeply, unerringly human. There, in that bubble of underground life, judgment was suspended for an hour, a year, a lifetime, while occasionally a shred of self-esteem and even pride would blossom under the folds of gossamer, lace, and leather.
Then something happened to Tracy that caused all that power to drain out of her. She kept the story a secret from us for years. In the cellar, we named it the Disaster, so she wouldn’t have to spell out the details of the worst thing that had ever happened to her. The worst thing besides Jack Derber, that is.
And after the Disaster, her mother disappeared again, maybe for good. When she’d been gone for three weeks, Tracy just about decided she wasn’t coming back. She figured she could hide that fact from Social Security for a while and could forge her mother’s name on the checks long enough to get some savings together, but by then she didn’t even care.
She sank deeper into the club scene, sickened, miserable, and alone. Her life was going nowhere, and she was smart enough to know it. Drinking wasn’t helping. That night at the bar some stranger offered her a hit. That night she took the needle in the dark, her hands shaking with fear and anticipation. Maybe this was the answer after all: the quick way out of the pain, if only for a little while.
She had seen enough people shooting up to know the drill, and she took the leather strap and fastened it tightly around her arm. The needle found its way into her vein easily, slipping in like destiny. The first rush of the drug filled her with euphoria and wiped away her suffering, sweeping it out like a burst of clean air whipping through the city streets at dawn. At that moment, for the first time ever, she thought she understood her mother and wondered if she hadn’t been right about life after all.
Somehow Tracy stumbled out of the club, into the back alley, where she could be alone to savor the pleasure. It was a hot summer night, the air full, so thick with humidity it hit her like a wall as the door slammed closed behind her. The sweat was beading on her forehead, dripping down her chest and into the cheap leather of her hand-me-down bustier. She leaned against the Dumpster out back and slid down into the refuse of a thousand sunken lives—used condoms, cigarette packs, ripped underwear, part of a rusted-out chain. But even then something at the heart of the pleasure of the drug made the tears well up, made her think about everything that had happened, and she’d cried, an animal howl from deep inside, until she slowly lost that final grip on cons
ciousness.
She woke up, probably days later—she couldn’t tell—in the cellar, on the cold stone floor, in a pool of her own vomit.
CHAPTER 8
I sat on the bed in my hotel room, looking at my face in the mirror over the empty bureau. I gripped my cell phone, talking myself into making the call I knew I had to make. It was a Monday morning, and I had Tracy’s office number scribbled on a piece of paper in my other hand. I took a deep breath and dialed.
After three rings I heard her voice answer hello, and I almost couldn’t summon my own to reply.
“Hello!?” she said again, impatient as always.
“Tracy?” She was the only one who hadn’t changed her name.
“Yes, who’s this? Is this a sales call?” She was already annoyed.
“No, Tracy, it’s me, Sarah.” I heard a sound of disgust, then a dial tone.
“Well, that went well,” I said to my face in the mirror. I dialed again. It rang four times, then she picked up.
“What do you want?” she said angrily. Her voice dripped with disdain.
“Tracy, I know you don’t want to talk to me, but please hear me out.”
“Is this about the parole hearing? You can save your breath. I’m going. I’ve talked to McCordy. You and I have nothing to talk about.”
“It isn’t about that. Well, it is, but it isn’t.”
“You’re not making sense, Sarah. Get it together.” She hadn’t changed much in the ten years since I’d spoken to her. I could tell I only had about twenty seconds to persuade her not to hang up. I got to the point.
“Tracy, do you get letters?”
A pause. She obviously knew what I meant. Finally, suspiciously, “Yes. Why?”
“I do too, and listen, I think he’s telling us something in them.”
“I’m sure in his crazy head he is, but they don’t make any sense at all. He is insane, remember, Sarah. Nutso. Maybe not legally, maybe not enough to get him off the hook. But crazy enough that we should be throwing out his letters unopened.”