SHE HATED THE BAYOU. EVEN AFTER all these years, it was still foreign to her. It reeked of decay and its music crashed through the air in a cacophony of unblended notes. She stood at the edge of the pier and let her thoughts descend into the depths of darkness below her feet, almost believing she could see the outline of the gun.
Hank was gone on an overnight fishing trip with some buddies, and Jenny had taken the opportunity to let Rachel into the house to take a shower and a nap in the guest bedroom before heading back out to the shed. Night was creeping in, and it was too dangerous for Jenny to keep a fugitive in the house when she couldn’t have one eye on the driveway. They both agreed they’d feel better not risking it.
What they couldn’t agree on was their next step. Jenny thought Rachel should be planning her defense strategy for when she eventually turned herself in. She even offered to reach out to some high-profile defense attorneys who might take her case for free, but Rachel wouldn’t hear of it. She had no intention of returning to Mississippi. Ever.
The silence of the empty house brought with it a comfort Jenny hadn’t anticipated. With a glass full of wine in one hand and the freshly washed quilt in the other, she found her way to the guest bedroom to remake the bed and search through some of her old clothes to find something that might fit Rachel. Bins that housed more half-finished projects than most people had even started were stacked on top of the closet shelves. Boxes of photos and birthday cards and school projects spilled across the wire shelves, all in line to be assembled into albums and scrapbooks. Jenny pulled down a few of the clothes bins before her eyes zeroed in on the red plastic bin in the far corner of the top shelf. The one she hadn’t touched in almost twenty years. The one she’d broken more than a few promises to herself to get rid of.
It was heavier than she remembered, or perhaps age had weakened her, and when she dropped it onto the bed, dust fibers billowed into the air. A tinge of guilt pricked at her conscience before she pried off the top, inhaling the smell of stale smoke and musk that permeated the air around her. It was the scent of him invading her senses and filling her with a memory so real that she was once again sitting by his side in a smoke-filled lounge where he’d just performed, counting out dollar bills and phone numbers that had been left in his tip jar, listening to him hash out his plans to get signed by that highly coveted record label.
The plastic lid fell to the floor as her eyes fixed on the man in the top photo, her breath catching in her throat. It could have been her son staring back at her from that bin, tall and thin, with roguish, dark eyes that matched his mischievous grin.
“David.” She breathed out his name and blinked away the tears before she took the photo in her hands. She didn’t remember the photo, but David’s name was scrawled across the back in handwriting that had a marked resemblance to Hank’s. She’d often thought about how similar her life could have been to Rachel’s if Hank hadn’t spared her that fate, and though she sometimes lacked appreciation, there was no denying what her husband had done for both her and her son. David, Dean’s biological father and the man Jenny was set to spend her life with, disappeared ten months after they met, which happened to be the week she revealed her pregnancy to him. She’d been naive to think she could change David with that baby. It turned out that a family was too much to ask of a struggling musician who was in love with his wandering lifestyle. Within days of the announcement, what few belongings he had kept at her apartment disappeared, and then one day so did he. Three months later, when a handsome oil rig worker and his buddies sat in Jenny’s section for lunch at the Oyster Reef Restaurant, her fate was sealed.
She placed the photo on the bed and dug deeper into a world that had been calling her back for years. A world where a young, beautiful girl smiled up at her in photo after photo. It was hard to believe that carefree girl was once her. Soft, brown eyes peered out from charcoal-lined eyelids, and pearly teeth gleamed between scarlet-painted lips. As she ran her fingers over the silken beauty of her youth, she wondered if David ever thought of her. What would she say to him if she could go back?
She thought about him from time to time, about what her life would have been like if she hadn’t left New Orleans, but as she soaked up the memories of her youth, she realized it wasn’t him she had missed. It was what he represented to her: independence, freedom, dreams. He’d always lived by his own set of rules, and even though he did it selfishly, he was out there following his dreams while she was here, living someone else’s.
The wineglass was dry by the time the bin was empty, and Jenny took a moment to survey the mess she’d created on the bed around her. She felt like she’d just cheated on her husband, and a renewed sense of guilt washed over her as she cursed herself for holding on to that bin. Dean had always been the feeble excuse to hold on to David and her past; it was to be a keepsake for him, a window into the truth about his biological father. The only problem, though, was that Hank and Jenny had never gotten around to telling him he was adopted, and after a certain number of years and too many missed opportunities, the moment was never right. It made no sense to tell him the truth. He already had a father who adored him; why tell him about the one who’d abandoned him?
At the bottom of the bin, beneath the dust of Jenny’s life, lay an old business card with a black raven on the front and the Bourbon Street address of a voodoo priestess scrawled across the back. She shuddered as she thought about that day all those years ago. She’d been warned. She hadn’t stumbled into this life unaware of what was coming. The voodoo woman had given her plenty of notice when she’d stood Jenny up and faced her toward the door.
This is west. Choose this direction, and you will see all the gifts you have to offer the world.
Then she’d turned her to face the other direction, the one that would soon take her to Calebasse with her new husband and the baby she didn’t yet carry.
But choose east, and you will see the woman in the bayou whose home was not meant for you.
She’d ignored the warnings, of course. What else could she do when she found herself five months pregnant with no family, no money, nothing? Hank had offered to rescue her, and after hearing about the woman in the bayou one too many times, the jokes got old and his tolerance reached its limit. Jenny promised to stop talking about her, but she never forgot.
She tossed the card back into the bin and started in on the mess around her on the floor, throwing in albums and loose pictures and letters in haphazard fashion. She’d almost filled the bin by the time she saw it, an old envelope that must have been tucked between the pages of a photo album.
It was an envelope she was certain she’d never seen before. There were others beside it, cards and letters that had been torn open with haste and excitement, but this one was different. This one wasn’t addressed to the Jenny from New Orleans, the one with the black eyeliner and scarlet lipstick, but to the Jenny who was living in Calebasse, Louisiana, with her soon-to-be husband and son. It was postmarked just two weeks after Dean’s birth and had been sliced open with a whetted letter opener, just like the one Hank used.
The paper was soft between her fingers, and when she pulled it from the envelope, she instantly recognized the beautiful penmanship as David’s. Her eyes pored over the pages, devouring word after word, until there were none left to read, and then she started over. Words flooded her mind and consumed her as she read the letter again and again, each time slower than the previous, until she could take it no more. The paper slipped from her fingers and drifted to the floor at her feet, her tears dripping down beside it.
The wine ambushed her when she pulled herself from the bed, and when she fell into the nightstand, the empty wineglass fell to the floor beside her, dripping wine onto the carpet and bleeding into the words of David’s letter, blotting them out forever.
What would Hank’s excuse be?
She stumbled through the hallway to her bedroom, feeling her way along the wall with clumsy hands as the floor spun beneath her feet. Her head was swimming with merlot and her tongue was too thick for the slurred words she spat out at her absent husband.
“Whyjoo do that to me, Hank? How couldjoo?”
The room continued to spin, even when she fell onto the bed and covered her head with the pillow, as if she were floating above herself, waiting for it to end, waiting for the moment when it would all come crashing down.