“BONNIE? DO YOU understand me?”
The crystal-pink light of dawn was filthy with blackflies. They were loud and incessant, a static disorder dirtying the insides of my ears.
My father shook me. “Bonavere, answer me now.”
The crisp snap of a twig under my feet and the vague mass of green became the swamp, unnervingly clear with its flitting leaves and cool morning air.
“Suzanna is dead.” I pointed to the ambulance driving her onto the dirt road. I said it to no one, and without any sense of conclusion, as if it were no more than a floating assortment of words. I knew from the unfamiliar ring in my voice that this was the first time I had spoken since my father carried me to the edge of the trees by the tire-worn path. The remaining paramedics, the last searchers, and my father all looked at me at the same time.
“You know that girl?” a paramedic asked.
Dewy grass slid between my toes. I was holding my boot to my chest, I did not know why. I thought of spring, and waking up early in the morning, sitting barefoot on the lawn in my nightgown. Had I gone quiet again? Everyone was looking. The wind blew my father’s hair about his face, and swept through the trees in rustling waves, and though it was no longer dark the moon was visible, tilting a powdered cheek in the paling sky.
“Suzanna is dead,” I said again.
“Bonnie, please.” My father combed my sticky hair out of my eyes. “Answer this man’s question.”
“You’ve met her,” I said. “She’s Connie’s friend. You drove them to the Prytania Theater last month. You don’t recognize her?” I moved to touch her shoulder, tell her to turn around so that my father could see her face. My mind blanked into a fierce white light. No, she was not there. Suzanna DeClouet was dead, I had said so, and yet I was still holding her. I had to keep reminding myself that no, she was in the ambulance driving down the road. I could not see her, not really, however much she was still in front of me. I could not smell her, the sweet-rot stench that was not how Suzanna usually smelled.
My father removed his glasses and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He nodded. “Yes. Yes, baby, I remember her.”
“She lives on Madison. Her daddy’s a dentist.” My voice was thin, almost indignantly reedy, as if somehow it was crude and ignorant of these men to not already know this of Suzanna.
I was shivering. I could not tell until my father placed his hand on my shoulder.
We climbed into the back of an ambulance meant to drive us into town; the drivers would not take Saul and his family, and the Chiffrees had driven off with a neighbour who had come out looking for Saul. The paramedics’ first attempt to help me in with them had resulted in a cold shake through both of my legs, and more vomit erupting in my throat and onto a man’s shirt. I tried to look him in the eyes now, but my sight had become slippery and slid through the air as if it were skidding uncontrollably across glass.
“The police will meet you at the hospital, Mr. Fayette,” said a paramedic. “For statements.”
Statements. I bunched my fingers in front of my mouth. Suzanna DeClouet was dead. What other statement could I give? She was dead and so anybody could be dead. If we could not see them right in front of us, who was to say that they were not?
The paramedic was staring at me as I counted his blinks in my head. I thought it must have been too long since I blinked, myself, and that everyone would think my eyes were broken if I did not make a more concerted effort to close them. My father set his palm on my knee and said: “Nothing has happened to your sister, Bonnie. Everything is going to be all right. You’ll stay at home now, Fritzi will watch you. Lily Lafleur, too. I should never have let you girls keep going to school all week. You’ll stay home. Understand me? No more of this.”
The hospital swept around me in rolling white currents. Fluorescent hallways, dripping vines of clear antiseptic tubes, blankness everywhere with the bright sting of a flashbulb. Once the needle pierced my arm I went reeling, pumped sweet and full with a sharp nectarous liquid that had me clawing at a bubblegum Band-Aid to get at the candy inside.
At home, there were more drugs. Mrs. Lily Lafleur dubbed herself resident doctor for the day, drifting about my bedroom in dreamy lavender and crinoline, and crushing pills into a bowl of applesauce with a mortar and pestle like a spring cotillion witch. I swam for hours in a tingly cloud, watching her pretty mannerisms, my heart skipping in my chest.
“Do you even know where you are?”
The flat, heady voice was like dark cola foam.
Fritzi stared across the room at me from the far corner of her bed, beneath her terrifying silent movie poster of ghostly faces wearing alien headgear. She had not left bed all day, except to go to the bathroom, and with her dark cropped hair and her uniform gauntness, she had begun too deeply to resemble the spooky faces glowering above her bed.
“Don’t go stirrin’ up trouble,” Mrs. Lafleur said. “Of course she knows where she is.” The poor woman sounded overwhelmed, and I was sure my sister was not making it any easier. Mrs. Lafleur was not from around here; her voice held a thick Mississippi drawl, and a bright lemony ring which seemed to hover, light as air, in the upper recesses of her throat. It was pleasant to hear but all too easily flustered, and pinched to a squeak with agitation.
“I wouldn’t eat too much of that applesauce,” Fritzi said. She silently mouthed the word poison.
“Stop that, right this instant. It’s only meant to calm her down. You want your poor sister pickin’ at all them ugly scratches?” Mrs. Lafleur lifted the bowl from my lap. “Get some rest, darlin’.”
“Thank you, Miss Lily, but I don’t need rest.” I had begun to feel frantic in a hot, unfocused way. As much as I liked Mrs. Lafleur, I wanted her to go home and nitpick over her own family, and for Fritzi to just pass out on her pills already if she was not going to be of any help. Saul lived all the way in the Ninth Ward and there was no getting to him if my father had his way, rotating multiple sets of eyes on me at all hours of the day.
“Crawl into bed, sweetness, can’t ya?” Mrs. Lafleur patted my legs. “Of course you don’t want to sleep, crammed all up with the curtains like that.”
I tugged a pink paisley sheet up over my legs, held it close against my chest. “I can make do in the nook. It’s comfortable here.”
It was Connie’s nook, where she sat and watched the birds in the oak, and the way the light altered the colour of the moss from grey to pink or blue, depending on the hour. I did not want her birds to worry and had been keeping close to the nook, but I had not slept in my own bed, the bunk below hers, since the night before the party. I was afraid to touch it, to so much as look at it and unwittingly drag it into the present when its unwashed sheets and headgrooved pillow could go on living forever in the past.
I tried to follow what Mrs. Lafleur was saying as she bustled about, swiping dust up with her finger, but I plunged without warning into the spindly mangroves where Suzanna lay, where I remembered now I had tripped and stumbled to get to her, my legs falling through gaps in the roots and bruising black and green up to my thighs. Dark spades of oak leaves. Eyes like incurious glass bulbs. The moment I thought it was Connie stiff in my arms, that bottomless drop in my mind.
“Here, put some proper food in your bellies.” Mrs. Lafleur slid a tray of toast, poached eggs, and strawberries under my nose. I smiled and took the tray from her, easing it onto my lap.
“Mal a vonts, Miss Lily.” Fritzi’s eyes flicked up, then back down at the mug of coffee growing cold in her hands.
“Friederike, please,” she said. “Look at those pretty berries I picked up specially fo’ ya.” She reached over me to grab the bowl of fruit, her shawl of burn-out velvet brushing its tassels against my arm. When Fritzi only glanced away, Mrs. Lafleur shook her baby-blond curls and flicked her wrists, a bit dramatically, as if her relenting palms shook up out of them like a magician’s bouquet. “I tried. Nobody can say I didn’t try. I better go pry your mama out of bed, in that case. Not exactly how we used to spend our afternoons, now, is it?” I figured, by her trailing voice, that we were not meant to hear that last sentiment.
For years Mrs. Lafleur had been a regular guest, slinky in low-cut shirtdresses, with her hot roller scent, bearing gooey praline cookies and chatter like tinkling chimes. It felt like such a long time since afternoons saw silver trays and company, though barely more than a week had passed. Now she spent an hour each day drawing Mama from her mattress. Washing and combing her hair. Helping her into her slippers and robe, and tidying up the ever-mounting assortment of dust and dishes and mail.
“Try to eat, baby girl.” Mrs. Lafleur drew close, that hot lemony breath in my ear. She ticked her head toward Fritzi. “Maybe the other one will if you do.”
She straightened, hand to her chest, and closed the door behind her.
“And stay out,” Fritzi muttered. She heaved herself up from bed and walked to the door, locking it with an unwelcoming slash. She threw a nauseated scowl at my glob of eggs. “Those look disgusting.”
“We’ve got to eat,” I said, bringing a tine of runny egg to my mouth and sniffing it, as though I were trying to trick an infant into eating their Gerber’s.
“Not hungry,” Fritzi said. “You are?”
I held out my fork and the egg shone a sick-canary yellow, reeking of salt.
“Want the vomit pail?” Fritzi asked. “Looks like you need it.”
I set my fork back on my plate with a rattle. “Not as much as you.”
She was curled around a plastic green sand pail we had been vomiting in when sick since we were toddlers.
I could not get used to her being so still. Dr. Falgoust had put her and my mother on the same medication, meant to calm their nerves, but mostly the pills left her slumped, reduced to a drool-sleepy state where she was too tired to so much as brush her own teeth. That or it roused her to some sloppy state of distemper, where she shuffled about the room unsure what to do with herself. In those instances particularly tiny pills would come pouring out, meant to suck the anger down to a pit in her stomach where I imagined burning cyclones lived.
Fritzi lit a cigarette and lowered herself flat onto her back. Her knees were bent and blocked the rest of her from my view. I watched a stream of smoke shoot up from the shrouded hollow of her dark red linens, and thought of those traps in Greek mythology, the elegant ones filled with dreamy music on golden lyres and hidden trickster toxicity. Sinister siren enclaves and hypnotic, hissing mermaids. Caverns of escape one is never meant to leave.
“I’m going to find her, you know,” I said, blinking through the streaks of smoke that had travelled across the room.
Fritzi let out a mean little cough of a laugh, saturated with ennui, practically dipped in it. “You’re going to get yourself killed looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found.”
“You can’t possibly think that Connie would put us through this.”
“She hasn’t before?”
“That was different.”
“How?” Fritzi sat up, her elbows landing slack on her rolled-out thighs. She looked at me, almost unrecognizable in her vacantness, all chain-smoke and boyish bedhead, and some clueless wet twinkle in both eyes. “How was it different before?”
“She came back before.”
Fritzi turned and chewed on her thumbnail, never a habit of hers, far more like me or Connie. She stared keenly at the floor beside her bed, at one particular spot to which she returned so frequently I worried she was seeing spiders where there were none. She looked toward the covered window when she saw that I was watching. “Maybe she had more reason to leave this time.”
It crossed my mind then to tell her that Suzanna was dead, but the police who had flanked my hospital bed in blue imposing pillars, the bleary gold shine of their badges like blinding sunspots, had instructed me not to discuss what I had seen.
I watched my sister’s bony edges and curves shift under her bedsheet. I thought how she looked more like our mother than ever — that lilting, wrung-out beauty like a starving swan. It felt wrong; Fritzi was so different from Mama, full of commotion and bad volume control and infectious snaps of laughter. She reached out to our nightstand, and tapped along the plastic bottles until she found the one she wanted. Her arm dropped over the edge of her mattress with a bright burning glow between her fingers. She had smoked our room into a noxious fog.
What our room had become in such short time was frightening. The air was different, syrupy with sweat, almost perverse with the unventilated effluvium of unwashed clothing, unwashed bodies. Our red curtains remained drawn, and in the day the sun threaded through so that the walls glowed, dark and warm, like the inside of a paper lantern.
“I told you not to eat that applesauce,” Fritzi said, as my legs swung with a clumsy rush over the seat of the nook.
“I have something to show you.” I clung to the curtains for balance, orienting myself. I did not need to tell her about Suzanna; she would see the necklace in the picture and know that I was right. I stumbled to our tall redwood dresser, its deep-cut carvings of Dutch fables, cats and pigs and tiny scampering maidens, blurring in and out of place. I blinked and everything doubled. When I reached the dresser I grabbed hold, falling against the cupboards, my kneecaps filled with the funny sensation of clouds.
I slid the bottom drawer open and froze. “Where is it?”
Fritzi shifted in her bed, her rib-swelled back turned to me.
“Fritzi, where is it?”
“Where’s what?”
“You know exactly what. Tell me what you did with it.”
“Nipped that nonsense in the bud is what I did with it.”
“That isn’t fair, it doesn’t belong to you,” I said. “Give it back.”
“What for?” She set her feet on the floor, one hand nursing her forehead. Her robe hung off her shoulders and twisted around her torso. When our mother had bought it that year it was the creamy pink of cupcake frosting, but in the smoke-dampened air it had dwindled to the colour of spoiled salmon. “I’m not letting you hurt yourself, Bonnie.” She coughed into the back of her wrist. “You’re not getting yourself killed because Constance is being typical.”
“There’s a girl in the picture.” I pointed, feverishly, as if the photograph were projected between us. “She has the same necklace that Connie started wearing, and she disappeared, too.”
Smoke escaped Fritzi’s mouth. “So?”
“What do you mean so?”
“That doesn’t mean anything.” Her small mouth shrank. Her palms were flat on either side of her, squeezing the mattress. “As if getting lost in the swamp chasing ghosts wasn’t stupid enough. Now you’re going to torment everyone into thinking Connie’s . . . hurt? Kidnapped? Why would you do that?”
“Let me crawl into bed with you,” I said, abruptly. “I don’t feel well.”
She stiffened, watching my eyes land directly where her palms gripped the bed. She sighed and plunged her hand under the mattress. “Fine, you caught me, here’s your creepy old picture.” She flung it onto the bedspread beside her. “Ain’t got the muster to fight you on it.”
I climbed onto the bed next to her and set the photograph on my lap. In a bending slant of sunlight, Amy Bellrose smiled up at me — the sharp black and white of her beside the unvaried paleness of her sister.
“Be my pillow,” Fritzi said, slurring. A Demerol murmur. She was drifting back into that brain-sticky sleep.
I pried the pail away from her, taking its place, letting her squeeze me. I nudged my shoulder against her chin. “Fritzi? Wake up. Look at this with me.” I was on the precipice of the same floating place. A detail struck me from the infinitesimal grains of grey in Amy’s face, but drowsiness pushed through me in a soft pulse, and it was with difficulty that I blinked and pinched that last piece of clarity, concentrating on the tear in Amy Bellrose’s lip where a shining pink scar would appear if sewn.