7
LEO RAN A FEW ROWS in one direction, his feet slipping on the cement. He sprinted back again. He went out to the main walkway and looked one way, then the other. Marie was gone. There was no sign of her or Ruby or his father. No flowing red dress, no white headscarf, no father carrying a daughter with his arms weighed down by a heavy black bag holding a bowl, a plant. He felt lost, like someone overboard: the boat comes in and out of view as the waves rise and fall, but with each glimpse the craft is farther and farther away.
Leo dashed back to the dark side of the crypt and looked for any signs of a door, any handles or knobs or latches. The smell of smoke drifted around him, and the embers were dying, dimming. He ran his hands up and down the rough white stone, and he felt it. At first it was only a crack, a gash in the rock the width of a pen, but as he explored it more he realized it had square edges. It was no natural crack. It was there for a reason.
Leo plucked the lock-picking wires from his pocket, dropping them in his haste, and they made a clinking sound when they hit the concrete. He grabbed for them, chose the thickest one, and went to work. Even though it was dark he closed his eyes, focusing on the point of the pick, feeling what it felt. It scratched inside the hole, snagged on various surfaces, but there was nothing that would budge, nothing that even considered giving way. He pressed it along the inside.
Snap. The pick broke.
He chose another piece of wire from the ring. He tried to calm himself, tried to see with the lock pick the way he always did, but there was nothing.
Snap. He broke another.
Snap.
Snap.
Snap.
He was down to his last hope. His last answer. He held it up and looked at it in the light—it was a hairpin bent into the shape of a lightning bolt. It made a dark scar against the sky, a rip in the fabric. He had found this particular piece of wire in a church parking lot where he searched for fool’s gold.
For a moment, he thought about Ruby. For a moment, he wondered if perhaps he should let her go with his father. Maybe she would find healing there, wherever they were going. Maybe the doctor was right. Who was he to keep her from that?
But none of it felt right. None of it. Not the sneaking or the stealing away or the secrecy. Certainly not the door in the side of a grave. No, his sister belonged here, with him.
Leo put the small lock pick in, but he realized that the keyhole was far too deep for his short piece of wire. Still, he probed the sides of the hole again, scraping with the pick for any notches, any edges. In every lock he had ever picked there was space and emptiness, but there was also a crucial encounter, when he picked up on the location of the mechanism. After that always came the slightest pressure followed by a reluctant giving in, a release.
Snap.
His last pick had broken.
He pounded his palms against the rock. He pushed. He shouted Ruby’s name. He fell to his knees, leaning his back against the stone.
“Ruby!” he shouted one last time, putting his face in his hands and weeping. How could his father do this?
Every good thing was gone. The shadows that lined Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 gathered around him like pools of black water, bottomless, insatiable.
Time did not exist there in those middle-of-the-night hours, and whether that was a product of Leo’s imagination or something Marie had left him with, no one will ever know. But if he’d worn a watch he might have seen the second hand stop for what would normally have been minutes, hours. Perhaps he even would have seen it tick backward, reaching to some ancient beginning. And he would have seen the minute hand dance forward, unfettered by any normal kind of passing. This is what grief will do, and loss. Time stumbles under the weight of deep sadness.
Leo sat there, the stone hard against his backbone, until the eastern sky began to lighten. Eventually he stood, the numbness upon him again. He stared at the tomb he had slept against, the tomb with the square keyhole in it. He saw a small plaque.
This Greek revival tomb is the reputed burial place of Marie Laveau.
He stared at it for a long time.
Marie.
He turned and walked to the gate of Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1. It was still open, so he squeezed sideways through the gap. He didn’t care anymore if anyone saw him. He could see a man in a house across the street making coffee in his kitchen. Leo wondered what the man would think if he looked out and saw him. Would he think Leo was a boy, or a ghost?
Leo walked back the way he had come, staring at the cracks in the sidewalks, noticing for the first time how their crooked winding was the same shape as the lock picks he had snapped. The dim stars faded and the streetlights blinked out and the morning had nearly arrived in full when he turned down the sidewalk to his father’s house. He walked up to the front door and walked inside. He did not lock the door behind him.
Up three flights of stairs to the top floor of the house, to Ruby’s room. There, he fell asleep in her bed and dreamed of her. The two of them ran and ran, always through a never-ending city, always through alleys and side streets and the dark, dank basements of abandoned warehouses. But no matter where they went, there was always the sound of footsteps trailing behind or tapping lightly on the floor above them. When he and Ruby finally left their pursuers behind, they came out into the light, only to find Marie standing there, a stern look on her beautiful face.
He woke to the sound of his mother coming into the house.
“Amos!” she shouted in a hesitant voice, not wanting to come inside without an invitation, or at least an acknowledgment. The two of them had created very separate lives, and there was no longer that familiar freedom of simply walking into the other’s house without knocking first.
“Amos!” she shouted again, and Leo did not have the heart to go to her, not yet. He could tell she was very worried. His father never left the house unlocked, and he never went anywhere early in the morning. He was a late-night kind of guy, one who rubbed his eyes and complained about the brightness of 9:00 a.m. while tightening the shades.
“Leo!” his mother shouted, and this time her voice had an edge of panic. “Is anyone here?”
He tried to shout back to her, but at his first attempt his voice came out in the sound of a sob.
Ruby, he wondered, where have you gone?
He took another breath, cleared his throat, and tried again. His throat ached from crying.
“Mom!”
He heard her footsteps dancing up the stairs. They were light, barely touching each step. She pushed open the door, and there was worry on her face. When she saw him, the worry fled, but only for a moment, because she saw the look on his face and the empty space in Ruby’s bed.
“Ruby?” she asked. That was all, one word. Oh, the power of individual words, the power of individual names!
Leo shook his head. “She’s gone,” he said, putting his face in his hands.
Outside the window, he could hear the birds singing.
His mother sat down on the floor beside him. It was as if she had been expecting this all along, and now that it had happened, some kind of unnatural calm (or shock) had settled on her, stifling her. It seemed to take all of her effort simply to speak.
“Gone?” she asked.
“Where?” she asked. “Leo, where did he take her?”
Leo looked up in his mother’s face. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
Leo shrugged, an almost indifferent motion, but a solitary tear made a shiny path down his cheek.
“I don’t know,” he said again. “He locked me in the closet. I got out. I tried to follow them.”
All the weariness from the night before came over him and he closed his eyes. His mother was here now. She would take care of everything. She would know how to find Ruby. She would be able to bring her back. He opened his eyes and looked up at her. She seemed to be rising up out of deep water, coming back to life.
“He didn’t take the car,” she said, her voice picking up speed. “Did he call a cab?”
Leo shook his head and said the same three sentences again. “He locked me in the closet. I got out. I tried to follow them.”
It was the only thing he would ever tell her about that evening. It was the only thing he would later tell the police when they questioned him. It was his attempt to block out everything else he had seen, everything else that he did not understand.
Leo couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone anything more. Besides, what had he seen? Nothing, really. A strange woman hovering over a dying fire. His father holding his sister, their backs to him. Where they went from there, well, he hadn’t actually seen anything. He’d only heard the deep echo of a boulder crashing against another boulder, the primal turning of an ancient key. He’d seen nothing.
He didn’t think his mother would believe him if he told her what he thought had happened, that his father had carried his sister through a doorway into a crypt opened by a beautiful black woman named Marie, probably the same Marie whose name was on that very grave. No one would believe him. He barely believed himself.
“He won’t be far,” his mother said, jumping back to her feet and moving for the door.
“Mom, he left hours ago. Last night. A long time ago.”
She stopped, so easily deflated, and grabbed on to the door frame. She leaned against it as if trying to hold up the house, a structure that threatened to fall in on itself.
“Leo,” she said again, this time not looking for an answer, simply looking for someone who would listen to her ask the question again. “Where did he take her?”