OF COURSE THE moment that Joseph had stepped onto solid ground in New Orleans, he realized that Isabelle must be dead, for the life force that was reaching out to him at that point was not coming from the land of the living. And yet, like Moody, he too did not want to believe it … did not want to believe what must have been true. What the photograph was ultimately telling them.
But it was not until they reached Yellow Henry’s place of refuge that Joseph realized all that the photograph had been trying to say. Isabelle had been guiding them there—that much was simple. But guiding them toward what? The answer was now plain.
It was her daughter—Isabelle’s daughter. She was the ghost of what remained.
How could decades of mystery have been unlocked so easily? It was one of those puzzles that, once put together, laid bare the grains of its own simplicity.
Isabelle had planned to leave Boston because she had been carrying a child. And yet the pictures revealed a different story.
“That girl came here,” Henriette had told Joseph. “Found her way here through the swamps, even after what they had done to her. Those devils … what they did to her. But mind you I’ve seen worse. Maybe she was lucky to get out alive.”
Henriette told Joseph of Isabelle’s escape, how she had found her way to Henriette’s because she herself had grown up there, in the swamps. When she arrived, she could not speak, or even explain in writing what had happened. And in any case, words on paper would not have signified anything to Yellow Henry.
“I raised Isabelle from a child,” Henriette said. “Found her as a baby tucked inside a tree. She was a gift from the alligators and the cottonmouths. Later, when she was mostly grown, I sent her off with the traders—north. To some place better. I never heard from her again, but I knew that she would work. And then when it happened … I also knew.”
Henriette was never surprised.
“She did not need to explain to me what happened—je savais. Just as she knew that she would die when she had the child. And that was something I knew too. So she scribbled her words on this paper, and I’ve kept it all these years.”
Henriette held a folded paper in her hand—it was yellowed and soiled.
“For the photographer,” she said.
Moody was across the room, still in the throes of his visions.
“I named the girl Vivienne,” she said. “For her sake, I erased the memory of her mother. And, for that matter, the mother before that—Justine. For you see, they had all come to me.”
There was a perfect symmetry to what she was saying—the flight of Isabelle’s mother, and years later the flight of Isabelle—both leading to the same place. The same hopeless salvation.
“But I did not fully understand,” Henriette said, “because of course my Isabelle could no longer speak. And as Vivi grew, she could not speak either, because, you see, the girl was born without a voice. But she had something much more powerful than the gift of speech. She had the gift of sight, and her visions flowed out through her fingers.”
Over the years, Henriette said, the girl had begun to draw. She had learned to navigate the swamps, to do business with the fur traders … had learned all of the cruder things that her mother before her had learned. But through that she drew, and her drawings became more precise. Child’s sketches at first, surely, but as she grew into a young woman, her drawings developed a realness that could stop one’s blood.
“That was her gift,” Henriette said. “Isabelle’s memories were her gift.”
They were horrors—the papers. For Joseph they were horrors. Henriette could see it, and she admonished him.
“Shame on you,” she said. “Shame on you of all people. You are one who has always embraced what you see, and yet this—this—you do not want to see.”
She jerked her head toward the recumbent Moody.
“Sometimes you are no better than him. Maybe you need a bath too.”
Henriette was right. Joseph did feel ashamed—ashamed that he had come to Boston looking for Isabelle with such confidence and arrogance. He was going to track her down, the way people had once tracked him down—and failed. He would not fail. He was Joseph Winter—“Fifty-two Winter”—a legend amongst the fugitives. A man of great importance.
And yet he did not save her. There was nothing he did to try to save her. He had saved himself, while she went on saving others.
“Yes …” Henriette said, “I see it. I see that she held you too, and I’d like to tell you that she left you something, but she didn’t. You weren’t special. She belonged to everyone—to all of us. Her voice was the voice of all of us.”
Henriette looked as if she were about to spit.
“And they took it.”
Joseph turned to Vivi, who had been sitting there silently since entering the room. Her appearance had not been dramatic. Strangely, it had been something expected.
“She knows the life of this swamp,” Henriette said, “like her mother, and her grandmother before that. And with that comes responsibility—Joseph Winter.”
And it was as if in saying his name, she were pronouncing him alive for the first time.
“You see who she is and you see what she is capable of. She is a woman whose drawings give you the world.”
“But—” Joseph urged.
“She has no words,” Henriette said. “Only visions. Nos rêves et nos visions … dreams and visions of what is to come. She forces us to see. And I am sorry for you.”
Joseph held Vivi’s hands. He could not stop himself from weeping. Over on the divan, Edward Moody began to stir.
“The photographer will wake,” Henriette said. “And when he does it will be his turn to see.”
She brandished Vivi’s drawings as Moody let out a soft cry. Then she turned from the pair and began making her way across the cabin. Moody shifted and grunted, and Henriette paused, looking back toward the bar with that wry smile on her face.
“Yes,” she said. “He has been sick for a long time, but even I am surprised by his strength.”
• • •
HE WAS WEAK, and everything in his vision was a blur. Could what he was now seeing be real? There was a woman standing before him—a beautiful young woman he instantly knew. Not a ghost, and not Isabelle, and yet these two things she seemed to be. He had lost all sense of time, and could not tell how long he had been gazing at her. The drawings had depicted Isabelle’s fate—the fate he had never wanted to see.
But she had been waiting for him. All of this time she had been waiting! He had been right to hold onto her. He had been right not to let go. She had called to him, summoned him. Down here to this wretched swamp. He had only wanted her back, and now she had come back him.
But it was not her.
He stared at her, examined her. Joseph Winter was holding her hands. The old Moody returned—the Moody who wanted to tear her away from everyone else. Even now he grew hot at the mere thought of Joseph holding her. Such thoughts could only remind him of his own failings, and his own shame.
But it was not her.
Yes, the face was hers … the shoulders, the neck, and the breasts. All hers. The way she breathed was her, and that shape of the mouth was hers. But as Moody’s vision cleared, he could see that it was not her.
And he could see that she was not his.
At last, Moody rose unsteadily from the divan, and walked across the cabin toward the trio at the bar. He stood before them for a moment, uncertain what to do or say. The young woman shifted her gaze toward him, and stared at him with familiar eyes.
Yellow Henry took one of the woman’s hands and offered it to Moody. The woman’s other hand remained in Joseph Winter’s.
“This is Vivienne, photographer.”
Moody took Vivi’s hand.
“I am sorry,” he said.
There was everything to apologize for. There would always be the record of what he had done.
The young woman smiled—a remarkable smile. She possessed the easy grace of her mother.
“Now you see, photographer,” Henriette said. “Now you finally see the real picture.”
The three of them remained there—Joseph, Moody, Vivi—their hands chaining them together, for some time. From the table, the negative shined toward them like a coated mirror. Isabelle was all but invisible.
Henriette held up the folded piece of paper—the one that had captured Joseph’s attention from the start.
“There is still the matter of this,” she said, looking at Moody. “I have always known that this was for you, even though she never told me.”
Moody did not let go of Vivi, but instead took the letter with his other hand. The sight of Isabelle’s words again redoubled his sense of gratitude.
He whispered the words, aloud. They were too powerful to remain silent:
You are a great man. You will do great things for people. You will open their eyes. You will teach them how to see.
She is all that is left of me now. She is yours. Keep her, guard her. She needs you. Everyone needs you. I left so that everyone could have you.
Please forgive me.
Her selflessness overcame him like a tide from which he could not escape. She had wanted to be gone so that he could be saved—so that his dishonest, ambitious self could be saved. Somehow, she had known that his fortune needed protecting.
Moody released Vivi’s hand, and folded the piece of paper. He had an unshakeable sense of what he needed to do. Vivi had been waiting for him, here in these swamps. And it was Isabelle who had led him here, and left her to his care.
He moved toward the table and returned the negative to its case. The negative had brought him back to Isabelle—and now to Vivi. The letter was perhaps the last thing that Isabelle had ever touched, though a tear on Vivi’s cheek might have been so, too. The letter … her words … her voice. It was hers. He tucked the letter into the negative’s case, alongside the backside of the glass. The words needed to be near what remained of her.
“There is one more thing for you to do,” Henriette said. “We need to dump that water out over your shoulder … go to the crossroads, and get rid of it. Even if the devil is there waiting for you, it is the last thing you must do.”
She was nodding—and grinning—as if she relished the very idea of danger.
“Yes—” she said, “the water does contain one of your tears. But that doesn’t fix everything. The devil gets you for your crimes.”