The Lazarus Heart (17 page)

"Yeah? Well, fuck you too," Jared says, and rolls over again to stare into the storm.

After Jared and the bird have left her alone in the apartment, Lucrece sits at the window and watches the rain filling the gutters on Ursulines. She knows that she should be moving, should be asking the questions that Jared's impatience and rage have kept him from considering, not sitting on her ass while what little is left of her world careens toward fresh disaster. But she feels too stunned, entirely too overwhelmed.

There's a limit,
she thinks.
Even for me, there must be a limit.

Since Benny's death her life has become a downward spiral toward a despair so complete and crushing that it could be the lightless bottom of the ocean, that absolute pressure on every inch of her body and mind and soul. She wasn't even given a chance to grieve for the loss of her twin, her bright shadow, before she had to begin fighting to save Jared's life and was thrown into the merciless arena of lawyers and police and courtrooms. And the press too, because it was just too good a story not to smear across every paper and tabloid and television news broadcast: the transsexual sister pleading for the life of the accused homosexual murderer of her cross-dressing twin.

When the police were finally finished with Jared and Benny's apartment, she was the one who scrubbed her brother's blood from the floorboards and windows, the one who dragged the gore-crusted mattress away and painted the walls that could never be cleansed of their stains. She felt like a traitor, covering over those last lingering traces of

him. She was the one who handled Benny's funeral when the coroner's office finally allowed what was left of him to be entombed in the plot Jared had bought the year before in Lafayette No. 1.

And Lucrece did almost all of it by herself, because while Jared had attracted plenty of art-crowd hangers-on and wanna-bes, the three of them had very few actual friends, people willing to stand by her through the shitstorm of publicity and pain that her life became in the days after Benny's murder. Those days that had turned to long months of the same droning, unrelenting hurt.

When the trial was over and Jared was sitting on death row at Angola, Lucrece was left to stand guard over the apartment. She gave up the old place in the Warehouse District. The only hope remaining in the world was that some overlooked bit of evidence would free her brother's lover before his execution left her finally, irrevocably, as alone as someone could become.

Against that day she had nothing but Jared's pearl-handled straight razor and the knowledge of her limits, the certainty that she would not be left lacking an out, a way to stop the pain when it was clear that there was nothing left for her to do. When there were no more stingy strands of idiot hope to dangle from, no more far-fetched fantasies of justice to keep her reeling from day to day.

Then Jared was killed in some sort of brawl, a fight with another inmate, or maybe he was simply attacked; she still isn't clear on the details. They didn't matter, anyway. All that mattered was that the end came a whole lot sooner than she expected and Lucrece was caught off guard. Jared was supposed to die after all the slow and impersonal rituals of legal execution, after the obligatory appeals and protests. Instead he bled to death in a prison exercise yard. Or so she was told. The news reached her in a midnight phone call from one of Jared's attorneys. For a long time afterward she sat staring at the telephone as if maybe it had been a mistake, maybe in a moment someone would call back and tell her no, it had been a
different
Jared Poe, sorry for the confusion. Or even a practical joke. Lawyers could be pretty sick fuckers, after all, and she'd have gladly forgiven them and laughed, she would have actually fucking
laughed
at that point.

Eventually she went to the bathroom medicine cabinet, where she kept the razor, and she sat on the toilet seat and stared at it the way she'd stared at the phone. She wasn't afraid of dying. If she ever had been, that fear had been stripped from her.

Lucrece folded the blade open and it glinted dully in the dim bathroom light. She even made a couple of tentative cuts along her arms, preparing herself for the pain of the deep longitudinal slashes that would be necessary to ensure permanent oblivion.

But then someone had whispered into her ear, so close that she could feel cold breath against her cheek. A single question from a gentle voice so much like Benny's that she let the razor slip from her fingers and clatter to the tile floor.

Who's gonna bury Jared if you go?

It might have been in her head, the product of a traitorous or cowardly imagination, a hallucination manufactured in a last-ditch effort to save her own hopeless life. But she waited, very still, patiently listening for anything else the voice might have to say.

"Haven't I done all that I can do?" Lucrece whispered back to the empty apartment.

"Haven't
I?"

There wasn't an answer, although she sat there on the toilet seat for almost an hour longer, listening to the murmuring background noises of the creaky old building, the street sounds of the Quarter going on about its business around her. Without her, if need be. Eventually she picked up the razor and folded it closed, returned it to its shelf in the medicine cabinet. She was damned to a few more days of Me, a little more sorrow, by the image of Jared's lonely funeral, the casket being carried into the mausoleum and no one in attendance who wasn't paid to be there.

Outside the storm howls like a hungry giant. Lucrece puts one hand out flat against the win-dowpane. It feels like she imagines herself, polished flat and smooth, transparent and cold as the rain beating against it from the other side.

Why did I have to keep going
after
the funeral? That's a fair question, isn't it?

But there are no more answers now than there were that night when she sat with the open razor glinting at her feet. Only the mindless storm and the indifferent night, the sound of her heart, a restless reminder of her own irrelevant mortality.

If Lucrece had been any less warped by the world and her time in it, if she had not already been forced to accept so much loss and horror, then Jared's return might have been one step over the limit of what she was capable of enduring, the part of the story where the author loses her to disbelief and she closes the book for the last time. As it is, it only feels like the next impossible episode in a story that has grown ever more

ridiculous since the day she was born into a body that wasn't even suited to her most basic needs.

That's the only truth she can read from the rhythm of the rain against the window, the only divination to be gleaned from the interlacing paths of water down the glass. Just

the cruel, simple fact of her continuing survival and the comfortless understanding that there is still something left for her to do before she can finally let go and follow her twin.

"Please, Jared," she says, pulling her hand back from the window, letting the curtain fall back in place to hide the storm. "Give me the time I need to figure this out. Don't make me have to be here for nothing..."

And the thunder makes a sound like an old man laughing.

The Eye of Horus is a couple of blocks west of the apartment, a tiny curiosity squeezed in between a gallery and an antique store specializing in art deco lamps. By the time she reaches it Lucrece is soaked despite her black raincoat and umbrella. She stands dripping beneath a candy-striped awning, peering into the shop's single dusty window. The glass is decorated with two carefully rendered Egyptian hieroglyphs, stylized hawks bracketing Gothic letters that spell out the shop's name. Lucrece used to come here often, with

Benny or alone, when she was still designing clothing, used to buy what she needed in the way of feathers and bird bones from Aaron Marsh, the proprietor.

Sunrise is still a couple of hours away and the French Quarter is idling, drowsy, most of the soggy night's revelry over but the new day as yet undelivered. Lucrece raps her cold knuckles against the door again. A bell on the other side jingles faintly, but there's no sound or movement from within the darkened shop. She's starting to shiver. She stomps her feet against the sidewalk, realizes that the rainwater has gotten into her boots as well. She knocks harder, rattling the little stained-glass panes set into the door.

"Come on, Aaron," she says, "I
know
you're in there somewhere." She bangs at the door again.

This time a dim, yellowy light flickers on somewhere toward the back of the Eye of Horus and there are stumbling noises. Someone curses. A moment more and she hears the click of a deadbolt being turned before the door opens a crack, still held by a safety chain. Aaron Marsh peeps out at her cautiously, like a rat, his scraggly white beard and blue eyes bright even in the shadows.

"What the hell do you want?" he growls past the chain. "Do you have any idea what

time
it is? Go away or I'll call the police."

"I'm sorry, Aaron," Lucrece says. He recognizes her then, repeats her name a couple of times and makes a disgusted, inconvenienced snorting sort of sound.

"Lucrece," he says. "Lucrece DuBois? What do you want?" "I need to talk to you, Aaron. About crows."

Aaron Marsh snorts again, the noise a surfacing hippopotamus makes.

"I thought you were
dead"
he says gruffly, suspiciously, and Lucrece shakes her head.

"No," she says. "That was my brother. But that's why I'm here, because of Benny." "But you just said that you wanted to talk about crows," he says, squinting to get

a better look at Lucrece. His arched eyebrows are the same bristling snow white as his long beard.

"Please,
Aaron. I'm freezing to death out here." She stomps her feet again, not entirely for effect.

He mumbles something to himself that Lucrece doesn't understand, but unfastens the chain and opens the door the rest of the way, stepping aside to let her pass. He's wearing a paisley housecoat and slippers, and his eyes are sleepy and alert at the same time. Lucrece steps gratefully into the musty, warm shop. Aaron shuts the door behind her, locks it again. The air smells like old feathers and dust bunnies, cedar and pipe tobacco-gentle, nostalgic odors from a time when her life made sense.

"You're dripping all over my floor," Aaron says, and of course she is, the water streaming off her raincoat and her hair onto the red and gold Turkish carpet. The dim lamplight from the back of the shop makes Aaron look only a little older than he actually is, somewhere on the brittle edge of sixty. He makes Lucrece think of a slightly deranged Walt Whitman. He takes her coat and holds it gingerly between two fingers, drapes it across a brass coat hook nailed up near the door, points to another hook from which Lucrece hangs her umbrella.

She glances about the Eye of Horus, which doesn't seem to have changed much since her last visit at least a year and a half ago. Rows of tall oak and walnut display cases and bookshelves line the walls, cases filled with painstakingly mounted skeletons of eagles and herons and a hundred different species of songbirds; taxidermied wonders, stuffed owls and ducks and a flock of extinct passenger pigeons, and his most prized possession in a case in the center of the shop, not for sale at any price but he can't resist showing it off: a stuffed dodo. There are jars filled to overflowing with peacock and pheasant and ostrich feathers, drawers occupied by every conceivable sort of egg,

each carefully drained of its embryonic contents and protected in beds of cotton and excelsior.

Before he moved to New Orleans sometime in the nineteen-fifties, Aaron Marsh was professor of ornithology at a small-town university somewhere in eastern Massachusetts. And then there had been a sex scandal, a flunking student who got revenge by confessing to the dean or headmaster or whomever that he was Aaron's homosexual lover, and Dr. Marsh was out on his ass. So he'd come south, to a warmer, more forgiving place less prone to witch hunts, and he'd opened the Eye of Horus.

"Well, would you like some tea?" he asks grudgingly, but most of the crankiness seems to be gone now. "A hot pot of green tea will warm you up."

"Yes," she says. "I'd like that very much, thank you." Aaron shuffles past her toward the curtain of amber beads that separates the shop from a narrow flight of stairs leading up to his apartment overhead. Lucrece follows slowly behind him, admiring Aaron's treasures even through her mental fog of cold and fear. She passes the big dodo standing its silent, perpetual guard like a character from a Lewis Carroll story. Its glass eyes seem to watch her skeptically, ready to pounce if she makes a wrong move.

When Lucrece reaches the bead curtain Aaron is already at the top of the stairs speaking softly to someone. It hadn't occurred to her that he might not be alone, and she wonders if they'll have the privacy she needs to ask her questions. The stairs creak loudly beneath her wet shoes.

"I think you'll live," Aaron mutters. "Now go back to sleep and stop being such a bitch."

By the time Lucrece mounts the last arthritic stair to the short second-floor hallway Aaron has disappeared into the kitchen at the other end of the hall. To her right the bedroom door is standing open and there's a lamp burning on a small table by a huge, sagging canopy bed. An annoyed-looking young man is sitting up, blinking at her.

"It couldn't wait until morning?" he asks.

"No," she replies. "I'm sorry, but it really couldn't."

The man makes a dismissive gesture with one hand and lies down again, covers his head with a pillow.

"I'm sorry," Lucrece says again, feeling awkward. Then Aaron is calling her from the kitchen and she can hear water running, filling a kettle. "Just ignore him," Aaron shouts, but she pulls the bedroom door closed and it creaks louder than the stairs.

The strong green tea does warm Lucrece. She sips her second cup while Aaron rambles on about the shop, holds the little china teacup in both hands and rolls it back and forth between her palms. The taste and smell of the tea is nostalgic too. She wonders if there's a thing left in the world that hasn't become tainted by her sadness.