The Scattering (5 page)

‘Bamboo wouldn't have stopped the water though, Mrs Lawson. Coz nothing stops water. Water is real patient. I seen what water can do. I only beat it coz…' Ashleigh stopped short, flung herself back against the seat and sighed.

‘Because what, child?'

‘Well, because I got in touch with my own strength. I pulled it out of me. I had to.'

Once again, Jessica was struck by Ashleigh's grievous words and gravity of tone.

‘What does the T stand for in your name?' Jessica asked, as if it might offer up some kind of clue to the child's severity.

‘I don't rightly know. Troy, I think. I guess they wanted a boy,' Ashleigh replied.

*

Night fell on Panama City in late September around six. After the store closed, Jessica would usually make a light supper then walk around the nursery doing jobs in preparation for the following day. She'd repot plants knocked over by the wind or by children running down the pathways. Sometimes she'd find a racoon or fox scavenging and shoo it back into the bamboo. The bamboo attracted a lot of rats, too, as they liked to bed down in the dense undergrowth. Occasionally, if Jules were home and wasn't drunk, he would come out and help her align the saplings and shrubs, and then, if the day had been dry, they'd water the plants together. Then Jessica would put on the garden lights and sit back in her favourite chair. She loved the night sky over the Gulf of Mexico. In the moonlight, the water was emerald green, the sky a deep lapis lazuli blue.

Jessica went to the trays of new shoots and began to carry them towards the store. Before she'd shifted the second crate, Ashleigh came out of the house and began to help. Jessica saw that the girl was strong, built like a boy, broad and thick at the shoulders. Ashleigh carried the trays to the porch where Jessica wanted them laid out in a line so that they could be priced up and ready for sale in the morning.

‘Don't you have a boy, Mrs Lawson?' Ashleigh asked.

‘I do, but he's out of town. You'll meet him soon enough, though
boy
he is not.'

‘What's his name?'

‘Jules.'

‘If I had a place like this I'd never leave.'

‘It's good to travel to places, Ashleigh. Jules – my boy – he likes to get out, that's all.'

‘You travel much, Mrs Lawson?'

‘A little. I wanted to do more. But with the business, I guess I didn't get the chance,' Jessica replied.

‘Maybe you thought there wasn't much reason. I saw the way you like the evenings out here.' There she goes again, Jessica thought, spouting her insight and her wisdom.

‘You got a daughter, too. I know coz I seen her pictures. That must be her room with all the covers in it.'

‘It is,' answered Jessica, quietly.

‘You waiting on her to come home, too?'

‘I am,' Jessica replied, swiftly pulling on her garden gloves. She tugged at the tiny sprouts of weeds peeping up through the clay. She felt a surge of anger course through her that she could not reasonably explain to herself. Except that she knew this blood-rush always came whenever anyone would try and talk her out of waiting for Tina to come home. Not that Ashleigh had done that. But had she, Jessica would have sorely wanted to rip the child's heart out.

‘What are these things anyway?' Ashleigh asked, turning to the crates with their inch-high shoots.

‘These? Why these are my Christmas roses. Except they're not really roses. That's just a nickname they got.'

‘What are they, then?' Ashleigh asked.

‘Hellebores. They bloom early. Around January. They're poisonous. But I don't grow them to eat them,' Jessica replied.

*

Ashleigh and Olivia had been signed up by Bobby Jean for a term at Bay City High. Three days into term, Cole Spencer, the Head, called Jessica.

‘No, it's not Olivia, Jessica May. It's Ashleigh. Look, I just think you should come down here, soon as you can.'

When Jessica arrived at Bay City High it was quiet. All the times she'd been in that school for Tina or Jules she'd never seen it as calm. It was like it was shut or Christmas. Cole Spencer rushed into the foyer and asked her to hush as he led her into the assembly hall. All the students sat around quiet as mice, the teachers behind them, arms folded. She noticed that Miss Quigley was crying. Miss Quigley was as stern as iron so Jessica thought that maybe someone had died. Until she saw who it was they were sitting around listening to. Up front, by the stage, on a small classroom chair, her long pale legs all tied up around each other like pea vines – Ashleigh, talking animatedly about the hurricane.

‘It's not just Katrina,' whispered Spencer.

‘What else is there?' asked Jessica.

‘A whole lot of what else. She says… well… she says she's
the daughter of God
.' A cold shiver ran down Jessica's back. Mad as the words Spencer had just said sounded, they went a long way towards explaining the unnerving self-assurance she herself had observed in Ashleigh.

‘Don't be crazy, Cole. She's a kid. It's just a turn of phrase.'

‘Listen to her, and watch their faces. She's hypnotic. I'm telling you, the child is gifted. From the beginning of lessons this week she's been dazzling every teacher in her Grade. She says she got the gift out in the floods. From the hurricane itself.'

Jessica looked around at the rapt faces of the children. They were all engrossed in Ashleigh's tale. Which seemed to be about how, when the whirlpool started up in the river, Ashleigh had stood up and demanded it fall away, and how it did just that, and how when the waters parted she walked on dry land to the other side of the river to rescue her sister, Olivia.

In the following weeks the store was the busiest Jessica had ever seen it. People came to buy flowers and wreathes and winter shrubs, but mostly they came to see the girl who had been touched by God in the hurricane. Even when they didn't ask directly to see Ashleigh, or point her out to each other, Jessica knew that was why most people came to the store. (It had never been busy at this time of year.) On Saturdays, when Ashleigh would help out, Jessica would see old women or sick-looking people whisper into the girl's ear to see if she could help them. Sometimes they touched her arm, or brushed past her clothes, and Jessica knew it was so they could get something of Ashleigh into themselves. Some kind of hope or healing. Jessica wanted Ashleigh to settle down to a normal life, as much as she could offer the child while under her roof.

One evening Jessica asked Ashleigh to sit with her out on the porch.

‘Sweetie, I know what you've been saying at the school.'

‘I know, Mrs Lawson, I saw you.' Jessica lit up a cigarette. She hadn't especially wanted to discuss the matter. It was Ashleigh's personal business, and soon the child would be gone from the house and Panama City anyway. But after seeing how people were with her in the store, how they looked at her on the street and in the bank, Jessica felt she had to speak up.

‘This has got to stop, honey. You don't realise how people can react to this kind of talk. It's dangerous.'

‘You don't believe me, Mrs Lawson?'

‘It's not about whether I believe or don't believe. Look – Eric – you remember Eric from the hospital?' Ashleigh nodded.

‘Well, Eric said you and Olivia need to come by one day soon. He'd like you to speak to someone. Counselling it's called. You know what that is, Ashleigh?'

‘I'm not crazy, Mrs Lawson. I already spoke to doctors.'

‘You did? When?'

‘In the 'dome. After a couple of days they had doctors talk to the children who lost their folks. They thought I maybe got hit on the head. But I didn't.'

Jessica looked long and hard at this skinny girl with the white braids and grey-blue eyes. She was convinced now that the loss of their parents had caused Ashleigh and her sister such inestimable pain that they were, most likely, as Eric had said, suffering from some kind of delayed reaction.

‘Pineville is a long way from New Orleans. How'd you get to the Superdome?' Jessica asked.

‘Red Cross picked us up on some dirt track,' Ashleigh replied.

‘By then your parents had…'

‘Yes, Ma'am.'

‘The house went too?'

‘Yes Ma'am. See, it came real early in the mornin'. I remember the air filled up with grey and dark, and pieces of our rooms, my dolls, my books, were swirlin' around, gettin' flung down onto trees and other houses. We ran out of the house and just as we did it folded up behind us like firewood. Olivia cried for Beau, our dog, and Ma and Pa went lookin'. They were just gone a couple of minutes when the river burst out of the earth and swept everythin' forward. We all got separated so quick. I remember my breath – coz it got took clean out of my body, and my nightdress swelled up and I thought I would take off and fly. But then I got swept along so I clung tightly to Olivia. We seemed to be in the water hours and hours. But nothin' fell on my head, Mrs Lawson. I just made up my mind to pull the strength out of myself, and I did.'

‘And all of this “daughter of God” business?'

‘Olivia got pulled to the other side of the river and this force started to build up inside the water and I couldn't cross. I tried and tried. That's when I heard a voice, and I recognised what it was sayin'. It was from Exodus:
And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.
So I just did what Moses did, which was what the voice told me to do.'

It occurred to Jessica, then, that maybe Ashleigh was right. Maybe nothing had fallen on her head. Maybe she just hadn't been well to begin with. After all, what did Jessica really know about these young people now living in her home? So much data had been destroyed by Katrina; Ashleigh could be just as ill as her sister for all Jessica knew.

‘Ashleigh, now Bobby Jean and me, we mostly go to Unity Church. And Unity is non-denominational. You know what that means?' Ashleigh nodded. ‘It means a mixture of everything and nothing in particular. You see, we don't do much Bible study at Unity. And we don't believe hurricanes have anything at all to do with God. Maybe you believe it's his “wrath”, do you?'

‘What I believe, Jessica, has nothin' to do with religion.'

‘Your daddy. Was he a Baptist preacher?'

‘Episcopal.'

‘Episcopal? Well, they aren't fanciful. So how come you got to thinking you're the daughter of God?'

‘My daddy said.'

‘What do you mean “he said”?'

‘My daddy told me. He said I was the special one. He said it every night he come in my room. And it was only the moment I saw my sister on the other side of the water, that I truly believed him.'

*

Eric brought both girls out to the waiting room where Jessica waited with Bobby Jean. Then Bobby Jean stayed with the girls in the bright, sea-lit room as Jessica went into the consultation room with Eric. Jessica sat. The female psychiatrist entered and sat down opposite Jessica and opened a file.

‘Olivia's epilepsy is congenital, but with the right treatment she will most likely stop having seizures by her teens. She is slightly traumatised, but it seems Ashleigh covered Olivia's eyes from a lot of the horrors they might otherwise both have seen.'

‘Horrors like what?' asked Jessica.

‘Well, there were a lot of bodies on the river. Drownings. A lot of loose animals, too. And it was hot, so you can imagine what state those bodies were in. Ashleigh believes she saw things.'

‘What things?'

‘Like I said. Drownings. Animals gnawing at bodies.'

‘What else?'

The doctor hesitated: ‘Well, if you must know, for instance, like a National Guardsman airlift a woman into a helicopter then drop her to her death. Like soldiers opening fire on a black neighbour of the Williams' who, Ashleigh claims, was procuring food from his own store. These are serious allegations. So for the minute it's Ashleigh we're mostly concerned about, Mrs Lawson.'

Jessica decided at that point not to inform Eric, or the doctor, that there were people in Panama City who believed Ashleigh had divine lineage. But somehow Jessica thought that perhaps they knew something about this already. The beach town was, after all, as provincial as any small village – which, indeed, it used to be and in a way still was – despite its recent sprawl out onto the highways of Wal-Marts, malls and Po-Folks restaurants. People on this part of the Gulf knew the exact movements of the tide; they knew when new retirees arrived into this or that complex, or when they died. At the Unity Church there would be a coffee hour after service each Sunday and everyone would talk. Jessica had the feeling that everyone in Panama City (including the people from Unity) pretty much believed she had the daughter of God living under her roof. So it would be a lot easier for Jessica if it turned out the child had concussion. Then everything could calm the hell down before the two girls finally left for Atlanta or somewhere else. Just about anything (except that thing Ashleigh had alluded to the night before) was better than the child going round with an inner power other people wanted a piece of.