Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (39 page)

He opened Genevieve’s freezer and looked for the special bag, and was worried when he didn’t see it. Surely she had put together some of Auntie’s special spice mix—the basis for every pot of red beans he’d ever made. If she didn’t…

There it was, on the top shelf of the freezer, a cheesecloth bag of secrets, sitting next to the andouille sausage, another key ingredient.

He pulled out the bag and the sausage, and cut the frozen sausage into one-inch pieces. He figured he could fix up the Treme house with a little help, even if that durned insurance company wanted to act a fool. His daddy had built that house himself, and surely, he could make it livable again. But Silver Creek. That news had left a hard bruise on his heart.

That, he could not fix. Silver Creek was gone, and not the victim of a flood, unless you counted the flood of greed. It would have been easy to blame somebody, Genevieve maybe, certainly himself for not paying closer attention to what was happening. The truth was, it was no one’s fault. It was just the way of things. But when he remembered Julian’s face, clouded in sadness and regret at the loss, well, Simon could have been knocked over with a feather.

He poured the starchy water off the beans, filled the pot again, brought them to a second boil, and plopped the spice bag in, and wondered what was going on between Julian and Velmyra. Something was happening there, and if there was anything good to be found in all this mess, at least the boy had come to his senses and reached out to that sweet young lady again. He poured vegetable oil into a cast iron pot and put the chopped vegetables and garlic in to sear (Auntie Maree would have used bacon grease, but the oil was his one concession to the occasional spike in his blood pressure), then looked up to see Julian standing in the doorway.

Speaking of the devil, or thinking of him, at least. Hands in both pockets, looking lost. Looking the way he did when he was a boy and had something big on his mind.

“Hey, Daddy.”

Simon smiled, nodded. Turned the flame down from under the pot.

“You OK?”

Simon looked at him. How many times was the boy going to ask him that? “I’m alive. I’m cooking. I’m as good as gold.”

Julian picked up a spoon from the counter and put it back down. “Daddy, I just wanted to say I’m sorry…”

Simon put down his knife as the vegetables cackled over the fire. “Son, look, I don’t blame you. Not for any of this.”

“I was just thinking. Maybe we, you and me, could buy some property down here. Something small, a few acres. Maybe something with a pond where we could go fishing.”

Simon looked crossways at Julian.
Fishing?
Somebody musta kidnapped his son and sent this look-alike stranger in his place.

“Son, don’t let it worry you. It’s just a piece of land.”

Julian looked away toward the open window facing the yard.

Simon sucked at his bottom lip. He probably shouldn’t have said something that Julian could see right through. God knows, and Julian did too, it wasn’t just a piece of land. More like a piece of his heart, his daddy Jacob’s heart and soul. He wanted to reach out to Julian, wipe away the film of sadness that veiled those young eyes, but he was never too good at comforting. That had been Ladeena’s job. It was always Ladeena who’d kissed the bruised knee, the wounded elbow, rubbed salve on the congested chest. Made life’s bogeymen disappear. He only knew how to do what men like him did best; offer distraction from whatever the problem was.

“Good to see Velmyra again. She sure is a nice young lady.”

“She was trying to help us—me and Kevin—get the land back.”

“Umm, hmm, well, that sure was nice.” Simon looked down at the skillet, stirred at the vegetables with the knife. “Son, as long as you’re standing there, reach into that drawer and hand me that mixing spoon.”

Julian opened the drawer and found the wooden spoon. But when he pulled it from the drawer, something fell onto the floor. He reached down and picked up a leatherbound journal, frayed and weathered with age.

Simon looked up from the pot. “Oh, that’s Auntie Maree’s cookbook. She wrote all the recipes down she made up. Said one day she’d publish it, but she never did.”

Julian held it in his hands and tried to open it, but the crinkled pages were stuck together.

“It’s so old, lots of secrets in that book. It first belonged to Claudinette, then she gave it to Liza, and Liza gave it to Maree. I can’t read a word of Claudinette’s writing. Some of it’s in French—that’s what Claudinette spoke. She was your…let me see…”

“My great-great-grandmother. John Michel’s wife.”

Another shock. He’d not talked to him about Claudinette since he was a child, since he could still get him to listen to the family tales.

When he got the middle pages separated, Julian ran his fingers over the wrinkled sheets of linen, considering the old woman’s script—written half in French and half in English, wondering just how many times Claudinette had stood in the very spot where he was standing. Wondering what was on her mind when she wrote the page before him. Thinking about all the generations of Fortiers in this kitchen between that day and this one. He put the book back into the drawer.

“Anything I can do to help?”

Simon looked up. “Yes. You can stop your moping, boy. This ain’t the end of the world, and I’ma tell you, things got a way of turning out the way they should. Why don’t you go out there and talk to that pretty young lady?” He winked at him. “Awful nice of her to come, but only a fool would think she only came here to see me.”

Julian went back to the porch where Genevieve, Pastor Jackson, Sylvia and Kevin sat talking and drinking iced tea spiked with Genevieve’s white lightning.

“Join us?” Sylvia pointed to an empty rocker next to her.

“In a little bit. Where’s Vel?”

Sylvia pointed around the side of the cabin, and he found her, sitting crosslegged on the grass, sketchbook in her lap, a piece of charcoal in hand, drawing the huge live oaks in the yard.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Daddy kicked me out of the kitchen. He sent me out here to talk to you.”

She smiled, and looked up from the sketch, a teasing light in her eyes. “Anything in particular he tell you to say?”

Julian looked back toward the house. “Uh, let me go and find out. I’ll be right back.”

She laughed, her eyes catching the play of afternoon light from the sun.

“Listen,” he said. “That painting. The album cover? Wow. Thank you.”

Her eyes widened. “You like it?”

“Like’s the wrong word. More like ‘humbled’ by it. I’d forgotten how good you were.”

She patted the ground next to her.

“Come. Sit.”

He sat facing her, his knees bent and his arms around them.

She tilted her head, squinted from the light. “So when did you find out your father was going to be here?”

“When I drove up and saw him sitting on the porch.”

“You mean you didn’t know, and you just happened to show up on the day he arrived?”

“Exactly. Crazy coincidence.”

Velmyra smiled, nodded. “Well, you know I don’t believe in coincidence. Synchronicity, maybe. Like twins who know what the other is feeling, or parents who know when one of their children is in trouble.”

“Yeah, maybe so.”

She looked up as a cloud passed over the sun, fading the shade on the ground and deepening the color of the leaves of the nearby pecans. “It’s so amazing, this place. I just wish there was something we could do.”

He looked across the road as a red-tailed hawk left its perch on the pine tree and flew toward the creek.

“Sylvia told me something the other day after you left. Something about how hard it is to live your life without regrets. Well, for me, they’ve been stacking up lately.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself.”

He looked toward the porch, the rockers moving in disparate rhythms, the air so quiet he could hear the creak of wood and the clink of ice tea glasses from where he sat.

“I regret not seeing this place earlier, for what it is, what it means.” He turned to look at her. “And I regret what happened between us. You were right, about a lot of stuff, really. I couldn’t see it then. I’m sorry for that.”

Velmyra closed her sketchpad and placed it on the ground next to her.

“Julian, I want to tell you something. You wondered why I got married so soon.”

He blinked. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

“No. I want to.”

He shrugged, frowned. “OK. Tell me.”

She halted, looking away, her eyes searching the sky as if cues were written in the clouds. She leaned over and touched her forehead with her hand. “Something happened, something that would have stopped you in your tracks. After it happened, I think I had to prove to myself that I wouldn’t do just anything to make you stay.”

He looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

She let out a deep sigh. “Something happened.”

She stared at him narrowing her eyes long and hard, long enough for the tears to form, and for the meaning of her words, spoken and not, to settle into his mind.

And in that moment everything was clear. His eyes grew cool.

“Just tell me. Just say it.”

She looked down at her lap, rubbed her hands against her knees. “When you left, I thought my heart would stop. I needed something, somebody, and Michael was right there. I taught with him at school. I knew him before you, we’d gone out a few times. When you and I broke up, he called. Turns out he was just waiting for me. Sort of.”

She paused. “You hadn’t been gone that long when I found out my...condition. I told Michael. We’d only been going out a few weeks but he wanted to get married right away, raise my son—yes, it was a boy—as his own.”

Julian’s heart fluttered, his breath quickening as she spoke.

She went on, the tempo of her speech slower, her voice breaking. “But he…didn’t make it.” She covered her eyes, paused, fighting tears. “He was a little fighter, but he only lasted forty-two days. He never left the hospital. Michael was devastated; I was shaking for a week. We named him Michael Jr., on his last day.”

“He was born with a little hole in his heart.”

Julian looked at the ground, at his feet, anywhere but at Velmyra.

“Things fell apart between us after that. There just wasn’t enough love there, if there was ever any at all. It was as if he’d only wanted to rescue me, be the hero. It seemed like there was no longer a reason for us to be together.”

Julian pinched his eyes shut, his brows furrowed, trying to understand. He, Julian Fortier, had been a father for forty-two days. A child of his, a boy, had been born, lived, then died; a whole life flashed by in seconds.

He cleared his throat. “You should have told me. I would have…”

“Done the right thing? Oh, I’m sure you would have, which is why I didn’t. It would have been OK for a while. But there would have been a day when you would have looked at me in a way I wouldn’t have been able to stand. You had your life mapped out. You had plans, you were headed someplace. I didn’t want to be the reason you didn’t get there. I just couldn’t carry that load with me.” She shrugged. “Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.

“So. You were talking about regrets,” she said, her eyes now glassy. “I’ve had a few myself. Sometime, a while back, I would lay awake at night and wonder, what if I’d told you? What would our lives have been like?”

Julian held his head between his hands, closed his eyes to the pain between them. She should have told him.
She should have told him.
A flurry of emotions flashed before him like playing cards dealt from quick, nimble hands: sadness, anger, jealousy, resentment, confusion, and most of all, doubt.

What if she had told him? And what if the child had lived? Would he have, as she said, looked at her one day in a way she could not stand? He wanted to think not, but the other possibility blinded him like an inescapable, glaring light, and he wondered if maybe that tiny hole in his heart, the one
he’d
been born with, had ever really closed. Wondered if that small defect might have leaked out some vital stream of selflessness that could have created in him the loving, willing father a child would need. For a fleeting moment, he hated the man who had so eagerly, so willingly stepped up in his place.
If he’d only known
…Maybe never knowing what he might have done was the price he’d paid for the life he chose.

There was no use in thinking about that now. He looked at Vel, whose reddened eyes mirrored the regret he now felt. But these weeks since the storm, and especially these last few days, had been a time of accepting what was, and dealing with it. Doing the next thing, even if that meant starting over. Old lives washed away, new ones begun—like it or not, ready or not.

If there was anything he’d learned since the storm, it was that even though some things could not be undone, they could be survived. They could be accepted. One could lay back and howl at the moon, or one could take whatever came, handle it, and then move on.

Julian was silent a while. Then he got up abruptly, and extended his hand to Velmyra. When she was on her feet, he circled his arms around her waist and drew her into him.

“You know, you’ve always had my heart,” he said. “You know that.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder, tears flowing, as he stroked her back.

“God, I wish I’d told you. You had a right to know.”

When he pulled away from her, he took her hand.

“Walk with me,” he said.

“Where?”

“Down to the creek. I want to see it one more time.”