City of Masks

28

Madwoman in a car. That's what people see, Cree thought. Screw 'em.

She drove the Taurus toward Lila's house, having a one-sided conversation with Mike. "What's she doing, Mike? How would you call it?"

He'd always had a shrewd eye for people's motives. They used to talk about their family relationships or work contacts, trying to untie the knots that came with any human interaction. Playing detective with the human psyche.

The Mike in her imagination didn't answer. He wasn't there; he was a memory from a day in Concord, that first autumn at the farmhouse. They'd just discovered that grapes still grew along the stone walls at the edge of their property. In the dry fall air, that fine New England light, you could smell the winey sweetness of them as you came near the sun-warmed stones. Finding the vines among the scrub had excited him, and as he looked eagerly for bunches of frosted-purple spheres he looked much younger, like a kid. The wind tugged his cowlick over and down across his eyes like an errant windshield wiper and he pushed it away repeatedly, unconsciously, so intent on finding the fruit. The animation in his dark, alert eyes.

"It's like she's playing a game of chess with me," she told him. "She keeps me at a distance, she won't tell me what I need to know. But today I could swear she was close to telling me something. What? Why didn't she?"

Mike didn't answer.

"No, it's not like chess. This is a game where I don't know the rules. I don't know the objective!"

She had stopped at a light, and the driver in the next car over seemed to be looking at her strangely. Below the level of the window, she gave him the finger.

"Is she steering me toward something, or away from something? Or is she just really ambivalent, changing her mind? What?" Mike didn't answer. She looked quickly over at the empty passenger seat as if she might catch him there if she were fast enough. Of course, it was empty but for her purse. In the rearview mirror she caught a glimpse of her own desperate eyes: madwoman.

"Let's put 'em in a big vat and trample 'em with our bare feet," Mike said. "Stain our legs purple to the knees. A New England bacchanal." They had collected about two handfuls of grapes, and he held them up to the sun and gazed at them. "Naked among the mashed grapes. An ecstatic, drunken frenzy – "

"All that with a half pint of grapes?"

"Right. The hell with the grapes. Who needs grapes?" He gave her a lusty, wild-eyed look.

They had laughed and pitched grapes at each other. Laughed until his eyes changed, suddenly got very serious with a penetrating realization that she intuited instantly: fesus, I really love this woman. She really loves me. It took her breath away.

Cree slammed on the brakes barely in time to avoid hitting the car in front of her. Mike's face vanished, leaving an aching void. This was dangerous, she decided. You couldn't get sidetracked like that.

Stick to the plan, she reminded herself. She stopped at a hardware store to pick up some gardening gloves. When she returned to the car, she turned on the radio, a country and western station, too loud, and got lucky: not a soupy ballad but a clever, upbeat ditty about lovin' your pickup truck.

After a big rain, New Orleans started up with a sputter and a catch before it regained its momentum. The winds had spread leaves and trash on the pavement, and boughs lay on the residential streets. Where storm drains had clogged, puddles made moats at the curbs. The weather reports announced that the front had swerved farther east then originally expected, and the sky was expected to continue clearing. Still, people paused often to gaze upward, as if skeptical that the weather had passed.

As she'd expected, the Warrens' yard looked battered, its shrubs stooped and blossoms blown. Leaves and twigs littered the front yard, and scatters of petals dotted the grass and stuck, rain plastered, to the pillars.

Again the house was full of the muted din of the remodelers. When Lila led her into the dining room, Cree showed her the gardening gloves she'd bought. "Let's skip the photos and stuff today – I don't think either of us is up for that. Your yard is a mess. We should go outside and try to spruce things up, don't you think?"

Lila was dressed in a pretty, prim housedress and pumps, and at first she looked dumbfounded by the suggestion. But after a moment she nodded.

"I have to change my clothes," she said.

Lila led Cree out to the garage, and they brought rakes, pruning shears, a little kneeling bench, and a two-wheeled garden cart out into the lawn. Though the sky was clearing rapidly, the grass was still wet and a pattering of drops fell from the leaves of the live oaks. Lila had put on jeans and canvas tennis shoes and gloves, but now she stood in her own backyard and looked around as if she were dazed.

"I feel like a stranger here," she said. "A stranger to my own life."

"I know the feeling." Cree took one of the wire rakes and began sweeping the grass.

"This is deliberate, isn't it? Getting me out here? You're thinking this might have some therapeutic value."

"Yeah. But not just for you, believe me. I am in serious need of some grounding myself."

Lila nodded. She picked up one of the pruning shears and studied it as she opened and closed it a few times. "You probably want to know what happened yesterday, at the hospital."

"Of course."

"They did all kinds of tests – 1 felt like a lab rat. They don't have all the results yet, but the brain scans were normal. There's still some blood work to come in, but they don't expect anything from it."

"Are you relieved or disappointed?"

"A little of both." A wry flicker of a smile moved at the corners of her mouth. "I think Dr. Fitzpatrick felt the same. He said you'd told him to expect it, though."

Cree resisted the urge to ask about Paul. Instead, she disengaged a fallen branch from one of the shrubs and put it into the cart, then began sweeping some more leaves together.

After a tentative start, Lila began to work more confidently. Her hands moved deftly among the bent leaves and ragged blossoms, testing, snipping. When given a task to do, Cree thought, they were competent hands whose skillful movements seemed at odds with Lila's habitual uncertainty.

"I had an interesting meeting with your mother this morning," Cree said after a while.

"Oh?"

"A remarkable woman. Also a hard nut to crack."

"Yes. She's always been a… forceful personality. But she got more that way after Daddy died. Harder, I mean. Distant. That's how she coped with it."

Cree nodded. "Sounds like they loved each other a lot."

"Oh, for sure. It was something of a famous courtship. Two old families, all that. Very romantic." Lila smiled at the memory, but then her hands hesitated among the leaves and the smile eroded.

"What was that thought?"

"Oh. Just that it's sad – the year before he died, they were having some problems. I remember her starting to sleep in the other bedroom, and wondering about it. Finally I realized it was because when Uncle Brad died, she was so close to him, she needed to be alone more to deal with her grief. But then when Daddy died, I knew she felt guilty about having been so distant. About letting something come between them during his last days and all."

"That's pretty perceptive for a girl of, what – fourteen?"

Lila's hands went back to work. "Once upon a time," she said, both bitter and wistful. "But I suppose everybody looks back at some golden era of their lives and wonders where it went."

Cree stopped raking, startled. "I used those same words just last night! Talking about my own 'golden era.'"

"To Paul?" Lila glanced sideways, caught Cree's expression, and again her smile flickered weakly. "Don't be surprised. You two – it makes sense you'd be attracted to each other. You… seem to have a lot in common. And he is easy to confide in." She worked for another moment with determination, then stopped and gave Cree a direct look. "Are you going to tell me your story?"

"If you'd like me to."

Lila thought about that briefly, and her confidence faded abruptly"Does it have a happy ending?"

For a moment, Cree thought of contriving what Lila must have needed very badly, a compassionate lie: Sure, I dealt with what happened to me and came through it just fine and so will you. But it wasn't true. It wasn't that easy, couldn't be.

"I don't know what kind of ending it has," Cree admitted.

They kept working, removing damaged branches and exploded blossoms, raking leaves, picking up twigs. The sun came through more strongly now, drying the foliage and drawing forth the muggy humidity. An occasional jogger went by on the levee path. Cree told her about Mike's death and reappearance, and the way it had changed her. If she couldn't promise a happy ending, she thought, there might at least be some affirmation in hearing someone else's ghost story.

She had hoped it would be easier the second time, but it wasn't. Again she felt things breaking inside, jarring and grinding and rearranging.

They finished up the large, central flower bed and then went to the east side of the lawn to attend to the beds along the fence. Lila didn't say anything for several minutes after Cree finished telling her saga. She was working in a dense azalea, kneeling on her little padded bench with her head bent forward like a penitent.

"Thank you," Lila said quietly. "I know it can't be easy. To tell all that."

"It fucking kills me. Sorry for my language. But I keep thinking it's important. To talk about it. It was you who helped make that clear to me."

"If you're looking for me to reciprocate, I can't. I've already told you everything that happened."

"It doesn't have to be about the hauntings. Lila, today your mother told me you'd had a nervous breakdown when you went off to boarding school. An episode of depression. What was that about?"

"There's nothing to tell. I hated the school, my family was falling apart, my uncle had died not long before. And then my daddy died during my first year. I missed him horribly. My mother was broken up and drinking too much, and even Josephine had left, so I had no one to talk to. I got… unglued."

"That's a lot for anyone to deal with."

Lila nodded. "Ron, it wrecked him up, too, just in a different way. He's two years older than me, but he was still living at home – he went to the public high school here. You wouldn't think it now, but before all that he was a… a sweet person. He used to be my confidant, my protector. But it scarred him terribly. The lesson he learned was that loving your family too much can hurt you. If you take anything seriously, it'll hurt you. So he's never married, never settled down, never taken anything seriously. He's never let himself care about anyone but Ron Beauforte – that's how he protected himself. Now it's just… who he is."

Cree thought that was a fair appraisal. "So, you… did you get any kind of help back then?"

"Oh, I left school for a couple of weeks. I came home and Momma had me see Dr. Fitzpatrick – Paul's father, an old family friend. She wasn't going to let someone outside our immediate circle see a LambertBeauforte in the shape I was in, God, no! She told me to show some spine, and he did what doctors did back then: gave me all kinds of pills. Anxiety pills, depression pills, pills to help me sleep – it's a wonder I didn't become an addict. After a while they sent me back to school."

"When did it end? Your… breakdown?"

Lila tipped awkwardly back on her haunches, a plump woman unused to sitting on the ground. "End? It never ended. I put my problems and my feelings and my past into a… a Mason jar, sealed it up tight. And did my best to keep them there. I became this." She sat back into the wet grass, gesturing at her body, her house, and her yard, and her expression turned sad and hollow. "I didn't rock the boat or draw attention. That's what you were supposed to do."

Cree's breath went out of her as she was buffeted by an aching sympathy. She felt that self-containment in Lila, that holding back, that clinging to a safe, predictable life, that rigid rule of doing what was expected. It was Lila's way of protecting herself, not so different from Ron's – except that in her case it was reinforced by all the traditional, safe, domestic women's roles, and by Jack Warren's good-ol'-boy, chubby-hubby expectations, and Charmian's tyranny, and it all fit together. No one had protested when Lila had locked herself away and that bright, sparkling girl disappeared.

"Is that what you meant the other day? When you said something had happened to you?"

"Oh, hell, I don't know. I can't remember my past, Cree. What I remember, it's all from those clippings and photos. It's a movie of a life, not a life. Paul said you were thinking about repressed memory. Maybe that's what it is. But I don't know – it just feels like there was the life then, and there's the life now, and they don't have a hell of a lot to do with each other."

"Lila, there are two ghosts. I don't know what to make of the wolf or the snake or the table, but there are two more… human… ghosts.

One is the boar-headed man who chases you and hurts you. The other manifests mainly in the library. He goes through some act of violent beating and then later dies and feels a sad, beautiful longing. They're not the same person. Do you know who they are?"

"No!" Lila's eyes had widened at the idea. "I thought there's only one! How can you be sure?"

"It's more than the difference in their moods or their affects. They spring from different impulses. They're completely different kinds of manifestation. Different… levels."

"I don't understand anything you're saying! I only know what happens to me!" Lila's hand were working busily among the leaves and stems, but she was clipping anything, hacking away at healthy branches and tops full of unopened buds. Cree put her hand on her arm and was alarmed at the tension she felt there.

"We don't have to go into that now. Lila, I… I've been taking on your susceptibility to these ghosts – you understand that, right? But if I'm going to survive, I've got to take on your strength, too. I've got to absorb your determination and your persistence and your stubbornness. I've got to know your desire to… fix what's wrong with your life. You've got to show me how you survive." Cree hoped any of that made sense to her.

Lila's arm seemed to shiver beneath Cree's fingers. "I know why you told me about you and your husband," she said in a darkly hollow voice. "And I'm grateful. But see, your story, it's… beautiful. Sad, but beautiful. Mine – it's not. And there's nothing either of us can do about that."

Cree didn't know what to say.

"And as for how I survive," Lila went on, looking more like her mother now, "I survive by doing the next thing that needs doing. And the thing after that. Which right now probably means working on the yard here. You're very right – it is a mess."

The plumbers had left by the time they went back inside, but the tilers were still at work and the house was filled with the sharp chemical smell of adhesive. As Lila conferred with the men upstairs, Cree spent a few more minutes leafing through the Beauforte photos. Nothing new caught her eye. When Lila came back down, they hugged good-bye wordlessly and Cree left.

She wondered whether she had accomplished anything at all. Her attempts to build upon their earlier spirit of companionship had failed. Lila had closed down, especially when Cree had told her there were two ghosts. The idea had upset her greatly; the image of her hands rooting and clipping blindly, indiscriminately, seemed to bode ill.

The only ray of hope Cree could find was a subtle one. It had to do with why Lila had chosen to move back to Beauforte House in the first place. Yes, Lila was in a box, a jar, constructed equally by herself, her family, her society. But her original desire to move back to Beauforte House was a proactive effort to break out of her boxed-in life. She had sought to reclaim that depth, that richness of texture. To reclaim the past, too. Lila's determination to move back there had to have an unconscious element of wanting to come to grips with her sealed-away past. On some level she understood her fundamental predicament and was willing to face it. That motivation was the essential foundation of any therapeutic process.

Cree turned left at the street and walked along the front of the Warrens' yard. They hadn't gotten this far in their cleanup effort, and leaves and twigs still littered the shmbs and flower beds. She walked toward the Taurus, absentmindedly picking fallen twigs from the front plantings. At the corner of the Warrens' lot, where the growth met the side fence, a larger branch had fallen, crimping the shrubs beneath, and reflexively she stopped to disengage it. When she pulled aside the surrounding foliage to lift it free, she saw something that turned the world suddenly upside down.

Behind the leaves, lashed against the rail of the fence at the corner: a finger-sized stick. It was tied with long blades of grass, or maybe the thin fronds of a palmetto. It had one notch carved crudely into it.

A hoodoo hex, just like the ones Deelie Brown had found at Beauforte House.