CHAPTER 1
Ava was on a train called the City of New Orleans, on her way to the actual city of New Orleans, where her grandmother lived. She carried a backpack filled with books and a small suitcase of clothes. It was summer. She had finished the eighth grade four weeks before. Her mother had been dead for three. Louise had walked into the emergency room with a bad headache, and twenty hours later she was gone. A freak thing, the doctors said—a rare virus that attacked the brain stem.
Ava watched the green landscape flip past her train windows. She tried reading Harry Potter but she was too distracted, so she paced up and down the train cars. She’d never been anywhere besides her home in Iowa and one trip to Chicago. The country seemed too big. Ridiculously big.
Her mother’s roommate Kaitlyn had driven her to meet the train in Chicago. The three-hour trip from Iowa City had been laced with Kaitlyn’s endless stories about her boyfriend, who may or may not have been flirting with his neighbor down the block, whom Kaitlyn described as “one of those overgrown Girls Gone Wild sluts, I mean, she’s thirty years old for god’s sake”; Kaitlyn’s mother, who perpetually got on her nerves; and Kaitlyn and Louise’s bitchy boss at the factory, who had been unexpectedly kind when Louise got sick. It was easy to be with Kaitlyn because she never stopped chattering and did not require a response. Ava knew she was doing it on purpose, keeping things light. They’d been crying for weeks and needed a break. Ava was tired and numb, relieved to be away from the pity on everyone’s faces, and all the places where her mother should have been.
Kaitlyn parked in front of the train station in Chicago and handed Ava a sheaf of twenty-dollar bills.
“Keep it in your bra,” she said.
The girl gave her a look. Kaitlyn was always being embarrassing.
“Or your sock.”
“Thank you,” Ava said.
“I wish I could come with you,” Kaitlyn said.
“It’s okay. I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t let anybody talk to you.”
“Okay.”
“People aren’t good, remember that.”
She’d heard Kaitlyn say this before, it was one of her maxims.
“I know,” Ava said.
“Smart girl.”
Ava got out of the car. A printout of her train ticket was in her jeans pocket, creased and sweaty from her anxious hand. Her grandmother in New Orleans had paid for the ticket. Ava watched Kaitlyn drive off before she went into the station, found her platform, and boarded the train. She tried not to think about the speed at which it carried her away from home.
The train arrived in the afternoon. Ava had grown up hearing stories of New Orleans her whole life, and was half-surprised, now, to find that it was a real place. So far it was dirtier and uglier than she had pictured, the train station far less impressive than the ornate one she’d left in Chicago.
Ava looked around for her grandmother. She wondered if there would be a sign with her name on it, maybe some balloons or flowers like in the movies, when people arrived somewhere. She walked from one end of the station to another, scanning faces, more black faces in one place than she had ever seen before. No old ladies stood around waiting for her. She bought a Coke from a machine. She studied the mural that stretched above the ticket counter, a depiction, it said on the wall, of the history of New Orleans. The paintings were violent and disturbing, with dark colors and sharp angular figures doing terrible things to one another.
After a while she went outside and stood under the broad awning. A jumble of freeway overpasses loomed next to the building. The heat was shocking, thick. She waited there, trying to guess what kind of vehicle her grandmother might own. She imagined a plump gray-haired lady and a plush sedan, a jar of cookies, a guest room. She sweated against her backpack and her suitcase felt heavy and slick in her hand. She went back in to the air-conditioning.
Ava wandered around the station, past blue and brown chairs bolted to the floor. She found a pay phone and tried Lane’s number but it rang and rang. Ava waited through a series of buses unloading, each dispensing a throng of people into the station. She checked outside again. No luck.
Back inside she was pacing, too anxious to sit. People around her surged toward and away from buses, hugged and stretched and dragged their luggage. Ava went for the third time into the gift shop and studied the souvenir trinkets and T-shirts. The lady behind the counter spoke to her.
“Hey, babe, can I help you find something in particular?”
“No,” Ava said. “Thank you. I’m waiting for my ride.” She stood next to a shelf of real baby alligator heads. They’d been coated in some kind of shellac and they glistened under the fluorescent fixtures.
“You been waiting a while. Maybe they’re not coming.”
Ava said, “I was thinking that, too.”
“Where you trying to go?”
Ava opened her backpack and found the little book where she had written down her grandmother’s address. She read it out.
“Dang, that’s way Uptown.”
“Could you tell me how to get there?”
“You could maybe take the streetcar, if it’s running,” the woman said.
“What’s the streetcar?” Ava asked.
The woman frowned. “Maybe better if you have money for a cab. You have money?”
Ava nodded.
“Go see if there’s one out there.”
Ava thanked the clerk and walked into the humid heat and car exhaust of the Central Business District. She approached a waiting cab and gave the driver the address. He helped her with her case and she got in the car. A television played flashy celebrity gossip news in the backseat and Ava watched it as they bumped over rutted streets.
Ava had never been in a taxi before, but this experience was no less strange than any of the past three weeks. After the hospital and the funeral, the world was not what she had thought. Things happened and she observed them with a detachment that overlay a deep, unaccessed horror. Just get there, Ava thought. See what happens next.
CHAPTER 2
Lane hunched over the sketchbook on the table, drawing in a rush of focused energy, like the world might end at any minute. Nothing mattered but the work, even if it was some bullshit commissioned piece for a stupid hotel she would otherwise never set foot in. Something distressing lived in a part of her mind she had no access to, but she caught glimpses of it sometimes. Slivers of trouble coming, or trouble already happened and forgotten but spreading its damage around, just beyond the edges of thought.
The day was still, the light in the kitchen soft and diffused. Lane knew the paths of the sunlight in every room of the house. As a girl she had watched the angles of sun and shadow until she had them memorized. Fifty, sixty-something years ago. Now the house was like an extension of her intelligence, a container of memories she mostly ignored as she sketched.
This mural, for a new restaurant in the Marigny, was to be a landscape extending across four walls of the large dining room. A traditional scene of the neighborhood when it was still part plantation and a few narrow cobblestone streets. They wanted authenticity, historical accuracy, photorealism—Lane’s specialties. For weeks she’d been researching old maps and drawings.
She flipped through a book of costumes from the 1820s, marking pages of French and Haitian dress styles. She lost herself in the details, studying and sketching, until her physical reality brought her back to the kitchen. Stiff muscles, hunger, a headache that meant she needed caffeine. Crumbs on the table from breakfast cast tiny shadows indicating late afternoon. She stood and went to the refrigerator, poured a chicory coffee over ice, and lit the pipe that had gone out in the ashtray.
Lane heard a knock at the door, then the bell. She put down the pipe and went to answer. Caterers, the party, was that today? She must have written it down somewhere, on a notepad, but where was the notepad? She’d discovered in recent months that things had a way of proceeding on their own, even if she forgot all about them. People got alarmed when she asked questions or acted surprised, so she tried to project an air of benevolent nonchalance. She accepted whatever situation presented itself, as though she’d been expecting it. The marijuana helped.
But it wasn’t the caterers, just a neighborhood boy selling buckets of popcorn for his soccer team. Lane sent him away and set out her large transferware platters for the party, even though it was her assistant Oliver’s job. He would come over and organize everything, and they’d have a cocktail before the guests showed up. She depended on Oliver to see to all the small irritating details of her life so she could concentrate on her art. He’d worked for her for years now, since right after Katrina. She smoked some more, took a yogurt from the fridge. She hated having to eat. The dreary requirements of the body took up too much time.
When she was young, she’d devoted so much of her days to grocery shopping and cooking meals, trying out new recipes. She used to bake her own bread, when her husband, Thomas, was alive. Absurd to think of it now. Lane rarely thought about Thomas anymore. It had been nearly forty years since he’d died—a flash flood, his car hydroplaned and hit a truck. Could have happened to anyone. There had been the baby to deal with, and the problem of making a living, raising the child. She’d got on with it, put the marriage behind her.
Lately thoughts of Thomas tumbled into the present, unbidden. They felt like visitations of some sort, a transporting of the past into the present. A memory took over, a complete sensory immersion, paralyzing: the smell of yeast; the ringing phone; flour motes dancing through a shaft of kitchen sunlight; the cramp in her neck as she held the receiver with her shoulder to keep her hands in the dough. Flour handprint on the receiver, flour on her dress and in her hair.
Lane listened to the voice on the line. Ma’am, you need to come down here. She hung up, watched the long cord curling around itself. Thinking only, the bread will be ruined and Thomas will complain. She would not have time to make more, what with the laundry, shopping, the other countless essential chores. But then she got ahold of herself. She covered the dough and put it in the icebox to stall the second rise, gathered up the baby, and drove to the hospital. When she got there she learned he was already dead.
She arrived home late that night, just her and little Louise. The dough had coated the outsides of the pans, having grown and bubbled up with yeast. The refrigerator was a mess, covered in dried dough. If she’d left right away, dropped the bread without a thought, and rushed to his side, maybe he would have lived. If she’d been more kindhearted, could she have seen him conscious once more? She could have been, one last time, the recipient of his gaze, full of love or disgust or whatever it was.
A month into young widowhood, she realized her days were less complicated than they had been before. Thomas had been too needy, like most men, unaware of the details that rendered their lives seamless, the cooking and cleaning and errands. Men were so helpless. They couldn’t even feed themselves. The baby sucked away at her, too, sapping her energy and time, but you could hardly blame a baby.
Lane experienced a sense of relief, immediate and astounding, when she learned the accident had killed him. She loved him, she wasn’t a monster. But that first wave of clarity, that sense that she would be fine, that a lot of things would be easier now—she’d been right about that. She moved through her days quietly, caring for the baby, all the while listening to the rising sound inside her, a buzzing voice that grew more insistent. Her life was starting. It was all hers. She would never have to give it up again.
Oliver let himself in, carrying a case of wine and a bag from the art supply store. He closed the door with his foot and set the box down on the sideboard in the dining room. Lane was sitting at the big mahogany table. He saw the platters piled up at one end.
“What the fuck’s all this out for?” Oliver said.
Lane glanced up from her sketchbook. “What?” she said.
He pointed to the platters. She’d quit throwing her monthly parties two years ago now.
Lane shrugged. “Wanted to look at that pattern. For a sketch.”
“Huh. Would have thought it was the wrong period. This is late 1800s, isn’t it?”
“You think these restaurant idiots know that?” Lane said.
Oliver laughed. “They’ll sue you if they find out.”
He touched the edge of the Limoges. It was Edwardian bone china, over a hundred years old, but the underside was chipped and the gilding mostly gone from the rim. Lane had run it through the dishwasher lord knows how many times, and it wasn’t worth anything now. The house was crammed with used-up, ruined treasures.
“Well,” Oliver said, “do you need it still?”
“No.”
Copyright © 2021 by Melissa Ginsburg
