Page 10 of The Big Easy & Other Lies
“Yes ma’am,” I called back. When the door opened enough, I slipped through it and leaned against it hard, so it shut with a loud protest.
“Grab me some food and then go look for the owl.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I called. I nuked a TV dinner for her and delivered it to her folding tray. It was Dr. Phil time, and between his mustache and her “meal,” she’d forget me for a while.
I climbed the stairs to my room at the approximate speed of the growth rate of moss, exhausted by the thought of the owl search. On the landing, I paused for a moment to adjust to the heat. Hurricane Katrina damaged the air conditioner years before, and instead of fixing it, Delphine bought a window unit for the den. She stayed cool while I ran a fan and dripped sweat every night.
In my bedroom, I took my first deep breath since coming home. This was the only sane space inside Delphine’s chaos. It was easier to feel Mom’s presence in here, too. Touches of Isabelle Landry graced every corner. The blue paisley quilt she made me for lay atop my narrow twin bed, the ends tucked under in perfect hospital corners. Her favorite books sat right next to mine on the single shelf above my dresser, shortest books on the outside and tallest spines in the middle. I ran my fingers over the spines ofPride and Prejudiceand a collection of Grimm’s fairy tales. Below the shelf, her face smiled out of a framed picture on the dresser top. I looked like her, I knew, because everyone said so when I was little. Dark hair, pale skin, hazel eyes. I only wished I could see her in my face too. I could barely even see her in my memory anymore.
Pictures of her lined my windowsill and nightstand too, but the one on the dresser was my favorite. Whoever took it captured the smile that she saved only for me. I always kept a single cut flower in front of the frame in a vintage bud vase I’d found at a thrift store. If anyone ever poked a head in, I was sure it would look like a shrine. Maybe it was.
I grabbed my jar of Vick’s VapoRub, scooping a tiny bit out and rubbing it under my nose, inhaling its fumes instead of the faint rot from downstairs. Gross, but less gross than garbage decay and ripe litter boxes. And dead cats.
I climbed onto my bed and lifted a tattered book from my nightstand onto my lap, tracing the letters my mom had painted on the cover in her thin, elegant cursive.Trista and the Prince.It was the fairy tale she had told me since as early as I could remember, Isabelle’s own made up story embroidered with new details nearly every time I heard it until she finally wrote it down for me to keep. “I’ll stay with you in this story,chère,” she’d said when she’d given it to me. She’d died three weeks later.
The book showed the wear-and-tear of my childhood handling. I treated it far more gently now, but I couldn’t leave it alone completely. Touching it sometimes calmed me when Delphine got to be too much. I could almost hear my mom’s soft voice telling me, “Show her love, Camille. When Remy died, it killed something inside her. That’s what happens when you let grief eat at you. You have to pour it out, make it into something beautiful.”
Remy was Delphine’s only son. He died in a car crash before I was born. My father was driving, and it killed him too. How screwed up was that? For meandfor Delphine. Mom told me about it when we first moved in with Delphine. The hoard wasn’t nearly as bad then, but the evidence that she was...not right had surrounded us. The boxes, and bags, and piles of things...it had all looked so different than our tidy cottage in nearby Covington.
After Delphine had shown us to our rooms, I’d climbed onto the hospital bed the hospice people had set up for Mom. She’d curled up in it as soon as we arrived and lay exhausted but still smiling at me. “Aunt Delphine is so messy, Mama,” I had whispered so my great-aunt wouldn’t hear us, smart enough to be scared of Delphine even then.
Mom had petted my head and sighed. “I know, sugar. But Remy was the last person she had left to call her own. I think she holds unto the stuff because she couldn’t hold on to him.” Then she’d told me about the night it happened. About the call from a neighbor who spotted the wreck first. About how it nearly broke Mom’s heart to lose the father of her child, Drake Simoneaux, the night before their appointment with the justice of the peace to marry them. About the blur of attending the funerals for her high school sweetheart and then her favorite cousin. “It’s a hard thing to lose someone you love. You have to find ways to keep them with you. Delphine does it by hanging on to everything. It breaks my heart.”
I’d heard the sadness in her voice, but I didn’t want to pity Delphine. I didn’t want to listen to Mom say I should be nice, her bald head resting on top of mine while she stroked my dark hair. It used to look like hers until the chemo stole it from her. I only wanted to lay there with her and pretend that she wasn’t dying of leukemia and leaving me to Delphine.
I had listened anyway because I didn’t know how many more words I would get.
“It’s okay to be sad when I go, Camille. But don’t let it eat you. Turn it into something beautiful every time it hurts you to think of me. Then I’ll be with you again.”
Mom had always talked like that. At first, I’d believed her. With a need born of a grief so deep I couldn’t find the bottom of it, I would pour out everything I loved about my mother into the best drawing my eight-year-old fingers could make with crayons. I kept the pictures inside the back cover ofTrista and the Prince, my imagination outstripping my talent as I tried to recreate her paintings and escape into the story Mom had loved so well. Even now, the story crept into my work. It had inspired the designs I kept hidden in my private portfolio, the ones Mrs. Broussard had snooped on.
I opened to the first page ofTrista and the Princeand drank in my mother’s painting. Her delicate watercolors swirled over the thick paper. This page added the subtitle I loved,The Tale of Tear Girl.Mom had named her princess Trista to play on the French word for sad,triste.
The story began with Tear Girl crouched over a wooden pail in a dim cave, the wicked Nimue standing over her, wielding her terrible lash.
Once upon a time …
Comfort washed over me in a gentle wave like it did every time I read those words.
A beautiful girl lived with an evil crone in a hovel at the heart of The Deep Swamp.
“Camille!”
Dang.
I had my very own crone to screech at me every day. I set the book on my nightstand and stuck my head out the door. “Coming!”
Man, I really hoped the owl turned up soon.
Chapter 5
A car horn honked from the driveway early Monday afternoon. I grabbed my cell phone and some lip gloss and flew down the stairs. “Going to work!” I called to Delphine. Escaping her was the only good thing about working the LeBlanc event.
Livvie honked again even though I knew full well she could see me. “Very funny,” I said, and she grinned.
I grinned back and jumped in on the chorus of the song blaring from the speakers. By the time we pulled up in front of Bran’s house, an old Rihanna anthem played while we waited for him to answer Livvie’s honk.
He opened the car door and groaned. “Your radio presets are a punishment, girl. I can cure it with this,” he said, waving his iPhone.
