Page 15 of Meet Me in the Garden

“As a whistle.”

Claire shakes her head, keeps shaking it. Al ignores her. “Might notbe a bad idea to get you out of town. You’re gonna need to lay low today, ice those ribs, so we get a sense of what the damage is. We’ll accept your help in the morning for the assembly if you can handle it. In the afternoon, you can take Odette.”

“Thank you,” I say to Lionel. He tries to smile at me. “Thank you,” I say to Al. He winks.

“I don’t know what we’ll tell Maman,” Claire says.

“Claire, it’s Odette’s choice,” Adele says. “How about we let it be? We have plenty to worry about already. I don’t see why we need to tell Maman anything.”

Back in the Laurent house, Hattie’s lingering in the kitchen. She’s been waiting for me. “We’re leaving the morning after next,” I tell her.

“Thought it might be something like that.”

We stay together in the kitchen, saying nothing, just looking at each other. And then she goes downstairs.

In Cyril’s room, I pack my suitcase, fitting as much as I can. I press my ear against the worn floorboards, listen for the sewing, humming and stopping. Humming and stopping. I lie on my belly with my eyes closed, palms open against the floor.

Later, at the table, I tell Mama and Papa Laurent that it’s our last dinner together. They hug me tearfully, say it hurts but they know it’s right. “You’ll make the rounds tomorrow?” Mama Laurent says. We’re all familiar with the knocks at the door, classmates and cousins and old friends saying they’ll see us again sometime when most often it’s farewell for good.

In the morning, Hattie already downstairs in her sewing room, I pause on the front steps, struck by the sensation that I’m in a play with no audience. I talk to no one, seek nobody out. I walk through the Lower Garden District to Magazine Street, run my fingers against the glass of Bill’s old studio, papered over from the inside. I walk past shotgun houses and mansions and shops, under oak trees, through the cemetery. Gust and rattle of the streetcar. Waft of sweetness from Lorraine’s Bakery. One last beignet, powdered sugar on my fingers. Across from the shop, threecolored children play music on the stoop of a bright-yellow house with turquoise trim. A boy with a drum, a girl with a trumpet, another girl singing with a voice louder and stronger than seems possible for her age. Al’s voice in my head: “Our birthplace is the birthplace of jazz.”

Five generations of Honorés in Louisiana. Five generations of summer heat and magnolias and thunderstorms, of bright colors, of courtyard gardens, of zydeco and dancing the second line and warming spices over the stove. On my fifteenth birthday, Papa took me aside when the party was over, handed me a yellowed page. His great-grandmother’s free papers. He told me her history. Born into slavery. Taken as a child from a plantation in Virginia, chained to a ship and delivered to the New Orleans port, sold to the Honoré plantation. Freed by the head of the family and made to be his lover. “She was fifteen years old when she gave birth to my grandmother,” Papa told me. “All of her children born free.” I felt that other fifteen-year-old alive and present. Felt her fear and her effort and how she made a home here.

And now we’re leaving.

I cut through Washington Square and cross into the garden. The iron gate, the ferns, the bench under the Angel’s trumpet. It’s smaller now, colder, the buildings on either side closing in. I clip some flowers with a pair of Hattie’s sewing scissors, tie them into a small bouquet.

At two o’clock, I find Lionel waiting in a car parked outside the blue house, a map unfolded across his lap. “You mind driving on the way there?” he asks. “My head’s killing me.”

“Sure,” I say. Throat thick. I keep swallowing. It doesn’t help. I start the car, pull onto the road. Lionel checks the rearview every few seconds. His face looks worse than it did yesterday. “It looks so painful.”

“I’ll heal.”

It’s the same route I drove with Cyril. Same trees, same mansions and river bends. But we reach Baton Rouge and go through it, farther. The bouquet from the garden rests between us on the seat, the petals already fading.

I ask Lionel how he feels about leaving.

“I’ve given New Orleans all my love,” he says, “but I can’t say I’vereceived much in return. Honestly, I wish you could keep driving us right now. Tomorrow morning feels a long time away.”

A sign tells us that we’ve crossed into Jackson. Upon seeing it, a heaviness. “Have you been here?” I ask.

“Never. You?”

“Once,” I say. “With Delphine. My sisters don’t know.”

The gate looms ahead of us now. We slow to a stop and I’m relieved when Lionel leans over to give the guard our names and tells him why we’re here. I roll the car through the gate and the memory rushes back to me: Papa, seeing Delphine and me from across the room, rising, astonished. Pulling chairs out at his table for us to sit. “Look at you. My daughter. My niece. How are you both so beautiful?” Filling the hour with polite questions and conversation. Thanking us for coming when the bell sounded. “You came such a long way. Such a long way, just to see me.” A gentle hug when we left, his hands on our shoulder blades. Not a word about when we might come back, as though to spare us from worrying that he might wish for more.

“I’ll wait here,” Lionel says. “My face isn’t fit for public viewing.”

I’m already crying, fumbling for the handle, can’t seem to grip it. “It’s busted,” he says, leaning over me, shoving it open, and then I’m walking past the grand white columns and through the doors of the East Louisiana Hospital for the Insane, making my voice steady as I tell the woman at the counter that I’m here to visit my father’s grave.

“Is he in the cemetery, or the sanctuary?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Did someone from your family claim the body? Have a tombstone made?”

“My mother did.”