She sets the sundae glass down on the end table right next to the window, and the swarm pulses again. The borders shift, but it holds its general shape even as it moves several inches down the glass to be closer to the flower.
It occurs to Caitlin that just a few days ago, this sight might have horrified her—this sight should horrify her—but now her cheek is resting against the glass, her fingers tapping gently in time to the sounds of more and more insects pelting the thickening blanket of cicadas, flies, moths, and palmetto bugs. Now Caitlin feels embraced by hidden forces laced through soil and sky. And she feels comfortable leaving the blossom behind as she returns to the patch of Spring House that gave birth to it. If the insects assembled on the other side of the glass are not her protectors, there’s a good chance they will act as guardians to the flower that drew them out of branches, gutters, and nests. At the very least, there should be enough of them by the time she gets back to completely hide the solarium from view.
17
“She’s leaving,” Scott Fauchier says. “He’s gonna follow her.”
“Ask him about the bugs,” Kyle Austin says.
“The what?”
“The bugs. Look!”
Kyle points to the giant computer monitor on Scott’s desk, and suddenly Scott is bending over so close to him Kyle can smell the bergamot in his cologne.
Scott’s loft-style apartment is inside an old brick school building on Magazine Street, a few blocks from the Mississippi. The furniture is all glass and steel, the carpets a dull shade of gray that looks like it wants to turn into a deeper, richer color. Everything about the place screams Miami coke dealer, and when Scott offered him something to settle his nerves, Kyle was surprised he didn’t have anything stronger than Grey Goose. There are pictures of grown-up Scott everywhere—usually with a buffed-up, ponytailed little trainer on his arm—but the way the two of them have been lounging in front of the computer for most of the night, waiting for Mike to set up the wireless cameras, has made Kyle feel like a teenager all over again. The thought gives him a warm fuzzy feeling and he actually smiles, before he remembers he and Scott had sort-of murdered someone when they were seventeen, and that was the only reason they were hanging out at all. That’s what guilt truly is, Scott realizes, a fishhook’s tug on the third or fourth minute of every happy moment.
“You see ’em?” Kyle asks. His finger is hovering several inches from the spot where what looks like a swarm of moths are dancing in and out of the streetlight’s exaggerated green glow around one corner of the second-floor solarium.
“Fuckin’ bugs, I don’t know,” Scott says. “What are we? Her exterminator?”
But Scott lifts the prepaid cell phone Mike bought for them earlier that night to his ear and repeats the question. He listens for a few seconds, then says, “He’s gone. Says he didn’t see any bugs. Can we stay focused on what’s important?”
“OK,” Kyle says, holding back his anger. “Tell me again… what’s important?”
Instead of answering—your wife, my line of health clubs, my endless succession of well-muscled girlfriends—Scott pads across the expansive apartment toward the bottle of Grey Goose sitting on the kitchen counter.
18
Nova’s battered Honda Civic is parked outside of the Waffle House between two pickup trucks. The car’s back window is a bubbled mess of lamination film, and the LSU bumper sticker is mud-lashed and frayed at the edges.
Before he passes through the front door, Blake spots her sitting at the counter alone, slumped over a spread of papers and file folders. The portly waitress refilling her iced-tea glass has wide eyes and pencil-thin eyebrows that give her an expression of restrained panic even as she greets Blake with a casual nod.
When Nova looks up at his approach, Blake sees the tense set to her mouth, the way her right hand has curled into a claw atop the papers she was just reading. He wonders if she was willing to make the forty-minute drive here from Baton Rouge because she doesn’t expect to sleep anytime soon.
For a while they just sit next to each other on their respective stools as trucks lumber by outside, bound for the I-10 on-ramp. Blake wonders if moving to one of the empty booths nearby would strike Nova as too intimate, too forced.
“I know why you hate her,” he finally says.
“Caitlin?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t hate her.”
Nova is collecting the pages in front of her, arranging them in a neat pile as if she planned to shove them into the purple backpack at her feet but then remembered they were part of the information-sharing deal she made with Blake earlier that night.
“Fine. I know why you’re mad at her.”
She gives him a blank stare, as if there’s nothing she likes less than having her mind read by white boys.
“I remember… It was last year, right after her parents were killed. Your dad said something to me about how he was putting the money together for his own landscaping business… ” Nova looks away suddenly. He’s scored a direct hit. “He said he and his brother were going to team up, maybe try for a bank loan. Then I never heard anything about it again. Caitlin… She killed it, didn’t she?”
“She offered him the house.”
“So… kind of a fair trade.”
“A trade? How? He lives there, but he doesn’t own it. And she pays him less now ’cause of it. He’s got no insurance, and now has to ask her every time he goes to see a doctor. It embarrasses him. He won’t let her see it, of course, but it does. He… he could have started something of his own, you know? Something with his name on it. But the minute she gets wind of it, she starts screaming and crying like she’s about to lose her parents all over again. Like he’s her daddy and not…” Mine. The word, unsaid, hangs in the air between them like a cloud of cigarette smoke. “All so she didn’t have to hire a new yardman.”
“He’s more than a yardman.”
“In your eyes, maybe. But he doesn’t get paid more than one.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. And you’re wrong. We’re not her family. We never have been. We’ve worked every party she’s had. We’ve never been guests. Not once.”
She has spoken a truth about their position at Spring House that he acknowledged silently to himself a long time ago, and then rationalized away with glib self-assurances that Willie and Nova felt included and somehow affirmed by the company of wealthy white people.
It also dawns on him that, despite their pact in the gazebo as children, he isn’t necessarily family either. Caitlin’s slap earlier that night was proof of that. Maybe if he’d accepted Alexander Chaisson’s insane offer when he was fourteen, they would all be better off. Maybe he and Caitlin would be trapped in a loveless marriage defined by self-loathing and deceit, or maybe not. Maybe they would have worked out some mutually beneficial arrangement. Maybe he never would have fallen in love with John Fuller ,and Caitlin never would have been betrayed by Troy. Or maybe his thoughts are now as crazy as Caitlin’s recent behavior, and he should consume something that isn’t mostly sugar or caffeine.
“Are you all right?” Nova asks.
The effort it’s taken not to laugh at his inane speculation has left a strained half smile on his face that probably makes him look drunk, which is exactly what he’d like to be. “Booth?” Blake asks.
Nova nods, collects the papers in one hand, then hooks the strap of her book bag with the other. They cross the tiny restaurant together, heads bowed and brows furrowed, as if they’re doing so at the order of a demanding school teacher.