“I know the whole experience took a long time,” he said, “that time itself was impossible to factor into it.” He glanced at her. “You know what I mean,” he said. “Like in the old days when people would be lured by the Little People. You know, they’d go off and spend one day with the Little People, but when they came back to their villages they discovered they’d been gone for fifty years.”
She laughed under her breath. “Is that an Irish story?”
“Yeah, from an old Irish nun, I heard that one,” he said. “She used to tell us the damnedest things. She used to tell us there were witches in the Garden District in New Orleans, and that they’d get us if we went walking in those streets … ” And think how dark those streets were, how darkly beautiful, like the lines from “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Darkling I listen … ” “I’m sorry,” he said, “my mind wandered.”
She waited.
“There were many people in the visions,” he said, “but what I remember most distinctly is a dark-haired woman. I can’t see this woman now, but I know that she was as familiar to me as someone I’d known all my life. I knew her name, everything about her. And I know now that I knew about you. I knew your name. But I don’t know if that was in the middle of it, or just at the end, you know, before I was rescued, when maybe I knew somehow that the boat was coming and you were there.” Yes, that was a real puzzle, he thought.
“Go on.”
“I think I could have come back and lived even if I had refused to do what they wanted me to do. But I wanted the mission, so to speak, I wanted to fulfill the purpose. And it seemed … it seemed that everything they wanted of me, everything they revealed, well, it was all connected with my past life, who I’d been. It was all-encompassing. Do you follow me?”
“There was a reason they chose you.”
“Yes, that’s it exactly. I was the one for this, because of who I was. Now, make no mistake. I know this is nuthouse talk again; I’m so damned good at it. This is the talk of schizophrenics who hear voices telling them to save the world, I’m aware of that. There’s an old saying about me among my friends.”
“What is it?”
He adjusted his glasses and flashed his best smile at her. “Michael isn’t as stupid as he looks.”
She laughed in the loveliest way. “You don’t look stupid,” she said. “You just look too good to be true.” She tapped the ash off her cigarette. “You know how good-looking you are. I don’t have to tell you. What else can you recall?”
He hesitated, positively electrified by that last compliment. Wasn’t it time to go to bed again? No, it wasn’t. It was almost time to catch a plane.
“Something about a doorway,” he said, “I could swear it. But again, I can’t see these things now. It’s getting thinner all the time. But I know there was a number involved in it. And there was a jewel. A beautiful jewel. I can’t even call this recollection now. It’s more like faith. But I believe all those things were mixed up with it. And then it’s all mixed up with going home, with this sense of having to do something tremendously important, and New Orleans is part of it, and this street where I used to walk when I was a kid.”
“A street?”
“First Street. It’s a beautiful stretch, from Magazine Street, near where I grew up, to St. Charles Avenue, about five blocks or so, and it’s an old old part of town they call the Garden District.”
“Where the witches live,” she said.
“Oh, yes, right, the witches of the Garden District,” he said, smiling. “At least according to Sister Bridget Marie.”
“Is it a gloomy witchy place, this neighborhood?” she asked.
“No, not really,” he said. “But it is like a dark bit of forest in the middle of the city. Big trees, trees you wouldn’t believe. There’s nothing comparable to it here. Maybe nowhere in America. And the houses are town houses, you know, close to the sidewalks, but they’re so large, and they’re not attached, they have gardens around them. And there’s this one house, this house I used to pass all the time, a really high narrow house. I used to stop and look at it, at the iron railings. There’s a rose pattern in the railings. Well, I keep seeing it now-since the accident-and I keep thinking I have to go back, you know, it’s so urgent. Like even now I’m sitting here, but I feel guilty that I’m not on the plane.”
A shadow passed over her face. “I want you to stay here for a while,” she said. Lovely deep grosgrain voice. “But it isn’t just that I want it. You’re not in good shape. You need to rest, really rest without the booze.”
“You’re right, but I can’t do it, Rowan. I can’t explain this tension I feel. I’ll feel it till I get home.”
“That’s another thing, Michael. Why is that home? You don’t know anyone back there.”
“Oh, it’s home, honey, it is. I know.” He laughed. “I’ve been in exile for too long. I knew it even before the accident. The morning before, it was the funniest thing, I woke up and I was thinking about home. I was thinking about this time we all drove to the Gulf Coast, and it was warm at sundown, positively warm … ”
“Can you stay off the booze when you leave here?”
He sighed. He deliberately flashed her one of his best smiles-the kind that had always worked in the past-and he winked at her. “Want to hear Irish bullshit, lady, or the truth?”
“Michael … ” It wasn’t just disapproval in her voice, it was disappointment.
“I know, I know,” he said. “Everything you’re saying is right. Look, you don’t know what you’ve done for me, just getting me out the front door, just listening to me. I want to do what you’re telling me to do … ”
“Tell me more about this house,” she said.
He was thoughtful again, before beginning. “It was the Greek Revival style-do you know what that is? – but it was different. It had porches on the front and on the sides, real New Orleans porches. It’s hard to describe a house like that to someone who’s never been in New Orleans. Have you ever seen pictures-?”
She shook her head. “It was a subject Ellie couldn’t talk about,” she said.
“That sounds unfair, Rowan.”
She shrugged.
“No, but really.”
“Ellie wanted to believe I was her own daughter. If I asked about my biological parents, she thought I was unhappy, that she hadn’t loved me enough. Useless to try to get those ideas out of her head.” She drank a little of the coffee. “Before her last trip to the hospital she burned everything in her desk. I saw her doing it. She burned it all in that fireplace. Photographs, letters, all sorts of things. I didn’t realize it was everything. Or maybe I just didn’t think about it, one way or the other. She knew she wasn’t coming back.” She stopped for a minute, then poured a little more coffee in her cup and in Michael’s cup.
“Then after she died, I couldn’t even find an address for her people down there. Her lawyer didn’t have a scrap of information. She’d told him she didn’t want anyone down there to be contacted. All her money went to me. Yet she used to visit the people in New Orleans. She used to call them on the phone. I could never quite figure it all out.”
“That’s too sad, Rowan.”
“But we’ve talked enough about me. About this house again. What is it that makes you remember it now?”
“Oh, houses there aren’t like the houses here,” he said. “Each house has a personality, a character. And this one, well, it’s somber and massive, and sort of splendidly dark. It’s built right on the corner, part of it touching the sidewalk of the side street. God knows I loved that house. There was a man who lived there, a man right out of a Dickens novel, I swear it, tall and sort of consummately gentlemanly, if you know what I mean. I used to see him in the garden … ” He hesitated; something coming so close to him, something so crucial-