The Heavens Rise (2 page)

And there it was, the opening. The way in.

He could show her how to start living.

•   •   •

When he asked her out the first time, she made him meet her at some ratty coffeehouse over in the Faubourg Marigny that was full of hippies and fags. And even though the whole thing made him feel like some cheap man-whore, the way she was keeping their meeting a secret from everyone on their side of town, he knew better than to complain.

And there was no getting her to talk about the great betrayal that had ended her three-year relationship to Anthem Landry, but it didn’t matter. The story was common knowledge by then anyway.

Poor Nikki. She had planned her entire life down to the last detail, without giving any thought to the type of man she’d selected to make the trip with her. Davidson College had been her school of choice: North Carolina was just far enough from home to get them away from her boyfriend’s sprawling, overbearing family, but not so far that they couldn’t fly home for every holiday. The problem, of course, was that everyone except for Nikki knew that her boyfriend didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Houma of getting in, not when he couldn’t be bothered to memorize anything besides old Saints scores. But Niquette Delongpre—planner and perfectionist, daughter of one of the most respected maxiofacial surgeons in the country—wouldn’t be deterred by her boyfriend’s rejection letter. Obviously, Anthem should move with her
to North Carolina anyway. Get a job to support himself, maybe find a community college and gets his grades up to where he could reapply. Anthem’s response, heard by most of the Cannon campus during lunch,
“You expect me to fuckin’ pump gas all day while you sit in a classroom talking about poetry?”

The lawns outside the cafeteria had certainly paid host to worse lovers’ quarrels. But a few days later, the news broke that after consuming half a bottle of Southern Comfort, Anthem Landry had somehow wound up in the arms and accommodating mouth of a doe-eyed junior, Brittany Lowe, who was well known among her male classmates for having tiny, unobtrusive teeth. That’s what the girl said, anyway. Anthem denied the charge with shouts, and more than a few tears, to anyone who would listen. Nikki chose to believe the worst.

And for Marshall Ferriot, that was very good news. Especially when you considered the story was a complete lie. Turns out Brittany Lowe was willing to do pretty much anything Marshall wanted her to do, as long as he supplied her with a bottle of Vicodin out of his mother’s medicine cabinet.

Despite his success so far, Marshall knew better than to speak ill of the man in question to Nikki’s face, even if he did think the guy was a worthless piece of Lakefront trash. Anthem Landry came from a family of riverboat pilots and those assholes were the worst, a bunch of drunken slobs who had bought all kinds of political power in Baton Rouge so they could keep the entire port hostage with their ridiculously high salaries. He should know; his father ran one of the most successful cold storage companies on the Gulf Coast. Men like his dad kept the city running, his family always said, while lazy niggers threatened to take the whole thing down.

And what the hell kind of queerbait name was Anthem anyway? It chapped Marshall’s ass that the guy never caught any flack for it at school. Let Marshall belch in the wrong direction and he’d end up with some stupid nickname he couldn’t live down for months.

Of course he didn’t say a word of this to Nikki.

Instead he started talking about his desire to travel the world, to make big bucks in a city like New York and Chicago after he graduated from Duke (which was, by the way, not too far from Davidson). He thought he was being subtle, but maybe he wasn’t. After three more coffee dates, Nikki’s smiles started to seem a little indulgent. But she listened to him ramble on, and then, finally, just when he feared he might have lost her, she invited him to Elysium.

ATLANTA

MAY 2013

T
hey moved the patient out of Room 4 when animals started dying outside his window.

The squirrels came first, a slightly disjointed row of them that appeared in a single day, just a few feet away from the window ledge: furry tails limp and snakelike, chests sealed to the patchy lawn with dead weight. Two of the three nurses who gathered at Room 4’s window that afternoon blamed the live oak tree nearby; some sort of awful fungus must have laced itself all through the branches overhead, then Alvin and his poor buddies took a few nibbles and
plop, plop, plop.

But Arthelle Williams wasn’t sold on this scenario. It would have been five plops in all, and not a single one of the squirrels had landed on its back. Was that even statistically possible? The thought of there being statistics related to random squirrel deaths made her laugh so hard her breath fogged the glass.

She volunteered to go outside and take a closer look. It was a marvel,
she thought, that her coworkers could empty a bedpan without so much as a wince, but the idea of getting within a few feet of a dead rodent turned them into squealing little girls.

They watched her from the window as she poked at the furry carcasses with a stick. There was no sense in pushing Marshall Ferriot’s wheelchair to the window; he wouldn’t be able to see any of it anyway. The boy hadn’t seen a damn thing for eight years. But the new girl, Emily Somethingorother
—
the little blonde who’d watched too many TV shows about hospitals on her daddy’s flat-screen and was always asking them silly questions about
their mission—
was so upset about the dead squirrels she hadn’t managed to peel her hands from her mouth for the entire time it had taken Arthelle to walk outside. Tammy Keene, the other nurse who’d discovered the gory scene, finally gave in to the girl’s histrionics and curved one arm around Emily’s shoulders while she gave Arthelle a pointed look that said,
If I’d wanted to deal with children today, I would have stayed home and looked after my own.

“Some of these new nurses,” Arthelle had said to Tammy earlier that morning, “they make it hard to tell who the patients are.” The joke hadn’t been one of her best. If they had been working at a real hospital, it might have earned her a cackle or two. But here at the Lenox Hill Long Term Care Center, it was always possible to tell the nurses from the patients, because none of the patients could walk or speak. A high-end vegetable garden; that’s how Arthelle had heard more than one visiting physician refer to the place. And it was a pretty apt description: a place for the rich to stash their brain-dead invalids until pneumonia or a virulent infection did them in for good. Of course, the brochure didn’t word it quite so succinctly.

Arthelle dropped the stick she’d been using to prod the carcasses when she realized the other end had sunk into exposed brain matter. The squirrels hadn’t tucked their heads underneath their bodies as she’d first assumed. Their skulls had been smashed in. By what exactly, she had no idea. If it had been a tool wielded by a man, the blows were
amazingly precise. The poor guys weren’t that big, and the rest of their bodies were undamaged.

Not smashed. That’s not right either. Exploded.

Childhood horror stories about seagulls being killed by Alka-Seltzer pellets swirled in her head, but it was the stomach that got blown out in that scenario, wasn’t it? Not the skull. Not the
brains
. And from their respective poses, it looked like the squirrels had been crawling straight for the window when the event in question had reduced each of their heads to little mounds of gore. And it didn’t look as if it had all happened at once. Some of the poor little guys . . . well, they looked
fresher
than the others.

There was a perfectly logical explanation, she was sure of it; gruesome, to be sure, and a very valid reason to get the hell away from the furry little devils and report the whole mess to security, but logical nonetheless.

God knows, they didn’t need any more weirdness around Marshall Ferriot. That was for sure.

Spend your day working around mannequins and you were bound to believe one of them had turned its head in your direction when you weren’t looking. This was normal, and to be forgiven. But it was also to be
contained
and dealt with responsibly. This was the lecture Arthelle gave Tammy Keene, Emily New Girl and the other nurses who had joined them for dinner that evening at one of the malls in Buckhead. The squirrel slaughter was common knowledge by then, and Arthelle figured the last few women who had invited themselves along were after gruesome details, not comfort food.

For a moment or two, it seemed as if her lecture had worked. Arthelle’s fellow nurses responded with bowed heads and the dull clinks of spoons hitting cast-iron skillets as they all devoured their macaroni and cheese.

“He killed them.”

It was Emily who’d said it, of course; Emily, with her doe eyes, and
that squeaky, cartoony voice Arthelle just knew was an act designed to get men to take care of her. Little Emily New Girl, her head full of childish ideas that would never provide her with a grown-up life. And even though she looked away quickly from Arthelle’s fearsome glare, the sight of it wasn’t enough to keep her mouth shut.

“He can make you do things . . . he
can
. If you look into his eyes, he can make you . . . And when it’s over, you don’t remember doing any of it.”

No one said anything until the waiter brought the check.

•   •   •

The bird was next. It happened early in the morning and, while no one saw the event itself, everyone who was on the wing at that moment heard the loud
thwack
the crow made as it flew right into Room 4’s window with enough force to crack the glass in two places. And because there had been no witnesses, no one could tell if the bird’s compact skull had cracked open during the collision or just moments before.

And even though there was no evidence that young Marshall Ferriot had been disturbed by the event
—
or any other event that had taken place in his immediate vicinity for the past eight years, for that matter
—
he was moved to another room later that afternoon, this one featuring a view of a barren service alley with a Dumpster tucked at the far end.

“Somebody better pop the lid on that Dumpster a couple times this week,” Tammy Keene said after she and Arthelle had tucked Ferriot into his new bed. “Make sure the rats are doing okay.”

“Hush your mouth, girl,” Arthelle whispered. “I’m tired of this nonsense.”

Sick to death of the whole subject was more like it. The poor boy was a vegetable, for Christ’s sake. And she was coming to hate how quickly the women in her life would give their heads over to superstitious gobbledygook. Sisters, in particular. Almost every girlfriend of
hers from childhood had grown up to be some crazy Bible-thumping church lady. Arthelle sometimes felt like the only black woman in the South who wanted to live a life of the mind.

There was also the fact that she didn’t feel like telling Tammy, or anyone else for that matter, about how badly she’d gone off on Little Emily when she caught the girl rooting through Ferriot’s file that morning. So some trust based at a New Orleans bank paid for the boy’s care? So what? None of it was proof that the boy was some kind of witch or warlock or whatever else little Emily was making him out to be to the other nurses.

He was a patient just like all the others and, if he gave Emily the creeps, she should stay out of his goddamn room and stop making trouble. Otherwise, Arthelle would have her ass fired.

They had a job to do, and it wasn’t to make up stories.

TANGIPAHOA PARISH

APRIL 2005

A
fter they crossed Lake Pontchartrain, Marshall used his fake ID to buy them a milk carton full of frozen strawberry daiquiri and, when they were passing through Madisonville, a tiny hamlet that sits right at the spot where the Tchefuncte River slides free of Lake Pontchartrain’s northern shore, Marshall reached across the gearshift and took Nikki’s hand. For several agonizing seconds, her 4-Runner thudded over the steel girders of the town’s tiny drawbridge before she closed her fingers around his. And even though she wouldn’t look at him, he sprouted a painful hard-on in his jeans.

“Watch out for snakes!” Nikki said as they walked up the oyster-shell driveway to the property. It was the third time she’d warned him about a possible reptile encounter since they’d stepped from her car. Snakes didn’t bother him much, but they sure as hell got to her. He found himself taking note of this fact, lingering over it, wondering if
perhaps he could put it to some kind of use. For her own good, of course.
If I can cure her of a terrible fear, just think of the things she might let me do to her.

Like most children who’d grown up in Louisiana, she’d probably heard that old story about the water skier on the bayou who lost his balance and started screaming, “Help, I’m in barbed wire!” Only, according to the story, it wasn’t barbed wire. When the boat circled back, the friends pulled the man from the water to find him festooned with thick, black serpents. An entire school of water moccasins! Maybe if he told her that he’d found the story listed in an anthology of debunked urban legends or that, while water moccasins were certainly aggressive, they had terrible aim when it came time to bite, she might like him even more.

He followed the beam of her flashlight, which she kept angled on the mud underfoot, across the broad lawn that sat between the house and the dark, gurgling rectangle of the swimming pool. The entire property was plated in deep darkness that became impenetrable at its wooded borders, and the fact that she wasn’t leading him into the house, or in the direction of any shed that might contain light switches, sent shivers of delicious anticipation racing up his spine.

This is what you get when you work hard enough,
he thought, as he listened to their intermittent gasping breaths.
If you sit through enough bullshit coffee dates, if you’re a man of promise and resources, you can get a girl like Nikki Delongpre to take you to her secret love nest under the cover of darkness.