The Heavens Rise (6 page)

“I asked you if you knew your snakes.”

Asked.
How long had he been speaking to her before she’d heard him? Was she on the verge of having a stroke? Was she really
that
angry?

“My snakes?”

“Yes. Your snakes.”

“I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t own any snakes.”

Marissa was surprised to see that Donald and Heidi were looking not at her but at their son, and their expressions were suddenly tense. Were they afraid he was about to divulge some terrible family secret to this black journo? Or were they just afraid of their son in general? Too afraid to pull that fork out of his hand and slap some manners across the back of his head?

“I guess I should be more specific,” Marshall said, but he was staring down at the table. Marissa thought,
The way he’s working on that tablecloth, I’d bet he’d be just as happy doing that to his own leg. Or mine.
A strange thought, but the guy was plenty strange. “If you were confronted with a snake, would you be able to determine whether or not it was venomous?”

“That depends,” Marissa said.

“On what?”

“I grew up here. So I know the snakes in this area. But if you dropped me in Texas, I’m not sure I’d be of much use on that front.”

“I think it’s important . . . in
life
, I mean, to be able to tell the difference between a snake that can actually kill you and a snake that just scares you. Don’t you agree?”

“Well, maybe . . . but what if you’re not afraid of snakes at all?”

“Are you not afraid of snakes, Marissa?”

In a low voice, Donald Ferriot said, “What’s this about, Marshall?”

The kid was barely eighteen years old and talking to Marissa like she was his kindergarten teacher.

“Now, don’t lie just for the sake of argument,” he chided her. “That wouldn’t be very polite, now, would it?”

“To be honest, Marshall, I’m more afraid of the snakes I might meet every day.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The snakes I might be forced to have dinner with, for instance.”

The silence around the table was as stilted and pained as it had been after Heidi Ferriot fired the first shot. Marissa was about to say something to lighten the mood but Marshall was suddenly staring straight past her head with such wide-eyed intensity that her words left her. One of the costumed waiters, or possibly one of the jugglers or mimes, had caught the kid’s eye. Caught
both
of his eyes in one tense fist was more like it. The longer Marissa stared at him, the more it became clear that Marshall Ferriot had gone entirely still, so still it felt as if the air pressure around them shifted suddenly. As if Marshall had been rendered so rigid and devoid of life, the air itself was literally avoiding him.

“What’s the matter?” Donald Ferriot asked his son. “Are you getting sick again?”

In response, Marshall got to his feet and started walking toward the
nearest plate-glass window. He picked up an empty metal folding chair a bartender had been resting his feet on a few minutes earlier. The chair had heavy cushions on the back and seat, so when he lifted it in both hands, the seat’s weight forced it to fold automatically.

“Oh shit,” Marissa whispered. She was convinced the kid was about to do something truly, truly stupid, probably in some kind of sick retaliation for Marissa’s crack about snakes. When Marshall was still several paces from the plate-glass window, he swung the chair back over one shoulder as if it were as light and slender as a baseball bat.

He’ll just try to make a commotion
, Marissa thought.
He’ll hurl the chair at the window to get the entire room’s attention and then—

The first crash got everyone’s attention all right. But Marshall didn’t stop there. He slammed the chair into the glass again and again and again, with a ferocity and determination that kept everyone glued to their chairs. The room was a sea of frightened expressions and napkins brought to mouths. Around the fourth strike, the kid had managed to punch several large holes in the plate glass, and the cracks radiating out from each one looked poised to bring the entire window apart.

Then Marshall tossed the chair to one side and took several steps backward. He had backed up almost to the nearest table when a terrible realization of what he was about to do swept the room. There were several small screams. Then Marissa was on her feet.

If she’d thrown herself at Marshall, tried to tackle him to the ground like he was a quarterback, she might have been able to prevent what happened next. But the kid was a good two feet taller than her. And it was a moot point anyway because when she reached for his shoulder, she missed.

Marshall hurled himself face-first into the perforated glass.
Like something out of a goddamn cartoon,
Marissa thought. The collision made a deep, bone-rattling thud tinged with the violent metallic rattle of the giant window’s frame.

But the window held.

The kid’s right shoulder was wedged inside one of the holes he’d punched with the chair; it looked to Marissa like he was trying to pry himself free. He was dazed and disoriented, his forehead sprouting blood from a dozen different cuts. But when he looked back into the room, his eyes found Marissa and she saw utter lifelessness in them. It was as if the kid’s spirit had literally been drained out of him.

In the years to come, Marissa would try to convince herself that it was the impact with the window that had knocked Marshall Ferriot’s senses from him, but that look—the emptiness of it, its
soullessness
—would stalk most of Marissa’s quiet moments for the rest of her life.

The group of tuxedoed men who had gathered behind her and Donald Ferriot froze where they stood. The glass Marshall was plastered against was too fragile for anyone to make a sudden move, she realized.

Marshall’s jaw went slack. His Adam’s apple jerked in his blood-splattered throat.

“I . . . I . . . put a . . .”

And as soon as his son’s words seemed to sputter out into ragged breaths of delirium, Donald Ferriot broke free from the group and lunged for his son. And even though the men all around him could sense Donald’s terrible mistake before he made it, none of them got to him in time.

Donald crossed the carpet with too much speed and force. He stumbled in his final steps, pitching forward into his son’s body. And for a few seconds, it seemed like it would just be a slight nudge, that’s all. But as Donald Ferriot threw his arms around his son’s waist and prepared to pull him free of the glass spiderweb he’d hurled himself into, the window gave way right in its weakened center and both men became a single tangle of limbs that vanished in an instant.

Then it sounded to Marissa like all the chairs in the room had gone over at once. Silverware and glasses were knocked from the tables as everyone jumped to their feet at the same moment. The screams came
next; a single piercing wave of them that said the shock of what they had all witnessed had worn off almost instantly.

To Marissa it felt like a stampede, and in the midst of it somehow, Heidi Ferriot ended up in her arms, her knees going out from under her, the bellows coming out of her a blend of rage and agony. Marissa wanted to lift her hands to her ears to blot out the terrible sound; instead she held tight to the shuddering wreck of a woman who was making them.

T
he oak branches outside Ben Broyard’s window cast dancing shadows on his bedroom ceiling. Night had fallen hours ago, but he was too exhausted to reach for the bedside lamp. This wasn’t just exhaustion, he knew, but a bone-deep sense of loss that felt completely alien. Not just alien.
Adult.
That was the thought he kept returning to; that what had happened this week to him, to Anthem, to
all
of them, was an
adult
thing, more significant and lasting than graduating high school or having sex for the first time.

Loss. Grief. Words that had tumbled off his tongue too easily over the years but which he’d learned the real meaning of only that week, when his best friend was replaced by a yawning, fathomless darkness surrounding miles of empty swamp road. He’d always been the mature one, the one who said the adult thing in every situation, but now he realized that to be mature, you had to know more than the dictionary
definition of words; you had to know what it felt like when those words hit you in the gut.

Ben was only ten when his father died, an aneurysm during dinner that dropped the man to one knee next to the kitchen table, and then face-first into oblivion. And what he remembered most about that time was how Nikki’s parents let her sleep in his bed because her prolonged embrace was the only thing that allowed him to get through the night without waking up in tears. He could remember how everyone had closed in around him en masse; his best friend, aunts, uncles, cousins, even his mother, who’d just been made a widow in her late thirties—they had all worked in concert to protect him, the baby, the only child of a good man gone too soon.

How many times had he heard those two words back then? Too soon, too soon. Well,
eighteen
was also too soon, right?

Still, everything about this week was different. He wasn’t the baby anymore, for one, and he had no special status amongst all those who had gathered on the banks of Bayou Rabineaux, spreading grid maps of Tangipahoa Parish across the hoods of their sun-baked cars, loading into fantail boats to assist in the fruitless search. No one left behind was special or more significant than any other. That’s what the sudden disappearance of an entire family could do; it sent out a pressure wave that leveled all their loved ones with the same explosive force, rendering them incapable of caring for the man, woman or child standing next to them.

At times, he’d found himself praying to a God he wasn’t sure he believed in and asking the simple question,
Is this how you would have me grow up? Not with a great love or some accomplishment, but the sudden unexplained absence of the person I cared most about in the world? Is this how you would have me start in the big wide grown-up world?

Nikki, the only person in his life who’d taken him aside and told him she would always be there, no matter who he turned out to be. No matter who he fell in love with. And what had he done? Just
nodded and smiled as if she’d offered him a ride home after school that day, as if he didn’t understand what she truly meant.
Yeah, thanks, Nick. Hey, that new cheerleader’s kinda hot, maybe I should ask her out, huh?

Down the hall, his mother had turned up the volume on the TV just enough to let him know she was parked in the living room a few feet from the front door. And because their house was a small shotgun cottage, that meant she had the back door in plain sight as well. So he was basically under house arrest. Again.

If she hadn’t called and made them come home when she did, he and Anthem would probably still be traveling back roads, hanging missing-persons flyers all over the state. But it had been a hell of a first day, that was for sure.

They’d started around dawn and managed to hit every gas station window and restaurant bulletin board from Madisonville to Gonzales. They had a flyer for each of them. Nikki, Mr. Noah and Miss Millie. And for most of the day, it had felt good. They were
doing
something. Being proactive, as Ben’s mother liked to say.

But after she ordered them home, their adrenaline surges subsided, and as they were driving back on Interstate 10, the setting sun a blood-orange bonfire behind them, each too consumed with thoughts to turn on the radio, that’s when Anthem exploded with the first sobs he’d let lose since Nikki vanished. And they were snotty, choked things, desperate wheezes combined with terrible, gut-clenching whines, and Ben could only rest his hand on Anthem’s shaking knee lest he lose control of his car. And after a while, he managed to speak again. “I was going to go. I was going to go with her, to North Carolina. That’s what I was . . . That’s what I was—”
going to tell her that night,
Ben knew; Anthem didn’t need to finish.

Now, as Ben watched the dance of shadows on his ceiling, he envisioned the flyers the two of them had left all over the state that day. He saw the black-and-white faces of Nikki, Mr. Noah and Ms. Millie
staring out at night-shrouded highways, their frozen smiles abandoned to the reluctant company of bored gas station attendants and grimy shelves of junk food.

Better to see these things, he guessed, than to imagine what might have become of their SUV that night. The scraps of evidence they’d been left with could be easily assembled into a nightmare: the mangled guardrail scraped with banners of black paint that matched their Lexus, two cracked pieces of rear bumper, one half of the SUV’s rear window that had been recovered from the mud a good distance from where they went off the road. All he had to do was run through this list in his head before he saw Nikki trapped inside the sinking car, fists pounding the windows, black water rushing in to fill her screaming mouth.

It was the third or fourth ring, he couldn’t be sure which one exactly, that stopped his tears.

“It was him,” the girl on the other end said as soon as Ben picked up.

Not Nikki.
And he wondered if he’d be sidelined by this realization for the rest of his life, whenever the phone rang unexpectedly. But he did recognize the girl’s voice. After the hell he’d put her through, and the confession he’d wrung from her, he figured Brittany Lowe would never speak to him again, but here she was.

“You asked me why I did it,” Brittany said. “The story, about hooking up with Anthem. You asked me why I—”

“Why you lied. Yeah, I remember.”

“He wanted me to.”

“Anthem?”

“No! Jesus. Aren’t you watching the news?”

“I’m kinda tired, you see, my best friend, she disappeared last week and we’re still looking for her so—”

“Marshall Ferriot,”
she said, unwilling to be the victim of his sarcasm. “The guy who just jumped out a window at the Plimsoll Club?” Ben was stunned silent. “He’s the one. He’s the one who asked me to lie,
all right? I figured I’d just tell you now since, you know, it doesn’t look like he’s going to
live
and all.”