The Heavens Rise (8 page)

“Is that what you really believe?” she asked. “You think he’s in some kind of limbo?”

“Well, if he’s not in hell, I hope he’s got a real good view.”

The kid’s jaw was quivering again, and the wet sheen in his eyes was back, and that’s when Marissa realized why he’d looked vaguely familiar. His jaw was quivering the first time she ever laid eyes on him, on the WDSU nightly news, when he was one of scores of other well-dressed Uptown teenagers and their parents standing along the banks of Bayou Rabineaux and setting glowing Japanese lanterns adrift in the
black waters that had swallowed the Delongpre family with one final, unforgiving gulp.

The Delongpres.
Funny how the name itself had been scrubbed from her memory by the horrors she had witnessed at the Plimsoll Club.

“What’s your name?”

But he was halfway down the block, and he was moving so fast down the grim little concrete canyon, the white soles of tennis shoes seemed to be winking at her.

I
want you back in school tomorrow,” Peyton Broyard told her son when she found him slouching in front of his laptop. She’d only been home from the grocery store a minute or two when she abandoned her bags in the kitchen and came straight to Ben’s room, and that meant the message she had to deliver was important
with a capital I, P, T and another T
, as she liked to say.

Ben’s mother had stopped searching his face for evidence of teenage secrets a while ago, mostly because she wasn’t any good at it. Too many alarmist news stories about teenagers and drugs had given her the false sense that her only child was a lot more predictable then he actually was. Three times last year she’d accused him of
recreational cough medicine abuse
when in each case he was just sluggish at breakfast because he’d been up most of the night downloading pirated gay porn.

Now, as she stood planted in his doorway like a miniature Beefeater
with a festive scarf, Ben was reminded once again of how his mother would always look twice as masculine as him, even when she was decked out in J.Jill. They were almost the same height, but the gymnastics training she’d gone through as a young girl had left her brawny and bullish. Her Suze Orman haircut and sharp jawline didn’t do much to soften her appearance either.

It had been a few hours since Ben’s run-in with Marissa Hopewell and he’d spent the time since perusing Nikki’s Myspace page, now plastered with heartfelt tributes from students who just couldn’t go on with their lives in the wake of her disappearance even though they’d hardly said more than a few words to her in their lifetimes. But it wasn’t the desire of his classmates to cast themselves as major stars in
The Great Delongpre Disappearance
that had left him dazed. And it wasn’t his spat with Marissa Hopewell either. It was the dawning realization that he and Anthem probably wouldn’t be doing any more flyering anytime soon, not after what had happened the day before.

“Mom, I have
two
classes tomorrow and I’m passing both of them.”

“That’s great. And I want you back in some kind of routine, so you’re going to go to both. Even if you plan on getting a C in both.”

“I’ve never made a C in my life.”

The doorbell startled them. Theirs was a small shotgun cottage on a block of mansions, so it was just a few paces to the front door, down a short hallway wallpapered with the annual Jazz Fest posters his mother collected and had framed every spring.

In her youth, Peyton Broyard might have blanched at the sight of a strange black woman standing on her front porch, but Ben thought even that was growth considering his grandmother had once said to him of black people,
They’re like dogs, Ben. You can’t show them you’re afraid of them
. But Peyton’s widowhood had included several dalliances with black men. Also, after a second or two of awkward silence, it became clear to everyone that Marissa Hopewell wasn’t a stranger to her at all.

“I read your columns!” his mother cried.

“Thank you.”

“You’re wrong most of the time, but I read you anyway.”

“Well, good. That’s what they’re for.”

“So why are you—” Peyton turned and gave her son a look. Then pivoted toward Marissa, one hand going up as if to ward off an offer of Girl Scout cookies. “Oh, no, no, no. No interviews. Nah uh. No way!”

“Uhm, actually, Mrs. Broyard, your son came to interview
me
earlier today.”

“I see,” Peyton said. “So we didn’t do more flyering, did we?”

“I didn’t say we did,” Ben answered.

“You didn’t say you didn’t either.”

“Hey. Can we do this all night?” Ben suggested. “It’ll be awesome!”

To Marissa, Peyton said, “Are you here to sue us?”

“Well, your son is a very articulate young man. I’ll say that much.”

“My son is a verbal terrorist who doesn’t believe in personal boundaries.” Peyton’s stage whisper must have been for effect because Ben heard every word.

“I see . . .” Marissa answered, searching Ben’s face. The woman was probably trying to figure out if Ben had been wounded by his mother’s description, or if the two of them always sparred like this. Ben rolled his eyes to let her know it was the latter. “You know what they say. One man’s terrorist is another man’s—”

“Journalist?” Ben finished for her.

“Who says that?” Peyton asked. “No one says that.”

Then she saw the two of them smiling at each other and realized it was a joke. “All right, well, come on in. Since you seem to be friends and all. Just think twice before you give this one a
platform,
okay? He’s loud enough already.”

•   •   •

A few minutes later, Ben and Marissa were outside in the backyard, seated at a wrought-iron patio table blanketed by the deepening shadows
cast by the oak tree overhead. The yard was sandbox size and it always felt to Ben like the oak was going to literally take it over one day. His mother had worked hard to cover the fences with walls of bougainvillea, and a moss-dappled cherub sat on a lone stone bench at the very rear of the garden.

Peyton brought them both glasses of iced tea. Then she departed with a bright smile, relieved that her son was someone else’s worry, if only for the next few minutes or so.

“Were you pulling my leg when you said you went to every hardware store in Orleans Parish to find that bulb?” Marissa finally asked.

“Which bulb?”

“The one that killed those birds at your school.”

“The one Marshall used to kill those birds? No. I wasn’t pulling your leg.”

“Jesus . . . Do you ever actually go to school?”

“I’m a second-semester senior and I was already accepted to Tulane. I don’t really
need
to go to school.”

“Well, there’s always the whole
learning
aspect, especially if you want to go into journalism.”

“Who said I wanted to go into journalism?”

“You did, when you went around acting like a reporter.”

“I’m working on a novel.”

“Don’t bother. There’re too many already and not enough people to read them.”

“
Seriously?
You realize you said that out loud, right?”

Her arch smile told him she didn’t care. She seemed utterly at ease in his presence despite their brief, tempestuous history together; when she took a sip of iced tea and brushed her free-form dreadlocks back from her brow, she did so with hands that were still and controlled, unlike his own. He envied her stillness, her maturity. Her poise.

“You know,” she said, “I recognized you today. From the news.
That’s how I found out who you were. You’re one of Niquette Delongpre’s friends. That’s what the flyers are about, right?”

“We’re done with the flyers.”

“Why’s that?”

“Something bad happened yesterday.”

“Oh?”

“My mom said no interviews.”

“And I haven’t said the word once.”

“We were in Ponchatoula and Anthem wanted to put some up in this sorry-ass little bar. I didn’t think we should go inside but he wouldn’t listen. So he just barged right in and started giving his little speech. Like about how our friend might be lost and she was in an accident so maybe she’s disoriented and wandering around out in the swamp somewhere and doesn’t even remember her name—” Saying the words now made him believe them even less, and remembering Anthem’s pained desperation as he’d said them, studded with pathetic attempts at good cheer, made Ben want to cry. “The bartender went off on us ’cause he thought we were scaring off his customers. But Anthem didn’t give a sh—damn. He just kept at it. So finally the guy ripped the flyer out of his hand and he read the date when they disappeared and said, ‘Sorry, pal. Looks like your little slut walked out on you.’ ”

“That is unfortunate,” Marissa said.

“Actually, the unfortunate part was when Anthem broke the guy’s nose and knocked out two of his front teeth.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“How old is this Anthem?”

“My age. But he’s bigger.
A lot
bigger.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Yeah . . .” Then he noticed she was studying him closely and he realized her words might have been some kind of trap. “
Her
boyfriend.”

“I see,” she said calmly. Apparently she would have had no problem hearing that Anthem was Ben’s boyfriend. The idea was absurd, of course, but the fact that she would have accepted it so easily made Ben feel exhilarated and terrified at the same time.

For a while, they sat listening to the nearby fountain’s gurgle and then the sustained wail of a train blowing its horn as it traveled the Mississippi’s crescent.

“You can’t blame me for thinking that if you’re chewing me out over a column about Marshall Ferriot, you think there’s some connection between what he did to himself and your friend’s disappearance?”

“Remember how this isn’t an interview?”

“I remember. But if you think there’s a connection, I’d be curious to know why you wouldn’t want it made public.”

Ben looked away, ashamed by his inability to answer. All he could think of was the flask Anthem had brought him yesterday; silver, freshly polished, sloshing with bourbon. There’d been almost no time to savor their quick escape from that awful little bar before Anthem began to drink himself into a full-blown vomit fest.

Almost as bad as the sudden loss of his best friend was the dawning realization that his next-closest friend in the world was becoming completely unglued because of it and that in just a week’s time, Anthem Landry had been sent the way of his bar-brawling, jail-visiting older brothers.

“Why are you here?” he asked her.

“You made an impression today.”

“And you don’t get a lot of chances to visit the Garden District?”

She flinched. It was slight, but he noticed it, and even though it wasn’t much, it was more emotion than she’d shown him on the sidewalk that day, even when he was really laying in to her.

“That’s offensive, Ben,” she said quietly.

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded but there was no awkward, placating smile, no real need for her to let him off the hook right away. She wasn’t his teacher or his mother. And there was no denying it; he’d hurt her feelings. But he’d only been able to do that because she’d let her guard down. And if she’d let her guard down that meant her motives for being there were more pure than he’d imagined.

The idea that she might be genuinely concerned about him left him at a loss for words; worse, it threatened to undam a tide of emotions he’d held at bay for a good four or five hours now. He knew his mother loved him and cared about him, but as always she thought she could save him from his feelings by barking a bunch of sensible orders at him. And Anthem? Had Anthem once turned to him and asked him how
he
was handling everything? And for Christ’s sake, he’d only been with Nikki for three years; Nikki had been Ben’s closest friend in the world for fifteen.

He didn’t want to go down that road. He really didn’t. But he was so damn tired, and when he wasn’t absorbed in some obsessive quest to find another person who had been sitting at Marshall’s table that night, the inside of his head felt like a jar full of wasps.

“I think he caused the accident,” Ben said.

It was the first time he’d said the words aloud, and their effect on Marissa was instantaneous. Her eyes widened and she leaned forward so far she had to place her fleshy elbows on the edge of the table. “Marshall Ferriot?”

“Yes.”

“Start at the beginning.”

“Nikki and Anthem broke up about a month ago because they had a big fight and this girl at our school claimed Anthem hooked up with her afterwards. The girl was lying. I got to her admit it. Then, when Marshall did his
thing,
the girl called and told me Marshall was the one who asked her to lie about it.”

“Why’d she agree to lie?”

“The bottle of Vicodin Marshall lifted from his mother’s medicine cabinet helped.”

“Okay . . . Keep going.”

“The night the Delongpres went missing, I went to the house before the cops got there. I knew where the key was. I didn’t tear apart her room or anything. Mostly, I just wanted to see if any of her belongings were there. Like her cell phone or anything. There was
a
phone there, all right, but it was in her desk drawer and it wouldn’t turn on, which was weird because it looked okay. But after a few minutes, I realized it had been soaked in water.”

“Wait a minute. You think she came home
after
the accident and—”

Ben shook his head. “That’s what I thought at the first. But the cops checked the records and saw the last call she’d made on it had been the week before. And I know she had another phone on her the night she went missing because I talked to her on it before Anthem and I left to go meet up with them at Elysium.”

“So she replaced her phone, the week
before
she went missing?”

“Yep. Because it got soaked. Not wet.
Soaked
. And she didn’t tell me where or how. And we told each other
everything.
But that wasn’t all . . .”