The Scattering (4 page)

‘I left the shop early, Mr McCourt,' Bridie said, quietly.

‘Do you want me to go in to the girls?'

‘No, not at all. It's near closing now. Anyway, you're off and that's it. We do need cornstarch though.'

‘I'll see to it.'

‘Grand. I just wanted to come up and ask if I could have the day off Monday.'

Something was wrong. Bridie was an attractive woman: pale as milled flour, but because of her persistently poor self-esteem, she did not radiate the beauty that was evidently hers. She wore no make-up, never seemed to get her wiry grey hair coloured or styled, and habitually wore thick beige nylons with small eyeholes stopped from cobwebbing entire legs by layers of clear nail varnish. One time he had noted a glittery blue by her right calf. He had laughed at the cosmetic tricks of his daughters, and knew that repairing nylons had long gone out with the ark. Still, he found her injured politeness magnetic.

‘Is that alright, Mr McCourt?'

‘Monday? Yes, of course. Take it off, Bridie. I'll take over. That's if I haven't forgotten what to do.'

‘Ah now. You're too modest.'

‘Planning a heavy weekend then, Bridie?' he joked, ushering her into the front room.

‘No,' she said quietly, ‘it's my divorce.'

His face reddened and he turned to the window. In the more energised atmosphere of the bakery he would have been quicker off the mark and able to respond to Bridie's frankness. But at home, this evening, his guard was down, and he couldn't think of anything to say. He stared into the darkening street.

‘Warm fire you have going there, Mr McCourt. Would you not close the curtains and put on the light and settle up to that? It's dark now, you know.'

‘I'm watching my wee girl, Bridie. Till her bus comes for the airport.'

‘Righto,' she said, gazing towards the window. ‘Maybe I'll bring you a pie then, later. Would you like a pie, Mr McCourt?'

‘No. I'm not hungry at all.'

‘I'll go so.' He let Bridie out of the house. He was sorry to see her leave, but glad that he could carry on by the window in peace.

The dark clouds were staggered in short strips across the horizon. His daughter remained perched on her trolley, her bus now almost forty minutes late. He considered going to the door and calling out for a cross-traffic conversation, but then thought this would embarrass her.

Theirs was an emotional, fragile bond. She was five when his wife had died. He had not managed to be both parents to any of his children, least of all to her. He had behaved badly. When the others had left for England and America, she and he had been left at home together, and there had been much drama. He had not known how to raise a child by himself. Francie and the girls did what they could to help (as the bakery was being reestablished) before leaving for work and lives elsewhere.

During her teenage years, he had switched tack, resorting to plain-talking force, and once had woken her up for school by pouring a bucket of cold water over her while she slept. He knew now that it was just one of his many cruel and unforgivable explosions of anger in the house; that he should have asked for help with his morose, introverted daughter. He'd not had much trouble with the others (apart from a brief episode with Francie), but she had left him exasperated. When she was fourteen she had suddenly become a vegan and began to object vehemently to his use of gelatin in the shop. He learned later that the protest came as a result of her membership of the Baha'i Faith, which she had clandestinely joined. There had been no end to her rebellion.

In her late twenties they had begun a slow truce. There was much left unsaid about the years he might have been more percipient, had he not been in such a prolonged mourning himself.

His eye fell on the mossed-over marble seat in the corner of the garden: the love seat. At least, that was what he and his wife had secretly called it. Engraved somewhere were their initials, and ‘1975', the year they had come home. He and his wife had behaved like kids in private, and he was often stunned to think that within the family there had been two of him. That the children did not know the man his wife had married amazed him, but that was how it was: one man, necessarily split. And when she died, it seemed that the man she had married went too. The dead take big bites out of you, he thought, so you'll never forget. Every day he had hoped the bombing of the town would receive a thorough investigation; there had been a few gestures, some well-meaning attempts to get to the bottom of it, but little had come of them.

His thoughts went back to Crowe Street. He remembered he'd been staring into the smoky, stinking streets for ages, stunned, unable to find his legs, or, after the mesmerising motions of the barrel, a modicum of voice. Understanding had come slow and hard: she had been waiting in Kay's Tavern, his red-haired wife, and they had been due to meet there at four. He remembered hoping she was as late as she usually was for him, or that she'd got caught up in O'Neils, Christmas shopping; he remembered he'd had a bad feeling. He recalled the wintry gust battering the red barrel down Market Street. It was then he'd looked up to see Jaxy and Joe walk slowly towards him, their peaked yellow hats held low.

The bus pulled in with a jolt. He watched his daughter stamp out her cigarette then press down the creases in her coat. She lugged up the bar of her trolley, wheeled it into the queue. As the long line of late and frustrated voyagers mounted the bus, he watched her quickly slip from the queue, pull a pen and scrap of paper from her bag, look towards the white bungalow and jot down the details from the FOR SALE sign. She mounted the bus and jostled into a window seat at the front. He watched her turn and peer out of the window towards him. He could see her nervous face light up as she caught sight of him behind the flame. She waved and kissed the window with her gloved hand as the bus drove off. He waved back and watched till the diesel trail cleared. He felt the breach that had been between them close a little. After pulling the curtains, he put on the lights and blew out the candle. Vanilla filled the room as he went towards the kitchen to make breadcrumbs.

Hellebores

‘Did you say
girls
, Bobby Jean?' Jessica asked, wondering exactly what kind of girls her friend was referring to. ‘I'd love to take them. I would. But this is no place for… BJ, do you know what time it is?' Jessica held the phone away as Bobby Jean pleaded and hollered on about it being an emergency. ‘I can't. It's Jules. First he washed up from God knows where, and now he's gone off again. I've just about got my hands full with him and the plants.'

But Bobby Jean worked on Jessica carefully, knowing Jessica wouldn't be able to resist when she told her the girls' parents had floated off somewhere down the swollen Mississippi; that when the levees had been breached and the bridges destroyed they had never been seen again, and that the two girls had been shunted from Pineville to Baton Rouge to Atlanta. Bobby Jean knew her wards' story would chime with something deep inside Jessica. Because it had themes that were familiar to her: losing the people we love and having to carry on all alone without them. Bobby Jean knew pretty much everything there was to know about Jessica May Lawson.

The day the girls were due to arrive Jessica had a clear-out of her house, which was really the living quarters above, and an extension of, her store. She cleaned the spare bedroom upstairs, and had Guy, a landscape designer with no physical strength whatsoever, help her bring into it a double bed and coat rail. She put fresh sheets on the bed, brought in a bedside table from her own room, placed on it a vase of freshly cut irises. Then she went into Tina's room, stood at the threshold and looked around at the dustsheets covering the furniture. She knew that the two girls could just as easily have had this room, or even a room each, except that it wouldn't have been easy for her. She closed the door and noted how expectant the house seemed, as if it awaited the arrival of the two young girls, hungrily.

The next day, Olivia and Ashleigh T. Williams arrived at Lawson's Nurseries with Bobby Jean over two hours late. Unpacked and seated at the table, the girls sat quietly and had hot chocolate and lemon cake (which Jessica had made especially). When they were done, Jessica showed them to their room.

‘They barely said a word other than “yes Ma'am, no Ma'am”,' Jessica said to Bobby Jean when they were finally alone together.

‘They're traumatised, and why wouldn't they be? They've just seen the earth open up and steal away their folks. And they had to navigate some deep and mean floods, too, before they eventually got picked up.'

‘What did you say the parents did?' Jessica asked her friend, a well-respected realtor who was always doing some kind of good in the community.

‘Father a preacher, mother led the Pineville choir. There are relatives in Atlanta, that's how come the girls were sent there, but Atlanta can't find them. Not yet anyway.'

As the two girls slept, Jessica walked out into the warm air of the Panama City night. She went to the new delivery and brushed her fingers along the thick green shoots. She could hear the surf crashing on the sands and the sandpipers chattering. She thought she could hear, too, the start of new winds gathering. After a while she went to her chair and watched darkness race through her palms and bamboos like the tide. She pressed her face and neck up against the clear wide sky. This was how Jessica found her unity with the world: imaginatively, and in the dark. And sometimes, cast adrift in the night air, Jessica would think of the nights on the beach with Tina and Jules, back when they were a family. Sometimes she might even hear Tina getting in or out of her car, and it would make her jump. It would never be Tina, of course, but usually Jules with some beach girl. It would never be Tina because Tina had been gone a long time. Jessica's thoughts were just about to slip back to the days of Jules and Tina on the beach when she heard a noise out front. She was ready to chastise her son but turned and saw the taller of the two girls, shaking and crying.

‘Are you alright, Ashleigh?' Jessica asked.

‘It's Olivia, Ma'am, my sister,' the girl replied.

‘What's wrong with her?'

‘She's sick and we ain't got no medication with us.' Jessica stood up. She could hear thrashing noises coming from the room upstairs.

‘What's wrong with her, Ashleigh? You needn't be afraid to tell me. In fact it's best you do.'

‘Olivia, Ma'am, she's, well, sometimes she has these fits.' Jessica ran faster than she had done in an age. On reaching the room, she did what she had seen done in so many movies: she restrained the erratic motions of the child, who was half out of the bed, soaked to the skin in sweat and spit, by holding down a tight and twisted-up cloth between the child's teeth. When the shaking stopped, Olivia passed out, bone-rattled and exhausted, like the entire State of Louisiana in the weeks after Katrina.

*

‘Jessica, I did not know. There was no time, and believe me I'm gonna give Atlanta shit on a stick for this.' Bobby Jean sounded furious. And Jessica believed that her friend would indeed give the Atlanta authorities ‘shit on a stick'. Nonetheless, when she had agreed to Bobby Jean's requests for shelter for the two girls, Jessica had not planned on offering anything more than that.

‘How come she didn't have a seizure until now is what I want to know?' Jessica asked.

‘Well, you know how it is. I guess her body thought if anywhere was a good place to have a fit, yours was it.'

Jessica sat in the hospital waiting room with Ashleigh beside her. She was beginning to regret letting Bobby Jean get the better of her.

‘Are you gonna give us back to Atlanta now, Mrs Lawson?' Ashleigh asked.

‘Well, of course I won't be doing that,' Jessica replied, and looked furtively at the pale willowy child sitting beside her. There was something odd and overly mature about her, Jessica thought. She reminded Jessica of a hothouse flower, as if she'd gone from bud to bloom without much flowering in between.

Olivia was led out by a male nurse. The name on his badge said Eric.

‘Sometimes it happens like this with children,' Eric said. ‘They sort of tailor their suffering to the situation. They can just up and decide to feel it later.' Eric urged Jessica to get both girls seen by the hospital psychiatrist in the coming weeks. ‘Standard procedure for Katrina victims. If they lost their parents the way they say, these kids are gonna hurt and pretty bad too.'

The girls were quiet on the way home. Olivia curled herself up against her sister's shoulder in the back of the car. In the mirror, Jessica could see Ashleigh peering out at every blown-away door, every broken window or house-frame, as if they were signs she alone was able to read.

‘You alright back there, Ashleigh?' Jessica asked.

‘Sure,' Ashleigh replied.

‘When the hurricane made landfall here, it wasn't so bad, as you can see. It got worse towards Alabama. Panama City was pretty much prepared for what it got. You see my bamboos in the nursery?' Ashleigh nodded.

‘Saved the whole place. Bamboo bends with the wind, see. Better than stone. And it protected everything inside. All the plants and flowers. All my stock.'