The Tangled Bridge (42 page)

He turned toward the door, and as she followed him, she said, “I've got to get back to New Orleans immediately.”

“Too dangerous.”

“But, Gil and Rosie. I've got to meet mother under the bridge or she'll kill them.”

Francois paused, his back to her. “Maybe tomorrow.”

She didn't like it. It pushed things too close.

He must have taken off his bandages, but the sunlight pouring in made it difficult to get a good look at him. Something was strange, though. He was bald, and much more healthy-looking than he ought to be. His clothes were not sagging on him.

On some level she already knew. Remembered. But …

He gestured to her to follow him out the door. The sunlight blinded her, and she paused with her hand over her eyes.

“Right here,” Francois was saying.

He waved her to a crate that rested against the shanty wall. “Have a seat.”

Someone else was sitting on the next crate. She looked at him as she sat down.

“Treese?” An adolescent boy slightly older than she was gaping at her.

“You been sleepin a long time,” Francois began.

She squinted, her eyes still adjusting, and she saw that the boy sitting next to her was long-legged, peach fuzz on his chin, black-skinned and blue-eyed.

It dawned on her with a strange, ringing numbness. Trigger: Still a boy. But a much older boy.

It was coming back to her, how much Gil and Rosie had aged in the rafters beneath that roof.

Francois said, “Y'all gonna have to make some adjustments.”

Patrice was weeping now, and Trigger put his arms around her. He held her tight.

“I just woke up, too,” he mumbled into her hair.

Francois put his hands in his pockets and turned to the side, clearly unsure what to say.

“You remember it?” Trigger asked her.

“Only the last. The part with Maman. I'll gladly go with her for Gil and Rosie's sake but what's to keep her from going after y'all again?”

“Don't worry, she ain't gonna keep none of us.”

Patrice smiled through her tears and said, “Won't. Any.”

Trigger said, “Gosh, you're so pretty. You look like an honest-to-goodness lady.”

“I can't believe how tall you are.”

She looked up at Francois. He still had his back turned, but from his profile she could now see an eye patch and the healed scarring where a portion of his lip was missing.

“How long, exactly, were we in the briar?” she asked.

Francois looked back toward them. He started to speak but then paused.

He took a breath and let it out before answering; then: “About six years,
p'tite
.”

She froze, Trigger still holding onto her. He went still, too. Six years. Six years. That meant she was twenty. Guy and Gilbert were sixteen. Rosie: thirteen. The time in the briar had seemed endless, true enough, but also beginningless.

“Lotta things happened,” Francois said.

Patrice nodded though she was still absorbing this. Gil and Rosie, living like that. Up in the rafters of that horrible place where Maman kept them. Six years seemed like an eternity to Patrice at fourteen—actually, twenty—she couldn't imagine what it meant to them.

Francois said, “Listen. Lotta pirates around. Some of' m workin for your mother. They tried to come after y'all lotta times over the years. You stay away from pirates.”

Patrice nodded again.

“Another thing, they ghosts around, too. And the thing about'm is, they're your ghosts.”

Patrice and Trigger looked at one another. “We're … dead?”

“Hell, I don't know. Don't think so.”

He looked pained by the conversation. He turned his head to look down the boardwalk, and Patrice thought he was going to walk off right then and there.

Instead he said, “In a way, y'all come back to this place out of order. Ain't like regular folks. They just leave and come back. But y'all, you leave today and come back yesterday. Understand?”

Flatly, no. Patrice had no idea what he was trying to say. “Where's Ferrar?”

“Ain't here.”

“I just saw him!”

“No, you saw a … who was he with?”

Patrice didn't answer, thinking of the lady who looked exactly like her, and lowered her gaze to the new carved necklace. It occurred to her that Francois was wearing one just like it—including the oak leaf. Trigger, too.

Francois nodded. “That's it. Only way you can tell who's what. You and me and Trigger here got the leaf. That means we're on straight time. You don't talk to no one with other necklaces. You got it?”

“What do you mean, ‘straight time'?”

“It means you ain't doubled back yet. And don't go by your real names. Just use your middle names. If you have to leave and come back, you pick a different name and a different necklace.”

“Change our names? Why?”

Francois was looking across the bayou and showed no indication he cared to discuss it further.

Trigger said only, “Jeez, Francois, we all thought you's gonna die.”

Patrice elbowed him for his rudeness. But without taking his gaze from the bayou, Francois nodded as though he'd believed the same thing.

Finally, he gestured toward Patrice. “You healed me.”

Patrice gaped at him. She remembered wrapping him in bandages, that was all.

But then Francois added, “Meanin, you goin to someday.”

*   *   *

WHEN THEY NEEDED TO
visit the willow tree the first time, Francois escorted them through the floating village and only allowed them to advance when no one else was around. Then, later, when it was time to go again, he told them to use a bucket in the shack. Trigger had no problem with that (or peeing into the bayou, for that matter), but Patrice decided to wait until Francois was willing to escort her to the tree. Using a bucket like that, it seemed like the kind of thing people had to do long ago. Outhouses and makeshift facilities that smelled horrid and bred diseases. The Terrefleurs outhouse still stood, though the main house was plumbed and there were central facilities for the workers.

Terrefleurs seemed so far behind her now. A world away. With no LeBlanc to run the place, and no Francois or even Tatie Bernadette, what had happened to it over these lost years? All that cane in the fields, but who'd seen to it that it got sold and made into sugar? Who paid the workers? What had become of sweet Eunice and her mother?

All the other shacks on this spoke of the boardwalk stood vacant. Patrice spent the afternoon with Trigger, trying to sort out what had occurred over the past six years. They sat on the crates or went inside the shack. Even with so much happening the central concern remained the same: Get Gil and Rosie back. They weren't precisely sure how they were going to do that though she and Trig were coming up with one plan after another, and immediately discarding each one for too many flaws. One day left to figure it out.

The sky had gone pink. Sunset today. Everything would change by sunset tomorrow.

Trigger said, “Francois don't seem too overjoyed about helping us get to New Orleans.”

“We'll have to figure it out on our own.”

Trigger pointed down the boardwalk. “Hey, look! It's—”

But Patrice managed to clamp her hand over her brother's mouth before he finished the sentence:
It's Ferrar.

“No names!” Patrice said.

“He'll help us out!”

Ferrar was coming toward them with his head up and a smile visible even from a distance. Patrice sprang to her feet, so delighted she wanted to run down the boardwalk and throw her arms around him. But then she paused.

Wouldn't that be childish?

Little girl
, he'd called her the last time they'd spoken. Yesterday for her. Six years ago for him.

Her hand went to her hair. She had no idea what she looked like. How odd, though she hadn't been able to take her eyes off of Trigger and his transformation from boy to teenager, it hadn't occurred to her to find a way to take a look at herself.

No mirror of course. Her hair had been brushed, her body washed, and she was wearing clean clothes. Someone had done those things for her the way Tatie Bernadette had been caring for Gil and Rosie. Perhaps the ghost version of herself? The future version? What a strange thing for her to look forward to.

Ferrar was now just several feet away, but she turned from him and looked into the bayou, hoping to see her reflection. There. But this bayou liked to boil cold, and the effervescence distorted her face and body in swirls and whorls. The only thing she did notice—from looking down, not looking into the bayou—was that her hips looked different. Less straight. More of an angle between her waist and hip bones.

Ferrar scooped her up and spun her around.

It startled her, and she threw back her head and laughed, squeezing him tight. A thrill ran from her belly up her spine. She'd really only met Ferrar twice, and both times she'd nearly gotten him killed. Amazing that he would be as happy to see her as she was him.

He set her down slowly, smiling at her, and held her there a moment longer than she expected. It made her feel awkward and hot at the neck.

She felt relieved when he finally turned to Trigger, patting him on the shoulder and shaking his hand. Her legs were wobbly. She sat down on a crate to keep steady and tried to tell herself that the reason why she was dizzy was because she'd just been spun.

Trigger grinned at Ferrar, now nearly the same height. “You told us there were ghosts in this place but you could have gone into a bit more detail, Old Socks.”

“I never knew it was so haunted as this! Or that I might wind up a ghost, too.”

That lovely mixed accent of his—country and French, twangy and soft. He was wearing an oak leaf carving just like the ones Trigger and Patrice wore. That morning, Patrice had seen the other Ferrar wearing a carved sphere.

She realized he was watching her watching him, and the intensity of his gaze made her grateful she was still sitting down.

“Have you been here the whole time?” she asked, if only to interrupt the stare.

Ferrar shook his head. “Off and on. After that first spell, I had to go find work in the city. I came back here once a month to look in on y'all and bring supplies. But it's gotten so dangerous lately that I've had to come back more often.”

“Dangerous?”

Ferrar nodded. “Word has gotten out that Bayou Bouillon is enchanted. Bootleggers comin in from all over—no one is so superstitious as a criminal. Except maybe a gambler.”

Trigger grinned, breathing through his mouth and wearing an expression that seemed far better suited to his previous, eleven-year-old self. “Superstitious on what? What're they trying to get out of it?”

Ferrar's expression tightened just a bit. “They've been told if any man can trap a ghost and bring him to the witch in New Orleans, she will reward him.”

“A ghost? Meaning…?”

“No one here is safe.”

Patrice thought of how her body had been left behind unoccupied while her mind was in the briar. “How did we … not get taken, then?”

“This place is easy to defend. The boardwalks are laid out like spokes on a wheel. We moved you to a different one from time to time. We prevent anyone from coming down your boardwalk. Francois is the commodore here, and he oversees everything. This is where the outlaws come to trade.”

Patrice looked down toward the end of the boardwalk, toward the center of the village. She could hear voices there now. See the torchlights flaring in anticipation of sundown.

Ferrar said, “And the village itself is very difficult to get to. We watch the channels carefully. When anyone approaches we see them long before they get here. Unless…”

“What?”

He shrugged. “Unless it's a ghost. They come up through the boil.”

That stunned her. She tried to imagine an older version of herself, fresh from some other world, swimming to the surface.

Patrice looked out over the water. It appeared like any other bayou at sunset, reflecting the persimmon sky and throwing dancing cables of light across the shacks. The fine bubbles at the surface were masked by late season hatches and the fish that were feeding on them.

“We have to get Gil and Rosie back,” Patrice said.

“That's what you said the last time you spoke to me. All these years, I thought I might be able to find them and bring them to you before you fell back to your body.”

Such weight in his voice. She looked at him, wondering, and grew quiet to the skin.

When her father used to go lost in the briar, he looked different—less human, more animal. His facial expressions lacked self-awareness. Even people who did not know him and did not speak to him could tell something was wrong. That they should be cautious.

“What did I look like? All those years. I must have been … so … wild.”

“I don't know. Francois wouldn't let me near you.”

That surprised her. “Why not?”

Ferrar shrugged. “A young lady, vulnerable. He was protective. Francois has spent the past six years guarding you two and the village itself. People who live here have had to fight for it. Every attempt by outlaws to enter the village has failed, because unless they give the signal, no one can get through the channel.”

“What's the signal?”

“It changes. Sometimes it's three bells sometimes it's light flashes. He allows only the regulars.”

Ferrar paused, lifting his fingers to graze her jaw for just a fleeting moment. “You, he kept hidden from everyone. I saw you only by looking at your ghosts from a distance.”

Something about his expression. He was hiding some secret knowledge. Knowledge about her. She didn't like that.

She said suddenly, “We have to go. Gotta leave here and meet our mother by sunset tomorrow.”

He frowned. “You do that, her men will kill you. Either that or take you away.”