James Ruppert. Kills eleven family members at Easter dinner. 1975. This guy was nuts. I guess we’re all nuts though, so I’ll do him. I don’t see myself killing family the way Ruppert did and, before you ask, no, I didn’t crave this sort of action back when I was at home. But you’ve got to admit his family was shitty to him. And here he is, forty-one and still living at Mommy’s house. That had to say “failure” in a big way, proving what his dad was always saying he was. Big brother’s over to dinner with his eight kids-Eight! You’d think the brother would have shot his own self-and his wife who used to be James’s girlfriend, and while she’s cooking up the Easter ham, he knows Mom’s thinking about throwing him out on his ear; and he hasn’t got a job, so he’s broke. Then you factor in that he stands to get a lot of dough from insurance. Shooting the family starts to look pretty good. Sane even. Until you get to the kids. Maybe he figures they aren’t quite people; with eight of them, they wouldn’t seem like an endangered species exactly, just a housecleaning issue. What I don’t get is why go to all that trouble then wait for the cops? Did he think he would get off on a thing like that? If he did, then he really was nuts. Hey, maybe he should have gotten off on the insanity plea. Catch 22. We’re all nuts, but if we tell you that, then we’re not. I feel sorry for James; he was fucked from the start.
Marshall was scared. Polly could see it behind the sparkle in his eyes, behind the sparkle of the two-and-a-half-carat diamond ring on the table between them. Whether he was scared she would say yes or refuse, she didn’t know.
Despite the cynicism she cultivated in her dealings with the opposite sex, Polly was a romantic. Ivanhoe was a favorite of hers, Sense and Sensibility, Sleepless in Seattle. As a girl, she’d read Costain’s The Black Rose so many times the cover began to look like third base at the Little League park. She had taught True Love, as seen by poets, playwrights, and novelists most of her adult life. As she would point out to her students, not only did true love not necessarily run smooth, it was often fatal.
They were in the courtyard of the Court of Two Sisters in the Quarter. A canopy of ancient oaks sequestered the garden, each tree strung with a thousand tiny lights, and each light refracting in the facets of the diamond engagement ring. It surprised her that she wasn’t surprised. It also surprised her that she wanted to pick it up, slip it on her finger, and scamper down the aisle in a cloud of white taffeta. Perhaps love was like the mumps. If a woman came down with it after forty, it could kill her.
Staring at the black velvet box with its glittering promise so lusciously displayed, she heard herself saying, “We’ve only been together for a month.”
“But what a month,” Marshall replied and, with the long-fingered hand she loved to hold and watch when he drew pictures for Emma and Gracie, nudged the box a few inches closer.
She wondered if she eyed it as the mouse eyes the bit of cheese in the trap, not knowing it will soon make literal the notion that it was dying for a nibble.
“Cliché or not, I feel like I’ve known you my whole life,” Marshall said softly.
Polly felt that way as well. They had re-created a timeline she had skipped over: They played as children with her daughters, they giggled on the phone for hours like teenagers, they sat up late over wine arguing politics and saving the world like college sweethearts, they went to openings and museums like upwardly mobile thirty-somethings, they sat on his balcony in rocking chairs the way old folks were said to do. A lifetime together.
“The girls… ” Polly said lamely.
“I aced the interview,” he reminded her with his wonderful smile, slightly crooked, as if a part of him mocked the hope of his own happiness.
Polly worked hard at treading the thin line between being completely open and honest with her daughters and burdening them with adult concerns. She had kept her so-called love life-the sporadic dates she’d enjoyed over the years-separate from her home life and her children. That hadn’t been true with Marshall. Knowing Gracie and Emma noticed the interplay between them, she told them they might be getting serious.
The next afternoon, as she walked across campus to her car, her cell phone rang. Fishing it from her purse, she checked the screen. Gracie. Cold spiked in Polly’s chest. Their cell was only to be used for emergencies.
“Are you okay? Is Emma okay?” Polly demanded. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“Momma, take a breath,” Gracie returned. The annoyance in her tone reassured Polly. “We are at school. It’s recess. Momma… ” The quality of the sound dwindled. From the use of “we,” Polly guessed Gracie was conferring with her sister. In a couple of seconds she was back. “Momma, remember last night you said you and Marshall were like serious boyfriend-girlfriend? Do you think he wants to marry us?”
The fear that had gripped her when the cell phone rang returned. If the girls rejected Marshall, then he was out of their lives. It was as simple as that. Except this time it wasn’t. Polly was in love. Being in love, though as grand as the poets had promised, brought with it a terrifying helplessness.
“I remember, sugar,” she said carefully. She beeped the Volvo open and slid behind the wheel, her briefcase and purse on her lap. She put the key in the ignition and started the car so the air would run, but made no move to go.
“Well… ” There was another brief conference at the other end of the ether.
Realizing she was clutching her phone so tightly she was in danger of breaking it, Polly forced herself to relax.
“Momma?”
“I’m here. Tell me.”
“Me and Emma want to interview him.”
“Emma and I,” Polly corrected automatically.
When Gracie hung up, Polly called Marshall and invited him for dinner. “Come early, around five,” she told him. “The girls want to talk to you.”
After school, Emma and Gracie went into their room and closed the door. Polly could hear them murmuring and laughing; sounds that usually filled her with joy grated on her nerves.
They didn’t come out until Marshall rang the doorbell at four-forty-five. Gracie emerged as Polly let him in. “You’re early. We’re not ready yet,” she said and disappeared back into the bedroom.
Polly laughed nervously. “I have no idea what they’re planning, Marshall, only that it’s important to them. Can I offer you a strong drink?”
“Later, maybe,” he replied. “Later, definitely,” he amended. “I’m afraid it might not make a good impression on my inquisitors.”
He was not joking.
Sitting in the living room, he on the couch and she in the chair, they tried to make small talk. When that failed, they stared at one another and waited.
At five o’clock the bedroom door again opened and the girls came out. Both had on their best dresses. Both wore shoes. It should have been endearing, comical, even, but Polly saw the alarm she felt reflected in Marshall ’s eyes.
Gracie carried a yellow legal pad and a pencil. “Mr. Marchand,” she said politely. “Would you like a glass of water or to go to the bathroom or anything before we get started?”
“Mr. Marchand?” he said, with a half-smile and a cocked eyebrow.
“It’s formal,” Emma explained gravely. “You’ll be Marshall again after. Okay?”
“Okay. As long as I get to be Marshall again.”
Gracie sat on the coffee table facing him. Emma, just as serious but still Emma, bounded up onto the sofa next to him.
“Ready?” Gracie asked.
Marshall nodded. Polly imagined his palms were starting to sweat.
“First question: Why do you like Momma so much?” Gracie read from the legal pad.
It was a good question. Polly had to make an effort not to beam at her offspring.
Marshall thought for a while, his hands folded neatly on his crossed knees. Finally he said, “I think it’s because, even though the world can be a scary place, she makes me feel like it’s full of wonderful things and that we will find them and be happy. Not all the time, of course, but a lot more than we are ever sad.”
Gracie looked at Emma. Emma nodded, her blonde hair, as fine as it was when she was a baby, swinging over her pixie ears. Gracie drew a neat line through the question.
Marshall shot a glance at Polly. She shrugged. He was on his own.
“Do you like children?” Gracie read off the next question on their list.
“I don’t know any children but you guys. If all children are like you, then I like children. My guess is that children are like everybody else. I’ll like some and won’t like others.”
Again the exchange of nods and the line through the asked-and-answered question.
“This is the last one,” Gracie said encouragingly. “If we let you be Momma’s boyfriend, how would our lives be better?”
No wonder the list had taken them all afternoon, Polly thought. They must have been googling advice columnists and picking out the hard questions.
“Gosh,” Marshal said. Then, “Gosh, that’s a tough one.”
“Take your time,” Emma said kindly.
“How about that drink now?” he said to Polly. She laughed but didn’t move. She had no intention of missing a minute of this.
“Okay. Let me think. I have some money,” he said slowly. “But your mom makes enough to buy everything you need, so that wouldn’t make it better.” He seemed to be floundering. Polly worried that he would choke. “It’s easier to fold sheets with two people. There would be two cars, so it would be easier to get to all the places we want to go. I could take care of the lawn and fix things if they got broken. I could help build things-I’m a trained architect and builder, you know. I could kill cockroaches for you.”
“We don’t kill them. We put them out,” Gracie said repressively. Neither she nor Emma was looking impressed, and Polly felt oddly hollow.
Marshall looked at his hands for a minute or more. When he looked up, his face was as open as a child’s. “The only thing I could bring to make your lives better would be more love,” he said. “I have a lifetime’s worth saved up. That should count for something.”
Gracie looked to Emma. Emma nodded. Gracie drew a line through the question. “That will be all,” she said formally. “Thank you, Mr. Marchand, Momma.”
“Thank you,” Emma echoed, and, Gracie leading, they filed back into the bedroom and closed the door.
Simultaneously Polly and Marshall expelled their breath, then laughed.
“What happens now?” Marshall asked. “Do I go home and wait by the phone? Give the names and addresses of my former employers?”
He stood and Polly rose to put her arms around him and lay her head on his chest. They stayed like that without speaking until the bedroom door flew open and Emma, dressed again in shorts and a T-shirt, exploded from the room and launched herself in Marshall ’s general direction.
“You passed!” she shouted as he caught her. “You aced it!”
Gracie followed her sister. She’d changed out of her tribunal clothes as well and wore blue cropped pants and a matching tank top with a giant pink paw print in glitter on the front.
“Does this mean you’ll marry me?” Marshall asked her. Had Polly not been seated, her knees would have buckled. Marriage had not yet been discussed.
“No,” Gracie replied. “It means we won’t not marry you.”
Polly smiled at the memory. “Yes, you did ace the interview,” she admitted and took a sip of champagne, giving herself time to settle.
“I love you,” he said simply. “Finding you was like finding I was not deaf, dumb, and blind, though I had learned to live that way. I wish you’d been in the square when I was thirty, but you weren’t. Now my biggest concern is that, even if we both live to a hundred, we won’t have enough time together.”
Polly arched an eyebrow. “I do not have one foot in the grave. The women in my family live to a great old age. Well, our bodies do; it’s our minds that tend to go when we’re in our seventies,” she teased. All of it was a tease. Polly had no idea how long the women in her family lived. Her mother had died at forty-three. According to the neighbors Hilda passed out drunk and fell face down outside. It rained heavily that night and Hilda, like the apocryphal turkey, drowned in two inches of water.
Marshall pushed the hair back from his forehead. His fingers didn’t merely comb through the hair, they raked.
Removing a crown of thorns was the image that flashed in Polly’s mind, and for a heartbeat, she waited for the drops of blood to seep from his flesh. The thought was sacrilegious. Though she no longer believed in heaven, the concept of hell had never truly left her.
He reached across the table and rested his hand over hers on the white cloth. “I suppose, if it weren’t for the girls, we could just move in together, but even that wouldn’t be enough for me. It wouldn’t pay you the honor you deserve, and it wouldn’t honor the love I have for you.” He smiled. “Quite a speech. Believe it or not, before I met you, I was the strong silent type.”
Proposals of marriage were not alien to Polly. Something about her put men in a marrying frame of mind. There were a couple of reasons that prevented her from indulging in gestures of mad passion: Emma and Gracie. No less carefully than Marshall built his houses had Polly built hers: her daughters and her teaching, friends, quiet moments with a book, ballet lessons, soccer, the theater, flower-arranging classes, evenings with Martha. She owned her own home and did as she pleased.
American mythology would have it that divorced or widowed women in their middle years were desperate to remarry. That had not been Polly’s experience. Most had made lives they enjoyed and would only compromise for a very shiny white knight with a particularly breathtaking steed.
And a very long lance, Polly thought, and smiled at the turn her thoughts took.
“A smile. Is that a yes?” Marshall was trying for lightness and failing. The shadows in his eyes suggested her answer was a matter of life or death.
Both flattering and unsettling.
“We have known one another for four weeks,” she reminded him gently.
“The time doesn’t mean anything,” Marshall insisted. “You can live with someone for years and have the marriage fall apart two weeks after the wedding. You know that’s true. Polly, since the night we had tea, I have never had a second thought. Never. About the logistics, sure. But not about how I feel about you.”
Polly had been carried away on the same whirlwind. On their third date-the night following their second, two nights after their first, she’d brought Marshall home to meet the girls. Very few of the men she had dated had been privileged to meet Emma and Gracie. Because they were good girls, they had been polite but maintained a sense of reserve. Not with Marshall. He fit into the family as if there had always been a place waiting for him.
His quiet gravity, the way he addressed them as adults and listened with genuine interest to what they had to say, the easy concern he showed when they were worried, the kindness when they were peevish or tired had won them over with a stunning rapidity. Another reason to proceed with caution: should she and Marshall separate, hers would not be the only heart broken. She pushed the glittering diamond back toward him. “Much as I would like to, I cannot,” she said simply. “This is too much, too soon.”
“Keep the ring. Think about it. Please. These chances don’t come often. For most people they never come.”
His urgency had the quality of a man who knows he’s dying-and wants to collect the brass ring before the Grim Reaper collects him.
“Maybe we should take a breather,” she said. “Take a little time apart. I need to collect my thoughts.” He looked so devastated, she softened her decision by saying, “A girl cannot think clearly around you, my darling.”
“Don’t reject it.” He nudged the ring back toward her. “Think about it.”
“Despite the wisdom of song and tradition, diamonds are not a girl’s best friend. Though I must admit, most women take better care of their diamonds than men do of their dogs.” Polly was trying to lighten a mood that had suddenly become fraught with storms she couldn’t see but only feel as a pressure behind her eyes.
“I will think about it,” she promised.
“Don’t think too long.”
The phone had been ringing for some time before the sound worked its way through Polly’s dreams and dragged her into the waking world. “Yes?” she said into the receiver as she felt around for her glasses.
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”
Marshall. They’d not spoken in the week since he’d proposed. She switched on the bedside lamp and squinted at the clock. One-fifteen a.m. His intensity had scared her. The girls asked after him. She enjoyed her freedom. Her thoughts were only of him. Emotions hard to quantify during the day batted inside her head like birds in a chimney. “It’s late,” was all she could manage.
“I’m sorry. I woke up. I guess I heard a noise or something and… and I needed to hear your voice.” He sounded like a man who had awakened from a nightmare of hell fire and brimstone. He laughed ironically. “If you can’t stay awake, just put the phone on the pillow and let me listen to you breathing.”
A nightmare of fire and brimstone.
Polly smelled smoke. Gray-white tentacles were reaching under her bedroom door, curling up the dark wood of the door.
“Oh, my Lord!” she whispered.
“What, what is it?”
“Smoke.”
“Is the smoke alarm going off?”
Phone to her ear, Polly swung her legs from the bed and took two steps toward the door.
Like a blind hungry ghost, smoke reached for her feet. Peach-colored paint on the door began to crack, black fissures snapping through, blistering like burned skin. She opened her mouth to scream for the girls but stopped herself. If Gracie and Emma heard her voice, they would wake and try to come to her.
“Don’t open the door. Don’t hang up. I’m coming,” Marshall was saying. Polly disconnected and pushed 911.
“Please, please, please,” she murmured to whatever gods listened as she ran for the bedroom window, the phone pressed hard to her ear. “There’s a fire,” she said when the emergency dispatcher answered and gave her address.
“Get out of the house immediately,” the dispatcher said. “The fire station nearest you was flooded after Katrina and has not been reopened. The closest trucks are fifteen to twenty minutes away. Stay calm.”
The bedroom’s one window was the only way out and it had been painted shut when Polly bought the house. Without hesitation, she picked up her dressing chair and smashed the glass.
The 911 dispatcher was still talking as she threw the phone out onto the grass. Shards of glass the size and viciousness of shark’s teeth razored out from the broken mullions. She’d be gutted like a fish. Using the legs of the chair, she cleared out as much glass as she could. Behind her, all around her, she could hear the fire snickering, licking, devouring, a thinking beast that roasted and ate human flesh. Again and again she banged at the old window, its many layers of paint holding onto daggers of glass like stubborn old gums to the few remaining teeth. Screaming an obscenity she’d grounded Gracie two weeks for using she threw the chair against the wall. Spinning from the wreckage she dragged the bedspread off the bed and shoved it through the opening. Belly on the sill, Polly began pushing her body through the ruined window.
A shard raked her left shoulder. The first hot pierce of glass then the rip as it clawed into her. All Polly felt was fury that it slowed her down. Grasping fistfuls of a rhododendron bush, she wrenched herself free from the window’s jaws and fell. Stiff branches caught at her clothes and grabbed at her hair until, screaming with rage, she made it onto the lawn. Staggering to her feet, she began to run. The house was small: two bedrooms separated by a short hall, with a bathroom on one side and the living room and kitchen on the other. It was no more than forty feet from her bedroom window to that of her daughters. In true nightmare fashion, the distance lengthened. Polly felt as if she forged her way through waist-deep mud, yet when she reached the corner of the house, her speed snatched her feet from under her on the dew-wet grass and she fell.
Two feet, hands and feet, it was all one to Polly. She clawed her way through the dense wall of sharp-spiked holly she’d planted beneath the girls’ window as a natural security fence. Cupping her hands around her eyes to shut out the streetlight’s glare, she peered through the burglar bars she’d had installed on this one window so she could sleep nights, unafraid of someone creeping into her children’s room and taking them, as those girls in California and Utah had been taken.
Billowing smoke pushed down from the ceiling like alien clouds in an old science fiction movie. Wraithlike and malevolent, it poured upward in a sheet from underneath the door. Emma’s Tinkerbell nightlight flickered in and out of focus. Inanely Polly thought, Clap if you believe in fairies.
The girls were asleep, each in her own little bed.
Or dead.
The thought hit Polly’s brain with the force of a wrecking ball, and she cried out, grabbing the ornate cast iron as if she could rip the bars from their moorings. “Gracie!” she shouted. The window was open a few inches, enough to let in the breeze. Polly pressed her lips to the crack, “Emma, Gracie, wake up!”
“Momma?” came Gracie’s sleepy reply.
“Wake up, honey. We’ve got a fire in the house and we have to go outside.” Polly’s voice was higher than usual, but she sounded reassuring. “No need to panic,” she said as much to herself as her daughter.
“Momma? Where are you?” Gracie was sitting up in the bed now, staring at the smoke crawling up the far wall.
“At the window, honey. Here. That’s right. I’m going to get you out. Wake up your sister, but don’t scare her, okay?”
Polly pulled on the bars. They were iron and screwed into the side of the house. She tried to shake them. They didn’t even rattle.
“Firemen will be here in a minute,” she promised. The little house was old: shingled roof, oak floors, walls of wood and plaster. A two-hundred-thousand-dollar tinderbox.
“Gracie, stop,” Emma whined.
“Wake up, Momma said. The house is on fire.” Gracie’s voice quavered, but she was pretending not to be scared. She was being brave for her sister. Polly thought she would die of love for her. With a guttural cry that brought both children to the window, she wrenched on the bars. They didn’t so much as creak.
“Stay by the window, my darlings. You hear me? Put your mouths up to the crack and breathe this good air. Don’t open it any wider, okay? It will make the fire want to come in faster. You just sit tight. Don’t open the door. I’m going to get you out.”
Breaking this tenuous connection with them hurt so deeply, pain knifed through her chest. Praying she wasn’t having a heart attack, Polly tore free of the holly and ran to the front of the house. Orange light danced in waves of heat. Gouts of flame cut through smoke billowing from the windows. Paint on the front door bubbled. Great heat blisters popped and breathed white vapor.
There was no way in. She wouldn’t live long enough to reach her children. The girls would die alone.
Polly howled and heard Gracie scream. Then white light blindsided her. She fell to her knees, images of the house exploding burning behind her scorched eyeballs.
Engine roaring, a truck pounded over the curb and smashed through the azaleas to lurch to a stop on the lawn. The door flew open and Marshall leapt from behind the wheel.
“Where’s the fire department?” he yelled as he ran across the lawn. “My God, you’re bleeding.”
“They haven’t come.” Polly grabbed his wrist and dragged him toward the side of the house.
“Where are Emma and Gracie?”
“Inside,” Polly cried. “Emma and Gracie are still inside. Marshall, I had security bars put in!” The words tore her throat. “I don’t know how to get them out.” Polly’s fingernails clawed into the flesh of his wrist as she pulled him through the slash of leaves to the window.
“Momma!” Gracie screamed. Polly could scarcely see her for the smoke. It was coming out the window now. Behind the glass Gracie’s pale face shone like a ghost.
Marshall tore free of Polly’s grasp and ran. “No!” Polly shrieked, but he was gone.
Gracie was crying. Polly squeezed her face tightly against the bars trying to see her child. The iron was hot.
“Momma, Emma wouldn’t stay. I tried to make her, but she got away. Momma, she opened the door, and I can’t see her. I can’t see her.”
“Emma!” Polly shouted. Smoke burned her eyes. “Emma, you come back! Come to my voice, baby.”
“I couldn’t stop her, Momma. She pulled away so hard, and she’s so fast.” Tears streaked white as they cut through the grime coating Gracie’s face.
“I know, honey. Emma is as quick as a bunny. Stay at the window, baby. You stay right here.”
Emma was dead, and Gracie was going to die.
“Give me your hand. That’s a girl.” Polly pushed her fingers through the narrow opening, raking the skin from her knuckles. “The fire trucks are on their way. Emma!”
“Don’t move!” came a command, then a crash so loud Polly and Gracie shrieked.
Marshall raised the sledge hammer and drove it into the side of the house a second time. A hole was opening through the siding. Smoke trickled out. He struck again, and the hole was big enough for a small person to crawl through. Two more quick blows, wood shattering inward, plaster dust swirling into the smoke, and a narrow door half the height of a man was made between two upright two-by-four studs. To Polly it was a miracle. She’d not known a hammer could so easily knock a hole in a house.
In a heartbeat, Marshall was through the breach. “Gracie,” she heard him call.
“Go to him, baby. Quick as a wink.” Polly said urgently. She let go of her daughter’s hands. “Go to Marshall, baby.” Gracie’s ghostly face slid into the smoke. Polly fought the need to call her back to the window. Within seconds she was through the hole, coughing. Polly grabbed her and held tight.
“Get away from the house,” Marshall shouted. “I’ll get Emma.”
Knowing there was nothing else she could do, arms wrapped around Gracie, Polly led her to the sidewalk across the street. Even fifty feet away, the heat was palpable. The roof over Polly’s bedroom was intact, but the side of the house up under the eaves was burned away, and flame licked at the shingles.
On her knees on the concrete, Gracie held against her, Polly imagined Emma, small pink feet on floorboards hot as a griddle, ruffled nightie ablaze, her silky hair crackling like lightning. Had Gracie not been between her and the fire, she would have walked into it to stop the pain of the vision.
Smoke ceased to trickle from the hole Marshall had made and began to pour.
Faintly in the distance Polly heard sirens, fire trucks racing from whichever functioning stationhouse had taken them in, the ranks of firefighters depleted by those who’d evacuated and never come back. Gracie’s crying became a slow, steady keen. Polly rocked back and forth trying to soothe them both.
A firefighter came up to them as his fellows rolled out the hose. A second engine arrived, lights and horns blaring.
“Anybody inside?”
“Yes,” Polly heard herself saying as if from a great distance. “My daughter.”
The fireman’s face hardened, and she supposed he was trying not to telegraph his thoughts. Because the loss of Emma was not to be borne, Polly looked away from him.
A gout of black smoke burst from the hole Marshall had knocked in the wall of the girls’ room.
Gracie started to struggle, trying to get free of Polly’s arms. No!” Polly cried and held her more tightly as if Gracie, too, would run into the flames to be with Emma.
“Momma, let go. Look!”
At first Polly saw nothing; it was as if the fire had burned her retinas. Then from the smoke, a shape emerged.
“Momma, it’s them!” Gracie cried.
Black as a chimney sweep, Emma clinging to his neck, Marshall fell through the jagged gap in the side of the house, staggered to his feet, and fell a second time. Polly started to run to them. A fireman stopped her. She fought him until he shook her, yelling, “Ma’am, ma’am, it’s not safe.”
Two others ran to help Marshall. The first took Emma; the second lifted Marshall from the ground. Keeping a firm grip on Polly’s upper arm, her fireman got on his radio, asking for the status of the ambulance.
“Anybody else inside?” he asked Polly.
“No.”
“Just your husband and the kid?”
“My fiancé,” Polly said. Then with a vehemence that surprised her, she repeated, “He is my fiancé.”
The day Marsh met Polly, he had gone mad. Or gone somewhere. Danny had felt him leave-a sucking sensation that left a vacuum behind, a north wind snatching away a coat, the dentist drawing a living tooth. Now, three months later, he and Marsh were standing shoulder to shoulder in the Methodist church on St. Charles waiting for the bride. If Polly had been younger, it would have looked suspiciously like a shotgun affair.
The church’s steeple was missing, smashed by Katrina.
The guests had to enter under scaffolding.
And it was too fucking hot for a wedding.
Though the church was air-conditioned, Danny could see the beads of sweat at his brother’s hairline. Marsh was getting what he wanted, and it scared him.
It should scare him. It should scare everybody, Danny thought.
It was the fire.
Marsh appearing on scene in the nick of time and playing hero. Just as the fire was getting started, Marsh had phoned Polly and awakened her.
Such perfect timing. Danny wondered if Marsh knew more about how the fire started than he should have.
Danny wasn’t worried about trouble with the law. Wind and flooding had damaged electrical wiring. Debris had piled under and around buildings. Police and fire departments were desperately understaffed. The loss of Polly’s house was one of many in the months following the storm.
Whispering at the far end of the room cut into his thoughts. He felt Marsh tense. They were not touching but a connection had been forged between them as kids; Danny knew his brother, felt his brother, as another part of himself. In more ways than most people realized they were the same man.
At the end of the room, the doors opened a few inches, giggles trickled out like water over rough stone, then they clicked closed again. The judge smiled. Marshall smiled back. There was an expectant murmur from the guests: partners from Marsh’s firm, Tulane people on Polly’s side. All seemed delighted these two were joining together in holy matrimony.
None of them could see Marsh-or Danny for that matter. All they saw was the shiny careers the two men had built around themselves. Polly was marrying a man no one but his brother could see.
The door reopened and Emma and Gracie, in identical high-waisted dresses of lavender, silk sashes a shade darker, and neat white Mary Janes, marched solemnly into the church. Danny winked at Emma, making her laugh. Her older sister quelled her with a look, and the two of them finished their dignified walk up the aisle, then retired, one to each side, like small pastel soldiers on parade.
Emma and Gracie were the only children Danny had ever bothered to get to know. To his surprise, he rather liked them. Before Emma and Gracie, he’d tended to think of children as much like animals, only stickier. Children were as unlike animals as they were unlike adult humans. There was a basic fiendishness in them, a primal distrust of the rules, that he found fascinating.
Fluttering like purple butterflies, Emma and Gracie settled.
Marshall ’s attention remained fixed on the empty doorway. Danny amused himself by imagining his brother’s eyes sproinging from their sockets, his tongue rolling out in a long red carpet, and his still-beating heart zooming out on extension tongs in the tradition of moonstruck cartoon characters.
True love. Hallmark made a fortune off the concept, as did more self-help authors than should ever see publication.
Danny had a sneaking suspicion it was the American version of bread and circuses. As long as the masses could be kept entertained pursuing the holy-and expensive-grail of True Love they didn’t tend to pay much attention to the systems that were bilking them.
A moment of dramatic tension, and then the recipient of Marshall ’s lost heart stepped into the doorway: Polly Deschamps née Farmer, divorcée, mother of two. She wore a dress of pewter with daffodil piping, colors that set off her silver-blonde hair. The collar was mandarin and closed with a frog that matched the piping. The style was pure fifties, from the years when fashion worshipped Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren.
Ms. Deschamps was nobody’s fool.
Seldom had Danny met anyone, man or woman, around whom he felt so unpleasantly transparent. There was a rich undercurrent in her eyes. He’d seen hints and shadows that suggested she took very little for granted. Not the person one would want to try to keep secrets from.
Polly turned and there was a tantalizing susurration. Few fabrics moved the way silk did.
Danny admired her taste. Polly did not conform to the trivial. She defined her own beauty. Earlier in her and Marsh’s courtship, Danny flirted briefly with the idea of winning her away from his brother. It wasn’t that he wanted Ms. Deschamps; he just wanted to remove her from his brother’s life before somebody got hurt. He had discarded the notion as soon as he realized it would be an either/or thing: he could either have Ms. Polly or he could have his brother. He chose Marsh. A no-brainer, as the vernacular would have it.
Polly stepped from the apse. With an innate-or, this being the Deep South, more likely a learned-sense of feminine theatricality, she twitched the full skirt clear of the door frame, looked up from beneath bangs that seemed windswept even in the still, warm air of the chapel, and smiled.
Danny felt the push under Marsh’s sternum, the ache across his shoulders, and knew the effort it cost his brother not to dash down the aisle and take her into his arms.
Polly knew it, too. Danny read it in her face. Then he felt it, felt her, inside Marsh, inside his brother. He tried to breathe, but his lungs wouldn’t fill with air. She was in Marsh’s head and spine, reaching out through his hands, looking out through his eyes. She was inside and all over him. All over them. And Marsh opened himself to it like he had never opened himself to anyone since he was a little boy.
A white-hot point lacerated the back of Danny’s left eye. A central core of him shook. He was having a heart attack or a stroke. An aneurism, a fall of black, killing blood, trembling and pulsing, was breaking, bringing down eternal night behind his eyes.
“Danny? Danny? Hey man, you okay? Danny boy? Should we call a doctor or something?”
Marsh’s voice brought him back to the world, the room. It was over, done. The ceremony concluded, the bride kissed, and all the while Danny had been dying. He looked from Polly, to Emma and Gracie, to the pastor. They looked back, their faces ludicrous with concern.
“Brother, are you okay?” Marsh said. He laid his hand on Danny’s shoulder and Danny began to breathe again.
“Overcome is all,” he said. “I’ve missed having a sister.” He smiled and opened his arms to Polly.