Three days later, when she was up and about, we told Alouette that her baby had died and she said, “Yeah, I thought so.” She was still on sedation, her eyes dull stones.
I went out that afternoon and bought clothes for her. Jeans and sweatshirts, for the most part, but also a plain cotton dress. That’s what she chose to wear when I came by to take her, out on pass, to dinner.
“Well?” she said, standing at half-slouch in the doorway of her room. She had pulled her hair, damaged from months of poor nutrition and utter lack of care, behind her head with a barrette and tried to fluff it out, to give it some body. She wore lipstick that, pale as it was, only emphasized her waxy, sallow complexion. She’d borrowed shoes, navy pumps, from one of the nurses, I guess, along with the lipstick and barrette; I’d bought her a pair of knockoff Nikes.
“Well,” I said. “Your mother’s daughter. No doubt about it.”
“Yeah? Well you can be pretty charming for an old fart, even if you are full of shit.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Take it any way you want. Where we going?”
“Up to you. Kids still live off pizza?”
“I don’t know. Next time I see one, I’ll ask.”
“I stand corrected, and apologize. How about burgers?”
“How about steaks?”
“That was going to be my very next suggestion.”
“Big ones. What time do the gates slam shut on me here, anyway?”
“Ten. So there’s plenty of time for a movie too, if you’d like.”
“You’re pretty ordinary, aren’t you, Lewis?”
“I try.”
“Okay,” she said. We stepped together out of the hospital into a warm fall evening, day’s final light fading in a blush of pink and gray just above the trees. “I’ll try too.”
The place we decided on, with the improbable name of Fred’s Steak-Out, looked as though it had slipped through a crack in time from Dodge City or Abilene circa 1860. You could see space between the bare boards of floor and wall, the tables were slabs of wood nailed to lengths of four-by-four and covered with butcher paper and drinks came in old canning jars. The spitoons must have been out back for cleaning. And of course the food was wonderful.
Alouette had prime rib that looked like about half a small cow, a baked potato the size of a football, and mixed greens, mostly kale and collard greens, from the look of it. I ordered grilled tuna with a Caesar salad. We both had iced tea. Lots of iced tea. She still complained of a sore throat from having had the tube in, and thirst from all the drugs.
That night I talked to her more about her mother and me, about our time together. Specific things, things she asked, like had we ever gone here, or done that, and how had it felt when Verne got married and I didn’t see her for so long, did it bother me when she was on the streets, what made her decide to give it up finally, how had she managed to do that. We talked, too, about what was going to happen when she got out of the hospital, where she’d go, what her options were (as everybody says these days), and by the time I delivered her back to the hospital, there were glints of light deep within her eyes, stray emotions tugging at the hard lines of her face. Or at least I imagined there were.
Alouette wasn’t the only one who needed to check in with reality.
I went back to my room and dialed Chip Landrieu. He’d obviously been asleep.
“Lew Griffin,” I said.
There was a long silence.
“It’s usually only bad news comes in the night,” he finally said.
“Not this time. Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I’m calling from Memphis, and I’ve spent the last few weeks down in Mississippi. But I wanted to tell you I’ve found Alouette.”
Another silence. A breath.
“Is she all right?”
“I think so, basically. She’s been on some hard drugs, and it’s going to be rocky for a while. But I’ve talked to her a lot these last few days. I think she has a good chance of making it.”
I told him about the baby, about Mississippi and my straggling path toward Alouette.
“She’ll be getting out of the hospital soon.”
“What then?”
“I’m not sure. We’ve talked about a treatment center up here, or some kind of halfway house. She may want to come back to New Orleans. Right now, it’s still one-day-at-a-time time.”
“You will let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, won’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Thanks, Lew. Keep me posted.”
“I will.”
“You need anything? Money?”
“I’m fine.”
“Let me know if you do. Guess I’ll owe you a few dozen lunches when you get back.”
“You’re on.”
I sat looking at the phone for a while, finally dialed again but when Clare’s answering machine came on the line, hung up.
A minute or two later I called back and told the machine: “It’s Lew, Clare. I’m in Memphis. I found Alouette. Sorry I haven’t called, but I have been thinking of you.”
After hanging up again, I realized that I should have left my number and thought about calling back, but decided to put it off till morning.
I pulled out my notebook and looked up Richard Garces’s home number. His machine came on the line, its recorded message in rapid-fire, oddly staccato Spanish, but then Garces himself broke in with “Rick.”
I told him who it was and he said, “Hey,” stretching it out like a yawn, “good to hear from you.”
He’d spoken with Mickey Francis from the hospital and was up to date on pretty much all of it.
“I need some help, Richard. Advice, really.”
“You’ve got it.”
“What’s Alouette’s legal situation?”
“Shaky-as it always is when contentions of mental health are part of the package. Of course in this case there’s really no established history of mental health problems, and the girl is in her majority.”
“If her father doesn’t know by now, he will soon enough. I’m expecting lawyers to swoop down on her like a pack of crows.”
“I’ll have to check to be sure. Laws could be different there; a lot of them are, since everything here is based on the Napoleonic Code. But there’s no formal charge as far as the courts are concerned, right? No talk of sanity hearings, anything like that?”
“None.”
“That would probably be the way he’d want to go. Claim that the girl was financially dependent, stress her runaway status, abandonment of the baby and its subsequent death. That’s all public record. The lawyers could lean hard on her overdose as a suicide attempt. After that, mostly it would depend on the judge. Down here, I could pretty much call it according to whose court it was set for. There, I just don’t know. But they’d probably get some kind of exclusionary ruling. Commitment to one of the diagnostic centers for observation, possibly, or mandatory court-monitored therapy.”
“Is there anything we could do to counter it?”
“This isn’t science we’re talking, Lew. Not even law, really-and law itself is unpredictable enough. More like magic where the correspondences are skewed and whatever rules there are, keep changing. Let me do some checking. I’ll get on the network and see what I can turn up. I have some contacts scattered around up there. I’ll get back to you. May be a while. The girl able to sit up straight and say what she wants?”
“Yes. Once she decides.”
“She look okay?”
“Yeah. A little shopworn.”
“Good. That counts for a lot. Okay, let me fire up the circuits and read some smoke. Where you gonna be?”
I gave him my phone number and said if I missed him, which was likely under the circumstances, I’d check back with him sometime tomorrow.
I hung up and sat remembering light gouging at my eyes.
Once years ago, surfacing briefly in a diner during a week-long drunk, I found Mephistopheles himself sitting across from me in the booth, pouring Tabasco sauce into his coffee. At the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world. We talked a while (I remember the waitress coming by to ask if I needed anything, and a couple of times to ask if I was all right, and some other people staring over at us), I declined his offers, and he left, telling me to keep up the good work.
Naturally, I later used the whole thing in a novel.
Tomorrow morning, too, I would call the university, try to mend that tattered sail as best I could, if it were mendable at all. Then Clare. Hoping for wind and calm seas.