Taltos

doctor doesn’t want her hands to be soiled. Think about it, how often a surgeon washes her hands. She asked me how I was, she wanted …” And there he had choked up, both times that he told this story. “She wanted to take my pulse. She was worried about me.”

Wish to God I had seen it, what they buried! Wish to God she had spoken to me!

It was the strangest thing-to be rich now, the designee at thirteen, to have a driver and a car (vulgate translation: flashy black stretch limo with disc, tape player, color TV, and lots of room for ice and Diet Coke), and money in her purse all the time, like twenty-dollar bills, no less, and heaps of new clothes, and people patching up the old house on St. Charles and Amelia, catching her on the fly with swatches of “raw silk” or handpainted “wall coverings.”

And to want this, to want to know, to want to be part of, to want to understand the secrets of this woman and this man, this house that would one day come to her. A ghost is dead beneath the tree. A legend lies under the spring rains. And in its arm, another one. It was like turning away from the sure, bright glitter of gold, to take dark trinkets of inestimable power from a small hiding place. Ah, this is magic. Not even her own mother’s death had so distracted Mona.

Mona talked to Rowan. A lot.

She came on the property with her own key, the heiress and all that. And because Michael said she could. And Michael, no longer looking at her with lust in the eye, had practically adopted her.

She went back to the rear garden, crossed the lawn, skirting the grave if she remembered, and sometimes she didn’t, and then she sat at the wicker table and said, “Rowan, good morning.” And then talked and talked.

She told Rowan all about the development of Mayfair Medical, that they had chosen a site, that they had agreed upon a great geothermal system for the heating and cooling, that plans were being drawn. “Your dream is coming into being,” she told Rowan. “The Mayfair family knows this city as well as anybody. We don’t need feasibility studies and things like that. We’re making the hospital happen as you wanted it.”

No response from Rowan. Did she even care anymore about the great medical complex that would revolutionize the relationship between patients and their attending families, in which teams of caretakers would assist even the anonymous patients?

“I found your notes,” said Mona. “I mean, they weren’t locked up. They didn’t look private.”

No answer. The giant black limbs of the oak moved just a little. The banana leaves fluttered against the brick wall.

“I myself have stood outside Touro Infirmary, asking people what they wanted in an ideal hospital, you know, talking to people for hours.”

Nothing.

“My Aunt Evelyn is in Touro,” Mona said quietly. “She’s had a stroke. They ought to bring her home, but I don’t think she knows the difference.” Mona would cry if she talked about Ancient Evelyn. She’d cry if she talked about Yuri. She didn’t. She didn’t say that Yuri had not written or called for three weeks now. She didn’t say that she, Mona, was in love, and with a dark, charming, British-mannered man of mystery who was more than twice her age.

She’d explained all that several days ago to Rowan-the way that Yuri had come from London to help Aaron Lightner. She’d explained that Yuri had been a gypsy and he understood things that Mona understood. She even described how they’d met together in her bedroom the night before Yuri went away. “I worry all the time about him,” she had said.

Rowan had never looked at her.

What could she say now? That last night, she had some terrible dream about Yuri that she couldn’t remember.

“Of course, he’s a grown man,” she said. “I mean he’s past thirty and all, and he knows how to take care of himself, but the thought that somebody in the Talamasca might hurt him.” Oh, stop this!

Maybe this was all wrong. It was too easy to dump all these words on a person who couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.

But Mona could swear there was a vague acknowledgment in Rowan that Mona was there. Maybe it was only that Rowan didn’t look annoyed, or sealed off.

Mona didn’t sense displeasure.

Her eyes swept Rowan’s face. Rowan’s expression was so serious. Had to be a mind in there, just had to be. Why, she looked twenty million times better than she had looked in the coma. And look, she’d buttoned her negligee. Michael swore he didn’t do those things for her. She’d buttoned three buttons. Yesterday it had only been one.

But Mona knew that despair can fill up a mind so completely that trying to read its thoughts is like trying to read through thick smoke. Was it despair that had settled on Rowan?

Mary Jane Mayfair had come this last weekend, the mad country girl from Fontevrault. Wanderer, buccaneer, seer, and genius, to hear her tell it, and part old lady and part fun-loving girl, at the ripe old age of nineteen and a half. A fearsome, powerful witch, so she described herself.

“Rowan’s just fine,” Mary Jane had declared after staring and squinting at Rowan, and then pushing her own cowboy hat off her head so it laid against the back of her neck. “Yep, just brace yourself. She’s taking her time, but this lady here knows what’s happening.”

“Who is this nut case?” Mona had demanded, though she’d felt a wild compassion for the child actually, never mind that she was six years older than Mona. This was a noble savage decked out in a Wal-Mart denim skirt no longer than the middle of her thighs, and a cheap white blouse that was much too tight across her egregious breasts, and even missing a crucial button. Severely deprived, and playing it off beautifully.

Of course, Mona had known who Mary Jane was. Mary Jane Mayfair actually lived in the ruins of Fontevrault Plantation, in the Bayou Country. This was the legendary land of poachers who killed beautiful white-necked herons just for their meat, alligators that could overturn your boat and eat your child, and crazy Mayfairs who’d never made it to New Orleans and the wooden steps of the famous New Orleans Fontevrault outpost, otherwise known as the house on St. Charles and Amelia.

Mona was actually dying to see this place, Fontevrault, that stood still with its six columns up and six columns down, even though the first floor was flooded with three feet of water. Seeing the legendary Mary Jane was the next best thing, the cousin only recently returned from “away” who tethered her pirogue to the newel post, and paddled across a stagnant pool of treacherous slime to get to the pickup truck she drove into town for her groceries.

Everybody was talking about Mary Jane Mayfair. And because Mona was thirteen, and the heiress now, and the only legacy-connected person who would talk to people or acknowledge their presence, everybody thought Mona would find it especially interesting to speak about a teenaged hick cousin who was “brilliant” and “psychic” and wandered about the way Mona did, on her own.

Nineteen and a half. Until Mona laid eyes on this brilliant bit of work, she had not considered someone of that age a true teenager.

Mary Jane was just about the most interesting discovery they had made since they’d started rounding up everyone for genetic testing of the entire Mayfair family. It was bound to happen, finding a throwback like Mary Jane. Mona wondered what else might crawl out of the swamps soon.

But imagine a flooded plantation house of Greek Revival grandeur, gradually sinking into the duckweed, with globs of plaster falling off “with a splash” into the murky waters. Imagine fish swimming through the stairway balusters.

“What if that house falls on her?” Bea had asked. “The house is in the water. She can’t stay there. This girl must be brought here to New Orleans.”

“Swamp water, Bea,” Celia had said. “Swamp water, remember. It’s not a lake or the Gulf Stream. And besides, if this child does not have sense to get out of there and take the old woman to safety-”

The old woman.

Mona had all of this fresh in her memory this last weekend when Mary Jane had walked into the backyard and plunged into the little crowd that surrounded the silent Rowan as if it were a picnic.

“I knew about y’all,” Mary Jane had declared. She’d addressed her words to Michael too, who stood by Rowan’s chair as if posing for an elegant family portrait. And how Michael’s eyes had locked onto her.