helped make that clear to me.'
'If you're looking for me to reciprocate, I can't. I've already told you everything that happened.'
'It doesn't have to be about the hauntings. Lila, today your mother told me you'd had a nervous breakdown when you went off to boarding school. An episode of depression. What was that about?'
'There's nothing to tell. I hated the school, my family was falling apart, my uncle had died not long before. And then my daddy died during my first year. I missed him horribly. My mother was broken up and drinking too much, and even Josephine had left, so I had no one to talk to. I got… unglued.'
'That's a lot for anyone to deal with.'
Lila nodded. 'Ron, it wrecked him up, too, just in a different way. He's two years older than me, but he was still living at home – he went to the public high school here. You wouldn't think it now, but before all that he was a… a sweet person. He used to be my confidant, my protector. But it scarred him terribly. The lesson he learned was that loving your family too much can hurt you. If you take anything seriously, it'll hurt you. So he's never married, never settled down, never taken anything seriously. He's never let himself care about anyone but Ron Beauforte – that's how he protected himself. Now it's just… who he is.'
Cree thought that was a fair appraisal. 'So, you… did you get any kind of help back then?'
'Oh, I left school for a couple of weeks. I came home and Momma had me see Dr. Fitzpatrick – Paul's father, an old family friend. She wasn't going to let someone outside our immediate circle see a LambertBeauforte in the shape I was in, God, no! She told me to show some spine, and he did what doctors did back then: gave me all kinds of pills. Anxiety pills, depression pills, pills to help me sleep – it's a wonder I didn't become an addict. After a while they sent me back to school.'
'When did it end? Your… breakdown?'
Lila tipped awkwardly back on her haunches, a plump woman unused to sitting on the ground. 'End? It never ended. I put my problems and my feelings and my past into a… a Mason jar, sealed it up tight. And did my best to keep them there. I became this.' She sat back into the wet grass, gesturing at her body, her house, and her yard, and her expression turned sad and hollow. 'I didn't rock the boat or draw attention. That's what you were supposed to do.'
Cree's breath went out of her as she was buffeted by an aching sympathy. She felt that self-containment in Lila, that holding back, that clinging to a safe, predictable life, that rigid rule of doing what was expected. It was Lila's way of protecting herself, not so different from Ron's – except that in her case it was reinforced by all the traditional, safe, domestic women's roles, and by Jack Warren's good-ol'-boy, chubby-hubby expectations, and Charmian's tyranny, and it all fit together. No one had protested when Lila had locked herself away and that bright, sparkling girl disappeared.
'Is that what you meant the other day? When you said something had happened to you?'
'Oh, hell, I don't know. I can't remember my past, Cree. What I remember, it's all from those clippings and photos. It's a movie of a life, not a life. Paul said you were thinking about repressed memory. Maybe that's what it is. But I don't know – it just feels like there was the life then, and there's the life now, and they don't have a hell of a lot to do with each other.'
'Lila, there are two ghosts. I don't know what to make of the wolf or the snake or the table, but there are two more… human… ghosts.
One is the boar-headed man who chases you and hurts you. The other manifests mainly in the library. He goes through some act of violent beating and then later dies and feels a sad, beautiful longing. They're not the same person. Do you know who they are?'
'No!' Lila's eyes had widened at the idea. 'I thought there's only one! How can you be sure?'
'It's more than the difference in their moods or their affects. They spring from different impulses. They're completely different kinds of manifestation. Different… levels.'
'I don't understand anything you're saying! I only know what happens to me!' Lila's hand were working busily among the leaves and stems, but she was clipping anything, hacking away at healthy branches and tops full of unopened buds. Cree put her hand on her arm and was alarmed at the tension she felt there.
'We don't have to go into that now. Lila, I… I've been taking on your susceptibility to these ghosts – you understand that, right? But if I'm going to survive, I've got to take on your strength, too. I've got to absorb your determination and your persistence and your stubbornness. I've got to know your desire to… fix what's wrong with your life. You've got to show me how you survive.' Cree hoped any of that made sense to her.
Lila's arm seemed to shiver beneath Cree's fingers. 'I know why you told me about you and your husband,' she said in a darkly hollow voice. 'And I'm grateful. But see, your story, it's… beautiful. Sad, but beautiful. Mine – it's not. And there's nothing either of us can do about that.'
Cree didn't know what to say.
'And as for how I survive,' Lila went on, looking more like her mother now, 'I survive by doing the next thing that needs doing. And the thing after that. Which right now probably means working on the yard here. You're very right – it is a mess.'
The plumbers had left by the time they went back inside, but the tilers were still at work and the house was filled with the sharp chemical smell of adhesive. As Lila conferred with the men upstairs, Cree spent a few more minutes leafing through the Beauforte photos. Nothing new caught her eye. When Lila came back down, they hugged good-bye wordlessly and Cree left.
She wondered whether she had accomplished anything at all. Her attempts to build upon their earlier spirit of companionship had failed. Lila had closed down, especially when Cree had told her there were two ghosts. The idea had upset her greatly; the image of her hands rooting and clipping blindly, indiscriminately, seemed to bode ill.
The only ray of hope Cree could find was a subtle one. It had to do with why Lila had chosen to move back to Beauforte House in the first place. Yes, Lila was in a box, a jar, constructed equally by herself, her family, her society. But her original desire to move back to Beauforte House was a proactive effort to break out of her boxed-in life. She had sought to reclaim that depth, that richness of texture. To reclaim the past, too. Lila's determination to move back there had to have an unconscious element of wanting to come to grips with her sealed-away past. On some level she understood her fundamental predicament and was willing to face it. That motivation was the essential foundation of any therapeutic process.
Cree turned left at the street and walked along the front of the Warrens' yard. They hadn't gotten this far in their cleanup effort, and leaves and twigs still littered the shmbs and flower beds. She walked toward the Taurus, absentmindedly picking fallen twigs from the front plantings. At the corner of the Warrens' lot, where the growth met the side fence, a larger branch had fallen, crimping the shrubs beneath, and reflexively she stopped to disengage it. When she pulled aside the surrounding foliage to lift it free, she saw something that turned the world suddenly upside down.
Behind the leaves, lashed against the rail of the fence at the corner: a finger-sized stick. It was tied with long blades of grass, or maybe the thin fronds of a palmetto. It had one notch carved crudely into it.
A hoodoo hex, just like the ones Deelie Brown had found at Beauforte House.
29
Joyce was in a good mood when Cree got back to the hotel. 'Mr. Beauforte agreed to meet us at the house at seven. But he sounded prickly. What'd you do to get him so bent out of shape?'
'My job.'
Joyce nodded without conviction. Then she looked Cree up and down, noticing the wet grass stains on the knees of her jeans, the many faint scratches on her forearms. 'What happened to you?'
'Gardening. The storm kind of wrecked up Lila's yard, so – '
'I mean what's got you so upset?'
Cree debated telling her about the hex but thought she'd wait, try to fit it into the pattern that teased at the edge of her thoughts. 'Listen, Joyce… I don't know if I'm up for going to the house tonight. I've got some thinking to do. You don't really need me for this, anyway, you're better at it than I am. You go without me.'
Joyce nodded, suspicious but apparently not too dismayed at the prospect of spending an evening alone with a guy who looked like Clark Gable with some meat on him.
