The Heavens Rise

hand.

9

You’re a liar!”

The boy couldn’t have been any older than sixteen, but his outburst left Marissa Hopewell standing gape- mouthed a few steps from the entrance to her office building.

She was as startled by the kid’s physical appearance as she was by his shrill accusation. Business-casual pedestrians weaved around him as his thick patch of sandy-blond hair danced in the hot wind, the same wind that kept turning her breasts into a boat’s prow under her flapping peasant dress. He was older than he looked at first glance; it was his height—five foot two, tops—that made him look like a child, and an angry one at that. The rest of him was all milk-white skin, a small, round face dominated by huge blue eyes—bloodshot from hours of crying, it looked like—and a full-lipped mouth so generous it made him look like he was constantly sneering.

He looked vaguely familiar, too. Like a child actor she’d seen play bit parts in movies over the years.

Bev Legendre, Kingfisher’s ad sales director, put a protective hand on Marissa’s shoulder, while the other ladies they’d just had lunch with hovered close by, deciding whether or not to call the security guard.

“I’m sorry. But I don’t know who you are,” Marissa tried in her best maternal voice. But the kid screwed his eyes shut and shook his head as if her soothing tone was enough of an accusation to rival the one he’d just made.

“You had a fight with him. Before he did it. Before he jumped. But you just left that part out, didn’t you?”

“Young man, how ’bout you calm yourself down and—” Bev cut in, with a tone of whiskey-voiced authority. Marissa placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder and gave her a slight nod. Bev withdrew and went to join the other women, a few of whom were now stationed inside the lobby doors, pretending not to stare and doing a bad job of it.

“You’re a friend of Marshall Ferriot’s?”

Instead of answering, the kid said, “I talked to everyone who was at the table that night and they said your column was crap!”

“Well, there’s no accounting for taste.”

“How about lying? Is there any accounting for lying?”

She’d regretted her wisecrack as soon as it was out of her mouth, but when the bundle of hostility a few feet away reacted with that dreaded accusation yet again, she had to work to unclench her fists. She’d averaged three hours of sleep a night since the horrors she’d witnessed in the Plimsoll Club, and reliving it all again for the column her editor had leaned on her to write certainly hadn’t helped much. In fact, it had resulted in her first visit to Sunday services in months, which had thrilled her mother no end, but left Marissa feeling a little desperate and weak.

But one thing was for sure; the teenager before her was in a lot more pain than she was, and she was willing to endure another few insults to find out why.

But had she lied?

It was an op-ed column, for Christ’s sake. Teen suicides had been the focus, not the gory blow-by-blow of Marshall Ferriot’s horrific and fatal jump. Not her. But maybe that was just it. Lies of omission were the worst kind, really, maybe because they were so damn prevalent. Was that what he was accusing her of? Some unpleasant words exchanged with the victim before his leap and suddenly she was, what? A part of the story?

Come on, girl. Don’t act like you haven’t thought it yourself over the past few nights, staring up at the ceiling, remembering the soullessness in his eyes when he hit that window. Wondering if maybe you’d tipped a crazy man over the edge with that cute little line about having dinner with snakes.

“I’m very sorry about what happened to your friend,” she said.

“He wasn’t my friend,” the kid muttered. And something about this admission seemed to make him more present; he registered their audience inside the lobby and his eyes widened with embarrassment. And there was that wet sheen again, but he quickly blinked it away.

“Then what was he?” she asked.

“His mother, she was being rude. Asking you questions about your family. Your people. Some of the other people at the table, they thought it was racist.”

Well, glad I wasn’t the only one, Marissa thought.

The boy continued. “But then Marshall . . .” And Marissa saw for the first time that uttering the guy’s name seemed to make her surprise visitor sick to his stomach. “Marshall . . . he asked you something about snakes . . .”

“Yes. He did . . .”

And it pained her to answer. It made her realize that yes, there was plenty of weirdness before Marshall’s big leap, and she’d left it all out. Maybe if she’d taken a deep breath while she was writing the damn thing. If she hadn’t rushed through it and let her sleeplessness get the best of her. And maybe she’d left out those pesky details because she didn’t want to be writing the damn column in the first place. The whole thing felt gruesome and invasive and she couldn’t find the right words to describe that mind-bending night. Hell, she’d also left out the part about how Marshall’s mother, a woman who had radiated contempt for Marissa just moments before, had somehow ended up sobbing in her arms, sobbing for a son who would be declared brain-dead when he was wheeled into Ochsner Medical Center an hour later, and for a husband who had died breaking their son’s thirty- one-story fall.

“And you said something back,” the kid said, only his voice had gone soft, and maybe that was because Marissa couldn’t look him in the eye anymore.

“He asked me if I could recognize certain snakes in the wild and I said I was more worried about the snakes I might have to have dinner with.” And as soon as the words left her mouth, she saw the soulless look in Marshall’s eyes again, the lattice of cuts on the boy’s face. And . . . Oh my God. Holy mother. He’d said something! He actually said something and I plum forgot it with everything that—

She didn’t want her struggle to remember Marshall Ferriot’s last words—maybe they’d be his last words; he wasn’t technically dead yet—to show on her face, not with her tiny accuser still standing right there, looking calm and focused now that she’d been thrown off her game.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” The boy said. “That he said something . . . before the window gave way . . .”

“I put . . . That was it. He said, I put a . . . And then. That was it. The window gave and he was gone. He and his father . . . just gone.”

His slight nod told her she’d just given him what he’d really come for, that her sudden recollection matched what the other guests at Table 10 had told him. And only then did she stop to consider how remarkable it was that this quaking teenager had managed to get to all of those people in just a few day’s time. Her column had gone up on the website just the day before, and it wouldn’t be in the print edition until Monday. So, either he’d done his investigative work in a day, or he’d been working this since it happened. Working it, or living it, she wasn’t quite sure, given that the kid’s connection to Marshall Ferriot still wasn’t clear. Either way, holy crap! Who was this little guy?

“Is that why you went to church with your mother last Sunday? ’Cause you feel responsible for what happened to Marshall Ferriot?”

“That’s stalking, son.”

“Oh, but if I was you, it’d be journalism, right?”

“It’ll all be semantics when my mother pulls the pepper spray.”

“And you still won’t have answered my question.”

“I went to church because I haven’t been sleeping well since it happened and I believe in something, so I thought it might help.”