The Heavens Rise

“Did it?”

“Yes. But so did wine.”

“My mother drinks wine to go to sleep too.”

“Yeah, well, if I had to deal with your mouth every day, I might need wine to get up in the morning.”

“That’s nice.”

“I see. So nice was your objective here?”

“Well, if your objective is not to answer my question, then—”

“Tell you what. If one of those nice ladies over there steps in front of a truck by mistake later today, you gonna feel responsible because you shot off your mouth at them before they had time to digest their lunch?”

“It’s not the same thing and you know it—”

“Don’t tell me what I know, young man.”

“He bashed out a plate-glass window with a metal folding chair and threw himself against it. He took a running start, for Christ’s sake!”

“I know what he did. I was there. I saw it!”

“Yeah, but you didn’t write it. No, you wrote all about teen suicides and mental health resources in high schools. Oh, and you took a bunch of pot shots at my high school because everybody who goes there is rich—”

“Rich and?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“The answer’s no. I don’t feel responsible. I think Marshall Ferriot was clearly unbalanced and it wasn’t going to take much to tip him.”

“I’ll say,” the kid growled under his breath.

“But you’re asking the wrong question.”

“How so?”

“You should ask me if I regret saying it.”

He was regarding her for the first time without open hostility, and she felt the tension in her chest turn into a vague wash of heat that ran down into the pit of her stomach.

“Do I think he tried to jump out that window because of me? Hell, no. But what I said to him that night might be the last words he ever hears. And they were unkind and they were meant for his mother. So yes, I regret saying it. I do. But if you’re after some kind of truth with me today, son, let me tell you the only thing I know to be true, one hundred percent. Nothing in life is under our control except how we treat people. Nothing.”

It didn’t look like she’d knocked the wind out of him, but those big, bloodshot eyes of his had wandered to some point just behind her, and she realized he had the look of someone reading off a script. And when he spoke again, she was startled to stillness by how devoid of emotion his voice was.

“Junior year we had a transfer student come to Cannon named Suzy Laborde. Her parents didn’t have two pennies to rub together, but Suzy was a killer math student so she got a scholarship and she worked her ass off to stay there. She was from outside Thibodaux, so that was about a two-hour drive each way. Her mom would have to drop her off near school at six in the morning so she could get back to Houma in time for her first job. So Suzy would have to wander the neighborhood for a couple hours, maybe hang out at gas stations ’cause those were the only places open that time of day. Sometimes Mom and I would see her on the way in and we’d give her a ride. But most people just ignored her.

“She didn’t care that barely anyone would give her the time of day. She didn’t care that she couldn’t afford the nice clothes the other girls wore. She didn’t ask to be invited to anyone’s parties and she sure as hell didn’t expect to be Homecoming Queen. And I don’t think she gave two shits when Marshall Ferriot started spreading rumors that he’d seen a roach crawl out of her shirt during assembly.

“Then she made a mistake, see. We were all in American History class and the teacher had put Marshall on the spot. I can’t even remember what the question was but Marshall didn’t know the answer and the teacher was letting him hang himself. And then Suzy jumped in and corrected him. And she was right. And I remember thinking, Oh shit, Suzy. Now he’s really going to come for you.”

A sudden spike of emotion caused the kid to suck in a deep breath. Marissa watched, silently, as he gritted his teeth in an attempt to get his composure back.

“Cannon has this big courtyard in the middle of school. And there’s a giant oak tree right in the center with these benches all around it. Suzy and one of the art teachers built this birdhouse for the doves that used to nest in the tree. It was like her thing. She was out there every morning and every afternoon, feeding the birds. Making sure the house was still in one piece.

“One morning, when everyone was in the courtyard before first period, Suzy went to check on the birdhouse and she saw someone had nailed a piece of wood over the opening. And there was a smell coming from inside it, a bad smell. So bad, nobody was sitting near the tree that day. So she ran and got some maintenance staff and they pulled the board off . . . and I just remember her screaming. Screaming so loud everyone in school could hear. See, there was a security light in the tree right over the birdhouse and whoever had nailed the birdhouse shut had replaced the bulb in it with a heat lamp. The doves had cooked to death overnight.”

“And you think Marshall did it?” Marissa asked.

“I know he did it.”

“How?”

“Because I went to every hardware store in Orleans and Jefferson Parish before I found the clerk who sold him the bulb. And I took what I found to Suzy and I told her we had to go to the upper- school principal. And she begged me not to because if her parents found out that anyone that crazy was threatening her at Cannon, they’d pull her out in a heartbeat. Because they were tired of driving her two hours every day, tired of her needing to be too good to wait tables like her mother. And that’s the only reason Marshall got away with it.”

“Because Suzy asked you not to do anything,” Marissa said.

“All I’m saying, Miss Hopewell, is that maybe you should let yourself off the hook if you were unkind to Marshall Ferriot. Also, they say most coma patients can hear everything that’s said in the room with them. So that comment you made to him in the Plimsoll Club. It’s not like it’ll be the last thing he hears. Not until he decides to die.”

“Is that what you really believe?” she asked. “You think he’s in some kind of limbo?”

“Well, if he’s not in hell, I hope he’s got a real good view.”

The kid’s jaw was quivering again, and the wet sheen in his eyes was back, and that’s when Marissa realized why he’d looked vaguely familiar. His jaw was quivering the first time she ever laid eyes on him, on the WDSU nightly news, when he was one of scores of other well-dressed Uptown teenagers and their parents standing along the banks of Bayou Rabineaux and setting glowing Japanese lanterns adrift in the black waters that had swallowed the Delongpre family with one final, unforgiving gulp.

The Delongpres. Funny how the name itself had been scrubbed from her memory by the horrors she had witnessed at the Plimsoll Club.

“What’s your name?”

But he was halfway down the block, and he was moving so fast down the grim little concrete canyon, the white soles of tennis shoes seemed to be winking at her.

10

I want you back in school tomorrow,” Peyton Broyard told her son when she found him slouching in front of his laptop. She’d only been home from the grocery store a minute or two when she abandoned her bags in the kitchen and came straight to Ben’s room, and that meant the message she had to deliver was important with a capital I, P, T and another T, as she liked to say.

Ben’s mother had stopped searching his face for evidence of teenage secrets a while ago, mostly because she wasn’t any good at it. Too many alarmist news stories about teenagers and drugs had given her the false sense that her only child was a lot more predictable then he actually was. Three times last year she’d accused him