The Heavens Rise

of was that Anthem had probably smiled that way when he was fucking Nikki. And she’d probably given him plenty of reason to.

A stout bearded white guy in a baseball cap and a vest jacket was hovering behind the tiny, dark-skinned crew members. “Who’s this, A-Team? One of your journalist friends?”

Anthem cackled, but immediately looked away from his fellow pilot, probably to avoid breathing on the guy. “Naw, man. Just a cousin of mine from out of town. Careful on the way down there, Favreaux. Wouldn’t want to have to comfort your wife in that nice Jacuzzi of yours.”

“Only comfort you’re ever gonna give a lady is a child support check, Landry.”

And then the pilot disappeared down the ladder, and Anthem gave Marshall a conspiratorial grin, as if they had just accomplished something momentous together. Then the two crewmen—Asians, Marshall could see now, probably Thai or Malay or some other for-shit country where the only thing to do was leave—led them down the long metal-walled corridor.

Anthem had been so concerned with remembering the walkie-talkie he’d need to communicate with other vessels on the river, he’d forgotten Marshall was carrying his cell phone, and he didn’t notice when Marshall fell back and hurled the thing through an open porthole.

25

TANGIPAHOA PARISH

APRIL 2005

She would drain the pool as soon as she got there. That was her plan.

The execution of it was another matter entirely, and that’s what Nikki Delongpre was plotting as her family trundled along Highway 22 in her father’s massive Lexus SUV, a car so big and cosseted, her mother claimed it could double as an insane asylum cell for a wealthy heiress. And her mom would know; whenever they took long drives together as a family, Millie Delongpre would stretch out across the length of the backseat with her favorite pillow, several strands of platinum-blond hair draping her slack mouth as she dozed. Tonight was no exception. Her father was driving, as always, and he was caffeinated but silent, probably running through party preparations in his head.

While Nikki kept her head turned to the window so she could chew her fingernails without fear of parental disapproval, her father gently tapped his fingers atop the steering wheel, keeping time to Louis Armstrong’s “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” It was the official song of her parent’s epic, enduring love affair, the song her father had played on a cheap old stereo the night Millie had accepted his marriage proposal in a shadowy cathedral of cypress and string lights. The song of Elysium, and the song of their lavish wedding, still spoken of in ecstatic terms by the close friends who’d been in attendance. But Nikki always found Satchmo’s voice to be haunting and mournful, and this piece of music relegated her to the sidelines of a mythic romance she feared she’d never be able to live up to in her own life.

She kept telling herself she should be grateful for how quickly things had worked out, and part of her was: Ben’s detective work, the confession from Brittany Lowe, all of it was miraculous, really, and now Anthem, the only man she’d ever loved, had been returned to her after days of darkness and grief and worst of all, uncertainty, days of having her carefully crafted life plans blown to the winds like dust from her palms. But there was one loose end, and it was a big one.

The pool.

It hadn’t been touched since her terrible night with Marshall Ferriot, and odds were it was still swarming with those awful little nameless things. They’d been all over her skin as she’d run for her 4-Runner and she was willing to bet the little creepy-crawlies were the cause of the terrible headaches she’d suffered for days after. They weren’t excruciating; it was the brief, distortions of her vision that had frightened her the most. A pressure would start in her temples, and then for a few seconds, everything was grayscale, and a little twinkly around the edges, like she was looking at the world through a fish tank stained with ash. But she hadn’t said a word about them to anyone. How could she?

Any mention of the headaches or the stuff in the pool and suddenly one question from her father was sure to turn into two and then her mother would get involved, her mother who could never keep a secret, and then they’d both be demanding to know why she’d gone all the way out to Elysium without telling anyone, and swimming? Had she really gone swimming out there by herself? . . . Time. That was what she wanted. Just a little time to let everything settle, to let the reconciliation between her and Anthem become a solid, reliable thing before she had to answer any questions about Marshall Goddamn Ferriot.

But she didn’t have time.

Ben, Anthem, her own parents; she had no right to let them become victims of her secret. She couldn’t let them get anywhere near that stuff, whatever it was. Tons of Google searches had given her all kinds of images of bacteria and parasites and microbes but none that matched what she’d seen floating through the flashlight’s beam that night. So a nickname had come to her unbidden, and she couldn’t manage to shake it no matter how hard she tried. Swamp sperm! And the real reason she couldn’t get the words out of her mind was obvious; they were part of her not-so-subconscious belief that the headaches were divine punishment for what she’s done—what she’d almost done. Even though she’d read tons of pamphlets on domestic violence, even though she’d rolled her eyes at plenty of TV shows where battered women blamed themselves for the abuse heaped on them by their lovers, her thoughts about what Marshall had done to her always reset at the blame game.

If you hadn’t kept it a secret. If you hadn’t been so quick to believe Brittany Lowe’s story about Anthem. You knew something was wrong with Marshall. You’ve always known. But you ignored it because he was so handsome and because he made you feel special and valuable and worth going to North Carolina for if it ever came to that.

A better person than her would have gone back to Elysium on her own and drained the pool before now. But she’d barely gone anywhere alone after Marshall had slammed her into the side of the pool; she’d never been subjected to that kind of violence before, had never even been threatened with it. It left her feeling so timid, broken down. And yes, a little privileged not to have known that kind of fear before, but still terribly ashamed at how badly it had sidelined her. Of course, she had gone to replace her water-ruined cell phone on her own, but that had been a real struggle. As she was standing in line at the Sprint store, her hand had traveled reflexively to the welt on the back of her head, and as soon as her fingers grazed the enduring soreness there, she found herself in a panic, looking over both shoulders, convinced that Marshall was about to come barreling into the store, a semiautomatic pointed at her head.

Just point. Divine inspiration. This is what she’d been looking for ever since they’d pulled away from the house. First thing, walk to the pool, turn on the light and point and say, “What the hell is that stuff?” You’ll have warned everyone, no one will get exposed without their knowledge. And it won’t be a lie because fact is, you still don’t know what that crap actually is.

It was perfect. She’d been overthinking everything. What else was new?

Just point.

She was on the verge of laughing aloud at this simple revelation when a pickup truck flew past them going in the opposite direction, and in the rearview mirror, Nikki saw the truck’s headlights illuminate the large black snake sliding across her mother’s chest.

Darkness descended. She told herself it was a trick of the eye. But she could hear its scales rustling against her mother’s blouse.

Her lips parted; she heard herself wheeze. She went to reach for her father’s arm and saw the speedometer. They were hurtling down the highway at seventy-five miles per hour. And so she froze. She froze because the snake she’d seen had been huge, body almost as thick as her wrist, scales the color of smoke. A water moccasin, it had to be. And yes, yes, yes, snakes only attack when their territory is threatened, but this bastard had been removed from his territory and placed in hers and so there were no rules. There were no rules and oh my God it was huge and her mother couldn’t wake up because she’d scream and if she screamed, what