The Heavens Rise

that at all.

But I didn’t want any of this, now, did I?

I lie awake nights remembering the view into his soul my gift afforded me. We were writhing together in the grass, a few yards from the pool at Elysium, and he was holding me by my neck while he drew a short knife with a sharply curved blade up the length of my sternum. And I wasn’t screaming or crying out for help or even gasping for breath. I was accepting this evisceration with serenity and calm. And I could feel his pride, his sense of triumph, at my silence.

Can you blame me for what I did to him?

Have you ever looked into the soul of someone who craves your evisceration? Can you see why I changed my mind at the last minute and decided to go for more than a confession? “I put a snake in their car” . . .

It’s been a year now. I’m sure they medevaced him out of New Orleans before Katrina. But with each passing day, his chances of waking up again diminish. I’ve read up on what happens to patients in a persistent vegetative state. I hope all of it happens to him.

Yes, I’ve thought about finishing the job on many occasions. My father was so horrified by what I’d done, he made us leave New Orleans before I could try. But how would I do it? I can’t use my ability on a person who isn’t technically conscious. (Trust me. I’ve tried, just to satisfy my curiosity on this front.) And I’m not going to make an innocent person do my dirty work.

And then there’s the whole not knowing. There’s what I heard him say at the table that night, about knowing the difference between a venomous snake and a nonvenomous one.

The water moccasin and the diamond-backed water snake are easily confused, you see. Both grow to lengths of six feet, both have smoke-colored scales and bodies as thick as a person’s wrist. Only the diamond-backed water snake isn’t venomous at all. Was it just a prank? And was he just a boy who didn’t know any better? (Am I just a girl???)

As for the peek I got into his soul? Maybe there are similar visions of violence inside the souls of men who have never lifted a hand to harm anyone in their lives. But he did harm us. And so . . . yes, there is a little regret. Just enough to keep me from driving a knife through his heart with my own two hands.

I like to believe that with each day, with each hour, death has pulled Marshall Ferriot a little closer to the gates of hell; some souls are just heavier than others.

But I wonder if as he lies there, some part of his brain is replaying that image of me, gutted like a catfish, over and over again. And when those thoughts become too much for me to bear, I tell myself that a father for a mother is a fair enough trade. For now.

26

TANGIPAHOA PARISH

OCTOBER 2013

Ben Broyard threw himself against the door so hard that the journal he’d just finished reading went spinning off the table and clattered to the floor beside him. There was no response from outside.

Then he was standing in mud, his shoulder still aching from the blow.

String lights sparkled in the low, shadowy branches overhead. The trailer was several yards behind him. Once again, time had been excised from his consciousness with a surgeon’s precision. And as he turned in place, he realized there were two trailers parked in the mud a few yards away, not just the one in which he’d been confined. The other was a bright silver Airstream that had the same stage-set newness and shine as the tiny prison in which he’d been forced to read a chronicle of monsters and magic.

He was standing amid a re-creation of Elysium as it appeared more than two decades ago, in that photo of her newly engaged parents Nikki had described in her journal. (It had to be a re-creation. The land on which the original Elysium had stood was now a wash of untamed swamp.) Everything seemed perfectly arranged except for the small tangles of shredded plastic lying close to the trailers. The closer Ben got, the more he could see that they were pieces of the original lounger Noah and Millie Delongpre had been reclining on as she’d extended her ring hand toward the camera. But just pieces. Something had torn both lounge chairs to pieces.

A snake’s scales. Claws. The eyes of a lost woman.

Just then, approaching footsteps squished in the mud and when he turned, Ben saw a stopped figure hobbling toward him with the support of a cane. There was some vitality underneath the man’s strained movements, and Ben sensed that his contorted walk was not the result of age, but of some recent and serious injury.

Once they were a few feet apart, the pale glow from the string lights above illuminated the man’s face. Ben felt his vision narrow and a weight on his chest that made him gasp.

The last time Ben had laid eyes on Noah Delongpre had been eight years ago; the man had been home early after doing his rounds at the hospital and rifling through mail in the kitchen as he pretended not to eavesdrop on the conversation Nikki and Ben were having in the other room; another whispered, frantic how-can-I-ever- forgive-Anthem session Ben felt overwhelmed by and powerless to bring to a satisfying close. Noah’s eyes had briefly met Ben’s through the doorway, and for the first time he’d seen real concern for Nikki in them. The sight of it had so startled him in that moment, he’d stammered through his next few sentences to his best friend.

Noah Delongpre had always struck Ben as a wildly self-centered man, and his only real joy in the world seemed to be his love for his wife, a love he saw his only daughter as a distraction from. Perhaps if Nikki had been less self-possessed, more in need of his constant guidance, he could have treated her like a patient. Or a case. Maybe that’s exactly what he’d done following the madness recorded in the journal he’d just read.

But now, here he was, looking as if he had aged two decades instead of one. Gone was his military-grade buzz cut; it had been replaced by a thick salt-and-pepper mane he’d tied into a ponytail and threaded through the back of his gnawed baseball cap. He had the same angular features, with small, deeply set eyes, dwarfed by his boat’s prow of a nose. But Ben couldn’t tell if the tightness in his expression was the result of controlled fury or a great, interior strain.

“If you’re going to waste our time with protests, do it now, by all means,” Noah Delongpre said. “But allow me to remind you that there was a time when the mere notion of there being a chemical inside of plants that essentially metabolized sunlight itself would have seemed like an insanity to most men. Maybe it still does . . .”

“You exposed yourself to it too?” Insane, Ben thought, even as he spoke. All of this is insane. But it felt as if some long-buried set of instincts inside him had taken over and was answering for him, some primitive yet essential ability to believe in the impossible. He didn’t dare call it faith. Not yet, anyway. To do so would imply that the hell of which he’d just read had something of the divine within it.

“So you believe what you read?” Noah asked.

“Whatever you can do, whatever she can do, you’ve done it to me twice. So I’m not sure I really have a choice.”

“You were hoping it was her, no doubt. When you opened the door.”

“No. I knew it wasn’t her.”

“How?”

“Because she would never treat me like this.”

“It’s been almost a decade, Ben. You have no idea what she’s capable of doing to you or anyone—” His anger caused him to straighten a bit, and just this small movement stoked the fires of whatever injury he was struggling against. “That’s the only reason I drove you again—”

“Drove me?”

“That’s the term we came up with for it. Her power. He’s got his own name for it too, I bet. Marshall Ferriot, that is. But I warn you, don’t become lost in the language of the thing. Terms, labels—they’ll do nothing to blunt its reality.” When he noticed the expression on Ben’s face, his eyebrows lifted and he recoiled, both hands