***
The Louisiana heat was arresting compared to the long, secluded weeks in the northern mountains. Steam poured off the streets that smelled of spice, incense, and sweat. The razzle and boom-snap of jazz horns carried over the air as familiar and comforting as the welcome of an old friend. She passed the bookstores tucked away in ancient corners of the Quarter, past the voodoo shops where he would linger over shrunken heads and chicken’s feet, long ago, and she would ask polite questions of the cashiers, who were often priestesses themselves, inviting her to see this and that and explaining how things worked. A tourist carriage pranced by and a young, bald man wearing vampire fangs stood outside his door offering to tell fortunes. Tabitha saw a man in a filthy hospital gown with open wounds on his arms and legs. She bought him lunch and water, and a box of bandages.
Tabitha took a cab uptown. Even though it had been over a year since her last visit, she knew these streets like the back of her hand. The cypress trees hung heavy with moss amongst the magnolia and willow. The houses stood three stories high, their proud fronts echoing tea socials and long dances into the night (and, also, of haunted moans in dank cellars and hidden quarters). They made Tabitha think of the story about a girl who lingered in her white gingham dress, hung in the branches of the family tree while the spirit of a fallen, hybrid species made reckless love to her in the invisible air. Her secret lover, trapped past physicality and churning deep in the fruit of her unconscious- intoxicatingly juicier than any real touch. The mind is a powerful thing, especially handed over to another.
The cab meandered down narrowing streets as, once again, they tread into the breadth of the city. They approached a private brick courtyard along a row of elegant townhouses. She gazed at its weather-stained brick and mortar, the lattice-work as delicate as lace that stretched from the upper balcony to the foundation. Autumn green ivory crept along the wrought iron balustrade and circled the perimeters of the courtyard, mingling with the potted ferns and lavender. The olive shutters gleamed against the black-paned glass, and the air flushed with the dank scent of roses, wafted in by a southern wind through the back garden. Tabitha closed her eyes and sighed, her mouth a sweet smile. It was good to be back.
She walked along stone steps and pulled the bell chain that cried with a firehouse ring. A tiny woman in a white sundress with black, cat-eye bangs that grazed the limits of her brow answered the door. Recognition lit her face.
“Oh, Tabitha!”
“Mona!”
The tiny woman hugged Tabs with a supernatural strength that contested her small frame.
“Oh, I didn’t realize you were getting in so early,” she said.
“I’ve actually been here a few hours. I wanted to walk some of the old haunts before I came over. I hope I’m not too early.”
“Are you kidding me? Of course not. Come in, come in,” Mona said, ushering her into the foyer and taking her bag.
“Your room’s all ready for you. Emmett’s at his studio, but he’ll be home to have dinner with us.”
Mona paused, taking Tabitha’s face in her hands.
“You look wonderful,” she said, turning her cheeks from side to side, running one finger under her eye in a light brush. “It’s healed.”
“Almost,” Tabs said.
Mona’s eyes filled with tears. She was never one for prolonging the inevitable.
“I’m so sorry, Tabby. I wish you had been able to come to me.”
Tabitha shook her head, brushing a tear from Mona’s eye like a mother.
“Don’t be,” she said. “I would have, if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was afraid he might look for me here... Did he?”
Without speaking, Mona took her hand and led her into the living room, past the music room and the pantry, through the dining room. She opened the pocket doors which led to her reading room. In it were piles of boxes, all labeled in his handwriting: “Tabs-books”, “Tabs-clothes”, “Tabs-music”.
“When did all of this come?” Tabitha asked in a hushed voice.
“He came, not a few days after you’d left him. After a week or so, when we hadn’t heard from you, he went home again. When I got your letter, I called him. I didn’t think you would be angry, my telling him that you were alright, but that I didn’t know where you were, which was the truth. He came back about three months ago and brought your things. I think he’d hoped you’d be here, but he left them anyway. It was no trouble keeping them,” she said, patting Tabs’ hand to soothe the troubled frown on her face.
“I could tell how hard it was for him, mustering up the gumption to hand those things over. I didn’t want him to have to do it twice. You understand?”
“How was he?” Tabs asked.
Mona pulled Tabitha down unto the red brocade lounge. She turned her cup of tea in slow circles. Watching the steam for portents.
“That first time he showed up, I was afraid for him. His arm was cut up pretty badly, and he was in a lot of pain; not physically though-his physician had done a good job at treating those wounds.”
“I’m not judging you for that,” Mona said, speaking with an abrupt and urgent note in her voice when she saw the shadow cast over Tabitha. “I will tell you that both sides of that story have been reconstructed to me and that they are all but identical. He admits that what he did was in the passion of the moment, as did you. I’m only telling you about that as an observation, not a judgment.”
“I know,” Tabs responded.
“Anyway, it wasn’t the arm that worried me… He was desperate. He cried openly, and often.”
“He was crying?” Tabs asked.
She could not believe that it was true. In the months that they had been together, she had never seen him display one trace of sadness, let alone grief.
“I thought he would be so angry.”
“No, Tabby. He wasn’t. Far from it. Truthfully, I don’t know if he (or you, or any of us) understood what having you in his life had meant to him, or how it had changed him. I asked him to stay that week. I was afraid to let him leave and go back to y-, his, empty house.”
Tabs nodded, looking into the recesses of her hands, remembering back into that far and distant land, on a mountaintop in the Oregon pines. Mona’s words echoed in the small spaces of her mind, changed him.
“How about this last time?” she asked. “How was he?”
“Better. Quiet,” Mona said. “It had been six months since you’d gone. I think he’d accepted it…What about you?” she asked, changing the subject. “Where have you been? What was it like?”
“Hmm. Well, the time I spent in Oregon was interesting to say the least.”
“Well, I’ll say. You spent almost a month with a private cult in the middle of nowhere. Did you see Bobby?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry for that.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“Well, you know I want to pick your brain about that whole experience; unless of course, you already have your own plans for that story,” Mona joked.
“No. I’ll tell you all about it. And you can write it with pseudo-names and a different local, and that way the slander-police can’t trace it back to me,” Tabs said.
“Great,” Mona laughed, clapping her hands, both of them relieved to have lightened the mood for a moment.
“But anyway…it’s been almost a year since all that. Where did you go after Oregon?”
Tabitha stared at the boxes, so distracted by them, wondering if each unfolded leaf would slice through, unraveling the stronghold of her heart.
“I T.A.’d at a university in Maine. It’s a private university in northern Maine; there’s really not that much to tell. I knew someone who worked there, so that was my in. I suppose having missionary parents has its perks.”
“We were snowed in for most the fall, and winter,” she continued. “We used snowmobiles to get around, and, I spent a lot of time snowshoeing in the woods; just wandering, thinkin
g. It was perfect.”
“And how were the people there?”
Tabitha thought for a moment.
“More of what I was used to, I suppose. Only, I’ve been around so many polar-opposite types of people, you’d think I’d be used to anything. I guess we tend to revert back to what we’ve known; what made sense in childhood doesn’t necessarily have to now- it’s comfortable, an escape. Anyway, they were strictly religious, legalistic even, which didn’t bother me really. To them, legality is everything. I wasn’t one of them and so, they treated me just like they would treat any other, well... good-mannered heathen bound for hell. ” She laughed.
“To tell you the truth though, their ways weren’t that different than the fire-orgy clan in Oregon. Everyone screaming and convulsing towards some enlightened, mind-blowing ecstasy.”
“Oooo. Is that a little blasphemy coming out of your mouth?” Mona asked.
“You blaspheme God, not the people who reinvent fictitious rituals and tack His name to it,” Tabs replied.
“Fair enough,” Mona said. “Anyway…so why would they accept you as an employee? No offense.”
“It’s a pretty strong connection when you’re related to the Dean…”
“That’s the someone you knew?” Mona interjected.
“Oh, yeah. An uncle of mine.”
Mona shook her head, amused. “Alright, continue.”
“He was comfortable with my beliefs, as long as I promised to keep them to myself, ha ha. God forbid I would have converted them into cutting their hair or wearing pants. But, anyway, that’s why I worked as a T.A. Even if I had wanted to teach there (which I didn’t- I just wanted the solitude and the pay) the board would have had a mad fit. But it was good. I needed that time,” she said, staring at those boxes, thinking she needed more, a lifetime’s more.
“So did you meet anyone new?”
“I met lots of new people,” Tabs said, adjusting the cushions behind her.
“You know that’s not what I meant. I mean…” Mona said, jabbing her in the ribs, “did you meet anyone?”
Tabitha sighed.
“If I wanted someone to keep me barefoot, brainless, and pregnant, I wouldn’t have had to travel to the barrens of Maine to find him. Do you know that all of the men are required to grow out their facial hair into full beards? Might as well be a lesbian at that point; a girl could get lost in all that gristle and never find her way out.”
This sent Mona reeling into a nearby armchair in fits of hysteria.
“Besides,” Tabs continued, “what makes you think I’d want to meet someone?”
Mona stopped laughing and dropped to her side.
“Baby, it’s been over a year.”
“Yes. One year.”
Mona flicked her finger under Tab’s chin.
“Are you going to spend the rest of your life alone, clinging to a memory?”
Tabitha stood and opened the French doors that led into the garden at the rear of the house. White roses littered the doorway, and lilies floated in the base of the marble fountain, its gallant cherub standing serene with pointed arrow into the air. She looked into the vast opening, with its flush, golden wall, its crocus and violet, lush and crowded with humming and scent and light. In the center of the garden stood a Victorian woman, cloaked, downcast, her hand strewing an unraveled bouquet, its petals cascading in ribbons to the marble base, her curls unfurled from the silken band that ran through her hair. Tabitha loved her, the blankness of her stone eyes unable to mask her countenance of sorrow. Surrounded by such beauty, but lost.
“And if every moment I have after is a bitter lie compared to that memory? What then? Do I need to destroy another life in the process, just to discover that I will never be able to conjure even one shred of myself that I gave to him?”
Tabitha leaned against the heavy oak frame. “It’s his still,” she whispered. “I’ll never belong to anyone else the way I belonged to him. I love him, Mona; permanently.”
“Then call him,” Mona replied, coming to her. “Apologize, and let him do the same. Fix it.”
“It’s not fixable,” Tabitha said, shaking her head. “That’s the point. We were stuck. We had nowhere to go, not forward and, at least for me, I can never go back. Forgetting about him is not an option though. I’d rather have the memory of what we were, that we were at least something to each other, than to go on destroying one another…”