Blood Memory

My hands are shaking on the wheel. I need another Valium, but I don’t want to risk falling asleep on the interstate. Suck it up, I tell myself, the mantra of my youth and the unwritten motto of my family. After all, it’s not as if my present dilemma is new. I never got pregnant before, but pregnancy is merely a new wrinkle in an old habit. I’ve always chosen unattainable men. In some ways, my whole life has been a series of inexplicable decisions and unresolved paradoxes. Two therapists have thrown up their hands in despair over my ability to function at my present level despite self-destructive behavior that keeps me dancing on the edge of disaster. My relationship with my present therapist, Dr. Hannah Goldman, has survived only because she allows me to skip my scheduled appointments and call her whenever I feel I need her. I don’t require face time. Just an understanding voice.

Actually, it’s about time I gave Hannah a call. She doesn’t know about my pregnancy. She doesn’t know about my panic attacks, either. After four years with her, I still find it difficult to ask for help. I come from a family that believes depression is a weakness, not an illness. I didn’t see a therapist as a child, when one might have done me some real good. My grandfather, a surgeon, believes psychiatrists are sicker than their patients. My father, a Vietnam vet, saw several VA therapists before he died, but none was able to alleviate the symptoms of his post-traumatic stress disorder. My mother also discouraged therapy, saying shrinks had never done her older sister any good, and that one had even seduced her. When suicidal impulses finally convinced me to seek treatment—at the age of twenty-four—neither the MDs nor the psychologists were able to control my mood swings, ease my nightmares, or slow my drinking and occasional reckless sexual behavior. For me—until Hannah Goldman and her laissez-faire style—therapy was pretty much a washout. And yet … though my present situation would qualify as a crisis in Hannah’s book, I can’t quite bring myself to call her.

As the night landscape changes from wet bottomland to hilly forests of oak and pine, I sense the great river out to my left, rolling southward as it has for millennia, oblivious to human travail. The Mississippi River links the town of my birth to the city of my adulthood, a great winding artery connecting the two spiritual poles of my existence, infancy and independence. Yet how independent am I? Natchez, the upstream city—older than New Orleans by two years, 1716 versus 1718—is the source of all that I am, whether I like it or not. And tonight, the prodigal daughter is returning home at eighty-five miles an hour.

Forward and backward …

Hurtling around curves in the dark forest, I feel a sort of emotional gravity sucking at my bones. But until the sign that reads ANGOLA PENITENTIARY flashes out of the night, I’m not sure why. Then I know. Just south of the razor-wire-enclosed fields known as Angola Farm, a great island rises out of the river. Owned by my family since before the Civil War, this atavistic world hovers like a dark mirage between the genteel cities of New Orleans and Natchez. I haven’t set foot on DeSalle Island in more than ten years, but I sense it now the way you sense a dangerous animal stirring from sleep. Only a dozen miles to my left, it sniffs for my scent in the humid darkness.

I step on the gas and put the place behind me, slipping into a driving trance that carries me the remainder of my journey. I slip out of it not on the outskirts of Natchez, but on the high-banked, curving drive that leads through the woods to my childhood home. Once surrounded by two hundred acres of virgin forest, the antebellum estate where I grew up now occupies only twenty landscaped acres hedged around by St. Catherine’s Hospital, a residential subdivision, and a stately old plantation called Elms Court. Nevertheless, the tunnel of oaks that arches over the drive still gives tourists the sense of approaching a cloistered European manor.

A high wrought-iron gate blocks the last fifty yards of the driveway, but it’s been unlocked for as long as I can remember. I stop and press a button on the gatepost. The iron bars retract as though pulled by unseen hands. As though the gods themselves have opened my way home.

Why am I here? I ask myself.

You know why, replies a chiding voice. You have nowhere else to go.

After dry-swallowing a Valium, I drive slowly through the gate.

The bars close behind me with a clang.

FIVE

In a vast clearing ahead, moonlight washes over a sight that takes most people’s breath away. A French palace rises like a specter out of the mist, its limestone walls as pale as skin, its windows like dark eyes glassy from fatigue or drink. The scale of the place is heroic, projecting an impression of limitless wealth and power. Viewed through the prism of a modern eye, the mansion has a certain absurdity. A French Empire palace nestled in a Mississippi town of twenty thousand souls? Yet Natchez contains more than eighty antebellum homes, many of them mansions, and the provenance of this one perfectly suits the town, a living anachronism of grand excess, much of it built by the hands of slaves.

My family arrived in America in 1820, in the person of a Paris financier’s youngest son, sent to the wilds of Louisiana to make his fortune. Cursed with a cruel father, Henri Leclerc DeSalle worked like a slave himself until he surpassed all paternal expectations. By 1840, he owned cotton fields stretching for ten miles along the Mississippi River. And in that year, like most of the cotton barons of the time, he began building a regal mansion on the high bluff across the river, in the sparkling city called Natchez.

Most cotton planters built boxy Greek Revival mansions, but Henri, fiercely proud of his heritage, broke tradition and constructed a perfect copy of Malmaison, the summer palace of Napoléon and Josephine. Designed to humble DeSalle’s father when he visited America, Malmaison and its attendant buildings became the center of a cotton empire that—thanks to my family’s Yankee sympathies—survived both the Civil War and Reconstruction without mortal damage. It endured until 1927, when the Mississippi overran its banks in a flood of biblical proportions. The following year came crop fires, and in 1929 the stock market crash completed the proverbial “three bad years” that even wealthy farming families dreaded.

The DeSalles lost everything.

The patriarch of that era shot himself through the heart, leaving his descendants to scrape out a meager existence alongside the blacks and poor whites they had so recently exploited. But in 1938, fortune reversed herself again.

A young geologist with Texas backers leased a huge tract of former DeSalle land. Through a quirk in Louisiana law, landowners retained the mineral rights to their property for ten years after it was forfeited. My great-grandfather was ecstatic just to get the lease money. But nineteen days before his mineral rights expired, the young geologist struck one of the largest oil fields in Louisiana. Christened the DeSalle field, it produced over 10 million barrels of crude oil. My great-grandfather eventually bought back every acre of DeSalle land, including the island. He also bought back Malmaison and restored the house to its pre–Civil War splendor. Its present owner, my maternal grandfather, keeps Malmaison in pristine condition, worthy of the Architectural Digest cover it graced ten years ago. But the city that surrounds the mansion, though as well preserved as Charleston or Savannah, seems as doomed to slow decay as any other Southern town bypassed by the interstate and abandoned by industry.

I pull around the “big house” and park beside one of the two brick dependencies behind it. The eastern slave quarters—a two-story edifice larger than some suburban houses—was my home during most of my childhood. Our family’s maid, Pearlie, lives in the western quarters, thirty yards across the rose garden. She helped rear my mother and aunt from infancy, then did the same with me. Well over seventy now, Pearlie drives a baby blue Cadillac, the pride of her life. It sits gleaming in the darkness behind her house, its chrome polished more regularly than that on the cars of any white matron in the city. Pearlie often stays up late watching television, but it’s past midnight now, and her windows are dark.

My mother’s car is nowhere in sight. She’s probably in Biloxi, visiting her elder sister, who’s embroiled in a bitter divorce. My grandfather’s Lincoln is gone, too. At seventy-seven, Grandpapa Kirkland still possesses remarkable vitality, but a stroke a year ago ended his driving days. Undeterred, he hired a driver and resumed the pace he’d always kept up, which would exhaust a man of fifty. Grandpapa could be anywhere tonight, but my guess is that he’s on the island. He’s an avid hunter, and DeSalle Island—which teems with deer, wild hogs, and even bear—has been a second home to him since he married into the family a half century ago.

When I get out of the Audi, the summer heat wraps around me like a thick jacket. The whine of crickets and the bellow of frogs from the nearby bayou fills the night, but this soundtrack from my childhood brings mixed feelings. As I glance toward the rear of Malmaison proper, my eyes lock onto a gnarled dogwood tree at the edge of the rose garden that separates our house from Pearlie’s, and my throat seals shut. My father perished under that tree, shot dead by an intruder he confronted there twenty-three years ago. I can’t look at the dogwood without remembering that night. Blue police lights flashing through rain. Wet, gray flesh. Glassy eyes open to the sky. I’ve asked Grandpapa many times to cut down that tree, but he’s always refused, claiming it would be foolish to mar the beauty of our famed rose garden out of sentimentality.

Sentimentality.

I stopped speaking after my father was murdered. Literally. I didn’t utter a word for over a year. But in my eight-year-old brain, I ceaselessly pondered what the intruder had come looking for that was worth my father’s life. Cash? The family silver? Grandpapa’s art or gun collections? All were possible targets, but no money or property was ever discovered missing. As I grew older, I wondered if it could have been my mother that drew the prowler. She was scarcely thirty then and could easily have caught the attention of a rapist. But since the intruder was never caught, this theory couldn’t be tested.

After my first depressive episode—I was fifteen—a new fear crept into my mind: that there had been no intruder at all. My father was shot with his own rifle, and the only fingerprints found on it belonged to family members. I couldn’t help but wonder whether my daddy—scarred within and without by a war he’d wanted no part of—had chosen to end his own life. Whether, even with a wife and daughter who loved him, he’d felt he had no choice but to stop his pain with a bullet. I’d been close to that point myself by then, so I knew it was possible. I’ve reached that point again in the years since, and more than once. Yet something has always kept me from accepting suicide as my father’s fate. Perhaps it’s my belief that the strength that kept me alive during those terrible nights was a gift from him to me, the only legacy he left behind.

I hate the fucking rose garden. Patterned on the Malmaison gardens tended by Josephine herself, where every variety of rose in the world was represented, it fills the air of Malmaison with scents that make tourists gasp with pleasure. But for me the smell of roses will always be part of the stench of death.

I turn away from the garden and, with paranoia born from years of urban living, unload my dental cases from the backseat. Only when I’m halfway to the door of our slave quarters do I remember that in Natchez I could leave my cases in the unlocked car for a month and find them just as I’d left them when I returned.

The front door is locked. I have no key. Trudging around to the window of my old bedroom, I set down my cases and slide up the pane. The closed-in smell that wafts through the curtains hurls me fifteen years back in time. I lift the cases over the sill, set them inside, then climb through and make my way through the dark to the light switch on the wall. It’s an easy journey, because my bedroom looks exactly as it did in May of 1989, when I graduated high school.

The walls are brown 1970s paneling, the carpet the same navy blue installed the year I was born. Silk dragonflies of myriad colors hang from filaments tacked to the ceiling, and posters of rock stars adorn the walls: U2, Sinead O’Connor, R.E.M., Sting. Shelves of photographs and swimming trophies line the wall opposite my closet, chronicling a competitive career that began at five and ended at sixteen. The older photographs show my father—a dark, handsome man of medium height—standing next to a gangly little girl with long bones but no apparent muscle. As the girl’s body begins to fill in, my father vanishes from the photos and an older man with silver hair, chiseled features, and piercing eyes takes his place. My grandfather, Dr. William Kirkland. Studying the photos now, it seems odd that my mother is in so few of them. But Mom never took much of an interest in my swimming, an “unsocial” activity that consumed vast amounts of time that could otherwise have been spent in more “appropriate” pursuits.

Glancing into the closet, I see clothes I wore in high school hanging there. Beneath the clothes, a wicker laundry basket filled with Louisiana Rice Creatures. The sight of the clothes doesn’t affect me, but the colorful stuffed animals bring a lump to my throat. Originally stuffed with dried rice, Rice Creatures were local precursors of the Beanie Babies that later became a national craze. There must be thirty of them in the basket, but the only one that really matters to me is missing. Lena the Leopardess. Lena was my favorite, and I’m not sure why. Maybe because she was a cat, like me. I loved Lena’s spots, I loved her whiskers, I loved how she felt pressed against my cheek while I fell asleep. I carried her everywhere I went, including my father’s funeral. It was there, surrounded by adults in the visiting room prior to the service, that I saw my father lying in his coffin.

He didn’t look like my father anymore. He looked older, and he looked very alone. When I pointed this out, my grandfather suggested that Daddy might not feel so lonely if he had Lena for company while he slept. The idea of losing Lena and my father on the same day frightened me, but Grandpapa was right. Lena made me less lonely every night, and I was sure she could do the same for Daddy. After asking Mom if it was okay, I reached over the high side of the coffin and nestled Lena between my father’s cheek and shoulder, just as I did with her every night. I missed her badly after that, but I comforted myself with the thought that Daddy had a little piece of my heart to keep him company.

Standing in this bedroom is creeping me out, as it has on each of the occasions when I’ve returned home. Why does my mother preserve it this way? She’s an interior designer, for God’s sake. Practically manic in her desire to transform every space over which she’s given dominion. Is it an homage to my childhood? To a simpler past? Or is it an open invitation to me to come back and start over at a point before I “veered off track”? Just when that was—my personal failure as a “DeSalle woman”—is a point of contention within my family. In my grandfather’s eyes, I didn’t screw up until I was asked to leave medical school, which precluded my following in his footsteps as a surgeon. But in my mother’s eyes, my failure began long before, at some indeterminate point during adolescence. Though I’m not a DeSalle by name—my father was a Ferry—I am very much considered a DeSalle woman, which carries with it a legion of traditions and expectations. But a thousand small choices have taken me ever further from this predestined road, onto one that hasn’t led me within a stone’s throw of a husband, a fact my mother never lets me forget. I’m actually thankful I arrived tonight to find her gone.

As I stare at a photograph of my father holding my hand high in triumph, the Valium enters my bloodstream, and a blessed calm comes over me. Because my father died when I was eight, it was he alone that I never disappointed. I like to think that, had he lived, he would be proud of what I’ve accomplished. As for my problems … well, Luke Ferry had problems of his own.

I pull back the spread on my permanently made bed and take my cell phone from my pocket. A pang of guilt hits me when I see thirteen missed calls. Punching 1 to check my voice mail, I listen to the first message. Sean called me even before he left Arthur LeGendre’s house. In a reassuring voice he tells me to stay calm, that Piazza is his problem not mine, and then he begs me to keep myself together until he gets there. “There” being my house on the lake. I skip ahead several messages. The change in Sean’s voice is astonishing.

“It’s me again,” he says angrily. “I’m still at your house, and I have no fucking idea where you are. Please call me back, even if you don’t want to see me. I don’t know if you’re drunk in some dive in the Quarter or lying dead in a ditch somewhere. Have you stopped taking your meds? Something’s wrong, Cat, I know it, and I don’t mean the murders. Look … you have to trust me, and you know you can.” There’s a crackling pause. “Damn it, I love you, and this is bullshit. This is why we’re not together already. I’m sitting in this empty house and—” There’s a click, then nothing. This message exhausted the phone’s available memory.

I slip off my pants and draw the bedcovers up to my chest. I want to call Sean and tell him I’m all right, but the truth is, I’m not. In fact, I might be losing my mind. But there’s nothing he can do about that.

As the cell phone drops from my hand, I see an image of Arthur LeGendre lying dead in his gleaming kitchen, black socks pulled up on his white, sticklike legs. Above his corpse floats the killer’s message, painted in blood: My work is never done. Again I see the bite marks on LeGendre’s bloodless flesh, one more set in the endless train of scars and mutilation I’ve witnessed over the past seven years. Is this really my job? How can someone’s life’s work be the analysis of something so brutal, so small, so irritatingly specialized? There has to be more to my choice of career. But what? My father’s mysterious death? Too obvious. “My work is never done,” I murmur, feeling the Valium course through my veins. Earlier today, the sedative I’d swallowed to combat my alcohol withdrawal gave me an unexpected gift: dreamless sleep. I haven’t known such relief for years.

“Thank you,” I whisper to the drug, as though to the god of sleep. My left hand slides over my hip and comes to rest on my lower tummy. My right hand slips out of the covers, reaching for a hand that isn’t there.

“Daddy?” I whisper. “Is that you?”

He doesn’t answer.

He never does, but tonight the aching loneliness that accompanies thoughts of my father isn’t so severe. Valium pads the edges of the pain, easing my descent into sleep. For years I’ve suffered from nightmares, and lately the alcohol I use to deaden them seems to have made them worse. But the Valium is an unfamiliar drug, as fresh and potent as the first drink I ever swallowed.

Tonight sleep enfolds me like the ocean depths on a free dive, a bright upper layer that deepens in color and density as I descend, swimming down, down, down, away from the chaos of the surface, into the blue cathedral of the deep. My sanctuary from the world and from myself. No thoughts here beyond the exigencies of survival. Only peace, the bliss of entering a place where but a handful of humans can go without bottled air, where death is a constant companion, where life is sweeter for the awareness of its fragility.

Here I am weightless.

Shapeless.

An astronaut drifting through deep space without a tether, unconcerned that her life support systems have shut down, that her body must sustain itself or die. Anyone with a lick of sense would kick madly for the surface.

Not me.

Because here I am free.

I don’t know how long I float this way, because time means nothing here. What I do know is that I must be sleeping, because on a real free dive, time means everything. Time is the remaining oxygen dissolved in your bloodstream, the only currency that can buy you depth, and depth is the holy grail, the point of the whole mad exercise. Or it’s supposed to be, anyway. That part confuses me, actually. Because you can never reach the bottom. Not in the real ocean. It’s only back on land that you can do that.

Surfacing now. I know because the sea has slowly stopped trying to drive my wet suit into every opening in my body, and blue-white lightning is flashing above me. A sudden storm? I tense against the inevitable clap of thunder, but it doesn’t come. When the lightning flashes again, a strange sound registers in my mind. Not thunder—not even the lap of waves against the dive boat. It’s the snick of a camera shutter. When I finally break through the surface, I smell acetone, not the ozone that follows a lightning strike. Blinking in confusion, I call out, “Sean? Sean, is that you?”

A dark brown forehead and saucer eyes rise above the footboard of my bed. A nose and mouth follow, the mouth agape in wonder. I’m looking into the face of a black girl of about eight. She has the frozen look of a child who has entered a familiar yard only to find a strange dog waiting for her.

“Who are you?” I ask, half wondering if the girl is real.

“Natriece,” she says, her voice almost defiant. “Natriece Washington.”

I glance around the room, but all that registers is the sunlight pouring through a crack in some curtains. “What are you doing here?”

The girl’s eyes are still wide. “I be here with my auntie. I didn’t mean to make no mess.”

“Your auntie?” The smell of acetone is stronger now.

“Miss Pearlie.”

Suddenly it all comes rushing back. The phone call from Sean. The corpse in the house on Prytania Street. The zoned-out night drive to Natchez. What an irony to find that you do crazier things sober than you ever did drunk.

“What time is it?”

The child gives an exaggerated shrug. “I don’t know. Morning time.”

Pushing down the covers, I crawl to the foot of the bed. The contents of my forensic dental case are spread across the floor in disarray. Natriece is holding my camera; its flash must have caused the “lightning” that awakened me. Among the instruments and chemicals on the floor lies a spray bottle of luminol, a toxic chemical used to detect latent bloodstains.

“Did you spray any of that, Natriece?”

She solemnly shakes her head.

I gently take the camera from her grasp. “It’s all right if you did. I just need to know.”

“I might’ve sprayed a little bit.”

I get out of bed and pull on my pants. “It’s okay, but you need to leave the room while I clean it up. That’s a dangerous chemical in that bottle.”

“I’ll help you clean up. I knows how to clean.”

“Tell you what. Let’s go visit your auntie, and then I’ll come back and deal with this. I haven’t seen Pearlie in a long time.”

Natriece nods. “She told me nobody was out here. She just unlocked the door to get Mrs. Ferry’s wash.”

I take the little girl’s hand and lead her to the door, then flip off the light and walk into the hall. Natriece lingers behind, standing with her back to me, looking into the dark room. “Did you leave something?” I ask.

“No, ma’am. I just looking at that.”

“What?”

“That there. Did I do that?”

I look over the girl’s head. On the floor near the foot of my bed, a greenish blue glow hovers in the darkness. The luminol has reacted with something on the carpet. The chemical registers false positives with several compounds, one of them household bleach.

“It’s all right,” I tell her, dreading my mother’s reaction to the mess Natriece has made.