1
My self-imposed silence was kind of half-assed. The no-touching rule, I followed that religiously. But I still talked, a little. The old me knew how to commit to things. But because the new me didn’t, because I wasn’t that brave now, my life kept hobbling along. I did keep to myself. Mom made me see therapists and psychologists. They talked a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. But I knew that was garbage. I knew I had to keep myself quarantined, distanced.
Once in a while, I could still feel it in me. Starting to heat up right there under my sternum, churning in my ribs, wanting to come out.
Mom and Dad never bought it. When we moved down to our summer home for good, Mom fell in with our old friends Sarah Rawlings and her daughter, Mia-Joy. I wanted to keep away from them, from everyone. But I learned pretty quickly that if I could put on the facade of normal--even the tiniest bit--with the Rawlingses, Mom would let up on the counselors and shrinks. And Mia-Joy didn’t need to ask me a zillion nosy questions. She didn’t mind that I didn’t talk much, or that I never touched other people. In fact, Mia-Joy barely seemed to notice. It just gave her more time to talk, which is exactly what she’d been doing since I could remember.
But after Sophie, after everything, Mom felt a calling to come work with New Orleans Congregational, and Dad decided that post-Katrina New Orleans would be a boon for his construction company. The second big oil spill kept New Orleans in the news, and people wanted to rebuild the city even more, Dad said. People needed a new start here. Mom and Dad agreed; Dad would build their strip malls, and Mom would rebuild their shaken faith. So we left our old life in Chicago.
That’s how they sold it to me. And Mom told me, in a hushed voice, her eyes crinkling in that worried way at the corners, that we would start over too. We needed to. Sophie was gone.
I just nodded.
I wasn’t even doing that today while Mia-Joy went on talking at breakneck speed as we sat behind the counter, peeling shrimp in the twinkling-clean white-tiled kitchen of the Rawlings Crawdaddy Shack. Mia-Joy’s mother stood at the large steel stovetop, her hair a mass of russet curls like Mia-Joy’s. She stirred the gumbo pots, the lunch rush less than an hour away. Mia-Joy’s ancient-looking Granny Lucy sat in her rocking chair next to the screen door, chewing on her black licorice, eyes closed as always. But just when you had forgotten she was even around, she would jump into the conversation and remind us that she was still here and, yes, she did know everything. The late-July air hung hot and damp against my skin, and the kitchen smelled of sweet onions, red peppers, and fresh bread pudding.
“My daddy doesn’t seem to want me to go, but Mama doesn’t mind,” Mia-Joy explained. The shrimp were slippery in my hands, and they made my mouth water. Seafood in the bayou was a different experience. The buttery crab legs. Red beans and rice with paprika shrimp. In Chicago, in my regular life, seafood had tasted more . . . Midwestern . . . stale . . . bland. It was out of its element.
Much like me.
But Mia-Joy was New Orleans in every sense of the word, even if she was itching to get out. French Creole, with a father who fished on a shrimp boat, a brother who headlined at a jazz club on Bourbon Street, and a granny who taught her the finer points of twenty-first-century voodoo. When Raymond Kanzler stood Mia-Joy up for the Turn-About last year, Granny Lucy had told her, “You give that boy a headache he ain’t never gonna forget. Just turn his picture upside down. Keep it that way for a week.” Mia-Joy did it too. But she was already on to another boy, another adventure. She was sparkling, alive, colorful, just like New Orleans itself.
“You mind your grades, Mia-Joy,” her mama said, keeping her back toward us, her attention on her stove. “Then we’ll talk about your summer in New York.”
“What did I tell you?” Mia-Joy squealed at me, popping one of the boiled shrimp into her mouth. She would go to New York after our senior year. She would model. I didn’t doubt that. I smiled back at her. Forte. Allegretto. These were my musical descriptors of Mia-Joy. Loud. Up-tempo.
I pictured a mash‑up of my old life and my new one right then. Mia-Joy hanging out with Annaliese and Cody from back home. Mia-Joy cackling with laughter when we pulled pranks on the swim team. No, scratch that. Mia-Joy would never be able to keep any secrets, would never be able to keep a straight face. Mia-Joy was a lot of things, but subtle was not one of them.
“Corrine, you’re scratching your palm, cherie,” Granny Lucy called over.
I looked down and she was right. I wondered what she was going to tell me that meant: Was I going to kiss a fool? Inherit a windfall? But the old fishing lures hanging on the restaurant door clinked and clanked as it opened--G‑sharp, E, C, E. I didn’t catch what Granny Lucy said. Sounded something like “catching an old train.”
A middle-aged couple walked in, heads together, laughing. He made me sweat just looking at him, a bushy beard and a sport jacket in this heat. She was a tiny woman, but her shoes made this great little slap-clap noise on the tile floor, and when I looked I saw that she had on ridiculously high heels, bright red. I caught a look at her face then--quickly, because I didn’t like to make eye contact anymore--and I realized that it was Sylvia Smith, the professor from Tulane.
She had curly red hair, moved like a bird. You couldn’t mistake her.
A flush crept up into my neck and ears. Mom had made me meet her during those first few weeks when I had been nothing more than a hot mess. Mom had probably envisioned things getting better, me eventually taking lessons again, needing a tutor here.
I slunk down into myself. But it didn’t matter. Professor Smith would have no reason to remember me. I had refused to play the violin for her, refused to even speak. Mom had apologized like crazy, and we had never spoken of it since.
“Where y’at!” Mrs. Rawlings called, her voice booming throughout the little restaurant.
“Mornin’,” Professor Smith answered. Mrs. Rawlings met her at the counter, and they began to small-talk. The bearded man chuckled and his ample belly jiggled. I couldn’t tell if Mrs. Rawlings knew Professor Smith or if they were just doing that whole Southern-friendly thing. I still couldn’t tell the difference.
“She stayed,” Mia-Joy said, elbowing me in the ribs, nodding toward Professor Smith. “During Katrina. People say she saved like three different neighbors. Tracked down insulin for this one old lady who was in a wheelchair.”
I nodded. This was how it was now. People in the French Quarter defined themselves by Katrina. I knew what that was like--to define yourself through some kind of catastrophe, through loss. I kept my eyes cast down, working at peeling shrimp, but my gaze kept wandering back to those red high heels. She had stayed here. Weathered the broken levees and destruction and somehow lived through it to wear red high heels again. That was something.
The door jangled, and I immediately felt weird. Bothered. I didn’t really know why. The heat? Thinking of my violin?
I stole a look at the door. Beat‑up old black Converse gym shoes and frayed, too-long jeans. I told myself not to even look up. No interaction.
But then I noticed rain clattering against the window. The sound. Shoosh, whoosh, shoosh. It wasn’t just a midday summer drizzle but more like a sheet of slanting rain, right here in the middle of this sunny New Orleans afternoon. The sky was blue, the clouds cottony white, and yet it rained, beating a rhythm on the restaurant windows.
Something about that didn’t sit right with me--the sunshine along with the rain. That should have been my first clue.
But I shrugged it off. That was just how New Orleans was--unpredictable in every way.
The new customer was still stomping his Converses on the welcome mat, and when I glanced at him I caught his silhouette. He shook his dark wet hair free of the rain, and I thought I was prepared. Okay, tall, dark stranger. He’ll be hot. Big deal.
He squared his shoulders and looked at the menu board, up through his dark lashes, and I could not make myself look away. I always looked away. I tried to seem invisible to people. Keep the circle small, I told myself. Fewer people in the circle, fewer people to hurt, fewer people to hurt you.
But I was glued. He had a messy mop of dark hair, wavy and untamed, defying gravity as it swirled up and away from his forehead. As he spoke his hellos, he had that drawl, that deep Southern twang to his vowels that turned his speech into music to my Midwestern ears. “Good mawnin’,” he said, and his voice was low, just above a mumble. Legato. Slow and smooth.
His eyes were the brightest blue, and his eyelashes were ridiculous, like fringe. They should’ve looked silly on a boy. But they didn’t. They worked against the square, rugged cut of his cheekbones, his jaw. The corners of his mouth turned up in a friendly way, but when he spotted Mia-Joy and me staring up from our pot of shrimp, he truly smiled. Big shiny white teeth twinkling like the tiles of Mrs. Rawlings’s kitchen.
His smile made him look younger. Did he go to Liberty? I expected his eyes to be meeting Mia-Joy’s beauty, taking in her long legs, her icy-green eyes, her caramel skin, but I was wrong. He looked straight at me, a half-smiling, half-startled expression, but only for a moment. Then his face changed, softened. He nodded a hello, like he knew me.
I felt a little fizzle at the base of my neck and all over my scalp then, like someone had touched me after rubbing socked feet over a shag carpet. Static electricity. The little hairs on my arms stood up, and a current vibrated right through me, settled in the back of my molars, like chewing on tinfoil. Yuck.
For a beat, I held his gaze. I held this note between us a tad too long, which was so much farther beyond my usual boundaries. I felt shaken and naked. I averted my eyes, caught my reflection in the window: my long dark hair, my pale skin. My swimmer’s body had dwindled now into a ghost of its old self.
I turned away, and I lost hold of the big stainless-steel shrimp pot, dropping it clean out of my lap. The clank of the steel on the tile shocked me back into reality.
“Fluckity fluck,” I swore under my breath, Mia-Joy’s favorite faux curse. I bent down to pick up the shrimp. Mrs. Rawlings snapped my behind with a dish towel. “I am so sorry,” I said, feeling the blush of the moment climb up my neck and onto my Irish-white face, my paler-than-pale cheeks and earlobes.
I heard the customer asking if he could help, but Mrs. Rawlings refused, instead taking his order for crawfish jambalaya. I did not look back up. I cleaned my mess silently, cursing myself, throwing away the shrimp, costing the Rawlingses at least thirty dollars in product.
I made myself think of Sophie. A reminder. Because that’s what I had to remember. That’s who I was. And I had to interact as little as possible. Or else my bad luck, my mojo, whatever . . . it would creep out again. Get its roots in somewhere. Like kudzu, squashing the life out of everything beautiful around it.
When Mrs. Rawlings asked me to sit for a reading after the lunch rush, I shook my head as always. The Rawlings family was usually respectful of my limitations. But for some reason that day, when Mia-Joy begged, “Please, Corrine,” I gave in. I said yes. I told myself it was the guilt of the lost shrimp. But there was something else going on, and I think at some level I already knew it. Something was coming. The air around us felt heavier, expectant.
I sat down at the counter, ignoring the looks passing between Mrs. Rawlings and Mia-Joy. The heat of the day was in full swing now, pressing down on us, closer, thicker. The air-conditioning in the restaurant worked--technically--or so Granny Lucy always reminded us, even though she sat by an open screen door all day long. The backs of my legs immediately stuck to the red vinyl of the stool. Mia-Joy plopped onto the stool next to me.
“Lawdy Jesus, you must’ve said the right thing today,” Mia-Joy said to her mother. “Something changed her mind.”
“Maybe a full moon,” Granny Lucy called from her rocker near the back door, the runners of her chair crunching on the shells of the peanuts she was eating.
I forced myself not to roll my eyes.
“Put your hands on the table, honey. Flat, palms down. And Mia-Joy, shush, so as I can concentrate here.”
Mia-Joy made a show of zipping her lips, bugging her eyes. I listened to Mrs. Rawlings, placed my hands on the table. I still had a callus on my left forefinger from the violin. It had been months since I had played, but I felt the callus there now, rubbed the pad of my thumb against the hardened skin. I missed the weight of the instrument in my hands, the smell of the wood when it was under my chin.
I knew from watching other readings that Mrs. Rawlings liked to hold the hands of a customer before she shuffled her tarot cards, get a feel for the person, but she was being respectful of me. And I was glad. But truthfully, my mind wasn’t really there. I was already thinking about going home.
I watched Mrs. Rawlings shuffle her cards. The deck was larger than a regular one. The cards were old but well taken care of, only slightly tattered. On the back, the black-and-white design of an elaborate snake faded to yellow only at the edges, where I assumed the oil from several generations of Rawlings hands had accumulated from shuffling the cards.
Mia-Joy’s mama placed them on the counter and then lit a single candle. She was a big woman, built sturdy. Mezzo forte. Even louder than Mia-Joy. She looked fierce and powerful, with a broad face and a broader waist, but she had the same eyes as Mia-Joy, playful and sparkling, Crayola green, and when they fixed on you, you knew you were only going to hear the truth, plain and simple. She suffered no fools. I waited for her to deal her cards, but I didn’t believe in this kind of stuff. My mom was a minister, for God’s sake. I didn’t believe in full moons or tarot cards or . . .