Bones in the Water

The storm brewed nearly twenty years. Its force down the road in New Orleans held no candle to Katrina, but in West Renard the trees shook with something more than wind and rain. They rattled and bowed with a secret coming up and out of the earth, out of the swamp. There were bones in the water here. Bayou Lafourche rose up and spilled them, four to be exact, onto the back lawn of one Jenny Ledet, whose roof had been spared, but whose privacy would not. A near-complete femur, two cervical vertebrae, and a partial skull lay in the mess of mud and grass behind her squat ranch home.

“You think it could be Tommy?” She whispered to her boyfriend. They watched from the back porch as the sheriff and two deputies photographed then collected the bones in the muggy September air. Local news cameras filmed it all, eager for such gossip so soon after an already newsworthy storm.

“Could be,” Jenny’s man said, bringing a bottle of beer to his lips. “Or could be anybody.”

Within two days, though, the whole town knew: it was, indeed, Tommy Duchamp’s bones that the storm had brought in. A decades-long mystery would be solved, it seemed.

The Duchamp house stood a few miles outside of town, a stately farmhouse of Antebellum architecture now adrift among two-story matchboxes. Years of neglect had eaten into its grandness until it now appeared as rotten as the slave-owners who’d erected it, surrounded by bald cypress that went untrimmed and bogged down with Spanish moss. The house and grounds smelled always of the swamp that bordered it, a little like decay. Tommy Duchamp had disappeared from that house nineteen springs earlier, when he’d been a cocky teenager sweet on the preacher’s daughter. In tight jeans and his daddy’s button-down, he’d gone into town for the high school dance and never been seen again.

Like the house, the Duchamp family entered a slow deterioration, dissolving into the swamp like bark off a dead tree. By the end of his first decade gone, they’d left behind both the estate and his sister Maggie, a girl tall and strange and perpetually furrow-browed. She spent most days staring out the window of her childhood bedroom at the dissipating fog on the old sugar-cane field. In another era the Duchamp family would have been called creole, marked by a complex ancestry of both Europe and Africa, who had found their way through turns of fortune onto such a large and out-of-the-way estate. But the people in town called Maggie nothing at all. She’d become just as much a ghost as her brother in those nineteen years.

Maggie watched the police car crunch into the gravel drive and knew at once why it had come. She pulled back her wild curls and quickly traded her sleep shirt for a cotton dress, bare feet smacking the stairs on her way down to the foyer.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” She’d opened the door before the sheriff could knock, gaze shrewd through her thick glasses.

“Well, good morning, Ms. Duchamp. You weather the storm okay?” The sheriff half-smiled. His deputy hung back near the car, eyeing the menacing trees and unkempt, soggy lawn.

“Fine,” she said. “You found Tommy.”

A grim expression: “Yes, ma’am, we did. We’ll need to talk to your mama. You know where she is?”

“Florida, I think.” Maggie shrugged, held up her index finger for him to wait, then disappeared into the house a moment. She came back with a battered postcard that she passed over the threshold. The sheriff nodded and took it, noting the Tallahassee address scrawled on the back. Mrs. Duchamp had fled after her husband died, had not even offered to bring 25-year-old Maggie along wherever she was going.

“Newspapers’ll be coming, I expect. TV too, wanting a statement.” He cleared his throat and swiped at his forehead just below the brim of his hat. “I’m sorry about your brother, Ms. Duchamp. Sorry to bring all this up again after so long. And sorry your daddy won’t get to know what happened.”

Maggie narrowed her eyes at him. “What did happen?” Her arms crossed over her chest “Do you even know?”

The sheriff regarded her a moment and then shook his head. “Don’t imagine we will, no. Not much evidence to go on. Bones sat in the muck too long.”

With a quiet nod, she slipped back inside, closing the door on the sheriff.

----

In town, gossip was all aflutter. Suddenly every porch had a set of chairs occupied by at least two neighbors, and no piece of news was sacred or safe.

“The FBI is here and so’s Fox News so you know it’s gonna be a big thing.”

“I saw that truck from CNN parked at Duffy’s Barbeque.”

“You think they got ahold of Charlene yet? I bet she had to pretty herself up before they knocked on her door.”

“I saw her outside Rouses with her hair all done, wearing a sundress like it’s May. They must’ve got ahold of her.”

Charlene Wexler, née Martin, had been Tommy’s high school girlfriend. She’d since become a common subject of gossip, as pretty preacher’s daughters are wont to do. Word was she’d been spotted about town smiling for cameras, flirting with city reporters, making herself visible.

“What’s she do she can afford those fancy outfits?”

“She runs a blog.”

“A blob?”

“A blog, Enid. She writes about herself on the internet. Tells folks what diaper bags to buy.”

“They pay her to do that?”

Charlene could tell you the brand, price, and retail source of every item of clothing she wore, and that of every other mom on the playground. In her living room she staged her twin boys with a range of products, posed them, filtered their images, softened the light from the bay window and tweaked the hue of her own skin and hair. Bayou Babies, she called her site. It was stupid how much a company would pay her to recommend a pair of $200 mom-friendly ballet flats or a new leak-proof child’s water bottle.

“Just so grateful to know what happened,” her face all over mainstream news: Mommy Blogger’s Long-Lost Boyfriend Found Dead. Her hits were through the roof.

Charlene’s secret was that she did not care, not one bit, about any of it.

She watched the reporters come and go, watched the networks eventually turn their attention to new murders, new scandals. She sipped her coffee and watched her children play. There was only one thing she wanted now, and she bided her time until she could have it.

“Think I’ll take a shopping trip this weekend,” she told her husband. “Go all the way into the city, maybe.” She was cutting carrots for a stew, hair in a ponytail. Casual.

“Alright,” he said, amenable enough. “Guess it’s been a little while.”

Saturday morning she kissed all her boys and told them, “Wish me luck,” before she took to the wheel of her little sedan, leaving the minivan behind. At the edge of town, though, she took Route 1 north up the Bayou, rather than west to the highway that led into New Orleans.

When she turned onto the long gravel drive, again Maggie knew at once who it was and why she’d come.

Over the threshold on the big porch, the two women stared at each other, Maggie in another long dress, hair frazzled and barefoot, Charlene in her overpriced tank and shorts.

“My packages arrive?”

Maggie nodded.

A brief hesitation hung between them, air thick with water and screaming with bugs. Then the two women launched themselves toward one another and fell into each other’s arms, clutching and kissing cheeks and hair in a fierce embrace. They squeezed and each pressed her face into the other’s neck in turn, Maggie bending for the shorter woman, wrapping long arms around her friend’s tiny waist.

“I knew you’d come,” she said into the top of Charlene’s head.

“Had to.”

They moved inside to the kitchen where Maggie poured them both some tea. “I saw you on the news,” she said.

Charlene dropped herself onto a stool at the counter and offered a half-sad smile. She picked at her manicured nails. “I saw you too.”

“Hm,” Maggie grunted, “knew they’d make me look crazy. Might as well’ve called me a witch.” The cameras had been sure to capture the dilapidated state of the house, and Maggie had never been good at public speaking.

Now Charlene’s smile was genuine. “Aren’t you, though? Livin’ out here with no man and no kids and all these trees and swamp?”

Coy, Maggie looked from under her lashes. “Maybe,” she said, and picked up her glass of tea. “But what you do, it’s kinda like witchcraft.”

Charlene’s eyebrows rose in a question.

“I mean you make people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Make ‘em buy things, dress a certain way, spend money they don’t have... make them see what you want them to see.”

“Ah,” Charlene said. “But you, you’re much more transparent.”

A look passed between them that turned both their mouths up in mischief. They each bore the secret of the other’s true self and it was a seldom comfort that they could let the knowledge pass between them so freely. But they had the whole day to revel in it now. Their fingers touched on the counter, then interlocked, pulling palm against palm, forearm to forearm. Maggie bent to lower her forehead against Charlene’s, and both women closed their eyes.

“I was so afraid,” Maggie whispered.

“I was too—scared like I hadn’t been since…”

“Yeah.”

“But they said the bones—”

“Too worn through. No evidence.” Maggie pulled back. “We’re safe, Charlie. They’ll never know.”

Solemn, Charlene raised a palm to Maggie’s cheek, resting her thumb against soft flesh. She nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”

----

Imagine there once were two little girls who found each other, one still with braces in her mouth, the other tall and bony but not inelegant. Imagine they found some small spark between them, on the playground maybe, behind the jungle gym. It was real friendship but also something more—a true connection whipped wild by the enthusiasm of youth and the magic that only teenage girls can muster. They could move stars, levitate boulders, set the whole earth on fire with the power and love, yes love, between them. Their spells were hand-written scribbles on torn notebook paper, their conjurations pop songs hollered in bad harmony while they climbed bigleaf magnolias and came down smelling of perfume. Now imagine the braces come off and one girl is suddenly considered beautiful, suddenly the subject of gossip and expected to date boys. Imagine her friend has a brother.

The truth is that Tommy had been no good.

Not long after Charlene’s fifteenth birthday, Tommy had come sniffing around. He lingered in the doorway while the girls painted their nails and whispered to each other. He followed them out along the line of bald cypress that grew beside the Bayou and teased Charlene, whipping little sticks and rocks at her bare legs. He watched her in the hallways at school, while she ducked and avoided his attentions. The adults called it cute. “He has a crush on you,” they said. Soon they were calling her his girlfriend.

Hiding in the balcony of the high school auditorium, Charlie had whispered, “I don’t like Tommy. I never liked him, but they say he’s my boyfriend.” Her lashes were wet, nose red. “I don’t want him.”

Maggie squeezed her hand. “It’s better when you don’t push him away.” She averted her eyes, face reddening. “He gets angry when he can’t have what he wants.”

Maggie knew too well, had known since they were children. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine, only it wasn’t a suggestion: the horrible sensation of his fingers on her jaw, forcing her to look; a trip to the beach where he yanked down her swim top and pushed her into the sand “Not very big yet, are they?” His cruel grin haunted her. She hugged Charlene tight on that balcony until she felt something harden within her friend, some steel of backbone and vengeance she hadn’t known was there. The sense of it was contagious and it grew in her own spine as well.

“We can do something about it,” Charlie said, so low Maggie almost didn’t hear.

Her own resolve hardened into stone. “Yeah.”

The night of the school dance, Tommy was to meet Charlene outside the gym. She wore a pink dress, glittered eyeshadow, butterfly clips in her blonde hair. “You look like Brittney Spears,” her mother had said, and Charlie had made herself smile while she stepped into a pair of heels she hadn’t quite learned to walk in. Maggie wouldn’t be there. Instead, her daddy dropped her at the movies to see Never Been Kissed for the third time and made some nasty remark about the title.

What happened in the hours between seven and ten is a blur of secrets: a boy lured out to the woods behind the school by the girl in pink; one heavy, knotted branch launched from behind a tree to crack his skull; four arms and two sets of bare feet dragging him through the mud to the edge of the swamp; a second clean pink dress secreted in a backpack. If there was mud under Charlene’s perfect nails when she stepped into the gym, no one noticed.

“Have you seen Tommy?” she asked around, perfectly worried, butterfly clips still in place.

Maggie was a strange girl, everyone knew, so a sweatshirt on such a warm night seemed off to no one. If the muddy tank beneath it smelled of swamp when her daddy picked her up, he said nothing.

“How’s the movie?”

“Same as last week,” she smiled, adjusting her glasses and tugging her hair free from its tie. All the mud of that evening went down the drain of her shower.

Now two women, much changed but still so full of love for each other, lay twined watching movies on an early Saturday afternoon. In an hour or so, Charlene would open the packages she’d had sent to the house, slip their items into shopping bags. She’d climb back into her car and drive south into West Renard, and if her clothes smelled of the swamp by the Duchamp house, her husband would think nothing of it.