She worked hard to keep from considering the way things could have been, and might have been, but were not. Things had gone another way, and this other way had been best for them both. Or so she was forced to assume, not knowing what might have happened if she’d bundled up and headed north, and west … or if he’d taken off his coat and parked his dirigible in the delta.
Before he could mention that she’d grown uncharacteristically silent, she made some excuse to be done. “Tell your engineer I said thank you, and that it was a pleasure to meet him. And it’s been … it’s been good to talk to you again. I’m glad to see you’re still doing well, and thinking of ways to do better.”
Then she left him there, still standing by the river, his hands in his pockets, wondering whatever things he was wondering, but not following her.
She hitched a ride back to the Metairie station, sitting beside a sharecropping woman and her oversized, dull-faced son with sloping shoulders and enormous hands. At the station she waited for the correct street rail car and took it to Rue Canal, opting to walk from the final stop rather than hail a cab. It was only a few blocks back to the Garden Court, and she felt restless for reasons she could not explain — or chose not to.
She looked up from her reverie to note that the sky was going gray. At first she thought it was because the hour was swiftly growing late and the curfew coming soon, then realized that the sky must be shuttered with clouds, and not quite so far toward evening as it felt at first. The river smelled like summer coming in, and dead fish and waterlogged vegetation, and the air that carried those scents from bank to bank and beyond was dragged along the ground by those same dark clouds that blackened like spilling ink up from the south. She regarded the sky and said, to no one but herself, “A storm’s coming.”
Her parasol wouldn’t help her if the bottom dropped out. But she’d been wet before, and she’d be wet again before she died, and it’d never been a catastrophe yet. So onward she went, deeper into the Vieux Carré.
She walked briskly past people who were opening windows to catch the breeze that would billow through before the rain came up behind it. They were tying back curtains and inviting the air to sweep on through, push out the odors of cayenne and Tabasco, crawfish and rum, red beans and rice, and cigars and cheap tobacco. The Quarter exhaled paraffin and charcoal, incense and manure. It breathed diesel and industrial lubricant, barbecue and salt.
It whispered.
Josephine stopped, unsure of what that sound had been — uncertain if it meant anything, or if it’d only been her imagination. A tumbleweed of newspaper went skipping across her path, rolling into the street and stopping in a puddle, where it unfurled to reveal the headline. The first words were blurred, but the remainder of them read, AT THE ST. LOUIS CATHEDRAL. As she stared, dirty water soaked through, obscuring even that scant message, but somehow revealing another, farther down the page — before the whole thing disappeared into soaked, illegible pulp.
GARDEN
She looked away from the sopping paper. It meant nothing, after all. She found herself casually surprised that she’d bothered to stop for it, and wondered why it’d seemed — even for a moment — like something worth examining.
She resumed her pace. Her feet clapped against the hollow sidewalks with their planed slats, and her skirts skimmed the splinters. Still, she felt odd, as if she’d heard something but failed to understand it. As if she should’ve listened harder. Like she was being chastised at a distance, by a mother or grandmother whose voice she couldn’t quite pick out of a crowd.
The creak of a sign hanging on a chain tickled at her ears. She spied it up ahead, and, catching its text from the corner of her eye, she drew up short again. She could’ve sworn — would’ve sworn, and at great length — that it’d said, TOO LATE TO WAIT. But it read only, TULANE WAITMAN, advertising a minister’s office.
She stared intently at the sign as she passed beneath it. It performed no further tricks; it only swung squeakily in the shifting air ahead of the incoming storm.
Where was she again? Oh, yes. Rue Galvez, just past Esplanade. Funny how she felt so turned around.
She took the next turn and proceeded via dead reckoning, the kind that was engraved in her blood. She’d lived in the Quarter all her life, and she knew it like the corridors of the Garden Court. She could have navigated it blindfolded, in the fog, at midnight. Even so, her heart pounded, and she did not know why. She knew only that she had to keep moving. “Because of the curfew,” she muttered to herself, but did not believe a word of it.
The streets were nearly empty, and this, too, was strange. True, the businesses were closing up shop against the storm, against the limits imposed by the Texians, but there was also … something else? It was a ridiculous thing to think, but Josephine thought it anyway, and she kept walking, and faster. Just short of a run.
Running would draw attention. She did not want attention, did she?
Well, why not? She was doing nothing wrong. It mattered little if anyone stopped her.
A seagull squawked loudly and flapped far too close to her head, startling her into flinging her hands defensively upward. The bird chattered its displeasure and dropped with a soft slapping of its splayed, webbed feet onto the planks immediately in her path. It stretched its wings, opening and closing them as if in warning, or summons, or some other gesture the woman couldn’t decipher.
“What?” she asked it, feeling ridiculous. “What do you want? Get out of the way,” she said, and prepared to aim a kick in its general direction. She knew from long experience that she’d never hit the thing; it’d be out of her way well in time, which was just as well. She didn’t care to hurt it, but she would not be bullied by a creature the size of a cat.
It cawed once more and stared at something behind her, so she looked over her shoulder and spied — at a brief, outrageous glance — a storefront window that made her gasp. A large white skull filled the entire pane, but only for a split second … before it was replaced with a dress stitched for a bride, advertising the stock at Miss Delia’s Dresses and Wares.
Josephine’s throat went dry, and a warm flush began creeping up her chest. Her hands tingled and went numb. “What’s going on?” she asked no one in particular. “What’s happening?”
The gull answered with a scrap of stationery in its mouth. It hadn’t been there at first, but it was present when she turned around. The bird dropped the shred of paper printed-side up, declaring in someone’s overelaborate handwriting, Join us for something garbled and runny, dampened into meaninglessness. Then, at Jackson Square, the north corner gardens!
Jackson Square. The Cathedral.
A message, but from whom? From what? And who would communicate in such a fashion?
It would be better to go find out than to always wonder — or that’s the conclusion she came to as the bird flew off, taking the paper with it. She adjusted her trajectory and increased her pace. At first she merely hustled, walking too fast for decorum, but soon she was all but skipping, then dashing outright.
She wasn’t sure why she was running, or what she was running from, though she could take a guess.
“Not yet, not yet, not yet,” she said under her breath as she tore along, ducking down alleys and cutting across intersections.
The whole Quarter ushered her along, clearing the way.
The doors moved and the sweepers stepped aside. Horses drew carriages out of her path, and rolling-crawlers lurched off as she darted toward them. Wisps of fog frayed and split at her approach, and Jackson Square was closer, closer, and closer.