Dolly Jean will stand to see it demolished. Oh, I think Dolly Jean is with them too. Now Dolly Jean looks like a withered apple, but they say she is very quick.”
“I’m glad she’s there,” he said. “I like old people.” Rowan laughed softly, resting her head on his shoulder. “Maybe we’ll ask Aunt Viv to come over,” he said. “And how is Bea? What is happening with Bea?”
“Well, now,” said Pierce with a little tilt of his head. “Ancient Evelyn has worked the miracle there, simply by coming home from the hospital and needing care, and guess who has dashed up to Amelia to feed her soft-boiled eggs and make her talk, and make her grip tight with both hands? Dad says it’s the perfect antidote for grief. I wonder if Mother’s spirit isn’t there.”
“All the news is good news now,” Rowan said with a wan smile, her voice deep as always. “And the girls will be in the house, and the silence will have to wait, and the spirits recede into the walls.”
“You think they’re still there?” Pierce asked with touching innocence.
God bless the Mayfairs who have never seen, and don’t really believe.
“No, son,” Michael said. “It’s just a big beautiful house, and it’s waiting for us, and for … new generations to come.”
“For Mayfairs yet unborn,” whispered Rowan.
They had just turned onto St. Charles Avenue, the heavenly corridor of green, oaks in blinding spring leaf, sun mellow, traffic slow, flash of one lovely house after another. My town, home, everything all right, Rowan’s hand in mine.
“Ah, and Amelia Street, look,” he said.
How dapper the Mayfair house looked in the San Francisco style, with its fresh coat of peach with white trim and green shutters. And all the weeds gone. He almost wanted to stop, to see Evelyn and Bea, but he knew he had to see Mona first, he had to see the mother and child rolled into one. And he had to be with his wife, talking quietly in the big bedroom upstairs, about all that had happened, the tales they’d heard, the strange things they’d seen and might never tell anyone … except Mona.
And tomorrow he would go out to the mausoleum where Aaron was buried, and he’d do the Irish trick of just talking to Aaron, out loud, as if Aaron were answering, and if anybody didn’t like it, well, they could just get out of there, couldn’t they? All his family had always done that, his father going out to St. Joseph’s Cemetery and talking to his grandmother and grandfather any time he felt like it. And Uncle Shamus when he was so sick, saying to his wife, “You can still talk to me after I’m gone. The only difference is I won’t be answering you.”
Once again the light changed, darkening, and the trees expanded, crowding out the sky and breaking it into tiny glowing fragments. The Garden District. First Street. And wonder of wonders, the house on the comer of Chestnut, amid its spring banana trees and ferns, and azaleas in bloom, waiting for them.
“Pierce, you must come in.”
“No, they’re waiting for me downtown. You rest. Call us when you need us.” He had already slipped out to lend a manly hand as Rowan climbed from the car. And then his key was in the gate, and he was waving goodbye to them.
A uniformed guard walked along the side fence, disappearing discreetly around the end of the house.
The silence was healed, the car slipping off in light and shadow, noiseless, removed, the dying afternoon burnished and warm and without the slightest resistance. The scent of the sweet olive hung over the whole yard. And tonight he’d smell the jasmine again.
Ash had said that fragrance was the sharpest trigger of memory, a transport into forgotten worlds. And he had been so right, and what did it do to you, to be taken away from all the fragrances you needed to breathe?
He opened the front door for his wife, and felt a sudden impulse to carry her over the threshold. Hell, why not!
She gave a little unrestrained cry of delight, clutching his neck as he scooped her up.
The thing about gestures like this was not to drop the lady in question.
“And now, my dear, we are home,” he growled against her soft neck again, forcing her head back as he kissed her beneath her chin, “and the smell of the sweet olive gives way to Eugenia’s ever-present wax, and the scent of the old