The Long Goodbye, No. 2

Act I

The bus from the Lower Ninth Ward to St. Olga's Academy smelled of sweat and old tobacco and damp canvas. Clementine Thibodeaux sat near the back with a cloth bundle on her lap. The air conditioning had broken two stops ago. The woman across from her fanned herself with a church bulletin. The driver ran the route in silence, his hands on the wheel, his eyes on the road.

Clementine's skin was pale in a way that was not vanity but biology. The doctor in the clinic near her building called it porphyria. Her mother called it the curse of their ancestors. Clementine called it nothing. She had learned early that names were a way of making things feel manageable, and her life had stopped feeling manageable when her father left and the doctor started charging extra for visits that did not lead to cures.

St. Olga's was built inside a former plantation house, the sort of place that looked like it belonged in a painting of the old South but smelled, in practice, of bleach and mildew and the sweet-rotten perfume of magnolias left too long on the ground. The girls who stepped off the shuttle buses were dressed in clothes that cost more than Clementine's mother would earn in a year. Cordelia LeBlanc stood at the top of the steps in a white dress and a smile that could have been used to measure hardness on the Mohs scale.

Clementine was assigned to the farthest table in the dining hall. "For the comfort of the other students," a prefect explained, though no one else had voiced discomfort. Clementine ate alone. She ate quickly. She looked at her plate and then at the wall and then back at her plate.

At night, she lay on her narrow bed in the dormitory and listened to the ceiling fan click every seven seconds. The heat did not break. It compressed. It sat on her chest like a palm.

Act II

Willa Thibodeauxno relation, though they shared a surname the way two trees might share a name when planted in the same soilhad whip marks on her back. Clementine saw them in the laundry room on a Wednesday afternoon, when she went to check on the washing and found Willa sitting on a folding table with her shirt pulled up, her shoulders bare and raw.

Clementine said nothing. She fetched a first-aid box from the supply closet. She opened it. She took out iodine and gauze and tape. She cleaned the wounds with movements that were neither gentle nor hurried. Willa flinched at the first touch and then went still.

"LeBlanc did this?" Clementine asked.

Willa nodded.

"Are there more?"

Willa shook her head.

Clementine wrapped the gauze and secured it with tape. She put the iodine back in the box. She closed the box. She stood up.

"Tell no one," Willa said.

Clementine paused at the door. She did not turn around. "Good."

Silas Boudreaux appeared in her orbit around this time, the way rain appears in New Orleansinevitable, unannounced, and accompanied by a humidity that makes everything feel slightly heavier. He was tall and thin and held a bottle of whiskey in his hand the way some people hold a cigarette, as though it were a prop in a role he had not fully decided to play.

"Why do you help her?" he asked one evening, leaning against the wall outside the dormitory.

"She needs help."

"That's not what I asked."

Clementine looked at him. His eyes were red-rimmed but clear. "I don't know why."

"Everyone knows why."

She thought about this. "Maybe."

"Why help me?" he asked.

"Because you look like you might drown."

"I can swim."

"No," he said. "You can't."

They stood in the heat for a moment, neither of them moving. Then a dormitory door opened and a girl called Clementine's name, and he nodded once and walked away.

Cordelia organized a Purification Committee in October. It sounded like a church group. It functioned as a weapons unit. Willa was bound to the top of the old bell tower on a Friday evening and photographed by four girls who had been paid in makeup and gossip. The photographs were copied and distributed across the city. Clementine saw three copies pinned to bulletin boards before dusk.

She did nothing. She walked past the bulletin boards. She went to her room. She sat on her bed. She thought about Willa's back and the sound the gauze made when she tore it from the roll. She thought about Silas and the way he said you can't swim when she could.

Act III

The thing Clementine didthe only thing she has done in the years before this moment that could be called active, as opposed to reactivehappened in a leather chair in the office of Mr. LeBlanc, Cordelia's father.

She sat across from him and spoke in a voice that was quiet and steady. She knew about the photographs. She knew about the Purification Committee. She knew about the copies distributed to the schools and the churches and the social clubs. She knew, because Willa told her, and she believed Willa.

"What do you want?" Mr. LeBlanc asked. He did not look at her the way other men looked at her. He looked at her the way a businessman looks at a ledger entrycalculating, not cruel.

"I want Willa to stop being tied to things."

Mr. LeBlanc exhaled through his nose. "You understand what you're asking me to do?"

"I understand that your daughter is photographing girls and distributing those photographs. I understand that this is a liability. I understand that you are a businessman."

He was quiet for a long time. "Leave."

She left. She walked back through the corridors of St. Olga's, past the girls practicing piano in the music room, past the ones sitting on the lawns with books they were not reading, past the rose garden where the roses were dead and the dirt was dry and cracked. Silas found her there.

"You blackmailed him," he said.

"I protected her."

"You turned bullying into a transaction."

"That's New Orleans."

He sat down on the grass. He did not look at her. "Yeah. It is."

Act IV

The hurricane came in September. It was not dramatic. It was not the kind of thing that appears in movies with trees uprooted and roofs torn away and people clinging to telephone poles. It was rain. It was wind. It was water moving into places where water should not be.

St. Olga's basement flooded. The original photographsWilla's photographs, the ones Cordelia's girls had madedissolved in the water like ink on paper. The evidence was gone. Cordelia's behavior was unprovable. Mr. LeBlanc denied everything. Willa stopped speaking to anyone.

Clementine's mother, Solange, came to the academy to do the laundry. She was hired through a woman at the church, the same woman who had given Clementine her first pair of shoes that did not have holes. Solange wore a black dress and a cross around her neck and a face that was neither angry nor sad but tired in a way that sleep did not fix.

She saw Clementine in the corridor with Silas. She stopped. Her face went pale.

"Who are you talking to?" she asked when she reached Clementine's side.

"No one."

The flood receded. The water went down. The walls dried. The mold returned three months later, because mold in New Orleans is not an event. It is a condition.

Solange caught pneumonia in November. It started as a cough and became a fever and became something the clinic could not treat and became something that required a hospital and money they did not have. Clementine wrote a letter to the academy and did not include a reason. She handed it to the secretary and walked out.

She moved to Texas with a distant cousin who lived in a town called Baytown. The apartment had an air conditioner that made noise but did not cool. She married a man who worked at an oil refinery. He was not cruel. He was not kind. He was a man who came home at night and ate dinner and watched television and went to sleep.

Her skin remained pale. Her hair remained black. She woke at six in the morning. She made coffee. She ironed his shirts. She went to the bank and sat at a desk and stamped forms. She came home. She cooked. She washed dishes. She went to bed at eleven. She slept. She woke. She did it again.

Years later, someone in New Orleans found a photograph in the back of a local newspaper from 1995. Two figures standing in front of the old St. Olga's rose garden. The image was blurry. The people were unidentifiable. The caption read: "St. Olga's Academy, Class of 1995." No names were listed. The roses in the background were long dead. The fence was rusted. The sky was grey. Nobody knew who the figures were.

Author Note & Copyright: