House of Blues (27 page)

Within seconds, the world had cracked and split open.
 

18

Sugar hated sitting still, it was unlike her to sit
still; she was a woman of action. But there was nothing she could do
right now except try to pick up the pieces. She had had a service
come in and clean her house, but there were still grisly signs of
what had happened. She had called painters. She was going to have the
room painted another color—a peachy pink—so it would look
completely different.

Grady had said, "Mom, why don't you move out?
This place is too big for you and it has horrible memories. You don't
need it, make a fresh start."

But she didn't want that. There were horrible
memories, all right, but some of them were old and she'd been living
with them a long time. She was going to go through everything and get
rid of the garbage—get rid of everything that was Arthur's—and
she was going to have the whole damned place painted, all in colors
she loved that Arthur had vetoed. She might even get rid of all the
furniture, piece by piece, and buy stuff Arthur would hate. Being a
widow had its upbeat side.

But it scared her to death.

Now, when she should be mourning Arthur—and a piece
of her was, she just didn't show it—she was also realizing how
furious she was with him. It had been there for years—this
smashed-down, walked-on, crumpled-up fury—and now she could no
longer stamp it down.

She hoped she wouldn't get up at the funeral and
deliver a diatribe.

The funeral! Jesus. Where are Reed and Sally?

The question popped into her head every time she
managed to distract herself from it, which was about once every six
hours. Aside from these four (more or less) daily distractions, it
was all she thought about. The worry was always just underneath
whatever else she was doing, like some ferret or weasel gnawing at
her vitals. It was always there, but she felt better, she felt almost
good, when she was acting; trying to solve it; working to get to the
bottom of the problem. Two people so far had told her they thought
she was "in denial," whatever that was, because she was
keeping busy. And she had seen how that cop looked at her, that Ms.
Langdon, a huge brute of a woman—as if she were heartless. But it
wasn't that. She should be so lucky. She just didn't show her
emotions like other people.

She was putting things away in her buffet, so the
painters could move it, when she came upon the photo albums
carelessly stored there after some family dinner or other. Without
thinking, she opened one. It was an old one, put together when the
children were young, when they were all happy together. Before Arthur
started cheating on her.

There was Reed with her complete set of kiddie
kitchen equipment she'd gotten one Christmas, and in another, all
three of them holding up their Easter baskets. That was the year she
and Arthur had been so foolish as to get Grady a baby duck, which had
grown up and chased Reed around the backyard whenever she ventured
out.

There they were in their Easter clothes, Grady in a
little boys' shorts suit and the girls in matching pink dresses. Evie
had hated hers and wrecked it, falling down; purposely, Sugar was
sure. Reed, true to form, hadn't gotten so much as a smudge on hers.

They were unbearably adorable—how on earth could
they have turned out so abysmally? Grady a worthless failure. Evie a
drug addict.

Was I that bad a mother?

No, that has nothing to do with it. Look at me—I
had a dreadful childhood and I'm fine.

That was what she always came back to. She thought
that a person had in her the seeds of ability to do and be anything
she wanted, and she considered herself proof of the theory. She
didn't think that you were shaped by your environment, and she wasn't
even that sure about your genes. It was you. Your own character. Your
own strength.

Sugar had been born the third child of an oil company
executive and a professional mom. Georgina, her mother, had had to be
a pro, because two more children came after Sugar. The stair steps
were Michael, Patrice, Eugenie, Patrick, and Peter. Sugar had been
nicknamed because the other kids couldn't say her name.

I didn't even get my own damn name.

Michael was the oldest, Peter was the youngest,
Patrice was the first girl, and Patrick was a boy, which meant he
outranked her. Everyone made that perfectly obvious.

There were four years between Michael and Patrice.
Georgina probably thought she was off the hook when Sugar came along.

She took it out on me too. But she was oh-so-glad to
have two more boys. There had never been anyone to play with. The two
older kids had each other, and so did the two younger ones. Nobody
ever even noticed Sugar; no one cared about her.

She should know. She used to stage crying jags and
lock herself in the bathroom, just to get noticed.

It didn't work.

(But one thing, she knew what that was all about;
Evie used to pull the same thing, always trying to get attention, and
Sugar never let her get away with it.)

She got all A's. That didn't work either.

Once she wore the same clothes for a week. Nobody
even said anything.

She had read that you spent your whole life fighting
the patterns set early in life, and she'd certainly found it so.

I feel like I'm invisible; like I have to raise my
hand and say, "Excuse me, I'm here. Would you look me in the eye
now and then? Would you just pretend for one second I'm as important
as my husband? Or even that you see me?"

That was the way things had been for her. Whereas
nothing really awful had ever happened to any of her children.

At least until the Bad Day.

The pictures in this album had all been taken before
that; back when the world was young and innocent.

That was the worst day of her life, or probably any
of their lives. She would never forget the look on that poor child's
face . . .or the wound, so angry, so inhuman-looking; or the sounds
she made, later, during her therapy.

Sugar shook her body, willing the memory away.

But that was just one day in our whole lives; and in
the end, it brought us closer together. We all had to rally around in
the face of adversity. Arthur even dropped his current mistress. I'm
pretty sure he did, anyway. He acted almost normal for a while.

Sugar closed the album and, to her intense surprise,
found herself sinking to the floor, great, hopeless sobs escaping
from her diaphragm.

When the phone rang, she
thought, Reed. It's Reed! And she was almost right. It was Grady,
with news of Dennis.

* * *

Grady was trying to recover, somehow make sense out
of Dennis's story. Dennis had phoned him to come bail him out. The
police had found heroin in his room, and they were going to use it to
keep him.

Grady didn't know what to do. His mother was at
Dennis's house; he couldn't let her junkie son-in-law move in with
her, and he certainly wasn't going to move her into his own house. On
the other hand, Sugar really had no right to be in Dennis's house.
Sugar had settled the whole matter herself by saying she wanted to go
home anyway. He'd found her there, cleaning up or something. "Tough
old bird" was too mild a phrase.

Dennis was going to be a problem, though. No question
he was using again, and Grady didn't see any signs that his
brother-in-law was going to stop.

He should have left Dennis in jail—he'd have had to
detox. But in the end he couldn't do it. He liked Dennis, and even if
he hadn't, it would have been too mean.

He believed his story too.

Oh, yes.

The ring of truth was more like a peal.

That was like Evie. Exactly like her. To get drunk
and go nuts like that.

That was Evie.

"She's bad! She's always been bad," his
mother had blurted. She was a real
primitif
,
his mother was.

But Evie—what was she?

This was the part of the story he was trying to make
sense of, that he had struggled with for years. Who and what was
Evie, and how did she come to be?

The Evie Phenomenon, he called it, and he thought it
might be different from Evie herself, but he wasn't sure. His parents
had considered her devil spawn without apparently seeing the irony of
it.

The piece he was working on when he got the phone
call was called "The House of Blues Before The Thing."
Oddly enough, it was about her.

She was so far out of control.

So terrifying. Somehow,
everything she did ended up being frightening, he didn't know why.
"It was a Sunday afternoon," he had written, "and our
cousins had come over . . ."

* * *

Maybe it was Easter or something like that—we'd had
some big family gathering and they were all there, Tante Patrice's
kids and Tante Breezy-Ann and Uncle Patrick's. There must have been
nine or ten of us, including a few grown-ups who'd been detailed to
supervise, and we decided to play softball.

The grown-ups drifted away, all except for Uncle
Michael, who was the black sheep, being gay, and probably didn't care
much for the others his age.

We were doing fine, having a great time, when Evie
hit a foul ball and it went through the kitchen window. That wouldn't
have been so bad if Mama hadn't been standing at the sink, washing
some crystal things she didn't want to put in the dishwasher. The
ball whizzed by her ear, hit the refrigerator, ricocheted off it, and
hit her smack in the middle of the back. Holy shit, you'd have
thought she'd been shot. From the shriek she let out, you'd have got
the idea she was paralyzed. Well, poor thing, she was probably scared
to death. It's not ev ery day a flying missile doubles around and
hits you in the back, chases you down like one of those vulgarly
named pyrotechnical devices.

She started screaming, "You kids! You kids!"
and someone said Evie did it—probably me—and she hollered, "Get
in here, Evelyne Hebert. I'm going to knock you into the middle of
next week."

Evie started crying and cringing—God, I was sorry
for her! I don't think I've ever seen anyone look so scared in my
life. It wouldn't have occurred to me to be so scared of either of
our parents. I don't know if Evie was just a natural victim or what.
Maybe things happened to her that Reed and I don't know about. She's
the oldest—she was there before we were. Maybe her life was
different somehow.

For whatever reason, she was always different from
us.

She was bad.

That wasn't news. We knew she was bad because that's
what everyone said—it was a given in our family. But until then I
didn't know how scared she was.

She was cringing like some kind of pathetic
dog—actually holding onto a tree and hiding behind it—and she
said she didn't do it.

Mama said, "Mike. Did she do it?"

And Uncle Michael said, "She hit the ball,
Sugar, but Elise pitched it, and anyway, I'm the adult here, I was—"

"She just lied to me—did you hear that? Did
you hear her 1ie?"

All the other grown-ups were gathered in the kitchen
by this time—all of them come to see if the person howling was
their own dear little child, I guess, but Mama didn't seem to care
how big a spectacle she made of herself. They were just kind of
watching in various states of shock, mouths open, and Dad had his arm
around her waist. He was probably saying, "Now, Sugar, honey,"
or something like that, but she was all alone in the world for all
the attention she paid.

All alone except for Evie. She said, "You lied
to me! You're just a little liar, aren't you? You come here to me.
I'll show you what happens to liars."

By this time even I was getting scared, and so were
the other kids, I think. We were just standing around like the
grown-ups, sort of frozen in place. I don't know what we thought Mama
was going to do to her, but there was something terrifying just in
the way she was yelling.

And of course we knew that it was her fault. Because
somehow or other Evie made things go wrong. We knew in our hearts
that none of us was capable of making that ball hit Mama, that only
Evie did things like that. No one moved; not even Uncle Mike. Mama
kept saying, "You come here to me. Do what I say, Evelyne
Hebert," and slapping the kitchen counter with the flat of her
hand. It made a noise like a gunshot.

Evie sort of whined, "No, Mama; no, Mama,"
like some pathetic baby animal, and then Mama said, "Don't make
me have to come and get you," in a voice like the blade of a
saber. Evie started dancing. Jumping up and down and turning around
and around, flinging her arms in the air, flailing them about. She
was saying, "No! Noooo! I can't," and her hands looked like
they were going to fly off her wrists.

Mama said, "You've got five to get over here."
And she started counting. "One. Two. Three."

Evie was still dancing, still jumping up and down,
but she was scratching the tree now, attacking it with her nails,
which were probably bitten to the quick, but I guess she wished she
could turn into a cat and climb it.