The Map of Moments (2 page)

One figure remains in shadow. Max cannot see its face, which is fine, because he doesn't want to. He's too afraid.

He focuses on Gabrielle, shutting them all out. He wants to give her all of him, to bring her joy and he touches her face, thrusting up to meet her.

Only then does he feel the wetness beneath him.

Frantic, he glances around and sees water flowing up through the spaces between the floorboards. The arms of the ball gown float like butterfly wings. An old leather shoe drifts by his head.

He tries to ask where it's all coming from, turning to look up at her. But when he opens his mouth, water spills in. The attic is flooding. Max is drowning. Panic surges through him for a moment, but up through the water he sees that Gabrielle is still rocking on top
of him, smiling as she presses her hands down on his chest, holding him down, keeping him under. He cannot breathe. For a moment he fights her, but then his panic shatters, leaving only the debris of sadness.

The world inverts.

Gabrielle is still above him—he can see the beams of the attic roof, and he can still feel the floorboards beneath his back—but as though the house has turned upside down, she is now the one under the water. It fills the top of the attic and she begins to sink upward, arms still reaching for him as though beckoning him to follow.

She is wearing her mother's old debutante gown now, and it billows around her. Then the roof tumbles away, down into a pit of nothing, and she slips into black waters and is gone.

And he wakes…

…with a deep breath, as though coming back to life. Max had a moment of dislocation, and then his seat jostled and the hum of the passenger jet's engines filled his ears, and he remembered it all.

“Jesus,” he whispered, opening his eyes and surrendering to consciousness.

The obese woman in the seat beside him shifted, absorbing even more of the space he'd paid to occupy. It seemed she'd actually gotten larger since the plane departed Boston, but of course that had to be impossible.

Don't be a prick,
he chided himself. Such thoughts were out of character for him on most days, but most days he wasn't pinned into his seat by a woman of such immensity. Most days he wasn't returning to a place he'd sworn to leave
forever, traveling to the funeral of the person responsible for both the greatest joy and the greatest pain he'd ever known.

So if he behaved like a prick, he had a feeling he'd be able to live with it.

The landing announcement came through the PA system. Max managed to get his seat upright. He rested his head against the window frame and stared down at civilization below. It should have been New Orleans, but ten weeks after the hurricane, getting a flight into that city still presented complications and doubts. In the seven months he'd lived in Louisiana, Max had never been to Baton Rouge, and as the plane descended over the state's capital, he found himself wishing he could have avoided it forever.

Did I ever really know you?
he thought. And though the question was meant for Gabrielle, it could easily have applied to the city of New Orleans. He'd barely scratched the surface during the nearly two semesters he'd taught at Tu-lane, figuring he'd have years to explore and understand the mystery of what had once been called the Big Easy. It had been a city of music and exoticism, a place of both excess and torpor. He thought he'd gotten more intimate with New Orleans than the average tourist, but he'd been fooling himself, like a john falling in love with his favorite hooker.

Such thoughts led to dark corners of his mind, and he forced himself to move away from them. Gabrielle had hurt him so badly that he'd fled home to Boston, taking a new position teaching at Tufts University. But comparing her to some back alley whore made him cringe. She wasn't entirely to blame. Yes, she'd told him that she loved him, and pulled him into her life and her bed with a fervent passion
he had never before encountered. But Max was thirty-one years old when he met Gabrielle, while she was only nineteen. He'd been her professor. He'd known the rules, and had broken them with abandon.

Yet despite the way everyone who discovered the relationship had seemed willing to give him a pass, Max blamed himself. He'd looked into those bright copper eyes and
seen
the love she felt for him, believed it wholeheartedly. When Gabrielle had told him that she'd dreamed of finding a man who would leave
her
breathless, and that she'd found him in Max, he'd believed her. When they'd made love in the attic on Landry Street, and she'd wept and clung to him afterward, and wished them away to someplace where no one else could ever reach them, he had felt like the man all men wanted to be—the hero, the knight, the lover and champion.

What an asshole.

One thing he'd learned in his time in Louisiana was that New Orleans was a city of masks. Everyone wore one, and not just for Mardi Gras. Only the desperately poor were what they seemed to be. Otherwise, how to explain the way the populace had so long ignored warnings of their beloved city's vulnerability, or the libertine air of sexual and epicurean excess and music that fueled the tourist trade, while sixty percent of the city remained illiterate, and thousands lived in shotgun houses slapped together like papier-mâché? New Orleans had two faces: one of them a stew of cultures and languages, poverty and success, corruption and hope; the other, the mask it showed the world.

How could he have been fool enough not to see that Gabrielle also wore a mask?

Max had asked himself that question far too many times while back in Boston. He ought to have been settling in, enjoying the preparations for his new job, and trying to move on. At his sister's Fourth of July barbecue, he should have listened when she'd told him her single neighbor, Jill, had taken an interest in him. But he'd been too lost in that question to pay attention, beating himself up, wondering how he had fallen in love so fast and hard. Wondering how long it would be before it stopped hurting.

And then August had come, and with it, hurricane season.

Watching the television reports as Katrina moved into the Gulf of Mexico, he'd wondered why no one seemed as terrified as they should have been. Weren't they watching the same reports down in Louisiana? Couldn't they see the monster about to make landfall? But even as those questions rose in his mind, he understood. Some of the people in New Orleans would put their faith in God, others in luck, and others would simply chalk it up to fate. If the storm was meant to take them, it would. And some would just be stubborn; until someone called for a mandatory evacuation, they weren't going anywhere. And maybe not even then. Someone would have to round them up to get them out of there.

For too many, no one ever came.

Max had sat in his little faculty apartment on the Tufts campus and watched the anguished aftermath of the storm.

He had little faith in the spiritual, but Max had felt a soul-deep certainty, in those initial few days, that Gabrielle had not survived Hurricane Katrina. Days turned to weeks, shock turned to numbness, and numbness to mourning.
Hurricane Rita arrived at the end of September, flooding parts of the city all over again. Chaos had still not released its hold on the Gulf Coast, and it seemed order might never be restored.

On the 18th of October, just over seven weeks after Katrina, Max's phone rang. Without even realizing it, he had gotten into the habit of holding his breath when he glanced at the caller ID window. That night, the readout had said
unknown caller,
but what struck him was the area code: 504. Louisiana.

Max had picked up the phone. He'd hated himself for the hope in his voice when he said, “Hello?”

“It's Corinne Doucette.”

And he'd known. “She's dead, isn't she?”

For a moment, the line went silent. Then, just as he'd begun to think they'd been disconnected, Corinne spoke again.

“I told her to get out of there, but she wouldn't go. Said she couldn't leave, that it was the only place she'd be safe. They were saying all the neighborhoods in the bowl could be flooded, but she just went up into that damn attic and wouldn't come down. I told her she was crazy, Max, but you know Gaby. No talking to that girl.”

Corinne's voice had broken then.

“The water got that high?” he'd asked.

“High enough.”

Max had listened to Corinne as she told him about evacuating to Houston, and how she'd called and tried to get the police or someone,
anyone,
to go by and check the house on Landry Street. Most of her family had left New Orleans,
and of those who planned to return, none of them wanted anything to do with Gabrielle, dead or alive. Except for Corinne, her family had written her off years before.

In late September, Corinne had reluctantly returned to New Orleans. And so she'd had to identify the body.

At last, when Max had heard enough, he'd finally spoken up.

“Why did you call me?”

It had brought her up short. “What?”

“After what happened. Why would you call me?”

Her nerves had to be frayed. She'd laughed, and the sound was full of hurt and anger. “Jesus, Max. I called you because I thought you'd want to know. Maybe she fucked with your head, but I figured you were the only one…”

Her words trailed off.

“The only one what?” Max had to ask.

“The only person in the world besides me who would cry for her.”

Max had wanted to tell Corinne that he'd done his share of crying for Gabrielle when she was alive. That it hadn't helped then, and it wouldn't help now that she was dead. But he couldn't get the words out.

Nearly three more weeks had passed, and now he found himself on this airplane, about to touch down in Baton Rouge. During the layover in Memphis, he'd almost turned around and caught the next plane back north. At least, he'd pretended to himself that he could do that. What a joke. He could no more turn around than he could snap his fingers and make the grief go away. Leaving the way he had, this chapter of his life had
never
felt closed.

Gabrielle's funeral might finally put an end to it.

He'd grieve, but he would not cry. Perhaps it was a good sign that he couldn't shed any more tears for her. Or maybe it meant he was dead inside.

“I hate landings the most,” said the woman beside him.

Max blinked and looked at her. She'd said nothing the entire flight, and now she wanted to strike up a conversation? The cynicism that had been building in him all year began to form a reply, but then he looked at her, and he
saw
her. The woman had kind, intelligent eyes, and wore an expression of nervous self-deprecation. He wondered what brought her to Baton Rouge. There must, he knew, be other people on board who were coming to Louisiana for funerals or to rebuild. And some who were returning to search for still-missing loved ones, lying undiscovered in mud or in some other attic.

“Don't worry,” Max told her, smiling. “This close to the ground, even if we fall the rest of the way, the worst we're gonna get is bruises.”

She gripped the armrests and stared at him, wide-eyed. “Don't even say that!”

Then, with a squeak of tires, the plane found the runway. The woman let out a breath and chuckled. “Was that your attempt to set me at ease?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“You're not very good at it.”

“Never have been,” he confessed. “But still I try.”

They shared a smile as the plane taxied toward the terminal.

“What brings you to Louisiana?” she asked.

Max glanced out the window. “A woman.”

Corinne drove south on Interstate 10 with the windows down, making a wind tunnel out of her beat-up old Chevy Corsica. Max didn't complain. The car had no air-conditioning, and the afternoon was warm and humid. Back home in Boston, November meant chilly days and chillier nights. But that Louisiana day, winter felt a whole world away.

“Thanks for coming to get me,” he said, fifteen minutes south of the airport.

“Not a problem. Guy like you, if you'd gotten a rental, you'd probably have been carjacked before you got anywhere near your hotel.”