The Neon Tempest
92: Chapter Thirty-One, Part One
Previously…
91: Chapter Thirty, Part Three
When she’d been young, after “the Illness” and her release from the hospital, Mer’s father sent her on a trip to New Orleans with her nanny, to the French Quarter.
That’s what her father had called it - “the illness” - so often and with such vague import that it took on a life of its own, became a proper name for the nebulous absence in her memory, the shape of hazy nothing marking the boundaries of what she remembered about her recovery. She’d never been sure what ailment she had, if it’d been some cancer or neurological disease, or something rarer that had no name, and so had to be called “the Illness.” Her only recollection of that time between there and here had been constructed out of secondhand accounts, out of deductions and lesser assumptions. When she’d been declared well by a young man with tired eyes and an old stethoscope draped around his neck, her father thought she could do with a vacation away from clinics and doctors, far from the sterile, sequestered hallways of their private tower apartment, and so asked her where she’d like to go.
He stood in the door to her lilac-hued bedroom. A hooded night-light cast a shadowed halo on the wall beside him.
Anywhere in the world, he told her.
New Orleans, she requested. The French Quarter.
“You can go anywhere,” Gomez said. “Anywhere.”
“New Orleans,” Mer repeated. “The French Quarter.”
“But why?”
“There’s a zoo,” she said. “And the aquarium. The aquarium has catfish bigger than you and me.”
“We have a zoo,” Gomez said. “We have catfish.”
“Not like these,” she said, her eyes big. She shook her head, held up her arms in a loop. “These are huge. And older than you, even.”
“I doubt that very much, darling,” he said.
Mer remembers him smiling and corrects herself. He never smiled. He never smiles.
“Is that really where you would like to go?”
“The zoo and the aquarium and beignets and gumbo and the cathedral and zydeco and Marie Laveau’s and pirates,” she said. “Please.”
“I never should have bought you those books.” He smoothed the front of his suit and stood straight. “New Orleans it is,” he said. “I will touch base with Nanny to sort the details. You can fly out tomorrow after lunch.”
“Thank you, daddy,” she said. She threw out her arms, opened and closed her hands.
Miyazaki bowed slight, and told her goodnight, that he had business to wrap up before he spoke to Nanny, and left. His footsteps clipped down the hall, faded behind an open-and-shut office door.
Mer remembers climbing from her bed and grabbing one of the books her father mentioned, one about voodoo and about its Creole queen, Marie Laveau. She read about scrawling three chalk X’s on the mystic’s grave and making a wish, about the attendant loa drawn to the act, and how one must be careful in invoking them because they might never leave, and ride you invisibly for all your days.
To be continued…