It was also what had made me the unprepared parent to two teenagers and a preteen.
My father’s family was among the first to settle here when my great-great-grandfather was assigned a judgeship by none other than Jefferson himself back in the early 1800s. With ancestors who were among the first important founders of the city, my father felt our family bore a certain responsibility. But his take was one I’d never really subscribed to. Probably because my own mother had been of questionable heritage (read: she’d been a stripper on Bourbon Street when my father had met her) and had thrown his unnamed title into his face when she’d left us both when I was four.
So when my father and his wife had died, I’d moved back into the mammoth house that had been in my family since my ancestors had moved down to Louisiana from the Boston area, and tried my best to be a surrogate parent to my three younger sisters.
It was that same house I now stood in front of, experiencing myriad mixed feelings.
Emilie and Laure still lived there. It was where Emilie had gotten married two years ago and now had a child of her own. A house that Zoe hadn’t seemed to be able to get out of fast enough when she was eighteen and moved to a dorm on the campus of Tulane. I rubbed the back of my neck, marveling at how similar her actions had been to my own so long ago. Before I was forced back into that house and into the role of “guardian.”
“Thank God you’re here,” Emilie said, opening the door at my first knock. “I still haven’t heard anything from Zoe. She’s not answering her cell phone, and Laure hasn’t had any luck getting anything out of her friends.”
It also appeared Emilie was having problems in other areas as she bounced one-year-old Henri on her hip, the toddler’s face red and damp from tears.
She led the way back to the kitchen, where they had always spent a great deal of their time. There, Emilie’s young husband, James, was making what looked like dinner by way of sandwiches, and Laure was on the phone, apparently talking to another of Zoe’s friends.
I put my hat on the rectangular table that sat six and shrugged out of my overcoat, taking Henri when Emilie thrust him at me.
“He’s teething,” she said.
I went to the sink and placed the toddler on the counter next to me while I washed my hands, then picked him back up.
“Is there some way you can trace her cell?” Laure asked, disconnecting from her call.
“Only if she answers it,” I told her.
Henri had taken to chomping on my index finger. I winced, discovering that a tooth or two or three had already broken through his tender gums and were now breaking into my flesh.
Out of the three girls, Zoe was the one most capable of taking care of herself.
And the other two had been old enough when their parents had died that the trauma of losing loved ones had never completely left them.
Suddenly every eye was on me, including the two big blues of the baby in my arms.
“What?”
Laure waved her hand. “What what? What have you done since Emilie called this morning?”
I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t done anything. “I was waiting until I came over here for details.”
“You already have all the details,” Emilie said, taking Henri away from me as if he’d been a gift she was now rescinding.
I shared a look with James, who immediately went back to making sandwiches that for all intents and purposes had been done five minutes ago.
“So what are you going to do? Have you put an APB out on her? Have you gone to the dorm?”
“I’m guessing you already have,” I said.
“Of course we have. But we don’t have badges.”
“I don’t think Zoe would appreciate my flashing my badge around campus.”
“I don’t care what Zoe appreciates—and that’s assuming everything’s okay.”
Laure shuddered and wrapped her arms around her slender torso.
“Look,” I said, picking up a piece of salami and putting it into my mouth, “this isn’t the first time Zoe’s pulled something like this.”
Actually, it wasn’t the second or third, either, but I wasn’t going to point that out. To do so would be to hurt Emilie and Laure by trivializing their concern, and I wasn’t prepared to do that.
“Two days isn’t all that long a period of time.”
“But what if she’s been kidnapped?” Emilie asked.
Her fear must have manifested itself physically, because Henri suddenly started crying.
James took him and mumbled something about changing his diaper as he disappeared from the room. Neither of my sisters appeared to notice.
“If she’d been kidnapped, then surely a ransom demand would have been made by now.”
As if on cue, the phone rang, echoing eerily throughout the silent house.
Laure and Emilie raced for it, while I put the top on one of the sandwiches and took a bite. Hey, I hadn’t eaten since lunch and I was hungry.
“Hello?” Laure said, winning the race.
Her tensed shoulders relaxed as she listened to someone who was apparently not a kidnapper.
“Hi, Rose. No, no word yet. I want to keep the line open in case…she calls. I’ll let you know the minute we hear anything.”
She hung up again and looked back to me.
There were few things that could floor me. But the two women staring at me as if waiting for me to pull answers out of my sleeves like a magician’s never-ending scarf was one of them.
“All right, I’ll look into it,” I said under my breath.
Emilie hugged me, and Laure looked more relieved than I felt comfortable witnessing.
Was it really only yesterday I’d been helping Laure with her homework while Emilie had braided Zoe’s hair in this very kitchen, a pot of gumbo on the stove while the radio played tinny zydeco or jazz?
Yesterday and ten years ago.
“Thanks, Al,” Emilie murmured, her cheek soft against my stubble-covered one.
“Not that I think it’s going to accomplish anything. Watch and see if our renegade little sister doesn’t call herself before I can find out anything.”
“We can only hope that’s the case,” Laure said.
The telephone rang again. James walked back into the room with a still-wailing Henri, and Emilie went to put the sandwiches on plates.
Laure picked up the phone. “Oh, hi, Valerie. No, no word yet. Yes, yes, he’s here now.”
My ex-wife.
I dry-washed my face to hide my frown from Em. “You called Valerie?”
“Don’t look so surprised,” she said from the other side of the counter. “Even though you two are divorced, Val’s still like family to us.”
“No, not yet,” Laure was saying. “We’re going to call around to the hospitals now.”
An image of my father’s slack face where he’d lain in a curtained-off area of the hospital emergency room flashed through my mind.
And for the first time I knew a fear that