The Heavens Rise Read online

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  For Sid Montz and Christian LeBlanc

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  From the Journals of Niquette Delongpre

  I. Marshall

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  From the Journals of Niquette Delongpre

  II. Ben

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  III. Marshall

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  IV. Anthem

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  V. Marshall

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  VI. The Heavens Rise

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  From the Journals of Niquette Delongpre

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  From the Journals of Niquette Delongpre

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  VII. Marissa

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  From the Journals of Niquette Delongpre

  Acknowledgments

  About Christopher Rice

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF NIQUETTE DELONGPRE

  * * *

  I’m not sure how long it was down there.

  The soils beneath South Louisiana are constantly shifting; a mass of alluvial sands deposited over hundreds of thousands of years by the Mississippi’s flow. It could have worked its way up from deep within the earth, possibly pressured by the nearby upwelling of one of the many salt domes that dot the bottom of my home state.

  Or it could have been drawn to the surface by the work of some retired and forgotten oil well. I’ve studied old survey maps. There were two within a five-mile radius of our property. But they were capped and abandoned decades ago.

  I remember when my father got the call that the contractors had discovered some kind of artesian well just a few yards from where they were laying the foundation of the new house. I remember how excited he was as he breathlessly explained the possibilities to my mother and me. The cost of running a larger pipe between Elysium and one of the parish’s main water lines was considerable; that’s how isolated the place was. But after a little investigation, the aquifer turned out to be woefully small, an isolated pocket beneath layers of bedrock that had long ago been cut off from its original source.

  Still, Dad wanted to put it to some kind of use, even if it was only temporary.

  We had so many excited conversations about that well. I can remember us all sitting around the dining table speculating on the ornate uses we could put it to. A fountain, perhaps. A koi pond was my idea. “Too California,” my mother protested.

  She was the one who had named the property years before I was born. Elysium, a final resting place for the heroic and virtuous. It was an odd name for an isolated acreage of mud and cypress that was a good ten-minute boat ride from its nearest neighbor. But my mother had an obsession with Ancient Greece that stemmed from the pagan-themed Mardi Gras parades that ruled our lives each winter. The significance of the name ended there, though. The house my father eventually built on the property wasn’t even Greek Revival. It was a raised Acadian cottage, with wraparound screened porches and a one-story brick foundation to protect it from floods. Still, if there was one thing my father worshipped more than his lifelong dream to construct an elegant idyll in the swamp, it was my mother, so the name stuck. Back when he was a college student, and the place was just two trailers, a long oyster-shell driveway and walls of deep, dripping shadows on all sides, my father proposed marriage there beneath ropes of string lights he and his fraternity brothers hung that afternoon. A photograph of the happy couple taken on that night, surrounded by several of my father’s brawny accomplices, hung on the wall of our front parlor for years.

  A swimming pool. That’s what my father wanted. If the well eventually did run dry, we could always feed the pool from the main water line, he insisted.

  I was resistant at first. The idea of a gurgling, classical French fountain surrounded by all that wild foliage appealed to my teenage love of the Victorian gothic. But my father used a very simple and cogent argument to change my mind; I loved to swim, but with my mortal fear of snakes, I’d never so much as stuck a toe in the thick finger of black water that snaked through our property like the waterlogged path of some giant jungle serpent. But if I had a cool, perfectly clear pool of pure water, direct from the source . . .

  Eventually, I gave in. Of course my father still asked for a show of hands, which seemed like a silly formality to me, but I cast my vote anyway. A swimming pool it was.

  It was a decision that destroyed our lives.

  I

  * * *

  MARSHALL

  1

  * * *

  ATLANTA

  MAY 2013

  The patient in Room 4 was named Marshall Ferriot and he couldn’t dream.

  Instead he experienced vivid eruptions of memory that came from the center of what he perceived to be his person. After the terrifying fall that landed him at death’s half-open door when he was only seventeen, he lost all sense of his physical body.

  Only rarely was he given some sense of the passage of time and, when it came, it was always accompanied by the jarring realization that his home was a dark, purgatorial place where dreams and memories, all those aspects of human beings people consider to be intangible, took on discrete wavelengths before they were stripped from those human souls they once defined.

  In these moments, he could feel himself dragging against a current of souls broken down to their raw constituents—a quantum flow of hopes, nightmares and memories—and it made him feel like shark bait being towed through open sea. While he had no sense of his limbs, he knew he was still too fully formed to be worn down and passed through this pulsing refinery of the spirit.

  Then, a moment of stultifying blackness would arrive, stealing the passage of time, an intermittent distortion that turned a march of ten years in the conscious world into an endless tape loop of revelations lost, rediscovered and lost again.

  Sometimes he could hear the nurses. Their whispers and their shouts would come in at equal volume and, with them, a dim awareness that they spoke of him often because they were afraid of him.

  But, for the most part, Marshall Ferriot’s consciousness fluctuated steadily between vivid memories of the time before his fall and a terrifying awareness of his paralysis at the edge of death.

  And the memories were growing stronger. They had come to include rich sensuous details that suggested an awakening of some kind might be close at hand. But first they carried him back to New Orleans, the city of his birth, and to the swamps of Tangipahoa Parish and a place called Elysium, where he’d been granted his first and last taste of a beautiful girl with cat-eyes and honey-colored hair, a girl whose very name filled the remnants of his soul with sustaining rage.

  Niquette Delongpre.

  2

  * * *

  NEW ORLEANS

 
APRIL 2005

  Her motivation was revenge, he was sure of it. And that was fine with him. At seventeen, Marshall Ferriot prided himself on being a young man who could recognize opportunity when it arrived and, with the fiery end of the passionate romance between Niquette Delongpre and Anthem Landry, opportunity arrived at Marshall’s doorstep with bells on.

  He had wanted her since they were sophomores, after her breasts had swelled to fullness over the course of one summer, after her walk had acquired a swaying, adult confidence, probably ’cause she’d given up her virginity to that stupid fathead she’d fallen head over heels for the minute he’d transferred into their class. Since then, Marshall Ferriot had spent hours watching Nikki glide gracefully through the hallways of Herschel B. Cannon School, all the while wondering what the skin around her nipples tasted like, or how much pressure he’d have to bite down on them with before she let out a pained yelp that would curl his toes with pleasure.

  He’d concocted a few plans over the years, most of them intended to get her white-trash boyfriend kicked out of school and sent back to Jefferson Parish where he belonged. But it was clear the two of them were too much in love to be driven apart by such a meager separation, so Marshall had even thought about cozying up to that little homo she was best friends with, maybe letting the guy give him a BJ or two if he promised to do Marshall’s dirty work. But Ben Broyard, pipsqueak that he was, always looked at Marshall as if there was a stink coming off of him, as if he could detect the dark thoughts Marshall nursed about people who made him angry and thought they were kind of stupid, even if they did involve knives and rope.

  What Marshall had been waiting for was a golden opportunity, a sign that the stars had aligned on his behalf, and it didn’t come until the last months of senior year. There had been plenty of girls to occupy his time along the way, of course. There were the real girlfriends, the ones befitting a young man of his stature and breeding, classically pretty, with first names that were more often used as last names for men—Chesley, Whitney, Preston—girls who never let him go below the waist unless he got them shitfaced on Zima. And then there were others. The ones who could keep secrets. The band geeks and the computer dorks. The ones so grateful for any kind of attention from a guy like Marshall they’d let him use things like beer bottles and staplers.

  But Nikki Delongpre, she was the prize. The ultimate. Everybody agreed; there was something different about her. Like the fact that she’d been the only freshman ever to make varsity cheerleading, and then had ditched the squad a few months later because, as she told everyone who asked, she thought she was too young to have an eating disorder. Stuff just didn’t get to Nikki the way it got to the other girls at Cannon; she wasn’t a gossip, she rarely drank. And until Anthem’s betrayal, she was rarely swept up in some tearful drama over something somebody might have said about her three weeks ago. Marshall had overheard two teachers talking about her once and their words had seared themselves into his mind. While the first asserted the Delongpre girl had a wisdom beyond her years, the second—in the same kind of superior tone Marshall’s mother used to discuss the moral failings of Democrats—asserted that Nikki was a perfectionist, and if she was ever going to really grow up, she would have to stop planning her life and actually begin living it.

  And there it was, the opening. The way in.

  He could show her how to start living.

  • • •

  When he asked her out the first time, she made him meet her at some ratty coffeehouse over in the Faubourg Marigny that was full of hippies and fags. And even though the whole thing made him feel like some cheap man-whore, the way she was keeping their meeting a secret from everyone on their side of town, he knew better than to complain.

  And there was no getting her to talk about the great betrayal that had ended her three-year relationship to Anthem Landry, but it didn’t matter. The story was common knowledge by then anyway.

  Poor Nikki. She had planned her entire life down to the last detail, without giving any thought to the type of man she’d selected to make the trip with her. Davidson College had been her school of choice: North Carolina was just far enough from home to get them away from her boyfriend’s sprawling, overbearing family, but not so far that they couldn’t fly home for every holiday. The problem, of course, was that everyone except for Nikki knew that her boyfriend didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Houma of getting in, not when he couldn’t be bothered to memorize anything besides old Saints scores. But Niquette Delongpre—planner and perfectionist, daughter of one of the most respected maxiofacial surgeons in the country—wouldn’t be deterred by her boyfriend’s rejection letter. Obviously, Anthem should move with her to North Carolina anyway. Get a job to support himself, maybe find a community college and gets his grades up to where he could reapply. Anthem’s response, heard by most of the Cannon campus during lunch, “You expect me to fuckin’ pump gas all day while you sit in a classroom talking about poetry?”

  The lawns outside the cafeteria had certainly paid host to worse lovers’ quarrels. But a few days later, the news broke that after consuming half a bottle of Southern Comfort, Anthem Landry had somehow wound up in the arms and accommodating mouth of a doe-eyed junior, Brittany Lowe, who was well known among her male classmates for having tiny, unobtrusive teeth. That’s what the girl said, anyway. Anthem denied the charge with shouts, and more than a few tears, to anyone who would listen. Nikki chose to believe the worst.

  And for Marshall Ferriot, that was very good news. Especially when you considered the story was a complete lie. Turns out Brittany Lowe was willing to do pretty much anything Marshall wanted her to do, as long as he supplied her with a bottle of Vicodin out of his mother’s medicine cabinet.

  Despite his success so far, Marshall knew better than to speak ill of the man in question to Nikki’s face, even if he did think the guy was a worthless piece of Lakefront trash. Anthem Landry came from a family of riverboat pilots and those assholes were the worst, a bunch of drunken slobs who had bought all kinds of political power in Baton Rouge so they could keep the entire port hostage with their ridiculously high salaries. He should know; his father ran one of the most successful cold storage companies on the Gulf Coast. Men like his dad kept the city running, his family always said, while lazy niggers threatened to take the whole thing down.

  And what the hell kind of queerbait name was Anthem anyway? It chapped Marshall’s ass that the guy never caught any flack for it at school. Let Marshall belch in the wrong direction and he’d end up with some stupid nickname he couldn’t live down for months.

  Of course he didn’t say a word of this to Nikki.

  Instead he started talking about his desire to travel the world, to make big bucks in a city like New York and Chicago after he graduated from Duke (which was, by the way, not too far from Davidson). He thought he was being subtle, but maybe he wasn’t. After three more coffee dates, Nikki’s smiles started to seem a little indulgent. But she listened to him ramble on, and then, finally, just when he feared he might have lost her, she invited him to Elysium.

  3

  * * *

  ATLANTA

  MAY 2013

  They moved the patient out of Room 4 when animals started dying outside his window.

  The squirrels came first, a slightly disjointed row of them that appeared in a single day, just a few feet away from the window ledge: furry tails limp and snakelike, chests sealed to the patchy lawn with dead weight. Two of the three nurses who gathered at Room 4’s window that afternoon blamed the live oak tree nearby; some sort of awful fungus must have laced itself all through the branches overhead, then Alvin and his poor buddies took a few nibbles and plop, plop, plop.

  But Arthelle Williams wasn’t sold on this scenario. It would have been five plops in all, and not a single one of the squirrels had landed on its back. Was that even statistically possible? The thought of there being statistics related to random squirrel deaths made her laugh so hard her breath fogged the glass.
<
br />   She volunteered to go outside and take a closer look. It was a marvel, she thought, that her coworkers could empty a bedpan without so much as a wince, but the idea of getting within a few feet of a dead rodent turned them into squealing little girls.

  They watched her from the window as she poked at the furry carcasses with a stick. There was no sense in pushing Marshall Ferriot’s wheelchair to the window; he wouldn’t be able to see any of it anyway. The boy hadn’t seen a damn thing for eight years. But the new girl, Emily Somethingorother—the little blonde who’d watched too many TV shows about hospitals on her daddy’s flat-screen and was always asking them silly questions about their mission—was so upset about the dead squirrels she hadn’t managed to peel her hands from her mouth for the entire time it had taken Arthelle to walk outside. Tammy Keene, the other nurse who’d discovered the gory scene, finally gave in to the girl’s histrionics and curved one arm around Emily’s shoulders while she gave Arthelle a pointed look that said, If I’d wanted to deal with children today, I would have stayed home and looked after my own.

  “Some of these new nurses,” Arthelle had said to Tammy earlier that morning, “they make it hard to tell who the patients are.” The joke hadn’t been one of her best. If they had been working at a real hospital, it might have earned her a cackle or two. But here at the Lenox Hill Long Term Care Center, it was always possible to tell the nurses from the patients, because none of the patients could walk or speak. A high-end vegetable garden; that’s how Arthelle had heard more than one visiting physician refer to the place. And it was a pretty apt description: a place for the rich to stash their brain-dead invalids until pneumonia or a virulent infection did them in for good. Of course, the brochure didn’t word it quite so succinctly.