The hidden room is small. Maybe six feet by eight. The air is dry. The walls are papered, floor to ceiling, with photographs.
Charlotte. Cordelia. Charlotte. Cordelia.
Babies. Toddlers in matching smocked dresses on the same verandah where Cordelia sits now. Teenagers in tennis whites at Audubon Park. Debutantes at Comus. Each photograph is labeled in fine ballpoint along the bottom margin — Charlotte, 9 mo, 14 lb 6 oz, started transfusion protocol; Cordelia, 3 yr, 28 lb, induction marrow draw #1; Charlotte, 12 yr, 4'11", platelet count 142. Some entries have dosages. Some have surgical dates.
My stomach turns over.
Beau is at a wall safe set into the back of the closet. He has the dial in his fingers.
"How do you know the combination?"
"Charlotte's birthday."
The safe beeps. Red light. Wrong code.
He tries Cordelia's birthday. Red.
I notice the engraving on the safe's brass plate then. It's small. A single flower outline, no larger than a thumbprint. Five petals. A magnolia.
My grandma's voice, from years away.
Magnolias are pretty, sugar, but they don't bear fruit. That's the trick of 'em. Nothing to take.
She used to say it under her breath when the home-aides told her she had beautiful skin for her age. She used to say it sitting on the porch watching me bring home report cards.
I had thought she meant herself.
I reach past Beau and turn the dial. My birthday. Month, day, year.
The safe clicks open.
Beau looks at me different.
I don't explain.
Inside the safe: a small Olympus digital voice recorder. And a leather-bound book, the kind a country GP would have used in 1950 — pebbled brown cover, gold deckle edges yellowed. The cover's blind-stamped Lecroix.
I open it.
It's a home-birth ledger. Each row: date, mother's initials, time of delivery, weight, length, infant status. The handwriting is my grandma's — the old, careful, Catholic-school cursive she used to write my permission slips with.
I find the page I'm looking for. November 1998. Mother: C.B.S. — Catherine Beauchamp Sutton. Three rows. Not two.
Infant 1: female, 6:12 a.m., 5 lb 9 oz, status: live birth, transferred to family physician.
Infant 2: female, 6:24 a.m., 5 lb 11 oz, status: live birth, transferred to family physician.
Infant 3: female, 6:31 a.m., 4 lb 14 oz, status — transferred to relinquishment — minor child.
Signed in the right margin: M.B.L.
Maybelle Boudreaux Lecroix.
There is no hospital seal on infant three. There is no county form. The "transferred to relinquishment" handwriting matches my grandma's, but there's no agency name, no case number, no countersignature.
There's also no name in the daughter-name column for infant three.
There is, instead, a parenthesized note in different ink, in Catherine Sutton's looping prep-school hand:
(Rain.)
My fingers go cold to the second knuckle.
Remedy. The rain after the storm.
I had always thought that was Grandma Mae's nickname for me.
It wasn't a nickname.
It was a workaround for the name on a page she couldn't say out loud.
Beau lifts the voice recorder. He presses play.
A young woman's voice. Sobbing. Educated. Wrecked.
"Mae. Please. Take her. Just the one. The Sutton family can't have her — she and Cordelia are both compatible, they'll bleed her out."
Another voice, my grandma's, twenty-six years younger.
"Mrs. Sutton — what about Cordelia, ma'am?"
The pause on the recording is long.
"Mae. I can't save them both."
The recorder cuts to static. Beau presses stop.
I sit down hard on the wood floor. The ledger slides off my lap.
Outside the panel, in the gallery, I hear the soft rubber wheels of a wheelchair coming down the hardwood.
A whisper through the wall.
"Remy. Get out."
The panel opens from the outside.
Cordelia is in her wicker chair. Nobody's pushing it. She rolled herself here.
She tosses a key fob into Beau Sutton-Marchand's hands.
"Black sedan in the basement garage. West gate. Go."
He doesn't move.
"Where's Charlotte."
She looks at him for what feels like a long count.
"You'd ask about her first."
"Cordelia."
Her eyes go wet. They don't spill.
"I have been in this house ten years. You've been visiting this house since you were nineteen. You saw the needle tracks on my arms. You decided I was delicate. You heard me say I was in pain. You decided I was dramatic."
His face goes the color of paper.
"I didn't know."
"You didn't know because you loved my sister. And when a man loves my sister, the rest of the world goes black around her edges."
She lifts her hand and points it at me, still in the gray housekeeping uniform, still on the floor with the ledger in my lap.
"And she was the next tool you found. Bring in a keener to cry for me alive, so my mother lets her guard down. Beau. You hurt people even when you're trying to save them."
I look at Beau. He doesn't answer.
Cordelia turns to me. Her voice softens by exactly one degree.
"Remy Lecroix. You are my sister."
My throat closes.
"Don't trust anybody," she says. "Including me."
Out in the gallery — footsteps. Heels. Coming fast.
Catherine.
Cordelia moves in one motion. She wrenches her own collar open at the seam. She knocks the porcelain vase off the side table next to her chair. Glass scatters down the gallery.
She screams.
"Help me! Beau Sutton-Marchand is trying to take me out of this house!"
The first security man kicks the door.
Beau grabs my wrist. He pulls me toward the false panel — there's a maintenance corridor on the other side, narrow as a coffin, lit by a single bulb.
I look back.
Catherine has reached Cordelia. She is bent over her daughter's chair. She is slapping her, open-handed, across the mouth.
Cordelia takes it.
She doesn't cry. She doesn't move. She turns her face just barely toward me, and her lips shape one word, soundless:
Wail.
She wants me to keen. Not for the dead. For the wronged.
I know what she needs.
We come out of the Audubon Place compound at four in the morning.
Beau drives fast. We don't speak. I have the leather ledger inside my jacket and the voice recorder in my pocket and my hand pressed flat against my own ribcage like I'm trying to hold the bone in place.
He pulls into the circular drive of Slidell Memorial Care just before dawn. The Spanish moss on the live oaks is dripping with the rain that came through overnight.
He puts the Yukon in park.
"Your grandmother knows more than she has said."
I nod.
"Miss Lecroix."
I have the door open. I half-turn.
"I'm sorry."
I let the door swing closed without looking at him.
"Mr. Sutton-Marchand. An apology doesn't square the books. The threat to my grandma — I'm still keeping that one on the ledger."
The home is quiet at this hour. The aide at the front desk waves me through. Grandma Mae's room is at the end of the second-floor hall, the one with the wicker rocker by the window.
She is awake when I open the door. She is sitting up. The Mardi Gras T-shirt quilt is across her knees.
When she sees me, her first move — automatic, twenty-six years of practice — is to lean forward in the bed and try to put her body between me and the door. Like I am six and I have just woken up from a nightmare and the bad thing is in the hall.
I close the door behind me. I sit on the edge of her bed.
I put the ledger on her lap.
She looks at it. She doesn't pretend not to recognize her own handwriting.
The tears come down her face without her face changing.
"They came for you."
I crouch down by the bed.
"Grandma. Who am I."
She puts her hand in my hair, the way she did when I was a child after bad dreams.
"You are my granddaughter."
"Other than that."
She closes her eyes.
"You are the third Sutton girl."
She tells me, in her labor-and-delivery voice — the calm one she used to use when a young mother was crashing — what she did twenty-six years ago.
Catherine Sutton had a husband with a rare blood type. The kind of blood type that meant his children would be valuable insurance against the chronic illness running in his side of the family. Catherine wanted heirs that matched. Money buys clinics in Grand Cayman that do not ask which embryos a client wishes to discard. Catherine selected for the rare type. She got three girls.
When the test results came back at one month, only two of the babies — Cordelia and the third — matched. Charlotte didn't. Charlotte was the prettiest and the healthiest and the one who looked most like Catherine. Catherine kept Charlotte for the public-face role. Catherine kept Cordelia for the marrow.
I was the spare blood bank.
My biological mother was not Catherine. My biological mother was the woman on the recorder — Catherine's husband's mistress, who lived in a guest cottage on the property as the live-in "secretary," who had been brought to that house when Catherine's husband had decided he wanted a third child the legal wife wouldn't agree to. She delivered all three on the same day. She begged Grandma Mae to take the smallest one, the one with the same blood type as Cordelia, because Cordelia was already on the donor cycle and she could see what the third one would be raised to become.
Grandma Mae took me.
She forged the relinquishment paper.
She drove me west across the parish line in a shoebox.
"My biological mother," I say.
Grandma Mae's lower lip trembles.
"She died, mon p'tit pain. The month after you were a month old. They said she fell off the second-floor verandah."
"Fell off."
"That's what they said."
"Grandma."
"That's what they said."
"Did she fall off, or did somebody push her off."
She cries so hard she can't answer. She holds my hand.
The door to the room swings open.
Catherine Sutton is in the doorway.
She is in a charcoal silk dress and pearl earrings. Her hair is set. Two of her house-security men are behind her.
She smiles at us.
"Mae. It has been a long time."