“I know,” I say. “I did, too.”
“Me too.” Mackey sighs.
“Yeah,” Sera says, and she reaches for her brother’s hand. “We all did.”
When they all leave, I trade my flip-flops for boots and grab a flashlight, then I head down the back steps into mud. Zale is already waiting for me back at Li’l Pass. Shirtless and smiling. Worn-out jeans rolled up to his knees. He’s been fishing, he tells me. His hair is windblown, and his skin is warm from the sun. He smells like sweet grass and pine trees, and when I crawl up to sit beside him on the trailer, I slip my hand into his, almost without realizing it.
Zale looks just as surprised as I am, and I blush. Flustered and embarrassed. But then then he grins. Doesn’t let me pull away.
And that little zing makes me giddy.
“I was hopin’ you’d come out tonight,” he says, and he nods toward the river. “Look at that.”
In the distance, the lights are coming on along the boardwalk, and La Cachette looks like an ocean liner sailing the vast, flat sea of the bayou.
“I remember comin’ out here with my mama sometimes,” Zale tells me. “When I was real little. Just this time of evening. To see the lights.”
His voice is washing me clean. That flash of Elora that came to me earlier is fading. I can’t feel those squeezing fingers on my neck any more. I need him to keep talking, so I ask a question.
“What was your mama like?”
This incredible light comes over Zale’s face, and I feel all my worries blow away in the evening breeze.
“My mama was the softest soul. Folks called her Elsie. But her name was Elsinore. Her people were from Tennessee. Snake handlers. She used to tell me that my granddaddy could charm an angry rattler just by looking him in the eye. Soothe him so peaceful you’d think that snake was drunk. He’d stand up to preach a sermon wearing two or three of ’em draped around his shoulders like neckties. And none of ’em ever bit him.”
It’s the most I’ve ever heard Zale say at once, and I let his words roll over me in waves.
I realize now that I can hear a little bit of Tennessee drawl mixed in with that slight Acadian echo.
Sweet tea and gumbo.
The music of it is intoxicating, and it melts into the night air like the calling of the birds and the wind through the tops of the cypress trees.
“My mama’s dead, too,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve mentioned my mother to him, and I feel the ache of her loss in a way that I haven’t for a really long time.
Zale squeezes my hand, and the hurt eases some. He waits. Leaves me an opening. But I’m not ready to tell that story just yet.
“My mama had the same talent as my granddaddy,” he goes on. “A gift to quiet the nerves and calm the soul. Only with her, it wasn’t just snakes. She had that same way with people.”
Zale is still talking. Telling me more about Florida. And about his mama. But I’m still thinking of my own mother. And her gift. Whatever deep magic she might have possessed.
I wish so much that I could remember her more clearly. I’ve tried so many times to conjure up the sound of her voice. Or the way she smelled. And sometimes I can, just for a few seconds. My memories of her are all so sketchy, though, because my mother might have died when I was eight years old . . . but she was gone a long time before that.
It scares me, not being able to remember her.
“You know the magic way Elora laughed?” I ask, and Zale turns to look at me. His ice-fire eyes burn so bright in the almost-dark. “What if I forget that someday?”
Zale lets go of my hand, and I miss that electric connection. But then he slips his arm around my shoulders and pulls me against him. I’m not expecting that, and the tingle makes my heart beat faster.
“Tell me something you want to remember,” he says. “About Elora.”
I have no idea where to start, so I pick the first memory that pops into my head.
“When we were in eighth grade, we both picked out the very same dress for our schools’ homecoming dances. Me up in Little Rock, and her down here. And we never even knew it until we exchanged pictures that next summer. And there we were dressed just alike. The same shoes, even.” Zale smiles, and I go on. “That sort of thing happened all the time. We’d give each other the same book for our birthdays. Send each other the same card for Christmas.”
“Tell me something else,” Zale says, and he holds me a little closer.
“When we were seven, we made up our own language. Just for the two of us. We spoke it most of a full year. Created a written alphabet and everything.” I laugh out loud, for the very first time all summer, and it feels good. But strange. “Everybody said it was annoying, us talking gibberish all the time. Only it wasn’t gibberish to us. We knew exactly what we were saying.”