The Marigny Keepers

Chapter 7

Alene was fearful during her entire walk home from the Quarter. She rushed down Esplanade, suddenly afraid to be out and alone on the street so late at night despite the abundance of tourists and friendly neighborhood shopkeepers still out and about on the Friday night. The entire neighborhood seemed different somehow; threatening and dangerous. The moon was almost full, casting an eerily bright light upon Elysian Fields. Alene wasn’t in any particular hurry to get back to Miss Briscoe’s, out of fear that Perrin might be waiting for her there. But she also felt exposed and unsafe out on the street, and had nowhere else to go.

She was completely nerve-wracked and didn’t know what to think. What did it all mean? Had she really had an imaginary friend named Perrin when she was a little girl? She knew it was true because her parents had told her so, but she couldn’t remember anything concrete about interacting with the imaginary boy. However she had imagined his appearance, his voice, or their friendship as a child was an empty memory.  Was it some kind of strange coincidence that grown-up Perrin had entered into her life within a few short weeks of her return to the neighborhood where she had lived as a little girl... literally across the street from the bedroom where she had served her imaginary friend tea?

Alene knew that the imaginary friend had been a cause of significant worry for her parents. They had punished her when she first began talking about Perrin and his ideas. She seemed to recall being apprehended at the corner of Franklin and Royal by her mother on a rainy day, her mother pumping her arm up and down by a tightly grasped wrist, scolding her as the rain poured down on them. Why had she been outside? Her memory of the event included an overwhelming annoyance with her mother for preventing her from doing something of dire importance.

There had been trips to child psychiatrists, one of whom had given Alene a bright red lollipop that had turned her tongue and teeth red, another who had prescribed drugs for hyperactivity that her parents had put her on for over a year. While on the medication, Alene had sat listlessly in her second grade classroom, falling behind in class work and showing little interest in playing with other children her age. And as soon as her parents took her off the medication, Perrin returned, wanting to play just as he had before.

There had been more, much more, Alene knew. So much more that her parents had put the house up for sale and had moved out on a whim into a rental home in the Garden District before they had even had a chance to shop for a new house to buy. She had left everything behind on Royal St. When they bought the new house in the Garden District, her mother would grind up angelica root and mix it in with jams for Alene’s sandwiches. She had a strange consultant from the Quarter come around and rub blackberry leaves on the walls. She had a distinct memory of the woman rubbing those leaves in circular patterns on the walls, and asking her mother what the purpose had been.

She had a sickening, blurry memory of her mother stuffing her into the back of their station wagon in the middle of the night on Royal St. wrapped in a towel. Come to think of it, that may have been the night they left the house on Royal St. for good. But Alene had no recollection of the events that had led up to being put into the station wagon and driven away. She had been eight years old when they had moved to the Garden District. She remembered plenty of other things about being eight: her hair in white-blond pigtails, missing all four of her front teeth, forgetting her Barbie in her second grade class room on Show & Tell day and being crushed the next day to find that it had been stolen. But her memories of that night of being stuffed into the station wagon were vague at best.

Alene breathed a sigh of relief when she reached the threshold of Miss Briscoe’s house and opened the door with her key. She noticed for the first time as she stepped inside that there was a slim line of some kind of white powdery substance spread across the threshold. Alene smiled. She recognized the silly New Orleans custom, of course. A line of salt kept the evil spirits out of the house. She never would have figured Miss Briscoe for someone who followed voodoo, but then again, it was New Orleans, and she wouldn’t have been surprised to see a line of salt across the doorway at the St. Louis Cathedral.