Chapter 3

It’s not a long ride from Tyler, Texas to New Orleans, but when you have to make a couple of pit stops and more than a couple of puke stops because of a two-day bender, it can be a seriously unpleasant trip. Michael and I drove, and Cain followed on his bike as Emily and Myra did their best impersonations of plague victims in the back seat. Cain and I had consumed nearly twice as much as they had, but we weren’t precisely normal, if you’ll recall. We only get about as drunk as we want to, and we can shake it off pretty quickly when we need to. I figured we needed to. The girls didn’t have quite our level of resilience, so it was a tough trip for them.

Finally, about nine hours into a seven-hour trip we rolled into the Crescent City. I’d never spent a whole lot of time in New Orleans, but I’d been there once or twice. I had nothing against the town, it just felt like too much old for me, and I had enough memories of old running around in my head without shaking them loose walking through the French Quarter. Cain pulled even with my window as we rolled off the interstate, and yelled “Follow me.”

We meandered through the Quarter until we pulled up to a small house on Royal Street, just off Jackson Square. Cain pulled his bike into a narrow alley and gestured for me to park on the street in front of the house. He motioned for me to follow, and we all trooped up a rickety flight of stairs into a second-floor apartment.

“Welcome, dear pater, to my humble abode.” He said grandly as we entered his slightly shabby yet somehow chic living room. There was a sofa that somehow managed to be threadbare and classy all at the same time, a feat I’d never managed personally, and a couple of mismatched lamps that nonetheless tied the whole room together somehow. The walls were decorated with back and white photographs of people in various ages, all taken in and around New Orleans. Emily wandered the walls as if in a museum, while her mother made a beeline for the sofa and curled up into a little, sweaty, exceedingly hung over ball.

“Cain, these are amazing,” Emily murmured as she looked at the photos. “It’s like you took a picture right into their souls and hung them up on the wall. Like this one here, I can almost see this woman crying for her lost little boy even though she’s smiling at a street musician.”

“You know, baby sister, there are some culture that still believe that a camera can steal your soul and trap it in the photograph. I think it’s the opposite, really. I think that the camera can set free a part of your soul that’s trapped in the everyday and let it loose to be miraculous. Turn around.” She did, and Cain was holding an expensive-looking digital camera. He snapped her picture before she could even vamp, and said “Gotcha! Now I’ve got a little piece of Emily-soul to carry around with me and stick on my wall.”

“You ass, you could at least have given me some warning.” She went over to him and punched him on the arm. “Well? You’ve gotta at least me see it so I can tell you to delete it.”

“Oh no, baby sister. You can see it, but I’m not deleting it. This is the most time I’ve spent with a sibling in a long time, and I want something to commemorate the moment.” He was smiling, but there was a heaviness to his eyes, and the moment, that gave us all pause. Myra broke the silence by getting up off the couch, bolting down a dark hallway into the tiny bathroom and being noisily sick.

“That’s Mom. She always knows just what to say.” And just like that, all the tension flowed out of the room. Emily slid her head under Cain’s arm just like they’d been raised brother and sister and snatched the camera out of his hands. She thumbed the controls expertly until her photo came onto the tiny screen.

“wow.” Her voice was very small, and she looked suddenly nervous as she looked up at Cain. “Is that what I really look like?”

“The camera doesn’t lie, baby sister. You’re beautiful.”

“But, I’ve never been pretty.”

“You’re right. You’re beautiful. I might have mentioned that. Have I developed a stutter after all these centuries?”

“But, it’s not right, I’m not like that, I don’t take good pictures, that’s not me.” By now my curiosity had gotten the better of me and I wandered over to look at the image over her shoulder. Cain had caught her just as she turned around, hair flying slightly, with a touch of backlight making it look even more golden than normal. Her mouth was open a little, teeth just barely showing in a pixie grin, and her eyes twinkled in light I never saw in that apartment. She was, in a word, beautiful.

Now don’t get me wrong, Emily was a pretty girl, and in the right setting maybe even men who aren’t her father would consider her beautiful. But after a drinking binge, nine hours on the road in the Texas-Louisiana summer and a total of maybe three hours sleep in as many days, she wasn’t at her best. But in Cain’s photo, she was everything she could ever be on her best day. He captured the absolute essence of Emily and distilled it into a single digital image. It was both breathtaking and a little scary.

“Damn, Cain. That’s an amazing picture. That’s the kind of thing photographers wait their whole life to capture, and you did it without even thinking or trying twice. You’ve got a gift, son.” I said.

“Well, Dad, I’ve had a lot longer to practice than most artists.”

“Good point.”

“So, other than to admire your skill in photography, which is considerable, and to allow Myra to vomit in your toilet, which is admirable, why are we here?”

“Well, I thought we could rest up here and then you and I could go looking for Mom later tonight when the clubs open.”

“You don’t think they’re open now?”

“They are. She’s not there yet.”

“How do you know? Never mind. You know. More to the point, does she know you’re here?”

“We’ve talked from time to time.”

“Is she alright?” This time it was my voice that was small, and I couldn’t look at my son’s eyes. I walked across the living room and out onto his tiny balcony. It was just big enough to hold two wrought-iron chairs and a tiny round table. I bypassed the chairs and leaned on my elbows on the railing instead.

“She’s okay, Dad. At least, she’s okay for Mom. You know how she is.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“She’s bitter, and angry all the time and she gets into fights with clients and gets guys so mad they punch her and throw her into the street half-naked sometimes and she runs through jobs like I go through clean socks, and I don’t think she’s happy unless she’s miserable.”

“Yeah, I know.” I did, too. She’d been like that ever since I brought Abel’s body back from the shallow grave where Cain buried him and laid him to rest under the Tree. Yeah, that Tree. It wasn’t the Garden anymore, and it wasn’t really the Tree anymore, since our Father had withdrawn his presence from us, but it was still the oldest Tree we had ever known, so it seemed somehow appropriate. I dug a deep hole and buried my eldest son there, and when I finished shoveling dirt back in on top of his lifeless form I turned around and saw that I was alone.

Eve stayed gone for several days, and when she came back she was different. The loss of our two sons in the same day had changed something fundamental in her, and it wasn’t long after that when we went our separate ways. We travelled the world for centuries, our paths sometimes crossing, but never for very long. And here I was after thousands of years ready to make nice and play happy family again. Oh, and here’s our long-lost son, the one that you kept in touch with and I said I’d never touch again except to strangle. Yeah, I could see this was gonna be a long night.

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