Page 79 of Pretty Nightmare

“Hmm. Well. Neither here nor there, I suppose. He wasn’t buried there.” Maggie wipes a hand across her nose as I get out of the truck and open the wrought-iron gate. This mansion has been here for nearly two hundred years and even though driveways in this part of the French Quarter are nearly unheard of, we have one.

I get back in and ease the truck up the driveway, put it in park, and then turn the engine off. “OK. Let’s go. We’re gonna clean up here and then head home.” I check the time on my phone. “It’s only six-forty-five. We’ll be fine if we play it right.”

She looks down at herself, then at me. “We look like gravediggers.”

“Not for long.” I reach behind me and grab a garment bag. “By the time we leave here we’ll look like we’re heading home from church.”

“Oh.” Mags laughs, points at me. “That’s good. You’re so clever.”

“I do my best.”

We get out and walk around the truck to the front of the house. It’s a stately white Greek Revival mansion that is three stories tall and has really over-the-top columns and a two-sided porch. Very traditional French Quarter architecture with tall, skinny, floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street. You can’t see the top floor from the street, because it’s set back. And the bottom floor is more like a garden level. But the fucking place is imposing. Especially when you’re six. I know. I lived here when I was six.

“Wow.” Maggie is in awe even though Boucher Manor is less than one third the size of Boucher House back on the Old Pearl River. “This is so special.”

“I guess.” I never saw it that way. I have been in love with Old Home for as long as I can remember. This house couldn’t hold a candle to it if it wanted to. It’s too close to the street, too close to the houses on either side, and every time I walk through the front door that outside feeling of claustrophobia closes in on me and becomes something akin to suffocating.

It’s not even like I have bad memories of this house. McKay and I had some fun times here. Schooling in the back room much the way Indie schooled in the back room of Old Home. And we ran these streets like hellions. We knew every alley. Every secret patch of grass hidden away from the prying eyes of tourists. We were a first-name basis with every local eatery bus boy. And we did have us some fun.

Hell, our old bedrooms are just the way we left them when we moved out fourteen years ago. And this city is filled with dark magic, which was alluring to little boys like us.

Little girls too. Because Maggie is transfixed as we walk up the porch steps and I punch in the code to unlock the door.

The lock releases with a beep and we enter a tall foyer. This part of the house is deceiving, because the foyer ceilings are seventeen feet tall. But it’s a small foyer. And if you choose to go towards the back of the house, that open-air feeling disappears immediately.

It’s not even like the ceilings are low. They aren’t. They are nine feet, at least. But everything is narrow. You can practically feel the houses next door and the street out in front. Even when you’re in the back yard, which is its own separate lot of prime New Orleans real estate, you can feel this city sucking the air out of the sky. Like it can’t breathe. Like it needs fuel.

It’s the complete opposite of how Old Home feels.

I nod my head to the stairs and that’s the way we go.

There are four bedrooms and three bathrooms on the second floor, which makes this house sound big. But the rooms are tiny. The square footage is just a little over twenty-five hundred square feet, total. Old Home, by contrast, is nearly triple that.

Most of the space at Old Home is unused. We stick to the rooms we love most. But nothing about the property surrounding Old Home, or the house itself, is suffocating.

It feels like freedom when I’m out there.

Here? This place? It feels like a prison. All that wrought-iron out front—and trust me, there is a lot of it—they feel like bars keeping you in instead of a pretty, decorative gate keeping others out.

I stop at the first room, McKay’s old bedroom, and then unzip the garment bag and pull out her white dress. “Go in there and take a two-minute shower. Two minutes. Ya hear?” She nods. But I am not holding out hope that she actually listens. It just feels necessary to make the demand. “In the bathroom there is a cupboard. Inside the cupboard are towels and little bottles of shampoo and tiny bars of soap. Use them to wash up. Dry your hair. Put on the dress. And then come downstairs.”

I hear the back door open below us and Maggie looks up at me, panicked.

“Just the caretaker. No need to worry. I’ll be downstairs talking to him by the time you’re finished. Put your money in here.” I take a little pink purse out of the garment bag and hand it to her. “Bring me the brush when you’re done and I’ll do your hair. Hear me?”

She looks down the stairs for a moment, then back at me. “I hear ya.”

“Good.” I hand her the dress and she disappears inside McKay’s old bedroom.

I let out a long sigh as I continue down the hallway to the next room. My room.

It’s exactly how I left it at age twenty-two, when McKay and I finally decided that the renovation at Old Home was well enough along to move up there for good.

No little-boy things in here. No trophies on display in the built-in shelves. No certificates of achievement tacked to the walls. No baseball bats or other sporting equipment propped up in corners. That was all put away long before we moved out.

But there are still a few remnants of my childhood about.

Framed pictures of McKay and me in Fiji. We went there once a year, every year, until my father died. And then I guess we figured we’d had enough of Fiji. Because we never went back.