Free A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice Page A

Stephen slept, the tow-truck driver arrived.
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    Monica handled him three twenty-dollar bills. The driver peered under the Jeep. Both driver’s-side tires had been eviscerated by a knife—“A big one!” he added clinically. The white lines had resulted from a car key held in one fist and gouged through the paint. As the driver struggled to his feet, Monica informed him that she had special instructions.
    At two-thirty in the morning, he deposited the Jeep in front of the Charbonnet residence on Philip Street. Monica knew that Elise Charbonnet would discover it in the harsh morning light when she woke up.
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    T he next morning, her head pounding with the pulse of the previous night’s Southern Comfort, Meredith retrieved her secret notebook from under her bed, wrote “I’m sorry about your car,” and then tore the page and threw it in the wastebasket.
    Monica got out of bed at eight A.M. after having slept three hours. She went to her son’s bedroom door, cracked it, and saw him curled beneath the comforter. She would keep to herself the memory that had plagued her all night.
    She went to Jeremy’s study. On the wall above the doorway, printed starkly in his own handwriting, hung his favorite quote from Death in Venice by Thomas Mann: “For passion, like crime, does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life; it welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for passion sees in such disorder a vague hope of finding advantage for itself.”
    In the disorder created by his parents’ deaths, Jeremy and Monica had found distinct advantage.
    In July of 1964, Jeremy Conlin decided to break the vow he and Monica had made together—that they were never to see each other’s houses. Jeremy’s parents were leaving town for their annual trip to the Gulf Coast. He asked Monica if she would like to come over.
    Until now, their courtship had centered mainly around the St.
    Charles Avenue streetcar line. Each evening at six, they would ride the streetcar down St. Charles to Canal Street, before reboarding for their return trip. The red sunlight filtered through oak branches, glint-58
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    ing off Monica’s blonde hair as she leaned against the window. Jeremy would attempt to compose poems in his leather-bound notebook.
    Sometimes Monica and Jeremy would get off the streetcar at Audubon Park. They would wander deep into the park, past children playing hide-and-seek around fallen oaks, crossing the bike path where other couples flew past them leaving a laughter in their wake that Monica found to be more contented than her own. One night, half a month into their courtship, darkness took them by surprise and the park became a jungle of shadows. She clutched Jeremy’s hand and talked away her fear.
    “I think you write because it’s easier than talking,” Monica announced.
    “You’re wrong,” Jeremy corrected her, in the manner of someone convinced the world does not think and suffer as much as he does.
    “It’s better than talking. There’s a space between the words you don’t allow yourself to slip into. Maybe it’s because everything I write is about you. You don’t hear the music of the words because you’re just waiting for me to call you a dumb Irish girl or laugh because your drunk mother named you after a retarded boy crying at the moon.”
    Monica dropped Jeremy’s hand like a hot plate. He kept walking a few steps before he stopped, bent his head toward a patch of night sky visible through the oak branches, and sucked in a deep, agonized breath.
    “If you think I’m stupid why do you show me your damn poems?”
    Monica bit back.
    “Because you’re not stupid. You’re too afraid,” Jeremy told her.
    Monica had not been afraid to clean up her mother’s vomit. She had not been afraid to scare the rats out of her mother’s bedroom. Jeremy Conlin was accusing her of being afraid of