I told her. In detail.
“I don’t believe this,” she said. “Have you lost your mind?”
“New Orleans does that to you.”
She hung up.
In the morning I went to Iberia General to visit Rowena Broussard, less out of concern for her than the fact that she had blamed her attempted suicide on Helen and me.
She was out of intensive care and propped up on the bed in a sunny room that gave onto Bayou Teche and live oaks strung with Spanish moss. Her lips were gray, her face pale, her wrists heavily bandaged. A glass of ice water sat on the table next to her. Water had been spilled on the table.
“Levon just left,” she said.
“I came to see you,” I said.
“I forgot. It’s a felony to commit suicide in Louisiana.”
“How about losing the victim routine?”
“You’re a hard-nosed wanker, aren’t you.”
I sat in a chair next to her bed and picked up her water glass. I held the straw to her mouth. She drank from it and laid her head back on the pillow.
“What’s a wanker?” I said.
“A fucking Seppo who doesn’t know where to plant his bishop.”
I thought it better not to pursue any more Australian definitions.
“I heard you put your suicide attempt on Sheriff Soileau and me,” I said.
“You’re right. That’s probably not fair. There was nothing good on the telly, so I thought I’d shuffle off to the crematorium.”
“Were you ever treated for depression?”
“Leave the psychoanalysis at the door, if you would.”
“I’ve had a long relationship with depression, Rowena. It eats at you in ways you can’t describe to others.”
“That’s why you’re a juicer?”
“I’m a juicer because I chose to be one.”
Her eyes held on mine, perhaps with curiosity. Or disdain. I had no idea who she was. I went to the window and gazed down at the bayou. “A Union flotilla came down the Teche in 1863. Twenty thousand Yankee soldiers marched right past the site of this hospital. They raped slave women and set fire to plantation homes up and down the bayou. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.’?”
“Tell me there’s a drop of sense in that, because it sounds like drivel.”
“I think Jefferson was saying that justice eventually comes about but often in an imperfect way. I’m saying I don’t know if you’ll get the justice you deserve.”
“You’re going to let him get away with this?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Maybe there’re others he’s attacked.”
“That’s not his reputation.”
Wrong words.