The Seven Boxed Set Read online

  Irish Colleen let her sigh go. “Elizabeth, what have we talked about?”

  “That… that adults think they want to help, but adults don’t understand our world.”

  Irish Colleen finished the braid and pulled Elizabeth around. “Mrs. Larsen has been very good to you. She’s a good teacher. A good woman, godly. But you told her something today that had her very concerned. And now you need to tell me.”

  “I can’t.” Elizabeth pointed her chin at the far wall, but Irish Colleen had it in her hands and pulled it back.

  “Yes, you can. Unlike Mrs. Larsen, who means well but can’t understand, I won’t punish you. Not for this. Tell me, Elizabeth.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t, or you won’t?”

  “Mama, I can’t, don’t ask me. Don’t!”

  “Does this have to do with what you said about Charles earlier?”

  “No.” Elizabeth wiped at her eyes and paused in mid-gesture. “Maybe. I don’t know! It’s not clear. It’s never clear when I need it to be, Mama. It’s just jumbles and swirls and my head is full to bursting with them.” She smashed her palms against her temples in fitful demonstration.

  The temperature in the room dropped. All the hair on Irish Colleen’s arms stood at attention. It was happening again, like it did when August died, but she had to know. She had to hear, because Colleen Brady Deschanel had never been much for surprises, especially the very bad ones.

  She pulled her daughter’s tear-drenched cheeks into her palms and forced Elizabeth to confront the moment at hand. “Elizabeth, tell me. Whatever it is, no matter how bad. We don’t hide from things in this house.”

  Elizabeth sucked in her bottom lip. Snot and tears slid over Irish Colleen’s hands, but she didn’t drop them. “It’s not clear…”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “One of us…” Elizabeth pressed her hands to her eyes and nose and wiped them. Her gaze traveled briefly to the window and the storm outside. Where did the rain come from? “One of us, one of the seven, is going to die at the end of the year and I don’t think we can stop it, Mama.”

  Who? Irish Colleen almost asked.

  As if it mattered.

  As if the loss of any of her babies would ever, ever be a loss she could bear.

  Irish Colleen didn’t consciously drop her hands from the face of her daughter, nor did she mean to back away and then rise, pressing her slippers into one step after another, toward the door, away from the monstrous proclamations of a child she loved with all her heart but did not know how to protect.

  Elizabeth’s sobs pierced Irish Colleen’s heart from the hallway as she clicked the door closed and stepped into the swash of moonlight that no longer seemed a sign from God, but a warning from beyond.

  One

  The Altruist and the Adherent

  Madeline Deschanel scribbled furiously in the lines and margins of the last gift her father gave her before he died: a diary. It was a bulky book with a bloated plastic cover bubbling up off the cardboard with peeling pink and blue elephants. When she’d opened it on her eighth birthday, she’d gaped at it, confused, until her father shyly explained he got the idea from the way Madeline excitedly watched the elephants at Audubon Zoo.

  “August, I told you she doesn’t really like elephants,” her mother chastised under her breath, as she sorted through the rest of the gifts. She tossed them in neat piles as if birthdays were a chore and not a blessing.

  “Daddy was right, I love elephants,” Madeline lied and wrapped her arms around her father’s shoulders, because already at eight she understood all men, even one as confident and assuming as August Deschanel, needed validation. Even when you had to be dishonest in the offering.

  Madeline didn’t use the diary then. In truth, she had no desire to catalogue her thoughts, which were a plaguing nuisance and always had been. What benefit could possibly be had by reliving them? No, she didn’t pick it up for many years, and when she finally did, the catalyst was the original giver of the gift, her father.

  The fight Madeline had with her mother on her sixteenth birthday wasn’t unusual—the fighting part anyway; they didn’t need an occasion for that—but her mother’s choice to invoke her dead husband was a new and pointed dagger that hit precisely where she intended.

  “The drama in your life is going to kill you,” Irish Colleen harped, after the party came to an abrupt halt with Madeline’s mention of going to a war protest at Louis Armstrong Park. She couldn’t understand how her mother had refused her this. It was the perfect compromise. It wasn’t a trip to Washington, or California. She could be a part of something without even leaving their city, and now she suspected her mother was less concerned with whether or not Madeline wanted to protest, and more with controlling her and turning her into the perfect little daughter.

  “It isn’t drama, Mother. People in the world are suffering, while we stuff our faces with roast and duck in our antebellum mansion, with our pretty gardens and old money.”

  “Says the young woman who has never known real hardship. Has never had to wonder where her next meal would come from,” her mother had said, without looking at her, her attention instead divided between minimizing her daughter’s plight and tidying up the dining room. She ran a rag over the old wood, catching some rogue icing. Outside, a hearse led a line of Benzes and Cadillacs toward Lafayette Cemetery No. 1; both a byproduct of living so close to the cemetery, and, as far as Madeline was concerned, a prophetic reminder of what life was like at Oak Haven under her mother’s rule.

  Madeline had wedged herself between her mother and the messy table. “I’m not ignorant to the privilege I’ve had, Mother. Not like Charles, who runs around snorting cocaine and screwing half of New Orleans while the rest of the world suffers. I’m smart enough to understand I have a responsibility to use my privilege to help the world.”

  “A smart person knows they can’t solve the world’s problems and instead focuses on their own.” Irish Colleen continued to wipe down the tables with the same disinterested look. She had never taken any of it seriously. Not Madeline’s desperate emotions and not the fact the world burned while they lived a life of luxury. Of all people, Irish Colleen should have been the one to grasp it. She’d been a river rat who spent half her youth homeless, and the other half searching for the opportunity that would pull her out of a life devoid of hope.

  “You don’t understand!” Madeline cried, cake sliding from her plate in one hand, a new Janis Joplin record slipping from the other. “I’m an empath, Mom. I feel things. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask to feel every single death in Vietnam, or to mourn Dr. King and Robert Kennedy like I mourned Dad. You don’t know how it feels to be me, so don’t you dare act like it’s nothing. Dad would have understood!”

  “Your father.” Irish Colleen’s voice shook. Her fists went white at her sides, the mess forgotten. Now she was paying attention. “You didn’t ask for this? Well, I didn’t ask for this either, Madeline! I didn’t ask for my husband to lie to me about who he was, marry me, and then leave me with seven children who are as strange and unusual as him!”

  Madeline felt the wrath emanate from her mother in violent waves. Even a normal person could have felt this, it was so potent, but as an empath, she absorbed it straight into herself, into the tiny pores, a direct injection to her marrow, attaching to her soul.

  She dropped her cake and her record, and ran straight to her room. Instinct carried her to the shoebox in her closet filled with things long-forgotten, and she pulled out the ugly diary, crushed it to her chest shaking from sobs, deciding then and there that her father would want her to find an outlet for all the emotion trapped inside her.

  Now, almost two years later, she had run out of paper, so she wrote smaller and into the margins, entries wrapping in spirals and into the four corners. She would continue this until there wasn’t a single white space left. She didn’t look forward to that day. If she was someone else, she would just buy another journ
al, but Madeline wasn’t someone else. Every drop of ink on this page kept her father alive in her heart. Kept her from completely losing her mind, once and for all.

  The words flowed from her heart to the liberating sound of Crosby, Stills, & Nash floating off her record player. Madeline closed her eyes and dropped a tab of LSD on her tongue. She swayed to the music and lifted her pen.

  Mike Wallace said on 60 Minutes that Nixon has over a half-million of our boys in Vietnam now, when the war should have ended last year. It should have never started! Big things are happening in Washington, D.C. and I have to get there and be with people like me, who are burning for change and can’t sit around waiting for it.

  We must lower the voting age to eighteen. We have to get these warmongers out of our highest offices.

  I don’t care what Mom says anymore. She’ll never have to send her own sons off to war. She didn’t understand why Woodstock was so important. She doesn’t understand how music can change things! What hurts the most is she doesn’t even try to understand me. She thinks we’re all freaks. Maybe we are.

  Madeline shook her cramping hand. The tiny lettering was a challenge, but she wasn’t ready to be done with this journal, and she had to preserve the remaining space. She wouldn’t be done with this journal until she was free of New Orleans and her mother.

  She almost fell off her bed when her door opened. She clutched her chest. “Augustus! I almost flipped my wig, you dope.”

  Her older brother grinned. A flush hit his soft, round cheeks. “You know I don’t understand half of what you say, Maddy.”

  “So, it’s my fault you’re such a drag?”

  Augustus plopped next to her on the bed and threw a shoulder at her. He caught her before she fell. “I’m trying to make something of my life. I don’t have time to be hip.”

  “And I’m trying to make something of the world.”

  “I know.” He rubbed the top of her head, mussing her wavy hair. “You will. When you’re eighteen.”

  He did know. Or, tried to. He was the only one who tried, and the irony that her most serious, most focused sibling was the only one who took the time to understand her was not lost on Madeline.

  She rolled her eyes. “You assume I’ll last that long under Comrade Mom.”

  “You have less than a year to go. If you don’t have the fortitude to survive a few more months in the house you grew up in, how are you going to find the patience and grit to effect change in the world?”

  Madeline groaned. “I hate Augustus logic.”

  “That’s not true. You said you look up to me.”

  “You’re the lunatic who still lives here.”

  Augustus folded his hands in his lap. “It’s easier to focus when I don’t have to worry about putting a roof over my head.”

  “You’re a Deschanel, you dope. You’ll never have to worry about putting a roof over your head.” She couldn’t hide the venom, which wasn’t directed at him at all, and she hoped he knew that.

  “I just want to get through business school so I can start my company. Why would I add complications I don’t need? I don’t care whether Mom is strict or doesn’t understand us. Not like you do.”

  “You should care,” she accused. “It’s part of who you are.”

  “It isn’t all of who we are,” he said patiently. “Besides, I also stay for you.”

  Madeline leaned into her brother. The musky scent of his oaky aftershave, his only personal indulgence, evoked a sensation of security she couldn’t find in any other way in this wretched mansion. With Augustus, she was safe. She may chide him for staying, but he was the only reason she hadn’t fled herself.

  “I just wanted to see how you were doing,” he went on. “I heard things got hairy with Mom when I came in from class. Are you okay?”

  Madeline’s head spun. The acid had kicked in, and the posters on her wall danced before her eyes. Jimi Hendrix twitched in a rousing guitar solo as the rainbow waves gyrated in chorus. Sweat poured down his strained face, and then he looked up and winked at her. She burst into laughter.

  Augustus placed his hand on her jaw and turned her head. “Are you high?”

  Her grin spread far enough across her face to make her teeth ache. “If I am?”

  He shook his head in disgust but said nothing more about it. He never had and never would. In these ways, he showed he cared, both by noticing and then by ultimately not berating her. “So, are you? Okay?”

  “I’ll be a lot better when Mom stops treating us like dogs she wants to come to heel.”

  “She’s raising seven children by herself. Have you ever stopped to consider how easily you empathize with the soldiers in Vietnam, when you find it so hard to understand our own mother’s pain?”

  Madeline punched his shoulder. Her fist slid off the soft polyester of his sweater and bent in a strange position. She shook the pain away. “Stop defending her! Whose side are you on?”

  “There are two sides to everything, Maddy. The world is easier when you accept that.”

  Her eyes rolled back into her head and she flopped back onto her pillow.

  “And I’m always on your side,” her brother said, low enough she could barely hear him over the music. “You know that.”

  Madeline rocked back into a seated position and rested her face in Augustus’ shoulder blades. “And you know if you wake up one day and I’m not here, it isn’t because you weren’t on my side.”

  “You promised me you’d finish high school.”

  “I promised I would try.”

  Augustus spun around. “Sounds like you’ve made up your mind.”

  “What, you gonna go fink to Mom?”

  “Stop accusing me of unfair things.” Rather than angry, he sounded hurt.

  Madeline, contrite, wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Aggie. You’re the very best brother in the wide world. I wouldn’t have lasted this long without you.” She peppered his cheeks with manic kisses.

  Augustus grunted, but his stiffness melted away. He squeezed her once, then peeled her off. “Okay, okay. I need to study.”

  She pointed her thumb down and made a disgusted sound with her lips. “You do that, Aggie, and I’ll just be in here making a plan to end the Cold War and bring our boys home from ’Nam.”

  Her brother—her only ally in this world—smiled before disappearing into the hallway.

  It was true that Augustus was the only reason she hadn’t run far, far away from New Orleans years ago. He protected her, but it was so much more than that. He didn’t look at Madeline and wish she were someone else, someone better. Someone more grounded, like him, or perfect Colleen. When she told him she meant to be a part of ending the war, his only ask was she finish school.

  She was trying. For him.

  But every day under this roof, with a mother who looked at her more like a disappointment than a daughter, and a life she could hardly stand to look upon without a twisted self-loathing that the rest of the world didn’t have such luxuries, tested her fortitude for the task.

  Madeline rolled over on her side and lifted the stylus on the record player. She was done with Crosby, Stills, and Nash for now. She slipped out James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James.”

  Leaning back against her pile of plush pillows, Madeline let the soft melodies carry her into the best part of her trip.

  * * *

  Colleen scribbled furious notes into the spiral book resting precisely parallel to her physics textbook. Her messy shorthand looked like nonsensical loops and spirals to others, but she could decipher every word. She first learned this skill as a method for keeping up with her frenetic mind, which moved at the speed of tomorrow. Now, she saw it as an edge to her future in medical school, where the incomprehensible scrawl would become part of the science.

  Only a month remained until finals, and then summer, and then… college. Colleen felt in her soul that she had been preparing for college since kindergarten, and many of her te
achers had expressed similar sentiments about her, though couched in the form of concern. When her friends are playing at recess, Colleen hides in the library. Of course, Colleen’s mother, Irish Colleen, always came back with the expected incredulous response. You’re calling me in because Colleen is too good of a student? Is that right?

  Irish Colleen never went to college herself. She had given up halfway through high school to first take care of her mother, and then later, was a hospice caregiver for the first wife of August Deschanel, Eliza, in her final months of life. August had loved Eliza, and she gave him everything he could ever want in the form of love, but Eliza was unable to give him what he needed, and that was children. Until he had an heir, the family would be in nervous limbo. Heartbroken but resolved, August turned right around and married Irish Colleen, and then the rest—seven live children, a handful of miscarriages, a marriage of mostly convenience but occasionally love—was history.

  But Irish Colleen was determined her children would benefit from the vast Deschanel fortune left to them by their late father and pushed them all into their studies whether the shoe fit or not. As it happened, the shoe only fit Colleen and Augustus, but Irish Colleen pushed each of the seven nonetheless, determined every one of her children would have the life she didn’t, never wondering if her expectations matched their desires.

  The Deschanel name alone guaranteed each of them a spot at any of the New Orleans private universities. This was the only reason Charles found his way to university at all. Colleen was determined to not only prove herself worthy upon arrival, but every moment thereafter. She was especially conscious her name would open doors for the rest of her life, and she would have no one saying she didn’t deserve to step through them.

  “I’m so tired of The Doors,” Carolina whined. Rory stretched the record over both their heads, out of her reach. She made tiny grunting sounds as she leaped for it.

  Colleen fell out of her daze. She’d completely forgotten her two best friends were even there. This happened all the time, and she wondered if they knew. “How about no music?”