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the morning; it was also Miss Millie’s birthday, so she had every right to demand that her daughter ride out to Elysium with her and Mr. Noah. But still, it made Anthem nervous, like the weekend away was actually an audition rather than a welcome back celebration.
    It was neither, Ben pointed out about three times after they got on the causeway, probably because it gave him an excuse to turn down the volume on the Cowboy Mouth CD Anthem had been playing on repeat for about a year now.
    “This is a birthday party for her mom, ” Ben said, with that maddeningly parental tone that sometimes made Anthem want to pop him one. “Don’t make this all about you. God knows. The Anthem and Nikki Show has had enough cliffhangers this season.”
    “It’s just good that we’re going, right?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “I mean, if she wasn’t sure, we wouldn’t be going at all. And they sure as hell wouldn’t let us come out the night before like this and sleep in the guest room, so—”
    “You know, we’ve really covered this, A-Team.”
    “I know, I know. I’m just saying.”
    “Yeah, well, less saying. More driving. The causeway cops are all bored a-holes.”
    “You’re a real gift in my life, you know that?”
    “You’re kidding, right?”
    “Totally bullshitting.”
    “Yeah, I figured.”
    But he wasn’t kidding. And he figured from the way Ben had gone quiet, his hands clasped between his bony knees, his gaze straight ahead so that the dashboard lights glowed in his circular-framed glasses, Ben knew he wasn’t kidding but didn’t want to talk about it. The older they all got, the more sarcastic and uncomfortable with touchy-feely moments Ben got. And, Nikki insisted, the less interested in girls he got. But Anthem figured that was just because most of the girls Ben was hot for were the pretty, popular types who weren’t all that interested in a nerdy bookworm who wanted to write for a newspaper someday. Right, Nikki would answer, the ones he knows are out of his league so he doesn’t have to worry about— And Anthem would change the subject or cut her off because the idea of his best buddy being a bone-smoker felt oddly like some kind of betrayal, and worse, Nikki’s insistence on bringing it up all the time told him she was trying to prepare him for the possibility, and not herself.
    But none of that mattered now. What mattered was, his passenger’s frosty silence notwithstanding, that everything suddenly felt like a gift to Anthem Landry. They had just entered that spot in the middle of the causeway where it was impossible to see land and, for the first time, he knew complete contentment. Or at least what he thought contentment should feel like; it was such a grown-up word, so superior sounding and so removed from the hormonal mood swings of adolescence.
    What Anthem Landry felt that night was the sense that he and the two people closest to him were living in a sacred space between great moments in their lives. And for years afterward, whenever he was in pain or trapped in the dark minutes of another sleepless night, he would exert all the effort he could to return to that lone, blissful hour. To Fred LeBlanc’s voice singing about how the morning mist arises through a crack in the glass after another sleepless night of wishing someone would take him back to New Orleans. To the hot wind ripping through the half-open windows and the briny smell of the moon-rippled lake water. To that eternal, frozen hour, buffed and polished to perfection, a lens focused perfectly on past promise.
    For years afterward, the sound of oyster shells cracking under tires ignited a low flame in the pit of his stomach because that was the sound that brought an end to so many things. That sound, and the sight of Elysium’s long curving driveway, empty and deeply shadowed behind the padlocked cast-iron gate. He tried Nikki on her cell but got her voice mail.
    That didn’t mean anything, Ben insisted. Coverage on this part of the