The Hole in the Fence

A child's unlikely friendship with an unseen neighbor transforms in isolation

- Adrian Van Young

ONE DAY, MY son befriends the nun. It starts with voices in the yard. Through the glass kitchen doors where I stand chopping onions, I hear Sebastian's voice and then a woman's. Sebastian, woman-back and forth. Sebastian is five, and when I come out to check on him, his face is pressed into the slats of the fence in the backyard.

This part of New Orleans is called Hollygrove—what Lil Wayne, who grew up here, refers to as “the Holy Mecca." I've also heard it called Pigeon Town, Leonidas, or, in faintly ominous tones, “the fruit streets" – a modest subset of what locals call Uptown, with its grand columned houses and clothing boutiques. It's working-class, mostly, with middle-class fringes: White, Black, and Latinx.

We've lived here since the summer of 2014, a month before our son was born when two friends and I unloaded a U-Haul while my wife, a hugely pregnant, supervised in the heat.

Hard to say what Sebastian and the woman are discussing. Immersive to him, something else to the woman: Bemusing? Disarming? I really can't say. But I hear traces of it, whatever it is, in the gentle upspeak of the fencetalker's voice, the emphatic, reiterative questions she poses.

Beyond that fence reside the nuns-a whole nun condo, two stories tall and eggshell blue. The nuns were there before we came. I had imagined uncanny habits with shadows inside them, but these are chill, back-to-the-land nuns. Sometimes I see their lights at night, the mellow, anonymous squares of their windows.

The woman says, “You wait right here; I'll be right back.”

I wait for Sebastian to turn, but he lingers, enraptured. I can see the tense shape of his young, restive body, the chicken wings flexing beneath his slight shoulders.