Cauchemar (10 page)

She didn't lift her head until she felt Callum's weight on the couch beside her. His arm clasped protectively around her shoulders. “So what do we do?”

In the early morning light, his skin looked waxy. She thought if he smiled in that moment, his face might crack. “We?” she asked. With that one word, she gave him a way out.

“We,” he agreed, and touched her stomach. “The whole lot of us.”

For several days, they ferried his life into hers by the swamp. Then a heavy morning downpour barricaded them in his dusty, mostly emptied home, and he laid a tattered red blanket on the floor. The rain brought sleep easily, but Hannah was startled awake by thunder. She rolled over to see Callum on his back, his eyes wide open, a vacant expression on his face. “Callum?” she asked, and felt an electric shock when she touched his chest.

Callum blinked rapidly and shook his head. “Sorry, I was spacing out. Guess it's just this sleepy weather.” He reached down and massaged his right thigh. “In fact, my leg's still sleeping.”

She plaited her leg with his, pressing her toes into his shin. “Is it all happening too fast?” she asked, giving voice to a fear that had plagued her for weeks.

He didn't answer and the stretching moment panicked her. “It's not the usual order of things. First comes love, then marriage,
then
the damn baby carriage, but that's a flawed schedule. Ask me, it's for cowards who need exits at every turn.”

Hannah considered his words, then went back to the basics of childhood friendship. “What's your favorite color?”

“Green. Yours?”

Hannah closed her eyes and saw a deep maroon. She tried to describe it, but Callum wrestled his way on top of her. “The real question is, what's your favorite breakfast? I'm ravenous.” He gummed lazily at her neck.

On the last day of the move, she sat on a tree stump by the water, watching bullfrogs bloat and belch while popping blueberries into her mouth.

“That's the last of it,” he said, kicking a box of records.

When she smiled, her teeth were black.

He approached her and peered into her mouth. “I've heard that women let themselves go after they've found themselves a man, but good God.”

“I'm practically dating a pirate. I've heard you don't have the highest standards.”

“Pirate?” he exclaimed. “Try expert navigator of these here dark waters. International waters, stern and bow, hull …”

“Even I know those nautical terms, Mr. Expert Navigator,” she said, and yelped as he lifted her into his arms and walked unsteadily to the back door, declaring he had to carry her over the threshold.

Later, Callum made a cacophony of metal against metal in her kitchen drawers. “Where am I going to put all this stuff? Mae was so well stocked, there's barely room for me in this house. Could I try the shed out back?”

Hannah suddenly remembered what she'd seen in the shed, and even months later, it set her heart racing. “No, not in the shed,” she said quickly. She toed a pot on the floor. “The shed's full of emergency supplies. Water, canned goods, things we'd need if we were ever stranded here.”

“You have your very own boat captain now,” he said in a booming voice, flexing his chest. “There'll be no more stranding for you, missy.”

Hannah raised an eyebrow. “Oh, captain, my captain, who can't use a pan to save his life.” She plucked at a piece of plastic still wrapped around a frying pan.

“Pretty young women tend to find me when I'm hungry, and are more than happy to oblige.” He fit her face between his hands and eased the scowl off her face with callused thumbs.

On her way upstairs, she stopped by his guitar stands and ran her fingers down the necks, frets like the ridges of a spine. She tried to pluck out a melody, but the sound came out wry and stilted, as if the guitars were mocking her attempts.

She'd never had a knack for music, and as had been the case during the last few months, the list of things she didn't know seemed to be growing longer. Knowing how to catch a frog and cook it, or how to pick out tarragon in a dish, had always seemed like enough for now. She'd toyed with a half-formed notion of going to college someday, but the thought of leaving Mae alone in the house had seemed unbearable. Mae had always listened patiently to Hannah's far-fetched plans, then gently changed the subject. Someday was transforming into a future with priorities she'd never imagined for herself, but maybe this was what it meant to live. An equation forged through the summation of choices.

Callum moved Hannah's dresser and desk into Mae's bedroom while she stripped the bed of its sheets.

“It's time to let go of her.” Callum took the sheets from Hannah and stuffed them into a black garbage bag. “My sheets have seen better days, so let's just get new ones. I was thinking pirate ships,” he joked.

“It's a waste of money.” She'd always liked nestling against the daisy pattern after a powerful nightmare.

“I don't want to sleep on a dead woman's sheets. If you think about it carefully, I think the creepiness will dawn on you, too,” he said, hoisting the bag over his shoulder. Then, seeing her smile shrink, he lowered his voice. “I'm sorry, that was glib. I wish I'd known her.”

“She would've liked you, I think.” Hannah squeezed the corner of a pillow as he pulled it from her hands. She watched it disappear into a black bag, and imagined several strands of Mae's hair going with it.

James visited with tools—“Some things Callum asked me to pick up”—and bagfuls of peaches and strawberries for her. He congratulated her on the pregnancy, hugging her tentatively and slapping Callum forcefully on the back. He looked different, softer, in khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt as he awkwardly handed her a bouquet of sunflowers.

“You know that bugs nest in here?” Hannah shook out the flowers gently.

“As long as they're not carpenter ants, they're welcome to join the parade of fat spiders and millipedes I've already spotted in this house,” Callum called from the hallway.

She poured James a glass of iced tea as he looked around the kitchen. “We're still adjusting,” Hannah explained, seeing the disorganized room through his eyes. She wasn't used to playing host.

“Looks good,” James assured her, then added, “You're really doing this? The two of you together?”

“Stranger things have happened.” Hannah halved a ripe peach and removed the fat black pit. She handed him half, then shrugged when he shook his head. “I wouldn't have planned this for myself. I thought twenty years old meant years yet to think about it.”

James fingered a dried vine hanging from a hook above the sink and released the smell of herbs. “People say it always happens when you least expect.” His eyes stalled on the melted candle on the windowsill. Hannah had found she missed their warming light, and it comforted her to echo Mae's habit of setting out candles at the beginning of each week.

“You think you'll stay in this house?” James asked.

“We're safer here than in town.”

James sighed. “I heard about that. Mallory Thames was her name, if that means anything to you. We found a very expired driver's license in her pocket. She's been shipped off to a mental institution. The old bat kept babbling about things tying her to the bed at night, entering her body during the day. She used the old ‘the voices made me do it' defense. Schizophrenic, must be.”

“She scared Callum.”

“Not you, though?”

Hannah flicked the black peach pit into the sink. “I'm used to it.”

James stepped back to lean against the counter and sipped his iced tea slowly, deliberately. “I can promise we'd keep an eye on you in town, and I can give Callum the name of a top-notch security system. Ask me, I'm not convinced bringing a pregnant woman out to the swamp is exactly ‘safer.'”

“And why's that?”

“Rumors,” James said quickly. “You know, people running their mouths. If the swamp alone isn't enough to spook you, then hell, crazy things come out in holding cells or in the drunk tank after a few hours of quiet contemplation. Men claiming they've seen or heard things.”

Hannah snorted. “What? Voodoo in the swamp? Bare-breasted women bedding gators? Yeah, that's old news.” She gestured around the room. “As you can see, it's just timber and brick like any other house.”

James laughed, dismissing his words before he even spoke them. “I know, I know. I've heard from various entirely untrustworthy, drug-addled sources that this house in particular is special. They say it's easier to call on spirits here, that it's some kind of summoning ground. They call it a crossroads.”

“Are you really buying into the boogeyman?” Hannah raised an eyebrow. “Okay, I'll bite. What kind of summonings?” Hannah was curious. As a child, she'd heard the townspeople's accusations and snatches of their stories, but when she came home, brooding over some new bruise and full of questions, Mae would dismiss their words. Eventually, after the bullying in town became unbearable, Mae had pulled her out of school and limited her contact to others who lived on the swamp. Others who, probably at Mae's prompting, knew better than to bring up Christobelle.

“I don't know,” he muttered. “The locals claim the space draws spirits, that there have been hauntings. Others say that Mae had the ability to speak to orishas. They say that's the reason she was so skilled at medicine.”

Hannah crossed her arms.

James's laugh was wooden. “It's not that uncommon. Conjurers are a dime a dozen here, all claiming to work break-up spells or bring fortune, but that's just voodoo. The orishas are something else. Those who believe say that most people have to be initiated. There's a whole complicated process to follow, but some people are especially suited for it.” He looked away. “They said Mae was.”

Orisha
. The word was exotic but strangely familiar, as if she'd heard it echo from some corner of the house while half-asleep.

Then the rest of James's words hit her. “Really, James, is this Salem? Say what you will about Christobelle, but how dare you speak about Mae like that? A talented nurse can't be just that, she has to be cavorting with spirits?”

James shrugged his shoulders and played with a cat-shaped magnet on the fridge door. “I'm not saying Mae hurt anyone, or ever intended to. People are unnerved by what they don't understand. She lived in your mother's house; she raised you. Have you ever asked yourself why?”

“I was a child,” Hannah said, hating how her voice broke. “The only mother I ever really knew raised me in a good house, where we kept to ourselves. We laughed, we cried, and never wanted for food or anything else. Why here? I don't know. The woman who knew why is gone.”

They both fell quiet as a gust of wind rattled the windowpanes.

“I'm sorry. Interrogating people is a force of habit, I guess.” James cast her a sheepish look and held out a hand toward her belly. “May I?”

Hannah shrugged. “Knock yourself out, but there's nothing there yet to feel. I'm just your average chub.”

“Leah was heartbroken when she heard about this,” James murmured to himself. He cleared his throat. “She's liked him for what feels like a very long time.”

Hannah pressed a nail into a soft patch of rot in the other half of the peach, smiling tightly. Jealousy filled her throat as though she'd swallowed the pit.

After James left, Hannah hopped up onto the kitchen counter and surveyed the room. Callum's pots were balanced in an unsteady tower in one corner, and a plastic bag filled with extra cutlery was in another.

She could hear him walking upstairs, stomping and huffing from room to room with his suitcase of clothes. Comfort was stoking a cautious fire in her chest. She resisted it, knowing now how it felt to be without it.

A clatter startled her and she looked down just in time to see Graydon jump away from the toppled pile of pots. “What's wrong?” Hannah asked as she slid off the counter and bent down to scratch behind his fear-flattened ears. She followed his yellow gaze to a hole in the wall that tapered off into slivered cracks at either end.

“It's just a hole, little one.” As she crawled toward it, she heard Graydon hiss behind her. Gingerly, she touched her finger to the hole and instantly recoiled. The plaster was warm as a wound.

“What are you doing down there?” Hannah looked over her shoulder to see Callum smiling at her.

“What are you doing up there?”

“Enjoying the view,” he said.

Hannah shook her head. “Maybe you should find another home for these pots. Graydon's nearly blind and senile, and sweet though he is, he won't pass up the opportunity to knock things over.”

“Yes, ma'am. Right away, ma'am.” Callum saluted her and filled his arms with pots. Smiling over his shoulder, he tossed them noisily into another black garbage bag.