Cauchemar (8 page)

Hannah set down her empty basket and moved toward the door, even as Sarah Anne called her back. Christobelle's words rang in her head, telling her to keep strong and close herself off, but all she felt was shame.

Sarah Anne caught up to her in the parking lot. “What was that?” she asked, her own groceries abandoned inside.

“They don't want me here,” Hannah said, blinking back tears. “They want me in the swamp, with the reptiles. Where they think I belong.”

Sarah Anne moved to stand in front of her. “You should tell the manager. They have no right to treat you like this.”

Hannah stared bitterly out at the street. “You don't understand what it's like, being turned away anywhere I go. You can't know how much they hate me.”

She felt paralyzed by the knowledge that others might turn on her even in the brief walk back to Callum's apartment. She was beginning to understand Mae's fierce protectiveness and how necessary their waterside exile had been. In that moment, she ached for the easy life that Mae had constructed for her.

“I don't care who your family is, money is money. Money is blind.”

“Not my money. They don't want anything from me. Everything I touch is tainted.”

She thought of Callum and the unburdened simplicity of his life before she'd come into it. How long before the townspeople found out who was sleeping in his bed? Or worse, maybe they already knew. Maybe they'd already confronted him, a wall of thick-armed men encircling him on the docks, his own small form eclipsed by their menace. There was nothing more terrifying than precarious happiness.

“Hannah, that's not true.” Sarah Anne touched her shoulder. Hannah flinched away from the woman's hand.

“Now you're tainted, too,” Hannah said, aiming for levity, but her voice came out dry and heavy. “I should go.”

“I'm sorry,” Sarah Anne said. “I know you must be going through a lot. Why don't you come over? Let me make you dinner one night, and we can catch up.”

“Sure,” Hannah replied, but she was already waving as she turned away. She'd imagined seeing Sarah Anne again many times over the years, and had rehearsed long apologies for abandoning her that night so long ago. But now she'd had two chances, and fallen short of contrition on both occasions. Maybe the finest gift she had to offer was to shut herself off.

So distracted was she by her thoughts that she bumped shoulders with the old woman standing in the middle of the street. “Sorry,” Hannah mumbled. She caught a glimpse of white hair framing milky brown eyes as she passed, and when she looked over her shoulder, the woman was still there, watching her go. She noticed the varicose veins streaking the woman's legs beneath the hem of her pale blue shift dress. Hannah's shoes slapped the concrete as she walked away, and she thought of a hunted animal, moving inelegantly through the brush.

When Callum was gone, Hannah was restless. Her new life was different from her previous uncomplicated fascination with books, herbs, and fetching simple accents for Mae's dishes. It had been a small life, but comfortable in its simplicity and reassuring for seeming so secure. Now her future stretched in front of her like a chasm, specked with terrible moments of anger at Mae for coddling her, for not pushing her toward university, for not teaching her the basics of finance.

“What do you know how to do?” Callum asked her, then grunted. “Aside from being sexy as hell.”

“Excellent,” Hannah muttered. “An exciting future in prostitution awaits me.” She cocked her head, considering. “I know how to cook, I guess.”

“I'll say. You're incredible in the kitchen.”

“No restaurant in this town would hire me, though,” she said, squeezing the juice of a halved lime into her glass of water.

“Come here,” he scoffed and wound his arm around her waist. “You don't need an income right this second, so stop stressing so much and just enjoy it. Slaving away for your bread and butter isn't all it's cracked up to be.” They danced clumsily across the living room. “Jesus, woman, would you let a guy lead?”

Hannah stepped hard on his foot. “I would, if he knew how.”

As he picked her up off the floor, she squealed. Beneath her trailing toes, his feet moved smoothly. “How's this?”

Her laughter answered him.

“Give yourself some time. You're young, still.” He ran his finger alongside her eyes, over her lips. “No lines yet,” he said, softly. He guided her finger across the same route on his face. “See? This is what they call expiring goods.”

Eventually, they made their way to the bed, where he mapped her body with his tongue, his lips murmuring against her skin as if she were his harmonica. His hands moved with teasing slowness along her body and she answered his plucks and plumbs with her truest notes. Afterward, they lay beside each other, their faces mashed by pillows, and talked softly.

“How can you even afford this place?” Hannah asked him, running her eyes across the molded trim along the ceiling. The bedroom's large windows opened like doors onto the starred sky.

“Renting an apartment in the middle of nowhere can be remarkably cheap. I make do with the occasional gig. And my parents died,” Callum added, his voice unemotional. “My mom first, a quick cancer, then my dad drank and smoked just enough to rot his stomach straight through.”

Hannah was surprised that he hadn't shared this with her earlier, and found herself yearning to hear someone else's experience of loss. “I'm so sorry. Were you close?” She stroked his cheek, trying to coax out grief, but he gave a wry one-sided smile.

“Not really. I flew the coop at fifteen. They were fine enough parents, but a bit too right-leaning for a musical son.”

“So why didn't you set up camp in Lafayette or Baton Rouge? Tourists are dying for a good swamp tour.”

Callum shrugged. “You get your motor clogged with hyacinth, and they expect you to find them a gator nest. I'm brave in plenty of ways, but not stupid enough to taunt a momma alligator for the viewing pleasure of chubby kids in bucket hats. And the music's good in Lafayette, but I never warmed to the zydeco. I've been here for years, and still can't partner-dance to save my life. Anyway, my sister gave me the lion's share of what little our parents had saved up.”

“You have a sister?”

Callum cleared his throat. “She's a few years younger than me. Was never too close with her either, but now she has a white-picket house in California and a little girl, and her husband is loaded. Sometimes it pays in unexpected ways, being a starving artist.”

“You are starving,” she teased, punching his ribs under the covers. “You're too thin.”

“And you, my dear, are nesting.” He turned her around easily, fitting himself against her back, and patted her stomach. She gasped and swatted his hand away. “Don't even,” he scolded. “I love it. I love it all.” His hand clutched hers. “What about you? Have you ever met your real parents?”

Hannah sucked in air and sat up. She could make out the unblinking glint of his eyes in the darkness. “My real mother's known in town. Or should I say, reviled. You've probably already heard about her, and maybe even made up your mind.”

“Hey, you don't have to say anything at all. I was just running my mouth.”

Hannah hesitated, then, taking a deep breath, decided to trust. It felt like counting on a slender rope to hold her against the appetite of gravity. “Have you heard of Christobelle?”

“That woman with the church? The spiritualist? I've heard a thing or two, usually from the too-good Baptist girls who heard it from their grandma. They say she's a voodoo queen of some kind, whatever that means.” He made a scoffing sound. “Yeah, she's legend.” Then, realization dawned on him. He sat up and slapped her knee in excitement. “Wait. That's your mother?”

“That's the one.”

The silence was heavy. Hannah imagined Callum leaving the room without a word, the shuttered windows shaking in the frames as he slammed the door. She braced herself against rejection, steeling her limbs.

“Shit,” he said, and drew her into his lap. She trembled with the effort of staying stiff, staying strong, then gave in. “That must have been interesting for you.”

Hannah nuzzled gratefully against his cheek.

“We can be done with the conversation if you want, but—is there any truth to it? Speaking to the dead and all that?”

“Funny how the ones who know firsthand are never the ones gossiping.” Hannah brushed back her hair and gathered it in a loose knot at the nape of her neck. It felt strange speaking out loud about things that she'd only ever turned over in her mind. “Who knows? After all, the power of voodoo is in the mind. You give someone a drink with crushed snails and sage, finish it off with a light psychotropic, and they'll see whatever you want them to. Some of these potions that people peddle have clay, black sand, or even ground-up bones in them. I don't know what she gives them, but from what I've heard, it's always men that go to her, and they end up sick. Or worse.”

“What's she got against men?”

Hannah remembered the way Christobelle rested against Samuel, depending on his presence beside her. How she'd called him her partner. “I don't think she wants to hurt them,” Hannah said slowly.

Callum whistled softly. “If I were you, I'd be so curious about it.”

Hannah bristled. “She gave me up. Mae raised me, and that's all that matters. I'm no more a part of it than anyone else, no matter what people might say. I've spent my whole life strung up for things I know nothing about.”

“Well, not nothing. Don't you ever wonder if you might have a bit of her in you? More than, say, her eyes or her nose?”

“You think it's catching? Talking to the dead?”

“I'm just saying that if there are people on the other side, it might actually be charitable to start a conversation.”

“I don't put much stock in it,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady as she lay back down and burrowed under the covers. “I don't really see how it's easier to blame a toilet flushing in the night on some angry, constipated ghost than faulty plumbing.”

“That's some pressing unfinished business.” Callum stretched out beside her.

“So?” she asked, trying to sound tougher than she felt. “Have I finally done it? Have I scared you away?”

“Oh, definitely,” he said, a smile in his voice. “I'm shaking in my boots.” His breath dripped down the whorls of her ear. “A little thing like you? Who could you possibly scare?”

That night, she dreamt memories. At six, she'd found shadows burned onto walls in the daylight, then wiped away at night. When she was nine, a very short man with filmy white eyes that looked as though they were wrapped in spiderwebs had come out of the water and offered her a fish. She'd been startled awake on dry land, alone, but the fish had been beating its death rattle on the ground beside her.

Then the dream changed. She was back in the house by the water. Hannah knew she was grown from the heaviness in her belly, the dull ache on either side of her breasts. Christobelle sat beside her on the living room couch. She held a handkerchief in her cupped hands, soggy and dripping blood.

“Do you need this?” her mother asked. The blood drops were perfect and pristine as cherries on the rug, and Christobelle wadded the fabric in her mouth. Her cheeks turned convex with it.

“Yes,” Hannah cried, diving to her knees at Christobelle's feet. She pulled the handkerchief out of the woman's mouth, but it was a dry, dusty pink. Her own initials were embroidered in one corner.

“Whose blood is this?” she asked, and felt the handkerchief disintegrate in her hands. When she looked up, it was Mae lying on the couch, and the handkerchief was on her face. Rising and falling with wheezing breaths. Her hands worked furiously in her lap, slippery on a long strip of skin. She was on the seventh knot.

Hannah stood carefully and moved away. Something scurried, something moving with four-legged agility under the dining room table.