“Mama?”
Her head moves an inch, and then one more, and then she’s looking at me, her eyes too alive in her face. The pain glistens in her black irises, moves like smoke over the whites. The only thing bright while the rest of her dulls.
“Water?” she asks. It’s a scratchy whisper, hardly there in the din of the night insects trilling through the open window.
I lift the cup and straw Pop left next to the bed for her to drink. I should have been here.
“Michael’s home,” I say.
She tongues the straw out of her mouth and swallows. Lays her head back. Her hands curled on the thin white blanket like an invalid’s.
“It’s time.”
“What?” I say.
Mama clears her throat, but her whisper is no louder: too-long pant hems dragging over dirt.
“It’s time.”
“For what, Mama?”
“For me to go.”
“What you mean?”
I set the cup down on the edge of the nightstand.
“This pain.” She blinks as if to grimace, but doesn’t. “If I lay in this bed for much longer, it’s going to burn the heart out of me.”
“Mama?”
“I done did everything I could. Brewed all the herbs and medicines. Opened myself to the mystère. For Saint Jude, for Marie Laveau, for Loko. But they can’t enter. The body won’t let them,” she says.
Her knuckles bear all the scars: slipped knives, broken dishes, pounds of laundry. I wonder if I pull her hand to my nose and sniff, if I can smell all the offerings she done placed on her altar over the years, done used to heal: strings of peppers, potatoes, yams, cattail, spider lily, Spanish needle, sweet bedstraw, and wild okra. All the green of the earth in her hands. But when I sniff, her palms sandpaper-dry, I smell threshed hay bleached by the winter sun. Dead. She squeezes, and it is pitiful. When I was a little girl, she kneaded my scalp when she washed my hair, scraped it with her fingernails as I sat in the tub with my knees in my chin. I want to cry. I don’t know what she’s saying to me.
“I got one left,” she says.
“What you mean?”
“The last mystère. Maman Brigitte. Let her come into me. Possess me. She the mother of the dead. The judge. If she come, maybe she take me with her.”
“There ain’t another? What about one that heals?” I ask.
“I didn’t teach you enough. You won’t be able to appease them.”
“I could try.” I let the words trail from my mouth and hang in the air like lax fishing line, dangling a hook nothing wants to bite. The night bugs call one to another, courting and threatening and singing, and I can’t understand any of it. Mama looks at me, and for one blink, hope shines, remote and brilliant as a full moon.
“No,” she says. “You don’t know. You ain’t never met the mystère. They look at you, they see a baby.”
I take my hand from hers, and she lays still, her eyes too wet, too large. Eyelids fluttering. She don’t ever blink.
“You can gather for me. I need rocks. From the cemetery. Enough to stack them in a pile. And cotton.”
I want to walk out the room. Walk out the front door. Walk straight to the bayou, to the water, step on it, shimmering glass under my soles, and walk until I disappear over the horizon.
“Cornmeal. And rum.”
“That’s it? You just going to go? Soon as you seek this spirit? Just like that?”
My voice breaks: my face is wet.
“Why can’t Pop do it?” I ask.
“You my baby.” She breathes heavy, and the grate cracks and sinks to rusted stillness. “Like I drew the veil back so you could walk in this life, you’ll help me draw it back so I can walk in the next.”
“Mama, no—”
“Help me prepare.” She sighs wetly then, and I reach out to wipe her face, the skin under the tears warm and wet and alive with salt and water and blood. “I don’t want to be empty breath. Bitter at the marrow of my bones. I don’t want that, Leonie.”
“Mama.”
The cup falls off the table, spreads a puddle of water around my shoes. The katydids clack in applause or disapproval, I don’t know.
“Baby, please,” Mama says.
Her eyes wild and wide. She moans, and what could be the pain moves through her, making her legs shuffle under the covers, then lay still: rough wind through bare winter branches. The morphine is not enough.
“Let me leave with something of myself. Please.”
I nod, and then her scalp is under my hands, hot to the touch, and I’m kneading and scratching like she did me, and her mouth is opening and closing in half pleasure, half pain. Opening and closing with what would be sobs, but she chokes them quiet. Relief again, but this time like a flood over dry plains, rushing from where I touch her head down her gaunt face, her sinewy neck, her flattened, etched chest, the dip of her stomach, the empty pot of her hips, the long, swollen black lines of her legs, to her flat feet. I wait, but nothing about her body changes. I expect her to lie slack, but it doesn’t happen. I only know she’s fallen asleep by her eyelids, the smooth marbles of them, relaxed. I leave her and pull the door behind me. Michael’s in the shower. Pop is still out on the porch, flashing in the darkness. Someone has turned a lamp on in the living room, and Given’s pictures, year after year of half smiles and angled legs like he’s a moment away from jumping up and running, look down on me. A multitude of Givens. And I want him back so bad then, because I want to ask him: What should I do?
Michaela’s on the second sofa in the living room. Michaela breathes openmouthed, huffing crumbs, and a half-eaten cracker falls from her hand to the floor. I don’t even pick it up. In my room, my full bed seems as small and narrow as Mama’s, and like her, I turn to the wall. I can feel her on the other side. She sears me. I couldn’t see before, but now I feel it: her chest packed tight with wood and charcoal, drenched in lighter fluid, empty no longer—the pain the great blaze, immolating all.
Chapter 11
Jojo