by J. D. Horn
“She’s so small,” Manon said, seemingly surprised. “So small,” she repeated herself, this second time with fear building in her voice.
“She’s a fighter,” the nurse said, speaking with a sterner tone than Lisette would have liked. “That’s what she is.” The woman reached a hand into each of the incubator’s hand ports. “She needs to know she’s got someone to fight for.”
No one could fault the nurse on her professionalism. She was working hard, though maybe not hard enough, to conceal her contempt for the mother who wouldn’t be present for her daughter, for the grandmother who hadn’t been present for hers. Lisette wanted to speak up, to try to explain their situation in a way that wouldn’t prompt the nurse to make a call to child protective services.
The caretaker looked back over her shoulder at them. “Place your hand like this. One on each side. And talk to her.” She zeroed in on Manon. “She knows your voice. Keep calm. Keep positive. Tell her how glad you are she’s in the world. Tell her how much you love her.”
Manon’s face crumbled and fat tears traced down her cheeks. “I am,” she said, seeming to realize the truth of her words as she spoke them. “I do. I do love her.”
The nurse’s flinty eyes warmed, and a genuine smile twitched on her lips. “Come here and tell her that.”
Lisette gave Manon a quick squeeze, then escorted her to the baby’s incubator. The nurse nodded to Lisette, as if to signal she had it from here. Perhaps it was selfish, but Lisette felt relieved the nurse’s newfound warmth seemed to extend to her, too. It was as if the woman was willing to cut them some slack now that she’d determined them capable of human feeling. She led Manon, guiding her hands through the ports. “There you are. Rest them by her sides.”
Manon beamed down at the tiny, fragile creature.
“Look. She knows you. See how she relaxed at your touch?”
Lisette hadn’t noticed any change in the child’s comportment, but she had nothing against a pious lie or two, especially in a situation such as this one. The nurse met her eyes, and in that instant Lisette tried to telegraph a world of gratitude. A soft blink reminiscent of a satisfied cat seemed to serve as the nurse’s acknowledgment. The woman placed a hand between Manon’s shoulder blades. “I’ll be right outside if you need me.”
“Thank you,” Lisette said, this time aloud.
Manon stirred as if from a dream. She mumbled, “Yes, thank you,” her focus never straying from the baby. Lisette and Manon stood there without speaking for a few golden minutes, taking in the miracle in the plastic box.
With relief came exhaustion. The room was spacious, with a recliner for the parents to use once the baby was far enough along to be held, and a padded bench that ran along a good portion of the far wall. Lisette took a seat on the bench and waited.
Lisette didn’t want to speak, for fear she’d fracture the spell the child was weaving on the mother. Finally, Manon broke the silence.
“I was thinking I might name her Joy,” she said, “after Grandma Perrault.”
“I think that would make your father very happy.”
The thought made Lisette happy, too. Joy Perrault had been a good woman; Lisette couldn’t have hoped for a better mother-in-law. She cursed the breast cancer that had taken Joy from them.
Isadore’s mother had always been a bit on the quiet side. She’d grown up in the North, the Chicago area, with her widowed mother, Lucille, and another woman Lisette now realized had been Lucille’s partner. Joy’s older brother had been a naval officer stationed at Great Lakes. It was he who’d introduced Joy to Isadore’s father.
Joy did have a couple of odd quirks—she was terrified by the scent of carnations and refused to set foot in the state of Mississippi, even though her people, the Burkes, were originally from a place there named Kilroy, no, Conroy, a dot on the map that had ceased to exist altogether after an explosion destroyed the paper mill that had been its main employer. Joy claimed her mother had forbidden her even to visit Mississippi. Said her mama had made that one stipulation before giving Joy her blessing to marry Isadore’s father and move back below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Long before Lisette had ever considered Isadore in a romantic light, their families had known each other. Joy always treated Lisette’s mother, Soulange, with a respectful, cautious deference despite her uneasiness about Soulange’s Voodoo. Though she’d never once set foot in Vèvè, she hadn’t been above coming to Soulange for counsel on everyday matters or sitting next to her at Saturday mass.
“Oh,” Lisette said as she realized the subtext encoded in the choice of name. Her mother-in-law’s skill for being a part of the family, but not a part of Soulange’s religion, had influenced the choice.
Manon licked her lips. “I want a different kind of life for her, Mama. Not that I don’t love and respect both you and Grandma Soulange. It’s only . . . with her father being—”
“I get it, my girl. No need to explain.” Lisette stood and drew near the incubator. She gazed down at the tiny life in the plastic box. “I want you both to distance yourself from witches and their magic. You can’t do that if you follow in my footsteps.” She traced a finger along the top of the incubator, pretending to herself she was touching the baby’s cheek. “I’ve come to realize as long as a person is in service to the loa, witches are going to be circling like buzzards trying to pick at their power. These witches—they killed your grandmother. And they damned near killed the three of us, too.”
“What about Vèvè? I know,” she dared, as Lisette pondered her reply, “you were hoping I’d carry on the tradition.”
Lisette shook her head, thinking on what she’d found when she entered the store that morning. “No, ma chère, I don’t think the loa want you anyway. I think the mantle is falling to your brother.” She sensed this to be true, and she also felt certain it was what Manon hoped to hear. Still, Lisette couldn’t help but wonder if Manon might be the one who regretted this conversation one day. If, after years of hiding the truth of who she was behind the less-than-glamorous realities of business management, there wouldn’t come a time when Manon might crave a bit of magic. “It’s his choice to pick it up or walk away. All I can do is make sure he makes that choice with his eyes wide open.”
Manon smiled at Joy, for she was Joy now. Not just “the baby,” and certainly never again “it.” Manon looked up at Lisette. “Would you like to . . . ,” she said, taking her hands away from her little love. “I know it isn’t the same as getting to hold her . . .”
“I was,” Lisette said, her heart flooding with love for both of her girls, “afraid you were never going to ask.”
FIFTEEN
Hugo claimed they had been invited to drop by, but Alice doubted the invitation extended to this late hour. The shutters of the house—a Gothic Revival double shotgun cottage—had been pulled closed, and the trio of lantern-like porch lights overhead was dark. She could see Hugo wouldn’t be put off even by such obvious signs. He wanted to rake Nicholas over the coals, and to do so properly he needed a larger audience.
Alice stepped off the sidewalk into the street. Still booming a few blocks down, the street was subdued, if not entirely quiet, here on its more residential end. At least it was until Hugo began rapping on the house’s twin front doors, moving back and forth between them as he called out to the residents.
If anything, this small gray house, crowned by a triangular central dormer that called to mind a traditional witch’s hat, seemed too on-the-nose to belong to les Jumeaux, or “the Twins,” as they were called when the former felt too stilted. Of the once powerful Chanticleer Coven, only the Twins and the Marins remained. With no one left to cling to the pretension of maintaining French as the coven’s official language, the Twins would be unlikely to hear the French version of address moving forward.
After so many years of thinking of the Twins as a single unit, Alice had been almost surprised to learn they had given names as individuals. The sister went by “Art,” short for Artem
is, and her minutes-younger brother by “Polly,” an adaptation of Apollo. Apollo and Artemis, sun and moon. Even if the Twins’ parents had lacked the coldblooded ambition shared by Alice’s parents, they must have had some pretension to greatness.
Thanks to the ever-cocky Hugo and the commotion he was causing on their darkened porch, curtains were shifting sideways and shades were being raised, only they were in the neighboring houses. As far as the Twins’ house went, there was no sign of life.
“We should go,” she called to Hugo. “They’re probably asleep.”
“Asleep?” Hugo said, looking back over his shoulder at her. “They’re witches.”
“Witches sleep,” Alice said, hearing the call of her own bed from only a few blocks away.
“Not the cool ones,” he replied and continued with his assault on the house.
I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down.
The words crept into Alice’s consciousness, causing her to smile, though the smile faded as soon as she realized the voice in which she’d heard them spoken was Daniel’s. The phrase came attached to a transient memory of crawling onto his lap and holding the book as he read aloud to her, but what began as memory grew feeble and was forced to rely on imagination for details. She couldn’t say where actual history ended and wishful thinking began. She did remember, and this part was certain—Daniel had been very good at doing the wolf’s voice.
She was about to make a case for calling it a night when the porch lights flashed on, and, like a cuckoo clock striking the hour, both doors swung open at once.
One twin stood in each doorway, dressed, not exactly to Alice’s surprise, in matching short candy-apple-red silk peignoirs and white floral overlay boots, a crystal at the center of each white leather daisy. Atop their heads sat identical brunette beehive wigs, ratted high enough to house multiple colonies.
They posed, turning slightly, one left, the other right, and raised the absinthe glasses in their right hands so the light spilling out through the open doors filtered through the cloudy, chlorophyll-green spirit.
“Oh, for God’s sake, guys,” Hugo said. “Too much pageantry, not enough alcohol.”
A curt, though still synchronized, spin on their heels, and the Twins turned back into their house, leaving the doors open behind them.
“Left or right?” Hugo said with a nod to each door.
“Does it matter?”
“Everything matters when it comes to magic. You of all people should know that.” He waited for her to choose, but when she hesitated, he tacked on an explanation. “It’s a little test they do, the first time someone comes to their house.”
“All right, then,” she said, nodding toward her choice, “left.”
Hugo paused, eyebrows raising in surprise. “Really? Are you sure?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
He shrugged. “Not judging. Wait, that’s a lie. I really am, but not entirely in a bad way.”
“What is this a test of?”
“Oh, c’mon. Really?” he said. When she didn’t reply, he laughed. “It’s pretty heavy-handed, and I’d assumed obvious. The left door, the left-handed path.” He paused, seeming to wait for a reaction. “It’s like a litmus test for someone’s propensity to darkness, a kind of ‘are you a good witch or bad witch?’ appraising tool.”
Alice didn’t mean to cheat him out of his moment, but she’d jumped a step ahead. Looking from one door to the other, she asked, “If the Twins are testing you as you enter their house, wouldn’t the left and right be from the interior perspective?”
“Oh,” Hugo said, his mouth holding the shape of the sound long enough to show Alice she’d managed to present him with an aspect of the situation he’d never considered before. He pulled an exaggerated, comic frown. “I went in the other. Well, what the hell. Doesn’t matter now.” He beckoned her with a wiggle of his finger, then said in a high, childlike voice, “‘Why, I’m not a witch at all.’” His pitch dropped to its regular register. “Least I won’t be for much longer.”
Alice joined him on the porch as the overhead lights began to flash.
“All right, all right,” Hugo growled, “keep your tit clamps on.” He looked back at Alice. “No, seriously, I could make out the chains beneath their robes.”
Alice shook her head at him in mock disgust. Unaffected, he turned and bounded, perhaps by habit, through the right door. Alice paused to consider the choice once more, then followed in Hugo’s footsteps.
“If this door is good enough for you,” she called to her brother as she crossed the threshold, “it’ll work for me, too.”
The Twins turned to stare at her with dual blank, befuddled expressions, as Hugo threw his head back and roared out a laugh. “I was only pulling your leg,” he said, reaching up to wipe a tear from his eye.
Alice blushed and clenched her fists. “You are an . . . ass. You’re an ass, that’s what you are.”
He drew closer and tapped the tip of her nose. “I’m your big brother, and I have years . . .” He paused. “Years,” he repeated himself, stretching the word out into a ghostly moan, “of teasing to make up for.”
“Oh,” Alice said. “Lucky me.”
Art arched one brow and gave a small, slow shake of her head, a muted expression, Alice decided, of sympathy. An almost imperceptible smile curled up on Polly’s lips. It was a rare break in their mirroring of each other.
Alice glanced around, taking in the room.
Although most of the house appeared to maintain a true double shotgun layout, the Twins, or someone before them, had knocked through the wall in the front room, creating a large shared space with chocolate-brown walls and dark hardwood floors. The room seemed to center on a grouping of furniture. A low, three-legged, teardrop-shaped orange coffee table stood before a minimalist teal love seat and was flanked on one side by a pair of fuchsia velvet chairs—these a bit too cleverly designed in the shape of fleurs-de-lis.
The far wall was devoted to a collection of ornate masks, most, Alice guessed, of Venetian origin. Hugo pointed himself toward this display. “Father,” he said, summoning Polly with a single shake of his curly blond head. “Longest Night. Masks.” It seemed a kind of shorthand existed between Hugo and the Twins. Or maybe her brother had simply grown accustomed to getting his way with them without a belabored explanation. Hugo concluded with a somewhat sardonic “please,” so maybe it was a little of both. All the same, it wasn’t lost on her that Hugo had spoken of Nicholas as “Father.” It was too late for her and Nicholas, but maybe it wasn’t for Nicholas and his only surviving child. Alice only wished she didn’t expect Nicholas to crush Hugo beneath his heel.
Polly waved her forward toward the wall, an evident invitation to select whichever mask she’d like to borrow. Only one option stood out to Alice—a simple, squarish half mask in bone white that called to mind the face of Babau Jean. Where she would have once found terror, she now felt an odd pang of longing.
“Would you care for some absinthe?” Art said.
Alice startled at the sound of her voice.
“Or perhaps something less decadent?” she added in response, Alice guessed, to her shocked expression.
“No,” Alice said, blushing once again. “It’s only I’d assumed you weren’t capable of speech.”
“Really, Alice, what an absurd assumption on your part. After all, we are members of the Chanticleer Coven. You even heard us sing as part of the spell working at Celestin’s charade of a funeral.”
“I’m sorry. I’d assumed that was part of the magic—”
“As a child,” Polly jumped in, “I had a slight lisp. Our father suffered a great sense of shame because of it, seeing my lisp as evidence of this . . .” He gestured from his beehive to his boots.
“This flawlessness?” Hugo finished the thought.
Polly’s face lit up with pleasure at the compliment. “You can be so sweet,” he said, then added in a lower tone, “when you care to be.”
> Hugo shrugged. “It comes at a cost.” He pointed across the room to a green glass bottle sitting on a drop leaf table pushed up against, and painted the same cocoa shade as, the wall.
Polly spun and turned his focus on her. “Really, ma douce, I can feel you limbering up to perform the mental acrobatics, and frankly, your efforts are exhausting me. He, she, him, her. I’m not trapped in the binary. On any given day, at any given hour, I myself might switch back and forth a dozen times. It matters far more to you than it does to me, so go with whatever you find the least taxing.”
“I . . . ,” Alice began, embarrassed, realizing that in the back of her mind she had begun to search for a polite way to ask.
“Father used magic”—he . . . yes he, she decided . . . had already moved on—“to try to fix me.” Polly lifted his chin as if in defiance. “When that failed, he took to mocking me without mercy. He badgered me to the point I also developed a significant stutter. After that, I stopped speaking altogether.”
His look of defiance fading, he smiled, almost apologetically, and reached up to pat the wig. “Mother engaged a speech therapist, and after a few years of work, the cat returned my tongue to me. But by then, Art and I had perfected our silent communication. We found we could carry on full conversations with only a single shared mental image. So much faster and more precise.”
“I’m sorry,” Alice said, filled with genuine regret for having resurrected painful memories, but also desperate for a graceful way to extricate herself from the awkwardness of the moment. “I had no idea.”
“T’inquiète pas, chérie,” Art said as she poured the green spirit into one of the half dozen ringed glasses arrayed around the bottle and balanced a flat straining spoon on its rim. “Father was a thoroughly detestable man, but justice was served in the end.” She laid a sugar cube on the spoon and reached for a carafe just large enough to hold a half cup of liquid. “We cut out his tongue.” She began dripping water over the sugar. “It seemed to be the fitting thing to do—after all, we were only children at the time.” She glanced up with a bright smile. “He choked to death on his own blood.” She gave a slight nod toward Alice. “Right there on the floor where you’re standing.”