by Molly White
“Yeah, that can happen. When one member of the family is special, ordinary can feel like an insult. I’ve got a cousin who makes Christmas miserable every year, being all over-sensitive about not having the touch. Like being married to a dentist and living in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Dallas is some big trial,” Bonita said.
“So how do you handle the headaches? And the health problems?”
Bonita’s gray brows rose. “What are you talking about?”
Cordelia pointed to the multiple bottles of vitamins and supplements on the counter. “I have to take all that, just to keep healthy. My body wears itself out from keeping the shield up all of the time.”
“Oh, honey, I’ve been at it a lot longer than you, had years of practice. And frankly, I don’t think my gift is as bright as yours. Eat up, that cornbread is better than any old vitamin tablet you could take,” Bonita said, tapping the plate. “I put cream in mine, which gives it a little extra body. I don’t care what Emily McAinsley says, you can’t use skim milk. That’s plain wrong.”
“So, you don’t use a shield?” Cordelia said, trying to get past the cornbread diatribe.
“Well, no,” Bonita scoffed. “Where’s the fun in that? You keep out the things you could see, the windows into people’s lives—falling in love and fighting and making up and all of the little scenes that happen when no one’s looking.”
Cordelia suggested, “Not seeing horrifying stuff that stays in your head forever?”
Bonita patted the clothed part of her arm. “I see. Yes, Cordelia. I have seen some awful things in my time. It’s just cruel, what people can do to each other, isn’t it?”
Cordelia nodded. Bonita cut her own portion of cornbread apart and slathered it in honey butter. Cordelia copied her, biting into the warm buttered bread. She sighed. She hadn’t tasted anything this good since eating in the cookhouse with Dixie Crown Amusements. How did everything in Mystic Bayou taste so good? Surely, there had to be one bad cook in town. She suspected it might be Zed. No man could be perfect.
“You ever heard of a mind palace?” Bonita asked, chewing thoughtfully.
Cordelia choked slightly on her cornbread. She had indeed heard of the complex method of memory enhancement—any self-respecting, half-hermit Sherlock fan knew about it. She just hadn’t expected the words “mind palace” to come up in conversation over cornbread in southern Louisiana.
In response to Cordelia’s jerky cough-filled nodding, Bonita continued, “Well, whenever I run into something I don’t want to see again, I just build another room in my mind palace. Well, that sounds fancier than it is. I picture it as a nasty apartment complex, nothing but studios. They’re ten-by-ten, with those awful popcorn ceilings, the ugliest orange shag carpeting you ever saw, and gray cement prison walls. And when a vision comes along that I don’t want taking residence in my head, I just shove it in that new apartment, whether it wants the lease or not. It lives there now, and it can’t touch the rest of what’s in my head. I never have to think of it again, because it’s stuck in that awful, dead-end apartment with no way out and it can’t hurt me. In almost fifty years, I’ve never stopped building. Do you hear what I’m telling you?”
Cordelia nodded, feeling more than a little cheated of a technique that would have helped her considerably over the years—if it worked. “I can’t help but think this is something my grandmother would have taught me if I’d ever met her.”
“Probably,” Bonita admitted. “If you’d like, I can teach you some other tricks I’ve picked up over the years.”
Cordelia nodded. “I need all of the help I can get. My shield’s been getting wobbly lately. And I need it to be strong if I’m going to survive this job.”
“Well, Jillian said it’s important for the town to make your job as easy as possible, and if I’ve done anything over the years, it’s helping to keep this town safe,” Bonita said.
“Like Batman?” Cordelia asked around a mouthful of cornmeal-based deliciousness.
Bonita snickered. “You’re a little smartass, which means we’re going to get along fine. I protect people from each other’s secrets. I know everything that happens here, and I keep it from hurting my neighbors. I may spread a bit of harmless gossip, but when it counts? I soften the blow. A man cheats on his wife? I make sure she finds out in the gentlest way possible. People get behind on their bills? The parish aid office gets an anonymous note that they need help. I’ve worked too hard for too many years to keep the people in this town happy and healthy to let some atmospheric anomaly come along and rip the parish apart.”
“Thank you,” Cordelia replied. “And I would appreciate any help I could get. I’m…self-taught is the best term, I guess.”
Bonita smiled at her. “Just as soon as you rest up and feel one hundred percent, we’ll get to it. Not before. Sleep is the best thing you can do for yourself.”
“I’d better start building apartments in my mind palace because I’ve been having a lot of nightmares,” Cordelia said.
“You’re going to have a regular Versailles up there, I just know it,” Bonita replied. “You might talk to Miss Sonja about some of that fancy tea she drinks. I’m sure one of her tea shops in New Orleans has something that can help you sleep. Or Siobhan. I don’t think she’s ever made a sleepy-time pie, but she might enjoy the challenge.”
Cordelia chuckled. “That’s a good idea. And even if it doesn’t help, I get pie.”
“That’s the spirit!” Bonita glanced out the window towards Brendan’s trailer. “You know, fresh air is important, too.”
“I know, I have to leave my burrow,” Cordelia sighed.
Bonita nodded towards the window. “The first step might be walking out your front door.”
Cordelia’s eyes narrowed. “What do you know?”
“I told you, I’m the town secret keeper,” Bonita said, smirking just as she shut the door.
“That’s not what I’ve been told!” Cordelia snickered, shaking her head. She hadn’t had a homemade meal cooked by someone else in years and suddenly, she was overwhelmed by Tupperware. She was not used to this sort of community, and not just because of her talent. Even in Candella, she and Bernadette weren’t entirely part of the psychic society there. The residents of Candella might ply their skills in parlors and elaborately decorated storefronts, but they considered sideshow life to be lacking in dignity. The pettier part of Cordelia found a delicious irony that while her mother considered them too good for the Florida towns where the circus folks wintered, her mother was found wanting by her “own people” in Candella.
While Cordelia was typically tight-knit with the people she and her mother traveled with, there were always a few bad apples that could make you regret trusting anyone. And townies? Cordelia and the other children of the carnival had been warned against townies as quick to judge and twice as quick to accuse them of wrongdoings, real and imagined.
But these townies? They were different. They’d just let the League roll into town and take up vital space. Hell, some of them were getting married and having babies with those League types.
She wasn’t sure whether it was because of the rift or the people attracted to the rift, but Mystic Bayou was weird.
That night, Cordelia made the arduous ten-foot trek over to Brendan’s trailer, hefting a warmed container of boudin with her. Brendan’s face was wary when he opened his door, but when he saw her standing there, that expression shifted to one of delight.
“I never thought I’d be so happy to see a face in all my days,” he said. “Sonja said you were recovering and didn’t want to be disturbed. We didn’t exactly exchange numbers. And I’ve tried not to look into your windows to check on you because I have several sisters and they inform me that’s…wrong.”
“Thank you, they are correct. Can I come in?” She waggled the container at him. “I can’t possibly take on this much sausage on my own.”
His eyes went wide.
“In my head, that sounded way less s
uggestive,” she said, pinching her lips together.
He chuckled. “Well, that is a shame. Come on in.”
Brendan’s trailer was just like hers, color-neutral and impersonal, though his looked a little bit more lived in. A laptop and books were spread out on the table and beer bottles sat on the counter. The beige throw pillows on his beige couch were rumpled.
“You didn’t have to make my dinner,” he said. “But I appreciate it.”
“I didn’t make it,” she told him. “The local postmaster brought it over. Wrote the warming instructions on the aluminum foil and everything.”
“The mothering in this place is aggressive,” he said, putting the container on the table with some plates. The sausages were speckled with spices and fried with onions. The smell was enough to make her mouth water. “You want a beer?”
“Oh, I don’t drink, because…” She paused to wiggle her fingers at her temple.
“Because you break into mime?” She glared at him, which made him snort as he turned toward the fridge.
“Your gift, I got it. I think I have a ginger ale or something. What kind of meat is this?” he asked as he took a big bite.
“You know, I didn’t ask.”
Brendan cried, “We’re living amongst the swamp people and you didn’t ask? This could be an alligator, or a bloody opossum.”
“They just say ‘possum’ here,” Cordelia told him.
“I’m less worried about pronouncing it than digesting it,” he said around a mouthful, suddenly exclaiming. “The devil’s breakfast meat!”
“It’s not that spicy!” Cordelia insisted.
“I’m Irish! We don’t use a lot of spices!” he exclaimed, sucking down the rest of his beer.
“Would you rather eat something out of a can or eat something that tastes good, even if we can’t identify it…and it may or may not be seasoned by Satan himself?” Cordelia asked.
Brendan conceded, “Good point. I’m already living in a bloody can, I don’t want canned food, too.”
Cordelia gasped, “You are grumpy when I leave you alone for a few days!”
“Not very good dinner company, I’ll admit. I’m just not used to this,” he said, gesturing around the room with his fork. “I’m used to damp, cramped cottages that smell of old tea, where the roof leaks every time it rains. Everything I touch here feels like it’s coated in plastic.”
“Well, it sort of is,” she said. “And I guess I am. Used to it, that is. I grew up in a trailer. Well, for three-quarters of the year, anyway. Ours certainly wasn’t this fancy. It was an old Airstream my mother bought secondhand in Gibtown. It was pretty worn on the inside, but Bernadette was way more worried about making sure the outside had a nice paint job. You know it’s way more important to look impressive than to make sure you have a comfortable place to sleep.”
He blinked rapidly. “I have so many questions.”
She hesitated for a moment. What with her limited socializing, she hadn’t shared this with very many people, but when she did, people had a tendency to laugh…and judge.
“I grew up in traveling carnivals,” Cordelia said.
“You were a carny?” he exclaimed, nearly letting the boudin drop out of his mouth. He clapped his hand over his mouth. “Sorry, that was charming.”
She giggled. Laughing and judging, she had seen, food spitting—that she hadn’t seen.
“A carny travels with the show, usually setting up tents or running the rides and so forth. I was a showman, the talent,” Cordelia insisted.
He winked at her. “Well, of course, you were, darling.”
“It was a family thing. My great-grandparents literally lost the farm during the Great Depression. My grandmother was only a teenager, and she figured out a way to translate the family talent into survival. She persuaded a passing circus to take her on as a psychic act and basically learned the job on the go. I mean, most psychic acts are just telling people what they want to hear, but having actual psychic talent makes it easier to convince the audience you’re the real thing. Grandma Natalia had a real knack for knowing how to interpret what she saw into advice the audience member wanted. She fed her family in a time when most grown men struggled to do that. And then in the winters, when the roads got too snowy for the caravan to travel, she and her parents retired to Candella, this kind of not-really-gated community for psychics in Florida. Grandma was practically the mayor there. She got the palm readers to agree to communal pricing. She set up a sort of neighborhood watch for the parlor psychics who met with clients in their homes, which could prove dangerous. If there was such a thing as a union for psychics, she would have run it. Bernadette—my mother—and I lived there off and on when I was a kid. Grandma had passed away right before I was born, but people were always telling us some story about her being this badass lady who just happened to have psychic powers.”
“She sounds like a handful,” Brendan said.
“Oh, she was. She didn’t marry until she was almost forty because she wanted to wait until she was sure she could support a husband. My mother was a late in life surprise baby, the ‘miracle.’ Sometimes, I wonder if Grandma felt guilty for that, like her being an older mom had something to do with Bernadette not inheriting the touch—because I get the impression she indulged Bernadette at every turn. It’s no surprise Bernadette felt like she was some sort of royalty. When Grandma realized Bernadette didn’t have the gift but wanted to continue the traveling life, she spent years figuring out the cues and tricks that ‘performing’ psychics use to work their acts. Coded messages, sending an agent into the crowd beforehand to pick up on little bits of information from conversations that she could use later. Bernadette was passable, but she just wasn’t Grandma. Working acts involve a serious level of skill. You can’t just wow the audience with a flashy costume and a bad Transylvanian accent and expect them to eat out of the palm of your hand. You have to connect with them, hold them, convince them that you’re trustworthy. Grandma passed and eventually, Bernadette couldn’t skate on her family reputation anymore. I think that was what really got to her. Not the loss of her mother, but the loss of her status.”
He was staring at her like she was telling some epic Greek tragedy, which she supposed was fair. He seemed to shake off his stupefaction when he realized she wasn’t speaking. “And then you came along and got put into the family business?”
She nodded. “By the time I was maybe two, Bernadette had me on the road. My father, whoever he was, was never in the picture, so she’d leave me with some of the concession workers, sleeping in their booths while she worked. Can’t have a crying baby interrupting the act, you know.
“When I was around four or five, it became apparent that I had the touch. Bernadette made it into a game, asking me to touch things and tell her the history. The problem was that even then, her protective instincts were almost nonexistent, and she thought nothing of handing me nightmare fuel. I still have dreams of the things I saw…they stay with you, like stains on your mind. But I kept going back to try because every time I touched something and had a vision, she was so pleased with me. She was hardly ever pleased with me. It was like the only way I could earn her love.”
“Love’s not supposed to be earned, darling.”
Cordelia took his empty plate and put the stack of them in the sink. She attempted to wash the dirty dishes, but he shooed her away with a dishtowel. He directed her toward the couch and sat next to her, not close enough to touch, but close enough. “Well, five-year-old me didn’t know that. Bernadette taught me everything Natalia taught her about what the audience wanted to hear, the advice to give. She went out to the Goodwill and bought me the sparkliest ballet costumes she could find. We based my whole stage presence around them—a tiny princess dressed in tulle, making my pronouncements in a high-pitched innocent voice. And the audience ate it up. I mean, no one wants to believe that a little kid would lie to them, especially when I was giving them such accurate information. And sometimes, I gave not-so-accu
rate information because it was what they wanted to hear. I once told a grieving widow that her late husband had loved her very much, even when she gave me a necklace from her husband, and I saw that it had graced the neck of a mistress. I told many sons that their late fathers had loved them, even if I saw those fathers hating every minute of playing catch when handed a baseball glove. It was just kinder. Of course, sometimes I saw things I wasn’t prepared for with my little brain, awful things, but I learned to mask my reactions. You can only ruin so many shows before they boot you. You gotta make the cash to keep your spot. Bernadette made sure I knew that.
“For a while, Bernadette was happy. I mean, I was bringing in a lot of cash and she was traveling with the big carnivals again. But after a few years, the cash didn’t seem so great and she started resenting that she had to depend on me. She didn’t want to work the crowd for me, she wanted to be in her rightful place in the spotlight. I tried letting her sit on stage and be the star, while I worked the crowd for her and passed her coded messages, telling her what to say. But like I said, you have to connect with people and the audience never really trusted her. She tried to make up for it, making her accent more pronounced, bigger gestures, more dramatic pronouncements. It was a disaster, enough to get us fired a few times, before she finally decided money was more important than her pride.”
“How long did this go on?” Brendan asked.
“Until I was nineteen,” she sighed. “Some agents for the League heard that there was a powerful touch-know traveling with a carnival. They showed up for a few shows, watched me work. And they were impressed enough to make an offer. I jumped at it. I knew if I told her, she’d find some way to stop me. She’d talk me out of it, play nice for a while. And we’d be right back where we started in a few months. So I packed my bags and left in the middle of the night without a word, like a coward.”