by Gaby Triana
I suddenly remembered where I was, who I was, when I was.
The ashes I’d scattered—they hadn’t been. That was a dream.
In real life, they’d been my pills. I’d just tossed my entire bottle of pills into the fucking sea. When I turned around to ask Mayai why he would have me do this, I faced an old woman dressed in black. Wrinkled, vacant staring eyes, her gnarled hands reaching out for my neck. You killed me. It was you.
“No, I didn’t. Nobody killed you, Violet. You died because you were old.” Was I speaking aloud or still in my dream? I wasn’t sure. The veil was thin, and I walked the hedge again.
How could you bring that witch’s remains back here? I heard her hollow voice as if from another dimension. How could you bring back the woman who cursed my family’s home? Are you hell bent on taking everything from us?
“My grandmother didn’t do anything,” I defended. “She didn’t do anything. Everything was taken from her!”
The woman’s small filmy eyes disappeared into wrinkled skin. The eyeless, faceless visage seemed to implode until she was only a dark mist hovering in front of me.
“Miss Whitaker!” More shouting, as the winds picked up and the rain slammed down on my bare skin in spiky sheets. The old crone disappeared into a vaporous shadow before my eyes, and behind her, standing on the back porch facing the garden was Nottie, waving me inside. “The bands are getting worse. Get inside! It’s not safe!”
TWELVE
The longest line I’d ever stood in my life was here and now—at the CVS.
Because of the approaching storm, everybody needed their backup medications in case transportation to and from the island shut down or the pharmacy became damaged. But now that the sun had come out in between feeder bands, we all came out. Waiting forty minutes already under the boiling sun sucked, especially since I’d already refilled these damn pills once before.
Damn Mayai.
He was my spirit guide, he’d said. He’d been my grandmother’s before me, and that was fine. I could deal with a hallucination who claimed to be my own protective ghost. What I couldn’t deal with was a hallucination claiming to be my protective ghost who made me throw my pills into the ocean. What kind of protection was that?
Because it was time to let go. Time to connect, he’d said.
He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand what it was like to be an eight-year-old who woke up screaming in the middle of the night, scared to death from all the shadows around her. He hadn’t been there, and he wouldn’t know the fear, so he shouldn’t have made me do that.
Standing in the queue, I seethed. Gritted my teeth.
Others in line had taken to friendly banter, a camaraderie between residents facing peril together, as they talked about the measures they’d taken to protect their homes and the things they still had left to do. The eye of the storm was now passing over eastern Cuba and within hours, conditions would begin to deteriorate.
“Looks good now, doesn’t it?” the woman ahead of me said. She knew I was from out of town based on the “friendly banter” she’d tried to have with me, but I’d been too pissed off at the moment to engage. “It always looks this beautiful hours before a hurricane hits. You don’t hear birds, do ya?”
“Actually, no.”
“Most animals have already taken shelter. Humans are the last idiots outside before a storm, doing final preparations until the last fucking moment to pick up their medications.” She laughed.
I had to get out of here.
I couldn’t stand the sun, I couldn’t stand the heat, this woman’s friendly face, nothing. And I swore to God, I was going to have an anxiety attack right here in front of everyone. Stepping out of line, I bypassed everyone and charged into the CVS all the way up to the front counter.
“Miss, you have to wait in line,” someone said.
I nearly shot them a retort in middle finger form.
Instead, I looked the pharmacist in the eye. “Hi. I already refilled these days ago, but there was an accident, and I honestly can’t wait. I need my meds now. Please.” I had no idea what I was doing. It wasn’t like I’d ever been a diva before. I just knew I felt desperate.
The bespectacled man gave me a thin-lipped grimace. “If it’s an emergency, go to the urgent care down the street. They’ll take care of you there. I’m sorry…next!” he called, avoiding eye contact with me.
I wanted to knock over the stand holding bags of cough drops, but the last thing I needed was to get arrested for disorderly conduct right before a hurricane. Everyone here was waiting, and everyone had to be patient, including me. But it was hard telling that to my OCD brain.
“Yeah, take your white privilege somewhere else,” a man muttered as I charged by.
I stopped to take him in.
Speaking of white, he was bone-colored and wore khaki shorts, a Polo shirt, and nice boat shoes. He’d probably just come from tying up his yacht in the marina. Behind him, a shadow form stood hovering over him. It morphed before my eyes—shifting into a large sunburned man with a noose around his neck. Parts of his hands and body had been charred, and he did not look happy.
“Sir, there’s a ghost following you around,” I said, focused on the dead man’s hollow eyes. “Just a head’s up, he’ll probably choke you in your sleep tonight.”
Then I walked off amid gasps and random insults.
Because fuck that guy. And fuck Mayai for dumping my pills.
Back outside, my phone rang—my mother’s happy face smiling in my hand, but I knew she’d betray that façade the moment I’d answer so I let it go to voicemail. I couldn’t handle my mother right now. Whatever she had to say, she’d end up texting it anyway.
Reaching La Concha, I again found the gate locked, but this time, I side-swept it and leaped right over the top. Did I care that my shirt got snagged on one of the pointed tips and I scratched the living crap out of myself? No, because I was quickly reaching my limit of zero fucks given.
I also didn’t care when I walked through the front door and Syndia, talking to Nottie about the potted plants she hadn’t brought into safety yet, paused to look at me. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To my room. Room 3, the room where my grandparents used to sleep. Is there a problem?” I pushed past her when she tried getting in my way. I felt like a rebel and I didn’t care. This might’ve been her property now, but in my heart, it was still Nana’s and until I helped my grandfather rest in peace, I would never leave.
Terror shone in Nottie’s dark eyes. I could only imagine what abuse Syndia had been heaving on her before I walked in. I tried communicating to her without words that she didn’t have to stay here, didn’t have to take this abuse, but Nottie was stuck as emotional victims tended to be.
“Whitaker, if you won’t be leaving, then I’ll have to insist that you do something to help us around this place. We are clearly in harm’s way while all you do is leave the premises to do God knows what.” Syndia’s voice grated on my eardrums.
“You mean reordering my medicine?” I strolled up to the plaque over the fireplace and pointed to it. “And finding out from strangers that everything my family loved was taken from them? Yeah, how selfish I’m being.” I probably shouldn’t have said that, but I was having a harder time than ever controlling myself without my Zoloft.
Bacon darted through the room upon hearing my voice and slammed his body against my legs in jubilation. Syndia, annoyed that her cat favored me over her, cocked her head and took slow steps toward me. “Everything was taken from you? Your family? You can’t be serious.”
“I’m dead serious.”
“What do you think you know, Whitaker?”
“I know enough.” I knew—felt was more like it—that something terrible had happened here and my grandparents had been bamboozled out of money, glory, and a happy marriage they’d both rightly deserved.
“Let me tell you about hard times,” Syndia said, pick
ing up her hammer that had been sitting on a table where she’d set it down. My mind without drugs imagined her using that hammer to smash my head into the wall right next to the plaque as a warning to other guests. “You booked five days at a Key West resort for two hundred a night. And that’s after paying airfare, rental car, and time off from work. Am I right?”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“But I do. I’m guessing you’ve never had a hard day in your life.”
“You don’t know that.” Emotionally but I had.
“I know plenty,” she said. “I know you brought Leanne Drudge’s ashes here to spread all over my house. I know that you see ghosts.”
What? How would she know that?
She giggled at the confusion on my face. “You think you’re the only one to see them? They talk to me, too. Why do you think this place is called one of the most haunted spots in Key West? And not in the good, touristy way,” she said. “In the nobody-wants-to-stay here way.”
“If they talk to you, too, why won’t your grandfather tell you where the treasure is?” I asked. “Problem solved.” She was bluffing, just like she was bluffing about knowing I could see spirits. “None of this has to do with what happened here in 1951, Ms. Duarte.”
“But it does. Your family had enough money to have your grandmother cremated whereas I had to leave my mother with the coroner down at the county. Do you know how much her Medicaid covered?” Syndia slowly encroached in my space.
“I’m sorry about your mother, Ms. Duarte.”
“Fifteen hundred, Whitaker.” She took slow steps towards me. I backed up, not liking the way she was approaching. “Fifteen hundred, and you know how much a basic funeral costs? You would know. Seven thousand five-hundred. So you see, you ended up better off than I did in the long run. So, why are you here? Can’t you leave us alone?”
I felt bad that she and her family had had a hard time all these years, but their choices had been her own. They could’ve sold this place a long time ago and moved somewhere cheaper, just like Nana had to do.
“You think this is about money?” I spat, backing away. “You keep thinking that. I don’t want anything belonging to you, Syndia. All I want is to find out the truth. My family has a right to know what happened here.”
“Your family lost its rights, information included, the moment your grandmother sold the house. You shouldn’t have stepped foot in here.”
“It was my grandmother’s wishes to be here,” I said. “Your life is based on a lie, Ms. Duarte. The least you can do is allow me to find the truth.”
She scoffed and turned away, sending Nottie into the backyard to finish bringing in the plants.
“This place of yours is built on lies,” I told her, entering the outside corridor. “The truth will always come out, and that’s been happening since the day my grandmother died.” Even more so since I spread her ashes. Maybe Nana’s presence agitated the haunting, got all the spirits out of sorts, her return to Casa de los Cayos awakening every resting soul on this property.
“How do you know that?” Her voice shook, and that glass eye of hers stared right through me with its lifeless sheen. “How do you know the truth always comes out? Google tell you that?”
“No, your house does. It speaks to me at every turn, tells me more and more each day.” I backed off, keeping an eye on Syndia as I felt my way backwards down the hall.
Chewing her bottom lip as she used the hammer to pound a plank of wood against a room door, I knew that Syndia was losing her shit. This woman was crazy. Like I’d lost it at CVS earlier but at a much more psychotic level, because she had more to lose than I did. Even I went home now, I’d be no worse off than when I’d left.
I had to watch myself around her. She stood to lose her home if she couldn’t pay it, she’d lost her mother to strangers who would burn her flesh then never return an ounce of her ashes, and now, a storm was on its way, threatening everything she had.
The more I gained, the more she lost.
And that made me her enemy.
THIRTEEN
I was more nervous about Syndia than the coming storm. Which, according to the latest advisory, would be starting very soon, with the eye wall passing over Havana, Cuba by tomorrow evening, putting us in the northwest sector.
I did my best to help her by bringing in loose items from the yard, anything that could become a projectile—empty pots, old yard toys, loose pieces of wood, which I piled inside the living room to use for shutters. La Concha didn’t have any of the fancy metallic hurricane shutters I’d seen down on Duval Street that closed shut like an accordion.
No, here, we had to hold the pieces up and drill them into the wooden structure of the house. It was easy to see where former shutters had once been drilled. The holes were still there, and we couldn’t use them or the screws would come right out. Hence, Syndia had to drill in new places, which only made the house look worse.
After a couple of hours, she grew tired. The woman might’ve been over fifty, but she was a beast for having such a small frame. Around five, I sat inside the living room to watch the latest advisory and while Syndia disappeared to another part of the house, saw that tornadoes had been spotted all along the lower keys.
Great. Tornadoes. Yay.
I checked my phone and saw at least a hundred texts from my mother and friends back home. I gave everyone the same copy-and-pasted quick reply letting them know I was fine. And then, someone called from a 305 number. Though I hadn’t programmed it into my phone, I had a feeling who it was and answered on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Ellie from Boston!” Luis’s cheery voice rang through the line. It was nice to hear a voice I recognized that wouldn’t judge me for staying in town instead of fleeing the storm like it was out to kill me.
“Hey, Luis. How’s it going?”
“Just finished up helping my landlord with the sandbags, thought I’d check in on you to see if you and Duarte needed anything.”
Nottie eyed me curiously from the front office. I sank into the corner to talk privately. “Actually, it’s just me and her putting up shutters. The older woman’s doing what she can. I honestly don’t know if they’re going to hold. We’re running out of steam here.”
“I told you I’d come by to help if you needed it.”
“I think we need it.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Syndia won’t like it, but try to convince her it’s for the best. See you soon.”
“Will do.” I hung up and grabbed a plastic cup of water from a pitcher Nottie had put out for us.
“What is it that we need?” Syndia asked me, coming back in.
“Oh, help with the shutters,” I told her. “A friend of mine in town said he would help when he was done with his, so I told him to come over. Hope that’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. I don’t have anywhere to put him up during the storm. All the rooms are filled with outdoor furniture and things.”
It wasn’t true. There wasn’t much outside but the broken lounge chairs and a mess of wild foliage. “I don’t think he plans on staying,” I explained. “He only wants to help. I mean, you want to be absolutely sure that our shutters are secure, don’t you? Make sure the house sustains minimal damage? It’s good to have a man around for the hard stuff.”
It was an awkward, sexist thing to say, but I knew it would appeal to her older woman sensibilities, and it worked. She shrugged, going back inside the office. “But he can’t stay.”
“No worries there. But I will ask him to,” I muttered under my breath. “If I feel unsafe around you.”
Before Luis arrived, I texted him to come around the side of the property where he could wedge his way in unseen through the guest gate. I didn’t want Syndia turning him away before he had the chance to help.
I was near the spot where I’d seen that bloody ghost, and my nerves were on high alert waiting for a similar experienc
e—the cold shiver up my arms, the frozen spot inside my torso, my inability to move. The rain had started again but it felt good to be outside, absorbing its energy. Somehow, it recharged me, made me feel I could handle anything.
I stood by the back wall of the last guest room, chewing on my nails. If I closed my eyes, I could feel them staring. The shadows. The spirits. Wanting to come near me, wanting to tell me things. No, no, no… I shook my head and tried to stay on this side of the veil.
According to Mayai, it was time to let them in. Time to listen and connect, but I just couldn’t fucking do it. I kept my eyes wide open, focusing on the smallest of things—the raindrops falling off the eaves, the lines and patterns in the hibiscus bush leaves next to me. Anything but staring into space. That was when they started to come out.
I was scanning the yard, waiting for a sign from Luis, when I spotted something in the corner of the yard. Covered in vegetation, it could’ve been anything, but the dull gray metal and patches of reddish stain told me it was discarded machinery. Slowly, I stepped through the leaves over to it, only to find it was larger than I originally thought, about six feet wide and four feet tall, a massive thing with gears and dull blades and curved parts to protect the user.
It must’ve been half a century old.
It was covered in rust and I felt stupid for not being able to identify it. All around me, mosquitoes flitted and landed on my skin, looking to feast. I knew I had to move out of this corner quickly, else become their latest meal. But I couldn’t move. I was drawn to this machine and its once-sleek design.
It might’ve been a strange lawnmower or an old air conditioner unit out here rotting in the wild, but whatever it was, it had taken a hold on me. Lightly, I ran my fingertips along its frame, stopping to close my eyes and just feel.
Them blades will get duller, if you do, then you won’t be able to use it no more.