by Nash Summers
Chapter 8
SOMETHING WET touched my face.
I blinked. A huge, wet nose was right in front of my face, and two blue, blue eyes stared at me.
“Hey, Coin.” I reached my arm out and scratched behind his ear. He barked once and then scrambled out of the room.
I sat up groggily, surprised to find myself on the sofa with the blanket I’d given Monroe to sleep with pulled on top of me. The sunlight was peeking in through the orange, sun-faded curtains. It coated the room in gentle, warm light.
The room was empty except for me. I looked around, wondering how I’d wound up sleeping on the sofa. The last thing I remembered from the night before was talking with Monroe in the living room.
And then I remembered the fire.
Soft voices echoed through the hallway at the other end of the room. I tossed back the blanket and stood, stretching, before heading in that direction.
At the end of the hallway, Ward leaned against the wall, arms crossed. The moment I came into view, he looked up at me. His unease with Monroe in the house was palpable. I could practically feel his wariness radiating off him.
Things hadn’t been the same lately between Ward and me. We usually never fought or argued about much. Most of the time we were on the same page about everything. But since Monroe had moved into town, things were strained. We were strained. I hated it.
“Morning.”
“Good morning, Levi,” Ward replied.
The voices came from the room my mama did her readings in. I looked toward the door, then back at Ward. “What’s going on?”
“Alta wanted to talk to him,” Ward replied.
I cocked an eyebrow. “And you’re standing guard outside of the room because….”
“I am not sure I trust him.”
“But you do like him.”
He narrowed his eyes. “I cannot help it. You like him. Your heart likes him.”
“If it’s any consolation, I wish I didn’t.”
“It is not.” Ward looked away from me.
“Ward—”
The door opened. Monroe stood in the doorway, head down, looking defeated. My mama stood behind him. They both wore matching frowns and forlorn expressions on their faces.
When Monroe saw me standing out of the room, he smiled weakly. “Hey.”
“You all right?” The tone of my voice seemed to surprise him.
Monroe nodded, avoided eye contact. “I gotta go.” He reached out to touch me, realized after a moment what he was doing, and immediately dropped his hand.
Without another word he made his way down the hall. Me, Ward, and my mama stood there silent, listening to the sound of Monroe walking through our old house with pattering, small footsteps behind him.
When I heard the front door close, I turned to my mama. “What was that about?”
She sighed heavily, rubbed her temples. “Come on in, sweetheart. Let’s talk.”
I followed her inside. She left the door open, but Ward maintained his post in the hallway. Candles were lit all around the room, even though daylight attempted to sneak through the fabric of the curtains. The shadowed cloak of darkness helped Mama focus when she wanted to do a reading. She’d always said that the light was too distracting—too beautiful.
Tarot cards lay scattered across the surface of the table. All of them had been flipped with the faces down.
When Mama sat down across from me in the chair, she said, “Your voice sounds different.”
My hands went up to my throat. I’d forgotten that it was still sore from the night before. I wondered if I was wearing a necklace of finger-shaped bruises. It was the one time I was almost thankful that my mama’s sight was nearly gone. If there were bruises on me, I thought it might break her heart. “It’s nothing. Dry air.”
After a short pause, she said, “He does take a lot without asking, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t think he means to.”
“Even being in the same room as him drains me,” Mama said. “That curse he has on him is so dark, so powerful. It’s such a drain. If he’d have been a weaker man, it would’ve killed him by now.”
I knew it was true, but it hurt to hear. I thought of that golden part of his soul I saw last night. It was hard to admit to myself that something so beautiful was coated in so much ugly.
“I think there’s some good in him still, Mama.”
She shook her head, her eyes closed. “Maybe. But not for long. That curse is so deeply intertwined in his blood, it’s likely to kill him. Or make him kill someone else. Both, probably. Every day that passes, it digs its claws deeper and deeper, drags him closer and closer to hell.”
“That can’t mean he’s a lost cause, though, right?”
“As lost as I’ve ever seen.”
“He can’t be blamed for that evil on his soul.”
She gave me an odd look. Her eyes weren’t focused on me, but a line still formed between her eyebrows, her mouth quirked downward in that particular way. “It may not be his fault, Levi, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t there. That stain is as visible as a red wine stain on a white tablecloth. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is that it got there, because it’s there.”
“Do you know how to get rid of it?”
She shook her head. “That curse was put there by someone twice as evil as Monroe Poirier could ever become. Someone powerful and full of hate entwined it into his heart and soul. I wouldn’t know where to begin with a curse like his.”
I reached out and touched my fingertips against the top of one of the tarot cards. “I don’t think I’m ready to give up on him quite yet.”
“I’ve never known you to be a stubborn boy, Levi.”
“Things change.”
“You’re changing. Him being around is changing you. I’m not sure yet if it’s his curse that’s changing you, or the man himself.”
Without looking at her, I flipped over the tarot card under my fingers. The Fool.
“Would it matter?”
After a moment she said, “I suppose not.”
“Gran was right about me.” I stared at the picture on the card.
“Your gran was right about a lot of things.” After a few moments passed, she continued. “Did I ever tell you that your gran told me once, when I was quite young, that I would lose my sight later in life?”
My head shot up. Her eyes were on the wall behind my head, hazy, clouded, white. I stared at her face, so similar to my own.
Once, when I was only about eleven or twelve, my mama had taken me and Silvi out on a picnic. The memory of that day clung to me like incense clings to fabric. The sky had been a perfect blue, not a cloud in sight. A thin stream looped around the tiny patch of grass we’d found beneath an old tree. It crackled and hummed as the waters splashed around the rocks.
My mama had picked up Silvi, who’d only been an infant then, and danced with her slowly in the field. Her long, yellow dress swayed in the breeze, and I remember thinking how beautiful she was.
She had turned to me and outstretched her free hand, the other holding on to my newborn sister.
“The sky will never be more blue than it is today, Levi,” she’d said to me. I had taken her hand and smiled, thinking then that she might just be right.
Looking back, I don’t think the sky had ever been more blue for her than it had been that day. Maybe she’d known that as a fact, and she’d gifted me that memory, knowing her sight would soon begin to decay.
“What did Gran say about your sight?”
“She told me when I was just a girl that the things I saw then in life I would not see again later. At first I thought she meant it metaphorically. Later, I realized, it was quite literal.”
“Do Gran’s visions—predictions—always come true?”
“In one way or another. While we might interpret them differently, the prediction, in some form, always seems to come true. It’s not something we can fight against.”
“Did you try to fight against
fate? To keep your sight?”
“There are more important things in life than sight, Levi. I made a terrible mistake, but what I was left with in my life, I’d have given up much more than my sight.”
We sat there in silence as the minutes ticked by. I thought of how brave my mama was, and hoped I could learn to be that brave when it really mattered.
“I don’t think I can let it go, Mama,” I said quietly. “This darkness. I don’t think there’s anywhere in the world I can go that would make me not want it.”
She smiled sadly. “I know, Levi. And by the way his aura sings when you’re around, I think that darkness would follow you to the ends of the earth.”
Chapter 9
“WHY IS it making that noise?” Silvi asked.
I tossed my head back against the headrest on the seat. “I have no idea.”
“It won’t start?”
“Nope.”
“How will we get into town to buy school supplies?”
“I have no idea, Silvi.”
“I need school supplies, Levi. I need pencil crayons and pencils and a new binder.”
“I know, Silvi.”
“Can we walk?”
I turned to her and smiled. When I tugged on one of her curls, she made a face. “It’s a bit too far to walk.”
Her gaze went to her shoes. They were little white slip-on shoes with black felt-marker doodles on the toes. “I guess it’s not a big deal.”
If there was one thing in the world I hated the most, it was disappointing Silvi. She never had tantrums or asked for more than my mama and I could give her. School was starting next week, and she’d been talking about her new school supplies constantly.
Silvi was the artist in the family, even though all she liked to draw were ghosts. She had little sketches of ghosts on her notebooks, her walls, on every piece of paper she could get her tiny hands on.
When Silvi first started school, her teacher had Mama and me go into the school to speak with her.
“She won’t stop drawing ghosts,” Mrs. Appleton had said with a weary look on her face. “When we do math problems, she adds and subtracts ghosts. Science lessons, she asked what ghosts were made of. One day last week, she stared into the back corner of the classroom for almost two entire hours. When I finally asked her why she was doing it, she told us there was a ghost standing there with a rifle.
“Needless to say, the children all began screaming and running around. It was quite a mess.”
It might’ve been inappropriate, but I laughed. I could tell Mama was trying her best not to crack a smile. Silvi was different. Harmless, but different. She always had been and hopefully always would be.
The engine made a clicking, chugging noise when I tried the key in the ignition. I tried again and again, hoping, magically, it would somehow fix itself after the fourth or fifth try.
“I think it’s dead,” Silvi said.
“I think you’re right. I’m sorry.”
She shrugged as though it were no big deal. I could tell by the look on her face it was. “That’s okay.”
We both climbed out of the car and slammed the doors a little harder than needed behind us. I stared up into the sky, looking at the clouds, wishing that just one thing could go right for me lately.
“What should we do with the car?” Silvi asked.
I thought of Monroe.
It had been almost two weeks since the one night he’d spent at our house after his garage fire. I’d found myself compelled to stroll past his house on my walks home from work, or to go to the swamp and look into its deep waters. It took every ounce of strength I had to stay away from Monroe Poirier and the swamp behind his house.
Monroe seemed to be avoiding me as well. Mama said it was because he was tormented by the negative effect he had on me.
Now, though, it seemed like I had no other choice. “Let’s go see Monroe,” I said. “Maybe he’ll know how to fix it.”
A bright smile crossed my little sister’s face. “And we’ll get to see Coin!”
I grinned. “Sure. C’mon.”
We headed down the dirt trail leading from the side of our house. I shoved my hands into my pockets and watched as Silvi brushed her hands against the tall grass and talked about how soft Coin’s fur was, and how he was the best dog she’d ever met. She said she was going to tell all of her friends at school about him and his big blue eyes and freckled nose.
By the time we reached the Poirier house, the sun lit up the afternoon sky. We’d stopped about halfway there to tie Silvi’s thick hair back in an elastic band.
Silvi stayed close by my side as we approached the house, silent then. It was almost as though she could sense my internal battle. I fought the compulsion the swamp and the Poirier house caused inside me, and the lust I had to be inside each of them. It was a sick, sad pull of desire for things I knew were the worst for me.
As we approached I saw that the rubble and burned ash of the garage had been cleared away. In its place now stood a new wooden structure of a garage. There were only beams and frames, no sides to the building, but a larger foundation than had been there before.
In front of the garage, a shiny red car was parked. I knew nothing about cars, but this one glistened in the sunlight, causing rays to reflect off its chrome bumpers and rims.
When Silvi and I were only a few feet away, a long pair of jeans-clad legs sticking out from under the car became visible. Black boots with untied laces led to worn, dirt-covered jeans, thick thighs, slim hips….
A dog barked. Coin stood on the front porch, his tail wagging wildly, eyes on us.
“Coin!” Silvi squealed. She ran off to greet him without a second thought.
“Levi?”
I turned back toward the car to see Monroe standing there, looking at me. He wiped his hands on a dirty rag. I couldn’t help but follow the movement.
“What are you doing here?”
A bead of sweat dripped from his temple down the side of his face, his neck, over his collarbone. He was shirtless, covered in grease and dirt, and his skin glistened in the sunlight. His skin was darker now, more tanned than when he’d first moved to Malcome. His jeans hung too low on his narrow hips.
When I looked at him, and when he looked the way he did, the swamp sang to me.
“Levi?” He took a step toward me.
“Sorry,” I said, forcing myself to look into his eyes.
“Not that I mind, but why are you here? I kind of thought after what Alta told me, you wouldn’t want to see me again.”
“That’s not—”
The sun was too bright. He stood too close. His skin was too blemished. His smile was too striking.
I took a step back and looked over at Silvi and Coin.
“I was going to ask for your help,” I said.
“Anything.”
My eyes met his and he grinned. “Anything?”
“Well.” He shrugged. “Anything within reason.”
“Will you rob a bank with me?”
“Of course.”
“If we get caught, I’ll rat you out in a second.”
Monroe tossed his head back and laughed. I watched the way the skin on his throat shimmered with sweat. “I wouldn’t expect any less. Besides, I can handle myself in prison. Not sure you’d be so lucky.”
Unable to help myself, I glared at him, bristling. “I could handle myself in prison.”
His eyes seemed to turn a shade darker. The wicked look that spread across his face sent chills up and down my spine. He looked like a man reliving his deepest, darkest fantasy.
He leaned into me and said, “I’d be more worried about how other men would handle you.”
“Oh? You have experience with prison?” My heart raced.
“I’ve spent some time behind bars. And you, with your charcoal eyes and rude little mouth—” He reached out and carefully stroked a strand of my hair. “—they’d eat you alive. Gentlemen do prefer blonds, you know.”
“Y
ou’re not a gentleman.”
A wide grin spread across his face. “No. I’m not.”
I stared at him, at that smile, transfixed, engaged, in lust. The spell he cast over me was thicker than glue, more real than any curse on his soul. It swamped me, filled me with embers of something hot and uninhibited.
Above us the sky grew dark. Black. The world slipped away. All that was left was him and me, and that dark snake that coiled up from the pools of the ground. It twisted itself around his leg, then around his hips. Its tail pressed against his flat stomach.
A dog barked, and the world came back into place. It slid into my consciousness easily, like a missing puzzle piece fitting in with the rest. Silvi sat on the porch steps, petting Coin, talking to him quietly as though she were sharing secrets with him.
“Whose car is this?” I asked Monroe awkwardly. I moved toward it, leaned in to examine the glistening paint.
“Mr. Butler from town. Saddie referred him to me. Gotta say, I don’t mind the work. Keeps me busy. Plus, it’s nice knowing not everyone in town hates my guts.”
The mention of my coworker was like a bucket of ice being poured down my shirt. I went rigid, annoyed with myself that I was lusting so obviously over a man who had once shared a night with my friend.
Monroe seemed to notice the change in my demeanor somehow. He looked like he was about to say something, thought better of it, and instead said, “What was it that you needed my help with? I meant what I said.”
“Oh. Right. There’s something wrong with our car. I have no idea what. It won’t start, and I was hoping you’d know what was wrong with it and be able to fix it.”
“Shit. Won’t start at all? Hope you weren’t trying to get anywhere too important.”
I looked over at Silvi and shrugged. “Kind of.”
Monroe stared at me a moment too long. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. “Hot date?” His smile was forced.
“Silvi starts school next week. I promised her I’d take her into town for new school supplies. She never asks for much, and I hate disappointing her.”
Monroe ran the back of his hand across his brow. “Well let’s go take a look at it and see if it’s something I can fix.”