Bijou

by Zeller, Jill

  Dad nodded. “You see why I couldn’t tell anyone. But Dominique found out somehow. And she wouldn’t let me alone until I told her the formula for Xtra. I didn’t tell her. She stole it from me somehow.”

  Also probably true. I waited a minute, looking over the circular rank of the family. “Is that why you took that Bijou back from me, when I visited you at your trailer? Was that Mom?”

  “Honey,” Dad came closer. He had stopped calling me ‘honey’ when I turned eleven. “I couldn’t let you have it. I need it. For my experiments.” He waited, turned slightly away. The silver waves of his hair seemed to reflect the sun, even though I knew it wasn’t possible for ghosts to be affected by sunlight.

  “You are working on a way to give the Bijou back, right?”

  Dad didn’t answer. He stuck his hands in his lab coat pocket. “I haven’t been a very good father, or even a good man. My ego always won out over my better sense.” He looked at me. “I had good and bad luck with my wives. My first wife, you will be happy to know, is still alive. Ivy’s mother was a train wreck. Suicide was her M.O. Rita. She was sicker than any of us knew. She didn’t want us to know.” He picked up my mother’s phial, held it in the sun. Anyone walking into the old kitchen now would see a tiny star hung in space. But I saw my mother’s face as she dropped me off at school, waving, smiling. That night she was dead.

  “So,” Dad continued, handing the phial to me to hold. “She gave me her Bijou. She wanted me to continue to work, to find a way to restore souls to the wraiths.

  Wraiths still packed the kitchen, streaming in an unending line through the portal, up the basement steps. “I pretended to work with Dominique, to get a portal open. I had to have unlimited access to her Bijou stash. I have to get to work, because it will take a very long time to match everyone up.”

  He smiled at me. “I was afraid to come to the land of the living. I had to do all my work in Hell. But now that I am here, I can begin in earnest.” He put his hands on his hips. “What I don’t understand is, why are the wraiths all hanging around here? Is it because of Dominique, or they can’t leave the vicinity of the portal? It is all very odd.”

  I nodded. I knew why the wraiths were staying close. “Hey Jack!” I yelled through the open kitchen door. “Start bringing that stuff inside, would you?”

  Giving me a mock salute, Jack disappeared from sight, and I heard him opening the back of his SUV. Dad looked at me; I could see his eyebrows draw down as impatience began to boil inside. “Perhaps you could go get the Bijou for me? I assume you know where it is?”

  I nodded again. But I remained standing near the table, holding Mom’s phial in my hand. I wondered if her wraith had gotten here yet.

  “Annie,” Dad’s voice had an edge to it. “Please.”

  I said nothing, just shrugged and smiled at him as Jack came through the door, followed by Zoe. They each carried a stack of compact red boxes. Around us, wraiths jostled and shifted; several moved very close to the boxes, pressing in, almost making it impossible to breathe.

  “There you go,” I said, and walked out of the kitchen into the hall, stepping past a blotch of Sawyer’s blood, two little scarlet-soaked bundles: my tank top and Agnes’s t-shirt. Mae hovered near the steps as if waiting for me. I looked for Bruce, but then vaguely recalled him following Agnes to the ambulance, a paramedic at his side.

  “Let’s pay a visit to our old friend.” I started up the stairs, and Mae came with me. She wore the smile that always scared me, when she had invented a new game of who will be the most humiliated by the time I get through..

  This time, I knew, I didn’t have to play.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The Last Bijou

  It took some persuading to get Zoe to accept her new school. But once she learned that it was the place Mae decided to haunt for a while and that fifty years ago a crazy teacher had killed another then shot himself, she became quite anxious to go, and fretted about the days until school opened.

  Even though summer lingered, laying heat on our days beside the pool, which got daily use, I was anxious for a feeling of fall, for a chill and crisp coolness. The heat was tough on Sawyer, too, as he recuperated at Ivy’s house making full use of her air conditioning.

  Ivy sat her chaise, imperious ruler of the patio. She sucked on her iced tea and made sarcastic remarks about the weather, her walker and wheelchair tucked away in her bedroom closet.

  I was too busy to think, these days. Signing papers for the purchase of our old house, hiring a contractor to begin work. But I forced myself to take a swim, or rather, I was badgered into it by my persistent offspring, who was getting close to her tenth birthday. I floated on an air mattress, looking up at the yellow sky through the branches of Ivy’s pine trees.

  Was it really only two weeks ago? Two weeks since I stood before Dominique where she was imprisoned in a wall of her own making, aging rapidly? She tried to kill me, leaping for me, getting her hands around my throat. But I, still strong from Hollis’s Bijou, was able to pry her off and push her to the floor.

  Her eyes were red with hate. “I will see you in Hell when you get there, Annie Novak. You know nothing of pain. There is no word for the pain you will suffer when I find you.”

  I didn’t answer. My wish to see her dead was tempered now, by the obvious state of her decay. The white blaze widened, jowls formed in her cheeks and knobby lumps covered her hands. I wondered how long she really had.

  Turning over on my air mattress, I tried not to think about it. Zoe glided past me; the pool water gave a great lurch as Bruce dove in. He shouldn’t be swimming yet, I knew, but he was trying to stay fit for Agnes, who lay on towel on the lawn, in straw hat and Lolita sunglasses.

  Dominique had left a stain on all our lives. It would be difficult to erase, even after she rotted away into nothing. Other Delphines still lived, too, and would one of them decide to take revenge on us? I didn’t know. I watched Zoe arrow through the water like a seal. I would have to arm her against them. I would teach her how to read their traces, scent their trail.

  I looked over at Ivy, who was playing a game on her little handheld. When I went to the hospital in Oakland to see her, right after we got all the Bijou safely inside the house, after I had seen Dominique one last time, I though Ivy was going to die. The physician on call was pessimistic, asked me about arrangements for hospice. My heart squeezed me tight with grief when I heard these words.

  Zoe and I entered Ivy’s room. She looked flat and tiny in the bed, IV dripping, oxygen in her nose. Seeing us, she smiled, raised a hand to Zoe, who took it.

  “Did you kill that bitch?” Her voice was weak. My throat closed to hear it.

  “Yes, in a way.”

  “’In a way’? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Language, Aunt Ivy.”

  Ivy looked at Zoe through narrowed eyes. “Sure thing, kid. Annie, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’ll tell you on the drive home” I sat on her bed, brushed her maroon hair out her eyes.

  “The hell you will. I’m not leaving here. Didn’t you hear what the doctor said? It’s hospice for me.” Ivy gave Zoe a lopsided smile, dropped her voice to a whisper. “I’d like to become a gray lady. Haunt all my ex-husbands.”

  Zoe didn’t look happy, but she tried to smile. “No, Aunt Ivy. Mom, Hurry up and give it to her.”

  Ivy squinted at me. I adjusted the nasal cannula in her nostrils. “What are you giving me?”

  I smiled at Ivy, and with satisfaction saw her frown deepen. “For once, I’ve got the upper hand. OK, Zoe, give me the phial.”

  The little globule of Hollis’s Bijou Xtra rolled around inside the amber glass. Ivy’s eyes widened when she saw it. “What’s this?”

  I explained. “When it’s given freely, it’s a whole other ball game. Hollis wants you to have it.”

  “Jesus he must hate me for what I did.”

  “No, he doesn’t. Open.” I removed the stopper.

/>   I didn’t know how long the droplet of Bijou Xtra would maintain Ivy’s health. I prayed that it would be for years to come. But no one knew the answer. The doctors, astounded at Ivy’s complete remission, had to decide that she was suffering from depression and the sight of her sister and her niece cured her. I had some arguing to do to convince them to allow me to take her home, but we signed the proper paperwork.

  And, as promised, I caught Ivy up to speed on all the events of the last twenty-four hours that she missed. She wanted to go to the old house right away, even though it was full dark and very late. I wasn’t sure what motivation inspired her the most, to gloat over Dominique’s fall from grace and greed, to observe Dad’s process for restoring Bijous to the wraiths, or, and this was the real reason, to see the olive tree again, touch its trunk, finger its leaves.

  “Wow,” was all she could say, as crickets sang their night songs and wraiths made eerie colored lights in the back yard. I gave her a hug, and she actually returned it, was not stiff like a board as she always was when I hugged her.

  Then I took myself off a ways, called the hospital, my heart thumping, to hear the best news. Sawyer was out of surgery, alive and expected to make a full recovery. They were keeping Bruce overnight, too, for a round of IV antibiotics.

  I asked if they had heard from Dr. Delphine. I wasn’t sure why I asked such a question, but I wanted to sever a tie, I think, the last tie, between Dominique Delphine and her lie of a life.

  There was a brief silence, then, sorry, we can’t comment on that.

  Golden words, too wonderful to hear. I didn’t want to comment on it either. I wanted to drink in the peaceful night, and now, on the water of Ivy’s pool, drink in the memory of things settled, and the living, and the quiet rules of the dead.

  About the Author

  Jill Zeller resides in Seattle, Washington, with one supportive and patient husband, a brand new English mastiff puppy, and one very superior tuxedo cat. To see more of her works please visit her website at http://jzmorrisonpress.com

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