The Witch of Bourbon Street

by Suzanne Palmieri

A woman, dressed in a beautiful yet prim gown, with light blond hair piled on her head, is opening and shutting each of the doors along the corridor. She’s holding a set of silver rosary beads and kissing them as she worries down the hall. “That’s my mother, Helene.”

  “I know,” says Jack.

  “Hush!” Bee whispers sharply.

  Jack reaches out to hold Bee’s hand. She lets him.

  “It gets worse,” she says.

  The hall grows longer, and Helene begins her searching in and out of the doors with more speed; only the faster she goes, the more her image lingers, like the tail of a shooting star. She’s crying, then weeping, now screaming, in slow motion through the hall.

  “Where are you? Come to me, oh darlings! I’ve lost you!”

  Bee is crying, too.

  “Let’s go,” Jack says.

  They are inside the lighthouse now.

  “This is my favorite place of all.” Bee smiles faintly.

  “It’s nice in here. Safe.”

  “I don’t understand why Mother is so upset.”

  “Bee, do you know what happened? Everything that happened to your family?”

  “No, I can only visit … see … whatever magic this may be, until the day Sister Vesta Grace arrives. That was us waiting for her on the lawn. Do you know, Jack? Is it terribly sad? If it is, don’t say a word.”

  She reaches up and touches her finger to his lips.

  Jack doesn’t say a word.

  26

  Sippie Faces Her Past

  She knew she wasn’t awake because the rain wasn’t touching her, even though she was out in front of 13 Bourbon and not in that strange little room with Jack. She wanted to scream, because she wasn’t able to do what she came to do.

  Then she saw him.

  “Eight Track!” she called out. They went running toward each other, meeting up in a twirling dramatic sort of hug in the middle of the street.

  “Sippie! What you doin’ out in this mess? Those people you livin’ wit crazy? Go on now, find somewhere’s to go.”

  “No storm can hurt me, I been blown around by more than this.”

  “Wait, Sippie, how come the rain and wind don’t touch us? Where we at?” he asked.

  “I don’t really know … inside a dream, or a memory. But I’m scared.”

  “Why, honey?”

  “Because I think you’re dead, Eight Track, and I don’t want you to be.”

  “I think you right, Sippie girl. But if I am, I’m supposed to be. I’m a weak man.”

  “No, you ain’t. You just lost.”

  “I thought I’d found my purpose when Frankie gave you to me, but I was wrong.”

  “Can’t never find yourself in someone else … you taught me that. And you taught me to be strong. Because you’re strong.”

  “No, I’m not. But I’m okay with knowin’ that. And you gotta be on your way now, Sippie. And don’t you worry ’bout me. You gave me more love than any temp daddy could’ve hoped for all these years. Go, be safe.”

  Sippie watched him shuffle away from her, as she had over and over again growing up. And finally, all that anger at watchin’ him go broke through and she allowed herself to speak her mind.

  “Wait! I need you! You come back here. Right now! I need you.”

  He turned slowly, making his way back to her, smiling. “What you need?”

  “I got to face something. And I think you got to bring me there.”

  “I think you right, honey.” Eight Track pointed: 13 Bourbon was alive, overflowing with people and laughter.

  Sippie had to find Simone, but somehow as she slept, she was small again, right back in that night, the last night Simone sang at 13 Bourbon. She found herself in Eight Track’s arms, neither of them able to do much more than watch. It was like stepping inside of a movie.

  “I didn’t need to remember this,” she whispered.

  “She brought you here that night?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Why didn’t you never tell me?”

  “Because I didn’t want you to be mad.”

  “So you knew, somewhere deep inside, that these Sorrows were your people,” Eight Track said quietly. “I think maybe I understand why we both here, baby girl.”

  “I’ve tried too hard to forget it. Wish I was with Crow, it was better being inside his eyes.”

  “You got me, and I ain’t leavin’ you till we done with this.”

  Simone was just finishing her set. Sippie watched her go into the office and fight with Millie. Then she went upstairs, those red heels of hers taking each step with certainty. Eight Track and Sippie followed slowly after.

  “Give her some time in there, Sippie.”

  “This my dream or yours? I just want to fast-forward. I don’t want to see her, Eight Track. Don’t let me.”

  “There’s got to be a reason, Sippie. Be brave.”

  They walked through the door and saw Simone already on the bed. Sippie tried to look away, wake herself up, tried to unsee what couldn’t be unseen, Simone seizing up until she was still and her eyes blank.

  “How old were you, six?” Eight Track asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Too little to know what was what, I suppose. Frances send you here? She took a risk, could lose you, too, if what you see don’t set right inside yo’ heart.”

  “What else do I have to see?”

  “I don’t think that last bit was for you, I think that was for me. So I knew she tried to protect you at the end of it all, that she was tryin’ to give us all a chance at somethin’ better. I feel lighter, Sippie girl. But if you ready, I think I know what you need. And I feel good being able to give it to you. Come on now, you come hold my hands, I take you.”

  When she looked around, they were standing in a field of wild violets. Oceans of them. Across the field stood a shack with a small tin chimney and a woman hanging white linens on a line. She was humming a song, and she had a beautiful voice. A little girl, black as night and wearing nothing but a white nightgown, came running outside.

  “Where are we?”

  “Dis a bayou right by Meager Swamp near where you come from. So small it never got no name. And dat, Sippie, is our Simone. Not da grown-up woman—that be Simone’s mama—da little girl all full of light right there is Simone. You didn’t do nothin’ to her. See, some of us are born strong, some are born weak. Dat’s just the way it is. Claudette, she’s a lot like Simone, can’t be what she ain’t. I’m weak, like I said. You and Frances, you be different. You got to know dat all the things people do, they start long before you ever came into the world. And dat’s why you got to be careful with what you do, so you can change all this.”

  The little girl went up to the linens on the line and reached to touch the sunlight that came streaming through them. She was backhanded quick and fierce by her mama, who didn’t even look when she fell down into the dirt.

  A man came out of the house and chased the little girl into the violets. She kept crying out for her mama, but the woman just went back to humming and hanging clothes.

  “I can’t see anymore. I don’t want to watch this. I want to go now,” said Sippie.

  “I love you, Sippie girl … but see … she didn’t leave you, honey. She was never there at all. You got to know that. You ain’t responsible for the way people hurt you. They hurt you ’cause they all hurt inside, too.”

  It was time to wake up and fix the future.

  27

  Rescue Me

  Frances and Danny

  When Danny burst onto the third floor, I had to hush him. “You be quiet, she’s sleeping.”

  He looked at me. “What’s the matter with her?”

  “Danny, the whole world has gone crazy,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.

  He went to the door of my room and walked in quietly. I followed. He double-checked the storm shutters on the window and put a lantern on the marble-topped dresser. “Lights will be off soon, I don’t want her in the
dark,” he whispered.

  Danny and I tiptoed out of the room, and before we closed the door, we looked in on her, just like when Jack was born and we’d stare at him for hours. We just couldn’t believe he was ours.

  “It doesn’t change, as they get older. I still look at Jack like that when he’s sleeping,” said Danny, closing the door gently.

  “Danny, I’m not sure … I don’t know if…”

  “I know. I know she’s mine. I don’t need a test or sixteen years of memories. She’s as much mine as she is yours. And that’s all the conversation we’re gonna have about that. Now, sit your ass down and listen to me without talking for once because I had quite a ride here and I’ve been rethinking almost all the things I ever thought. And I don’t know when I’ll feel crazy enough to talk like this again, so hear me out. Now, look…” He began pacing. “I know things been good with us, and I know we are right in the middle of something that’s too big to imagine, but I got to tell you—”

  “So say it, Danny. Just say it,” I interrupted.

  He shook his head, smiling. “You never could just sit and listen, could you? All right, fine. Frances, the only thing I’ve ever wanted was you. Just you. You how you are. Not changed or normal or ordinary or wearing shoes. Just you.”

  “Danny, don’t lie to me, not now,” I said. My heart was beating so fast, I thought it might burst.

  “Well, then what exactly is it you think I wanted? I’m not going to fight with you about this. You used to say I didn’t hear you, but I heard every damn thing you ever said. I heard every eye roll and sigh. Only you don’t believe me. So you tell me, what do you think I wanted?”

  There wasn’t any hate in his voice. He was serious, his words honest. So I put everything raw I had on the line.

  “You wanted to play football. You wanted to travel the world and live in a great big city and be a lawyer. You wanted Bonnie Belmonte, the blond girl with the perfect clothes and padded bra. Danny, I was the worst thing to ever happen to you.”

  I looked up, expecting to see his expression cloud over with what he liked to call “the Frances effect” when he didn’t think I was listening. But instead, that damn man was smiling.

  “Bonnie Belmonte? You can’t be serious.” He started laughing.

  “I’m dead serious. When kids, you came to that Christmas festival of lights on the bayou. I was there and you came up to me, asking me out. All your friends were laughing behind you. There you were, making a fool of me, and I hardly knew you, but man, did I have a crush on you! Who didn’t? But whenever I tried to talk to you over the next year, you didn’t talk to me at all. Next thing I know, Pete’s telling Old Jim about how you’re going out with the ‘prettiest girl,’ Bonnie Belmonte, while he was pumping gas and I almost threw up.”

  “Frances, I’m gonna say something right now and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.…”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I was a thirteen-year-old boy. What in God’s name did you think was goin’ on in my mind? Besides, you turned me down that night.”

  “I don’t care how young you were. You were careless with me, and you continued that mean-ass pattern for years. Thirteen, seventeen, twenty-two, thirty-five. It’s all the same.”

  “I was careless with you? Damn, girl, you broke my heart. You broke it that night when you said no. You broke it when you shut me out before I left for college and all I wanted to do was go to school and keep my sweetheart. You broke it again when you tried so hard to be someone you weren’t that I forgot who we both were.… What was I supposed to do?”

  My mind went in a thousand different directions. I’d broken his heart? What was he talking about? He must be remembering incorrectly, because I couldn’t have manufactured such an evil indifference. Could I?

  But that’s exactly what had happened. I’d been screaming so loud for love, I couldn’t hear him whispering over the thousand years of days we had together. And by the time we were at the end, all that tight resentment was all our minds and mouths could taste.

  “Frances … you want the whole truth? Here it is. All those things you used to say, the things I denied, they were true. Hell, I wish they weren’t. Feeling that way made me ashamed. And now that I know the reason why you were all caught up inside, I’m even more ashamed. If I’d known … But it doesn’t matter, we can’t go back. So, yes, you embarrassed me sometimes. Yes, I blamed you for stealing away those things I thought I wanted. Yes, you frustrated me. Yes, I didn’t want to understand you. But you are everything to me, Gypsy. My whole world. You and Jack and now Sippie. Nothing means anything without you. It’s like food with no salt or somethin’.”

  He’d sat down on the sofa with his head in his hands. I went over, putting my arms around him, and he pulled me on his lap.

  “Are we going to be able to fix this up, Dan? Make it right?” I asked.

  “We can try. The worst thing that can happen if we try to piece it back together is that we can’t make it just what we want it to be. You know, like new. But if we don’t try at all, the worst thing already happened. Right?”

  “Who likes things brand-new anyway?” I whispered, kissing him on the head. “Now—” A knock interrupted. “Probably Abe,” I said, getting up to open the door. But instead: “Why, hello, Mr. Craven,” I said. “I can’t thank you enough for those journals, but there are pages missing. And, it seems, they are the ones we need the most.”

  “Oh, my!” he said, looking past me. “Is that the mirror? Why, yes … it is. I tell you,” he said, walking past us, taking off his jacket, and rolling up his sleeves as if he were going to fix a car. “Stunning! Absolutely stunning!” Mr. Craven clapped his hands, aflutter with nervous energy. “And it’s so nice to touch it. To run one’s hands along the history of it, don’t you think? Miss Frances, come here,” he said. I walked forward, and he reached out, bringing my hands up to the mirror. He placed them on the frame so I was grasping it on both ends. “Can’t you just feel the history pouring out of this mirror?” he asked.

  I looked at him skeptically. I couldn’t. But then the corner of a smile began because behind one hand I could feel a large raised bump on the mirror backing.

  “The missing pages?”

  “It could be, Frances. Let’s find out, shall we? Help me here, Danny.”

  The two of them pried the back off the mirror just enough to take out what we already knew in our hearts were the lost pages of Monroe’s journal.

  “But why are they here?”

  “It just so happens that I came across a little bill of sale while I was going through old Albert’s things. It was for the refinishing of one large mirror. It was quite costly. So I thought, why would he do that? And I came here to you, in the hopes it was still among your many valuable possessions.”

  He put on his jacket and went for the door.

  “Don’t you want to read it with us?”

  “Oh, my, no. I’ll read it on my own later. What a treat. I think I’ll have some dinner. The smells from downstairs are so enticing!” he called out as he flew out the door and down the stairs.

  “Read it out loud, Frankie,” said Danny after Mr. Craven was gone. “This is what you were talking about, right? That these pages will tell us where he is?”

  “They should.”

  “Then read.”

  28

  The Shell Seekers

  Jack and Belinda

  Jack looks out over the Gulf of Mexico with Belinda B’lovely at his side. They are on Saint Sabine Isle—he’s explored it before, but it is not at all as he remembers.

  In this world, it’s a thriving luxury resort teeming with pretty little cottages and people milling about in old-fashioned bathing suits, sunning happily on the sand. He watches the Sorrows playing with one another, Helene resting under a tree.

  “She’s pregnant with Egg. This is before. I’m still little, see?”

  He sees a chubby child with a red bow holding fast to her father’s legs.

&n
bsp; “I miss him and I miss my sisters and brother, but mostly I miss my mother. I didn’t know how much I loved her until I couldn’t smell her anymore. She smelled like moonflowers. I want to tell her I’m sorry for leaving her. And I want to find someone else … someone I…”

  Belinda suddenly grows pale, transparent. Jack reaches out, his hand only barely able to touch her cheek.

  “You’re fading, Bee.”

  “I think … I think I am. I must be able to go to them now. What is this magic of yours, Jack? Must another child inhabit this place for me to be free? Are we making a switch?”

  “I hope not.” He really hopes not.

  “Hold my hand,” says Bee. “Think about where your body is. Think hard, Jack.”

  He grabs her hand as the scenery melts around them. They’re back in New Orleans. It is night, and they are standing near a sad tomb that Millie once showed him on a trip into town.

  The Lost Girl of August.

  “I know it all now,” says Bee looking at the stature. “I remember it all. It’s so very sad … and still, I feel free.”

  They stand there, stuck in time, quiet together.

  “What happened to me won’t happen to you, Jack.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was sick, Jack. So sick. Not sleeping at all. And I think, because of the fever, I was half on the other side already. I could watch and follow everyone around me while my body just lay there. You know how that feels, right?”

  “It scares me, Bee.”

  “It scared me, too, at first, but then, when I’d lay back down inside that fevered soul, I felt like a hundred rocks were piled on me already. I missed my family. Even Mae. So I started to stay inside that place more and more. Then, one day, a naughty orphan ran away from the nuns and they found him standing at the foot of my bed.”

  “This won’t do,” said Sister Rose. “We must make a secret door with a secret lock for protection.”

  Sister Rose went down to Frenchman’s Street and had a key fashioned in the shape of a mermaid tail.

  “Isn’t that fanciful, Sister. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to have one made with a crucifix?” asked the locksmith.