Cousin Flash galloped in on a huge, silvery roan horse—the four-legged kind. He was wearing a red-sequinned jumpsuit. Not big on the fashion sense, Flash wasn’t. “Sorry I’m late, Ma,” he boomed. He swung down off the horse. By the time he’d dismounted, the horse had become a djembe drum, and his outfit was a red dashiki, white jeans, and leather sandals. He took his place among the claypicken drummers by sliding into the head and body of their djembe drummer, whose eyes rolled back to show their whites and whose drumming switched from masterly to virtuoso. The worship service went back into full swing.
Ma Ocean put her hands on her hips and stank-eyed her two tardy offspring. It was easy to see which side of the Family Abby’s Glare of Hot Death had come from. “Which one of you blasted open Jack’s silk-cotton tree and let Boysie’s soul out?”
The two of them looked at her, surprised. Uncle Jack said, “I’m thinking it was you, Cath. There was no thunder.”
She rolled her eyes. “As if. Why don’t you ask Flash? ’Cause I’m telling you, sometimes he doesn’t have any thunder, either, knahmsayin’?”
“Sure,” grumbled Uncle Flash, “make me the bad guy.”
General Gun snickered. “Yeah, some undercover villain Flash would make. He can’t sneak around. Everyone can see him coming for miles.”
Flash kissed his teeth and rapped out a sudden irritable tattoo on the djembe.
Zeely said, “Guys, come on. This is serious.”
Through gritted teeth Flash ground out, “Someone please tell Miss Cathy that the thunder can’t roar if the lightning don’t flash.”
Ma Ocean shouted, “Shut up! All of you!”
Pouting, they all fell more or less silent, though Flash first grumbled under his breath, “They started it.”
Ma stared at him until he zipped his lips and looked down at his hands on the drum. She said, “I brought the sorry lot of you into this world, and you know for damned sure I’ll take you out of it. Now, I am going to get to the bottom of this mess. First of all, Jack; has Boysie reintegrated?”
“I don’t think so, Ma. I haven’t felt his soul cross the border between the worlds, and since his body’s missing, I can’t tell you whether it got back together with his soul. There are… signs that it hasn’t, though.”
He glanced guiltily over at me and Abby. Abby took my hand, as though for reassurance. What the fuck was going on? What had Hunter meant about why was she still OK? I squeezed Abby’s hand. If they wanted to hurt her, I wouldn’t be able to stop them. Yet I could do my damnedest not to let her go through it alone.
Ma Ocean said, “But why wouldn’t Boysie’s soul go back and join with his body once it was free? It was supposed to work that way! He can’t be lost. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
Hunter cooed, “It’s all right, Ma. You have me to take his place.”
Perhaps in response, Ma closed her eyes. “Give me strength,” she pleaded. Her words utterly demoralized me. She was practically a god herself; what did it mean that she needed to implore a higher power in this moment?
She opened her eyes again. “Now, Cathy, Flash; your brother asked you a question. You will both answer him truthfully. You hear me?”
Cathy pursed her lips and Flash scowled, but they both replied, “Yes, Ma.” Ma nodded to Uncle Jack to continue.
“What I want to know,” Uncle drawled in that lazy way he talked sometimes when he really meant business, “is who blasted the hoodoo tree in Suzy’s backyard in half with a lightning bolt?” He turned accusing eyes at Cousin Flash.
Flash shook his head, left the drummer he was riding, and mounted another one. “You know, the truth is, I don’t really want Boysie back. Making us all mind our p’s and q’s, be nicer to the claypickens, blah, blah—”
Cathy interrupted him with, “Flash, if this is a confession, will you just get the hell on with it, already? Idiot.”
“Shut up.”
Hard to believe those two had once had kids together. Where were Beji and Beji, anyway? I scanned the space. Right. Over there, mounted on two worshippers, teenaged boys, who were sitting on the steps at the entrance, probably hoping no one would notice them and make them take part. I waved at my cousins. I didn’t have a beef with those two. They waved shyly back.
“What I’m saying is, no matter how much Boysie gets on my nerves, it still wasn’t me who blasted the hoodoo tree! You would have known if it were, right? After all, everyone can see me coming for miles, isn’t that so?”
Hunter snorted. Uncle said to Flash, “I’ll take that as a no, then. Cathy, Sis, if you’d be so kind as to answer the same question?” Completely hidden by torn motley made from the clothing of the dead, Uncle began a graceful spin to the rhythm of the drums. The strips of cloth woven into his robe twirled in the deadly wind of his passing. We all stood back to give him room. “Cathy, did you strike my hoodoo tree to smithereens?” His voice was ominous.
Cathy sneered. “Please. I don’t care enough about you to damage anything of yours.”
Her hair grew straight and white and her black eyes faded to blue. Now she was wearing the wet-dream tights and high-heeled boots of a comic book superheroine. There was an X emblazoned on the chest of her outfit, deformed almost to illegibility by the improbable mammaries she’d sprouted. She smirked at Uncle and began her own spin, only umpteen times faster than he had, until she’d churned up a tall, narrow whirlwind in the space that extended upwards to infinity. We were all fighting not to get sucked into the maelstrom of it. Abby whimpered, “I hate this.” I put my arms around her and braced myself against Cathy’s storm.
Ma Ocean bellowed, “Cathy, you stop that this instant!”
Cathy obediently went still, but not without giving Uncle a head toss and a Z-snap first. I had to give it to her. Her tornado’d definitely been showier than his dervish twirling. Even Uncle Gun, he of the arms like thighs, had been struggling not to be drawn in.
Ma Ocean glared at her offspring. “I’m asking for the last time. If neither Cath nor Flash let Boysie’s soul out, then which of you did?”
I piped up, “And why was it separated from him in the first place?”
Abby tugged urgently on my arm. “Hush. I’ll tell you later.”
I fell silent again, seething at the insane family drama playing out around me.
“Grandma?” said Beji.
“Yes, dear?” She smiled indulgently at her grand—I think Beji was a granddaughter right then.
“It was us. Me and the other Beji.”
“Yes,” said the other Beji, “we let Uncle Boysie’s soul out.”
Uncle Flash exclaimed. Aunt Cathy cussed. Ma Ocean’s jaw dropped open. “But how?” she asked. “It was a lightning bolt!”
The Bejis looked sheepish. I thought I knew the answer. I said to them, “It’s because you’re the children of lightning and thunder, isn’t it?”
They nodded. “Mom, Dad, we figured out how to wield the storm from watching you. We just never told you before. And we’re not very good with the thunder part yet. That’s why there wasn’t any. Not until later this morning, down by the lake.”
Light dawned. “That was you guys that chased the haint away from me? Thank you!”
“You’re welcome.” They looked pleased with themselves.
Cathy said, “Huh.”
Flash smiled. “Chips off the old blocks.” He and Aunt Cath looked at each other, and if that wasn’t parental pride making them both beam so, I don’t know what was.
Uncle Jack said, “But why did you do it? Don’t you see how you’ve screwed everything up?”
Beji replied, “We know. We’re sorry. But we went to visit Uncle Boysie in the hospital last night, and he was sicker than he’d ever been.”
Beji added, “He was dying, Uncle Jack.”
A sound rang out that was utterly foreign to palais space. Everyone turned to look at me. It was coming from the pocket of my jeans.
“I’m so sorry,” I stammered. “I’ll just get
this.”
I answered my cell phone. It was Mr. Tankhouse, from the rest home. “Ms. Joli, I’m sorry to disturb you, but someone found your father. He’s at St. Sebastian’s Hospital.”
I couldn’t ask the next question, I couldn’t. But I had to. “Is he…?”
“He’s still with us, but I’m afraid he’s in a bad way. You and your sister may want to go there right now.”
I hung up. I couldn’t remember whether I’d even said goodbye to Mr. Tankhouse. “It’s Dad,” I told Abby and Uncle Jack. “He’s alive, but we need to go to Saint Sebastian’s.”
Abby nodded. Her face was grey.
“Oho,” chortled Hunter. “Things are getting really interesting now.” He leaned over and took Abby’s hand. He put it to his lips.
Abby snatched her hand from his grasp. She snapped at him, “You will never replace our father.” She linked arms with me and Uncle Jack and trilled a brassy flourish of notes that made my back teeth shiver. The last thing I saw as we began the shift back to the corporeal world was Hunter, staring knowingly at Abby and sniffing the hand with which he’d held hers.
Transit.
Dad swore and threw his pencil. It flew from his favourite armchair by the living room window and bounced off the opposite wall. The skunk that had been crouched adoringly at his feet waddled over to the pencil, mouthed it up, and toddled back to return it to him. I was fifteen, awkward in my body. Alternately sulky and elated. In the moment, definitely sulky. Abby and one of the Bejis had gone to a movie. I was supposed to have gone with them, but I was grounded because I hadn’t done my chores for more than a week. Just for a few unwashed dishes! It was so unfair! Curled into a resentful ball on the couch, I ignored Dad’s outburst and kept studiously watching some nighttime talk show host talking to some beautiful famous person or other.
Dad sighed and rattled the science journal he’d been reading. He tossed it to the ground and tore off the rubber gloves he’d been using to handle its right-angled pages. He stuffed the gloves between the cushions of his chair. He probably didn’t even notice that he was doing it. It was just his habit. If he didn’t hide them, his mouse supplicants would take them away to make nests in. “This research is all wrong,” he grumbled. I refused to look at him. Louder, he said, “All wrong, I tell you!” He pointed an accusing finger at the journal. “Allyou so close! But when you going to learn that if the results not optimal, you need to try the enantiomer? Eh? Your compound might be chiral! Allyou can’t see that?”
I couldn’t hear my show over his ranting. “So write them and tell them that, Dad.” He spent hours torturing himself like this, poring over medical and science journals and seething about research that wasn’t quite on the right track.
“Who going to take me seriously? When I don’t have no blasted piece of paper saying I’m a scientist? When I have to write up my research on homemade paper? In pencil?” He flung the offending pencil again. This time, the skunk stood on its hind legs and caught it neatly in midair.
“But you know how to make whatever it is, right?”
“Yes, I suppose I could.” He took the pencil from the skunk’s patient mouth. “Why?”
“Could you make it here at home?”
He considered. “I don’t see why not.”
This was more interesting than the talk show. I unfolded from the couch. “Let me use your computer for a second. I want you to see something.” I said it in a frosty tone to let him know that I was still mad at him, but I quickly forgot my huff as I introduced my dad to the wonder that was eBay. I called up some auctions for various types of potions, pills, and ointments. “See what I mean? People will try anything in order to stop hurting.”
He studied the screen. “Some of these are nonsense,” he said. “But some of them work.”
“Uh-huh.”
His eyes lit up. “I could be doing part of my job, and getting paid for it!”
“I figure.” In minutes I had signed him up for an account, and he was chuckling and making notes. The lab he set up in the basement sometimes smelled worse than the time that Butter startled the skunk and it sprayed her and the living room blinds, but soon, Green Man Herbal Online was doing enough business that Uncle didn’t have to subsidize us as often any more.
“He looks so tiny,” said Abby. She slid an arm around my waist so that we stood scar to scar, joined at the place where they’d separated us.
“I know what you mean.” I would have thought that nothing could make the three-hundred-plus-pound mass of my dad look small. But in that hospital bed, wearing only a blue examination gown, covered with a single thin white cotton sheet, with tubes coming out of his arm and a respirator hissing softly beneath his nose, Dad seemed insignificant.
Where had Uncle gotten to? He hadn’t shown up to meet us.
A woman had found Dad lying in the alleyway behind her convenience store. The store was only a few blocks from our—from Abby’s place. It looked as though Dad had been trying to get home. The woman had recognized him and called 911.
“I’m afraid his higher brain function is gone,” said the doctor. He’d told us his name. I couldn’t remember it. My brain was churning. It was a struggle to keep anything in mind but Dad.
“What can we do?” I asked. My eyes were all for Dad, lying there with his mouth gaping slightly open, hooked up to every tube under the sun. With my fingertips, I stroked a patch of skin on the back of his hand where there were no needles. Wide, brown, shovel-shaped hands with knotty fingers like strong roots. He’d coaxed food from the earth to feed us with those hands, bandaged our skinned knees with them. His skin under my fingers was rough, dry and ashy. I thought, ‘I must bring some lotion for him, so he won’t be itchy.’ Then I realized I didn’t know whether he could feel anything in his condition. Unlike his side of the Family, I couldn’t perceive his clay form as different from his self. To me, the person lying there was still my dad.
The doctor replied, “I know this is hard to hear, but there isn’t anything that can be done. He won’t wake up. His organs are beginning to shut down. We can keep the blood circulating in his body, keep filling his lungs with air, but his brain has ceased to function. In every way that counts, he’s deceased. I’m very sorry.”
Abby gave a soft cry.
I couldn’t get any air. I stared at the doctor, fighting to take a breath in. He said, “Joli? Are you all right? Do you need to sit down?” It was just empty sound. It was as though I were seeing him from the other end of a long tunnel. He helped me to the chair at my dad’s bedside. The doctor told me, gently, “Put your head down.”
I obeyed. For a second, the head rush got a little worse. Then, over a few seconds of forever, it faded. I sat up straight. “I’m OK.” The two most ludicrous words in the universe right now to describe how I was. I asked, “Is it… is it because he got out of the rest home?” My mouth was so dry that it was hard to get the words out. “Did he have an accident out on the street, or something?”
The doctor looked at his clipboard. He shook his head. “He had no injuries when he was admitted to the hospital just now. I see that he has—had—advanced dementia?”
Abby was perched on the edge of Dad’s bed, sobbing and stroking his shoulder over and over again. Without looking up, she nodded.
“Well, that could be the reason he collapsed. It may have progressed to such an extent that he, uh, developed the condition in which you see him now.”
Abby’s sobs grew stormier. Blindly she reached for my hand. I grabbed hers and held on. Her fingers were cold in my grip.
The doctor said, “I know this is all very sudden, but we need to secure a DNR from you both, since you’re his next of kin.”
Abby asked, “What’s a DNR?”
I said, “It means ‘do not resuscitate.’ ” The doctor nodded. “They want our permission to turn off the life support machines and let Dad…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Absolutely not,” said Abby.
My heart sa
nk. “Abs, don’t you get it? It’s the only way he can be… released.” If Dad’s body died, he would have fulfilled the terms of his punishment. He could become a celestial again. We could have him back, whole.
The doctor took a deep breath. “Ms. Joli, I know this must be very difficult, but there’s no coming back from the state he’s in now. The life support is the only thing keeping the body breathing and the heart circulating blood.”
“No. That’s not how it’s going to happen.”
I squeezed her hand. “Abs, what else can we do?”
“No, I said!” She pulled her hand out of mine. She turned to the doctor. “Can you give us a few minutes alone, please?”
“Of course. When you need me, just ask one of the nurses to page me.”
He pushed his way past the privacy curtain that went around Dad’s bed. We were left alone with the relentless rhythms of the machines keeping air and blood moving in Dad’s body.
“Abby, we can’t keep him chained in this body! Hasn’t he suffered long enough for us? Let him become what he was again!” I was desperate for her to understand. I needed Dad back.
Abby’s face crumpled into tears again. She wailed, “But I’m not ready to lose you!”
She was making no sense. “Why would you lose me?” The headache I’d been nursing all day blossomed from babe-in-arms to full-on, raging adulthood. “I mean, I’m moving into my own place in a few days, but it’s not like I’m going to the moon.”
She looked at me like I’d sprouted two more heads. “But you can’t do that,” she told me, her voice despairingly wan. “Especially not now.”
“No, it’s all right. Look, I know I was pissed at you when I stormed out yesterday morning, but Hunter’s full of shit. I won’t leave you to go through this alone, I’d never do that. I’ll visit Dad every day until… I promise. And I’ll stop borrowing money from you, and—”
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