… Watch’d by her,
Counted her pulse’s flagging stir,
Felt for her breath,
Held water to her lips, and cool’d her face
With tears and fanning leaves
I came to in Lars’s arms. He was carrying me up the stairs in Cheerful Rest. It was a jerky business that did nothing to help me feel less queasy. My feet banged limply a couple of times against the railing. I felt the impact, but not the pain. I couldn’t quite focus, and my tongue and lips weren’t working right. Abby? Where was she? I must have made some kind of sound, because a warm hand stroked my head, and Abby’s voice said, “It’s all right, Maka. I’m here.”
Lars rumbled, “I still think we should take her to the hospital.”
“No,” Abby replied. “They’ll shoot her full of sedatives. She hates being helpless like that.”
Oh, God, I could smell the piss on myself. Which meant that Lars could, too. And I’d probably gotten some on his jacket. Mortified, I tried to beg him to put me down. The words came out garbled, guttural. My hands thrashed weakly against his chest. I wasn’t parsing the fact that I couldn’t walk on my own. I just wanted not to have strangers see me in this condition. I just wanted Abby. The body contractions started again. One flailing arm caught Lars across the face. My eyes rolled sickeningly back in my head. Lars swore as he fought to hold on to me. I heard Brie’s voice say, “What’s going on?” before I went out again. I stayed semiconscious this time, enough to hear snatches of anxious conversation.
“Lay her down, I said! She’s having a seizure! She hadn’t had one this bad in years.”
“We need to put a spoon in her mouth so she won’t swallow her tongue!”
“No, we don’t! Nobody does that any more!”
My body came to rest on a firm, padded surface. My bed?
“Is she dying? Does anybody know CPR?”
“She’s not bloody dying! Let me deal with it. I know what to do.” There was someone beside me, her head level with mine. She said, “Easy, Maks. Don’t worry, I’m here.” Abby. She smelled like Abby. I tried to focus on her face, to sit up. The room spun. Abby’s voice said, “No, girl. You remember how to do this. Lie back down. Look, I’ll cover you.” A warm softness gathered around me, hiding away my wet jeans, the pee smell. Tears of gratitude rolled down my nose. Abby stroked my arms. “You with me, sweetie?”
I managed to grunt, “Uh-huh.” My eyes kept slipping in and out of focus. My hands were trembling. There was a fierce itch between my shoulder blades. And I was crankier than a bull moose in mating season. A seizure? Really? Why now?
Brie’s voice asked, “What’s happening to her?”
Abby answered, “Myoclonus. Muscle contractions she can’t control. She used to get them when she was a kid.”
I’m right here, I thought. Stop talking about me as though I weren’t in the room. With a head full of cotton wool and a mouth full of rocks, I managed to gargle out, “Why… Brie… here?”
Brie replied, “They couldn’t find your keys. I let them into your unit.”
“Uh…”
The effort of talking set my head spinning again. I reached my hand out. Abby took it. She murmured soothing noises. I felt the mattress sink and shift. She was climbing into the bed beside me. “You’ll be OK,” she said. “I’m right here. Lars, would you put her so that I can hold her, please?”
Though Lars was gentle and brief, the movement left me dizzy. But now I was in Abby’s arms, safe. She cradled the back of my head and rocked me the way she knew I liked being rocked when I was coming out of a seizure. The dizziness lessened a little. “Dad?” I asked, relieved that the word had come out more or less clearly.
“He’s here, too,” Abby replied. “Lars found a discarded yogourt tub. Don’t worry; Dolly’s making sure he stays put.” That was good. Dolly would make sure that Dad wouldn’t try to break me open again.
Brie’s voice said, “Uh, which one of you is Dolly?”
Lars answered, “The afghan. Long story.”
Abby began to hum a simple, wordless ditty in four-four time. I remembered it, but not quavery and thin the way she was singing it now.
Abby stopped. She gave me an apologetic smile. “I’m afraid for you,” she said. “You can hear it in my voice.”
I whispered, “You and Dad…” My throat felt as though someone had rubbed it with sandpaper.
Abby finished the thought for me. “Yes, Dad and I used to sing it to you. And even Uncle sometimes joined in, remember?”
“Uh-huh. Not the same without Dad’s voice.” That was the longest sentence I’d managed in a little bit. It exhausted me.
“He can’t exactly help right now, I’m afraid.”
“Abs,” said Lars, “try again.”
She didn’t hesitate for a second. “OK, Love.” The way she spoke to Lars brimmed over with tenderness and trust; even I could hear it. Gentle as breath, Abby started the tune again. Five notes into the first phrase, Lars closed his eyes, opened his mouth. Like taking the lid off a pot of popping corn, his voice exploded into impossible scales of sound, ran righteous riffs around, with and through the tune. Abby’s voice grew stronger, buoyed up by his. She smiled at Lars as though she were a cat and he were cream. The smile made her notes into burnished brass. She started scatting a counterpoint to the tune that she was somehow sustaining the while. Brie laughed the way you laugh when you just can’t believe that something is happening. Lars echoed the laugh, wove it into the melody. Now Abby was laughing, too; small, bright starbursts of merriment. She nodded at Brie, as though giving him permission. He looked stricken. He shook his head. Lars jerked his head to one side in an aw, c’mon gesture. Brie’s face went soft with longing. Of course; on the phone he’d told me that he’d been crap tonight. Maybe he was a claypicken after all. They had off days, right?
Then Brie seemed to come to a decision. He leapt into the jam with both feet, literally. He stomped out a syncopation, clicked his fingers to punctuate the beats, slapped out the counterpoint on the drum of his chest, punched a rhythm on the walls with his fists; anything except his voice. Backed by all that rhythm, Abby and Lars hollered and whispered and jook-jointed. The tune was both like and unlike any version of it that my family would sing to me. Abby doot-doot-dooted, a shout-out to the daily joys of just plain living. The music welled up, made me feel safe and strong. It was bigger than three beings and one tune. It was beauty. Together, the three of them were raucous, raunchy, angelic, sweet. Gradually my body’s twitching stilled. My breathing began to come more easily. Lars’s sound ramped down into a cheerful, chunky backbeat. Abby swanned into the rich, buttery tone that was her trademark. Brie stopped his gumboot stomp, instead tapping out a beat against his thighs with his hands, softer and softer, until it was little more than a pulse beat. Lars began to climb again, his notes ascending higher and higher, but quieter with each one. Then I couldn’t hear him any longer. Now it was just Abby and Brie, and gods, it was practically orgasmic. Brie’s face was alight with wonder. So was Abby’s.
Brie and Abby wound down to a quiet finish, and only then did he sit down hard on the floor and say, “Holy fuck, that was amazing! Have you all got the zimzam?”
“The what?” asked Lars.
I scowled. “Is that what you call it?” My voice was returning. “Look at him,” I told Lars and Abby. “He’s Shiny. I think he’s some kind of too—” I glanced at Lars. “Instrument. And he’s doing some scary shit to people in this building.”
Abby frowned. “He’s not Shiny.”
“What do you mean? Of course he is.” I lifted my head to look at Brie. But no matter which way I turned my head or squinted, there was no green aura flash around him. I sat upright, ignoring my swimming head. “How’d you do that? Where’s your Shine?”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “I lost it. We tanked so badly tonight that the band’s talking about breaking up. And I am not hurting anybody.”
We all jumped at a loud cate
rwaul from outside my door. Brie looked exasperated. “Ignore him. It’s just Yoplait.”
The caterwaul warped into the eerie, almost verbal yowl that a cat can do when it’s pissed at a human. The sound broke off suddenly. Then there were three sharp raps at the door. The little hairs on my arms stood up. “Lars, would you get that, please? I have to change out of these clothes.” I got out of bed, my blanket wrapped carefully around my lower half, and went to the bathroom to peel out of my pissy jeans. While I was in there, I heard Lars call out, “There’s no one there!” His voice was puzzled. “Just the cats. Hey! No!”
I opened the bathroom door in time to see Yoplait bound into the room, Butter hard on his heels, with Lars after them. Abby cried out, “Butter! You’re supposed to be at home!”
I made it back into the main room just as Yoplait evaded Brie’s grasping hands. I said, “Wait. Let them be.”
The two cats sniffed cautiously at Dolly, who whirred peaceably at them. They genuflected to Dad, who had already sprouted enough shoots and foliage that I could no longer see the battered yogourt container of dirt into which Abby and Lars had transplanted him.
Butter and Yoplait shot me a look. Then, together, they grew and stretched and transformed until Beji and Beji were standing there. Brie made a squeaking sound. Lars and Abby went openmouthed in astonishment.
“You fuckers,” I said. “You’ve been spying on us all this whole time!”
“Nah, not on you,” replied Beji.
“Well, sometimes on her,” said Beji. He winked at me. “You’re fun to spy on.”
“The thing is,” continued the other Beji, “we’ve been watching Brie for years.”
“Me? Why? And what the hell are you guys?”
Abby answered that. “Godlings. And our cousins.”
Beji blew her a kiss, then turned to Brie. “You haven’t lost your zimzam.”
Abby said, “Will someone tell me what in blue blazes zimzam is?”
Brie brightened up. “I haven’t lost it?”
“No,” Beji replied. “You lost Makeda’s mojo. Twice now.”
My skin was prickling all over. “My mojo? Brie had my mojo? But I thought I didn’t have any!”
Lars said, “Told you I could smell it. You’re a creature of mojo.”
Abby snarled, “Will everyone just stop telling her she has mojo? At this rate, I’ll never hear the end of it from her!”
I rounded on her. “See? I was right! You just want to keep me powerless and under your thumb!”
We were each trying to yell over the others. Brie was telling the Bejis that it was his fucking zimzam, thank you very much. Lars was shouting at Abby that she was not the boss of him. I was accusing the Bejis of being voyeuristic pervos. The Bejis were accusing each other of handling this all wrong.
Abby put her pinkie fingers to her lips and whistled, probably with only a twentieth of her sound-making power. The cups on top of my fridge rattled, along with my back teeth. I clapped my hands to my ears. Everyone fell silent. Abby glared at us all. “That’s better. Now, we’re going to do this one at a time.”
I said, “Let’s start with the Bejis.”
“Fine, let’s do that.” Abby nodded at them to begin.
“So,” said Beji, “our job as celestials is to look after twins.”
Other Beji continued, “Then you guys were born, and not only were you twins, you were kin. We’ve been very protective of you from the start.”
“And very interested in everything to do with your lives.”
“We followed Uncle Boysie and Uncle Leggy John when they went to do the operation on you, Makeda.”
I shook my head in bemusement. “I keep forgetting that you guys are older than us. You look like teenagers.”
“We’re millennia older. And yet with all our experience, we still can’t figure out why you decided to stop dating us.”
“Oh, hush. That was just a bit of booty-call fun.”
Brie boggled at me. “You had sex with your cousins?”
Beji smirked. “And you decided that dating shouldn’t be fun any more? Never mind, don’t answer that. As we were saying, we were there, hiding, when you got operated on.”
“When Uncle Legs tossed away that tiny piece of unformed mojo, Beji here snapped it up.”
Abby grimaced. “Ew, gross.”
“Wore it in a locket on a collar around her neck.”
Brie gasped. “You’re really the cat I found injured on the road when I was a kid?”
“I am. That car would never have hit me, but I was distracted. Because the locket was wriggling. Something was trying to get out of it. Never did find out what, since I got smushed by a car and my original cat body died. Had to grow myself a new one. And then I discovered that you’d taken off with the locket.”
“But I don’t even know where that is any more!”
“It’s here somewhere, in Cheerful Rest. Probably slipped behind something when you were moving in. I’ve been looking for it for years.”
“But you know the weirdest part?” said Beji. He turned to me. “The other night, when your haint attacked you and I fought it off? It came out of Brie’s unit. That’s when Beji and I figured it out; whenever your haint comes to you, Brie’s Shine disappears. We think your haint is your mojo. Somehow it developed. But it’s unattached. It’s desperate to be part of you again.”
I boggled at them. “That thing can’t be my mojo! It’s been trying to kill me for years!”
Wonderingly, Abby said, “It’s trying to get inside you, where it belongs. All this time, that’s what it wanted.”
“By climbing in through my mouth?!”
Beji shrugged. “It doesn’t understand why that makes no sense. It’s your mojo, not your brain.”
“Fine, but Brie says it’s gone now. So where did it go? Did it die?” Heaven help me, but I half-hoped it had.
Brie burst out, “It can’t be dead! It’s my talent, I need it! If you don’t have it, where did it go?”
Beji said, “It won’t die. Not as long as Maka is alive.”
The kudzu whipped a length of vine in my direction. I stepped back just as Dolly slapped it away with one of her corners. Brie watched Dolly with a thoughtful, covetous look on his face. “Hang on,” he murmured. “Makeda, you recently did some mad powerful zimzam, right?”
“Mojo, not zimzam.” Then I understood. “Oh, my gods.” I pointed at Dolly. “It’s in there. My mojo’s moved out of the locket and into the rug.”
As one, everyone turned to look at Dolly.
Brie said, “So you do have it!”
“Dude, as far as I’m concerned, you can have it back. I’ll make do.” I shuddered at the thought of having that creepy, shifty thing living inside me. What was it, anyway? The power to be nasty, violent, and malevolent?
“But what if it won’t come back to me, now that it’s found you?”
“I’m telling you I don’t want it!” I pointed at Dolly. “You. You listening to me? I don’t want you!” My skin crawled at the memories of trusting my body—and my sister’s!—to that nasty, stupid thing whose only purpose was to do me violence. “You go back to Brie. You belong to him. Leave me alone.”
Dolly seemed to shrink in on herself a little, like someone pulling a shawl tighter around their shoulders to keep the cold out.
“Hang a mo,” said Lars. “No need to be rash about this.” He turned to Brie. “You don’t need Makeda’s mojo in order to perform.”
“My mojo, you mean. Shouldn’t I have squatting rights, or something? She doesn’t even want it.”
“You jammed with us a few minutes ago, and you weren’t half bad.”
“You don’t get it, do you? “Not half bad” isn’t good enough. I couldn’t lead. I could only follow. And I sure as hell didn’t dare vocalize. I stuck to percussion.”
I saw Abby square her shoulders and I knew he was in trouble. “First of all,” she said, “I’m daughter to a celestial, my mojo is music, and Lars
here used to be one of Hendrix’s axes, so when we say that you weren’t half bad next to us, that means you were pretty fucking good.”
Brie boggled. “Hendrix? As in Jimi?”
Lars smiled. “Damned straight.”
“Second of all,” Abby continued, “you have a problem with percussion? It’s just as brilliant a means of making music as any other, and older than most.”
“Third of all,” I added, “what the hell are you? You’re not human, but you’re not Family, either.”
Beji said, “He is human.”
Brie said, “Of course I am. Abby, I’m not hating on percussion. I played tambourine enough years to learn that there are skills to playing even the simplest instrument. But suppose somebody took your cane away?”
Abby was unimpressed. “I’d get another one, or find a way to make do without it.”
Brie looked as though he’d just been told about a death in the family. “Suppose I can’t? Suppose I need Maka’s ugly-ass mojo in order to be a musician at all?”
“Hey! Don’t you insult my magic!” I’d just tried to give Dolly away, but now I was feeling all ownerish again.
Abby smiled. “And yet,” she said to Brie, “you’ve already begun remaking yourself. We all saw that a little while ago. You’re a musician, whatever your instrument.”
Yoplait Beji said, “She’s not lying.”
Brie moved very slightly away from her. “I can’t get over it that you’re Yoplait.”
“Sure. But Beji and I could hear you from outside the door. You were as good as when you have a zimzam going on.”
Abby said, “I can prove it to you, too. I have a show coming up.”
I asked, “The Nathaniel Dett one?”
“No, before that. A small performance at the Music Gallery. Brie, headline with me.”
Brie’s eyes got round as moons. “For real?”
“For real.”
Something delightful was happening. Or rather, something wasn’t happening, and that was delightful. Because I wasn’t feeling it. The envy, the shame, the lack I would have expected to feel at my mojo-master sister recognizing mastery in another.
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