“Not good. I mean, she’s recovering from the exposure at sea faster than expected, but something happened at the hospital today.” I hesitated, reluctant to tell the story again, but B.J. just waited quietly until I was ready to start.
We watched a small outboard chugging its way up the river as I talked. An older black man and a boy were in the inflatable dinghy, but with a mere four horsepower, the craft was barely able to make any headway against the current.
“I followed this one guy, a tall Haitian who was dressed and acting like an orderly. He seemed normal enough at the time. I even spoke to him, but I didn’t realize until later that he was probably the one who did it.”
“Did what, exactly?”
“Well, I don’t really know for sure. That’s where it gets weird. None of us saw it, and he was with her for only a few seconds. They couldn’t find any evidence that he had fed her anything or given her an injection, but now she acts like she’s drugged or in a trance. There’s a Haitian nurse who works there at Broward General. She as much as said that she thinks this guy put a curse on her. The kid won’t talk. She just stares straight ahead. She acts like a zombie.” I watched his face to gauge his reaction.
“Hmm. Zombies. Everybody in America hears ‘Haiti’ and thinks Voodoo and zombies.”
“I said like a zombie. I don’t think he really turned her into a zombie. I don’t believe in that stuff.”
“You don’t?” B.J.’s eyebrows arched high.
“Hell, no.”
“You might be surprised at what goes on down there. Don’t be so quick to write it off as silly superstition. There’s a great deal about this world that we still don’t understand, that our science can’t explain.”
“Come on, B.J., zombies?”
“Haiti is so close to the United States, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Did you know, you can do graduate work in world religions in this country and never study Voodoo? Yet they’re right there,” he said, extending his arm out in front of him, his flat palm indicating how close. “Like six million of them, and nearly all of them are Voodoo practitioners. There’s a saying: ‘Haiti is ninety percent Catholic and a hundred percent Voodoo.’ ”
I knew one of B.J.’s degrees was in comparative religions, but I didn’t know his expertise extended to Voodoo. “How much do you know about it?”
“Not that much. I’ve read some. I know that it is a real religion, even if to most Westerners it sounds like a bunch of superstitious mumbo jumbo. But if you think about it, Christianity would sound that way if you were hearing about it for the first time.”
“Okay, but we don’t go poking little pins in dolls.”
He rolled his eyes at me. “Sey, Voodoo is a monotheistic religion, which means its followers believe in one supreme being. Not so different, right?”
“Okay.” I smiled. It was really fun sometimes to poke at him when he got all serious. “But what about the zombies and the dolls?”
He ignored my question. “Voodoo originated in West Africa, and in the last three centuries, a lot of Catholicism has been blended into the mix. Voodooists believe in over two hundred different spirits, and many of them are now intertwined with Catholic saints. For example, an altar to their mother spirit—I forget her name—might include photos or statues of the Virgin Mary. They call upon these spirits much as Catholics call upon their saints.”
“Geez, B.J., should I be taking notes?”
He squinted. “You’re making fun of me.”
“No. It’s just that you’re very cute when you lecture.”
He smiled. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get carried away. Sometimes I can’t help it.”
“I know.”
“I’ve just always felt that Haiti and her culture have gotten a bad rap. Like you said, you thought this child was acting like a zombie. That’s how most Americans see Haiti: black magic, Voodoo dolls, witchcraft, zombies. It’s not your fault. You’ve been fed that image. When a Voodooist enters into a trance—or is ‘possessed’—it is an absolutely amazing thing to see. I’ve only seen it on video, myself. These people are in altered states brought about by their spiritual beliefs. You said this girl Solange has had a curse put on her. Whether you believe in such things or not doesn’t really matter. We may not share her beliefs, but she is in an altered state, and she needs a hougan or a mambo to help her get out of it”
My head jerked up. “What did you say?”
“That’s what you call the priests and priestesses of Voodoo. The men are called hougans and the women are called mambos.”
“This morning I visited this woman, Racine Toussaint. Remember? From that card I found on the Miss Agnes? I met her husband, but I couldn’t see her, he said, because she was too busy. I liked him, but there was something creepy about the house and how he acted. But he referred to her as Mambo Racine. He asked me to bring Solange back to see the mambo."
“It could be your best bet for this kid. If it is Voodoo that has caused her to be in this state, it’s going to take Voodoo, not Western medicine, to cure her.”
I brought my heels up to the edge of the dock and wrapped my arms around my legs. Part of me wanted to curl into a ball and make all this go away. “B.J., I don’t know what to believe. It was pretty strange today up in Pompano. I wish you could have been there. This house, this man, the way he talked about stuff I didn’t really understand. And then he got all agitated when I told him about the body of that woman who was found in the boat with Solange. He kept repeating her name over and over. He said, ‘Erzulie, Erzulie, I wonder if Mambo Racine knows’ or something like that.”
B.J. snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “That’s it. That’s the name I couldn’t remember. Erzulie is the name of the Voodoo mother spirit.”
B.J. had already set the table with place mats and napkins and little paper packets of wooden chopsticks. All the junk that had been on the table was neatly stacked on the bar that separated my kitchen from the combination living room/ dining room. In the center of the table was a plate that contained what looked like an assortment of colorful little packages, like a miniature birthday party. None of it looked like anything I would refer to as food.
“What’s that?” I pointed to the pile of presents.
“Sushi,” he said with a mischievous smile. “You’re gonna love it.”
That was B.J. He knew very well that I was not going to love it. I don’t like being forced to try new things. Especially pretty things. Food was not supposed to be that pretty.
I piled twin peaks of white rice and some kind of noodles onto my plate and then took the smallest, least fancy-looking little package. B.J. just sat there beaming.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” I asked him.
“Yeah, eventually. I just don’t want to miss any of this.” He nodded in the direction of my plate.
With the wooden chopsticks in hand, I grasped the sushi roll and nibbled a little off one end. It wasn’t half bad. B.J. looked so expectant. He didn’t think I could do it. Just to show him I wasn’t a total wuss, I chomped off a big bite.
The heat started to grow in my mouth. In an instant, my tongue felt like it had turned into glowing charcoal briquettes. After nearly tripping over my chair, I made it to the fridge, grabbed a beer, twisted off the top, and began to chug-a-lug.
B.J. almost fell out of his chair, he was laughing so hard.
“What the hell was that?” I said before taking another swig of beer.
“You picked the one that Sagami’s refers to as the kamikaze roll.” He took a deep breath and tried to make his face look serious. “They’re not all hot like that. Try another.”
“Oh, sure,” I said.
B.J. was trying so hard to control his laughter, but his chest and shoulders kept bouncing as more chuckles burbled to the surface.
I finished the beer, then crossed back to the table and proceeded to drown the rice and noodles on my plate in soy sauce. I pushed the grains of rice around my plate, not eating and not
talking. I refused to look up, even when I heard his chair scrape back and B.J. came up behind me and put his fingers on my shoulders. Ever since I was a little girl with two older brothers, I’ve turned very cranky whenever anybody teased me, which was fairly often.
His fingers pushed deep into the tense muscles on either side of my neck, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress the little shiver that ran up my back. The heat from his touch traveled down my arms and made my fingers tingle. Actually, my fingers weren’t the only part of me tingling. He alternated deep muscle massage with a feather touch on my neck.
I knew I should tell him to stop. He wasn’t playing fair. We were supposed to be taking a break, but when I opened my mouth to speak, he ran his hands down my arms, and all that came out were two sharp little gasps for breath. I turned, looked up at him, and then closed my eyes.
I was the first one to push back and break away from the kiss.
“B.J., I—”
He walked around the table, sat, and, smiling, filled his plate with the colorful rolls and began to eat with those precise bites of his, the careful chewing. He was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with some kind of surfer logo on the front. The fabric set off his teak-colored skin. I watched him fork the last bite of a roll into his mouth, watched his full lips as he chewed.
I was still trying to catch my breath and make the aching go away, and he acted as though nothing had happened.
“Good sushi, huh?” he asked, his eyes sparkling with the message that he was enjoying every moment of my misery.
Why was I pushing this man out of my life? Okay, so he ate weird food. But otherwise, what was the problem? That he wanted to start a family? I thought of Joe, yearning to retrieve his lost family. And then there was Collazo. Geez, I sure as hell didn’t want to end up like Collazo. Was my life alone with my dog and my boat really such a great life?
That was it: The answer was yes. I enjoyed my river, my routines, my rhythms. That was how I defined myself. Sometimes, when making love to B.J., it felt as though I disappeared. I became pure sensation—and it scared the hell out of me. What if I gave in to that, and the me I now know turned into something else? And worse yet, if I let that happen, and B.J. did as B.J. had always done, what would I have left after he went away?
He wiped his mouth carefully with his napkin, crumpled it, and tossed it onto his plate. I glanced down at my still-folded napkin on the table. Oh yeah, I thought. I kind of forgot about that. It’s not something I worry about when it’s just me and Abaco. I wiped my own mouth.
“What’s all that stuff?” B.J. pointed at the gear in the corner of the living room.
“Pit’s in town,” I said, glad that we had found a neutral subject to discuss so my heart rate could ease back to normal. “He dropped that off here this morning, talked to the gardeners, and left me a note. Then took off to go windsurfing. Typical, huh?”
He nodded. “It’ll be good to see him. How long is he going to stay?”
I shrugged. “You never know with Pit. I’m sure it won’t be long, though.” I got up from the table and walked over to the pile of gear. “I have a feeling he’ll be asking me to store some of this stuff.” I pointed with my shoe at the green foot-locker. “Like this, for example.”
“Yeah, too much for traveling the way he does. Not his style.” He got up from the table and began to clear the dishes.
I dragged the footlocker out into the middle of the room and sat on the floor next to it. “He said he’d been storing this over at his old girlfriend’s. I think she got tired of having his junk around.” I ran my hand over the top of the trunk. “I haven’t seen this trunk in years. I remember it was in the garage at the house after Red died, but I didn’t know Pit had taken it. There was so much stuff to be dealt with, I guess when this disappeared, I never even noticed.”
B.J. came over and sat on the floor next to me. He rested his hand on my thigh, and I jumped a little. “This was your dad’s?”
I nodded, started to say yes, but my throat seemed to close on the word. It’s funny how you just never knew when it was going to hit you, that feeling in the center of your chest of missing someone so much. There were lots of times I could talk about my dad without feeling the slightest bit of sadness, and other times when I just wanted to see him again and couldn’t speak without my voice getting tight and my eyes going all blurry. I swallowed and blinked and started again. “When we were kids, Pit and I used to sneak out into the garage and pull this trunk down and get into it even though we weren’t supposed to. Mostly, Red kept his mementos from the navy in here, uniforms, old letters, and photos and stuff. He didn’t really want his kids getting into it, which, of course, only made it all that much more attractive to us. One time we even tried on Red’s uniforms.”
I reached for the brass latches and tried to loosen them. The metal was corroded, green with flaking brown bits. The hinges screeched as they gave way and both latches opened. The smell of musty books, damp wool, and mothballs triggered another montage of memory as I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. I saw my father, back when he seemed so big, bellowing at us, telling us to stay out of the garage, out of his trunk, away from his tools and all his gear. My father, who fell apart after Mother died, until one day when there was no more food in the house and Pit was crying because Maddy was beating on him. That day Red had come into my room and taken me and my brothers to the Winn Dixie and bought boxes of macaroni and cheese and cans of soup. He learned to cook and clean and wash and made us do our share and brought some order to the house and our family and our lives.
And then I saw the three of us, his grown children, so lost that morning after his death. When, by two in the afternoon, all the paramedics and cops had gone, and they had taken his body away, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We wandered from room to room, out to the dock and then to the garage, and back into the house, not one of us knowing what to say or do for the others, each of us so alone in our loss and unable to imagine our lives continuing without Red.
The footlocker was only about half-full, just as I remembered it. It didn’t look as though Pit had disturbed the contents. I wondered if he had ever opened it or if he just took it out of the house and stored it at Tina’s, unopened.
I reached in and ran my fingertips over the navy wool of the peacoat, remembering how silly Pit had looked wearing the huge thing. He’d never had the shoulders of his father. Maddy was built more like Red, while Pit had the slim build of our mother.
“You’re lucky,” B.J. said. “I never knew my father. When I was young, I used to make up stories about him—my father, the hero. My mother was a Polynesian dancer, and I spent lots of time in dressing rooms reading books, making up my own stories.” He pointed to the contents of the trunk. “Your dad really was a hero in the navy, and then saving boats and lives with his tug.”
“Yeah, he was.” I paused to get my voice under control.
The way we were sitting, our knees nearly touching, made it easy for him to reach up and give my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Then he pointed into the trunk. “What are those pictures?”
Some were scattered loose and others were bound into packets. A yellowed envelope contained a few dozen slides. Reaching for a packet of photos, I explained. “Mother was into photo albums and organizing pictures into books and all that. Each of us kids had a baby book. I remember she used to ask Red to give her these photos so she could put them into a book, and they argued about it. He didn’t want her to touch them. I was just a kid, I may not have even understood what the arguments were about, but I knew it was a big deal. It would usually send my mother into one of her bad spells.”
My mother had her good days and her bad days. Today, she probably would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but back then Red just told us our mother had her moods. When things were good, she laughed and painted and took us on adventures and picnics, and she made the world seem a brighter, more wonder-filled place. When she was having her bad spells, however, we had to tipto
e around the house and take meals to her in bed. I remembered feeling that I wanted her to be the mom, to take care of us, and the fact that it was often the other way around didn’t seem fair. I was eleven years old the day she just walked out into the water and drowned on a calm day off Hollywood Beach. I was the only one of the family with her that day, and I failed to stop her, failed to save her.
I picked up the packet of photos. When I pulled on the rubber band, the old rubber snapped and fell in a limp tangle onto the blue wool jacket. The photos spilled across the contents of the trunk, and several fell to the floor outside the trunk. They were all color photos, but most of them had a greenish tint, as though they had been exposed to too much heat before developing. They were boating pics, shots of people standing around on a sailboat, working the sails, talking on the docks. I didn’t recognize the place, but as I picked them up and stacked them on my lap, I did recognize in one photo a much younger version of my father.
I angled the photo toward the late-evening light slanting through the cottage’s kitchen windows. Instead of the big square man I remembered, the man in the photo had broad shoulders that narrowed to slender hips. He was wearing swimming trunks that showed his well-muscled legs. He still had the red beard, but his hairline was different, his forehead less broad. I had been looking so intently at this younger version of my father, I had not paid much attention to the other man in the photo. It wasn’t until I turned the photo over and looked at the back that I realized why he looked familiar. In pencil on the back, Red had scrawled, “With Joe D’Angelo, Cartagena, 1973.”
I flipped the photo over and looked more closely at the man standing opposite my father. He, too, wore a mustache and beard, brown, streaked with blond, like a golden halo surrounding his mouth. I recognized the eyes, and then the legs, of course. Where Red looked like he was in his late thirties, Joe looked like he was ten years younger. They were horsing around, acting as though they were fighting over a dock line, but they were smiling. The yacht in the background was a classic wooden schooner, gleaming white hull, pristine bright work, the name Nighthawk in gold leaf on the bow.
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