It was akin to the feeling she remembered having when her grandmama would say to her, “Don’t worry, baby, Grandma ain’t gonna let nothing happen to her little puppy.”
Although her first inclination was to grab onto Sister and beg her not to leave, she let go of the fear and told Sister, “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye?” Sister laughed from the doorway. “Where you think you going? Good night, girl, I’ll see you in the morning.” Then, she shut the door firmly on her way out.
To Lena, the closing of the light wooden door sounded like a prison cell door slamming shut on a lifer. Just to make sure she could get out, she got up from her seat on the edge of her bed and opened and closed the door several times. Then, before she could lose her nerve, she went right to the white candle on her tall dresser, lit it and slipped under the covers of the bed in her pink bra and panties.
With the covers pulled up to her chin, she watched the candle flame reflected in the dresser mirror. The flame burned low and steady for a couple of seconds, then grew tall and flickering. Lena didn’t take her eyes off the flame and when it started emitting a light gray stream of feathery smoke, it occurred to her for the first time that falling asleep with a candle burning was a fire hazard, especially in the old wooden barracks-like dormitory.
Maybe I should try to stay awake and watch the candle so there won’t be an accident, she thought, keeping her gaze on the taper that now was spewing billows of the gray smoke. She was so mesmerized by the yellow flame, she didn’t even notice how much smoke had filled the small plainly decorated room.
She was beginning to find it difficult to breathe and the smoke had distorted or cloaked everything that was familiar to Lena. She heard a noise like a book falling to the floor over in a corner she could no longer see. She pretended to ignore the sound, repeated again and again, but it got louder and louder until it sounded like a freight train headed straight for her narrow twin bed.
Lena was too frightened to move and when the train sound had rumbled through, right past her bed, it left a room full of voices in its wake. Now she had no intention of moving. Every direction seemed to hold myriad voices and the outlines of human beings.
Now the smoke was so thick she could barely breathe.
“Ghosts!” Lena said aloud, and immediately felt herself being pulled in all directions. “Oh, God, I’m going to die!”
And as she gasped for breath, the life actually began leaving her body. She could see bits of herself floating up into the smoke. She could feel herself becoming less and less real. And she began to cry.
Then:
BAM-BAM-BAM!!
The sudden knock on the door—hard enough to push the unlocked door ajar—stopped everything that was going on in Lena’s dorm room.
“Emergency dorm meeting. Five minutes. In the main parlor.” The hall resident’s voice cut through the smoke in the room, then moved on down the hall to the next room.
BAM-BAM-BAM!!!
“Emergency dorm meeting. Five minutes. In the main parlor.”
Lena looked around and was stunned to find her room as it had been an hour before. But she felt as if she had just gotten a whipping: hurt, weary and defeated. She got out of bed, grabbed her fleecy robe and staggered up the one flight to Sister’s room, entered without knocking and fell across her narrow twin bed.
She didn’t look to see if anyone else was in the room. She didn’t wait for Sister to ask any questions. She just started talking.
“Sister, I am never gonna do that again. I don’t care what anybody says.”
“Um, it was a bad one, huh?” Sister asked sympathetically without need of a blow-by-blow explanation.
“A bad one?” Lena almost had to laugh. “I guess you could say that. A bad one? Sister, I almost just died in there.”
“I don’t know, Lena, maybe you ought to …”
“I know what I ought to do, Sister. I ought to just forget all this. Lighting candles. Seeing ghosts. Shoot, I almost suffocated in there with all that smoke. I’m going to stop being a part of it.
“I don’t want to talk about this again, okay?”
“Lena, I think this might be more …”
“I’m serious. I don’t ever want to speak about it or acknowledge all this veil stuff anymore.”
“Lena, maybe it’s not for us to …”
“I can’t take all this, Sister. I got to turn it loose. I’m almost eighteen years old now. And I’m making this decision for myself.”
Lena paused and looked Sister dead in the eye.
“Listen to me, Sister, when that woman, when Madame Delphie, said ’Believe!’ I did. For that moment, I let go and for the first time in my life, I think, really believed all the stuff I been seeing and hearing and folks been saying about me all my life. For just that moment. And then later, Sister, up here in my room, I swear to you, believing and lighting that candle and sitting in my bed hearing voices and seeing things, I could feel myself being sucked up by, I don’t know, some other world or something. I could just feel myself losing myself bit by bit, like molecule by molecule, and not just my body but my soul, too.”
Lena stopped and gulped air trying to catch her breath.
“Oh, Sister, I’m not ever gonna do that again. Not ever. It wasn’t just the spirits that came with that candle and me believing. That was scary. But it was mostly that feeling that I belonged over there with them.”
And Lena stopped as she shivered a bit inside her soft pink robe. Then she continued.
“And I think if I stop taking it so seriously, things will just settle down.”
Sister just sighed and clucked her tongue in disbelief. “Well, Lena …”
“No, Sister,” Lena said, speaking quickly. “Let’s collect the other paraphernalia from Madame Delphie’s assistant and take it out to the Dumpster tonight.
“I really think I been taking this stuff too seriously. Just ’cause I have a few nightmares and I walk in my sleep. Lots of people do that.
“So, I’ll just deal with it like everybody else. And things will just settle down.”
Sister didn’t say anything because she knew Lena needed a friend right then to be on her side. But she didn’t believe for a minute that things would ever settle down for Lena.
In the nearly thirty years since, Sister had spent many nights keeping her husband Douglas awake with her restlessness over Lena wandering the world pretending not to be special, a child of the veil. Her birth velum burned by her own mother in the trash. No one to watch over her because the unsettled spirits scared the protective ones away.
She knew that over the years, Lena had just ignored sounds, looked the other way when she thought she saw something otherworldly. Didn’t answer when some mist seemed to call her name.
And from her experience and her mother’s and her grandmother’s and her great-grandmother’s experience, Sister knew it was going to all catch up with Lena one day.
12
VAPOR
When Lena awoke the next morning, she was amazed that she felt rested. After her scare in the pool the night before, it surprised her that the witches had not ridden her all night.
It crossed her mind as she sat up on her white piqué-trimmed sheets that what she recalled of the night before had, indeed, been a dream. With the sun peeking in through the skylight over her head, she remembered clearly that her heart had been racing wildly when she jumped out of the water. She did not see anything swimming around in the water, but she decided not to get back in there. Instead, she had cut out the lights and slipped into bed without even saying her prayers.
In the light of day, she felt safe and brave.
“I can’t believe it actually felt like somebody was really in there with me,” she said aloud as she draped the white pique robe at the foot of her bed around her shoulders and headed for her bathroom. She was going to say, “Felt like ghosts brushing up against me,” but she did not want to invoke the spirit of the little girl she had spent her senior year at Mart
in de Porres avoiding. At the beginning of that year, a little girl from the kindergarten class had walked up to her at recess and with a very serious face said, “My name is Sonia. Are you named Lena?”
Lena had smiled, putting down her Coke, and nodded.
“What can I do for you?”
The little girl, dressed like Lena in a tiny blue plaid skirt and white blouse, glanced to her left, then glanced to her right, then over her little Peter Pan collar. With a curl of her finger, she motioned for Lena to stoop down to her level.
When Lena, puzzled, bent down, Sonia had said, “Ghosts be brushing up against me. They be brushing up against you, too?”
The only other child in her small parochial school who had also been born with a caul was seeking a kindred spirit. But Lena had left little Sonia standing there and had avoided her until graduation.
Now she wished she had Sonia’s phone number. Lena knew the little girl would know how it had felt in the pool the night before. As if ghosts were brushing up against her.
As she did each morning when the sun streamed through the overhead skylight as she brushed her teeth, Lena had to stop and admire her bathroom. It demanded attention. It was more a suite than a room. The huge walk-in shower stood like a solid entity from the middle of the room to the wall. Lena reached in and turned on the hot water.
The inside of the large white-tiled stall was interspersed with hand-painted blue and green tiles Mr. Crockett, the plumber and tile man, had made himself. He had blushed at Lena’s idea to extend the length of the shower to the outer wall and make the entire wall glass so she could enjoy the stand of birch gum and junipers outside while she showered. The magnolias were about to burst open with luscious openly seductive white blooms and the birch gum, tall and healthy, spoke of good luck to Lena.
Mr. Crockett wanted to tell someone other than his wife, “Man, Lena McPherson got a shower you can see right into from outside!” What he didn’t even tell his wife was that the glass wall of the shower faced a nearly impenetrable wall of birch, and a voyeur would have to get in there, then climb some fairly tall pines to see inside.
She rarely used it, but she also had one of the most beautiful bathtubs in the state. Mr. Renfroe’s cousin in Madison knew about the find of stone in North Georgia. “New quarry, old marble,” is all the old gardener said to explain the expense of digging, carving and shipping the tub to Mulberry that he had okayed.
The owner of the quarry accompanied the tub to Lena’s new front door. The stonemason, back in North Georgia, kept telling his wife, “It was a colored girl!” until she had to tell him to “shut up about that colored girl!”
As the shower stall steamed up, she hit the button for the first CD on the stereo controls over the sink. Salt ’n’ Pepa with their girl Spinderella was one of her favorite choices to get her going in the morning.
“Oo, baby, baby. Ba, baby, baby, baby,” Lena sang along, grinding naked in the wide lighted mirror in the bathroom with her burnished braids pulled up on top of her head in imitation of “her girls” on their latest video.
Lena washed her face with a soft loofah that Nellie had grown herself when she read that the gourd’s soft skeleton sloughed away old dead skin and age. Nellie had grown so many that even now, ten years after her death, Lena still had enough—dried, seeded, bleached and hanging from the rafters in the barn—to last her the rest of her life. And that was after she had given one to every woman she knew.
The women didn’t use the loofahs, but Lena felt she had done her part. They didn’t think she could, but Lena could hear the women tell each other, “Yeah, but she don’t tell folks she got a sauna and swimming pool out there in her house by the river, too, along with that loofah thing!”
The women could talk all they wanted. Lena was not about to share her few private retreats. She had a steam room, too, in her bathroom and whether or not the women in town knew about it, she cherished it as much as she did her shower.
It had been specially designed and built just the way she wanted it. Mr. Crockett had just shaken his head at Lena’s luxuries. The triangular steam room was built into one corner of the cavernous bathroom with two long white tile seats forming a comfortable “V.” The third wall and door to the room was made of frosted glass that let in just enough light to keep claustrophobia from settling in on Lena in there.
As she rinsed her face with handful after handful of tepid water running to her faucets from the deep well dug into the aquifer under her land, she could hear “Sexy Noises”—her favorite dancing-in the-shower music—flooding the room with percussion. She lifted her head above the sink and grabbed a thick white hand towel from the heated rack to her right to pat her face dry. Her mother had taught her never to rub her skin dry after bathing no matter how invigorating it felt. Even when she was a little thing, no more than three or four, her mother would lift her from the tub in the upstairs bathroom on Forest Avenue, set her down on the thick bath mat and gently instruct her in the proper way to dry soft, delicate female McPherson skin.
“See, baby, just take the towel and pat, pat, pat all over. Pat, pat, pat. Uh-uh, don’t rub like that, like your brothers or your daddy. They boys. But I always want you to treat your skin gently, okay? You gonna do that for Mama, baby?” In Lena’s head, her mother continued to talk in the soft sweet tones she reserved for her only baby girl. “Take care of that pretty skin God gave you. They can call it McPherson skin if they want to, but you get it from my side of the family, too.”
Lena could only safely think of Nellie’s maternal instructions for a few seconds. If she lingered any longer in her childhood, she knew she would soon be recalling other less sweet memories.
“Oh, shoot,” she said under her breath, a little shudder running up her back.
Lena thought she had caught a glimpse of a figure standing behind her in the mirror.
She had to make herself turn and look directly into the spot where the figure had stood. It was empty.
“Well, damn!” she said.
She did not want to give in to this vague presence, these ephemeral eyes that seemed to peep out at her from all kinds of places. Lena had never been completely comfortable with mirrors. Since she was a toddler, she had lived in fear that anytime she looked in a mirror, the glass would throw back more than just her reflection.
But Lena had gotten over many of her fears. And now she stood her ground and looked herself dead in the eye in the mirror over the bathroom sink.
“You gon’ have to get a grip, girl. We ain’t going back to that! I just can’t live like that again.” It was hardly living. Ghosts showing up whenever they felt like it.
“I thought I was gonna lose my mind.”
Along with the sensation in the pool the night before, this fleeting figure in her mirror was really giving her pause. She continued to give herself a good talking to.
“I’m a big old rusty woman now. I’m not a baby scared by ghosts in the night. I live way out here by myself. I’m not afraid of the dark. A glimpse of something out the corner of my eye is not going to send me into a hizzy fit. It’s not!”
I wish I had a mama or grand I could trust to hear my sadness and not get upset, she thought. I’d tell them just how hard it’s been. But she knew from experience whenever she shared her sorrow and pain, her fear and terror, with anyone other than Sister, the word spread so quickly through town and around that she had to do extra duty to calm the city down. She knew no one had ever intended to betray her confidence. But her sadness, it seemed, was just too heavy a burden for anyone to bear alone and before Lena’s confidante knew it, word was out.
Others seemed to just make jest of anything she worried about, belittling the problem. “Aw, Lena McPherson, get out a’ here. If I had all your money, I wouldn’t have a care in the world. Just like you.”
“Lonely? Hell, you get first crack at every man in town.”
“Yeah, I wish I could sit out by the river by myself without all these little crumb-crushers climbin
g all over me.”
Lena finally took the advice of Miss Annie Mae, whom Lena had discovered rocking and moaning on her porch one afternoon as Lena made her rounds.
“Miss Annie Mae, tell me,” Lena implored her, used to making everything right. “What’s wrong?”
Miss Annie Mae looked up with bleary, cloudy eyes and half smiled at Lena.
“Baby,” the old lady said, “I’ll just tell my troubles to the Lord.”
That’s what Lena did now, especially with Sister away in West Africa. She just told her troubles to the Lord.
Right then she said a quick little personal prayer.
And she did feel a bit more confident as she stepped in the shower, glancing boldly into the full-length mirror by the steam room door as she did. She stood inside the stall and listened to the thump of “Sexy Noises.” Even in the early morning light, Lena could see the outline of some of her favorite juniper trees outside the glass shower wall.
“Aren’t you afraid ghosts will be looking in at you while you’re naked?” Sister had teased uneasily about the legendary spirit-haunted trees.
The water from the shower massage reminded her of the unusually warm water in the pool the night before. Lena didn’t even have to aim the spray of the revolving shower head at her body to recall the sensation from the night before of air filling her, tickling her clitoris and lifting her hips into the air.
I’ll have to tell someone to take a look at that thermostat, she thought. I’ve never had my pool that hot.
Suddenly, an unexpected sound cut through the shower spray and the seductive music
“Ahem.”
Lena stopped shampooing her pubic hair with a soapy white shower mitt and playing with the shower massage she held in her hand. She stood stock-still with the spray from the shower head pelting her in the chest and listened.
“Is there someone out there?” she called over the sound of the shower’s water. She hit a button on the tile wall with one soapy hand and “Sexy Noises” ceased. She listened.
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