The Good House

by Tananarive Due

  “But you both believed you carried out acts of magic using spells. Corey believed this?”

  “We did.”Sean’s teeth were gritted.

  “And you both believed you had done something bad. And the land was tainted as a result.”

  Sean suddenly clapped his hands to his cheeks, shaking his head. Tears streaked his face. “Man, you’re just like him!” he said, his voice stripped. “Just like my dad. You think this is bullshit.”

  Angela brought herself to her feet. The woman staying with the children, the aunt, would not like her upsetting her nephew. “Calm down, Sean. I think I’d better go.”

  “You’ll get it soon, Mrs. Toussaint. It’s all gonna be clear, in living color.”

  “I really hope so, Sean.”

  “That’s what you think,” Sean said grimly. Angela was eager for her exit, but as she neared the door, Sean called after her in a much softer voice: “Hey…one thing before you go?”

  She faced him again, and his eyes were glazed. “What is it, sweetheart?”

  “Before Corey died, did he seem normal to you?”

  Angela felt a ripple of pain. “No,” she said. “He didn’t, especially right before. I knew something was wrong. He was anxious one second, happy and smiling the next. It was strange, and I was worried. He wasn’t himself at all.”

  “Neither was my dad,” Sean said. “Not unless it’s normal to grin like a fool and then jump in front of a truck when you went to town to get some subs for your kids to eat for lunch. Your kids you fuckingadored . So if you think I’m talking crazy, maybe you should ask yourself about that. Ask yourself what Corey and my dad had in common.”

  In some ways, it was the most reasonable thing Sean had said yet. This family was definitely connected to Corey’s death, Angela decided, and she had more than a slight feeling that once she solved this puzzle, it would be worse than two dead people. Much worse, maybe.

  “I will,” Angela said. “I promise you, Sean, I’m already asking.”

  “Wow,” Myles said over the telephone once he’d heard about her conversation with Sean.

  “Wow is right.”

  “That’s strange. I don’t know what to make of that.”

  “I’m going to get more out of that kid, too, even if I have to bring the sheriff next time.”

  Myles sighed. “Wow,” he said again. “I hate to make reckless statements, but…”

  “You might as well go on and say what you’re thinking, Myles.”

  The rain that had threatened for days was finally falling with a steady, persistent drumming across the rooftop, sounding like it wasn’t going anywhere soon. Rain in southwestern Washington was stealthy, without thunder or lightning, but this was a full-fledged storm. Angela lay across her bed, stripped down to her T-shirt and panties. She’d planned to take a nap, but her mind had been racing, making sleep impossible. With the sky darkening through her window, she’d decided to call Myles, as if it were a long-standing habit. His voice on the phone calmed her.

  “I’m thinking what you’re thinking,” Myles said. “The deaths of Corey and Rick Leahy may be connected somehow. Sean’s always adamant about me never going near your property. I wrote it off as superstition because he’d lost his friend there, and his father and I talked about it once. But Sean never said anything about magic or spells, and neither did Rick. That’s the part that has me stumped. I don’t know what to think. I’m at a loss over it, just like we all felt last year after June McEwan.”

  June McEwan, the Sacajawea High School principal, had been Angela’s home economics teacher long ago. She still had blazing red hair, and Angela remembered seeing her at the Fourth of July party, even though she hadn’t had a chance to talk to her.

  “What happened with June? Is she dead, too?”

  “No, no. I forget, you’ve been completely out of touch, haven’t you? Last summer, June invited her brother over for Sunday dinner, their tradition, then she got up from the table, walked behind his chair, and started choking the hell out of him. She almost killed him, Angie. His neck was black and blue. He literally had to fight her off with her steak knife.”

  Angela sat up, cradling the phone close to her ear. “June McEwan tried to killRandy?” Randy McEwan, closer to Angela’s age, was one of the gentlest men she had ever known. He and his sister were inseparable.

  “But you already have enough on your mind,” Myles said. “Let me drop it.”

  “Don’t you dare. What the hell happened? Were they arguing?”

  “Nope. He insists everything was fine between them. She’d been in a good mood right before it happened, he said. Then she started screaming about how she had to kill him. He was forced to commit her for a while, then she moved away. I thought about June after Rick died because of the suddenness of it, how uncharacteristic it was. There’s just been a lot of it lately. Corey’s death was the first thing, because everyone was devastated about that. They really were, Angie, the whole town. A year later, June bowled everyone over again. Now, this thing with Rick.”

  What little light had been left through the cloud cover was disappearing rapidly with nightfall, and Angela didn’t like the new darkness enveloping her bedroom. Quickly, she switched on the lantern-style lamp at her bedside. In the light, she felt less jittery. But just a little. This would be her first night sleeping alone in Gramma Marie’s house, and already she was dreading the darkness.

  “Any new word on the dog?” Myles said.

  “No, unfortunately,” Angela sighed. “That was something else that bugged me about Sean. He wasso sure the dog won’t be found.”

  “Have you talked to Naomi?”

  “Yeah, I caught her at home about an hour ago. She’s still a wreck, but she told me to thank you for everything, by the way.”

  “My pleasure. She’s a sweet lady. I’m glad to have met her.”

  Angela paused, feeling the uncomfortable stirrings that had visited her when she’d watched Naomi huddling in prayer with Myles. “I could put in a good word for you with Naomi, you know. She’s single, and you’re exactly her type.”

  Myles laughed, although the laugh sounded forced. “Don’t bother. She lives in Hollywood and I live in Sacajawea. That wouldn’t be much of a relationship, would it?”

  Touché. That sounded like it might have been directed at her more than Naomi, and Angela was sorry she’d brought it up. “Myles, I want to talk to you about why I disappeared on you,” she said. “Is there any chance you could come over?”

  “You mean now?”

  Angela almost lost her nerve, but didn’t. “Yes. Tonight.”

  “No, sorry, Angie. It’s dinnertime and it’s pouring outside. And to tell you God’s honest truth, I’m sure that wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  Sitting alone in her bedroom in Gramma Marie’s house, the twenty-two years since high school felt only imaginary. Here she was trying to ask Myles’s forgiveness after an emotional pothole, probably trying to lure him into her bed for a man’s touch after an eternity, and he was politely keeping his distance. Just like old times, when she messed up and fell from his grace.

  “I’m not angry,” Myles said, filling the silence. “Your son died, Angie. Besides that, we hardly knew each other anymore. You had no responsibilities to me. You have your own life.”

  Ouch, ouch, and ouch. Two left jabs and a right cross. At The Spot, making love, she and Myles had sworn to each other that they were soul mates. They might have been kids, but it had felt real as could be at the time. It damn near felt real now.

  “That’s not true,” she said. “We’ve never stopped knowing each other.”

  He didn’t answer right away, but when he did his voice was full of closure. “Well, I have a chicken on for Ma, so let’s consider this a rain check. Thanks for the update on Sean. The magic angle is disturbing, I agree. You shouldn’t ignore this.”

  He sounded eager to go, but Angela wasn’t ready to hang up and surrender to the empty house. Not so soon. “Yeah, that kidb
elieves in the magic, too,” Angela said, fishing for a less prickly subject. “You should have seen the way he jumped when I pulled out the index cards with Gramma Marie’svodou symbols.”

  Myles took the bait. “Is that what those symbols on the ring signify?”

  “That’s what I’m assuming. Gramma Marie believed invodou, like a lot of people. You remember.”

  “Sure do. Theloas and all that. You showed me her bedroom shrine.”

  “It’s a shame, but I don’t know anything about her ring or those symbols.”

  “Then that’s your first step,” Myles said. “You need to learn whatever Corey knew. You need to find out what he and Sean were so afraid of. Why there would be a curse.”

  His matter-of-fact tone made Angela’s scalp itch. “You think Sean’s story might be true?”

  “No. But if there’s any possibility your son killed himself because of his beliefs, you should know what those beliefs were. That ring keeps coming up, so it’s a good start, doll-baby. I really have to run, though. Are you all right?”

  No, Angela realized. She was not all right.

  “I’m fine. Have a good dinner,” she said.

  They said their good-byes, and the line clicked dead. Angela immediately became aware of all the sounds around her. Rain battering the house in torrents. Three hard thumps on the rooftop in quick succession, more walnuts. The rain collecting in the gutter outside her window, rattling as loudly as a rickety engine trying to come to life. She remembered Mr. Everly’s warning about the tree, but she whisked her mind clean, her old, useful trick. She was not going to sit in a dark house pondering the loss of her tree or Naomi’s missing dog. And she especially was not going to sit here worrying about Sean’s belief in curses and spells. If all of those unpleasant thoughts were going to assail her at bedtime anyway, she might as well put them off as long as she could.

  She needed a hot bath. In the commotion, she hadn’t had a single soak since she’d been here.

  After pulling off her T-shirt, Angela went to the bathroom and turned on the light, examining the sloping fullness of her bare breasts in the bathroom mirror. Not bad for forty, she decided. Her chest had tightened since she had started running, and her breasts were still alert; not an eighteen-year-old’s, but not drooping toward Mama Earth as much as she’d feared. Myles’s lips had sucked on these breasts at The Spot, so sweetly and gently that she’d barely felt him except in moist brushes. How much more assured would his mouth feel on her breasts now? She would probably never know, and that only made her curiosity more keen.

  Jesus, was she falling for Myles again? Or was she just horny?

  When Angela bent over the bathtub, she instantly forgot Myles and her breasts.

  The floor of the white tub was coated with streaked, gritty brown dirt that had not been there two hours ago. Two wet brown leaves with dark, rotting spots lay beside the drain, like the leaf in the toilet she’d seen her first day back. The mess in the tub didn’t smell like raw sewage, and it looked more like plain old mud, but Angela slapped her bare heel angrily into the tile floor when she saw it. On top of everything else, she was having plumbing problems, too? One more thing to look forward to, she thought.

  “Shiton me,” she said, turning the light off. This was tomorrow’s problem, not tonight’s.

  The bathtub drain gurgled, ever so quietly, behind her. Angela heard the noise amplified against the bathroom’s walls, just loudly enough to make her turn back around to peer into the dark. She saw her own long shadow in the light cast from the doorway, but she couldn’t see beyond the bathtub’s shiny white rim. She heard something splat into the tub, probably more mud, then that gurgling from the drain. The muted sound varied in pitch, lower and then higher, merry and playful. The bathtub seemed to be singing to itself.

  Angela’s fingertips tingled, ice-cold. So cold they seemed to burn.

  Mom, can I talk to you? I have to give you something.

  Angela expected something startling to happen, and it did.

  Above her, outside of the house, there was a thunderous cracking, then the violent swishing of wet leaves. The sound surrounded her, descending with the promise of impact. With a cry, Angela crouched and thrust her arm upward as if to keep the ceiling from caving in on her. Angela was frozen, her veins prickling.

  She couldn’t worry about the bathtub now. The walnut tree was falling.

  “Oh, God—”

  She was practically standing right beneath it. By the time it occurred to Angela that she’d be safer if she ran, the tree was landing. Its impact shook the ceiling and wall beside her in the hallway with an unsettlingthump . Angela felt the floor vibrate beneath her feet, and she cried out again. The decorative mirror at the front of the hall swung precariously right and then left, but came to rest at a crooked slant without falling.

  And that was all.

  Angela caught her breath, standing stock-still as she gazed upward, expecting to see zigzagging lines race across the ceiling as the tree fought its way inside the house. But there were no cracks, and there was no more sound. Nothing but silence now except for the rain. The tree had fallen, and now it was down, and there was nothing else.

  Angela breathed again, and rational thought began to shine through. She wasn’t hurt. The damage to the house might not be worse than scraped paint, or maybe a few displaced shingles. She was damned lucky. But Angela didn’t feel lucky. She stood in the same defensive stance in the hallway, unmoving. Listening. Waiting.

  Because therewould be something else. She knew that from a place that did not adhere to rationality, a wordless, unmapped place. She’d felt that tingling in her fingertips, the same sensation she’d experienced on the Fourth of July, and that tingling signaled big things, catastrophic things. She hadn’t realized until now how much she’d been living in dread of the day that cold-burn would return, imagining what awful surprises it would drag in its wake.

  And it had come. Tonight. Right before the tree fell. This time, she wouldn’t ignore it.

  Knowledge rustled inside her, trying to birth itself. Angela stood still, hardly breathing, because it seemed to her that if she stopped breathing for a short while, she would know why her fingers had tingled. The tree was only the smallest part of it. She knew that much.

  Angela’s heart ballooned and deflated in a manic rhythm in her chest. “Are you trying to talk to me, Gramma Marie?” Angela whispered. “I’m listening. I’m listening for you.”

  Her only answer came in the barrage of steadily beating rain on the rooftop, in a language she did not know.

  Visiteur

  Fight the Power.

  We’ve got to fight the powers that be.

  —CHUCK D, PUBLIC ENEMY

  Eleven

  OAKLAND

  TUESDAY MORNING

  1A.M.

  IT HAD BEEN SO LONGsince Tariq Hill had felt fine, he’d forgotten he was capable of it. But tonight he was fine and then some. He felt like himself again, better than himself, walking toward the entrance of Club Paradiso with his nephew DuShaun and three other rookies with an easy stride, the way a man walks when life is on good terms with him. As he and the players neared the warehouse-style club’s velvet rope, the crowd outside stirred beneath the bright solar lamp. A tangible current sparked through the line as onlookers’ eyes danced with daydreams of what it must feel like to make a stadium of sixty-three thousand football fans rise to their feet and scream.

  Twenty-ten. That was a good win over the Rams, especially on Monday night. Something to make the Rams think twice when the team went to St. Louis later in the season.

  “Way to go, DuShaun!” a woman shrieked, hoping to catch his nephew’s eye. DuShaun glanced in the direction of the call with a boyish grin, waving. The woman who’d yelled was with a group of friends, college girls maybe, their bulging breasts fighting to pop out of their blouses, skirts riding up their asses. Almost like children playing dress-up, except for the way those bodies smoldered. DuShaun’s eyes drifted
away from the girls and he shared a glance with Tariq, as if checking to see if his uncle was still there. DuShaun was a strict Baptist boy dating a new girl he’d met at Bible study, and although he was only twenty-one, he was talking about wanting to get married before too long. He hadn’t come to Paradiso looking for girls.

  But temptation was temptation. Tariq knew that better than anyone. “They might as well go stake out a street corner,” Tariq said, steering DuShaun past the girls.

  “That’s cold, Uncle Tariq,” DuShaun said, chuckling.

  “Are you football players?” A small voice behind them. Tariq turned around and saw two teenagers huddled against the wall, not far from the entrance. The taller one was a slouching boy with overeager eyes who looked about fourteen, but it was the girl who’d spoken. Her spiked hair was the color of orange juice. Despite her four-inch heels and enough makeup for three, her elfin body was unfinished. She was tall, but she wasn’t even fourteen. Where were her mama and daddy?