A Spectral Hue

by Craig Laurance Gidney

  “As a secretary!”

  “Still. She has a good eye. And not all art is supposed to be pretty.”

  “Apparently,” said Dad, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Mom laughed.

  Xavier kept his eyes closed, but his mind was racing. Did no one else see the moving spots of pink-purple flame? And how long had he been staring at the tapestry?

  3: Iris

  When Iris Marie Broome drove past the Whitby-Grayson museum, her shoulders tensed up. For the most part, she avoided the place but there was no other way to get to Winslow’s Bakery. The AirBnB venture was a new chapter in her life, and she wanted to celebrate the milestone with a Smith Island cake, a regional specialty. She no longer worked at the hospital gift shop a few towns over and she had gotten a nice windfall from Tamar’s estate. She’d been finally able to afford the boxy slate gray Kia she now drove. It was used but barely driven. Most of the cars she had had were on the verge of collapse in one way or another. As it trundled past the museum, Iris saw nothing out of the ordinary. Just the closed building and surrounding wooden planters full of marsh-bells.

  She unconsciously relaxed, her teeth unclenching, the knot in her shoulder unraveling. She got to Winslow’s just under the wire: it was fifteen minutes to closing. She felt a pang of elation—there was one whole cake left. Smith Island cakes were that odd blend of homey and elaborate. Each cake had at least seven layers of moist but stolid yellow cake. It was smothered with its trademark boiled ganache icing. This was a delicious but proudly unfancy confection, a favorite treat for watermen because the fudgy boiled icing held its shape in the harsh salt air.

  “What’s the occasion?” asked Jen Winslow as she boxed up the cake. Iris always liked Jen. She’d always made a point to be gracious to her and Tamar, and treated them like old friends. Adjusting to the remote town had been difficult for the both of them. Shimmer was tiny, and the townsfolk, many of whom came from a long line of Shimmerites, were slow to warm to new people. The fact that Iris and Tamar were together didn’t help matters. But Jen didn’t care. Tamar thought that she was closeted: “Remember when she talked about how much she loved the movie Fried Green Tomatoes? She asked me, ‘Were those two girls in love or what?’” Iris didn’t think that was enough evidence.

  “I’m not working at the hospital anymore,” said Iris. “I hated that job anyway. You had to stand up all the time, even when no one came inside. No more hour-long commutes.”

  “Hallelujah,” said Jen. “Though any day is a great day for cake.”

  “Girl, I’m not gonna eat it myself. Though I could. I’ve started doing the AirBnB thing. You know, renting out my room like an apartment. I have all of that house to myself….” She didn’t finish the sentence. She had drifted into awkward territory. Iris could see the pity beginning to write itself across Jen’s features. “I have my first guest. He’s a student studying Shimmer’s history.”

  “It’ll be a short book,” Jen said with a laugh. “More like a pamphlet.”

  Iris smiled at Jen. She wasn’t bad looking, with a face as round as a full moon, smooth skin and braided hair extensions that were threaded with cobalt blue. Maybe Tamar was right about Jen.

  I should ask her out to a movie sometime, she thought. Ever since Tamar had died, Iris had become a bit of a hermit.

  She picked up the cake box, and started for the door. She almost dropped the cake, which would have been a tragedy. She was startled by what she saw next to her car.

  There was a ripple of color there, somewhere between a heat mirage and the scintillating play of light on a stream. A scattershot speckle of pink light gently undulated into and out of existence. The light was the color of cherry blossoms. The translucent shape that housed the phenomenon was the rough outline of a person. She couldn’t determine anything specific about the apparition, no features or gender. It was just random flashes of pale pink.

  Not again, thought Iris.

  “Is everything okay?” Jen’s voice broke her trance.

  “Yes,” she said. She knew that she didn’t sound convincing.

  The wavering apparition didn’t move from the side of her car when she approached it. Iris put the cake in the backseat, and after a quick glance to see if anyone was watching, she whispered, “What do you want to show me?”

  She waited a beat. Then the pink translucence faded away.

  ***

  “You should go into business,” Tamar told her many times. “If Miss Cleo can make money that way, so can you.”

  And Iris always replied, “Why? It’s not like I can really communicate with them.”

  They called them ‘caspers.’ The caspers were beautiful, abstract things, like floating scarves or specks of light. They were in many colors, and sometimes they were also textures. Often they had the shape of a person, but not always. Iris just saw them. When she tried to interact with them, all she got was a stream of nonsensical images in flashes. One casper might send her a collection of shells, a hair comb, the face of a silver tabby, a beach scene. Another would flash a silver jewelry box, an old 45 single, and a discolored flower flattened between book pages. It was a hodgepodge, what she saw, with no logic. Iris trained herself to unsee the tattered caspers, who, for the most part, seemed oblivious. None of them could manifest completely, and they seemed to be unmoored and confused. This was especially true of the sightings at the hospital. When she wandered away from the gift shop, the dead filled the lobby and the various floors she visited to deliver floral arrangements and balloons. She saw the shredded and portioned silhouettes of the recently dead roaming the halls—half a woman the color of eggshells, a man seemingly made of shiny black vinyl. And sometimes, children in pastel tones.

  “You could try communicating with them through, I don’t know, a Ouija board,” Tamar said. She bought a board from a nearby big box store, and one night, they tried it. They contacted a couple of folks: a man named Callum and a person of indeterminate gender named Dion. (One of the questions they had asked, “Are you female?” The planchette slid to both Yes and No.)

  When that didn’t work, Tamar bought a deck of tarot cards, along with a book that explained the various spreads that could be used to summon and interact with the deceased. Iris never had the time to sit down and study the fairly complicated symbolic code. The deck that Tamar purchased, though, was interesting. It had an Afrocentric theme, with many of the major arcana represented by Orishas. She remembered that Oya was the Empress and Eshu was the Fool. Despite that, she didn’t care for the tarot deck. There was one card, the High Priestess, that Iris found disturbing, though she didn’t tell Tamar for some reason. The dreadlocked woman centered in the midst of darkness wore a wrap of glowing fuchsia, a color that was replicated in the highlights of her eyes. It was one of those pictures where the eyes followed you wherever you went. Iris hated pictures like that. Furthermore, no other figures—not the Hermit or the Hanged Man or the Hierophant—were depicted with such detail or in lurid colors.

  When she got home and put away the cake, she went into her bedroom. She was in the process of downsizing, getting rid of the detritus of Tamar’s things.

  “I wonder why she came for me,” Tamar said. “You were more a fit for her.”

  She brushed that thought aside, as if it were a gnat. Tamar’s face flashed in her mind. And her voice—what did it sound like, again? She had the sudden urge to listen to her voice, its honeyed soprano. But she didn’t have a recording of it. Iris tamped down the feeling, and continued sorting out the mess on her bed.

  There were books on numerology and the zodiac.

  “You’re a Scorpio, aren’t you?” Tamar had said when they first met. She had been wearing a silk green dress and had a white gardenia in her hair.

  “How can you tell?” Iris asked her. She hadn’t said two words to the new hostess.

  Tamar waggled her eyes. “It’s a gift I have.”

  Iris moved the books into the Donate pile. There was a Goodwill in Bethany Beach. They took every
thing.

  Tamar also went through a crystal phase. She left behind a jewelry box full of agates, rose quartz and tourmalines.

  “Do you feel any energy from the stones when you handle them?” she asked Iris.

  “They just feel like rocks, babe. Sorry.”

  Iris picked up some of the crystals, and sifted them through her hands. She liked the sound of their clicking together, and the cool, smooth texture against her skin. The pink quartz, though, reminded her of the disembodied entity she had seen in the parking lot.

  She remembered Tamar, sweating and disheveled, bent over a table strewn with tissue paper and varnish and the cuttings from wallpaper sample books and magazines.

  “I feel her moving through me. I am her vessel.”

  Iris sat down on the bed. It had been five years since she’d last seen Tamar. And only one year since she learned that she had died. Aunt Hagar had been vague about the cause of her death, but deep down inside, Iris knew Tamar had killed herself. When she saw the waxen body in the coffin, she was enraged. She knew that Tamar wanted to be cremated, and her ashes scattered in the Shimmer Marsh. Though they were not together—Tamar had moved to Oakland to live with her aunt—they still emailed and later texted, and even sexted. It was like they were together, if only in an abstract sense.

  Cherry blossom pink had been the color of spirit she had seen outside of Winslow’s. A pale delicate color that wasn’t the glaring magenta color of the marsh-bell.

  Iris hated that color.

  ***

  Iris was eleven years old when she began seeing auras. She could remember the first one she saw.

  Aunt Earline appeared as suddenly as Mary Poppins when her grandfather began getting ill. She didn’t even know that she had an Aunt Earline until one rainy day in April she showed up on the doorstep of the rowhouse in Philly. It had always been just her mother, Mona, and her grandfather. Iris’s father had died when she was very young. The week before, Pop-Pop, her grandfather, had had his foot amputated, so she had thought the burly woman in an orange dashiki was some sort of weirdly dressed health aide. She was tall, maybe the tallest woman she’d ever seen, and what Pop-Pop would refer to as “big-boned.”

  “Hey, Iris,” the woman said. She knew her name, somehow. “How’s it hanging? I’ve been dying to meet you.”

  In that moment, Iris knew that this woman was somehow related to her. She could see the reddish tint to her perfectly round Afro, the constellation of dark freckles over her light skin. She even had similar features to Pop-Pop, the same lip-shape, the same deep-set eyes as her mother. Relatives had come “out of the woodwork” after Pop-Pop’s surgery. Relations from Pittsburgh, Mechanicsville and Baltimore, bearing terrible looking casseroles and molded gelatin salads. All of the women had -ine and -ette names. She could never get them straight. Georgette. Pauline. Marvine. Harriet. They bought along their bored husbands, their surly teenaged kids, and fussed about Pop-Pop’s bed, fluffing pillows every two minutes or so. At least this one didn’t have a gross heat-n-serve dish.

  “I’m Earline. Your aunt.” She stepped into the narrow vestibule, which could barely contain her girth. All of the -ines and -ettes were presented to her as “aunts,” so this designation meant nothing to her. She moved aside, to let her into the barely wider front hallway.

  “Mama,” Iris yelled up the stairs, “Aunt Earline is here.”

  Her mother emerged from Pop-Pop’s sick room, at the top of the stairs. The look on Mom’s face was shock. She looked as if she had just seen a ghost.

  “Mona,” said Aunt Earline. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  The shocked look on Mom’s face fell away. It was replaced by another, darker emotion. She quickly shut the door to Pop-Pop’s room and came down the stairs. Her eyes were narrowed. “So you finally showed up,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “I had to come,” said Earline. “I mean, ‘honor thy parents’ is in the top ten, ain’t it?”

  “Who told you about Daddy?” her mother said.

  Iris, standing between them, thought for a second, Who’s Daddy? And that’s when it clicked into place. The two women had the same ‘high yellow’ skin tone and reddish-brown freckles on their faces. But they were complete opposites. Mom was small, not even five feet, while Earline towered over her. Mom looked like a doll next to Earline. A doll in a stiff grey dress, with white stockings and matching grey pumps. The only jewelry she wore was a simple silver cross necklace. Next to Earline’s loud outfit, Mom looked like a nun.

  “Suzette called me, and let me know.”

  “Suzette? Suzette, down in DC? How did she even know how to contact you?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Earline. “And I’ve been traveling all day to get here. Plane, train, bus. I’d like to see Daddy, if you don’t mind.”

  “He’s sleeping now,” Mom said. Her voice was lowered, her expression slightly less stony. “We can talk about it in the kitchen.”

  She ushered them into the room at the back of the house, with its walls the color of pale butter and the round white Formica table in the center. The countertop was covered with a couple of cakes and pies, hidden beneath domes. Mom set the kettle on to boil.

  “Aunt Georgette brought your favorite,” said Mom.

  “Mincemeat pie?” Earline’s voice, which was deep, went up a few octaves.

  Iris stared at the slice Mom placed before Earline in abject horror. The crust was invitingly flaky, but the filling was brown and ambiguous. A kind of gelled gravy enrobed chunks of something or other. The ‘minced meat.’ A strange, sweet and boozy smell wafted up. Earline closed her eyes in pleasure at the first bite, murmured an “mmmm.”

  For briefest of moments, a lacy veil, the color of the early morning sky, enveloped Earline. It unfurled with each savoring bite of the mincemeat pie. Iris gasped. Was it a mist? A light? A piece of fabric?

  Mom said, “Something wrong, Rissy?”

  But the whatever-it-was retreated, glowered about Earline’s shape, a shimmering blue outline.

  “Nothing,” she said cautiously.

  Earline finished the pie, started on the coffee that Mom had made for her. “That sure was good. Child, it’s so nice to eat real food again. I will retch if I have to eat another alfalfa sprout again.”

  “Does this mean that you’re out of that group?” Mom stood, leaning against the counter.

  “Black Gnosis is no more,” Earline said.

  “And we don’t have to call you Sister Imani?”

  “Sister Imani has left the building.”

  “What are you all talking about?” Iris couldn’t stand it any longer.

  Earline gave Iris the once-over look. “You don’t know? They didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Well, when you were two, and your daddy was still alive, I joined a religious group called Black Gnosis.”

  “Religious group,” Mom muttered, “more like cult.”

  “Now, now, Mona. I’m not disagreeing with you. But let me tell the child the story my way.”

  Nine years ago, Mona and Lamar Broome lived a few blocks away, in an apartment building. Iris had no memory of the apartment but apparently she’d spent the first two years of life there. Earline still lived at home with Pop-Pop. She was a year older than Mona, and was, in her own words, “a lost child.”

  “A hot mess,” Mom said under her breath. Iris thought, Mom really hates her sister. That’s when she saw the thin outline of color surrounding her mother. Earline’s had been clear blue. The light emanating from Mom was a muddy red color, like an old bloodstain that refused to come out in the wash.

  “Your mom isn’t wrong,” said Earline. “I was a hot mess. A lost soul, stumbling through life. After Mona married Lamar and left the house, I started up secretarial school cause Momma—your grandma—said single girls could meet men out in the workforce. But I never got the hang of shorthand and dictation. I might as well learned a new language. When Momma got ill
, I quit school to help around the house.”

  “What did Grandma die of?” Iris asked. Both her grandfather and mother were tight-lipped about things like death and illness.

  “Rissy!” her mother hissed, as if on cue.

  Earline: “You didn’t tell her? I swear. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Momma died of stomach cancer.”

  Iris watched her mother actually flinch at the naming of the disease. As if saying ‘cancer’ could summon those rotting cells. Her halo-light deepened in color, became bloodier.

  “It’s not like you had to take care of her,” Earline said.

  “You know that Iris was born around that time. I couldn’t—”

  “Chill, sis, chill. I’m not blaming you. Anyway. When Momma passed—”

  “Bless her soul,” said Mom.

  “We all went nuts in different ways. Daddy became a holy-roller. He read the Bible backwards and forwards, went to services on Wednesday and Sunday. Started quoting the Good Book in every situation. Corinthians this, Leviticus that.”

  Pop-Pop was still a ‘holy-roller.’ (Iris liked that phrase; she imagined a steamroller the color of the Golden Calf trundling down the streets, flattening sinners on the pavement.) She wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music. He’d warned her of the Satanic messages hidden in rock music, and how they could summon demons. (She doubted that ‘Boogie Oogie Oogie’ was some witch’s spell when he’d told her that.)

  “It was during this time that I met David Okeke, the leader of Black Gnosis. He was one charismatic dude. And he looked a little like Sly Stone. He knew several languages fluently, and he knew the Bible as well as Pop-Pop ever did.”

  “Oh, hush,” said Mona. “Daddy reads from the Good Book every night.”

  Earline paused, and rolled her eyes at her sister. “Daddy knows the King James Version. Does he know the original translations from Ancient Greek and Latin? Does he have a copy of the Apocrypha, the books of the Bible that were edited out by King James? Well, David Okeke did.”