Persephone Underground

by Jennifer Russon

“Your dad had a habit of getting drunk and saying stuff like that – that he’d found someone who could arrange to let him live forever, if he made the ultimate sacrifice.”

  Mom stabbed at the asparagus on her plate, unaware that my own fork was shaking in my hand.

  “I would tell him to stop talking nonsense and put down the wine. Your Dad had this penchant for a Dominican red wine called Mami Jew..jew something.”

  “Mami Juana,” I corrected.

  “Yes!” Mom pointed her knife at me and smiled. “That was it. I tried it only once. It knocked me down on my butt – made me see things.”

  She grew serious before getting up to prepare our dessert – ice cream in little bowls.

  “I always assume when your dad talked about sacrificing something in order to live forever, he meant you and me.”

  I knew better. Dad had chosen to give up my sister Ronnie so he could live forever because he couldn’t bear to part with us as his first choice. Walking out of our lives was his way of protecting mom and me.

  Chapter

  32

  Besides Lucas, none of the Furrs showed up to The Pomegranate to hear Demi’s act. She was opening for a band – a cover band that did nothing but songs by The Pretenders. The devil had invited a lot of powerful people to eat, drink and be merry on his dime. Lucas Furr wanted to get elected after all. He was running for office because he loved power – more than his family, more than anything.

  There was no trace of sadness on his face since Hayden’s suicide. He had moved on. I tried not to look at him, even though I’d gone to great lengths not to be recognized.

  But I did take a chance wearing this dress. Were Hayden or Mami Wata to see it, they’d remember it from our very first meeting, when I interviewed here this summer. They weren’t here, so I counted my blessings. I also held my breath while Demi took the stage. I think everyone did. Everyone recognized her. She would forever be “that woman whose husband was shot”.

  Before Demi came on for her set, I’d managed to pilfer the one set of car keys I was looking for – Lucas’s. If Mami Wata had taught me one thing over the summer, it was how to rip things off, without a soul noticing.

  I sat there, smug and pleased with myself, waiting for the entertainment to begin. Of course, mom had already fed me, but I made sure I looked old enough tonight to order a mai tai cocktail – little umbrella poking up out of it.

  I was still sipping from my glass when Demi’s routine began. There was something so tense about her act tonight, I couldn’t laugh. Other people laughed, but I just couldn’t bring myself. She told so many jokes about being hugely pregnant, it was almost like a feminist rant.

  “I’m already a working mother,” she brooded into her microphone.

  She had the Republican men in the audience all uncomfortable when she joked about abortion – as if you could joke about such a thing; however, Demi pulled it off. She got coarse and asked if the enormous bran muffin dump she’d taken this morning qualified as a newborn.

  “Shall I give it personhood?” she joked, tacking on the odd segue about assault rifles, and what it would take to get them banned.

  I saw older women – who I guessed to be the wives of the Republican dudes – clutch their imaginary pearls.

  Then she wrapped up with the obligatory “thank you, you guys have been great” and stalked off the stage.

  I saw her make a B-line for the parking lot, which I thought was strange. I decided to follow her, hiding behind some dumpsters while I watched her retrieve something from her trunk. It was a baseball bat.

  I knew instantly what she intended to do, and watched in horror, wondering if I should stop her. She listened inside for sounds of the band striking up on the nightclub’s stage, and when she was satisfied by a throaty rendition of “Don’t Get Me Wrong,” Demi sprang into action.

  She had, apparently, memorized the name of every student shot dead at my school. She paused before the windshield of every car in the crowded parking lot, wielding her baseball bat.

  Car alarms were going off as she brought down her bat – an outraged hammer – on every single car, smashing hoods and doors and glass – anything she could manage to destroy.

  She visited 22 automobiles, saving the best for last as Marc was the 23rd person killed that day.

  She knew Lucas Furr’s Mercedes by sight, running a finger over its full waxy polish before bracing like a baseball player for one last grand slam.

  “This one is for Marc,” she said, raising the bat as high over her head as she could. She brought it down and sent glass flying up like bits of hail, her arms visibly nicked in places.

  I hadn’t known why I needed to steal Lucas’s keys until this very moment. I had to intervene – save Demi before people started wandering out of The Pomegranate asking what all the commotion was.

  I opened the devil’s sexy car and beckoned her inside. I brushed the glass off the seats before we dared sit down, revved the engine, and peeled out of the parking lot. Looking at her, and having some medical knowledge from listening to so many of mom’s “work stories,” I could see Demi was basically okay. Her wounds from breaking so much glass were surprisingly superficial. Still, I worried about her unborn child and asked if she wanted me to drive to the ER.

  “ALL I WANT,” Demi enunciated slowly but loudly, “is to see Marc again. Can you do that for me, Persephone?”

  I was stunned that she recognized me, but a quick glance in the car mirror showed me my wig had fallen off back at The Pomegranate. Luckily my passenger was too distraught to ask me how the hell I was out on bail, and enjoying her comedy act on a Saturday night. It was all weird. I thought the most I could do for Demi was to answer her question honestly. I mean…I could take her to Marc. I had seen him in a jail cell down in the caves of The Underworld – just before being taken to Cancun.

  “What if I could take you to see him?” I asked, turning my head in earnest to look at her and having to correct the Mercedes as it veered off the road.

  Demi’s mascara was a mess – running down her cheeks like black waterfalls. “Really?” she pleaded more than replied. “You could do that?”

  I didn’t affirm, just pointed Lucas’s car toward the Boulevard of Champions. She recognized Mami Wata’s house when we pulled up.

  “I remember coming here and asking the owners if they’d seen Oreo when he got lost this summer. They run some kind of psychic voodoo parlor. Tell her I want to die,” Demi wept – “tell that Mami Wata lady to put me out of my misery and send me to heaven where my husband is waiting for me.”

  “Marc isn’t in heaven, exactly…but I do think you could see each other again,” I said, throwing the car into park. I came around to Demi’s side, and helped get her to her feet, which was tough since she’d put on about 40 pounds by her last trimester.

  Mami Wata met us at the porch with an alarmed look on her face. Of course she recognized Lucas’s car – not to mention noticed the blood streaking Demi’s arms.

  I decided to level with the old witch. I got straight to the point, with zero back story. I hadn’t seen her since she visited me in the hospital. So much had happened since then, but it was only a matter of time before Lucas came here looking for us, and I had to make this fast.

  “She went crazy after her show at the nightclub,” I exclaimed, out of breath because I was pushing Demi up the rickety steps and into Mami Wata’s kitchen.

  “She needs some of that tea or lemonade, or whatever you have to get her down to hell.”

  Demi was mute – white as a ghost. She seemed to be panting.

  Mami Wata limped over to the stove and put the kettle on. I could tell from the way she threw shade at me – her contemptuous half glances – she was furious I’d taken Domino.

  She knew I’d done it because his dog bed was empty. And now she was truly alone. There were no new maids coming from Bad Ass Academy to help around the house. Miz Furr had stopped vetting girls immediately after the shooting. Hayden was gone. I
was gone. My brief return was just a reminder of all the things she couldn’t have.

  Right now, all either of us wanted to do was help calm Marc Springer’s widow. She wilted into a chair and waited for the tea, her head in her hands.

  She kept muttering something we couldn’t understand. Something about being “broken” and “water” – that it was “too early” and she was barely 7 months along.

  Mami Wata looked knowingly down at the soaked kitchen chair.

  “Her water has broken. I’ve done plenty of midwifing. I will deliver her baby. I can nourish preemies to health. I did it with Hayden all those years ago. I can tell from the way she is carrying that it will be a boy.”

  At this, the old voodoo queen looked happy – optimistic even. Her master plan had finally come to full fruition. She fully intended to use Demi’s infant boy to replace her grandson.

  Seeing her agony, and only wanting Demi’s pain to end, I decided to play ball with the old witch.

  “What about being reunited with Marc? Is there any way? I saw him last time I was in the Underworld.”

  I looked at her pleadingly, but with daggers in my eyes. She had fucked with me and The Springers long enough. But the wrongdoing stretched way past us. Her family had torn apart an entire community, and I just wanted the balance of wins and losses between the two of us to reach some kind of equilibrium.

  “I will return Domino if you can put Marc and Demi back together again,” I negotiated.

  “I accept that, but I require more,” Mami Wata said flatly. “She must give her life to join her husband, and the baby must be left with me.”

  I hesitated. What nerve! Her terms sucked. She was taking everything away from a woman, who had already lost close to everything anyway – and all because her son Lucas was a murderous gun nut of a fool. How I hated every last Furr except my dear Hayden.

  I helped Mami Wata move Demi to the same bed I had slept in when I lived here. I mopped her brow with a cool wash cloth, and asked her what she wanted. We had given her some drugs to mitigate the pain. Her contractions were about 10 minutes apart.

  Demi gripped my hand and beseeched me with the wildest look of pain I had ever seen.

  “I think I could die here, Persephone. I hurt so much…and I have a confession to make here on my deathbed.”

  Mami Wata tended to Demi’s laboring body as she spoke, listening every bit as intently as I was, but keeping a poker face. She didn’t want this laboring mother to know her designs on the baby.

  “This baby isn’t Marc’s.”

  “Now hold on,” I said, confused as hell. “He said you guys were trying.”

  “Yeah, with a turkey baster. Not very sexy, is it? I had an affair with someone.”

  Mami Wata met my scared eyes – a look of triumph sparkling in her emerald irises.

  “It’s Lucas Furr’s,” Demi admitted guiltily. “I made a deal with the devil and I lost. I was just so…so tired of trying to conceive and getting nowhere with Marc. Lucas courted me – it was all very romantic…until…well..until the shooting,” Demi concluded.

  She told us she didn’t want this baby. That she wanted to give it up for adoption anyway. She didn’t love it. She just wanted her best friend, Marc back. She wanted things to be the way they were before they left California and moved to this God forsaken place.

  Mami Wata continued to work in silence. The baby would be here soon, she assured its panting mother. In the meantime, she needed something from me – her loyal servant.

  “Go to Demi’s house and get Domino,” Mami Wata ordered me. “Bring him back here, and by the time you return, everyone will have what they want.”

  I took Demi’s purse with me, fished for her keys and let myself into the Springer residence with ease. I found Domino grooming himself like a cat would. He was sitting contently on Marc and Demi’s bed. They had shared a bed, even if they didn’t “do” anything in it. I hated to grab him right away – to disrupt his grooming session, so I sat for a minute on the edge of the mattress. They had a mirror sitting atop a chest of drawers, and I stared at mine and the dog’s reflection until we went blurry.

  To my absolute delight, I discovered the mirror here to be every bit as powerful as all the others that had…taken me places. Trancelike I drifted over to it, and fixated on what I saw beyond the norm. I saw my own body, of course, clad in the green and white flowered dress that tied around my neck, and I also saw The Pomegranate.

  I saw myself – asleep at the bar – waiting for my interview to begin. The vision gave me hope. I picked up Domino carefully from the bed, and took him back to Mami Wata’s.

  When I arrived, she was standing in the doorway of her old house, barely illuminated by the white of a full moon. I put the dog down, and watched Domino sashay past his mistress, back to the bedroom he would apparently share with the voodoo queen for the rest of his life.

  Mami Wata was holding Lucas’s son, wrapped in bloodied white blankets.

  “Thank you for your help in this matter. I have everything I need right now. Look at his eyes,” the old witch said, making her way over to me with her precious bundle.

  I looked down at the child, who opened his eyes as if on command. I saw my lover in them. I saw Hayden, who had been reborn.

  “And Demi?” I asked tentatively.

  “She didn’t make it – lost too much blood. I have taken her body down to the root cellar; she will be with her love soon enough.”

  I wept openly, uncontrollably in front of Mami Wata, and someone else. The tap tap of feet alerted me to the presence of someone else in the room. It wasn’t the footfall of a human, but of a beast. Fury waited just behind his mother; he must have altered from Lucas shortly before. I supposed Lucas Furr had come here, expecting to kill me, only to meet his new son and get a dead body down to the Underworld instead.

  “So…what happens to me now?” I asked the voodoo queen.

  “My dear,” she laughed, distracted with the cootchie coo of caring for a new grandson, “didn’t you see yourself in the last mirror you looked into?”

  “It’s all a dream.” I parroted back this statement to her. It was not a question at all.

  “Yes, it can all be a dream if you like. This is just a seam in time that you ripped into and visited for a short while. I am offering to let you go back to square one, so to speak.”

  Mami Wata made off with the baby, telling me to make myself a cup of tea in the kitchen. She and the baby were going to sit a spell in her room. Maybe she’d try feeding him some pap – a milk recipe, she’d prepared earlier today.

  There was nothing slow or relaxed about the way I gulped that tea. It sent me spiraling down into a quasi-sleep. I had to swim back up, through heaviness and fog, until I was right back at The Pomegranate, in my best interview dress and ready to talk to the owners about a summer job.

  Only there was no one there to interview me. I was alone. I watched the same traffic rush by from the day I so nervously came here, hoping they’d choose me. I heard a racket in the back, and a young boy came through the double kitchen doors, carrying a big tub full of clean dishes.

  It was the Hayden that I loved. The skinny, wonderfully nerdy, awkward boy, whom I thought had died.

  “Can I help you, miss?” he asked in the voice that sent electrifying shivers up and down my spine.

  I loved that voice and the man attached to it, but this wasn’t the right time or place to make good on all of those feelings. It was over now.

  “No, I thought I was meeting someone here, but it turns out I came to the wrong place. I had the time mixed up,” I told him.

  Hayden shrugged good-naturedly, and I left him to stacking plates behind the bar. I ran to my car, eager to get home and tell my mom how much I loved her.

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