by Sean Stewart
Josh had often wondered if his lucky father would someday go that way.
Samuel Cane’s wife Amanda had been one of only two pharmacists to come through the Flood unscathed and with her full stock undamaged. She was a respected member of the Krewe of Togetherness right up to the day Sam lost their house and their luck began to turn.
Galveston in those days was a bad place and a hard time to be unlucky. Josh’s mom never for a moment tried to welch on her husband’s bet. After the Flood, luck was omen, not chance, and you took it in deadly earnest. But you didn’t risk your family’s future on it, either, she said. The words Josh always remembered were, “Your father and I have decided it would be best if we stayed apart.”
“Is that it?” Josh had said, turning on his dad, furious, tears in his eyes. “Aren’t you even going to, to, to fight it?”
But Sam Cane said, “Sometimes you have to cut your losses.”
TWO weeks later. Travis Denton brought his wife and three children to inspect their new property. The kids were playing in the attic when the conjunction of a gas leak and an electrical short blew the house to splinters. Travis and his wife died instantly. Two of the children perished in the fire; the third died a week later from his burns.
“You see, Mandy?” Sam Cane said, standing drunk and exultant in the doorway of the smelly little rental house where she and Josh were staying. “We can be together. God, it’s a hell of a thing, it’s a tragedy, but it was going to happen! That’s why I had to keep playing. That’s why I had to keep losing. If I don’t lose the house, that’s us down there, it’s our teeth they’re picking out of the street.”
“No, Sam.” Josh’s mother sounded very tired. “I still love you. But no.”
“Don’t you understand, Mandy? I’ve still got it. I still have my luck!”
“I know,” Joshua’s mother said. “But you don’t have us anymore.”
Part One
Chapter Two
SLOANE
JOSH is ten years old, still living the charmed life his father will lose in a game of cards the following winter. He is sitting next to Sloane Gardner in a deck chair beside Jim Ford’s swimming pool and they are looking at the stars. It’s one of Jim’s magnificent parties; inside Open Gates, musicians have moved from playing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” to covering old Beatles tunes. The older members of the audience join in the chorus. Laughter and lamplight leak out between the shutters.
The kids have been banished to the backyard. Some of them sneak up to the marble verandah to peer in at the singers until a grown-up, strolling the balcony with a glass of palm whiskey, catches sight of the skinny silhouettes and waves them away. The rest of the kids are scattered around the pool, lounging in patio chairs or sitting on the side dangling their feet in the water. The underwater pool lights are on, making it glow a cool, wavering, unearthly blue. Bats whirl and veer, rags of darkness moving in and out of the night so quickly Josh feels more than sees them, tiny winds and shadows that feed on the mosquitoes.
One by one the kids fall asleep in the patio furniture or are dragged away, bleary-eyed, by parents ready to go home. Josh, having maneuvered to sit beside Sloane, bites his lip to stay awake. He hopes she will talk to him and ask him questions, because she is the most curious of the kids and he is the smartest. She is quiet so long he is afraid she has fallen asleep, so he says, “You know, the stars at night really are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas.” She smiles, a very small, private smile, just between them. He explains how the stars twinkle because the column of air between the ground and space is bent and flawed, like bottle glass, so the stars look bigger some days than others, and ripple when you stare at them. His father hadn’t told him that; he had read it in the encyclopedia on his mom’s computer.
“So why do the stars disappear when you look at them?” Sloane asks.
“Do they?”
“Try it.” She squints. “Pick a faint one in the corner of your eye and then stare right at it.”
He tries it. “Oh.”
“See? Why is that?”
“Well, probably it’s…” And then Joshua stops, because he had been about to lie, which is unscientific. Instead he says, “I don’t know,” feeling that he has failed.
She gives him that sly look again, pleased. Her smile goes through him like a shiver on the surface of the glowing blue pool.
A long time later he’s almost asleep in the patio lounger next to hers when he feels the dry brush of her fingers against his hand. He lies very still, not knowing what to do, afraid the smallest movement might scare the hand away. He can feel his heartbeat at the base of his thumb; it’s like his whole being is concentrated in the skin of his left hand. Her hand creeps farther into his. Their fingers lace together. Laughter comes from the mansion behind them like wind moving through the leaves of the magnolia trees.
“Let’s not tell the others,” she whispers.
He squeezes her hand and nods, his heart tight in his chest, and stares up at the stars until the sound of her breathing slowly changes, and her warm fingers relax inside his own. He is half-asleep, blue and wavery, lit inside. Gone to water.
AFTER Amanda Cane lost her house and her husband—and her husband’s luck—she and Josh moved into a series of smaller places. At first Josh was still invited to the better birthday parties, but time went on. Joshua’s clothes grew shabby, his voice broke, Jenny Ford pretended not to see him during the Mardi Gras parade. Randall Denton made fun of him when they met on the street. But Sloane Gardner was the one Josh cared about. For years after they moved into the barrio he found excuses that would take him by Ashton Villa, where she lived with her mother the Grand Duchess. Or he would go to play chess downtown; he was a good player, he won a lot, and the games were played outside in the cobbled square across from the offices of the Ancient and Honorable Krewe of Momus, where Sloane was going more and more often to help her mother run the city.
Amanda Cane lost the lease on her pharmacy. Josh borrowed a wheelbarrow and moved his mom’s stock into the front room of their little house on the wrong side of Broadway. Randall Denton, who was seventeen by this time, now ignored Josh entirely.
Then Amanda and Josh got busy with an outbreak of yellow fever. Josh spent more and more time in the library, researching herbal remedies for his mother’s shop as the real medicines ran out one by one. Together they learned to make poultices from sage and plantain to ease the pain of cuts and bruises, brewed up damiana tea for old people with constipation, made chili pepper paste to ease arthritis, and experimented, cautiously, with morning glory extract for patients with asthma.
Josh developed a bad case of acne, and the pretty Mexican girls made fun of him. He tried to cure the acne by taking infusions of dandelion tea and steam facials made by pouring boiling water over dried yarrow. It didn’t work. He kept waiting for a growth spurt that never came. Finally he had to admit that five foot three was as tall as he would ever be. Sloane, on the other hand, grew taller and more poised, and began wearing the smart, tailored clothes her mother favored. For more than three years Josh ducked into any convenient doorway if he saw her coming, and left his mother any errands that would have taken him past Ashton Villa.
He never did grow taller, but his face cleared up and his voice settled in its new register. His clothes were threadbare, but he kept them neat and clean. One day in 2023, just after his eighteenth birthday, he walked down to the Strand to buy some cheesecloth to replace a worn-out strainer. He was wearing a drab but clean shirt of grey Galveston cotton, a good pair of shorts, and a pair of rope sandals when Sloane happened to emerge from the Krewe of Momus building just as he was walking by. He tipped his head in a dignified salute. “Good morning, Sloane.”
“It is, isn’t it?” And she gave him the polite, impersonal smile that the daughter of the Grand Duchess must keep ready for her mother’s citizens. She had not the faintest idea who he was. Josh was devastated.
So much for the fine, genteel life he was
supposed to have lived.
Five years later, when the Grand Duchess fell ill, he found himself wondering whether Sloane might come into his shop one day, looking for remedies. A stupid fantasy. The Grand Duchess would have access to real doctors and whatever real medicine remained from before the Flood. He was irritated with himself. Sure, Sloane Gardner would come to him for help—and what would he give her? Garlic cloves to rub on her mother’s feet? Stinging nettle shampoo to put the shine back in her hair?
But as luck would have it, Sloane did come into his shop late that summer, barely conscious, with her dress ripped and blood running down her face.
ON the evening of August 23, 2028, Sloane Gardner sat in front of her vanity, trying to decide what she should wear for a difficult evening. She was booked for two very different occasions. The first was a party to which her mother had summoned Galveston’s best society. The second was a secret meeting which would probably cost Sloane her life. She toyed with a case of brown eye shadow. It’s the sort of night, she thought, that puts a lot of pressure on one’s wardrobe.
A servant knocked on her bedroom door. “Do you need help, señorita?”
“No thanks, Consuela. You get yourself ready.”
“Bueno. And your mother…?”
“I’ll dress Mother.”
“Gracias.” Obvious relief in Consuela’s voice. None of the servants could stand seeing Jane Gardner reduced to her present pitiful state. Only a daughter was required to bear that.
It was now six o’clock in the evening. An hour and a half for Sloane to dress, then twenty minutes to throw an outfit on her mother, who would fume and complain about wasting even that much time on primping. Their guests would begin to arrive at eight. Allow at least two hours of mingling before Sloane could slip away…It would be ten-thirty at the earliest, then, before she could walk to the haunted amusement park where the Lord of Mardi Gras dwelt and beg for her mother’s life. The thought made her sick with fear. But everything else had failed. If she didn’t try it, Jane Gardner would die.
Very likely she would die anyway.
Sloane’s hands were shaking badly. It was going to be hard to get her makeup on. Damn. Her mother wouldn’t be such a coward. As Momus’s Consort, Jane Gardner had faced the Moon God every Mardi Gras since 2004. Sloane’s godmother, Odessa, was a powerful witch, and Galveston’s last surviving angel. For all Sloane knew, she might chat with Momus once a day and twice on Sundays. Sloane was not like those women. She needed the confidence of excellent mascara and well-made clothes. Once her eyes were done and she was wearing a tailored dress, it would be so much easier to be brave.
Sloane studied herself in the bureau mirror. She was tall and carried her weight on her legs: big feet, round calves, big hips and buttocks. I look like a pear, she thought dourly. That explains my psyche, too—easily bruised and squishy in the middle. Her waist and shoulders were slender. She had interesting breasts, she thought—large, but not the high round kind men seemed to admire. Hers hung down on her chest and then swelled at the bottom, with the nipples tilting up. More like squashes than melons. Sloane was what she called privately a Can-be. Her face was average, but well made-up and smiling, she could seem rather pretty. She wasn’t smiling now; her skin was clammy and pale. Wincing at her own ugliness she reached for her eye shadow. Courage may come, and courage may go, my girl, but vanity will never fail you.
Most days Sloane tried to use the newer, cruder makeups they could manufacture here on Galveston Island, but tonight she applied the last of the precious pre-Flood stuff Odessa had given her on her sixteenth birthday. It was realistic to anticipate crying, either in fear or grief: non-streaking mascara was definitely called for.
“If you don’t want to spend time fussing.” Odessa once said, “be bold! The most exhausting use of makeup is to pretend you’re not wearing any.” This was depressingly true. Sloane had watery hazel eyes, a pale complexion, and medium brown hair—more pear colors!—leaving her only two real choices. She could dye her hair black or red and then use black pencils and mascara, giving her eyes the contrast to blaze up greenly. This is what Odessa would do. Or she could spend ages in front of her mirror with soft brown eye shadow and pencils, smudging and blending.
Sloane smudged. After forty minutes she leaned back and looked at herself. It was dismaying to see just how subtle the effect was. Still, better to err on the side of sophistication.
She wondered if Momus would rape her. Surely not. Not his stepdaughter.
The air-conditioning droned on, fighting its long losing battle with the Texas summer. A ceiling fan turned overhead, making the mosquito netting around Sloane’s bed shake and flutter. There had been no rain since the 4th of July; almost seven weeks now. Jane Gardner and her city were withering together.
Sloane stood and walked over to her window. The glass was hot to the touch. She looked into the backyard. Chickens scratched in the sun-baked courtyard behind the house. Santa Anna, the rooster, jumped onto the power shed where their two matched ’02 Lexus engines whirred, powering Ashton Villa’s computers and refrigerator and prodigious air-conditioning. The swimming pool was a bare concrete pit. Her mother had drained it by the end of July to encourage water rationing. “Unless you are running a police state, you have to have moral authority to lead,” Jane said. She had been a lawyer, before the Flood.
First the face, now the dress. Sloane pulled open the doors of her enormous cypress wardrobe and picked through the ranks of clothes she had made herself, trying to find something she was willing to die in. The charcoal vest was attractive, in a quiet way, but it was diffident and professional, designed with her role as her mother’s executive assistant in mind. Not at all the thing to wear tonight. To walk under the moon’s mad stare to the Carnival where cruel Momus dwelt would require more courage than you could reasonably ask of a business suit.
“My outfits are a kind of test,” Sloane had told Odessa once. “Most people won’t pay me a bit of mind, but the very smartest people will notice.” She had been sixteen at the time, and very earnest.
“How will you know if you have succeeded?” her godmother asked.
Sloane considered. “Only half the women will notice me, and none of the men.”
Odessa had laughed at that.
Sloane took out several gowns and matched them with shoes and shawls on the dressmaker’s mannequin she kept beside her sewing machine. Sloane liked using the ancient Wheeler-Wright treadle model that had been in Ashton Villa since the turn of the twentieth century. It was a survivor, and she needed all the luck she could get.
She chose a full-length lichen-colored dress with brown trim, a scoop neck (not too low), and spaghetti straps that flattered her shoulders. She added a shawl of a different material, a lighter cotton with less body, colored a pale rose-tan with sassafras root dye. Then she added a filmy dark grey veil, dyed with pecan hulls. To the casual observer, having all three pieces of different cloths, unprinted and colored with local vegetable dyes, made the ensemble not much different than what a poor woman might throw together…except the pieces were exquisitely matched, and putting the darker cloth of the shawl and veil near her face served to subtly accentuate her eyes.
She would wear the veil back for the party, of course. But later, when she dared the fairgrounds where Momus dwelt, she might need something between her and the god’s white stare.
She also wore her most powerful charm, the watch her mother had given her the year she began to menstruate. It was a steel-cased Rolex with gold accents and diamond chips at every hour. “Time is the first thing the magic takes away,” her mother said. “Time doesn’t pass in the Mardi Gras, not in the ways we understand. Time doesn’t pass for savages, either. They live in a wheel that is always the same: winter, spring, summer, fall; winter, spring, summer, fall. To know the time of day, to know the day of the month, to know what year it is, and to have built something new and better since the last year on this day: that’s civilization.”
Slo
ane held the Rolex up to her ear and listened to it tick. Some days her mother’s life, sliced up into ten-minute meetings and half-hour speech appearances, seemed horribly suffocating. On those days, the watch was the last charm she wanted to wear. But tonight its grave, reliable march seemed very reassuring. Tick, tick, tick. Something you could depend on. Sloane felt calmer now that she was dressed. She returned to the mirror and regarded herself. No beauty, but a young woman of hidden strengths. Not a politician, not a governor, not a leader. Not a Grand Duchess, she would never be able to live up to that. A facilitator, though. A woman who knew her duty.
A nicely turned-out sacrifice?
Sloane snapped her makeup case shut. Enough of that.
THEY had moved Sloane’s mother to the parlor on the ground floor in June, when she got too weak to manage the stairs. She was sitting in her wheelchair looking out the front window at the flower beds that the sun by slow degrees had burned away. Jane had banished all the overstuffed Eastlake furniture from the parlor the day she moved in, replacing it with the spare rubbed-oak pieces from her room. “Nobody can think sensibly, surrounded by this,” she had said with a wave of her hand. She had more energy for hand-waving then.
Sloane put her makeup case on the austere Bailey-Scott end table by the bed. “Are you comfortable?”
Jane Gardner said, “It’s like being buried alive, one shovel of dirt a day.”
