by Amber Benson
“You understand that these things are not precise,” Hessika said, snapping another green pod in two and releasing its contents into the bowl.
Eleanora understood better than she wanted to.
“I do.”
Hessika nodded, the moonlight casting a shadow across her angular face, obscuring languid, almond-shaped green eyes wreathed in midnight-black false lashes. She set her bowl of peas aside, making room for it on the small rattan side table by relocating her glass of merlot, then she coaxed a cigarette from a soft pack of Lucky Strikes. She plucked a silver Zippo lighter from her skirt pocket—a gift from a bulldog-faced Marine she’d once bedded—and lit the cigarette.
Eleanora watched as moths dive-bombed the overhead porch light, the frosted-glass globe keeping them from self-immolating against the sixty-watt bulb. She felt like she’d been set adrift upon the ocean, the orange glow from the cigarette’s tip and the pale yellow of the porch light the only illumination in what seemed like a sea of night.
Hessika’s words came out muddled, the cigarette dangling against her lower lip, perverting the sounds into something Eleanora had to translate before she could pick out any meaning from them:
“I dreamt of a dark time. When our coven was the last to stand against something truly evil.”
Hessika paused, the orange coal flaring like fire as she pulled on the cigarette, then removed it from her mouth, cupping it limply in her hand. Around them, the insects wove their songs of longing and attraction like a fine netting, the cacophony of legs rubbing together in a sexual frisson so overpowering it made Eleanora’s head ache.
“In that time I was a ghost—a Dream Walker—invisible to you, but you knew I was there, keeping watch. You were a crone then, ma belle, withered and wasted away—I could smell the blood beneath your skin, blood that was flecked with something black and rank.”
Eleanora kept her mouth shut, choosing not to interrupt the flow of Hessika’s words. Instead, she idly watched the cigarette burn to ash between Hessika’s long fingers.
“There was a girl, she liked to wrap her arms around your shoulders, her hands were always covered in dirt”—she stopped to pull on the cigarette again and then release a long trail of smoke from her lips—“and you were preparing her. She was the next in line—and she would help protect something important. Be the last to stand when all the others had fallen.”
Eleanora froze as Hessika turned to look at her, their eyes locking. Without breaking the connection, Hessika took another drag from the cigarette, the stink of ash and phosphorus making Eleanora’s nostrils itch. There was a softness around Hessika’s eyes—sad eyes, Eleanora had always thought—but the wreath of exhaled smoke around her face made them seem frightening and irisless in the dark.
“She will follow you and you, well . . . it looks as though you’re gonna follow me.”
Eleanora’s throat tightened. She’d been so sure Hessika was about to tell her that she was going to die—it’d happened before, Hessika’s words like a magic noose around some young person’s throat, inching tighter and tighter until they’d choked the life out of what was once young and gay—but this, this was something else entirely.
“A dream of the future coupled with a dream of death, ma belle,” Hessika added as she reached a long arm across the space separating them and grasped Eleanora’s wrist.
Her touch was at once light and reassuring yet burned within the cold fire of empathy. It was an odd sensation, and not one Eleanora hoped to experience again.
“My dreams are never wrong, ma belle,” Hessika continued. “Remember that. Maybe not precise, but never wrong.”
Now all these years later Hessika’s portent had finally come to pass. Eleanora’s blood was black with cancer—and there was only one final task left to complete before Death could finally collect its due:
Prepare the girl. For she was next in line.
Lyse
The staccato cadence of the blond stewardess’s Midwestern twang slammed into Lyse’s head like a sledgehammer, every word a sharpened nail driven into the gray matter of her brain.
Because it was an oversold flight and she’d booked her ticket at the last minute, she hadn’t been able to choose her seat—which meant the airline gave her what was available: a middle seat in between an older grandmotherly type on the aisle and a young Hispanic kid two sizes too big for his window seat. The kid had spent the entire preflight ramp-up arguing with the stewardess over the need for a seat belt extender, and at one point Lyse had almost snapped at the stewardess to leave the poor kid alone. Not just because she agreed with the kid, but because she wanted the stewardess to stop talking.
But she knew she stunk like a distillery and was scared of getting kicked off the flight, so she kept her mouth shut, rejoicing internally when the kid finally relented and, grumbling to hide his embarrassment, took the seat belt extender from the triumphant stewardess, clipping it in place.
Lyse wished there were something she could say to make the kid feel better about being humiliated at the hands of a smug stewardess in a pastel blue uniform, but she decided her continued silence was probably a better balm than any fumbling attempts at commiseration.
As the plane took off, Lyse closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but once they were airborne and the Fasten Seat Belt sign was turned off, she spent most of the flight trekking back and forth to the toilet in order to dry-heave over the commode. She wasn’t sure if the nausea was due to a burgeoning hangover or was just the first sign that she’d given herself a concussion earlier that morning when, in a daring feat of acrobatic prowess, she’d tripped over a barstool and slammed the back of her head into the kitchen countertop, the soft skin of her scalp connecting with the hard stone to elicit a sharp, teeth-grinding thwack.
To her surprise, she’d found herself relatively unscathed after what could’ve been a major trauma: There’d been no blood, no laceration . . . just the budding promise of a painful knot.
After the unexpected call from her great-aunt Eleanora, Lyse had comforted herself by downing most of a bottle of Tito’s vodka and passing out with her face mashed up against the cold granite kitchen island. The alcohol, coupled with the horrible dreams she’d had while she slept—dreams that made sure she got no rest—contributed greatly to the accident.
Then, hours later, she’d been frightened awake by the feel of someone’s eyes on her back. It was unmistakable, the ungodly sense that a stranger was secretly observing her in this vulnerable moment, and fear ran through her body like an electric current.
She’d crawled off the barstool that’d doubled as her bed, hearing the creak of her bones settling back into place after a long night of immobility. She crossed the hardwood floor on bare feet and got as close to the kitchen window as she dared. She’d never bothered with window treatments—the kitchen was in the rear of the house, and the surrounding shrubbery had seemed thick enough to discourage any prying eyes—but as she squinted out into the pitch-black abyss of her backyard, she found herself wishing for heavy damask drapes, or at the very least those ugly poly-fiber blackout curtains.
Of course, no one was out there. The yard was empty and she was alone, but she had a hard time shaking off the creepy feeling someone had been watching her while she slept. Still groggy, she’d turned away from the window, and that was when she’d tripped over the barstool and almost brained herself.
It was that goddamned phone call. It had thrown her whole life off-kilter.
“I should have called you sooner, but I wasn’t sure what to say . . .”
The teasing cadence of Eleanora’s dropped New England r’s as they’d sounded coming through the phone line slipped inside Lyse’s head, a siren’s call to something she did not want to think about.
“They’ve done all the tests, so there’s no reason to get a second opinion.”
Her great-aunt’s words were transient and el
liptical, floating in Lyse’s memory like gauzy white light through layers of viscous liquid. She wanted to pummel the memory away, but it wouldn’t go.
“. . . three months, maybe less than that. Cancer. Started in the blood but now it’s everywhere.”
It was like listening to a song played through an aged and crackling phonograph, vowels and consonants blurring together until they lost their meaning.
“Just . . . stop talking for a minute. Let me process this,” Lyse had almost shouted into the phone as she leaned against the potting table. Though it’d been past six in the evening, the air in The Center of the Whorl, the plant nursery she co-owned with her best friend, Carole, felt thick and damp, still oppressive with the day’s heat.
Silence. Then:
“Bear? Are you still there?” Eleanora had used the pet name Lyse had chosen for herself the summer she’d turned fourteen—during those three sweltering months she would answer to no other name: Lyse was dead, long live the Bear.
Without realizing it, her body had responded to the shock by seating her ass on the concrete floor, the metal leg of the potting table pressing into her back, holding her up like the stipe of a cross as she began to cry.
I’m not gonna deal with this right now, Lyse thought, pushing the memories away as she stared at the blank screen embedded in the airline seat in front of her. She had always taken shelter in denial, using sarcasm and disdain to distance herself from pain. Logic predicated that this was a perfectly normal reaction to receiving unexpected and tragic news, but she’d never really been one to go in for logic—emotion was what ruled her day to day.
Which was why she’d chosen the oblivion of alcohol to get her through the worst of her panic. The only person who loved her was dying, and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. She was going to be alone in the world again. Like when she was thirteen and thought she was an orphan—before Child Services had found Eleanora, who wasn’t really Lyse’s great-aunt (though that was what she’d asked Lyse to call her) but a distant relative on her mother’s side, and Lyse’s whole life had changed for the better.
Lyse shut her eyes, the knot in her throat abating slowly—very slowly—as she tried not to think anymore, to make her mind a blank slate. Somewhere in the middle of this losing battle, she must have fallen asleep, because soon she began to dream. The visions in her head were raw and vivid, full of familiar smells and sounds, the colors bright and lurid. She might have believed she was fixed inside a strange alternate reality if some part of her hadn’t remembered she was flying forty thousand feet above the surface of the Earth.
In the dream she was a teenager again, walking through her old Echo Park neighborhood. There she moved like a ghost through overgrown gardens and derelict houses, visited dusty bodegas selling Santeria charms alongside bottled Mexican soda and Aqua Net hair spray, and stood on concrete retaining walls where shiny spray-painted tags that resembled Celtic knots sprung up like weeds to mark out rival gang territory.
She could taste the past in her mouth, smell it in the air around her as she wandered the streets and stairways of Laveta Terrace, Baxter, Clinton, and Curran, each stairwell a link to the landlocked hill homes that were built, so oddly, without street access. Sweat-soaked limbs and squeaking sneakers were her only companions as she trudged up and down the roughly curving hill streets.
Instinctively, she knew that the universe, and everything in it, was held together by webbing as fragile and sheer as the translucent filament of a spider’s home—that her past and present were inextricably linked and had been since the day she’d come to live with Eleanora.
Echo Park was calling her name. It was time to go home.
She woke up when the captain announced the flight would be landing ten minutes early. She was snotty and bleary-eyed, and it felt as though she hadn’t gotten an ounce of rest in days.
She made her way off the airplane without incident, stopping in the ladies’ room to splash cold water on her face and stare at her reflection in the mirror. She looked like death warmed over: red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes framed by bruise-purple circles; pale cheeks; lips so chapped they were flaking.
As she left the bathroom and followed the influx of people heading toward the exit, she powered her cell phone on. It began to make frantic buzzing noises in her hand, and she stared down at the cracked screen, surprised to discover one new voice mail message and two text messages waiting for her. It was barely nine in the morning.
Both texts were from Carole: Where are you? I went by the house—we so NEED to talk about that FYI—but you’re MIA, so we can’t. And: What the hell, Lyse? Call me!
The voice mail was from Carole, too—in her emotional upheaval, Lyse had forgotten to call her best friend and business partner and tell her she wouldn’t be showing up at the nursery that morning. She felt terrible, like she’d breached some kind of best-friend trust by not informing Carole she was leaving town, and why.
As she cruised past security and hit the escalator, she texted Carole back: Eleanora called. Long story, but I’m in LA.
She leaned her weight against the rubber handrail as she pressed send, exhausted by this simple task, and then closed her eyes, losing herself in the din of conversation around her.
Lyse felt her mind untethering like a shiny copper penny snaking its way toward the bottom of a detergent-blue swimming pool. The inevitable had happened, and it was as cold and punishing as a lungful of chlorinated water.
“Lyse?”
She opened her eyes and was shocked to find Eleanora waiting for her at the bottom of the curved escalator.
“Eleanora?” she said, and dropped her bag onto the dirty airport floor.
She ran to her great-aunt, flinging her arms around this now-frail creature who’d once been so robust and full of life. She pulled Eleanora in as close as she dared, not wanting to crush her. The two women clung to each other—one a crone at the end of her days, the other a maiden, hale and full of future—and the world around them ceased to exist.
“I’ve missed you,” Eleanora whispered, the sandpaper scratch of her voice tickling Lyse’s ear.
“Me, too,” Lyse replied, meaning it.
Lost in the midst of this bittersweet moment was the realization that Lyse had not told Eleanora she was coming to Los Angeles.
* * *
“They’ve cut down two more trees, the bastards,” Eleanora noted, pointing out the pale brown stumps to Lyse as they rolled her raggedy metal cart down the uneven sidewalk, passing the last remnants of the majestic ficus trees that had once lined Echo Park Avenue. “Who cuts down living things, Lyse—creatures of the Earth that clean the air and give shade to weary travelers?”
The dark green foliage and elegant limbs Lyse had stood under, that had kept her dry from the rain and protected her from the scorching sun during the hottest of the summer months, were gone, replaced by empty dirt plots as barren as newly filled graves.
Lyse knew Eleanora hated backward behavior championed “in the name of progress.” A decade earlier, she would have led the protest, taking names and causing heads to roll, but these days, Lyse realized, her great-aunt was too tired to do any damage to the members of the city council.
“I’ll say a little prayer when I get home,” Eleanora said, patting Lyse’s arm as they walked. “Say a few words to send an ill wind their way, the unfeeling idiots.”
Lyse had to laugh. Even though she still felt that gnawing hollow in her middle, it was amazing how easily her fears could be dispelled by her great-aunt’s blunt New England sensibility.
“I wish all you had to do was ask God to kick their asses,” Lyse replied, running a hand through her chunky bangs so they stuck up like porcupine quills in the heat. Her thick, dark hair grew so fast her bangs were forever in need of a trim, and she was constantly having to shove them out of her eyes.
Southern California was dry—the
antithesis of Athens, Georgia, where she lived now, which was humidity city. She wished she’d remembered this fact and brought some heavy-duty lotion with her. Her skin was already beginning to feel dry and cracked. Besides, she was exhausted, and the lack of sleep contributed to the icky “too tight in her own skin” feeling she was having.
“You look tired,” Eleanora said, as if she were privy to Lyse’s thoughts. “You didn’t need to walk down here with me.”
Lyse shrugged and said offhandedly, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead—”
She immediately realized what she’d just said and clapped a hand over her mouth.
Eleanora laughed.
“Don’t censor yourself on my account. I’ve made my peace with Death, Lyse—and that’s all anyone can hope to do in these situations.”
Lyse nodded, but inside she was still kicking herself for her slip of the tongue.
“But here we are,” Eleanora said, turning her cart into the doorway of the tiny neighborhood bodega.
“Hola, Eleanora,” the birdlike woman behind the cash register sang brightly as Lyse followed Eleanora inside.
Together, they made their way to the back of the store, where the refrigerator case sat humming, cold bottles of red-labeled organic milk stacked neatly inside it.
“Hola yourself, Juana,” Eleanora replied, raising a skeletal hand in the bird woman’s direction as she opened the refrigerator, seeming to pause as she caught sight of her reflection in the glass-fronted case.
Lyse wondered if her great-aunt saw what she saw: sunken cheeks and bruised skin stretched taut over orbital bones. A wraith. The walking dead.
“Is that all today, Eleanora?” Juana asked, the question cutting through Lyse’s thoughts like a freshly sharpened knife.
Eleanora had already moved to the checkout. Lyse joined her and was surprised to see an iPad on the Formica countertop instead of a more traditional cash register. It was a surreal hint of technology in an otherwise old-fashioned setting.
