Ghost Sickness

by Amber Foxx

  Mae rolled two sets of clean clothes, one for her and one for Jamie, into a tight bundle which she somehow crammed into the little bag, though the zipper didn’t quite close. “Bernadette’s getting her car. She’s gonna take him to his granma’s place.”

  “I’d rather come with you,” Ezra said.

  Mae gave Jamie a look, shaking her head. Did that mean she didn’t want Ezra around? Jamie started to ask, but Mae nudged him and they crawled out of the tent. She said to Ezra, “We’d love to have you hang out with us, but Bernadette and your granma want some time with you.”

  “They’ll want to talk about my dreams.”

  “Don’t you think you need to?”

  “I already did. With Jamie.”

  Adult pressure. Jamie felt it squeezing him and it wasn’t even him that was being pressed. “Yeah. Man-to-man heart-to-heart. “

  Bernadette’s black Escort pulled up on the road near the campground. She waved to Ezra.

  “I think you should go,” Mae said. He didn’t move. She added, “But it was good that you talked with Jamie first.”

  “Okay.” With a heavy sigh, Ezra turned, shambling off to join Bernadette.

  Jamie called after him. “Where’re your manners, mate?”

  The boy stopped and fidgeted, his chin tucked at an angle, as if undecided about raising his head enough to make eye contact. “’Bye.”

  “And?”

  “It was nice to meet you, Mae.”

  “That’s better. Hooroo, then. Catcha.”

  On the way to Zak and Melody’s house, Jamie watched the little black car zip up the access road and turn onto 70. Maybe Mae had been right to make Ezra go, but the exchange had felt wrong to Jamie. As if she’d taken over for him. “That what it’ll be like when we have kids?”

  “Whoa, sugar. Can we back up a little?”

  “Y’know, you being the one that knows best. Like, ‘Your dad’s nice but he’s soft on you. Don’t mind what he says.’ ”

  Mae moved the bath bag to her other side and took hold of Jamie’s hand. “Bernadette told me Ezra’s training to be a medicine man. That’s big. I’m not getting in the way of that. My granma died when I was ten, and she was a healer who could’ve taught me if she’d been around. I didn’t meet Bernadette until I was twenty-six and she was the first person who ever respected my gift or tried to help me use it. That boy is lucky. He’s already had more teaching than I have and he’s only twelve—”

  “Only twelve. Yeah. People need to give him a break.”

  “I bet you were taking voice lessons and flute lessons when you were his age. Didn’t your folks have to push you to practice sometimes?”

  “That was music, not seeing the fucking future.”

  “I’m talking about his family knowing what he needs. We’re not making decisions like we’re his mama and daddy. How did you jump to that parents thing?”

  “You acted like a mum with all the answers. Made me see us with our kids, y’know? And you acting like that.”

  Mae changed her hand clasp, intertwining fingers. “I haven’t got that far. Seeing us with kids.”

  “C’mon. You have to have thought about it.”

  “I really haven’t. I’m still getting to know you. Getting to know how we work as a couple.”

  Jamie felt as if she’d stepped on him. He tried to talk himself out of it. Mae didn’t mean to reject him, she just wasn’t imaginative. No. She was, but she used her imagination for things like picturing how the inside of a knee joint worked. She didn’t fantasize. Jamie had already ventured far into the future, but she was studying their relationship like love was science before she made plans.

  “Does that mean ... you’re not sure about me?”

  She pulled him into a hug so suddenly the bath bag whacked him in the back. “Sugar, I am sure I love you.” Her cheek pressed to his cheek. “And I know you love me. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves on the rest, okay?”

  Halfway reassured, Jamie kissed her, held her a while longer, and she broke the embrace to resume their progress toward the blue house.

  When he opened the door, Jamie felt slightly sick. The living room was in even greater chaos than it had been the night before, strewn with toys, breakfast dishes, children’s food-stained shirts and pants, tiny stray socks, magazines, Misty’s motorcycle jacket and boots, and Zak’s running shoes as well as crusted-over party dishes.

  “Bloody hell. How can anyone live like this?”

  “It’s what happens when your young’uns start walking. You can’t keep up with anything until they’re old enough to help you. Especially if your husband doesn’t help out. Mine did, and it was still like chasing my tail.”

  “Think that party had as much to do with it as the kids.”

  “I bet it did.” Mae started gathering dishes from the coffee table. “Zak gave a party she didn’t want and left it for her to clean up.”

  “You make him sound like a pig. He’s not. I mean, he fucked up, but ...”

  “But what? Am I wrong? Isn’t that what he did?”

  “Reckon. But he’s my mate, y’know? I don’t want you to hate him.”

  “I’ll try not to. But it’s kinda hard to like him.”

  Jamie’s plans to cook a good meal for his friends faded. He couldn’t picture them sitting down together to enjoy it. They probably weren’t even speaking to each other. He helped Mae collect the dirty dishes and they carried them to the kitchen, where they cleared more glasses from the dining table, plastic tumblers with superhero pictures on the sides and stale traces of alcohol in the bottoms. A dinosaur sippy cup with juice in it sat in one of the chairs. Jamie put it in the fridge.

  “Wonder if Will was off his face when Zak told him about Ezra’s dream.”

  Mae filled the sink and began washing the dishes. “Would he get drunk before a rodeo?”

  “He did. Saw him here last night.”

  “A professional athlete should know better than to compete when he’s got a hangover. I’m sorry he got hurt and I hope he’s okay, but if he drank a lot he was kinda asking for trouble.” She scrubbed at a bowl with something stuck to it. “Misty says that’s what he is. Trouble times ten.”

  “Yeah.” Jamie explored drawers until he found a clean dish towel. “Surprised Zak even invited him.”

  “Really? I thought Will was a party guy.”

  “Yeah, but Zak doesn’t like him. Can’t say I blame him. Baca’s a useless bastard. Think they’re over their old high school drama, but they used to be the fucking Mescalero soap opera. Tana was the good kid nobody noticed, and Mel was the wild one all the blokes wanted. Will and Zak were both really into her, but Zak won. Tana was Will’s rebound. She’d been hanging around waiting for him. Like someone was going to drop her a crumb.”

  “I swear, the Chino sisters have got the worst judgment about men. She’s marrying Melody’s reject?”

  “Not all the sisters. Tana, yeah. Marrying Will. Jeezus. Zak hopes it never happens.”

  They washed and dried dishes without talking for a while, then Mae asked, “Do you think he even told Will about Ezra’s dream?”

  “Of course he did. Zak believes in that kind of thing.”

  “If he had, you’d think Will would have been more careful. Being struck by lightning is scary.”

  “Maybe not if you’re Apache. Look at the Ga’an dancers, all the lightning imagery.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Dunno. Doesn’t matter. Point is, Zak might not think ‘struck by lightning’ is bad news for Will. Could be some kind of blessing. Anyway, who in bloody hell would think it meant a bull named Thunderstruck?”

  “Will. As soon as he knew which bull he was riding.”

  “Unless he got too drunk to remember.”

  “Or someone who doesn’t want him for a brother-in-law didn’t give him the word.”

  “Jeezus.” Jamie stacked clean dry bowls with a clatter. “That’s like saying Zak wished Will was dead.”

>   “Sorry.” Mae pulled the plug in the sink and the water began to gurgle. “But if he doesn’t like him—”

  “He wouldn’t give him good news. But if he thought it was death, fuck, Zak’s all about saving lives. I’ve heard him say he wishes Will was anywhere but in Mescalero or in Montana—” Jamie caught Mae’s reluctant twist of a smile, like she didn’t want Zak’s joke to be funny when it was. “Yeah, he really said that. But he wouldn’t want him dead.”

  “If you say so.” Mae dried her hands. “Don’t forget you’re gonna ask Zak about the party and the secrets and everything. You’ve got a good opening with the fact that he invited Will.”

  “Jeezus.” Jamie’s nerves tightened. “You telling me what to say?”

  “Sugar, I can hear you now. ‘What in bloody hell got into you, mate? You never serve any fucking grog and then you had this bloke you don’t like here drinking it.’ ”

  Startled out of his annoyance, Jamie let out a loud snort-laugh and dropped back into a slightly sticky chair. “And you say you’re still getting to know me.”

  *****

  Instead of cooking, Mae suggested they finish cleaning up the mess. She could tell the process troubled Jamie. He grew more and more subdued, quiet except for a few unhappy observations. As they worked on the living room, he mumbled, “Jeezus. Whoever brought the kids back this morning must have thought Mel relapsed.” And when they brought clothes and shoes to the bedroom, he stopped and stared at the bed. “Fuck. Looks like only one person slept in it.”

  Mae was affected, too, but in a different way. She didn’t know Zak and Melody well enough to be as sensitive to problems in their marriage, but she worried how it was affecting the twins. Her stepdaughters had noticed the tension between her and Hubert, no matter how hard they’d tried to hide it.

  Bringing the children’s toys to their room and collecting their clothes for the laundry filled her with unexpected longing for her girls. She didn’t mention it to Jamie, though, afraid he would misunderstand.

  When they’d finished and finally showered, he called Zak and left a message that he needed to talk with him. They dropped the bath bag at Jamie’s tent and began walking uphill to the powwow.

  Mae said, “I guess it’s too soon to know anything about Will.”

  “Reckon. Hope he makes it. Not that I like him any better than Zak does, but still, y’know? Don’t want him dead. And I’m worried for Mel and Montana. And Ezra. He’ll be traumatized if Will dies.”

  Jamie was right. Ezra, with his stubborn guilt over failing to warn the cowboy, needed Will Baca to survive. Despite Jamie’s confidence in Zak, Mae couldn’t help suspecting he had been the one to fail Will, not Ezra.

  Maybe, though he wouldn’t admit it, Jamie was thinking the same thing. They passed the rest of the walk in what was for him an unusually long silence. Mae put her arm around him, and he reciprocated, but remained under a mood cloud.

  He finally brightened when they reached the vending area, steering Mae down a side aisle toward the pottery booth. “C’mon. Want you meet some friends from Santa Fe. Well, from Pojoaque and Acoma originally. Live in Santa Fe now. I think. Work there, anyway.”

  “They’re your friends and you don’t know where they live?"

  “I see ’em at their day jobs. David’s at Whole Foods and Shelli’s at the Exotic Aviary. She would have sold me your bird. If, y’know ... if you’d wanted one.”

  “The lady with the parrot feather earrings?”

  “Yeah. You talk to her already?”

  “No. I just noticed the ones she was wearing yesterday. It was right after Orville had told me he and his first wife had a hyacinth macaw, and your friend had those long blue feathers on.”

  When Mae and Jamie reached the booth, the young woman with blue-streaked hair was crouched over a blanket on the ground behind the counter, cooing while she did something to a baby. The infant was hidden by her body except for two chubby brown feet kicking in the air. She dropped a diaper into a trash bag and resumed making mothering noises over the child.

  An Apache woman on a shopping spree, plastic bags hanging off her arms, was talking with a short rotund young man with long, shining braids. He had deep-set eyes over a sharp nose that had a dent at the bridge as if someone had been making him from clay and pushed too hard, features that gave his face a serious look even when he smiled.

  “You have more of those earrings you had yesterday?” the shopper asked.

  He indicated a black velvet tray full of earrings made of tiny disks of pottery painted with delicate designs in black, white, and brown. Corn. Hummingbirds. Parrots. “This is what we have.”

  “No, I mean the feather ones.”

  His wife rose, holding a large baby in a pink dress. The child’s hair stuck straight up, and she had her mother’s thick furry black eyebrows in what was otherwise a baby version of her father’s face. Mae found something charming about such a funny-looking infant and guessed that Jamie did, too. He was already making faces and chattering happy nonsense at the child.

  “I’m sorry,” the young woman said to the customer. “I don’t have any left.”

  “You had plenty. You sold all of those? Those big ones were thirty-five dollars.”

  “They went fast.” She offered the dissatisfied woman a discount on the pottery earrings, but the shopper left without buying. The blue-haired vendor shrugged and turned to Jamie. “Hi.” She beamed at him. “You haven’t met our baby. This is Star. Isn’t she something? You want to hold her?”

  Jamie took her, regarding her odd little face as if she were beautiful. For a moment he simply held her, then shifted her to one arm and slowly stroked her eyebrows with one gentle finger. She burst into a wild, juicy giggle. He looked at Mae, his eyes full of tenderness and awe, then fell back to absorption in the baby.

  Look at him. He wants to be a daddy. Mae felt a pang of sadness for him. Didn’t he realize how unready he was? His last major depressive episode was only four months ago, and his last debilitating panic attack far more recent. He still battled anxiety daily. Though he had all the love in the world to give, it might be years before he was stable enough for marriage and parenting.

  “Is this your girlfriend?” the child’s mother asked.

  “Yeah. Sorry.” Jamie looked up. “Shelli and David, this is the love of my life, Mae Martin.”

  Mae said, “Nice to meet you.”

  The Indian couple nodded, smiled, and scanned the passersby. Not interested in getting to know her? Desperate for customers? For people Jamie had made friends with while talking at their workplaces, they weren’t as outgoing as Mae expected—towards her, anyway. Shelli had been delighted to see Jamie and show him her baby. He was babbling at Star again, oblivious to the lack of conversation.

  Mae made an effort at small talk, saying to Shelli, “You had nice feather earrings on yesterday. I’m sorry I missed the ones that sold out. Do you get the feathers from the parrot store?”

  Shelli paused before answering. “I used to collect the ones they shed. When I worked there.”

  “What?” Jamie looked stunned. “When’d you leave?”

  Shelli and David exchanged glances. She said, “I got fired. A couple of weeks ago. Right after the last time you were in. I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry? Whoever fired you should be sorry. How could they let you go? You were so good there.”

  “I lost a couple of birds.” She straightened her golden pots into a neater row. “It was a freak accident. I had the back door open like we sometimes do when the weather’s nice. You know how the shop’s set up. The parrot room doesn’t go directly to that door. And they stay in their room unless we bring them out. But they were out of their cages, the ones that wanted to be, and I had Placido riding around on my shoulder—I’m so sorry. Bouquet, the hyacinth, took off. I don’t know what made her do that. When she went flapping through, I couldn’t just grab her—that’s a monster bird. And you know how Placido is, every bird’s friend. H
e followed her. We keep the wing feathers trimmed a little so they can’t get much height when they fly, so I should’ve be able to catch them, but when I got outside, they were gone. I don’t know what happened. We put out lost and found ads and some good rewards—two hundred dollars for each bird. No one brought them back. The owner thinks I stole them when I closed up. He doesn’t believe they flew away.”

  Neither did Mae. The story struck her as somehow implausible, though it had no apparent holes in it. Maybe that was the problem. It was too detailed, full of information Jamie didn’t need, like the layout of the store. When Mack had lied to Mae about where he’d been and what he’d been doing, she could always tell because his stories were polished and rehearsed. Of course, Shelli might be telling the truth for the umpteenth time, making her sound over-prepared.

  Did Jamie think she was lying? His expression was hard to read—frowning, mouth open as if stuck on words that couldn’t come out.

  “Placido?” he said finally. Wounded. Like the bird had betrayed him. “Jeezus. That’s awful.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Not your fault.” Jamie looked down and cuddled the baby. “You must miss the birds.”

  “I do,” Shelli said. “You know how much I love parrots, and we never could afford one.”

  Couldn’t afford one? A troubling thought hit Mae. She guessed that Placido had been intended for her. How expensive a pet had Jamie almost bought her? She tried to keep her tone casual. “You said the reward was two hundred dollars. What do the birds cost?”

  “The medium-to-small ones are in the sixteen-to-eighteen hundred range.”

  Mae took a sharp in-breath. Her jaw dropped. Jamie wriggled his shoulders in a small version of his evasive right-left shrug and gave her a smile, that flash of brightness he put on when he wanted to be liked or forgiven. The smile’s light didn’t reach his eyes. What she saw there was sadness.

  He loved that parrot. Mae didn’t know how she could feel both sympathy and frustration, but she did. Jamie meant so well and yet he couldn’t tell the difference between what would make him happy and what would make her happy, as if their needs and feelings were the same, and he’d been ready to spend close to two thousand dollars on that mistake.