Ghost Sickness

by Amber Foxx

  He laid the small rectangle of beadwork on the table, a geometric design that reminded her of a sunrise over a mountain. “It’s for a hatband for my father. The pattern will repeat a lot. He’s got a big head.”

  This was said seriously; Mae didn’t think Ezra was making fun of his father’s large head. “It’s beautiful.”

  The boy resumed beading, took a bite of cornbread, and glanced at Mae. “Jamie said you went to see to Will Baca.”

  Mae drew in a breath. “He shouldn’t have told you.”

  “It’s okay. He only told me and Grandma. He was mad at you for doing it and he needed to talk.”

  Of course. Jamie had to talk to sort out his feelings. He’d made a mistake in mentioning what Will wanted kept private, but in a way Mae was glad of it. Now she could talk with Bessie about the healing.

  The back door opened and Bessie started down the steps. Ezra popped to his feet and helped her, though she had adequate assistance from her cane. She sat beside him, told him to finish his lunch and go in so she could talk with Mae. The dogs ambled around the house and lay under the table near Bessie’s feet.

  “Can I stay if I’m quiet?” Ezra asked. “I want to learn from what you teach her.”

  “All right,” Bessie said. “But you’ll need to go in and get us some coffee when it’s ready. And a little piece of that pie.”

  Bessie folded her hands on the table. She spoke to Mae without looking at her, attentive yet focused inward. “I understand you helped one of our people.”

  “I tried.”

  Jamie opened the kitchen window and announced that coffee was ready. Ezra rose and went inside.

  Bessie spoke softly. “Is Jamie doing well now? He seems happy.”

  There was no simple answer to that question, but Bessie had to know that if she knew Jamie. “He’s working on it.”

  “Stan mentioned he’s got a gift, too. And that it came out just this summer.”

  “He doesn’t like using it.”

  “Jamie’s a late bloomer for a healer and a seer. It’s a lot for him to handle.”

  “I know. The only way he uses his gift is ...” Mae hoped the truth wouldn’t make Jamie sound silly. She respected his efforts to cope with an unwanted ability. “He practices on his cat.”

  “Good.” Bessie nodded. “Beginners should be careful.” She finally looked straight at Mae.

  Does she mean me, too?

  Ezra returned, carrying an old red metal tray bearing three mugs of black coffee, three forks, and three small plates with wedges of pie. Ezra served his grandmother first, served Mae next, and then set pie and coffee at his own place and sat to resume his beadwork, head bowed.

  “Thank you,” Mae said. “You’re a good host.”

  He ducked his head further.

  “He’s a good boy.” Bessie gazed at her grandson’s hands. “He’s been a traditional dancer since he could walk. He speaks our language. Knows all our traditions.”

  Mae said to the boy, “You’re lucky. My grandmother was a healer, but she didn’t get to teach me. I lost her when I was a little younger than you.”

  He nodded, barely glancing at her. Mae took a sip of coffee and wondered if what she said had been wrong. It had sounded sort of poor me, and she hadn’t meant it to. Rather, she’d meant to acknowledge the reason Bessie had been telling her about Ezra’s training—the contrast.

  “One of the medicine men is teaching Ezra,” Bessie said. “He’s a forecaster. He’s better than the weather channel.” Her eyes twinkled. She patted his arm and rested her hand there, her face growing serious. “He dreams things that are coming.”

  He dipped into a plastic box for a new bead and threaded it, his thick fingers precise and agile. “She knows.”

  Bessie drank her coffee and studied him. “When you dreamed that thing that happened, you didn’t talk to me about it.”

  He shook his head and added another bead. “I told Zak.”

  “Could he help you understand it?”

  “No.”

  Bessie said to Mae, “I help him with the meanings sometimes. So does his teacher. He’ll learn to dream on purpose, with time. To answer questions. It’s a strong gift. But it’s not easy having it. It can make you seem special, maybe impress people you look up to, and that’s tempting. It’s not what the gift is for, though.”

  Ezra bit his lip and nodded. Bessie let the silence sit. She turned toward Mae. “You said your grandmother didn’t teach you. Who did?”

  “Nobody, really.” Mae took a nibble of pie, found the flavor peculiar, and washed it down with coffee to get rid of the taste. “I had one lesson. Mostly I learned from books. Bernadette helped me choose what to read and made me practice, so I had some guidance but not a teacher. And once in a while, I feel my Granma’s spirit helping me.”

  Ezra squirmed. “I wouldn’t want a dead person talking to me.”

  “I don’t mind,” Mae reassured him. “It’s not scary or anything.”

  Bessie said, “White people have different ideas about the dead. They say their names. Keep all their things. They don’t get ghost sickness.”

  The boy frowned, poked at his salad, gave up and took a bite of pie. “Why not?”

  “The spirit world is all the same place, but we use different routes through it.”

  In the quiet that followed, Bessie ate pie and drank coffee, watching as Ezra wove beads into the hatband. He slid his work in progress around for Mae to look at again. He had added a row of sky-blue beads on either side of the abstract sunrise. She studied it, told him she liked it, and he took it back.

  Bessie spoke to her. “You ran in the race and watched the parade. You went to the hospital and now you’re back here already. That was quick for a healing.”

  “What I do is pretty quick. That’s why Will wanted me.”

  “Is that a good reason?”

  Of course not. Mae blushed. “Most people ask me to help them for other reasons than being fast.”

  “I’m sure they do. But we’re talking about this person. Do you think you helped him?”

  “I might have, yes. But I have visions sometimes while I’m finding the root of a problem, and I saw a whole lot of his past. I saw him do something wrong. I wanted to ask you about this. I only aim to heal the person, but I end up seeing some of their problems even if I don’t want to.”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “Maybe half the time. I can’t tell what to expect when I start.”

  Bessie took a moment. “So you can’t stop these visions.”

  “No, ma’am. I mean, Bessie.” Mae couldn’t remember when she’d last felt this inadequate. “I guess I’m not as ready to heal people as I thought. What would you have done if Will asked you to help him?”

  “I would talk with him a long time first. Pray with him. Be sure he was ready to make peace with people he’d done wrong to. That he had a plan for his life. We’d do that while he was still getting well in his body. Then, when he was able, I’d have him build the sweat house himself and we’d do the ceremony. We might do two or three sweats if he had a lot of problems. A lot of places where he’d been hurt and had hurt people.”

  Mae thought of all the effort Jamie put into healing himself, and how long a process it was. Bessie’s ideas of healing were equally demanding. Mae had let Will be lazy. “I wonder if I really helped him or just made him feel good.”

  “I’m sure you helped.” Bessie reached down and fondled a dog, provoking a deep canine sigh from under the table. “But you might have healed him backwards. He feels good now, but he’s still going to have to do all that work if he wants to keep feeling good. He didn’t get out of it.”

  “Do you mean he’ll deal with these things I learned about him?”

  “He’ll have to. You see things like that, you stir them up. Maybe that’s why you have those visions. Truth doesn’t want you to stop it. It wants you to stir it up.”

  “Like my dreams,” Ezra said. “It’s like ...
” He glanced at his grandmother, hesitating.

  “Go ahead, Ezra. Let me see if you understand.”

  “Mae sees things people need to deal with in their past or that people need to know from the past. And I see things people need to know in the future. It’s like ...” He looked down at his beads, one finger stirring them in the little plastic box, and pulled out a black bead. “Like ... Sorry.” He dropped the bead and chose a blue one. “I had it. I can’t explain it.”

  Mae said, “I think you meant, it’s like the truth wants to show up. Whether anybody invites it or not.”

  Bessie nodded. “The spirits use you. You’re not supposed to stop those visions, any more than Ezra should try to stop his dreams.”

  Mae thought of the visions she had on purpose. Were spirits still using her then, or was she on her own? Truth could hurt people, in small ways like her telling Jamie she didn’t like camping, or in big ways like the talk Will must have had with Montana, but people couldn’t heal without it. Relationships couldn’t, either. Painful or not, truth wanted to be known.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In the evening at the ceremonial grounds, as the Ga’an and the clowns began their initial silent ritual, Jamie trailed Mae along the front row of the bleachers to join Bernadette and her family. He’d wanted to stay down by the arbor with his parents and Bessie to watch the beginning of the ceremony, but Mae had preferred to be with Bernadette. The relationship book had warned Jamie against arguing about little things. His discomfort around Zak wasn’t exactly a little thing, but he’d fucked up earlier with a trivial fuss. Mae had looked at him funny when he’d had two pieces of pie at lunch. On their way to their cars, he’d accused her of silent nagging. A stupid fight. The look had been because she hadn’t liked the pie. He owed her one less argument.

  Most of the Pena-Fatty-Tsilnothos family watched the ceremony in reverent silence. Zak, however, was hunched over his phone texting, and Melody was tending to Dean, who was having a meltdown, while Deanna lay on her back on the bench talking to herself and kicking her legs. Bernadette scooted closer to her oldest niece, making room between herself and Zak. Mae took the spot offered, and Jamie ended up side by side with Zak, who ignored his greeting. Jamie’s toes clenched and wriggled. He couldn’t leave things this way between them.

  “Jeezus. Be a fucking adult, will you?” he whispered. “We’re too old for this not-speaking crap.”

  Zak stood and walked a few feet away, focused on his text chat. Jamie stifled an exasperated noise.

  The line of dancers faced each of the four directions in turn, moving around the fire. At each quadrant’s stop, the clown ran to the end of the line and brought back dirt that he placed on the lead dancer’s foot. Sacred dirt? Jamie had never known what it meant, but he loved the gesture, that handful of earth. It seemed like an act of completion and grounding, and made him imagine taking Zak aside and placing an offering of dirt on his foot. Now can we talk?

  Accompanied by a silent row of drummers holding their instruments without playing them, the dancers moved toward the big tipi and did a similar ritual around it but without the blessing of dirt. Facing the tipi in a line, the dancers made soft, eerie hooting noises when they raised their lightning sticks. It usually sent a charge into Jamie, something that woke up an extraordinary energy in him, but he’d been in and out of shadows all day, and the magical sounds felt darkly alarming tonight.

  “Shit.” Zak jammed his phone into his pocket, and hurried down the steps from the bleachers with heavy, slamming footfalls. Melody watched but didn’t stir, hugging Dean in her lap. She had finally gotten the little boy to calm down. Jamie caught her eye and raised an eyebrow. She nodded, and Jamie followed Zak.

  He caught up with him easily. Zak had stopped for the Ga’an dancers on their fourth approach to the big tipi, out in the modern-world part of the grounds. The line of massively crowned, black-painted men angled between Orville Geronimo’s booth and the big tipi and repeated their ritual. Zak kept his distance, his shoulders tense, his rapt gaze occasionally broken by restless looks toward the vending area. Torn. He’d rather stay. The message couldn’t have been fire or rescue work. If it had been, Zak would have gone around the other way and run. No long conversation—and no inner conflict.

  When the dancers and the drummers moved back into the arena, Zak shot Jamie a warning look and loped away. Jamie’s hip felt like he was slamming bone on bone as he went after him. “Mel wants to know—”

  Zak stopped. “Are you her messenger?” Noise from the bounce house and the chatter of passersby blurred his words. “She’s got a phone. She can call me.”

  “Don’t think you noticed—she’s got her hands full with Dean.”

  Zak glared and folded his arms.

  “What’s so bloody awful about talking to me?” The depth of Jamie's hurt ambushed him. To his embarrassment, his voice cracked. “I haven’t done anything to you.”

  Zak threw up his hands. “You and Mae have to stay out of my business. Can you do that? Can you stop following me around?”

  “Can you stop acting like a fucking criminal? I only asked where you’re going.”

  “I told you.” Zak stepped closer and lowered his voice. Though quieter, he was no less angry, his words the hissing escape of a substance under pressure. “It’s something Mel can’t know about. If I tell you, you’ll tell her. Then she’ll tell her sisters.” He winced as if this idea had struck him painfully. “Shit.” He glanced toward the vending area, then back at Jamie. “I’ve got enough to deal with as it is.”

  Reno stepped out of his father’s booth and approached Zak, speaking in Apache. Zak answered and then disappeared down a side aisle, the one where David and Shelli were located. Reno returned to the booth, took down a small painting with a sold sign on it and slid it into a box. Orville was talking with a customer, but broke off to ask his son something. Reno replied and poured packing peanuts into the box from a plastic bag. Jamie felt that he’d stepped into the middle of a quiet explosion.

  Reno’s little brothers strolled up, carrying trash bags and picker-uppers. Lifting their bags to show how full were—about halfway—they waved at Orville,

  He shook his head. “No money yet. They have to be full.”

  The boys wandered off toward the entrance, scanning the ground, chasing down a blown-away napkin. Jamie started down the aisle Zak had taken and encountered Letitia coming from it. She smiled as they almost collided.

  “Have you thought any more about that picture? I’d really like to shoot you.”

  “With a camera, I hope.”

  “Of course. Unless you do something to deserve the other.” Letitia gave him a wink and crossed to Orville’s booth.

  Jamie knew she’d been joking, but she’d been warning him, too. She might not aim a gun at him, but like Zak, she wanted him to back off.

  Reno sealed the box with the painting in it and offered to carry it to her car. She accepted as if she were surprised at his kindness, gushing a little too strongly. Another tangent of that subtle explosion, another trail from whatever piece of fireworks had gone off. She didn’t need help with that little box. They’re up to something.

  Trying not to seem nosy, Jamie approached David and Shelli’s booth with as little show of concern as he could. Zak was leaning on their counter, talking softly while David rearranged the pottery display. Shelli sat in a camp chair with a shawl over her shoulders almost hiding baby Star nursing at her breast. No sign of any haste or worry, but Zak’s posture and near-whispering suggested secrecy. He drew back abruptly as David grinned and waved Jamie over. “Haven’t seen you much. How’s your weekend going?”

  Jamie answered with “Mmm” and a right-left shrug. He juggled imaginary balls, dropped one and watched it roll away, and then dropped the rest. “Yours?”

  “Excellent. We sold some of our best pieces. I love tourists.”

  David had moved all the inexpensive items to the table at the back of the booth and was in the process
of setting the more expensive ones prominently at the front. He arranged a double vase and a swooping bowl of Shelli’s golden micaceous ware on either side of one of his exquisitely painted little pots featuring a hummingbird in black and brown on a white background.

  “You like that?” David asked. Zak frowned at him and gave a tiny shake of his head. David continued, unaffected. “Hummingbirds are for good luck.”

  “I could use some.” Jamie glanced pointedly at Zak. “Been a fucked-up couple of days. Why are they lucky?”

  “I don’t know. Just a tradition.”

  Shelli said, “I read in some bird article about how they can do all sorts of things other birds can’t. Not just hovering.” Deftly slipping the shawl over her bosom, she lifted her baby to a burping position over a small towel on her shoulder. “Did you know they can fly backwards?”

  “That’s weird. Do they ever land?”

  “They perch.” Shelli stood and patted Star, who responded with a burp of milky drizzle. “But they can’t walk. Their feet are underdeveloped.”

  Weirder still. David placed a parrot pot next to the hummingbird pot, reminding Jamie of Placido’s fate, and oddly, of the bird’s agile gray feet walking up his arm to his shoulder.

  Shelli asked, “Can you take Star while I button up?”

  David took his daughter and held her at eye level, making silly faces and noises at her. While Shelli turned her back and adjusted her clothes, Jamie rotated the parrot pot and found an identical bird on the other side. He felt Zak’s eyes on him. Jamie turned the pot over and read the price. “Jeezus. I should get this. Cheaper than a real parrot.”

  The joke made him sad and he set the pot down. Zak shot a questioning look at Shelli. She made a small gesture with her fingers, spreading them as if smoothing something down just above the counter, like she was urging him to calm down and act like there wasn’t a problem.

  What was the problem? Why was Zak still standing there? What had he been telling them? Can’t I just ask them?