by Lyndsay Faye
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” Robin rocks on his heels, golden eyes twinkling. “Fortunes are grown from the mulch of broken hearts. Well. Misfortunes, rather. Made several myself.”
“Misfortunes or broken hearts?”
His teeth when he smiles are predatory. “Only offering you a piece of the pie, what?”
Lia flees. She nearly collides with Maw-maw in the kitchen, the older woman holding a tea tray with a mad gleam in her eyes.
“Sausage puff?” Maw-maw offers.
The hall is only three yards off. The distance passes like the Sahara. A drink, I need a drink. She could have swallowed every drop of Ben for the rest of her life and still found space in her belly for a pint of whiskey. She remembers biting skinny hip bones, choking him eagerly down, everything in her brain quiet for the blessed seconds that were only about breath and love. Ben in awe, always in awe, that she wanted to. And she did. Ben might have been a sarcastic bastard at times, and a morose lump at others.
But he was also the single most generous person Lia had ever encountered. And for Lia or for their friend Horatio, he’d have walked into the middle of the Long Island Expressway.
When she reaches the stairwell leading down to the shop, standing there bereft with a sketchbook under her elbow, she realizes that she desperately needs a specific task.
Tasks are very important.
Enough tasks in a row, and Lia will stop feeling this way.
Jessica Anne Kowalski.
Her rapey ex-boyfriend is not going to eliminate himself.
She charges down the stairs, past where the sign is flipped to COME AGAIN PLEASE, and down the claustrophobic, dim metal flight to the flower storage and deliveries basement. The wedding vases live here, the chicken wire and floral tape, the candleholders, the water buckets for armfuls of larkspur and cherry blossom and iris and much stranger plants.
LARKSPUR: Flower to lift the heavy spirit, raise hope, loosen the tongue for laughter.
CHERRY BLOSSOM: Impermanence in Japanese culture, useful for changing streak of bad luck or unwanted situations.
IRIS: Named for the Greek goddess who linked the heavens and the earth by means of the rainbow; planted over women’s graves as a beacon to guide them to the afterlife. Nothing more powerful for ensuring that your message reaches its addressee.
Oh, and the altar. The altar lives here, too.
From a few yards away, it just looks like someone with a very strange aesthetic styled a table. A glass vase contains no flowers, but instead anisette liqueur—licorice floods the air whenever one of the sisters tops up the heart of the shrine. But when you come closer, things get pretty weird. Eight cups of plain water surround the central chalice. That would still look like décor, maybe, without the shallow abalone shell, a dish of birdseed with satiny feathers sticking out, the husk of a cockroach, the skeleton of a mouse.
There’s the symbol too, hanging above. It’s a pentagram. Inside the pentagram is a five-pointed star. Inside that star is another five-pointed star, and so on. Lia once tried to count them and afterward vowed never to let her eyes linger on the goddamn thing again. Sometimes Lia suspects there are infinitely smaller and smaller stars in the symbol. It reminds her of Ben trying to explain how since a black hole forces its tens of solar masses into technically zero space, it has literally torn a gash in the fabric of space-time.
Ben.
Ben, what are you doing right now?
Lia wishes she could cry. The way she started to upstairs. She loses the ability at the oddest times, when she needs a snot-drenched sob fest. Then a week later, she’ll watch a life insurance commercial and have a graphic meltdown.
The sisters can’t possibly know how it feels to be so craving alcohol that you start eyeing the antiseptic in the bathroom cabinet, calculating. Or to drop a wine bottle, break the neck, and still drink straight from it, just very carefully. And they don’t know how it feels to lose someone by accident, like a cell phone or a credit card.
The mantra returns, as certain as sunset.
Pick a card, any card, what’s the harm?
You killed them, you as good as killed all of them.
There are no excuses for the things that you’ve done.
Lia goes to the computer to look up Jessica Anne. They haven’t had an order this detailed in months now. Those who sense something mystic about the shop tend to drop coded words like sympathy or romance or get well, and the sisters always send them off contented. But this is going to get highly specific. Herbs, prayers, the smallest words etched along the thickest stems in the obscurest tongues. Moma has about two dozen oil blends stashed down here, and on days when she mixes them, the place is heady with myrrh, vetiver, almond, and lily of the valley.
Soft footsteps behind her. Fearing it’s Robin, Lia turns.
“We done pushed our lamb too hard, my sister,” Moma says sadly.
“Je suis désolée, sweet girl, truly so,” Mam’zelle apologizes with hand on heart.
Maw-maw stands with her arms crossed, nods.
And this, this is what sets Lia crying.
“There’s nothing to be said about my broken engagement.” Her face burns with searing tears. “I don’t remember anything, you know I don’t, I was supposed to be on a plane, bags packed, and then I almost fucking froze to death and then you dragged my useless carcass inside and nursed me and then four days had gone by without talking to Benjamin. Not even a text. I can’t talk about the worst thing I ever did when I can’t remember it.”
“Anything you have feelings about surely can be discussed,” Mam’zelle replies.
“This not-talking ain’t doing you no good, child, and you been doing it for two years.” Moma moves her braids behind her shoulder.
“Yes, well, I was catatonic when I arrived, so,” Lia whispers. “Maybe I still am. In a way.”
Occasionally she wonders why the sisters didn’t take her to an emergency room or call an ambulance. But nothing they do is normal, and Lia feels safer here than she ever has shaking till her bones clack on a hospital bed.
“That sketch you just finished, chère?” Mam’zelle points an elegant finger. “That is about your history. These two years you’ve kept your head down and fetched and carried from the market, and this is what we waited for.”
“That weren’t for no client.” Moma shakes her head. “That weren’t a dozen red roses with a splash of voodoo nights oil. That there who you really are. Gotta be shown, Lia, for you to be any use to you, use to us. Gotta be aired.”
“For Christ’s sake, why? I already lost everything. I can never go back to Ben, to my old life.”
“We got stakes in this our own damn selves. Trust in that. You ain’t got no fairy godmothers, Lia, believe me when I say.”
“But what is the point?”
“You gotta understand where you come from, baby girl, or how you can know where you aiming to get to?”
Lia laughs. “Where did I come from? I barely had a mother, my dad’s grief was like a straitjacket, we owe everything we have and are to another family, and I . . . I had secrets. Cruel ones. I had alcohol. It helped me to drown them. I had Ben, and my art, and now nothing.”
“That’s a whole lotta nothing to have to carry around on your back,” Moma observes. “Heavy load. Plenty enough nothing for a lifetime of talking over.”
“Fine,” Lia snaps. “You three couldn’t be any more mysterious, not if you walked around in Mardi Gras masks. Where do you come from?”
“I’m descended from French royalty and Negress slaves,” Mam’zelle answers, “the crème de la crème and the dirt under their feet. My ancestors were plantation men in tall silk hats and barefoot quadroons so beautiful they could stop your heart dead in your chest. That’s a lot of nothing on my plate too, chère. But all Creole stock were sorti de la cuisse de Jupiter, and Jupiter’s
thigh lives in me still.”
“I grew up with poor white Cajuns in the deep woods, me,” Moma replies. “Where I come from ain’t nobody recall, but they done taught me to fish for shrimps and oysters, cure sunstroke with willow tree branch and kidney stone with a swamp lily. Little black child belonged to everybody and nobody and some folk fed her and some folk whupped her and that’s a whole bag of nothing to carry around. But I can tell your future from which way the steam in your tea rises.”
“Devil shaped me from clay and fucked me to life with his red-hot tail,” Maw-maw rasps.
Her sisters’ hair stands on end.
“There ain’t no way you been taking them pills right!” Moma shouts.
“Maw-maw, quelle honte, have you been smoking the Moroccan again?” Mam’zelle cries.
“You talk sensible now, or you get on back upstairs!”
“Dieu me donne la force!”
“I come from nothing and going back to nothing,” Maw-maw sulks.
A collective sigh of relief sounds.
“That’s better—lord above.”
“Beg pardon for my sister, Lia, jamais have I seen her this bad.”
Lia laughs helplessly, the tears no longer burning her. She can breathe. She is sad, very sad, but she is also safe. She’s wearing an ivy coronet and this is all ridiculous. These sisters who aren’t really sisters, who talk like no one she’s ever heard. In fact, they talk like Lia imagines N’awlins residents spoke a hundred, two hundred years ago.
“All right,” she coughs. “I’ll keep sketching. But I had a shitty night, OK? No more chitchat about Ben.”
The sisters, comically contrite, nod as one.
“I, uh, came down here to study up on Jessica Anne Kowalski. We’re making her bouquet day after tomorrow, yes?”
“Mais oui, and we must do all we can for her, my sister,” Mam’zelle clucks.
“Oh, have I looked forward to this, sister mine,” Moma chuckles.
“I really can help you this time, then?” Lia hopes.
“You just try not helping me and see where it gets you.” Grinning ferally, Moma plants a kiss square in the middle of Lia’s brow.
Something knotted loosens inside her. It hurts, but a pain like moving a stiff muscle. Shaking a sleeping limb. Jessica Anne Kowalski deserves their help. Tasks are what’s needed, tasks are her friend, and these women saved her. And certainly these voodoo-infused bouquets are harmless objects, it’s impossible for them to have any real power, but the belief Jessica and others feel simply after laying that much cash on the table . . . it gives them confidence.
Nothing works better than an outrageously expensive product, so long as you trust that you got what you paid for.
Anyway, they’re works of art. And works of art genuinely can accomplish miracles.
Lia doesn’t feel happy. But she’s so much more settled by the time they’ve been consulting for half an hour about scents and charms that she nearly stops seeing Ben’s final handwritten letter to her. The sisters handed it over almost as soon as she woke up, retching. They didn’t say a word, just shook their heads. It’s been floating before her eyes like the afterimage of a photograph stared at too long and too longingly.
I loved you then. I love you now. I love you everywhere, and everywhen, and after what you did this time, I can never be with you again.
How am I ever going to recover from something like this?
HORATIO
There is enough
human suffering in you
to collapse a building . . .
—Robert M. Drake, “Enough Is Never Enough”
Horatio pokes a cylinder of eggplant rollatini he suspects was prepped last week. Italian food does well with a spot of refrigeration. But these ingredients are less infused and more . . . coagulated.
“Please stop being mad at me.” A miserable Benjamin sits opposite at a booth at the City Diner, an old haunt of his and Lia’s and sometimes Horatio’s, too. After-hours hash brown aromas and the clanking of pots fill the air. “I know I’m a complete piece of shit, but it’s soooooo painfully loud.”
A tall man wearing all black save for a ludicrously long white apron shuffles up, refilling acrid coffee. Ben keeps glancing at him, the way one might look at a curious zoo animal. The hoary old fellow has stark, tanned features. He puts Horatio in mind of those enormous scraggly seabirds that dive for fish.
“What’s the story about that one, then?” Horatio wonders when the server ambles off. “You persist in staring.”
“Lia and I used to come here, like, a lot,” Ben answers.
I know that, Horatio doesn’t say.
“We obsessed over where this guy was from. He’s not Muslim or Jewish, we once saw him eating an unedited Cobb salad. He always mumbles, but it’s no language we’d ever heard. Lia decided he was from a place called Bulvmania and made a whole map with French fry landmasses, ketchup war zones, parsley forests, torn-up Equal packet lakes, and salt and pepper beaches.”
Horatio smiles. A gush of sad fondness suffuses him. He always protected Lia like an older brother might, even when he wanted to borrow her skin for a disguise.
If there were a hell instead of accumulated goodnesses and evils, you would be heading there this very minute for that thought.
“Oh my god, that’s the first time your eyebrows have parted ways with your cheekbones in, like, an hour, thank you.” Benjamin pushes away half a club sandwich. “I never mean to hurt you.”
The fury returns, hot and humiliating, and Horatio clanks their plates together mid-table.
“Sorry, come again? You didn’t mean to ditch me while I was starkers, or fail to come back till ten at night, or be off your bloody gourd when you did?”
His friend collapses tragically. “It was an accident.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m kiiiind of sure it does, because people do not schedule panic attacks for right when they’re chatting with their moms about their dead dads and their taint stain uncles.”
“Sorry, carry on then with the vanishing and the general larking about, and I just won’t ever get angry about it. Would that suit?”
“None of this suits!”
“Yes, and I recall wanting to assist you, not wanting to come out of the loo with a towel over my knob only to find a wisp of air curling upward like a vanished cartoon character.”
“Oh yes, I asked for this to happen. I can even see the future and know impulsive decisions will work out badly.”
Horatio waves his hands like a referee stopping a football bloodbath. “When you’re like this, you’re . . . you’re awful. You’re dismissive and self-pitying and truly difficult, do you know that?”
“Everyone has been telling me I’m terrible company since I was four, so yes,” Benjamin snaps.
Horatio very nearly rolls his eyes. He knows his friend’s history the way he knows Leaves of Grass, but at some juncture in every person’s life, he believes, they must stop blaming spilt milk and traffic jams and yes, their own dodgy behavior, on what happened before they had reached double digits.
“Um. Listen please, every human in history is difficult at times, but you’re turning your version into something extraordinary. You aren’t a martyr or a devil or a saint, so if you can, stop sodding acting like any of them. Just own the mistake, apologize, and exist in the middle for as much as ten seconds.”
“As I mentioned to Mom earlier, I physically cannot always conform to societally acceptable parameters, so—”
“You might not always enjoy life, but absolutely everyone else feels the same way,” Horatio growls. “Sometimes it’s harder to be utterly brilliant and a bit mad, yes, but in other situations, it’s harder to be dense as a brick, so buck up.”
“Sure, pull up the bootstraps, as it were. Spoken like a very neurotypi
cal . . .” Ben pauses coldly to consider. “ ‘Pillock,’ I think is the word you would use. Derived from ‘pillicock,’ meaning dumb as a rooster? Yep.”
Horatio takes a calming breath, nodding in apology. “Forgive me, that was . . . quite horridly unfair. I am absurdly neurotypical. But, Benjamin, please. You can listen when I’m stroppy with you, say you’re sorry, not climb up and strap yourself to the rack, and bloody well carry on.”
“That’s the drill, then? You explode, I’m contrite, game over?”
“It isn’t a sodding game, and I’ve every right to be angry,” Horatio hisses. “And not just about this.”
Benjamin’s eyes widen almost comically. “You want to talk about that? In, like, a diner? Wow.”
“No, I want you to understand I’m this furious because I was worried sick. You want me to stop whinging? Fine, lovely. I don’t give a toss about you anymore.”
He drops his napkin over his plate while Benjamin gnaws a fry. Horatio feels his muscles uncoil. He’s broadening as he always does in America, wide shoulders winging outward. A Greek family a few booths away chatter among themselves. They remind him of his own kin, with an ache like sugar hitting a bad tooth. An elderly couple sit opposite, bowls of soup between them. To the right, a burly bearded man frowns ferociously at a newspaper. Horatio thinks he knows why his friends liked coming here. You could be anyone and not look out of place because City Diner wasn’t anyplace in the first place.
Where’s a better spot to feel perfectly at ease than nowhere?
“Do you see that, by the bar?” Horatio juts his chin.
Benjamin’s reddened eyes flick sideways. “Damn.”
The waiter sips a light beer as he sorts through his receipts.
“So, no restrictions on alcohol in Bulvmania. Could be a solid clue. Thank you.”
“Not a bother.”
“Horatio?”
“Hmm?”
“I could totally do that.”
“Sorry?”
“I’m gonna apologize to you without either nailing myself to a cross or hiding in a nuclear bunker. And I’m sorry for sneaking away to visit my awful, wonderful mother.”
