by Gina Linko
When I first spied the ornate cherrywood casket, a wave of guilt, slow and powerful, washed over me. I fought back the tears, and I dug my fingernails into my palms. This was why I was going to have to isolate myself. This was why I was not going to give in to my parents’ demands anymore. I had to quarantine this, whatever it was, firing up and coming to life in my chest. And I knew the first glance of that beautiful coffin would be forever burned into my psyche. Just like so many memories of Sophie. This was the why of it.
When the service was over, the procession began, the New Orleans–style funeral, with Granny’s casket being pulled by a horse-drawn carriage through the Quarter to her family crypt. We followed on foot through the streets, her family loaded down with flowers—calla lilies, her favorite—and Mia-Joy’s brother’s band played old, lilting hymns, with Stone on sax, accompanied by a tambourine, a snare drum, and a trio of gospel singers, call-and-answer style. There was an older gentleman with a bright white beard, a bald head, and the deepest bass voice, giving foundation to all the instruments. I watched him and tried to get lost in the music.
A hundred people, at least, walked in the procession, and I gladly hung back, with Mom giving me a few glances to make sure I was joining the group. I walked by myself, watching the old singer, trying not to let the guilt overpower me, trying to swallow back the urge to run away and hide.
When the parade strolled by the Union Passenger Terminal, it kicked on then, fiery and alive in my chest. I lost my footing for a second, and then I ducked into the station, deciding I couldn’t go to the cemetery, couldn’t do this anymore. Every cell in my body seemed to be alert, crackling with energy, as I hustled into the waiting area and collapsed in one of the sleek, wooden chairs. Could I possibly run? Just hop onto a train and get out of here?
I watched the seconds tick away on the large Art Deco clock above the ticket counter. Electrical?
I cracked my knuckles and read through the departure times. A ten-thirty train to Chicago was the first one going anywhere far. I could leave here. Although I wouldn’t be looking up any old friends, maybe I could visit Sophie’s grave before I decided where to go, what to do with myself—as if I could answer any of those questions. Ever.
It wouldn’t solve it. I knew that. I couldn’t run away from this.
I would just rest here for a minute and then walk home or catch a trolley, once I knew that the funeral procession had passed. I slunk inward and kept my eyes low, thinking. I thought about Annaliese and Cody back in Chicago. How easily Cody had let me shut him out after Sophie’s funeral. How hard Annaliese had worked to help me. How I wouldn’t let her.
I couldn’t dwell on it. I had been right to push them away.
Brahms. The same four measures, over and over. The deep bass accompaniment. A minor. Guilt.
Solitary confinement. That was the only answer.
Because even though I was sure of my curse, of my power, I couldn’t end it. I couldn’t end me. There was still too much inside me, too much of my mother’s daughter that could not contemplate that. I knew, deep down in that dark place of truth, that someday, maybe someday soon, I might be able to contemplate it, but not now. And for that I was grateful.
The air around me tightened and shifted in a tangible way, and I looked up, expecting something. I didn’t know what.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said under my breath, but there he was, striding right toward me. Rennick. He had already spotted me, and he waved, walking all confident and breezy.
I didn’t trust myself with any more interactions. When your own body betrays you in such a violent and deadly way, how can you trust anything about yourself? And that was me now, teetering, unsure, the rug forever pulled out from under me. A constant state of disorientation.
I had knocked my head pretty badly once on the diving board at Chaney Pool during swim practice and went under, and there had been a five-second span of time when I panicked. Couldn’t tell up from down, front from back.
That was like my life now.
I hurried into the women’s restroom. Was it a coincidence that Rennick was here? Or had he been looking for me? Had he been at the funeral?
I took my sweet time in the restroom—washed my hands, fiddled with my hair, read all the graffiti on the wall—hoping against hope that he would get the hint.
He didn’t.
The train station had become bustling while I wasted time in the bathroom. Several groups of what looked like day-care children and their chaperones had entered the station, as well as a large knot of older kids, all wearing orange T-shirts, some kind of field trip.
I scanned the room and there he was. Standing right by my chair, arms crossed, waiting.
I tightened my posture, balled my hands at my sides, hunched my shoulders. It was crowded. Beyond crowded. And I couldn’t touch anyone. I swore under my breath.
I had to get away. I skirted toward the nearest exit and found myself outside on the concrete sidewalk in front of the station. A small crowd stood in line near a hot dog vendor; a mom with a half-dozen kids walking in line with linked hands passed in front of me. I didn’t want to cut through the children, so I moved laterally.
“Hey!” I heard from behind me. I knew it was him. I turned left, tried to pretend I didn’t hear him.
I balled my fists a little bit tighter, and my nails burrowed into my palms. When I was finally clear of the children, I walked quickly toward the makeshift farmer’s market set up on the large lawn in front of the station, hoping to get lost in the crowd.
I was in so much of a hurry, I narrowly missed running straight into an elderly man using a walker. As I worked my way more slowly through the throng of people, with my hands balled at my sides, close to my hips—my normal stance—someone grabbed my arm. Low, near the wrist.
I gasped, frozen. “Don’t touch!”
It was Rennick, of course, and he looked at me peculiarly, but he didn’t let go right away. Just for a moment, he held my wrist. Long enough to let me know that he was in charge. Then he dropped it, leaned in close to me.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Corrine. But you have to listen to me.”
“No, you don’t understand. You can’t talk to me. I can’t be the—”
“I see the blue—the indigo—when I look at you,” he said, and then it was like the noise, the commotion, the world around us faded to gray. The bass of a nearby car radio, the couple speaking French beside us, the traffic sounds—they ceased to exist. It was just him and me standing there on the lawn, his eyes locked on me. I remembered the blue, the blinding indigo light on the rocks with Sophie. I had no doubt that this was what he was referring to.
My body slackened. I saw the edges of my vision get swimmy, begin to tunnel, but I pushed it back as quickly as it came.
“What do you know?” I said in a voice that I had intended to sound in charge but instead came out as nothing more than a squeak.
“Follow me.”
“No,” I answered, but then I was following him.
He led me farther into the farmers’ market, through the aisles of stalls, each one spilling over with brightly colored merchandise. There were too many people, too close and too loud. Before I knew it, we were at a standstill in front of a quasi voodoo booth, bearing gifts of gris-gris and Mardi Gras beads, tourist junk.
He grabbed my arm again, low near the wrist. “Come here.”
“No! Please!”
He gave me a look but didn’t let go. I yanked my arm violently, but his grip didn’t loosen.
“Please,” I whispered, terrified, his hold so close to my hand. My hand. The source of it all.
His brow furrowed, and he shook his head at me. Whereas he had seemed so nonthreatening before, so laid-back and friendly, now he was serious, forceful. “I’m not going to hurt you, Corrine,” he said again. “But you have to listen to me before you get on that train and I never see you again.”
“No, you don’t understand.” I tried to get myself thi
nking straight, but the pressure of his hand on my wrist, that physical touch, felt like a bomb about to blow up. “I don’t want to hurt you,” I said, getting my wits back a little. There was no way this stranger could know about Sophie, about me. “You have to let me go. Please. It’s dangerous for you. I’m not—”
“I see things,” he said in a low, stern voice. He looked at me for a second, that playful, lackadaisical smile of the Crawdaddy Shack now gone. His deep blue eyes bored into me. “I see things about people, Corrine.”
I tried to yank my hand away, but he held it still, and I didn’t know if it was just because I hadn’t been touched in so many months, if it had always felt so hot, or if it was just his touch—this touch—but my skin under his hand was burning. It didn’t hurt, not in a harmful way, but like the sun on your face in a swimming pool.
“Please,” I begged. “Don’t make me scream. Because I will. You seem nice enough.” I was speaking quickly, trying desperately to ignore the unhinged note in my voice. “Just let me go before you regret this.”
“Here, here we go,” he said, pulling me across the aisle toward a fisherman’s stand. He drew a five-dollar bill out of the back pocket of his jeans and laid it on the woman’s metal table. “Do you have anything that’s really fresh?”
The woman eyed his hand around my wrist just for the briefest of beats, but then she looked at me. I could’ve said something. I didn’t. So the woman turned to Rennick, answered him. “Fresh and tasty, whatcha got a hankerin’ for? Gator nuggets?”
“No.” He shook his head, drew me closer to him, hid our hands behind him. “I need something that just came in, a fresh catch. Just been dead for minutes, maybe less than an hour.”
She turned and took a few steps back toward some crates, a great big tin wash bin. “Trust me,” he said low. “You can’t not know this, Corrine. It’ll change everything.”
“Crawdads came in just a few minutes ago, some of them still snapping they claws.” She gestured toward the white bucket she held up.
“Two, please. Dead ones, okay?”
She took her time wrapping two crawdads in butcher paper. My abductor reached for them with his free hand. I yanked hard just as his attention waned, but he was too strong for me.
He pulled me back; it was no use. He moved us away from the stand.
“No!” I screamed at him, not caring who heard me. “No, please!” Tears were coming down my face now. I kicked him hard, once, twice, in the shin, but he didn’t seem to notice. He pulled me through the crowd, toward an old stone bench in front of the train station. He sat down and sat me down too. He ripped open the butcher paper with his teeth and grabbed one of the crawdads in his hands.
He opened the palm of my hand that he had been holding, and I could feel my heart beating in my neck, in the thud of my eardrums. I wondered briefly, sadly, if the curse, the poison, the death of me had traveled into him already, had affected him. I wondered how he would die. Would it be soon? Would it take a long time? Would it be painful?
He placed one of the crawdads in my open palm and closed my other hand around it. I heard sobbing and was surprised when I realized that it was me. “What are you doing?”
“Just focus on your hand, Corrine. Think about it.”
I thought about the dead crawdad. I thought about dead Sophie, Granny Lucy, Mia-Joy. I thought about this crazy stranger who thought maybe he could help this loony girl who everyone talked about. How he would soon be dead like this poor crawdad.
Why? I wanted to hit him. I was suddenly so intensely angry, furious at this kid. What gave him the right? “Asshole!” I yelped, and I tried to rip my hands away from his grip. But again, he just held on to me, a pained look on his face. Well, he would get his, I thought ruefully, but then I thought better of it. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t.
Here I sat, inexplicably, when I should’ve been in isolation. A crawdad in my hand instead. In my chest, under my ribs, a swirling heat came to life, and then my skin, every cell, awoke. The heat exploded, radiated from my middle to my limbs, my hands. Just like with Sophie.
My hands. I was powerless to stop it.
I opened my eyes when I felt it. It surged through me, out of me, around me. This coursing, burning current coming from my core, churning out into the rest of me. It was part of me, coming from me, but also alien and outside of me as well. It felt powerful and alive, but it was also unwieldy and reckless.
And there was the blue. Everything indigo. Rennick stared at me, smiling, expectant, his eyes wide. The crawdad’s antennae or claw or something tickled the inside of my closed hands. I realized then that Rennick’s hands were both cupped around mine, and we slowly opened our hands up, and the crawdad was moving, pinching. Alive.
I dropped it on the ground, watched it wriggle around.
“I knew it,” he said, reaching down to pick it up. “That is crazy! Holy shit!” He held the crawdad, looked at it in amazement. “I’m sorry to force you, but you had to find out. I knew someone else like you. Once. A long time ago. And I heard that you—”
“It wasn’t dead to begin with,” I said, disbelieving, shaking my head, watching the blue leave my vision in swirling inky puddles.
“It was.”
“This is some kind of trick. Who put you up to this?”
He furrowed his brow, leaned in close to me, said quietly, “You brought that thing back to life.”
I stood up and shook my head. I stepped away from him, pulled myself inward. This was some kind of joke. Some kind of cruel joke. “You don’t know anything.”
He stood, took a step closer to me. “I heard about your sister, Corrine. I Googled you and I—”
“You don’t know anything.”
He squinted at me. “I do,” he challenged.
And it was the weight of everything on me at that moment, the frustration, the guilt, the helplessness of not being able to do anything about anything, not being able to pull my arm away from this guy. He deserved it. I brought my knee up hard, right into his groin. “That’s for not letting me go.”
He doubled over, surprised, out of breath, and inexplicably laughing.
“Jerk,” I grumbled, and took off. I was hollowed out, unraveled.
I hailed a cab back to the Garden District. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee played its frenzied measures inside my brain. Beating its wings, its rhythm against my temples. I was fourteen before I really mastered that piece. It was designed to sound like chaos. To play like it. But it wasn’t.
He didn’t follow me back to my house.
I dragged myself up to my room and fell into bed, exhausted. I closed my eyes and the room spun. The world spun out of control around me. I concentrated on my breathing, slow, steady. My body ached, my nerve endings frayed and raw. I stripped down to my bra and underwear and lay on top of my covers. I was hot, too hot. My mind wanted to puzzle through everything that had happened, but my body wouldn’t let me. The exhaustion was ridiculous. My head felt heavy and fuzzy, full of cotton.
I fell asleep quickly. And I slept hard, dreaming of an indigo light, glowing, pulsating, coming for me in waves, each one getting closer. Ready to swallow me whole.
I woke sweaty and alarmed just as the indigo light reached me in my dream. I sat up with that airless feeling in my throat, as if I had just screamed. I took a few deep breaths and calmed myself down, noticing that the sun slanting into my room had the half-lit pink look of twilight. I watched the shadows of the pear tree dance on my bedroom ceiling. Their movements made me think of Gershwin and old Fred Astaire movies, the beautiful dancing sequences. Black and white. Rhythmic. Soothing. Mezzo piano. Quiet.
I pressed the palms of my hands together in front of my face as I sat there and tried to remember what it felt like to just touch someone that way, palm to palm. Did it always carry so much heat? Back in my before-life? When I gave high fives? When I held hands with Cody through the vintage horror movies on Friday nights at the Casablanca Theater? When I held on to
Sophie so I wouldn’t lose her at the mall?
That crawdad had to have been alive to start with, just unconscious, asleep, something. I was ninety-nine percent sure.
But I had felt something. I couldn’t discount it. That same kind of current, that same kind of buzzing beneath my skin, around my skin, enveloping me when I held that crawdad.
Who was he? This Rennick Lane? What did he know? And was there any possible way that he was right? That I had this power to resuscitate something recently dead?
It was a ridiculous question. Sophie.
I hadn’t resuscitated Sophie. I hadn’t helped her. I hadn’t done anything but ensure that she died, that she ceased to live. She would no longer thumb wrestle with my dad, plead for a dog, play video games with all the lights off, or beg me to read her the first Harry Potter one more time.
“But you have the best Hagrid voice!” she would tell me, giving me those puppy-dog eyes. And when that wouldn’t work, she would whistle through her teeth for me, that lonely little gap in her front teeth. It always made me laugh.
I threw my legs over the side of the bed, pulled on some clothes. The twitching movement of the crawdad in my palm seemed too near, too recent and real. I needed a reality check—something I had avoided for too long.
I went into my parents’ room and got out the album. When we moved here, Mom had set right to changing Sophie’s room into her home office so we wouldn’t have to be reminded by her favorite stuffed green lizard lying alone on her bedspread, her empty window seat, her glittery sunglasses sitting on her dresser. The room was empty of Sophie’s stuff now; it held a computer, a really cool glass-topped desk. A treadmill. None of us ever went in there anyway.
But my parents did look at the Sophie album. It had all of our favorite pictures of her through the years, through her nine years. Only nine years.
I never looked at it.
