by Dia Reeves
“Are you the one she’s looking for?”
Someone was sitting on the front row. A small person whose feet didn’t reach the floor, but not a child. Not with those wrinkles. And not a human. Not with those wings. Any other details were lost in the toxic whiteness.
“If I take you to her,” it said, its voice a sexless tremor, “she may reward me and let me eat your fingers. Come the rest of the way through, and give me your hand.”
As it hopped off the chair, Jimi was yanked backward.
As his eyes recovered and the color bled back into the world, he realized that Sister Judith had him by the scruff, and everyone was standing, crowding him.
“Get back. Give him some room.” Sister Judith let him go, but Jimi didn’t want to be let go, needed something rock solid like Sister Judith to anchor him.
“Did I imagine that?”
She steered Jimi into a chair. “I’m afraid not,”
“You disappeared!”
“Almost,” Sister Judith said, low and calm and in contrast with Carmin’s shouting. “You were fading.”
“Like Back to the Future! Dude, someone traveled back in time and is trying to erase your future!”
“Carmin, shut up.” Grandy pulled Jimi away from Sister Judith, clasping him to her bosom. “You poor boy. When Sister Judith grabbed for you that last time, I thought her hand would go straight through. You looked like a ghost!”
“See?” said Jimi, slightly muffled. He broke free of Grandy’s bosom. “Dez is haunting me. She did this yesterday at the rite, only I didn’t fade. Or maybe I did, but it happened so quick, I thought I imagined it, but I didn’t.”
Sister Judith was beyond confused. “Did you see her?”
“Some thing said she was looking for me. She did this, tried to drag me into the underworld so she could be with me. Now do you believe me?”
“You waited too long,” said Mr. de la Vega. “Held on and on instead of delivering her right away, and now your selfishness has poisoned her, turned her into a vengeful spirit. This is your fault.”
While Mrs. de la Vega tried to calm her husband, Sister Judith said, “Did you see her?”
“No. Everything was so bright and ghostly. My eyes hurt.”
“I don’t understand this.” Sister Judith said, examining the contents of the fountain as if for clues.
“That fountain.” Jimi stopped rubbing his eyes. “The other place had a fountain too, but it was full of blood. Or something. It was the only thing with any color.”
“Sounds like a sign to me,” Grandy said. “Did you bring all of Dez’s things for the fountain?”
“No.”
Everyone groaned.
“No wonder it didn’t work,” said Carmin. “You have to bring everything to a deliverance. Even I know that.”
“I didn’t think three things would matter.”
“They wouldn’t, normally,” said Sister Judith. “Any one item would do the trick, as it’s purely ceremonial. But just in case, we’ll leave these items in the fountain so the ritual will remain active. Take the final three items and douse them; immersion anywhere will suffice.”
“Won’t other people need to use the parish hall?” said Mrs. de la Vega. “We don’t want to be a bother.”
“I’ll have the fountain moved to my quarters next door, so that I can keep an eye on it. But, Jimi, don’t wait too long. If you are being haunted, the longer you wait to douse those items, the stronger her hold on you will become.”
“I’ll do it,” Jimi said. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
But two weeks later, the ritual remained incomplete.
Chapter 3
Are you ever going to call your tito?” Alexis asked, as if for the millionth time.
Jimi sat cross-legged in bed gazing intently at the screen of his laptop. “Gimme a sec.”
“I’ve given you ten thousand seconds.” Her long strand of black diamonds led the way, flashing in the dim light of his bedside lamp. She was a buyer at Ducane’s and always dressed as though she might have to go on display in the department store window at a moment’s notice.
She said, “It’s almost midnight in Santo Domingo. Your grandfather doesn’t turn sixty every day.”
“Yeah I know it’s horrible,” and then, under his breath, “What the hell is hypoxia?”
“Hypoxia is what happens when you don’t get enough oxygen, and sold to gypsies is what happens to boys who ignore their mothers. Is this my grapefruit spoon?” She grabbed it off his desk.
“Carmin stole it.”
“I’m not at all surprised.” She’d developed a low opinion of the Belrose family ever since César had married into it. “Is this what you used to blind that man?”
“Dez blinded him. Do you think I made that up?”
“Sister Judith said—”
“I know what she said, Ma.”
She winced. He’d taken to calling her Ma recently and loved how much she hated it.
“What are you working on that’s so engrossing?”
Jimi turned the laptop so that she couldn’t see, but Alexis was quick.
She recoiled from what was on the screen. “Would it kill you to look at porn like everyone else?”
“It’s just a guy who drowned to death. What’s wrong with that?”
“Is this what your two week hesitation has been about? Drowning?”
“I need to know what to expect; I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”
“It’s only metaphorical death, Jimi. Ceremonial.”
“People keep saying that. Say it again. Be nonchalant. It’s only my life on the line, nothing important.”
Alexis turned on the overhead light.
“Ow!”
“What?” He felt her trying to pull his hands from his eyes. “Let me see.”
She managed to pull down his hands and examine his watery eyes. “Now show me your teeth.”
Jimi almost laughed. “Gimme a break, Ma.”
“Show me!”
Alexis checked, and then after reassuring herself that he didn’t have fangs, she said, “Well, if it isn’t vampirism, it’s you being a baby. That’s my fault. I coddle you.”
“I didn’t know coddle meant ignore or berate in equal measures. I’m learning all sorts of things today.”
“Paul and I are going out to dinner tomorrow,” she said, ignoring him. “Come with us. It’s high time the three of us sat down and had a real talk. It’s a new school year, and there are monumental changes on the horizon. The living arrangements, for example, need a complete overhaul, and when the baby comes—”
“Look, Ma, I’ll call Tito in a second.” Jimi looked pointedly at the door.
“Am I being dismissed?”
“Yeah, and on your way out, turn off the light.”
Alexis went silent, as though she had the kind of feelings that could be hurt.
Jimi sighed. “Then stay, I don’t care.” He clicked open another page of dead bodies. “But you have to earn your keep. Obviously I’ll have to practice drowning, so what do you think is the best, least traumatizing way to breathe water? Through the mouth or the nose?”
“Are you asking me to help you decide how to kill yourself?”
“An educated guess—you went to college.”
“I’m calling your father.”
“Ma, relax. I just want to practice dying so that when it happens for real, I’ll be prepared.”
“The drowning isn’t real, you idiot,” she said, berating him. “What part of ‘ceremonial’ don’t you understand? I don’t want to hear any more about you practicing suicide.”
“It’s not suicide.”
“Stop fretting over the deliverance and destroy that letter and whatever else you kept. Sister Judith won’t let anything—”
“That letter?”
Alexis clammed up.
“You read it?”
“You’ve read my letters. That your father wrote to me, and that were a lot more inten
se than anything your mouse of a girlfriend ever wrote to you.”
“I was eight when I read your letters; I could barely read. You’re forty!”
“Let’s stay on topic, shall we?”
He grabbed his wallet off the night table and removed the letter he kept in it. “I’ll destroy it right now. You wanna watch, since you’re all up in my business anyway?”
“All three items would be more convincing.”
“I don’t have all three! I’m a product of a broken home—my possessions, my feelings, my loyalties are all divided. Like pie. And after this latest betrayal, you have the smallest slice.”
Alexis gestured at a pair of shoes he’d set aside to clean. “I’ll bring shoe polish so you can get started on those. Dinner’s in half an hour.”
“I have no interest in food.”
“It’s lasagna. And peach pie; I’ll give you the biggest slice.”
Jimi hated to give in, but Alexis’s peach pie was the stuff of legends. “I suppose I can allow that.”
“Good. And, Jimi, if you mention suicide in this house again, I really will sell you to gypsies. Now call your tito.”
Jimi did, to get her to shut up, and then after dinner, he called Sugar Lynn.
“Hey, sophomore.”
“What’s up, Jimi?”
“I want to drown myself tomorrow. For a little while, you know? To see what it feels like. Think you can do some of that CPR shit and bring me back?”
“Course I can,” Sugar Lynn said brightly. “Just tell me where.”
Chapter 4
Jimi arrived at the Nudoso the next day in the middle of a lukewarm summer shower. He rolled his bike to a stop on the same footbridge where the spy had had his eyes ripped out. Below, the Nudoso rushed by faster than it had yesterday, prettier with the rain dimpling its gray surface.
He had wanted to come early that morning, but he and Sugar Lynn were shameless overachievers and had to both leave early and stay late for extracurricular crap. Sugar Lynn had already texted that she wouldn’t arrive until five thirty.
Jimi stared at the water, the blackening sky, the wet wood of the bridge, but he didn’t sense Dez’s presence anywhere. He’d hoped he might feel her with him, feel something other than panic at the idea of inhaling water, but he only felt damp and hungry. He’d take Sugar Lynn to Smiley’s for cheeseburgers when she was done saving his life. Burgers made a great thank you.
“Just a thank you,” he said, removing Dez’s letter from his pocket and hunching over it to protect it from the rain. “A thank you, not a date.”
He read:
It wasn’t the record. Buy me two more, buy me ten. I’m not mad that you broke my record. I’m mad because it was on the floor. Why was it on the floor? I gave you something so dear to me, I did explain that, right? You put it on the floor and stepped on it. Is that where the things I care about belong? Under your feet?
You put my daughter’s things in a garbage bag?
Not that Dez had her father’s temper; Jimi didn’t remember her ever raising her voice, but she could get mad on paper. Jimi had loved that she’d liked him enough to get mad at him.
Jimi dropped the letter into the water.
His vision went a little blurry then, but only because he was tearing up, not because he was being sucked into an alternate dimension, thank God.
“Is that where the things I care about belong? Under your feet?”
Laughter. A girl’s laughter.
Under his feet.
Jimi left his bike on the bridge and hurried beneath it. The rain wasn’t heavy, but under the bridge the sound was thunderous. Dez wasn’t there. Some girl was. A girl his own age in a white rain coat. Sitting there between the bridge supports, hugged up with her boyfriend. Reading Jimi’s letter.
“What is it with people thinking they have the right to read my personal private love letters?” He snatched the letter from the girl in white, and it immediately disintegrated. He flicked the wet pieces back into the river.
The girl was staring at him, shocked. Her fingers were stained blue.
Fairy blue.
“You see that? She marked you. You’re in for it now. Say goodbye to your eyeballs. And don’t expect me to feel sorry for you. You and your nosy boyfriend can go to—”
The guy she was lying next to was too old to be her boyfriend. Unless the girl in white liked middle-aged men. Who were also dead.
Having lived in Portero most of his life, Jimi was blasé enough about death to feel grateful, rather than unnerved. Grateful that the body was fresh and not putrid. Blue and shriveled, like the picture Jimi had seen online.
“Hypoxia,” Jimi murmured, wondering if he’d look like that before Sugar Lynn revived him.
When Jimi tried to look at the girl in the white raincoat, his eyes slid past her, in that same freaky way it had in church, but much less intensely. Jimi certainly didn’t go sliding anywhere. He stayed where he was and made his eyes slide back to the girl who’d gone out of focus. That blurry white spot.
He squinted.
There she was, that same surprised expression. Not blurry now, and hunched over the dead man, her hands cupped before her face. Eating something.
Eating the dead man. Not snuggling.
Eating.
Jimi didn’t remember making the decision to move, but seconds later he was back in the driving rain, scrambling up the bank.
“Hey, wait.”
Jimi would have kept scrambling, but the rain had made the ground so slick that he went sliding down until he fetched up against the girl’s white rain boots.
“Don’t be scared,” she said, and something in her tone, in her demeanor, made Jimi feel foolish, like he’d been running from a puppy wearing a bowtie.
A puppy who apparently liked to eat dead people.
“I’m not scared,” Jimi said, standing. “And I don’t talk to dead things. Piss off.”
“I’m not dead.”
“What then?” Jimi pointed at the hypoxic man whose legs were bobbing in the river. “He’s dead, and you were eating him.”
“What can I say? I like dead people. Me and dead people are like this.” The girl in white twisted her two fingers together to indicate how close. “That’s the only reason I’m talking to you. Since you’ll be dead soon, what can it matter?”
She had huge dark eyes, and she looked foreign. Like from Mali or Ethiopia, except further than that. Middle Earth or Never Never Land, that kind of foreign. The kind of foreign that could understand the speech of animals or lure you beneath a hill to fairyland or turn into a fox as soon as you blinked.
So Jimi didn’t; he kept his eyes peeled as wide as he could get them.
“Don’t be embarrassed. I meet suicidal people most every day.”
It took a moment for her words to register. “I’m not suicidal.”
“So you didn’t come here to drown yourself?”
“Briefly,” he admitted.
“Because of that girl?” She waved toward the river with her stained hands. “Did she break your heart with that mean letter? Did she leave you for a football captain or an attractive loser with a motorcycle? Someone with more respect for her precious knick-knacks?”
“She’s dead, and I’m not the kind of guy who gets left.”
“Oh?”
Jimi didn’t like that “oh”, or the four syllables’ worth of mockery she injected into it.
He scuffed his shoe in the mud. “Well, one day I’ll say that, and it’ll be the truth. That’ll be a good day. In the meantime, I have to complete a ritual and vomit my dead girlfriend out of my system. To do that, I have to drown. So I’m here to practice.”
“You have to drown? Because you’re being haunted?” She laughed. “No way.”
“Why no way?”
“She’d be somewhere.” The girl in white looked all around. Under her rain boots. “Where is she?”
“She comes and goes. When she’s near, my back hurts and my vision
goes blurry, like when I saw you. I bet you scared her off. She never did like monsters.”
“I’m the monster? Humans can’t see me if I don’t want them to. But somehow you can. So what’s your deal?”
“Being haunted has made me more sensitive to the weirder elements of life.”
If she was upset at being called a weird element, she didn’t show it. She sat on the muddy bank and lowered the hood of her raincoat. She had black milkmaid braids, and her ears were not pointed, but that didn’t prove anything. The rain had softened again, but none of it landed on her. On her coat, but not her exposed neck, not her bare legs. Beanpole legs like his own.
Jimi was already muddy, so he decided it would be okay to sit next to the girl in white…as long as he didn’t sit too close.
“I don’t think you want to practice drowning. What’s the real reason?”
“It used to be the reason. I really was scared, but the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of meeting her in the afterlife. Seeing her, talking to her. Even for a little while.”
She said, “I thought you didn’t like encouraging dead people to talk to you.”
“This is different. I know Dez.”
“Dez?” It was cute the way she said it, like bees buzzing.
“Desiree,” Jimi said. “I figured I’d come to this bridge since I saw her here the other day.”
“You saw her?”
“She came to me as a bird, fairy blue, and plucked out this guy’s eyes. We also decided to become boyfriend/girlfriend on this bridge, so there’s a lot of energy here. It’s what turned your hands fairy blue.”
“That’s from the letter. The ink.”
“It’s from Dez.”
“Why do you keep saying fairy blue? Was she a fairy?”
“No, but she was dressed as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio on the day she died. I mixed the color for her costume myself. I invented that color—Alice blue and sapphire and cerulean swirled together and shimmering.”
“You made her costume?”
“I sketched it out. Dez liked ballet, so I thought it’d be cool if her version of the Blue Fairy looked like a Degas ballerina, but with wings. Her mom’s the one who stitched it all up though.”
