by Lyla Payne
She needs more sleep—for her sake and the baby’s.
“Morning,” I mumble.
She grunts. “Travis is on the porch again.”
“What?” My brain hurts at the thought of talking to him right now. At thinking, period. “Why is he on the porch, Millie? Let him in the blasted house.”
“No. He’s pissing me off, acting like he’s got some sort of right to bother us at all hours.” She sips her tea too forcibly, slopping some onto her hand. “Ow. Dammit.”
“You know, the baby can hear you.”
“Yeah, well, he’s my kid and your cousin. He’ll hear a lot worse before he can even hold his head up on his own, I’m sure.” She gets up and goes to the sink, running cold water over her hand and wincing.
There’s no point in avoiding telling her why Travis is here, not to mention why he’s been so pushy and distraught. But I’m so tired still. I want to sleep until the world somehow rights itself without my help.
I let out a long sigh. “He thinks he’s my half-brother.”
She whirls around so fast that water splashes out of the sink and onto the floor, a few droplets flying far enough to hit me in the face. “What? Why on earth would he think that? Is he Frank’s?”
Trust Amelia to realize in a heartbeat what it took me five to ten panicked minutes to conclude on my own: if he is my brother, he’s not Felicia’s. The curse is real, and it’s intact. The fact is, even if she was the one who took him to the Travis family, it doesn’t mean he’s related to me at all. My mother wasn’t exactly known for her reliability or honesty.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, why does he think it?” She swipes at the floor with a towel, but she can’t bend down far enough to dry it properly.
I watch her attempt to do it with her swollen toes for a few seconds before grabbing the towel and drying the spots myself.
“I could do it.” Her tone is annoyed, even though we both know I’m helping.
“Whatever.” I toss the towel in the sink. “I didn’t have all day.”
“Neither do I, Grace. We both have to be at work inside the hour. Out with it.”
“He thinks he’s Felicia’s son because she’s the one who gave him up for adoption.”
That takes longer to sink in, and my cousin makes her way to the table and into a chair, despite her being right that we need to get going for work. “Holy shit.”
“I know. It’s obviously not true, because the curse and everything, but Jesus. Where did my mother get a baby to give away?”
Her eyes fill with fear. “What if it is true? What if we’ve been imagining all of this, and in reality Jake was just an asshole, I’m just a depressed, sleepwalking freak show and you helped a vengeful voodoo lady curse Beau’s family for no reason?” Her voice is loud, so loud that Travis might be able to hear it from the porch, which makes my skin crawl. He’s got enough reason to think I’m a kook without hearing about curses and voodoo.
“Amelia, calm your tits. You know that’s not true, not any of it. Anne Bonny hasn’t been wandering around Heron Creek for two hundred years trying to get one of us to listen for no reason.” That seems to shake her out of her panic, and even though her eyes are still wide, her lips press together. “He’s not Felicia’s kid. I don’t know if he’s Frank’s or not related to me at all, but unless there’s some magical way to figure out what the blazes my mother was thinking over twenty years ago or Frank starts talking, I don’t know if we’ll ever find out.”
“You could do a DNA test.”
“I probably will, if that’s what he wants. I feel bad for the guy, no matter what a pain in the ass he’s been.”
She eyes me, suspicion on her reddened cheeks. “You don’t care at all that he’s been in town for months and never told you he thinks you’re his sister? I don’t buy that.”
I shrug. “I only have so much emotional capacity, Millie. I’m tapped out, so Travis is getting a pass on that front. I’ll let him grovel it out, though. For you.”
“I don’t want him to grovel, necessarily,” she grouses.
“Right. Says the woman who relegated a grown man to the porch like she’s practicing for sending her kid into time out.”
“Oh, shut your beak and go talk to him, then. I’m getting ready for work.”
She gets up and lumbers out of the kitchen, leaving me alone with my thoughts. It’s the last place I want to be, and even if what I said about my brain being chock-full of my own problems is true, I don’t have a problem letting Travis stew a little longer.
Might as well go ahead and get ready for work. It will buy me some time to figure out what in the hell I’m supposed to say to a man who thinks he’s found part of his birth family, plus I’ll have an excuse to cut the conversation short, too. I peer out the blinds on my way past and see him pacing the creaking boards of the front porch. The twisted pain on his face attacks my heart and almost forces me to pull open the door.
Then I realize I’m not wearing a bra and my clothes are basically see-through, and I scoot upstairs to get ready as I planned. For some reason, the sight of my bedroom, where Mayor Beauregard Drayton and I spent so many hours snuggled tight—and the place where it all started to fall apart—slaps me in the face with unexpected grief. The excitement of the past twenty-four hours has allowed me to not think about how losing him makes me want to fall to pieces. About how our relationship is…sort of on hold, I guess.
After he found out I’d not only cursed his family but hid it from him, he’d said that he needs time. It’s impossible to blame him and even harder to believe there could come a day when he could forgive me. I can’t go to him, can’t make his life harder no matter how my own feels torn to shreds over losing him. He said he needs space and time to think, so I’ll wait for him to come to me. If it never happens, I’ll only be getting what I deserve for being such a selfish, miserable person.
Except I’m not being selfish. Millie and the baby are my reason for everything. I love them. I love Beau, too, but it’s different. It’s new, it’s sexy, and it’s not tied to the very soul at the center of my being.
There’s no way to hide from the grief under the hot shower spray. No way to stop the tears, or quit thinking of all the things I could have done differently. I should have been honest from the start. I didn’t believe that he could love me, could want to be with a woman hell-bent on sacrificing his family to save her own. He says he wanted me to be honest but he hadn’t been. Not about Lucy.
A frown pulls at my lips at the thought of her. The woman who had stolen Beau’s heart before me, then disappeared when she found out he had money and status and everything she despised. It’s not fair to compare his transgressions to mine. I know that. He hadn’t even lied, not really, and what happened in his past is really none of my business.
The fact that I’m helping curse his family for all eternity definitely counts as his business, and I avoided telling him about it for weeks.
Still, that he kept her—and therefore his whole heart—from me for all these months feels like a betrayal. It stings as though the omission deposited poison under my skin. Nothing I rationalize will suck it out so I suppose I’ll have to live with it, the way I’m living with not knowing what will become of us.
Like Beau’s living with the knowledge that I kept things from him.
I sigh, turning off the water and grabbing a towel that smells like it’s a few days past needing to be relegated to the hamper. I use it anyway, knowing the slight odor of mildew will follow me around all day but unable to summon much concern about it. It’s Monday, which means no kids will be at the library for story time. Which means hardly anyone will show up all day, and I don’t have to worry about Beau popping in, so why bother?
Leo might stop by, but he’s used to my slovenly ways. I make a mental note to call him later as I pull on black pants and a light green sweater, then slide flats onto my feet. There’s plenty going on in my life, but the fact that we’ve got to find a
way to get Mel and Leo off the hook for helping me is right up near the top.
After my hair is mostly dry and wrestled into some semblance of a style, I grab a cup of coffee to go, feeling enough like a hermit that even stopping at Westies rubs me the wrong way, and I snag my dried rain jacket from the back of a chair. Travis jumps three feet when I let the screen door slam behind me, but it’s me who’s taken aback at the sight of his face.
There are lines around his eyes and mouth that weren’t there last night—or maybe they weren’t visible in the near-darkness. The whites of his eyes are cracked through with jagged red lines, and his hair needs a wash worse than mine had before this morning’s shower.
“Jesus, Travis. Don’t get all dolled up on my account.”
“Graciela, I’m so sorry.” He sounds so desperate it’s hard to look at him. “I should have told you straight away that the reason I took the job in Heron Creek was to meet you, but we didn’t get off on the best foot and then things were contentious between us, and I thought… I don’t know. There wasn’t a right time.”
I let him give his speech, which he’s obviously been working on for a while now. It isn’t clear how he discovered that I knew, but it’s easy to guess that his mother told him about my email. People just can’t keep proper secrets anymore.
“Travis, it’s okay. I mean, yeah, it would have been nice if you’d been honest from the start so I didn’t feel like you’re some kind of creepy stalker now, but that’s over and done. We need to talk.” I motion to the porch swing but see that it’s damp from the storm, and sigh. “You’re not Felicia’s son.”
“Yes, I am. She’s the one on the adoption papers. My parents insisted that it be an open adoption. They didn’t want any secrets, and they wanted me to be able to contact my mother if I so chose.”
“So you’ve seen your birth certificate.”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“No?” I bite my lower lip, puzzling it out for a minute. “Did she want to protect your father?”
I haven’t the slightest idea who Travis’s father could be if it’s not Frank. It could be anyone, but I don’t remember my mother being with any one man long enough to do his dirty work, but I was young. I don’t recall her having any girlfriends, either, so the main mystery in my mind is where on god’s green earth she got a baby that needed to be given away? How did she find the Travises?
“I don’t think so. She told my parents she didn’t know who my father was.”
I flinch at the slight accusation in his words. My mother was drawn to the possibilities of love but struggled to enjoy the day-to-day slog of making things work, that’s for sure. My own birth wasn’t exactly legitimate, so it’s not impossible that my mother had another child on accident.
It couldn’t have been a boy, though. That’s not possible.
Looking at the determined set of Travis’s jaw, a deep sense of dread settles in my gut. He’s not going to let this go. He probably thinks I’m being stubborn because I don’t want to believe that Fe could have had another baby after me, that she wouldn’t have kept him. Maybe that would mean I’m special or, more likely, that she hadn’t wanted children at all and was already saddled with me.
I’m going to have to tell him the real reason I know he’s not Felicia’s son. And it’s going to suck.
“Look, Travis…”
His features harden the way they had the first night we’d met, when he thought I’d killed Glinda. He’s handsome, with his dark hair and stormy eyes; he looks nothing like Frank or Fe, not at all. “I’m sorry that you find my existence so distasteful that you’re willing to dismiss it out of hand, despite the facts. I just thought…I thought it would be nice to know my real family.”
“Your real family?” I raise my eyebrows. “How about the people who raised you, Travis? Sheesh. I promise you that however shitty they are as parents, growing up with Fe would have been worse.”
“They’re not shitty parents. They’re just… We’re clearly not related, that’s all.”
We’re clearly not related, I think in response. The guy is straight-laced, by the book, and as rigid as they come. My mother had been the opposite, and now that I’ve met my father, it’s obvious my tendency to flout the rules when it suits me is genetic no matter which direction it comes from.
“It’s not that I find being related to you distasteful, Travis.” I look him in the eye so he knows I’m serious. I feel sorry for the guy, I do. It must be terrible to grow up feeling as though you don’t fit in, being aware of why, and knowing the people who should have embraced you chose to send you away instead. “It’s that you can’t be Fe’s son. We have… There are no males in our family who have survived to adulthood.”
That catches him off guard. He peers at me from under his unruly, black brows. “And you think that’s some kind of proof? Some families just have a large number of males or females, you know.”
I shake my head, licking my lips to try to get some moisture back into my mouth. The dread in my stomach grows. I wish I hadn’t had that second cup of coffee while getting ready because acid is sloshing up my esophagus. “Look, this isn’t easy for me, but I can see that you’re very upset so I’m going to say it anyway. I need you to know that so you’ll know I’m telling the truth.”
“As you see it.” A small smile plays on his generous lips. Genuine. Almost affectionate.
A surge of warmth tickles my belly. I think for the first time how maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to have a brother to give me a hard time now and then. Too bad it’s not true.
“Yeah, as I see it, if that makes you feel better.” I really wish I could sit down. In my desperation, I strip off my jacket and lay it on the bench, then plop down onto it. It’s too cold to be out without a coat, but this is a conversation best had while seated.
Travis settles next to me, heedless of the water beaded on his end of the wooden swing. He waits in silence, his reddened, chapped hands stuck deep into his coat’s pockets as the air around us grows thick with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation.
In my mind, I see my grams standing on the dock down by the river, one hand shading her eyes.
Dirt from the garden cakes her nails and the set of her lips suggests she’s fed up with us hanging around. Amelia and I perch on the edge, our bare toes dangling toward the water and goose bumps decorating the skin exposed by our frilly bathing suits—courtesy of her mother. Every time our feet touch the cold river, we squeal.
“Would you two just get it over with?” Grams rolls her eyes at our antics, never one for indulging the silliness of children.
“It’s better if you get used to it, real slow like,” Millie explains. I nod in agreement, testing the chilly wetness up to my ankle this time before yanking it free.
“Nothing you’re dreading is best done real slow like,” our grams advises, mimicking Millie with the last three words. “Best to go all the way under and let it shock you all at once instead of a bit at a time.”
Like most children, we didn’t take her advice back then. Now I know it applies—and not only when it comes to leaping into cold water in one fell swoop.
Nothing you’re dreading is best done real slow like.
Thanks, Grams.
I close my eyes, count to three, then open them and leap. “You know that I see ghosts. Maybe you don’t believe it, but it’s true. When I first came back to Heron Creek I met the ghost of Anne Bonny.”
“The pirate?” he interrupts.
I nod, unable to tell from the shuttered expression on his face whether he’s humoring me or really listening. “Yes, the pirate. Turns out the reason she came to me is because she’s my ancestor on my mother’s side, and she wanted me and Amelia to know about a curse placed on our bloodline back in her day.” I take a deep breath. “No male would live past the age of thirteen.”
Skepticism emerges now, dark on his angular features. “Why?”
“Her husband—well, her third husband—hated her and the
son she had with Calico Jack. He was jealous that she loved Jack more, and Anne never gave him a son of his own. He was determined that Calico Jack’s son would never inherit his fortune and would never be more prosperous than the husband’s own family line. Thus, the curse.”
“Her husband knew how to curse people?”
I grind my teeth, impatient now. I don’t have time to explain shit that happened a hundred years ago.
More than that, I need him to realize we’re not on the same team. I’ve got Clete on the periphery of my world, breathing down my neck about finding some dirt on the good detective. It’s not that I’d rather be on the moonshiner’s side exactly, but the guy takes his favors seriously. Even though he didn’t come through for me on the whole dirt on the Middletons thing, that didn’t mean he’d forget the promise I made in return.
My head spins with the thought. The last thing I need is Clete skulking around town, and to be honest, I’m not sure I’d be too sad to see Travis move along myself.
Really? You don’t have any desire to learn more about your mother? one of my devils scoffs as he lounges near my ear, breath stinking of childhood insecurity.
I want to flick him away, but Travis already thinks I’m crazy enough.
“No. There was a woman, a slave. She knew voodoo, or maybe Gullah religion, but either way, the curse was born. And in all of those years, the line spawned from Anne Bonny and Calico Jack’s child has never seen a male live past puberty.” I spread my hands, willing him to accept all of this, then tip my head. “I realize I have no firsthand knowledge, but you look as though you passed that milestone some time back.”
His cheeks go red at the observation. I meant it to be slightly lewd, to remind him that we’re not brother and sister, but end up feeling more than a bit icky and ashamed about it.
“Curses aren’t real, Graciela.”
