Dark and Shallow Lies

by Ginny Myers Sain

  “You don’t need to be afraid,” I tell her. But she’s still frozen. “Vic won’t hurt you anymore. Or your mama.”

  Evie kind of melts, and I pull her close to wrap her up in a hug. She clings to me like I’m some kind of life preserver. She’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a little sister. And I wish so much that I could keep her safe.

  From Victor. And men like him.

  From this place.

  From the hurt of loving someone who won’t ever be capable of loving her back. At least not the way she wants.

  But I can’t protect her from any of that. So I hold her and stroke her hair while she cries. I breathe in the sweet summertime scent of her. And I promise her over and over that Hart isn’t going anywhere. That he loves her.

  That I love her. So, so, so much. That everybody loves her. That everything will be okay. That’s we’ll always be here for each other.

  Finally, Evie runs out of tears, and she pulls away from me to wipe at her face. Then she kisses me on the cheek before she tiptoes back toward her own front door. She gives me a sad little wave, and I see her mouth the words I’m sorry, Grey before she vanishes inside.

  I feel like I’m in some kind of a daze. I slip into the Mystic Rose and ease the door closed behind me. Then I wander into the kitchen for a drink. Sweet-N-Low whines at me for turning on the light, but I ignore him. I’m staring at that photo again. The one of me and my mom.

  I lift the frame off the wall. It’s been there so long that the wallpaper underneath is brighter than the rest of the kitchen. It’s like a time warp. The little apples are still red instead of faded pink.

  I fold back the metal clips that secure the cardboard backing, then I pull out the photograph. The Scotch tape holding it in place is old enough that I barely have to tug on it. I rehang the dusty frame and carry the photo into my bathroom. I turn on the light and lean in toward the mirror. Then I hold the picture up next to my own face.

  The woman’s haunted eyes don’t match the innocent eyes of the little girl in the picture.

  But they do match the eyes of the older girl in the mirror.

  My mother and I have finally become twins, after all.

  I take the photograph to bed with me and lean it up against the framed picture of me and Elora on my bedside table. Then I stare at it for a long time before I flip off the lamp and somehow drift off to sleep listening to Evie’s wind chimes.

  It’s hours later when something wakes me up. I sit up in the dark, and for a second, I’m not sure why I’m awake. Then I hear it again. A tapping sound. Barely loud enough to register.

  I turn my head toward the window and almost jump out of my skin when I see the shape on the other side of the glass. But then I hear the whisper, and my fear is replaced by a strange sense of déjà vu.

  “Greycie,” Hart pleads. “Let me in. Please.”

  For the second time in seventeen summers, I slide open my bedroom window and let Hart come inside. He climbs right over the top of Wrynn’s little collection to stand staring at me in the moonlight. Dark curls. Strong back. Broad shoulders.

  Hollow eyes.

  A month’s worth of stubble.

  He starts to tremble. “I’m sorry,” he says over and over. “I’m so sorry, Greycie. I’m so sorry. Oh, God. I’m so fucking sorry.”

  I take him by the hand and lead him to my bed. I spread back the blankets, then I slip off his boots and pull him under the covers with me. I wrap my arms tight around him. Like that night when we were five.

  But he won’t stop shaking.

  “It’s okay,” I whisper again and again. But we both know nothing’s okay.

  “The hurricane made landfall.” He spits the words out through chattering teeth. “Elizabeth. In Florida. Eighty-mile-an-hour winds. Two people dead so far.”

  “Shhhh,” I soothe, and I run my fingers through his beautiful hair.

  “Falling trees,” he tells me.

  I press my lips against his forehead. His skin is ice cold. Like a corpse.

  “Hart—”

  “I just wanna know, Greycie. I need to know what happened. I miss ’er so bad.”

  The tinkling of wind chimes grows louder and louder until it seems to fill my little bedroom with its fragile sound.

  “Me too,” I whisper.

  And I know for sure then that what I told Evie was true. Hart isn’t in love with me. Not like Evie meant. Need isn’t love. Loneliness isn’t love. And pain isn’t love. Even if it’s shared.

  Hart notices the picture on my bedside table. The one of me and my mom. He reaches over to pick it up. There’s just enough moonlight to see the young woman and the little girl on her lap.

  He studies the photograph with dark eyes.

  “Can you do it, too?” he finally asks me. His voice is low in my ear. Hushed. Like we’re whispering shared secrets. Only I don’t know what he’s talking about.

  “Can I do what?”

  “Leo told me that your mama could start fires. With her mind. He said he’d seen her do it. Once. A long time ago.” Hart’s stopped shaking. Finally. “Can you do it, too?”

  I freeze. Cold under the covers.

  “Because if you can, Greycie, you should burn this whole fucking town right down to the mud.”

  I let him carry me all the way back to the boardwalk. He doesn’t say a word. And I don’t, either. What do you say when you know you’re about to die? I don’t think I have any last words in me.

  19

  Hart is gone by the time I wake up. I sit up and swing my feet to the floor, but I don’t get out of bed. Instead, I take the picture off my bedside table and hold it to the light streaming in the window. Hart didn’t have any details about what he said my mother could do. The power that she had. Just a vague story Leo told him once when they were out fishing.

  Maybe a tall tale to pass a long, hot afternoon.

  But maybe not.

  The hiding place draws power. It always has. The original group of spiritualists and seekers came down in 1887 from somewhere in upstate New York. They were tired of being run out of town after town by church people, and they were looking for a place where nobody would bother them.

  Except the dead, of course.

  So here came the psychics, wading into the swamp with their crystal balls and their tarot cards held high.

  Honey’s great-grandmother was one of them.

  Elora’s and Hart’s families are both descended from that founding group, too.

  Even before that, though, the runaway enslaved and the Creole people, along with the Houma and Chitimacha and others who shared these swamps, used to tell stories about this area. The Acadian settlers, too. Strange things happened here, they all said.

  I think about Case and Wrynn. Bilocation. And the gift of healing.

  And Zale. The power of the sea and the sky.

  But if my mother had some gift like that—some deep power, like Sera said—I’ve never known anything about it.

  And I certainly didn’t inherit it.

  I get dressed and wander into the kitchen to find Honey sitting at the table. She dumps a spoonful of sugar into her coffee and stirs as she listens to the radio.

  Someone from the National Hurricane Center reports that Elizabeth has emerged from this side of the Florida peninsula, and that she’s strengthening as she crosses the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters. In only a few hours, winds have increased to over one hundred miles an hour. She’s a category 2 now.

  Honey keeps stirring, and the radio station goes live to a press conference where the governor of Louisiana is declaring a state of emergency ahead of the storm’s predicted arrival here.

  “I’m not leaving,” I say as I sit down across from Honey with a bowl of cereal.

  She sighs. “Grey—”

  “We don’t even know what�
��s going to happen yet. Give me a little while longer,” I beg. “Maybe it won’t be bad.” I’m stirring my cereal around, but I haven’t made myself take a bite yet. “I can’t leave. Not until I know what happened to Elora.”

  “Sugar Bee, in the end, not everything is knowable.” Honey takes a small sip of her coffee. “Even for those of us entrusted with the gift of sight.”

  “This isn’t the end,” I tell her. “And this is knowable. I feel it.”

  Honey studies my face for a long minute before she nods. “One more day. But I won’t take chances with your safety. If it looks like we’re going to take a direct hit, you’re going home.”

  “I already am home,” I remind her.

  All that morning and afternoon, we stay busy in the bookstore. I spend the whole day helping clueless people pick out decks of tarot cards and incense and books on astrology. I even sell that ugly Himalayan salt lamp.

  Case’s mama, Ophelia, comes in to pick up some herbal tea and to talk to Honey about the storm. It’s the first time I’ve seen her all summer, and she gives me a big hug. It makes me ashamed of the way I treated Case. The things I was ready to believe about him, just because I was desperate for an answer. I can’t help but wonder what he told her about his bashed-in face. That missing tooth. I imagine her laying a gentle hand on his cheek, to make the bleeding stop.

  Wrynn hides behind her mama, just peeking out at me through that long red hair of hers. I see her snake out a skinny, freckled arm to snag some peppermints from Honey’s candy dish. But she doesn’t say a word. And I’m glad. I can’t stand to hear any more rougarou talk. I have too much on my mind as it is.

  All day, I keep waiting for an opening to bring up what Hart told me last night.

  About my mother.

  It’s late afternoon when I finally get my chance. There’s a lull between customers, and I jump right into the deep end. I figure I don’t have time for wading.

  “What was my mother’s gift?”

  Honey glances up from her word search to give me a strange look. Her earrings are dangly stars, and she has a bright purple scarf tied around her head. “You know she could see colors.”

  “You mean auras,” I say. “People’s energy, or whatever.”

  “That’s right,” Honey tells me. “We’re all made up of energy. And that frequency creates a field around us. Different energies show up as different colors.”

  “Like gray.”

  “I know it’s not the most exciting color in the world, Sugar Bee.” I roll my eyes. Honey says her own aura is pink. “But gray is symbolic of a long spiritual journey. It means you’re an old soul. You’ve traveled a long path in this life. That’s something to be proud of.”

  “Right.” I’ve heard all this a million times. “But could she do anything else?”

  Honey looks at me for a few seconds. “We are all of us capable of so many more things than we know, Sugar Bee. Beautiful things. And terrible things.”

  The bell over the door jingles, and a trio of stunning girls washes in on a wave of laughter. One of them has gotten engaged, and they’re looking for a reading. They want to know, should she marry DeShawn? Or hold out hope for something better?

  Last summer, Honey would have made an appointment for them to see Miss Cassiopeia, Romance Counselor. But Becky has had her sign flipped to closed since I got here, so Honey leads them to the alcove in the corner and pulls the curtain. Things get busy again after that, and she never offers me any more information. And I never get another chance to ask.

  But I can’t stop thinking about it. Because there’s an idea forming in my head. And I hope like hell I’m wrong.

  After dinner, I go to my room and pull out those twin hummingbirds. I weigh them. One in each hand.

  Beautiful things.

  And terrible things.

  My pixie cut is too short for hair clips to look right on me, but I sweep my bangs back on each side and slide the hummingbirds into my hair anyway. Then I don’t even bother to put on boots. I just set off into the bayou in my flip-flops, before I have time to chicken out and change my mind. I don’t get very far before I have to slip my flip-flops off and carry them. And then I’m barefoot. Mud up to my knees. Just like Wrynn.

  And Zale.

  He’s already waiting for me out at Li’l Pass, and the first thing I say when I see him is, “I need you to take me to Keller’s Island.”

  “Okay,” he says. He’s staring at those hummingbird hair clips. Both of them. And I see the questions burning in his ice-fire eyes. But he doesn’t ask them. He just takes my hand in his, and I feel that tingling warmth course through me.

  I leave my flip-flops sitting on top of the old flatbed trailer, and we trudge side by side through the long grass and the mud. And we don’t say much. At least not out loud. But every so often, I hear the sound of the ocean. Like a seashell held to my ear.

  Zale has an old flatboat hidden down at Holbert’s Pond, about a half mile south of our spot at Li’l Pass. He pulls the rip cord, and the ancient motor coughs and sputters, then comes to life with a cloud of black smoke.

  As we head out into the bayou, I glance back over my shoulder, and the lights along the boardwalk get smaller and smaller until they disappear behind us.

  And then there’s nothing but dark stretching out as far as I can see.

  Keller’s Island is a little bit of forested high ground that sits way back in the bayou. It’s surrounded by deep water on three sides. Ringed with bald cypress trees at the edges and thick with huge Live Oaks in the center.

  When we were growing up, after what happened to Ember and Orli, the older kids would go back there to party sometimes. It was a deserted place for them to get drunk and smoke weed and hook up in the dark. A spot to scare the daylights out of each other with real-life ghost stories.

  But not for us. Not for the Summer Children.

  We left it to the dead.

  Even when we got big enough to do our own partying, that place was off limits. We used to skirt wide around there when we were out in our airboats and ATVs. We’d point out the tree line. Whisper what happened there. Tell the story. Say the names like a ritual.

  But we only went there one time.

  To Killer’s Island.

  Hart took us all there the summer we were fourteen. We were supposed to be fishing, but he convinced us to take a detour on the way home. Some kind of sick field trip to see the place where all our childhood nightmares were born.

  It was bright daylight when the eight of us stood there together behind the ruins of Dempsey Fontenot’s burned-out cabin and stared at the pond where Ember and Orli died, but it still scared me so bad I couldn’t sleep for weeks. I felt uneasy all the rest of that summer. I couldn’t seem to wash the mud of that place off me, no matter how hard I scrubbed.

  Now the idea of visiting there in the dark makes me sick to my stomach.

  The journey doesn’t take long by boat, and pretty soon I see the dark outline of tall trees standing sentry against the night sky. The closer we get, the bigger they get.

  And the smaller I feel.

  We fly back through the bayou toward that thick stand of trees. But really, we’re flying back through time. All the way back to where this whole thing started, maybe.

  Thirteen summers back.

  To the beginning of it all.

  What’s past is prologue.

  Zale runs the boat up into the shallow water, then hops out to drag it to shore. He takes my hand and helps me out, and I gasp from the shock of his touch. I wonder if that will ever wear off.

  I hope it doesn’t.

  We hike through the thick woods and thicker dark, ducking low-hanging branches dripping with Spanish moss and dodging thorns that grab at us like fingers until we reach the tiny clearing at the center of the little island.

  When we step out
of the trees and into the moonshine, we’re standing right behind what’s left of the old Fontenot cabin. Dempsey lit it up like a bonfire, they always told us. I’ve heard that story so many times. Burned it to ashes before he cleared out.

  After he drowned Ember and Orli and left them in the pond to rot.

  Now, thirteen years down the road from that horrible summer, there’s not much left to mark the spot. No monuments or memorials. No little white wooden crosses. Just a pile of fire-blackened logs.

  My eyes adjust, and I look around the clearing to see signs of life.

  A tiny tent leans at the edge of the tree line. A few belongings are scattered around. A bedroll. A razor lying on a rock. There’s a fire ring. And a cooking pot with no handle. A discarded can of beans lies nearby, and a homemade fishing pole leans against a tree.

  I take all that in. Because I can’t stand to look at the spot where Zale’s own childhood nightmares were born.

  The bones of the cabin where his twin brother died.

  Aeron.

  Number twelve.

  I don’t want to look at the drowning pool, either. I’m trying not to imagine Ember and Orli. White dresses billowing out around them. Trailing blue ribbons the color of a cloudless Louisiana sky.

  Fish nibbling at their staring eyes—

  swimming in and out of their open mouths.

  I don’t want to know what they looked like when they pulled them out of the water.

  Faces gone. Limbs swollen black.

  But somehow I do know.

  Zale is silent. I feel him watching me. Waiting. Curious. And I don’t know if I can do what I need to do. I’m not sure I have the strength.

  The deep power.

  But I have to try. Because it’s the secrets that fester.

  I let go of Zale’s hand and slip the little silver hummingbirds out of my hair. I hold them tight in my fists. Then I close my eyes and think about my mother. I don’t move. I stay so still so long that my legs become cypress trees, rooted deep in the soft ground. I become part of the landscape of the bayou. Like the saw grass and the water hyacinth and the duckweed.