I tried again, pinching her nose shut. It was very awkward, bending over my own pregnant tummy. All I could remember about mouth-to-mouth was from ads I had seen as a kid for the St. John’s Ambulance course; they had a man blowing into a dummy beside a swimming pool. Mary Jo’s mouth tasted like cigarettes and mold and she smelled like an old person. Her skin was very soft and furred with fine hair. I blew into her mouth again, and again, and again, and again. “She’s not breathing!”
“Keep going, Toni. The ambulance will be here soon. Do you need help?”
I shook my head, breathed into Mary Jo again, tried to remember the old St. John’s Ambulance ads. Shit—the guy used to do mouth-to-mouth three times and then listen to the dummy’s chest. I put my ear on Mary Jo’s chest. Something bad was happening. Her heart wasn’t beating right, it was in spasms, like a rag being wrung out. Her legs kicked and twitched, but her face when I went back to give her more air was slack.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
I put my head on her chest. No heartbeat.
“Where the fuck is that ambulance!” I put my hands together on Mary Jo’s chest and pumped hard.
“Oh God, has her heart stopped?”
Pump. Pump. Pump. I put my head on her chest. No heartbeat. Pump. Pump. No heartbeat. I blew some more air into her mouth, and again. My back was on fire from bending over her and my shoulders hurt. Pump. Pump. Pump.
“Toni.”
“I don’t know what to do.” Breathe. Breathe.
Angela put one hand on my shoulder.
Pump. Pump. Pump. “I don’t know what to do.” I was crying. I had meant to take a CPR course for the baby’s sake, there was a special infant CPR course they offered out of Methodist Hospital and I had meant to sign up but I hadn’t gotten around to it. This could be my baby on the floor and I wouldn’t know what to do. My face was wet with tears. Pump. Pump. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
An eternity later I gave up. My arms were too tired. I couldn’t breathe. I was dizzy from lack of air and I couldn’t see for crying. I wouldn’t let Angela help. I realized the moldy smell wasn’t from Mary Jo’s skin, it was the Widow. It was the mold in the house and the smell of the Widow, who watched from behind my eyes as Mary Jo died. Her smell of mold and scorched cloth and silver polish that made my head spin when I ran out of air.
Mary Jo stared up at the ceiling. Her pupils were huge. I tried to stop Angela from touching her. Angela pushed me away, gently, and bent down to feel for a pulse. She shook her head. I was crying.
The ambulance came. Paramedics ran into the house and examined Mary Jo. Then they closed her eyes and stopped hurrying. They asked some questions about her. I told them how we had found her, what I had done. One of them was black. He said I had done the best I could. The white guy stood up and looked around the kitchen. The other asked if Mary Jo had seemed confused earlier in the day. I told him about the phone call, how she had said she was dizzy and had almost forgotten that my mother had died.
“Here it is,” the white guy said. He was holding a Tupperware dish. “Green beans. Found it on the kitchen table.”
“What?” Angela said.
The black paramedic said that Mary Jo had probably died of botulism. She had left the beans in the Tupperware too long. He said it happened to old people a lot. Mary Jo wasn’t old. She was only sixty-two. She died of botulism. He said there was nothing I could have done to save her, and he held my hands.
ELEVEN
Every day after Mary Jo died I could feel the Widow looking out from behind my eyes.
You get what you pay for, I guess; the Widow in my head was the price for failing Mary Jo. I could have saved her if I had gone to her house after she called me, dizzy and almost forgetting that Momma was dead. I let her down. I let her die. And doing that, I let Momma down too.
This time I knew better than to leave the funeral arrangements to someone else. I called lawyers, mortuaries, funeral homes, insurance agents. I even tried my best to track down Travis. I found a letter from him in Mary Jo’s house, postmarked Boulder, Colorado in 1991. I called Directory Assistance, but they had no listing for a Travis Turner at that address. The operator said there were thirteen T. Turners in Boulder. I called them all. None was Mary Jo’s son.
It seemed incredible to me that a parent could die and the child not even know it.
Angela did what she could to help. I suggested she move to a hotel where they would have air conditioning. To my surprise Daddy stepped in and asked her to stay with us. She agreed. She was a terrible cook.
We buried Mary Jo in the Memorial Cemetery on a morning in July when the sun pounded down like a hammer on our black suits and gabardines.
After Mary Jo’s funeral the combination of my pregnancy and the terrible heat seemed to leave me with no energy left for anything. I never had the long talks with Angela I had meant to.
The Widow watched her, though. She couldn’t get enough of Angela. When I was so tired I was nearly asleep in my chair at the end of dinner, the old witch still paced back and forth behind my eyes, staring greedily at Angela, the lost girl, drinking in her walk and her laugh and her flat Canadian accent, her hips that were Momma’s hips and the few grey strands in her hair.
Carrying the Widow like this was almost worse than the actual possessions. When a Rider climbed into my head, I felt a few instants of horror, a few hours were erased from my life, and then things returned to normal. Now the Widow didn’t need me to go away to ride in my head. The scorched cloth and silver polish smell of her was always faintly in the house, like the smell of Momma’s hairspray.
When she looked through my eyes, she turned everything to skeletons. I would look across the table at Daddy and see only his smallness and the loneliness of his endless trips to Beaumont and Longview and Shreveport and Jackson. I saw how old he had become: how round his shoulders were, how thin his hair. Even baseball seemed to have lost its interest for him; he fell asleep in the middle of games, he read the capsule summaries in the paper and didn’t bother with the box scores.
When the Widow looked at my body, she saw the cradle of cancers to come.
One thing I noticed, though, was that she bothered me less when Candy was around. I had never been so grateful for my sister’s cheer and energy. Angela found her amusing, but I thought it was deeper than that. I had come to see that there was great power in Candy’s will to be happy. In her own way, she was as ruthless about taking pleasure from her life as I had ever been about making my grades or succeeding at work. It was Candy more than I who had inherited our mother’s strength.
Even stranger than Candy’s effect on the Widow was Carlos’s. The Widow never cowered, it was not in her nature; but when Carlos was around, she hid herself so deeply in my head that I could forget she was still riding there. Candy had told me Carlos could talk to spirits. I was willing to believe this—there was no point in one of Elena Beauchamp’s daughters getting skeptical—but frankly I had never really seen the point. Now with the Widow in me I began to feel Carlos’s power…and, finally, I asked him for help. He agreed.
I was more nervous than I expected, waiting for him the night he was to intercede between me and the Widow. I changed clothes three times, wishing I could wear a business suit but stuck instead in a sleeveless flower-print maternity dress the size of a three-man tent. I lumbered from the kitchen to the front door and back again, wondering what was involved in his Mexican sorcery and if it would hurt. Wondering what the Widow would do. Surely nothing that would injure my baby.
Angela had said she would stay up with me until Carlos came. She dragged herself over to the refrigerator and stood there for a long moment with the freezer door open, pretending to get ice for a glass of tea. The day had been muggy, nearly 100 degrees until late in the afternoon. Just before midnight I wandered over to the patio and read the thermometer. Mockingbirds still called and sang among the branches of the live oak outside, invisible in the darkness. “Eighty-five degrees,” I said. By day the H
ouston summer is unbearable, but a July night in Texas is surely one of God’s gifts to the world, a mysterious velvety blackness, softer than a whispered promise, so rich and luxuriant you can almost feel it brush against your skin like the flesh of unseen flowers.
The birds fell silent. A moment later I felt a faint vibration in the soles of my feet as the floor tiles began to tremble. “The Muertomobile,” I said. “He’s coming.”
The grandfather clock in Daddy’s room was striking twelve when Carlos knocked at the front door. Instead of jeans and an undershirt, he was wearing a black tuxedo with a shawl-cut collar and black velvet lapels framing a strip of ruffled white shirt. Each cuff was pinned with garnet studs. In the light that streamed from our door I could see the reflection of my swelling stomach in his shiny black patent leather shoes.
Somewhere in the lace of branches looming overhead a single mockingbird began to sing again, singing and singing as if calling me into the darkness. The sultry air was rich with smells: asphalt still soft with heat, oleanders, clay, exhaust fumes, cilantro still on my hands from making that night’s dinner, and cumin and chilis, and sage and jasmine from our garden, and still the mockingbird made the dark air sweet with song.
“I’m kind of nervous,” I said, trying to laugh.
Carlos looked at me with the Preacher’s eyes and did not smile. “Sígueme,” he said. I did not know the meaning of those words, my Spanish was a decade old, but I felt the power in his voice, and when he turned I followed him.
The Muertomobile was a hulk of shadow by the curb, rimed and crusted with photographs and watches and silver dollars, candles and bits of bone. Brass and gilt and glass and silver winked in the light from our house and then went out as Angela closed the door behind me. I didn’t like the sudden darkness. The new moon had not yet been born, and the thick canopy of interlacing live oaks that lined our street throttled lamplight and starshine.
Carlos handed me in the passenger side; fat and awkward, I eased into the blood-red upholstery. Crushed velvet slid and whispered. Carlos swung the heavy door to; it shut with a clank like a bank vault closing. Inside me, the G kicked once and fell still. Carlos got behind the wheel and crossed himself and said, “Podemos entrar, debemos entrar, entraremos las tinieblas. En nombre del padre y el hijo y la sagrada virgen, estamos agarrados en el puño de la mano más poderosa y llevados a la oscuridad.” In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Sacred Virgin, with the strength of the Most Powerful Hand, we are going into the darkness. The words so heavy with power I felt the skin crawl on my arms and back, the little hairs prickling at the base of my neck.
Carlos turned the key and the engine of the Muertomobile throbbed in a deep bass note: turbines revolving under heavy rivers; machines turning far underground. He pulled out from the curb. He left his headlights off.
“Carlos? There’s no seat belt.” No answer. “It’s not lost in the upholstery either. You took it out, didn’t you?” I thought of the G, riding helpless and vulnerable in my womb. “This isn’t safe. I want to go back.”
Carlos did not slow down or turn back. “Háblame de los duendes.”
“What? What?”
“Los duendes. Habla de ellos.”
“I haven’t taken Spanish since high school.” We passed flickering between the street lamps, watching their brightness intensify, the live-oak branches laced above the road gaining definition, the pavement coming into focus, the glare shining on the windshield, blinding and then gone, and our own shadow creeping ahead of us as the light faded behind. Carlos had left the windows rolled down and I found I could still hear the mockingbird, now nearer, now farther away, as if she were keeping pace with us, flitting from tree to tree in the darkness along the road, singing and singing.
“Quién es la primera?”
“The first? Of los duendes? Um. The Widow, I guess. Yes, the Widow.” My heart was beating fast and painfully hard. I realized I was holding the door handle so hard my fingers were starting to ache. “I shouldn’t be here, Carlos. This is crazy. What sort of mother would go driving around in the dark with no seat belt?” A mother with Riders climbing into her head, that’s who would be out in this damn sorcerer’s car at midnight. Momma had done things like this all the time, I thought bitterly. Why should I be surprised to find myself doing it too? Oh Christ.
“Habla de ella.”
Talk of her, speak of her, something like that. “She watches the family. She hoards. She is a miser. She owns us without loving us.”
“Te ha cogido? La has llevado?”
Had I carried her? “Sí. Yes. These days I feel her behind my eyes all the time.”
Carlos swung the car down a new road. The street marker was clotted with vines, the street name choked and hidden. I did not know where we were. Houses stood by the road with their mouths closed, their eyes dark.
“Anciana!” Carlos called. Old woman!
There was a sharp thump from the back of the hearse. I screamed.
Carlos ignored me. “Habla del segundo.” Speak of the second.
I told Carlos of the Preacher, with his smell of old books and his hard silence. I told about the laughter he had taken away and his iron principles and his tablecloth made of real girls’ hair. I told Carlos about Sugar, the sweetness in her breath and her smell of peaches and sex. I told him of Pierrot’s cruel marvels, his razor smile, his hidden sadness, that lonely clown. I told him about Mr. Copper, who knew neither love nor pity; who played to win but paid his debts. And after I had finished telling of each Rider, Carlos would call out its name, and a sharp bump would come from the back of the Muertomobile, and the hearse would ride a little lower, and creep more slowly along the deserted roads.
Still the mockingbird sang, now farther, now nearer. Shotgun shacks and mansions rolled by, tenements and little white churches. I recognized none of them. Slowly, slowly I was filled with the certainty that we were not in Houston anymore, but in another city, a dream city like the one Rick Manzetti had wandered into on his trip to New Orleans. Perhaps a real town threw off five or six unreal ones, like shadows thrown from one object lit from several sides. Or perhaps there was only one city, and you could get to it from any town in America if you were lucky or drunk or damned enough, if you took just the right turn at just the wrong time. A city where gods might lounge in the doorways or sit whispering on their porches late into the night. And somewhere out there, beyond the mockingbird’s song, a little lost girl was walking, walking, walking through those midnight streets.
“Y la última duende?”
“The Mockingbird,” I said. “I…I don’t know what to say about her.”
“No tiene olor? Ni historia? Ni deseo?” She has no smell, no stories, no desire?
“Nothing. Momma never told any stories about her. She was only singing. Only the song. She mounted Momma more than any of the others, but I can’t remember a single story about her. And she is the only one I haven’t felt near me since Momma died. Sugar has mounted me, and Mr. Copper and the Widow. Pierrot—I’ve felt Pierrot,” I said, remembering his nasty laughter as I spoke with Rick Manzetti. “Some days I see the Preacher everywhere. But not the Mockingbird. Never her.”
Carlos nodded. “La sinsonte!” he called, but no bump came from the back of the hearse. “Está perdida,” he said. “Tienes que buscarla.”
She is lost. You must find her.
The black velvet curtain between us and the back of the hearse twitched and I jumped in my seat, praying it would not open.
“Ahora. Háblame de tu madre.”
“My mother? Why do we have to talk about her?”
Carlos did not answer. In the long silence that followed I thought I heard Pierrot snigger. The G moved, turning in my womb like a child in a restless sleep. I should think of a name for her soon. I was at thirty-one weeks already. Babies had been born this premature and lived. “My mother knew a lot about mascara but used too much foundation,” I said. “She went through a can of hair spray in six weeks and her
second favorite fingernail polish was Purple Plum. Is this what you want?”
“Háblame más,” said Carlos the sorcerer, so I rambled on, my fingers clenched around the door handle, my other hand on the dashboard to protect my womb in case we crashed. Sweat running in my eyes. My heart pounding and pounding.
“Mosquitoes didn’t like her much, which is probably why she kept the doors open all the time. They’d like to have eaten me alive. She hung garlic and tansy to keep them off; said her mother taught her that. She didn’t talk about her people very often. I do not believe they were educated folk. Momma didn’t have a hillbilly accent, but every now and then she would come up with these backwoods expressions: ‘He was the runningest ol’ dog you ever did see,’ or I’d ask if dinner were ready and she’d say, ‘Purt nigh, but not plumb.’ I guess you would call her a liberal; she was in favor of integration and she wanted to vote for a woman president. She used butter, never margarine. She always wanted to go to Paris, but never did.”
I glanced over at Carlos to see what he was getting out of all this, and gasped. He was driving with his eyes closed. For a long moment I stared at him with my heart hammering in my chest. I must have tensed up fiercely, because the G gave a kick like a mad colt.
The car started to drift off the road. “Habla,” Carlos murmured. His voice was low and hazy. I had seen people in trances before—Momma had friends who would go into trances as soon as look at you—and I knew he was far gone.
“She, she, she loved biscuits but she hated making them herself,” I squeaked. The car steadied in its lane and we picked up speed. “She always said biscuits in a can were one of God’s special acts of grace. She could drink just about anything. With liquor she didn’t care if she was drinking single malt Scotch or cheap mixed rye, but she was fond of a good bourbon. When I was little she was the only mom who let me do just what I liked with my hair, grow it out or cut it short or wear it in curls. She told me once her mother made her wear the same little swing for eight years and she swore she would never do that to her child. Uh…”