Odessa looked up from her workbench. She was wearing sandals and a red kimono with mysterious golden birds patterned on it. “Hey, kiddo, I looked for you last night to say goodbye, but nobody seemed to know where you were.” She squinted, then rose, alarmed at the sight of Sloane’s bruised face. She pulled Sloane into a warm hug. For the first time Sloane realized that the witch had grown old. She could feel the bumps of Odessa’s spine beneath her fingers. The witch’s thinning hair had turned wholly white, and her skin was brownish red, wind-chapped and leathery from too many years of salt and sun. Her back was beginning to bend over, and the breasts beneath her dressing gown hung flat. She smelled of sewing machine oil and ironed cloth, nail polish remover and Max Factor foundation.
The visions of Sloane’s own ugly old age that had gripped her at Momus’s touch flooded back over her.
Odessa drew back, holding Sloane by her shoulders. She reached up and felt her goddaughter’s cheek, very gently, with the back of one hand. Her knuckles were swollen with arthritis. “Well, kiddo? Start talking.”
Sloane told her the whole tale of her visit to Momus, her stupidity afterward in nearly getting herself raped, and her salvation in the arms of the giant named Ham and his friend the apothecary. When she came to the last part, about going home and finding her mother no better, it was difficult not to cry.
When she had finished, Odessa shook her head. “Some days you just can’t win for losing. You try so hard to be a good little girl, don’t you, Sloane? As if that was going to save you.” Odessa’s shoulders sagged and she ran one hand through her thinning hair. “And you’ve made a deal with Momus, too. It will take some work to keep you from Krewes now, child.” She sighed. “I reckon this is a Dr Pepper problem,” she said at last. “I’ve been saving a last few for emergencies and I think this qualifies. Want one, sugar?”
A few belts of whiskey might be better. “Yes, please.”
Odessa passed through the heavy swinging doors at the back of the dining lounge and into the restaurant-sized kitchen. A moment later she returned with two glasses full of ice. A refrigerator with a working ice-maker was one of the special luxuries Jane Gardner had always made sure to supply her. Odessa also brought an ancient two-liter bottle of Dr Pepper, the plastic coated with dust and webbed with cracks. She poured ceremoniously and they drank together. “I should have known something was up, the way you were dressed last night. I assumed you were putting on a good face for your mother’s sake. It was a very brave thing to do, wonderfully brave, little mouse,” Odessa said. “Very silly, too. Why didn’t you tell me you were planning this?”
Because it was quite possible you had a little Jane Gardner doll in concrete somewhere, ’Dessa. “Sorry,” Sloane said, eyes downcast. “I should have, I know. I was worried I would lose my nerve if I started talking about it.” Which was also true.
“Ha. I can just see you.” Odessa swirled her drink around, making the ice cubes clink. Water had already beaded up on the outside of her glass. “Can you remember the exact words you said to him?”
“Just that I couldn’t bear for her to—” Sloane stopped. The color drained from her face. “No. That wasn’t it either. I said, ‘I just can’t stand to see her die.’” A range of horrible possibilities started to open up before her. “But he knew what I meant, ’Dessa!”
“Don’t try that on me,” Odessa said sharply. “Save it for someone you can fool. Nobody says anything to Momus that isn’t the exact truth. That’s just what you said and it’s just what you meant.”
“It wasn’t the only thing I meant,” Sloane whispered. Her godmother shrugged. “If you want to sup with the Devil, you better bring a long spoon. Well, the damage is done now. ‘I just can’t stand to see her die.’ It’s not…it’s not a happy choice of words, Sloane.”
“I guess if I stay in Mother’s room, watching her twenty-four hours a day, she’ll live forever,” Sloane said bitterly.
Odessa took a sip of her Dr Pepper. “Not to be hateful, doll, but there is at least one other way you wouldn’t be able to see her die.”
Sloane stared at her for a long moment. “Oh,” she said. “You mean if I die first.”
“It fits the letter of the bargain.” The Recluse took a breath. “No, I think you will have to go back and renegotiate, dear. Only this time, I will help you and you will be less of a fool. Did you really think so little of me?” she asked with a flash of anger. She took off her bifocals and polished them up with a piece of cloth from her workbench. “Did you really think you were up to meeting Momus without my help?” She turned her back on the girl, gripping the top of her sewing machine. “Do you forget that there are people besides your mother who are counting on you?”
Sloane kept her eyes on the floor.
“Jane Gardner isn’t the only person who needs a successor, Sloane. Who couldn’t do her job? Anyone, any sufficiently dreary, practical-minded Krewe of Momus drudge can get a sewer line run or order a water main fixed when it begins to leak. What happens when the magic begins to leak, hey? What happens when nightmares start spilling into Jane’s little empire and there’s no Recluse there to shoo them off to Mardi Gras? I have taught you for a purpose, Sloane.”
“Oh, good,” Sloane said. “I was hoping there would be more to feel guilty about.”
Somewhere at the back of the house a shutter banged, once, twice. Odessa laughed. She turned and tousled Sloane’s short brown hair. “Quite right. What did you ever do to deserve two such terrible old ladies brooding over you? Still, the fact remains you have to try to renegotiate your deal. And for that we need quite another you, if you’re going to be dealing with the old lunatic himself. We need someone a lot less nice.”
She tapped her fingernails on her glass. “I’m going to make you a mask,” the witch said at last. Sloane’s eyes widened. Odessa’s masks were loaded with power. The Recluse drained the last of her Dr. Pepper. “There are some things you need a new face,” she said, “to face.”
A small collection of masks hung from the peg-board at the end of the bench. Sloane recognized some of them: Hollow, Dry Salvage, Lizard, Burnt Hair. “I’m almost done with this one,” Odessa said, picking a polished copper domino off the bench. “Remember it?”
The cheekbones and eyebrows of the mask were marked out with 4 Meg SIMMs Sloane had salvaged for Odessa from an ancient PC clone she had found abandoned in the attic of Ashton Villa. “Sure. What are you going to call it?”
“1999.” The witch placed the cool metal gently against Sloane’s face. It struck the breath from her like an electric shock, sweeping her up into a whining, buzzing, inhuman cascade of calculation, acquisition, construction, commerce. With shaking hands Sloane pulled it away and bent over Odessa’s workbench, trying to breathe, waiting for the driving rhythms of that vanished industrial world to stop roaring through her blood. “Oh, gods. I knew it was different, but…”
“One thing to hear the stories, but it’s another to feel it, isn’t it, honey? That’s what we lost,” Odessa said. “So much, Sloane. We lost so much.”
Sloane thought of Joshua Cane. His mother had dispensed real drugs in perfect little pills; now he was grinding up plants with a golf club head.
Odessa hung up the mask. “Let me just tidy up a bit.” She cleared the workbench of all its bits of cloth, stuffing them into the cedar chest by the sewing machine that was already full to bursting with coarse modern Galveston cotton and treasures from before the Flood: lace and nylon stockings, bolts of flowered silk, polyester slacks and high-quality stonewashed denim with the Levi’s buttons still attached, crepe chenille and squares of grey jersey and meters of formal gaberdine. Odessa cleaned her work space, whisking a can of solvent under the bench, hanging her soldering iron and a T-square back on the peg-board. The loose stuff she put in two red fishing tackle boxes: screws and nails and loops of wire, wrenches and drill bits, files for metal and wood and glass.
When Odessa had the bench cleared to her satisfaction she made Sloan
e lie on it, facing the ceiling, with her head pillowed on a bolt of cloth. “This is going to take some time,” she said, pressing one red fingernail against Sloane’s lips. “Days, possibly. I’ll send a message to Jane to let her know you’re safe. You won’t eat, you won’t drink, you won’t sleep. You will be the mask.”
Odessa walked through the door to the kitchen and rummaged around. Sloane tried to call to her. Words gathered like heat in her mouth, but her lips would not open. They felt numb where Odessa’s fingernail had touched. She tried harder, struggling desperately. A thin hiss of air leaked from her mouth. She gave up.
Odessa returned holding two striped straws. “Put these in your nose.” Sloane’s eyes widened. “You want to breathe, don’t you? Don’t worry, these are the wide ones, milk shake straws. Scavenged them from the Denny’s down the street. I don’t mind putting them in, but they’ll tickle less if you do it.”
Sloane took the straws and gingerly inserted them, one in each nostril. They smelled like old plastic. Odessa examined her, looking down through her bifocals, and then nodded. “Luverly,” she drawled. “I b’lieve they add character.”
The Recluse made several trips to the kitchen, returning with three large mixing bowls full of water, a can of plaster powder, a can marked “Danlo Dental Supply,” and a jar of Vaseline. She wet a rag and gently wiped Sloane’s face. The water was warm and smelled faintly of soap. “We were always different, your mother and I. Jane is a creature of clay. Everything sticks to her so. No wonder she can’t move, with all that weight bearing down. Me, I live in a world of water,” the old witch said, touching the rag tenderly to Sloane’s temples, to her lips. “Everything trickles away from me.”
Odessa patted Sloane’s face with a dry cloth, then opened up her jar of Vaseline and spread a thin layer over Sloane’s face with her fingertips, paying special attention to her eyelashes and eyebrows. Next she fished an old nylon stocking out of the fabric chest. “We have to protect your hair, now, don’t we, honey?” She pulled the stocking over Sloane’s head and then wrapped a muslin bandana around the whole business.
Odessa picked up a pair of scissors and cut three pieces of cheesecloth into one foot by two foot rectangles. Then she sifted plaster powder into the biggest bowl of water. “Of course I didn’t stick so well to Jane, these last few years. She dropped me easily enough. Can’t say I blame her. Persnickety old lady, I am now. You’d never know I was pretty once, would you?”
She went back to the kitchen and returned with an electric mixer. “Noise,” she warned, then she turned it on and began to beat the plaster. “No lumps. Like a good cake batter. Jane never did care to cook, either. Always wanted to eat out. Italian. Greek. Well, she came from those kind of people. Much richer than my momma. My momma taught me to cook. Chicken-fried steak, pound cake, corn bread. Black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day.” She lifted up a beater. Plaster dripped from it. “Good.” She cleaned the beaters. “We had our different kinds of power, Jane and I.”
She picked up the can marked Danlo Dental Supply. “Alginate. They make it from seaweed, actually, but I don’t know how. I stole this from my dentist’s office. Dr. Holub. He lost his mind the day after the Flood. Killed himself with a hatchet. Nasty business.” She sifted the alginate into the second mixing bowl. “Used to make dental impressions with this stuff.” The electric mixer whirred again. When it stopped, Odessa’s hand, blotched with liver spots, appeared suddenly over Sloane’s face. “And now, dear, it’s time to close your eyes.” She touched Sloane’s left eyelid with her long red fingernail, then her right. They slammed shut as if made of lead.
Sloane lay in the dark. Panic jumped like a cricket in her belly. Her heart was racing. She felt nearly as scared as she had standing before Momus. Sometimes, because she loved Odessa, she forgot how terrible Galveston’s angel could be.
The alginate poured down around her eyes and ran over her face, wet cool billows of it, thick as cake batter, spreading over her cheeks and lips. It trailed off, then came again, a second wave starting at her forehead, seeping down into her eyeholes, a last slow spill across her nose. Odessa must be using a ladle. A third thick wave over her mouth and cheeks. Sloane found herself breathing hard, mouth closed, pulling air through the straws in her nose. She flinched, twisting away from the spill of alginate.
“None of that.” A sharp tap on the top of her forehead and her face became inert. Odessa touched her left shoulder next. Numbness spread out from the touch, flesh going dead. Sloane whimpered. Now the other arm. Now her chest. Now her hips, her waist gone dead, her sex, the tops of her thighs. Odessa touched each leg. Sloane flexed her feet until her calves lost feeling, then her ankles, then her toes.
She was as good as dead. Her body no longer lived: she was wood and clay, sticks and stones. She was a blind dead thing, a stone underground, trapped in the dark with only the sound of her frightened breathing, unnaturally loud. Sloane had a sudden horrific thought: She wasn’t a woman, she was one of Odessa’s dolls, a thing with life but not volition, to be dropped in the sea or stuffed in a shoebox coffin and buried alive.
This is what it’s like for Mother every day.
Another wave of cool syrup on her face. “I don’t think either of us ever aged, until you were born,” Odessa said. “I was there that morning. It was blustery outside, cold for here. Up to that moment, neither Jane nor I thought we would die. But when you see a baby, it turns your own hourglass over. Every time I saw you getting older, Sloane, I would feel myself getting older, too. Only you were climbing, and I was slipping. You grew breasts, I grew wrinkles. I lost track of my own birthdays when I started counting yours, and they came faster and faster. Some days it hurt so much to see you, Sloane. I loved you so much, maybe more than my own kiddos if I ever could have had some. Them I would have grown used to. But you flew through here like a singing bird, and then were gone again. Watching you play I could feel the seconds slipping away from me, one by one.”
Sloane lay in the dark, paralyzed.
The alginate began to set immediately, stiffening to the consistency of hard cool gelatin. After three minutes Odessa tapped her on the scalp. “It should be set. Flex your face muscles for me now, sugar, to loosen the casting. I’m going to make a plaster mold. Remember those pieces of cheesecloth I cut? I’m dipping them in the plaster now. Good. Now I’m going to drape them over your face so we have some support for the alginate. That’s it, baby. There’s a pretty face under all that. I don’t know why you hide it so. Veils and hoods and you always looking at the ground.” The press of fingers around Sloane’s scalp, her cheeks, her jaw and chin. Odessa’s voice again, sounding tired. “Time will hide it for you soon enough.”
Sloane’s body felt heavy and lifeless on the witch’s table, a parcel of meat, nothing more. The stiff milk shake straws stuck up her nose made her want to sneeze. The sound of her breath sucking through them seemed terribly loud, so she had to strain to hear Odessa’s voice. “I was as pretty as you once, if you can believe that. It was hard work to behave like a lady, those last few years before the Flood; the magic got into your blood like wine, if you were an angel. It would have been easy to take what I wanted.” Odessa’s old fingers were on the only exposed part of Sloane that could still feel, just at the nape of her neck, naked below the muslin wraps. Softly Odessa stroked her short hair. “The news was full of stories of angels and minotaurs, miracles and nightmares. All that winter I felt the magic rising under me, as if I were standing in the Gulf and the tide was coming in. You know how it is, the water up to your waist, your chest, and then each wave your feet lift off the bottom just a little and it’s hard to stand firm. Then it’s up to your neck, you turn your face up, a wave smacks you and there’s salt in your mouth, you lose your footing, splash, find it again.
“I don’t even know why I was spared, really. Most of us were lost in a heartbeat, I think. I had a girlfriend I saw dissolve the night the Flood came down. Seeped away like a sugar cube in a hot cup of coffee. And of co
urse most that survived never got out of the Mardi Gras. For all I know, they’re still there with your step-daddy.”
The noise of Sloane’s breathing was like a rhythmic wind. She wished she could feel her chest rising and falling with it. Wished she could feel a pulse beating at her numb wrists and ankles.
“People were going crazy,” Odessa said. “The streets filled up with minotaurs. People kept expecting me to do something; I didn’t know what to do. It was Jane who took everything in hand. She realized we had to get in the Krewes. She was the one who salvaged everything from the hospital before it went under. Somebody else thought of tapping the gas lines for fuel, but it was your momma that got it done. Seems like every time disaster strikes, the Island looks to a Gardner. Dentons were always in it for themselves alone, and Fords have one eye on the bottom line. People trust the Gardners.
“She was going all the time, she hardly slept. I would come into her place—this was before she moved to Ashton Villa—I would stagger in at maybe two or three in the morning, she would still be working. I had to stay in the room to make sure her nightmares wouldn’t thicken, you know. That was the sort of thing that was happening those first six weeks and we wouldn’t have made it if we’d lost her. She would fall asleep on the little couch with maybe her head in my lap, face all drawn from working, nearly too tired to dream, and I could never fall asleep myself. There was one dim light going, a Coleman lantern I think it was, I’d turn it down real low, just it hissing in the corner and me looking down at her face, all shadows.”
Odessa’s voice stopped, along with her fingers. “I admired her very much,” she said. After a moment she took her hand off Sloane’s neck. “But that was long ago. She doesn’t come out to visit me anymore. Just sends the little messenger, hey, sugar? Just sends you.”
Odessa’s fingers returned, businesslike now, feeling around Sloane’s face, gently wiggling the edge of the alginate mask with its plaster backing. In a moment it released from Sloane’s forehead with a little tug, a whisper of air cool on her skin. Smoothly and steadily Odessa pulled the mask down. The straws slid out of Sloane’s nose, the darkness against her eyelids lightened, gelatin pulled away from her mouth with a last kiss. Then Odessa tapped her once on each eyelid, and she could see.