Circle of Secrets (7 page)

“Since I was a girl I been wanting to hang real lights in my blue bottle tree. They’re solar lights, too. The sun’ll heat ’em up all day and then, after dark, they’ll make a spectacular show for us while we eat our supper on the porch.”

“Oh,” I say slowly. “I get it now. I guess that could be okay.”

“Don’t be a stick-in-the-mud, Shelby Jayne.”

“I ain’t a stick-in-the-mud!” I protest, and then stop, Grandmother Phoebe’s voice ringing out rules of grammar in my head. “I mean, I’m
not
a stick-in-the-mud.”

Mirage murmurs, “Well, I’m doin’ my best to move past the pain. Look to the future, so to speak. Do something I always planned to do with — well, never you mind. I’m probably not makin’ much sense.”

“You mean Grand-mère? Before she died?”

She gives a little shake of her shoulders like a devilish imp is creeping up her neck right then and there. “Somethin’ like that.”

“Where’s she buried?” I ask, wondering if it was okay to ask or if she’d get mad at me talking about it.

“Bayou Bridge Cemetery.”

I swallow hard and slowly edge the question out of my mouth. “What’d she die of that was so bad you had to leave me?”

Mirage flicks her eyes at me. “Cancer, Shelby. Spread through her whole body. Never seen somebody suffer so much in all my life. Had to bathe her, carry her from room to room, her body just a bag of bones and skin, like a skeleton.” She stops and looks around, lowers her voice. “Let’s not talk
about this here in public. But I hope you’ll know why I had to come out here. My mamma was all alone, only had me in all the world.”

“Grandmother Phoebe only has Daddy and me, too.”

Mirage holds herself real still for a minute. “That’s true. And I never begrudged Phoebe her son or her granddaughter in all these years, but sometimes enough is enough.”

“Is that why you seem so mad?” Even as I say the words, I think about how, mostly, she seems sad and gloomy.

“I ain’t mad, Shelby. I’m glad you’re here, more than anything. But I am tired. Watching my mamma die, gettin’ through the funeral. I’m exhausted and it’s been hard being back here again. Too many memories … sad memories. And it’s lonely out here, like I told you. Thinkin’ ’bout selling the house, but don’t know where I’d go.”

“You mean you’d sell that swamp house?”

She eyes me. “Guess you’d like that, huh?”

I shrug like I don’t care one way or the other, but she shakes her head like it’s too much to think about.

After Mirage makes the purchase, she says, “Now that I have these lights, they’ll probably jest sit in a box on my own back porch. Don’t have the energy to put them up. Maybe you could.”

“Me?” I have no idea why she’d buy them and then not put them up, but I’m too tired to ask. The rowing from earlier
this morning hits me hard and all I want to do is sit down. Mirage doesn’t make much sense most of the time and that just makes me feel mad all over again.

Then again, if I put up the lights, maybe I’d find more notes in the bottles.

I suffer through a few more errands, but Sweet Ellen’s Bakery
beignets
sort of make up for my suffering as I lick the sugar off my fingers when we pull up at our own dock again. The sun is finally out, blue sky breaking through the clouds.

I jump out, and the boat teeters dangerously as I hit the bank.

“Tie up the line please, Shelby,” Mirage calls.

Quickly, I tug at the rope, jerk it around the piling bobbing up and down in the water, then run around the side of the house, past the rickety porch and the woodpile, scaring Miss Silla Wheezy and Mister Possum Boudreaux out of their afternoon naps. They stretch and yawn and arch their backs, then settle back down, eyes half closed, watching me.

I stop running when I get underneath the blue bottle tree. I just have to be alone for a little while. I’m tired of answering Mirage’s mother-y questions.

Nothing’s gonna help. I think it’s too late. I lost my real mamma a year ago. I used to have a mamma that went to college classes and wore her hair in a ponytail with butterfly clips. She used to fix fried chicken and mashed potatoes for
dinner on the nights Grandmother Phoebe was gone to City Council meetings, then got her homework done in front of the television while I did mine.

She’s not the same person I used to know at all. Now her hair is loose and wild, she has animals for pets in the house, and heals people like a swamp witch — even if she calls herself a fancy name like
traiteur.

Tears start coming on and I wipe them away with the back of my hand. Then my nose starts running and I rub my face with my sleeve. I’m not going to cry over her. If she didn’t want me back a year ago then she can’t change her mind now and make the whole year just disappear like it didn’t happen.

Seems like the swamp stole her away. Made a new person called Miz Mirage Allemond. A healer who talks to God and owls and has dirty toes to boot.

A sob fills up the corners of my throat.

Then I hear her calling my name. I don’t want her to see me crying so I pretend I’m deaf and press my forehead against the cypress trunk. Closing my eyes, I listen to the wind whistle across the open mouths of all those blue bottles above my head.

After a minute, I wipe my face and lean back. The bottles are dancing and swaying and the sun shines right through them, making them glow.

Some of the bottles have rainwater still inside, but three
branches over my head, there’s a bottle with something besides rain lying in the bottom.

Something white and folded.

My heart hammers at my ribs and my breath catches like a frog leaped into my throat.

I glance around. No sign of Mirage. I guess she gave up — or is she spying on me from the kitchen window? Maybe she’s ignoring me because I ignored her.

Turning, I look for something to stand on. Aha! I run to the porch and grab an old folding chair from a stack behind the old hot water heater standing in the corner. Then I run back to the tree. After I make sure the chair is steady, I scramble up and reach as high as I can to grasp the branch with the bottle.

Once the blue bottle slips off, the branch pops back like a whip, almost cracking the bottle next to it. I hold my breath waiting for a shatter of glass to rain down, but it doesn’t break.

First I close one eye, peering into the bottle’s mouth, then the other eye. Sure enough, there’s a folded piece of paper inside.

It’s harder to get out than the first, the paper slipping back down every time I think I’ve got my fingers pinched around it.

“Oh, heck!” I grumble as I try for the fiftieth time. Tilting, tilting, tilting, the paper finally slips out at just the right angle and I hurriedly unfold it.

I’m breathing so hard with anticipation, I’m practically gasping.

I can’t find you! Are you lost?

This time the handwriting is different.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

J
UST THE MERE THOUGHT OF A NEW SCHOOL MAKES MY
stomach tilt and whirl.

Two weeks after I arrived, I stare at the muddy, cocoa-colored water and try not to throw up.

I wish school didn’t start until September so I could just hang out under the blue bottle tree, play with Miss Silla Wheezy, and find all the secret notes inside the bottles. I hope there are more. I’m desperate to know who wrote them and what they mean.

Like secret notes passed back and forth in class.

Mirage spends most of the trip to town pointing out meadows of purple hyacinth, duckweed, and a flock of herons. I let out a tiny yelp when I see a gator watching us from the banks,
but he doesn’t move as we pass, even though my heart stops for about five minutes.

“Won’t hurt you,
shar,”
Mirage says in a calm voice. “He’s more ’fraid of you than you are of him.”

“Can we move more to the middle?” I ask, flapping my hands to get the boat to move away from the bank. Quick as I can, I pull down my long-sleeved blouse to hide the charm bracelet I snapped around my wrist before I left the house. I know I’m not supposed to wear it, but I can’t bear to leave it at home. Long sleeves is hotter than heck, and I’m already sweating, but I don’t want Mirage to know I’m wearing the bracelet.

“’Course, we can,” Mirage says, then pulls her oar to move the boat deeper into the center of the bayou. The current ripples against the sides of the boat, and I make sure not to look at that big ole gator watching me like he wants to eat me up in one big gulp.

After we tie up at the town docks, I unclench my aching fingers. My palms have red, puffy blisters from gripping the paddle so hard and my arms feel ready to fall off my shoulders again. But I was ready to knock a gator in the head if he tried to take a bite out of the boat.

“Pick you up right here after school. There’s a lunch in your pack, too.”

My hair is wet and stringy as I hunch inside my jacket, the paddle high over my head. When I step out of the skiff, I’m grateful once again that I’ve made it to civilization. “Do I have to do this boating thing every day until Christmas break?”

“You’ll survive,” Mirage says as she steps off the swaying pier and ties the rope.

I feel sick. “You going with me to school?”

She grabs a pack from under the seat of the boat. “I gotta sign them registration papers. Your daddy gave me your shot records, stuff like that.”

I freeze like a Popsicle when I see the line of yellow buses and the clusters of kids on the sidewalks. Wish so bad I could hide out in a washtub at Ozaire’s Laundromat. Ducking behind a hedge of rain-speckled shrubbery, my heart thuds so hard I’d swear I swam the bayou to get here.

“Come on, Shelby Jayne. Might as well get it over with.” Her lips are pressed tight and Mirage almost looks more scared than I am.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, even though I don’t want her thinking that I care all that much.

“Don’t like comin’ to this part of town much. Too many sad memories lingering around these parts.”

“Like what? How can a town be sad?”

“Oh, there’s the bell,” she says, ignoring my question as the school bell sounds.

Students stream through the front doors. Within seconds, the school grounds are empty. The rain comes down harder, like punishment for being tardy.

The Bayou Bridge Elementary School is muggy, smelling of old barbecue sauce and rotting carrots, like someone forgot their lunch in their desk over the summer.

My jeans are soaked by the time I step inside the school office and a blast of moist, warm air hits my face.

The office is small and quiet, emphasizing the sound of my squeaky, wet shoes. I swipe a hand across my bangs and discover that the ends of my hair are dripping like melting icicles. I’m sure I look like a drowned nutria and I can feel the red stain of embarrassment creeping up my face.

A woman in a swivel chair uses her feet to wheel across the floor from a desk to the copy machine to retrieve the stapler. She rides that swivel chair all over the office.

She clicks her tongue sympathetically. “I’m sorry to say, but you look like someone dunked you in the bayou, honey. Did you miss the bus? You must be new because I know everybody here since before they were born.”

“This here’s my daughter,” Mirage says, fidgeting with the zipper on her backpack. “Shelby Jayne Allemond.”

“Nice to meet you, Shelby Jayne.”

Real fast, I say, “Just Shelby.”

She smiles and picks up a mug of steaming coffee and
skims the top with her lips. It reminds me of the way my daddy drinks his and I don’t want to think about him so my eyes roam across her messy desk. Stacks of green files, papers and memos, a spilled box of paper clips, and a stapler she’s in the process of refilling. A nameplate sits askew: M
RS.
F
LORENCE
B
ENOIT.

“Got her paperwork right here,” Mirage says, handing the envelope across the desk.

Mrs. Benoit uses her heels to push her chair to a filing cabinet. “Go ahead and sit in those chairs while I see which class has space.”

I sink into a chair next to Mirage, who frowns over the blank registration papers and gets out a pen.

A few student aides go in and out, running errands. A couple of other women dressed in pantsuits walk out of the principal’s offices discussing something boring.

I close my eyes and pretend I’m not really here at Bayou Bridge Elementary School, but back home in my new class with LizAnn.

A few minutes later, Mirage hands over the paperwork and Mrs. Benoit’s eyes dart across each line like a speed reader. “I plopped you into Mrs. Jenny Daigle’s class. The students like her real well.” She looks up at Mirage. “You forgot your address on this line, dear.”

Mirage turns a little red. “I — I don’t really have an address.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Benoit says, and her face goes even redder than Mirage’s.

“We ain’t homeless,” Mirage says quickly. “Jest don’t live on a street. Bayou Teche swamp out near Cypress Cove instead.”

Mrs. Florence Benoit sizes up my limp clothes and my straggly hair and I’m ready to run straight back to New Iberia — even if I have to use my own two feet to get there. I’d planned on starting sixth grade with LizAnn in Mrs. Bergernon’s class this year.

I chew on my cheek and taste blood. My eyes get all watery so I stare at the wall until I can see straight again. Where’s Grandmother Phoebe when I need her? I know she has to have surgery, but I wish so bad I wasn’t in this dinky little town in this pathetic school in the middle of nowhere.

Mrs. Benoit says brightly, “I’ll make you up a file right quick, Shelby Jayne, and request your records from New Iberia. Meanwhile, here’s a map of the school — we only have two main halls, cafeteria here in the middle, and fields and track behind us. Mrs. Daigle’s classroom is just a couple of turns away. You better scoot on over — and oh! If you
get lost, come back here and I can get some students to escort you.”

I see one of the women from the rear offices start to walk toward us, and Mirage quickly reaches a hand out to me but stops when I take a step back. In a low voice, she says, “See you this afternoon, Shelby Jayne. You’ll be jest fine.”