Indigo (2 page)

But I shrugged it off. That was just how New Orleans was—unpredictable in every way.

The new customer was still stomping his Converses on the welcome mat, and when I glanced at him I caught his silhouette. He shook his dark wet hair free of the rain, and I thought I was prepared.
Okay, tall, dark stranger. He’ll be hot. Big deal
.

He squared his shoulders and looked at the menu board, up through his dark lashes, and I could
not
make myself look away. I always looked away. I tried to seem invisible to people.
Keep the circle small
, I told myself. Fewer people in the circle, fewer people to hurt, fewer people to hurt you.

But I was glued. He had a messy mop of dark hair, wavy and untamed, defying gravity as it swirled up and away from his forehead. As he spoke his hellos, he had that drawl, that deep Southern twang to his vowels that turned his speech into music to my Midwestern ears. “Good mawnin’,” he said, and his voice was low, just above a mumble. Legato. Slow and smooth.

His eyes were the brightest blue, and his eyelashes were ridiculous, like fringe. They should’ve looked silly on a boy. But they didn’t. They worked against the square, rugged cut of his cheekbones, his jaw. The corners of his mouth turned up in a friendly way, but when he spotted Mia-Joy and me staring up from our pot of shrimp, he truly smiled. Big shiny white teeth twinkling like the tiles of Mrs. Rawlings’s kitchen.

His smile made him look younger.
Did he go to Liberty?
I expected his eyes to be meeting Mia-Joy’s beauty, taking in her long legs, her icy-green eyes, her caramel skin, but I was wrong. He looked straight at me, a half-smiling, half-startled expression, but only for a moment. Then his face changed, softened. He nodded a hello, like he knew me.

I felt a little fizzle at the base of my neck and all over my scalp then, like someone had touched me after rubbing socked feet over a shag carpet. Static electricity. The little hairs on my arms stood up, and a current vibrated right through me, settled in the back of my molars, like chewing on tinfoil. Yuck.

For a beat, I held his gaze. I held this note between us a tad too long, which was so much farther beyond my usual boundaries. I felt shaken and naked. I averted my eyes, caught my reflection in the window: my long dark hair, my pale skin. My swimmer’s body had dwindled now into a ghost of its old self.

I turned away, and I lost hold of the big stainless-steel shrimp pot, dropping it clean out of my lap. The clank of the steel on the tile shocked me back into reality.

“Fluckity fluck,” I swore under my breath, Mia-Joy’s favorite faux curse. I bent down to pick up the shrimp. Mrs. Rawlings snapped my behind with a dish towel. “I am so sorry,” I said, feeling the blush of the moment climb up my neck and onto my Irish-white face, my paler-than-pale cheeks and earlobes.

I heard the customer asking if he could help, but Mrs.
Rawlings refused, instead taking his order for crawfish jambalaya. I did not look back up. I cleaned my mess silently, cursing myself, throwing away the shrimp, costing the Rawlingses at least thirty dollars in product.

I made myself think of Sophie. A reminder. Because that’s what I had to remember. That’s who I was. And I had to interact as little as possible. Or else my bad luck, my mojo, whatever … it would creep out again. Get its roots in somewhere. Like kudzu, squashing the life out of everything beautiful around it.

When Mrs. Rawlings asked me to sit for a reading after the lunch rush, I shook my head as always. The Rawlings family was usually respectful of my limitations. But for some reason that day, when Mia-Joy begged, “Please, Corrine,” I gave in. I said yes. I told myself it was the guilt of the lost shrimp. But there was something else going on, and I think at some level I already knew it. Something was coming. The air around us felt heavier, expectant.

I sat down at the counter, ignoring the looks passing between Mrs. Rawlings and Mia-Joy. The heat of the day was in full swing now, pressing down on us, closer, thicker. The air-conditioning in the restaurant worked—technically—or so Granny Lucy always reminded us, even though she sat by an open screen door all day long. The backs of my legs immediately stuck to the red vinyl of the stool. Mia-Joy plopped onto the stool next to me.

“Lawdy Jesus, you must’ve said the right thing today,” Mia-Joy said to her mother. “Something changed her mind.”

“Maybe a full moon,” Granny Lucy called from her rocker near the back door, the runners of her chair crunching on the shells of the peanuts she was eating.

I forced myself not to roll my eyes.

“Put your hands on the table, honey. Flat, palms down. And Mia-Joy, shush, so as I can concentrate here.”

Mia-Joy made a show of zipping her lips, bugging her eyes. I listened to Mrs. Rawlings, placed my hands on the table. I still had a callus on my left forefinger from the violin. It had been months since I had played, but I felt the callus there now, rubbed the pad of my thumb against the hardened skin. I missed the weight of the instrument in my hands, the smell of the wood when it was under my chin.

I knew from watching other readings that Mrs. Rawlings liked to hold the hands of a customer before she shuffled her tarot cards, get a feel for the person, but she was being respectful of me. And I was glad. But truthfully, my mind wasn’t really there. I was already thinking about going home.

I watched Mrs. Rawlings shuffle her cards. The deck was larger than a regular one. The cards were old but well taken care of, only slightly tattered. On the back, the black-and-white design of an elaborate snake faded to yellow only at the edges, where I assumed the oil from several generations of Rawlings hands had accumulated from shuffling the cards.

Mia-Joy’s mama placed them on the counter and then lit
a single candle. She was a big woman, built sturdy. Mezzo forte. Even louder than Mia-Joy. She looked fierce and powerful, with a broad face and a broader waist, but she had the same eyes as Mia-Joy, playful and sparkling, Crayola green, and when they fixed on you, you knew you were only going to hear the truth, plain and simple. She suffered no fools. I waited for her to deal her cards, but I didn’t believe in this kind of stuff. My mom was a minister, for God’s sake. I didn’t believe in full moons or tarot cards or …

As I sat there, I realized that maybe I should.

I looked down at the freckled, pale skin of my hands on the counter in front of me, and a thought hit me hard. If I truly believed that I had to keep the circle small—and I did, I believed it—then how could I so easily discount Mrs. Rawlings and her dilapidated old cards? Or the lady down at the 7-Eleven who reads fortunes from chicken bones?

I sighed, shoved the thought aside.
Two steps away from a straitjacket, Corrine
.

I heard Mrs. Rawlings finish shuffling and slap one card onto the counter. It didn’t register with me, though.
Nearly six months. Since Sophie
.

I heard the slap of another card in front of me, and Mia-Joy clucked her tongue. I focused on the cards, swallowing hard against the dryness in my throat.

Mia-Joy pointed at the first one. “The Lovers,” she said. The card had a stylized silhouette of two people in an embrace, the background full of red valentine hearts. “It can
mean love in lots of ways: family, romance … Maybe just a hookup.” Mia-Joy laughed loudly.

“You were scratching your palm, your left one,” Granny Lucy called from her seat. “Means you is fixing to meet an old acquaintance,
ma chérie
.”

I shrugged. Mia-Joy pointed to the next card. It bore a shrouded figure against a dark background, a black face in the hood. “Death,” Mia-Joy said. “Dum da dum dum.” Mia-Joy’s laugh sounded forced. My jaw tightened, and beads of sweat formed on my upper lip.
It means nothing
.

“Don’t freak out, honey,” Mrs. Rawlings said. “Everyone goes running at that card in the movies. But it doesn’t mean death all literal-like. It can mean change. Transition. Opportunity.”

The next card was a chalice, a fancy golden cup covered in jewels. I looked at Mrs. Rawlings, her broad face turned down to the cards, her eyes studying. It was quiet for a moment, and I heard a fly buzzing in the kitchen, the hum of the dishwasher.

Mrs. Rawlings looked up apologetically. She said, “Cups mean water.”

“Water?” I said. I could stomach love and death. But love, death, and water? Was this my freaking résumé? I got up quickly from the stool and turned toward the door, watching the edges of my vision get all inky and swimmy. Sparks of liquid orange flickered at the dark edges of my sight. I reached a hand out, tried to find something on which to
steady myself. My hand itself felt far away, detached from the rest of me. I heard Mia-Joy as if from a distance: “Corrine, it’s good—”

I passed out flat on the white-and-black tiled floor of the Crawdaddy Shack, the fly buzzing at my ear as I lost consciousness.

I shoved the outdated tape into the ancient black cassette recorder. It was a crazy old machine, on its last legs and totally about to crap out on me. I had begged Mom to invest in some newer equipment. But she had insisted that she knew how to use this tape recorder, and if
she
was the one who had to use it, then
she
would choose to stick with it. I pushed the PLAY button, and Mr. Lazette’s voice picked up right where he had left off—the story of the Madame Bridgit ghost on the hotel terrace on Dauphine Street.

I picked up my sketchpad, my favorite pencil, and my little pocketknife from Granddad. I sat cross-legged on my bed, scraping at my pencil, getting just the right point on it, listening to Mr. Lazette.

“I was only a chile, ya see. I recall I seen it twice the summer of the fire on Basin Street. Didn’t know it was a ghost then. Saw her wandering on the roof of the Dauphine Hotel. Made me nervous to see—”

Mom knocked on the frame of my open door, and I stopped the tape. “Come in.”

“You sure you’re feeling okay, honey?” She carried in a
tray and set it on my overcrowded nightstand. I looked it over: a tuna fish sandwich, carrots, a glass of sweet tea.

“I’m fine.”

“Sarah said you let her do the cards.”

I nodded.

“Was it fun?” Mom’s smile stretched tight across her face, wary. My mom, my middle C, my four-four time. My anchor.

“You’re worried. I’m fine.”

“It’s just that when I hounded you to hang out more, to overstep your boundaries, I didn’t mean you had to delve into voodoo.” Mom said this last part with that jingle-bell laugh of hers, but I knew there was some worry there.

“It was stupid,” I said. Now that I wasn’t sitting there with all eyes on me, those hokey cards staring up at me, I knew it was dumb. “I just got overwhelmed, I think.”

Mom sat down carefully on the edge of the bed. Her legs did not touch mine, didn’t even graze my knee. I took a bite of the tuna fish sandwich, and we sat in silence.

I ate a few more bites and took a couple sips of the iced tea. It was cold going down my throat.

“I’m glad you’re feeling okay.” She looked like she wanted to do something—touch me, hug me, tuck my hair behind my ear. I wanted to let her, but I couldn’t. I didn’t dare touch her. I realized in that moment that I could feel something, a tiny something in my chest, churning, blossoming.

I swallowed hard, inched myself farther away from my
mother. I was too tired of asking how, why, what. The only thing I knew was that it was there. And I had to respect it.

“He looks a lot like that,” Mom said, pointing to my sketch of Mr. Lazette. “Again.” She shook her head and gave me a smile. Her eyes, the same blue eyes as mine, looked amazed and entertained, but hidden underneath sat some fear.

I felt it too. “His story is creepy. Good, though.”

“I know. It’s a regular ghost story,” she said, rubbing the backs of her knuckles across her bottom lip like she did when she was thinking.

She first started interviewing the senior citizens up at Chartrain Hills because of a New Orleans history project I had to do at school. I couldn’t do it. It was early in the semester, when we had just moved here. I hadn’t said more than five words to anyone. She did the interviews for me, taped them.

Mrs. Janell Jackson. Her great-grandmother had traveled on the Underground Railroad, had been a contemporary of Harriet Tubman, and Mrs. Jackson could really tell a story. The truth was, Mom saw me enjoying something a little bit, putting that project together for history class, so she urged me to interview some of the old folks myself.

I couldn’t. But she kept bringing me tapes. It just kind of happened. She said the old folks liked talking even more than I probably liked to listen.

“What should I do with these stories?” I had asked Mom after three or four of them.

“You’ll think of something,” she said.

And that’s when I started sketching the tale-tellers. I had always loved to draw: pen and ink, charcoal, pastels. But after Sophie, after the move, it became the only thing I remembered how to enjoy, even just a little bit.

“When will Dad be back?” I asked, finishing off the iced tea. I had seen his handwritten note to Mom in the kitchen, on our chalkboard next to the phone.

“Next Thursday,” Mom said, taking a carrot off my plate and getting up. Dad spent about half of his time back in Chicago, with Harlowe Construction booming at both ends of the Mississippi River.

I nodded, reached over to press PLAY on the tape recorder.

“Have you thought about letting me show these sketches to anyone?” Mom asked, leaning on the door frame.

“No,” I answered simply. Mom nodded. She didn’t push.

I didn’t want anyone to see my drawings. It was only a hobby. I wasn’t that good at it, not like the violin. But even more important, sharing my art would be a much too personal interaction now. These sketches of my tale-tellers. And I could never answer the questions that these sketches would bring. Especially the one.

The question that even made Mom nervous. Fearful.

How could I listen to the tapes of these people, listen to their tales—with Mom giving them the prompt “What’s your
story?”—and then sit down and sketch them, without ever having seen them in my life?