Joplin's Ghost (53 page)

Carlos rubbed Serena’s shoulder as he passed her on the way to Phoenix’s bed, and Phoenix’s sister, still humming, squeezed his hand hard.

Three fly strips were hanging in the room—two near the window, one next to Phoenix’s bed. All of them swung gently in invisible breezes, like the swaying blinds. An upscale facility like The Harbor wasn’t accustomed to having a fly problem, but they had one in Phoenix’s room. The brown fly strips were dotted with black flies, more all the time. Before he’d left, Carlos had counted sixty flies on the strip hanging above Phoenix’s night table, at her bedside. Now he was sure there were more flies caught on the tacky paper, angrily buzzing their wings before they exhausted themselves and died.

Flies followed Phoenix from room to room, too.

Leah Rosen-Smalls sat in the reclining leather chair beside the bed, her head facing Phoenix. Her eyes were half-lidded, but watchful. She must be exhausted. Over the past three days, Leah Rosen-Smalls had become one of Carlos’s favorite people. She had to be in the greatest agony of her life, or close to it, but no detail got past her in that chair.

Carlos rested his hands on Phoenix’s mother’s shoulders, his chin on top of her head. “You need dinner, Mom?” he said. He didn’t know why he had started calling her
Mom,
but she didn’t mind. If she had figured out Carlos’s history with Phoenix, his past offenses were irrelevant. Everyone said Ronn had dived for cover while Carlos saved Phoenix’s life.

“Serena brought sandwiches from that place the concierge suggested, but I’m not hungry.” A crumbling tissue was always clenched inside her fist, and she rubbed it against her nose while she watched the nurse, Lydia, administer eyedrops to her daughter.

When Carlos saw Phoenix, his chest tightened as always. She looked like a corpse. Phoenix lay propped with the same wide-eyed gaze, staring at nothing and everything. Her jaw was black with the bruise he had given her when he pulled her beneath the table, but the bruise was easier to face than her eyes. As far as Carlos knew, Phoenix hadn’t blinked her eyes in three days.

Lydia was leaning over her with a dropper to hydrate Phoenix’s eyes, her routine. Lydia wasn’t bothered by the flies, the temperature variations or the spirit traffic in Phoenix’s room, but she was nervous around Leah Rosen-Smalls. She worked with a nervous laugh, constantly glancing toward the judgment chair behind her.
Tranquilo,
Carlos had murmured to the nurse on her way out once, and Lydia had smiled like he was flirting.

“How’s Phee?” Carlos asked Lydia.

“No change. She’s still trying to talk, so I guess that’s good.”

Yes, but to whom?

“Lydia, would you be sure to dry her face where it’s getting wet, please?” Leah said. She might be powerless to rescue her daughter from wherever she was, but she would not abide any form of carelessness in her sight.

“I will, Mrs. Smalls,” Lydia said. The girl had epic patience.

“Did she eat dinner?” Carlos said.

This time, Phoenix’s mother answered. “Not a bite,” she said, sighing. Phoenix had always been willing to chew and swallow her food as long as someone fed her, even if she wasn’t responsive. When she was admitted, Phoenix’s doctor told them that if Phoenix stopped eating longer than forty-eight hours, they would transfer her to a hospital with an intensive care unit. “And she would have loved it. Her chef fixed a wonderful jerk chicken soup, or bisque. When I was in the hospital having Phoenix, all I got was dry sandwiches and soupy mashed potatoes.”

She was trying to make a joke. Good woman. “Bling bling,” Carlos said, smiling. But not eating was a serious matter.
Please start eating again tomorrow, Phee. Stay with us.

Lydia pocketed her eye-dropper. She glanced at the dangling fly strip for an instant, then quickly away. In this heat, the strip had a faint smell that promised to turn putrid in time.
“Mañana,”
Lydia said, ready to leave. “Her color looks better, Mrs. Smalls.”

“I think so, too,” Leah said, although Phoenix’s face looked waxen to Carlos.

As Lydia was leaving, Carlos heard Johnita call out to her. “Let Dr. Romanowski know I can’t do that reading tonight. I can’t pull away right now.”

“Oh, my God,” Lydia said, as if she might cry. “We’re all looking forward—”

“Eight o’clock tomorrow, first thing,” Johnita said. She held up a finger. “One hour.”

Johnita Poston was the true celebrity in Phoenix’s room.

The psychic’s book was apparently a perennial best seller, which helped, but prophecy was her calling card. After she performed a single private reading for Phoenix’s psychiatrist, Dr. Young, no one on The Harbor’s staff objected to the unorthodox practices and virtually unlimited visiting hours in Room 315. The staff respected Johnita Poston’s wishes. No wonder Phoenix called her the Queen Psychic.

Lydia nodded eagerly. “Yes, we’ll be there. There’s ten of us. Is that OK?”

“That’s a lot, so no more. And don’t look so nervous: Your father will come through his bypass surgery fine, if that’s what you wanted to ask me.”

Apparently, it was. Lydia’s face bloomed into a smile. “
Gracias, señora
. Yemayá talks to you. You are blessed from God.” She picked up Johnita’s left hand and pressed it between her palms, as if to kiss it.

“I’m only a messenger,” Johnita said, something she said often. Politely, she pulled her hand away. She wasn’t interested in worship.

Carlos could understand the impulse to revere the Queen Psychic. Heather had exposed him to some strange circles, so he had met a lot of people who seemed to know the future, the past, and the thoughts of the dead. Not all of them had the discipline or desire for books and television shows, but they knew what they knew. Of all of them, Carlos had never seen a psychic as good as Johnita Poston, who could pluck knowledge out of the air. The unseen spoke to Johnita in crisp, clean sentences.

“Does Phoenix look better to you, too?” Phoenix’s mother asked him, after Lydia was gone. She wanted a second opinion.

Carlos stared at Phoenix’s open eyes, the color of pale rosewood. He missed her so much that his stomach hurt. Seeing her eyes now, he remembered what it had felt like to roll off her at the Osiris and see those eyes, and the blood and saliva dribbling from her mouth. For a terrible, unchangeable moment, he had been certain she was shot, too.

“I don’t know, Mom,” Carlos said, the best he could do without lying.

Phoenix’s head dipped slightly, giving the illusion that she had angled herself to look at him, steering her all-seeing eyes. Phoenix’s mouth trembled, working up and down. Carlos smiled, stroking her forehead. “Yes, it’s me, Phee.”
Why don’t you sit up and chat with me for a while? Why don’t you tell me where you’ve been? Why don’t you come back home?

“She’s glad to see you,” Leah said, sounding happy.

“Yes, she’s definitely still in there,” Carlos said, and he kissed Phoenix’s nose. “I know you love me, Phee. I love you, too.”

They kept their voices hushed because sometimes fragments of words came from Phoenix’s mouth. Most of the sounds she made were gurgles and grunts, but sometimes there was more. They wrote everything she said down on the notepad beneath the fly strip on the night table. In three days, she had said twelve words:
Daddy. No. Awake. Reenie. Mommy. Hold. Here—or hear. See—or sea. Carlos.
And
Scott
three times, maybe more. He wondered whose name she was calling during the times her lips moved without any sound.

Phoenix’s lips shuddered, then fell still.

“I’m right here,
linda,
” Carlos said. “I’m ready to hear anything you want to say.”

This time, there was no motion, no sound from her. Nothing but a heartbreaking stare.

“She started moving her fingers once,” Leah told him. “Like she was playing a piano.”

“When did that happen?” Johnita called. Her ears picked up the words of the living, too.

“Two or three this morning. I think she was sleeping. She did it with both hands. It wasn’t ten seconds, but I saw it. I happened to be awake.”
Not that she sleeps,
Carlos thought.

“That’s important, Leah. Write that down, if you haven’t,” the psychic said.

“I didn’t even think of it, until now.” Leah sat up, energized by the thought of doing something. She grabbed her notepad.

“Significant movements. Changes in her eyes. Auras. Write all of that down.” The psychic sounded like a commanding officer in wartime.

Carlos leaned closer to Phoenix, gazing at her unblinking pupils. Sometimes, when he stared long enough, Carlos felt as if he could fall into her. “You sure you don’t want to tell me something, Phee?” he whispered. “We’re getting worried about you.”

Phoenix’s throat rumbled softly. Her lips fell open again, bobbing once.

“I promise to listen very carefully,” Carlos said. “I promise to try to understand.”

Phoenix blew a puff of air against his earlobe. A
puhhhhhhh
sound.

He lay his hand on her blanket, the spot where he knew her stomach was. He pressed with weight, a silent encouragement.
Yes, Phee, please go on.

Suddenly, a gurgle popped out as a word. “Piano,” Phoenix said, more than a breath.

“Oh my God. I heard that,” Leah said, writing faster. “Thank you, sweet God. She said piano. Is that what you heard, Carlos?”

“I heard it.”

“Finn?” Heather said.

“Got it over here,” he heard Finn say from the doorway. “Pi-a-no.”

That was the clearest-sounding word yet. Leah came to her feet, joining Carlos over Phoenix’s bed. “That’s it, Buttercup. Don’t push too hard. You can rest now. Talk to us again when you’ve rested.” She grasped Carlos’s hand. “Two hours. She said her last word only two hours ago. This is the fastest she’s spoken again.”

“What did she say two hours ago?” Carlos said. No one had mentioned that.

Leah blinked. “Scott,” she said. “Four or five times now. She’s with him. I know it.”

“Maybe a piano will help us contact her,” the psychic said. Johnita claimed she was mostly guessing when it came to Phoenix, but that hadn’t sounded like a guess.

“Marcus said when Phoenix was in the hospital, he used to play music for her when he visited. That’s why we play the CDs,” Leah said. Phoenix heard CDs several hours a day, but so far none had the impact they’d hoped for. Not even Joplin.

“She was in a coma, no?” Carlos said. “Maybe this is like that. Maybe they’re related.”

Serena stopped humming. “Marcus told me how Phoenix played that piano after her accident. He would know…” She’d spoken of him in present-tense, until she remembered.

“I was there, too,” Leah said, filling Serena’s silence. “I saw it. She played in her sleep.”

“Maybe she could do that again,” the psychic said. “I told Phoenix at her reading that it was very important to find the piano from the accident.” Her tone sounded almost scolding.

“Yes, she asked me about it,” Phoenix’s mother said. “Two days before.” No one said what had happened within Phoenix’s earshot. They never said
shooting,
or
murder,
or
dead.

“We need to find it and bring it to her,” Carlos said. He felt hopeful, suddenly.

“It was so long ago!” Leah said, raising her hand to her forehead. “I can’t remember the name of the collector we sold it to. Do I have to go all the way home to dig it out?”

The pause was only two seconds at most. “Burnside?” the Queen Psychic said.

Leah gasped. “
Yes
. From Cutler Ridge. How in the world could you know that?”

“It wasn’t me, it was you. You knew. I just helped you wipe off a little dust.”

Goose bumps tickled the back of Carlos’s neck. Johnita Poston was spooky.
Her Highness could have been a dangerous woman in another life,
he thought, peeking around the corner at her. A fly landed on the end of the psychic’s pen, and she held the pen up to her face so she could examine the fly more closely. The insect stayed in place while she stared.

“It’s almost as if they’re bringing the messages on their wings,” the psychic said, murmuring mostly to herself. Then she went back to writing, intercepting another of the buried whispers. As soon as her pen touched the paper, the fly was gone.

It had flown away, Carlos was sure. But it had looked like it vanished instead.
Poof.

Carlos went back to Phoenix’s bed and gazed at her eyes, and pain stabbed his stomach again. Phoenix’s face was paralyzed in her life’s greatest instant of horror. He wished he could leap inside her pain and pull her to safety.
Come back to us, Phee. We miss you. We need you here on this side.

“I’m going to get that piano, Ms. Poston,” Carlos said to the psychic. “If we bring Phoenix that piano, will Joplin let her go?” The blunt question made Phoenix’s mother’s face turn ashen. None of them liked to call it what it was, but somebody had to.