Slice Of Cherry (9 page)

Because if Kit thought Franken could fill the emptiness inside her, she was sadly mistaken.

“Evisceration is so fucking
cool
!”

Fancy winced and smacked Kit on her ear. “You want Madda to hear you talking like that?” Madda was out in the garden picking green tomatoes to fry, while the sisters set the table.

But Fancy didn’t feel near as disapproving as she sounded. Kit was right.

Evisceration
was
cool.

Kit rubbed her ear absently, still grinning. Franken was right about one thing. Kit really did radiate light, especially when she was happy. Fancy turned away from her; sometimes that brightness was too hard to face.

“After we kill Franken,” said Kit, “I’m gone put
his
ear in a jar too. Just like that old man’s. I’ll start a collection!”

“I hope you hid that thing real good,” Fancy hissed when Madda came back to the kitchen. “Last thing we need is Madda finding it.”

“She won’t. Madda’ll never notice it among all the jars full of squirrel spleens and whatnot.”

“And we are not gone kill Franken. How many times I gotta tell you?”

“You don’t even like Franken; all you do is complain about him, and you can’t still be worried about the police.” Kit pinched Fancy’s cheek. “Not after what you did to that old man.”

Fancy slapped her hand away. “That was different. Besides, you did all the work. I just watched.”

“Don’t try to distance yourself from what happened. Voyeurism is participation.”

“What’re you girls whispering about?” asked Madda, eyeing her daughters expectantly as she fried the tomatoes.

“Nothing,” the sisters trilled in unison, smiling their brightest good-girl smiles. And then Kit turned to Fancy and whispered, “And what’s the difference between Franken and the old man?”

“Franken’s a thief, but he never tried to hurt us.”

“I don’t think that’d matter in a court of law.”

“
Of course it would matter.
There’s no legal reason to take a hostage. But with the old man, that was self-defense.”

“No,
that
was self-indulgence.”

Fancy couldn’t deny how she’d felt: relief and a slippery pleasure at having taken such ultimate control over someone. “Maybe a little,” she admitted.

Kit grinned. “You were right, you know, you and your boydar. I
do
enjoy evisceration, and so do you. We’re learning all kinds of things about ourselves today.”

“Be serious, Kit.”

“I am,” she said. “For the first time in my life I felt like myself. No pretending, no hiding. Just me, warts and all. Too bad it was wasted on that old man. I wish I could drop my guard like that with somebody I loved.”

“Hello.”

“I mean besides you. You think Madda would ever . . . ?”

“Wanna watch us eviscerate someone?” The idea was so insane that it was no wonder Kit couldn’t even get the words out. “What do you think?”

“Think about what?” asked Madda, bringing the tomatoes to the table.

“Nothing,” said the sisters, again.

After Madda said grace, she gave her daughters a long look. “What y’all been up to all day?”

Fancy said, “Just went to the record store and—”

“We saw a corpse on the road home!”

Fancy kicked Kit under the table, but it was too late. Madda gasped, and Fancy’s serving of tomatoes hit the table instead of her plate. “A corpse? What did it want?”

“It was dead,” Fancy said quickly. “Already dead when we saw it.”

“Yeah, Madda,” said Kit, still grimacing from Fancy’s kick. “The dead can’t talk.”

“But they can,” said Madda. “They can ask you things.”

The sisters waited for the punchline, but there was none, and Madda didn’t look like she was joking.

“It didn’t speak to you, did it?”

“Speak?” Kit looked as shocked as if Madda had cursed at her. “What’re you saying?”

She smirked and said, “Nothing.” Just to irritate her daughters. “It still might not happen. It never happened to me. It did happen to Big Mama, but she was twelve. You girls are way too old to—”

“What?” The sisters leaned toward Madda, breathless.

“To speak to the dead.” Madda paused, gauging her daughters’ reaction, perhaps expecting them to laugh or otherwise dismiss what she’d said. When they remained silent and wide-eyed, she continued. “Sometimes, corpses like to speak to certain people in our family. Like Big Mama. Big Mama wouldn’t set foot in a cemetery. Cuz sometimes when she’d step on a grave, the body would rise. And speak to her.”

Fancy’s weirdness threshold, which like any Porterene’s was extremely high, stretched painfully into the stratosphere.
“Big Mama was a witch?”

Madda waved her hand dismissively. “I don’t think it had to do with witchcraft—everybody knows there’s no such thing as magic. It’s just that sometimes, some people get born with a gift. Like being born with double-jointed thumbs or a birthmark. Something you either have or you don’t. Does that make sense? It’d be nice if y’all did inherit something from my side. I know y’all can see things, the way Guthrie could—”

“Fancy can,” said Kit, matter-of-factly. “Not me.”

Madda looked at Fancy and sighed. “I just wish y’all had more of my blood in you than your daddy’s. It’s nice to be different, but he was different in too many wrong ways.”

“But why are we”—Fancy hesitated—“why is
our
family different at all?”

“It’s always been like that. Your daddy’s people have farsight. On my side people can settle the dead—all the way back to Cherry du Haven, and Lord knows where she got it from. But Cherry’s gifts were strong, so strong they lasted beyond death.”

“It’s one thing for somebody like Cherry to talk to dead people,” said Kit, “but . . .
Big Mama
?”

Big Mama had been a tough woman, tall and quick to slap any kid dumb enough to back-talk her, but she had always been merry, too, and full of funny, inappropriate stories. She laughed a lot. Daddy had said it was because she drank a lot. Anybody who drank that much oughta be in a good mood, he’d often said. Peach schnapps had been Big Mama’s liquor of choice; her pores had always been sweet with the stuff. And though she had been full of stories, mostly about other people, the most exciting thing the sisters had ever seen her do was chase one of her ex-husbands out of the house with a broom. And now they were supposed to believe that Big Mama could reanimate corpses?

Kit asked, “What would the corpses say to her?”

“She said”—Madda frowned in remembrance—“that they’d always ask something like will you hear me or will you grant my plea, and Big Mama’d say yes, and then she’d give them whatever they needed to be at peace.”

“What would a corpse need?” asked Fancy.

“To apologize. To confess. To accuse. To be heard. Big Mama listened. So did Cherry.”

Kit brought out her switchblade—she’d remembered to clean it, thank God—and began tapping it against the table. “Why is it that only certain people can do things?”

“Why is it that you can sing and play that piano,” Madda said, “and Fancy and I can’t?”

“Because I don’t suck the way y’all do.”

Fancy thought about kicking her again. “Way to be ladylike, Kit.”

“It’s as good an answer as any.” Madda brushed her hand against Kit’s cheek. “Nobody knows, baby.”

Kit leaned into Madda’s touch. “How come you only ever tell us the boring stuff about our family history? About slavery and stuff. You never told us Big Mama was a witch!”

“Don’t call Big Mama a witch.”

“But she was . . . special,” Kit insisted. “So if our family’s
special, does that mean we get an extra wish at Cherry Glade? There’s gotta be
some
perks, right?”

“We only get one wish, like everybody else, greedy girl. That reminds me.” Madda left the kitchen briefly and returned with two pink glass bottles, round and squat and stoppered like they’d been made to hold perfume. She gave them to her daughters. “I was lucky to find pink ones,” she said. Some families had good-luck charms; some had good-luck mottos. The Cordelles had a good-luck color.

“What’re you gone wish for, Madda?” Fancy asked.

“To be able to spend more time with y’all,” she said, settling back in her chair. “See if I can keep the two of you outta trouble.”

Kit gave her a big-eyed stare. “We don’t get into trouble.”

Madda huffed. “Maybe you don’t get
caught
.” She eyed her daughters with exaggerated suspicion. “I’d love to be able to see what y’all get up to when I ain’t here.”

“We ain’t interesting, Madda,” said Fancy in her most reassuring tone.

“I doubt that,” said Madda, who didn’t seem at all reassured.

Much later, after Madda left for work, the sisters sat in mismatched chairs at their desk in front of the wisteria-eaten
porch screen. The rate at which the vine was creeping into the room was disturbing, especially to Fancy, who often expected to wake up with it growing into her mouth, choking her. The room was lit with hurricane lamps, which the sisters favored. Electric light was too piercing and chased the shadows away— the sisters liked shadows.

“You think somebody could raise that old man from the dead?” Kit asked, doing an elaborate twirl routine with the switchblade as “It’s Your Thang” played on the phonograph. “Not that there’s much left to raise.”

“Who?” Fancy was busy writing down her wish to Cherry, what Kit should have been doing instead of obsessing over a corpse. “Big Mama’s been dead a long time. And if
we
could, it would’ve happened by now. Big Mama was twelve when it happened to her.”

“What if it happened to somebody else?” Kit grabbed Fancy’s shoulder, causing her to scratch a line down her formerly pristine note. “Some bastard member of our family who we don’t even know about? Some person who goes for a walk in the woods and stumbles across his animal-ravaged carcass and raises him—”

Fancy balled up the ruined note. “Calm down.”

“You calm down!” Kit dropped her head to the desk. “I know what that old man’s dearest wish is—it’s to get laid by young girls. To get laid by me! What if he comes back for me?”

“Well.” Fancy rewrote the note and slipped it into the bottle. “You keep saying you don’t wanna die a virgin.”

“My life is going up in flames, and you’re joking?”

“I don’t joke; I quip. It’s much more refined.” She pushed away from the desk and Kit’s phony paranoia and went into the inner room’s bathroom to brush her teeth.

When she went back to the sleeping porch, stepping over the wet footprints she and Kit had tracked in earlier after their bath, Kit was scribbling her own note. “‘Dear Cherry,’” she said as she wrote. “‘Please help me avoid . . . losing my virginity . . . to a corpse. Your friend, Kit.’”

Fancy had to laugh at Kit’s theatrics. They both knew that if that corpse was dumb enough to come back from the dead, Kit would simply “play” with it until it begged to go back to hell.

“Don’t waste your wish on nonsense,” Fancy said, pulling back the sheet on her bed. “I gotta waste my wish on us not getting caught for killing that old man
and
for what we’ve done to Franken. So
you
need to wish for us to stay together.”

Kit paused in the act of putting her silly note into the bottle.

“I’ll wish for that if you promise me something.”

“What?”

Kit leaned forward, her gaze darkly intense. “If that old man comes back wanting to get laid, then we do him the way we do everything—together. You with me?”

“Nope.” Fancy flopped back onto her pillows.

“You mean you won’t have sex with one measly old corpse?” Kit balled up her note and hurled it at Fancy. “Not even for me?”

Fancy caught the note in one hand and set it calmly on the nightstand. “Kit,” she said gravely, “a girl’s gotta have some things just for herself.”

She expected Kit to pretend to faint or something equally ridiculous, but Kit only stared into her empty pink bottle, a thoughtful expression on her face.

“Just for herself,” she whispered.

A whisper, but it resonated in the hot, narrow room like a curse.

M
E AND
K
IT SAT IN
B
IG
M
AMA’S LAP WHILE SHE TOLD US A BORING STORY ABOUT THE OLDEN DAYS.
B
IG MAMA TOLD
K
IT TO RUN AND GET THE PEACH SCHNAPPS BECAUSE IT WOULD PUT US IN A LISTENING MOOD.
B
UT WHAT KIT BROUGHT BACK WAS CHERRY SCHNAPPS SO BIG MAMA SLAPPED HER AND WOULDN’T LET US DRINK IT.
S
HE SAID CHERRIES WERE BAD FOR GROWING GIRLS.

Cherry Glade wasn’t much to look at: several acres of flat green land surrounded by elm and maple and pine with a single dead moontree at its center. But people who set foot on the land could feel its power; their bodies would tingle as if they were waking after a long sleep. Only five such places existed in Portero, places Porterenes called Keys because doors to other worlds often appeared near them. All Porterenes could recite dozens of tales of people who had vanished near Cherry Glade and were never heard from again.

But Porterenes were used to such mysteries, and not even the possibility of disappearing off the skin of the world was enough to keep the crowd from having a good time. The
Crayola-green glade was dotted with sun-hatted picnickers and flocks of children in ties and kneesocks chasing each other. The older kids played subdued games of Frisbee and touch football, mindful of their party clothes. The older people sat in the shade of the encircling forest, either playing cards or keeping a sharp eye on everyone. They also had control of the music, much to the dismay of the younger crowd. Teens begging for Jay-Z and Mary J. Blige had to settle for Lenny White and Chaka Khan.

The only spot devoid of any people was the moontree, which stood in the center of the glade, its tall, blackened limbs curling upward like a candelabra.

The sisters, who rarely went to public gatherings, were reminded of the family reunions they’d gone to on Madda’s side of the family when Big Mama had still been alive. That was before Daddy’s actions had made their family persona non grata. Unfortunately, the Cordelles were just as non grata at Cherry Glade. As they scouted for an empty picnic table, Madda called out to several people, who either returned her greetings with chill, short replies or pretended not to see her at all.