Tina Mcelroy Ansa (19 page)

Then, a voice right at her ear seemed to whisper to her, “Believe!”

Lena glanced around at Sister a few feet away, who quickly looked to the bare wooden floor. It had not been Sister who spoke, blowing in her ear with the word, the injunction: “Believe!”

Lena took a deep breath and answered.

“Yes, Madame Delphie. I believe.” And she felt a tingle all over.

“Humph, I know you do. Take this candle and light it before you go to sleep. And make sure you are alone. Sister!” she shouted at the girl standing by the door. “See Marie on your way out.”

Then, Madame Delphie rose, and Lena saw that she was not a large woman as she had thought at first, but a small stout one about her grandmother’s size. Madame Delphie began moving across the room toward a dark curtain hanging across a doorway, but when she passed Lena, who was unable to move, the little woman reached over and touched the girl’s shoulder tenderly. The touch was like a shot of electricity that set Lena trembling all over. Then, Madame Delphie moved on behind the curtain.

Lena sat on the hall bench a minute or two, while Sister talked with Madame Delphie’s assistant at the end of the hall. But when the two girls emerged back into the sunlight, Lena realized that her knees were still shaking. She had to lean against the peeling wall of the house to steady herself.

“Aunt Delphie’s something else, yeah?” Sister said with a smile as she watched Lena try to gather herself.

Lena just nodded her head, dumbly. It felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds.

When her legs settled down and her voice came back, Lena reached into her shoulder bag and asked Sister, “Did you have to pay something?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Sister said as if she had just bought her friend a Coca-Cola. “My treat.” They headed back up the street toward the bus stop.

Sister wouldn’t let Lena ask any questions about Madame Delphie and what the candle meant.

“I was told you need all of your strength and attention for tonight when you light the candle and sleep,” Sister told her as they rode on the bus back to campus. “Aunt Delphie’s assistant told me you shouldn’t talk much, to eat lightly—no beignets—and rest, but don’t sleep ’til nightfall.”

“But what’s the candle going to do?” Lena had to ask something.

“Lena, I’m the one who took you to Aunt Delphie. I take my duty very serious, yeah. So please don’t keep asking me questions when I’m supposed to keep you quiet, okay?”

Lena didn’t know how she was going to make it until dark. She had so many questions, she thought she would crack open if she didn’t get some answers. But Sister had turned so solemn about her duty, Lena felt she had to respect it.

By the time the sun began dropping to the earth, edging toward first dark in the muggy New Orleans heat, Lena was so jumpy, she knew she would never be able to fall asleep at all that night, let alone at such an early hour. But Sister moved around Lena’s dorm room with such assurance, sticking the white candle into a small green bud vase, placing a book of matches from the cigarette machine in the basement next to it, and pulling down the shades at the windows, that Lena made an effort to lean on the feeling of near confidence she had felt when she told Madame Delphie she believed. Lena felt this time she might at last find safety with Madame Delphie’s methods.

It was akin to the feeling she remembered having when her grandmama would say to her, “Don’t worry, baby, Grandma ain’t gonna let nothing happen to her little puppy.”

Although her first inclination was to grab onto Sister and beg her not to leave, she let go of the fear and told Sister, “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” Sister laughed from the doorway. “Where you think you going? Good night, girl, I’ll see you in the morning.” Then, she shut the door firmly on her way out.

To Lena, the closing of the light wooden door sounded like a prison cell door slamming shut on a lifer. Just to make sure she could get out, she got up from her seat on the edge of her bed and opened and closed the door several times. Then, before she could lose her nerve, she went right to the white candle on her tall dresser, lit it and slipped under the covers of the bed in her pink bra and panties.

With the covers pulled up to her chin, she watched the candle flame reflected in the dresser mirror. The flame burned low and steady for a couple of seconds, then grew tall and flickering. Lena didn’t take her eyes off the flame and when it started emitting a light gray stream of feathery smoke, it occurred to her for the first time that falling asleep with a candle burning was a fire hazard, especially in the old wooden barracks-like dormitory.

Maybe I should try to stay awake and watch the candle so there won’t be an accident, she thought, keeping her gaze on the taper that now was spewing billows of the gray smoke. She was so mesmerized by the yellow flame, she didn’t even notice how much smoke had filled the small plainly decorated room.

She was beginning to find it difficult to breathe and the smoke had distorted or cloaked everything that was familiar to Lena. She heard a noise like a book falling to the floor over in a corner she could no longer see. She pretended to ignore the sound, repeated again and again, but it got louder and louder until it sounded like a freight train headed straight for her narrow twin bed.

Lena was too frightened to move and when the train sound had rumbled through, right past her bed, it left a room full of voices in its wake. Now she had no intention of moving. Every direction seemed to hold myriad voices and the outlines of human beings.

Now the smoke was so thick she could barely breathe.

“Ghosts!” Lena said aloud, and immediately felt herself being pulled in all directions. “Oh, God, I’m going to die!”

And as she gasped for breath, the life actually began leaving her body. She could see bits of herself floating up into the smoke. She could feel herself becoming less and less real. And she began to cry.

Then:

BAM-BAM-BAM!!

The sudden knock on the door—hard enough to push the unlocked door ajar—stopped everything that was going on in Lena’s dorm room.

“Emergency dorm meeting. Five minutes. In the main parlor.” The hall resident’s voice cut through the smoke in the room, then moved on down the hall to the next room.

BAM-BAM-BAM!!!

“Emergency dorm meeting. Five minutes. In the main parlor.”

Lena looked around and was stunned to find her room as it had been an hour before. But she felt as if she had just gotten a whipping: hurt, weary and defeated. She got out of bed, grabbed her fleecy robe and staggered up the one flight to Sister’s room, entered without knocking and fell across her narrow twin bed.

She didn’t look to see if anyone else was in the room. She didn’t wait for Sister to ask any questions. She just started talking.

“Sister, I am
never
gonna do that again. I don’t care what anybody says.”

“Um, it was a bad one, huh?” Sister asked sympathetically without need of a blow-by-blow explanation.

“A bad one?” Lena almost had to laugh. “I guess you could say that. A bad one? Sister, I almost just died in there.”

“I don’t know, Lena, maybe you ought to …”

“I know what I
ought
to do, Sister. I ought to just forget all this. Lighting candles. Seeing ghosts. Shoot, I almost suffocated in there with all that smoke. I’m going to stop being a part of it.

“I don’t want to talk about this again, okay?”

“Lena, I think this might be more …”

“I’m serious. I don’t ever want to speak about it or acknowledge all this veil stuff anymore.”

“Lena, maybe it’s not for us to …”

“I can’t take all this, Sister. I got to turn it loose. I’m almost eighteen years old now. And I’m making this decision for myself.”

Lena paused and looked Sister dead in the eye.

“Listen to me, Sister, when that woman, when Madame Delphie, said ’Believe!’ I did. For that moment, I let go and for the first time in my life, I think, really believed all the stuff I been seeing and hearing and folks been saying about me all my life. For just that moment. And then later, Sister, up here in my room, I swear to you, believing and lighting that candle and sitting in my bed hearing voices and seeing things, I could feel myself being sucked up by, I don’t know, some other world or something. I could just feel myself losing myself bit by bit, like molecule by molecule, and not just my body but my soul, too.”

Lena stopped and gulped air trying to catch her breath.

“Oh, Sister, I’m not ever gonna do
that
again. Not ever. It wasn’t just the spirits that came with that candle and me believing. That
was scary.
But it was mostly that feeling that I belonged over there with them.”

And Lena stopped as she shivered a bit inside her soft pink robe. Then she continued.

“And I think if I stop taking it so seriously, things will just settle down.”

Sister just sighed and clucked her tongue in disbelief. “Well, Lena …”

“No, Sister,” Lena said, speaking quickly. “Let’s collect the other paraphernalia from Madame Delphie’s assistant and take it out to the Dumpster tonight.

“I really think I been taking this stuff too seriously. Just ’cause I have a few nightmares and I walk in my sleep. Lots of people do that.

“So, I’ll just deal with it like everybody else. And things will just settle down.”

Sister didn’t say anything because she knew Lena needed a friend
right then to be on her side. But she didn’t believe for a minute that things would ever settle down for Lena.

In the nearly thirty years since, Sister had spent many nights keeping her husband Douglas awake with her restlessness over Lena wandering the world pretending not to be special, a child of the veil. Her birth velum burned by her own mother in the trash. No one to watch over her because the unsettled spirits scared the protective ones away.

She knew that over the years, Lena had just ignored sounds, looked the other way when she thought she saw something otherworldly. Didn’t answer when some mist seemed to call her name.

And from her experience and her mother’s and her grandmother’s and her great-grandmother’s experience, Sister knew it was going to all catch up with Lena one day.

W
hen Lena awoke the next morning, she was amazed that she felt rested. After her scare in the pool the night before, it surprised her that the witches had not ridden her all night.

It crossed her mind as she sat up on her white piqué-trimmed sheets that what she recalled of the night before had, indeed, been a dream. With the sun peeking in through the skylight over her head, she remembered clearly that her heart had been racing wildly when she jumped out of the water. She did not see anything swimming around in the water, but she decided not to get back in there. Instead, she had cut out the lights and slipped into bed without even saying her prayers.

In the light of day, she felt safe and brave.

“I can’t believe it actually felt like somebody was really in there with me,” she said aloud as she draped the white pique robe at the foot of her bed around her shoulders and headed for her bathroom. She was going to say, “Felt like ghosts brushing up against me,” but she did not want to invoke the spirit of the little girl she had spent her senior year
at Martin de Porres avoiding. At the beginning of that year, a little girl from the kindergarten class had walked up to her at recess and with a very serious face said, “My name is Sonia. Are you named Lena?”

Lena had smiled, putting down her Coke, and nodded.

“What can I do for you?”

The little girl, dressed like Lena in a tiny blue plaid skirt and white blouse, glanced to her left, then glanced to her right, then over her little Peter Pan collar. With a curl of her finger, she motioned for Lena to stoop down to her level.

When Lena, puzzled, bent down, Sonia had said, “Ghosts be brushing up against me. They be brushing up against you, too?”

The only other child in her small parochial school who had also been born with a caul was seeking a kindred spirit. But Lena had left little Sonia standing there and had avoided her until graduation.

Now she wished she had Sonia’s phone number. Lena knew the little girl would know how it had felt in the pool the night before. As if ghosts were brushing up against her.

As she did each morning when the sun streamed through the overhead skylight as she brushed her teeth, Lena had to stop and admire her bathroom. It demanded attention. It was more a suite than a room. The huge walk-in shower stood like a solid entity from the middle of the room to the wall. Lena reached in and turned on the hot water.

The inside of the large white-tiled stall was interspersed with hand-painted blue and green tiles Mr. Crockett, the plumber and tile man, had made himself. He had blushed at Lena’s idea to extend the length of the shower to the outer wall and make the entire wall glass so she could enjoy the stand of birch gum and junipers outside while she showered. The magnolias were about to burst open with luscious openly seductive white blooms and the birch gum, tall and healthy, spoke of good luck to Lena.

Mr. Crockett wanted to tell someone other than his wife, “Man, Lena McPherson got a shower you can see right into from outside!”
What he didn’t even tell his wife was that the glass wall of the shower faced a nearly impenetrable wall of birch, and a voyeur would have to get in there, then climb some fairly tall pines to see inside.

She rarely used it, but she also had one of the most beautiful bathtubs in the state. Mr. Renfroe’s cousin in Madison knew about the find of stone in North Georgia. “New quarry, old marble,” is all the old gardener said to explain the expense of digging, carving and shipping the tub to Mulberry that he had okayed.

The owner of the quarry accompanied the tub to Lena’s new front door. The stonemason, back in North Georgia, kept telling his wife, “It was a colored girl!” until she had to tell him to “shut up about that colored girl!”

As the shower stall steamed up, she hit the button for the first CD on the stereo controls over the sink. Salt ’n’ Pepa with their girl Spinderella was one of her favorite choices to get her going in the morning.