Voodoo Heart (8 page)

“Your family’s worried about you,” said the woman, yawning.

“They want the best for you,” said another.

“No, they don’t,” I started to say, but my tongue felt big. The bitter taste filled my mouth. “I’ll give you money if you leave,” I said, though I’d tried this with them before.
All
of this had happened before.

“We don’t want money. We want you,” a familiar voice said from the balcony. Then it called me by my real name. Melanie came in through the curtains. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, the same way she’d worn it when we were kids. She had on jeans and sneakers and a sweater with a row of crowns across the front. For a moment I thought she’d come to save me.

“It’s been so long. I missed you,” she said, and gave me a hug. Her hair smelled both lemony and strangely medicinal. When she pulled away, she kept her hands on my arms. “How have you been?”

“I want to stay here,” I said.

“Please don’t,” she said, smiling at me, her hands still gripping my arms.

“I don’t want to go back,” I said.

“Well, I’m afraid you don’t have a choice in the matter, okay?” she said. “You know you can’t just gallivant around forever. Don’t you ever think about how it reflects on Mom and Dad and the rest of us? Believe me, you’re lucky we found you before you did anything to attract bad attention. I know. You don’t want to see what happens to someone from a family like ours when they screw up.”

“Melanie, I won’t embarrass anyone. I just want to—”

“No. All right?” she said, her voice growing strained. “I’m sorry. I am. But I’m too tired to start arguing. I want to get back home.” There was something a little anxious about the way she said all this, almost frantic. “Now, where are the earrings?”

“I gave them away,” I said.

“Don’t give your sister a hard time,” said the man in the bathing suit. “You should be grateful to her for coming all this way.”

“Plenty of people in this world have no family,” said the woman.

“They’re out on the street,” said another. A hot breeze rolled over the balcony. I felt myself growing small, weak. I looked desperately at Melanie, but she stared right back at me with her own great need.

“Are you going to open the safe or not?” said the man behind me.

“No,” I said, though I felt tired enough to do it.

He slipped me into a nelson.

“Don’t hurt him,” said Melanie, reaching for me, then pulling back.

“I’ll have this cracked in a minute,” said the man on the balcony with the safe. “It’s a cheapie.” He put down his hammer and hefted the safe onto the balcony railing. He had it lying on its side so the bottom faced us. “Knock it on the screw there,” he said to the one in the bathing suit, who picked up the hammer and began pounding away at the bottom of the safe. The noise traveled through me in waves. I thought I might pass out.

“Melanie, please help me,” I said.

The man holding me tightened his grip and a web of pain spread through my shoulders. “Enough from you, kiddo,” he said.

And then, out of nowhere, Gay’s voice: “What’s going on up there? Are you all right, L.J.?”

“Gay!” I shouted, writhing. “They’re taking me back!” I managed to maneuver the man holding me out onto the balcony. Gay was with Edward, stopped just below my room.

“Who is that down there?” Melanie said, coming out onto the balcony.

“Well, well. I thought we’d never get the pleasure,” said Gay. “I have a bone to pick with you, Nancy.”

“Is he talking to me?” Melanie’s eyes darted back and forth between Gay and me. “Please go away!” she called down.

“Not until you leave L.J. alone. He’s through with you. You and your family are out of his life forever.”

“Please, this is our business!” she said.

“No, Nancy, it’s
my
business when your goons treat my friend like he’s your property! It’s my business when you stop my friend from making his own decisions!”

“Who is he?” Melanie said to me. “How does he know about our family?” She had the wild look on her face of one of those children at the Home Wrecker.

“Shut up, gimp!” said the man holding me.

“You watch your mouth!” said Edward.

“How do you know what’s best for him?” said Melanie. “He doesn’t even know what’s best for
himself
right now!”

“He knows what’s
not
best for him,” said Gay. “And that’s enough for me.”

“We’re his family,” said Melanie, her hands gripping the rail. “We love him. We’re bringing him home because we love him.”

“If you really loved him you’d let him go.”

That’s when the safe went over. I don’t know whether the man pushed it or it simply slipped from his hands. All I saw was it going over the railing: tipping forward, sliding a little, and then falling. It didn’t tumble. It didn’t spin or flip in the air. It just dropped.

The rest seemed to happen in slow motion. First there was a terrible crunching noise as the safe hit. The wheels shot off Gay’s chair and bounced across the parking lot. One hit a car with such force that it shattered the driver’s-side window. The chair tipped over backward and Gay was slammed against the tar, the safe on his chest. There was a popping sound, and then came the sparks, pouring right out of the underside of the chair. Gay’s perfect feet stuck up in the air—one of them had a sandal on it, but the other was bare. Then Edward was shouting for an ambulance.

Some old people came hurrying out of the lobby. There was a pounding on my door. Everyone but me was rushing about the room, blurred and moth-like. I heard one of the detectives ask another for a knife and a towel. I saw my clothes being stuffed into a garbage bag. Then, when the man holding me let go, I rushed out the door.

“Get him!” I heard behind me. “Grab his arms!”

I muscled my way down the hall, now crowded with curious people. I pushed inside the stairwell and took the steps a flight at a time, but as I reached the lobby, I started to gag, to wretch on that taste welling up at the back of my throat. I could hear the detectives on the stairs. I stumbled through the lobby and then I was out in the parking lot, kneeling next to Edward, above Gay’s shattered body.

Gay’s face looked peaceful; he appeared strangely content, pinned to the tar, gazing up at the darkening sky. His breath came in little hisses of air. I could smell oil leaking out of the chair. One of his eyelids kept winking.

“Go, before it’s too late,” said Edward. “He’d want you to.”

I looked around at all the people encircling us, staring. I couldn’t tell which ones were the detectives; their faces all looked menacingly familiar. A woman in a sun hat with a fan on the brim. An old bearded man with a pack around his waist. A man in shades talking into a plastic walkie-talkie. The taste was still there, pooling in my mouth. I was too frightened to move.

“Go!” said Edward. But I couldn’t.

Then, above all of this, I saw Melanie. She was standing on the balcony of my old room. She smiled sadly at me. “Run,” she said, and I did.

I called the hospital round the clock, every day for the next four weeks. It got so I knew all the nurses on Gay’s floor by name. Every time I called they asked me if I wanted to leave a message for Gay, and each time I said no. I didn’t know how to talk to him. One day, though, I called and, instead of picking up, a nurse put me through to Gay’s room.

“Hello? Gay Isbelle,” he said. “Hello?”

“Gay?” I said.

“L.J. Wow. I was hoping you’d call.”

“Gay, I’m so sorry about what happened. I should have—”

“Before you start apologizing, let me say something. First, there’s nothing to be sorry about. I have some healing to do, some bumps and scratches, but I’m okay. In fact, I’m glad things happened the way they did. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

“You wouldn’t?” He had suffered four broken ribs, a punctured lung, and some nerve damage to the right side of his face.

“Not a thing. This was my third ordeal, L.J., this bout with Nancy. I’ve dodged the bill three times. That’s something.”

“Gay, I have a confession to make. That wasn’t Nancy at the Shores. There is no Nancy.”

“I know that,” said Gay.

I paused. “You do?”

“Sure.”

I didn’t know what to say. In the background I heard the chatter from Edward’s portable TV. “Gay, I want to come with you when you go speak,” I said. “I want to be your assistant.”

“My assistant? God, I don’t know,” he said.

“Please, Gay. I want to go with you to talk to people.”

“Geez. I guess that’d be all right. My assistant, L.J. Yes, I like that.”

I laughed. My body felt light with joy. “L.J., your assistant!” I said.

“Come by tomorrow and we’ll talk about what you’ll need to do,” he said.

I arrived at the hospital well before visiting hours the next day. I brought a bouquet of flowers and a bright green pillowcase for Gay. For myself I brought a legal pad to take notes on. But when I was finally allowed up, I found Gay’s room empty, his bed stripped.

“Are you L.J.?” said a nurse whose voice I recognized as Gina’s. I told her that yes, I was. “He left this for you,” she said. She handed me an envelope, then left me alone in the room.

I sat down on the bed and turned the letter over in my hands. The trunks of palm trees wound upward past the windows. A skywriting plane began to write something, but quit after a few letters and flew off.

Finally, I opened the envelope. Inside were my sister’s earrings, and a note written on a piece of hospital stationery:

To my friend L.J.,

Happy fish, plus coin.

Gay

It’s been over a year since I left Florida. I live up in the cold, blue Northwest now, in a small town with rivers on both sides. All I’ll say is that I work in a store that sells antique maps and globes, from when the world was not so sharply in focus. There are chimes made of tiny glass guitars over the door. I go by a new name now, the whole thing just two syllables, so quick you might miss it. My favorite things in the store are the copies of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century globes, which are guides to the hopes and fears of people back then more than they are actual globes. Huge blue-and-white tigers stalk the icy regions to the north; sea serpents slink through the oceans; the eastern shore of a misshapen North America is marked by a freckled ear of corn.

Most of these globes don’t show Florida at all, but a few do, usually as a long, squiggly tube, like a deflated party balloon. On one such globe there’s an oval of sunshine painted over Florida and the Gulf below, a faint golden spotlight. When I think of Gay, I like to picture him under just such a spotlight, sitting in his chair with Edward nearby, talking to an audience. In my mind he’s speaking mostly to old people, but also to people recovering from disaster and misjudgment and heartbreak. He smiles at all of them out of the good side of his face as he talks. His eye is so sensitive now—I picture him wearing sunglasses if the floors are waxed too well and have a high sheen. Sometimes I imagine him wearing a wig with sideburns that never stay completely stuck to his temples; other times not.

What Gay is always talking about, when I think of him, are the moments right before his ordeals. Sometimes he talks about ordeal number one, the fire; other times number three, at the Shores; but mostly he talks about ordeal number two. He sets the scene: he says, “There was a click as the glider was released, as the bigger plane towing us let go. But there wasn’t any drop or jolt. Our glider just hung there, suspended at the center of this wide ring of clouds. Then the glider dipped a bit—it nosed down the way they can—and all of a sudden the whole green mass of the Arkansas marsh rose into view. My girlfriend at the time, Julie, was seated just in front of me. She was the daughter of a nurse at the clinic I went to for my skin grafts. At one point she looked at me over her shoulder and pointed down at this one patch of marsh that was bubbling and fizzing like crazy. Boiling almost. ‘Frogs,’ Julie mouthed to me. It was frogs breathing at the bottom of the swamp. I remember her mouthing it to me like that, ‘Frogs,’ even though it was quiet inside the plane.”

Right here is when he smiles biggest, despite the torn nerves, the damage; he smiles and everyone listening smiles too, because they think he’s remembering that last, fragile instant up there in the plane before the crash. They never guess that he’s smiling because of what he’s going to say next.