Cross Current (15 page)

I liked hearing that. It had been a while since I had thought of myself as a daughter. Maybe I was misreading Joe. Maybe he just needed to feel like a father as much as I yearned to be a daughter again.

“You know I’m retired,” he continued, “and sometimes I get kind of bored. I don’t have enough to do. I know people, I’ve got access to information, and maybe I can help you find her dad. I’m just offering.”

I thanked him and promised I would call him if I needed assistance. In fact, I doubted I would ever make that call. Maybe it was a result of having grown up, from age eleven on, in an all-male household, but I had a very difficult time asking for help.

Abaco and I were about halfway down my block, going very slowly as the dog sniffed every single bush and tuft of grass, when B.J.’s black El Camino pulled up alongside.

“I was hoping you’d be home,” he said. “I brought dinner.” He pointed to several white paper bags resting on the seat next to him.

“Great.” I tried to sound enthusiastic. It’s not that I wasn’t happy to see him, but after living with him for a couple of months, I knew what his version of dinner might be. Granted, after two days of burgers, it would probably do me good, but why did B.J.’s version of good have to taste so yucky? “The cottage is open. I’ll just let Abaco sniff a while longer, and I’ll see you back there.”

When I returned and let Abaco off the leash in the backyard, she ran straight back to the dock where B.J. sat with legs dangling over the water. She licked his ears, and he scratched hers. She soon began groaning in pleasure as his magic fingers did their work. I smiled as I sat next to them. I could relate.

B.J. handed me an icy Corona. He was drinking from a plastic bottle of Florida spring water. “The food’s all ready, I just wanted to sit out here for a bit. Enjoy the river. How’s the little Earth Angel doing?”

“Not good. I mean, she’s recovering from the exposure at sea faster than expected, but something happened at the hospital today.” I hesitated, reluctant to tell the story again, but B.J. just waited quietly until I was ready to start.

We watched a small outboard chugging its way up the river as I talked. An older black man and a boy were in the inflatable dinghy, but with a mere four horsepower, the craft was barely able to make any headway against the current.

“I followed this one guy, a tall Haitian who was dressed and acting like an orderly. He seemed normal enough at the time. I even spoke to him, but I didn’t realize until later that he was probably the one who did it.”

“Did what, exactly?”

“Well, I don’t really know for sure. That’s where it gets weird. None of us saw it, and he was with her for only a few seconds. They couldn’t find any evidence that he had fed her anything or given her an injection, but now she acts like she’s drugged or in a trance. There’s a Haitian nurse who works there at Broward General. She as much as said that she thinks this guy put a curse on her. The kid won’t talk. She just stares straight ahead. She acts like a zombie.” I watched his face to gauge his reaction.

“Hmm. Zombies. Everybody in America hears ‘Haiti’ and thinks Voodoo and zombies.”

“I said like a zombie. I don’t think he really turned her into a zombie. I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“You don’t?” B.J.’s eyebrows arched high.

“Hell, no.”

“You might be surprised at what goes on down there. Don’t be so quick to write it off as silly superstition. There’s a great deal about this world that we still don’t understand, that our science can’t explain.”

“Come on, B.J., zombies?”

“Haiti is so close to the United States, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Did you know, you can do graduate work in world religions in this country and never study Voodoo? Yet they’re right there,” he said, extending his arm out in front of him, his flat palm indicating how close. “Like six million of them, and nearly all of them are Voodoo practitioners. There’s a saying: ‘Haiti is ninety percent Catholic and a hundred percent Voodoo.’ ”

I knew one of B.J.’s degrees was in comparative religions, but I didn’t know his expertise extended to Voodoo. “How much do you know about it?”

“Not that much. I’ve read some. I know that it is a real religion, even if to most Westerners it sounds like a bunch of superstitious mumbo jumbo. But if you think about it, Christianity would sound that way if you were hearing about it for the first time.”

“Okay, but we don’t go poking little pins in dolls.”

He rolled his eyes at me. “Sey, Voodoo is a monotheistic religion, which means its followers believe in one supreme being. Not so different, right?”

“Okay.” I smiled. It was really fun sometimes to poke at him when he got all serious. “But what about the zombies and the dolls?”

He ignored my question. “Voodoo originated in West Africa, and in the last three centuries, a lot of Catholicism has been blended into the mix. Voodooists believe in over two hundred different spirits, and many of them are now intertwined with Catholic saints. For example, an altar to their mother spirit—I forget her name—might include photos or statues of the Virgin Mary. They call upon these spirits much as Catholics call upon their saints.”

“Geez, B.J., should I be taking notes?”

He squinted. “You’re making fun of me.”

“No. It’s just that you’re very cute when you lecture.”

He smiled. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to get carried away. Sometimes I can’t help it.”

“I know.”

“I’ve just always felt that Haiti and her culture have gotten a bad rap. Like you said, you thought this child was acting like a zombie. That’s how most Americans see Haiti: black magic, Voodoo dolls, witchcraft, zombies. It’s not your fault. You’ve been fed that image. When a Voodooist enters into a trance—or is ‘possessed’—it is an absolutely amazing thing to see. I’ve only seen it on video, myself. These people are in altered states brought about by their spiritual beliefs. You said this girl Solange has had a curse put on her. Whether you believe in such things or not doesn’t really matter. We may not share her beliefs, but she is in an altered state, and she needs a
hougan
or a
mambo
to help her get out of it” 

My head jerked up. “What did you say?”

“That’s what you call the priests and priestesses of Voodoo. The men are called
hougans
and the women are called
mambos
.”

“This morning I visited this woman, Racine Toussaint. Remember? From that card I found on the
Miss Agnes
? I met her husband, but I couldn’t see her, he said, because she was too busy. I liked him, but there was something creepy about the house and how he acted. But he referred to her as Mambo Racine. He asked me to bring Solange back to see the
mambo
."

“It could be your best bet for this kid. If it is Voodoo that has caused her to be in this state, it’s going to take Voodoo, not Western medicine, to cure her.”

I brought my heels up to the edge of the dock and wrapped my arms around my legs. Part of me wanted to curl into a ball and make all this go away. “B.J., I don’t know what to believe. It was pretty strange today up in Pompano. I wish you could have been there. This house, this man, the way he talked about stuff I didn’t really understand. And then he got all agitated when I told him about the body of that woman who was found in the boat with Solange. He kept repeating her name over and over. He said, ‘Erzulie, Erzulie, I wonder if Mambo Racine knows’ or something like that.”

B.J. snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “That’s it. That’s the name I couldn’t remember. Erzulie is the name of the Voodoo mother spirit.”

B.J. had already set the table with place mats and napkins and little paper packets of wooden chopsticks. All the junk that had been on the table was neatly stacked on the bar that separated my kitchen from the combination living room/ dining room. In the center of the table was a plate that contained what looked like an assortment of colorful little packages, like a miniature birthday party. None of it looked like anything I would refer to as food.

“What’s that?” I pointed to the pile of presents.

“Sushi,” he said with a mischievous smile. “You’re gonna love it.”

That was B.J. He knew very well that I was not going to love it. I don’t like being forced to try new things. Especially pretty things. Food was not supposed to be that pretty.

I piled twin peaks of white rice and some kind of noodles onto my plate and then took the smallest, least fancy-looking little package. B.J. just sat there beaming.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” I asked him.

“Yeah, eventually. I just don’t want to miss any of this.” He nodded in the direction of my plate.

With the wooden chopsticks in hand, I grasped the sushi roll and nibbled a little off one end. It wasn’t half bad. B.J. looked so expectant. He didn’t think I could do it. Just to show him I wasn’t a total wuss, I chomped off a big bite.

The heat started to grow in my mouth. In an instant, my tongue felt like it had turned into glowing charcoal briquettes. After nearly tripping over my chair, I made it to the fridge, grabbed a beer, twisted off the top, and began to chug-a-lug.

B.J. almost fell out of his chair, he was laughing so hard.

“What the hell was that?” I said before taking another swig of beer.

“You picked the one that Sagami’s refers to as the kamikaze roll.” He took a deep breath and tried to make his face look serious. “They’re not all hot like that. Try another.”

“Oh, sure,” I said.

B.J. was trying so hard to control his laughter, but his chest and shoulders kept bouncing as more chuckles burbled to the surface.

I finished the beer, then crossed back to the table and proceeded to drown the rice and noodles on my plate in soy sauce. I pushed the grains of rice around my plate, not eating and not talking. I refused to look up, even when I heard his chair scrape back and B.J. came up behind me and put his fingers on my shoulders. Ever since I was a little girl with two older brothers, I’ve turned very cranky whenever anybody teased me, which was fairly often.

His fingers pushed deep into the tense muscles on either side of my neck, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress the little shiver that ran up my back. The heat from his touch traveled down my arms and made my fingers tingle. Actually, my fingers weren’t the only part of me tingling. He alternated deep muscle massage with a feather touch on my neck.

I knew I should tell him to stop. He wasn’t playing fair. We were supposed to be taking a break, but when I opened my mouth to speak, he ran his hands down my arms, and all that came out were two sharp little gasps for breath. I turned, looked up at him, and then closed my eyes.

I was the first one to push back and break away from the kiss.

“B.J., I—”

He walked around the table, sat, and, smiling, filled his plate with the colorful rolls and began to eat with those precise bites of his, the careful chewing. He was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with some kind of surfer logo on the front. The fabric set off his teak-colored skin. I watched him fork the last bite of a roll into his mouth, watched his full lips as he chewed.

I was still trying to catch my breath and make the aching go away, and he acted as though nothing had happened.

“Good sushi, huh?” he asked, his eyes sparkling with the message that he was enjoying every moment of my misery.

Why was I pushing this man out of my life? Okay, so he ate weird food. But otherwise, what was the problem? That he wanted to start a family? I thought of Joe, yearning to retrieve his lost family. And then there was Collazo. Geez, I sure as hell didn’t want to end up like Collazo. Was my life alone with my dog and my boat really such a great life?

That was it: The answer was yes. I enjoyed my river, my routines, my rhythms. That was how I defined myself. Sometimes, when making love to B.J., it felt as though
I
disappeared. I became pure sensation—and it scared the hell out of me. What if I gave in to that, and the me I now know turned into something else? And worse yet, if I let that happen, and B.J. did as B.J. had always done, what would I have left after he went away?

He wiped his mouth carefully with his napkin, crumpled it, and tossed it onto his plate. I glanced down at my still-folded napkin on the table. Oh yeah, I thought. I kind of forgot about that. It’s not something I worry about when it’s just me and Abaco. I wiped my own mouth.

“What’s all that stuff?” B.J. pointed at the gear in the corner of the living room.

“Pit’s in town,” I said, glad that we had found a neutral subject to discuss so my heart rate could ease back to normal. “He dropped that off here this morning, talked to the gardeners, and left me a note. Then took off to go windsurfing. Typical, huh?”

He nodded. “It’ll be good to see him. How long is he going to stay?”

I shrugged. “You never know with Pit. I’m sure it won’t be long, though.” I got up from the table and walked over to the pile of gear. “I have a feeling he’ll be asking me to store some of this stuff.” I pointed with my shoe at the green foot-locker. “Like this, for example.”

“Yeah, too much for traveling the way he does. Not his style.” He got up from the table and began to clear the dishes.

I dragged the footlocker out into the middle of the room and sat on the floor next to it. “He said he’d been storing this over at his old girlfriend’s. I think she got tired of having his junk around.” I ran my hand over the top of the trunk. “I haven’t seen this trunk in years. I remember it was in the garage at the house after Red died, but I didn’t know Pit had taken it. There was so much stuff to be dealt with, I guess when this disappeared, I never even noticed.”

B.J. came over and sat on the floor next to me. He rested his hand on my thigh, and I jumped a little. “This was your dad’s?”

I nodded, started to say yes, but my throat seemed to close on the word. It’s funny how you just never knew when it was going to hit you, that feeling in the center of your chest of missing someone so much. There were lots of times I could talk about my dad without feeling the slightest bit of sadness, and other times when I just wanted to see him again and couldn’t speak without my voice getting tight and my eyes going all blurry. I swallowed and blinked and started again. “When we were kids, Pit and I used to sneak out into the garage and pull this trunk down and get into it even though we weren’t supposed to. Mostly, Red kept his mementos from the navy in here, uniforms, old letters, and photos and stuff. He didn’t really want his kids getting into it, which, of course, only made it all that much more attractive to us. One time we even tried on Red’s uniforms.”