Sweet Unrest (10 page)

“I don’t know,” I said, pretending to consider his request. “Depends on what you’re offering in return.”

He grinned, the left side of his mouth pulling up higher than the right and a bit of humor and warmth breaking through his usual mask. “And what is it that you want of me?”

“Answers.”

His brows went up at that. “To what questions?”

“Well, you could start by telling me why you keep following me.”

“I am not following you intentionally,” he said slowly, carefully. “You simply happen to be where I am.”

“So it’s a coincidence?” I asked doubtfully.

He shrugged. “If you would like.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in coincidences.”

He smiled fully then, unable to hide his amusement. “Please.” The word came out easier this time for him. “I would very much like to see your work.” He gestured for me to open the binder. I thought about refusing, but he looked so earnest in his request that I relented.

He motioned for me to join him as he sat, his legs crossed in front of him. When we were settled, he leaned against the tree and I pulled out my favorite of the pictures I’d taken since arriving at the plantation—a study of the dark shadows that the columns threw against the white façade of the house, like solid iron bars caging it in.

He studied the photo carefully. More carefully than I would’ve expected him to. “You have captured the secretive quality of the mansion, yes? It is quite striking. It gives the feeling of being trapped by the grandeur of the place.”

Warmth bloomed in my chest. Few people ever understood my photographs so quickly. I mean, people always thought they were good, but not everybody really got them.

“That’s exactly what I was going for,” I told him. “I wanted the shadows to look like the bars of a prison. They seemed so intensely malevolent that day. Here, look at this one.” I moved a new picture to the top of the pile, hoping his reaction wouldn’t disappoint.

It was the image of the large fountain in the south garden. Light pooled around the statue of a young girl who was holding her hands to the sky. I kept my eyes on the image, watching him out of the corner of my eye as he studied it, afraid that if I turned and looked at him directly, he would see how much I wanted him to get it. To understand this one too.

Alex didn’t respond right away. His brows were creased above those cat’s eyes of his, and his jaw was tight. All at once, his face seemed to unfold and he glanced up at me, his eyes no longer shadowed or evasive. In that moment, I had the feeling he saw more than just what I was doing with the photograph. I had the uncanny feeling that he saw me, too.
Really
saw me.

There was too much in his gaze—too much intensity, too many questions, just … too much. I couldn’t help but look away.

After a long, expectant moment, he cleared his throat and spoke again. “She looks like some sort of ethereal being in this one,” he said. “But you make it a question: is the water lifting her or pulling her back?”

He got it
. I bit my lip to keep from smiling like an idiot as I kept my eyes trained on the image.

“You are very talented, Lucy,” he said softly, leaning back away from me and the photographs I held.

“I have a lot to learn,” I hedged, risking another look at him. “But I hope I can make a life from it.”

“From taking pictures?”

I nodded. “Photography is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. There’s something ridiculously satisfying about finding the perfect moment that, you know, captures an experience. Preserves it for all time.”

He frowned. “This is what your pictures do?” The coldness in his tone surprised me. I couldn’t imagine what I’d said wrong to put that kind of ice in his words.

“Well, maybe not yet,” I replied carefully, trying to collect my thoughts before speaking again. “But it’s what I want them to do. Pictures are a record—a testament of a time. They’re a way of capturing the moment and holding it forever.” I chose my words carefully, but his face remained tense as I spoke. “And I’m babbling again,” I mumbled by way of apology.

“I am delighted to hear you talk.” But there was something dark in his tone that didn’t match his words.

It struck me then that the Alex in my dreams was a gentler, more idealized version of the boy that was in my here and now. With that Alex, I felt safe, even if Armantine didn’t. With this Alex? I wasn’t sure what to feel. The more time I spent around him, the more I wondered if maybe my subconscious had just evened out his rough edges and softened his intensity.

Since I’d been judging this Alex based on some silly dreams, I hadn’t considered that there might be something dark behind the mask of disinterested amiability he wore like armor. Perhaps something a little bit dangerous.

The silence stretched between us. Suddenly I didn’t want to be there, alone in the clearing with him. I put my photos back into the binder.

“Have I done something wrong?” he asked. His voice still sounded tight, strained, but it was also tinged with something like regret.

“No,” I lied. “I just need to get back. My parents will be wondering where I am.”

As I stood to leave, I resisted looking at him. I
liked
the Alex in my dreams, but I wasn’t going to make the mistake of confusing dreams with reality.

“Lucy?”

I stopped and turned back to him, hoping his eyes wouldn’t be cold again. They weren’t, but neither were they as understanding as they’d been just moments before—when he’d been looking at my work.

“I am sorry if I upset you,” he said as he stood to join me.

“It’s okay. I need to go anyway.” If nothing else, I needed to put some distance between us. And between the fantasy I’d dreamt up and the reality of the boy in front of me.

“Please, I will go. Stay and enjoy the afternoon.” He gave me a half smile that could’ve been charming, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

I grabbed my bag from the ground, but Alex was faster. Before I could leave, he was already backing away. He gave me a final, tentative wave before turning and heading toward the woods. When he stepped into the shadows of the trees, I lost sight of him. And I was alone again.

All at once I realized how hot the day had become, how thick the air felt. How strangely empty the clearing was without him in it. Even in the dream, the clearing had felt more complete with him there.

The dream
.

The whole time I’d been talking with Alex, I hadn’t quite been able to shake the intensity of Armantine’s feelings. The girl’s emotions about her Alex had been so stark, so
strong
, they’d colored my every reaction to him. But there had been something else. Something I was starting to remember clearly, now that he wasn’t there to distract me.

I turned to the tree—the ancient-looking oak dripping with Spanish moss, just as it had been in the dream. Carefully I searched the trunk, running my fingers over its rough bark, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. “Just a dream.” I breathed easier at the thought.

Slinging my bag on my shoulder, I turned toward our cottage—away from the pond and Alex and all the crazy thoughts I’d been having. The lack of the two interlocking A’s on the tree’s gnarled trunk was confirmation that I
wasn’t
crazy. I wasn’t having dreams about some long-dead girl and a guy who looked uncannily like the guy I’d just been talking to. Armantine
was
only a figment of my overactive and under-rested imagination. She hadn’t actually sat under this tree with another Alex more than a century before, and—

Then it struck me. That many years ago, the tree would have been smaller. I’d looked in the wrong place. I needed to look higher.

For a second, I thought about not going back. In some ways it would have been easier to just keep walking toward home, to forget about the tree and my theories. Too bad I’ve never been one to do things the easy way.

It took a few minutes for me to figure out how to get enough of a foothold on the trunk to hoist myself up. At first, I almost missed it, mistaking it for part of the rough bark. But as I ran my fingers over the shallow, jagged lines, I knew that nature couldn’t have designed those deeply gouged angles. Dark with age, the two intertwining A’s had somehow withstood the march of time.

I lowered myself back to the ground and, without thinking, glanced at the woods. I half expected Alex to be standing there, watching me, but the tree line was empty. All around me, the clearing felt very still, like the air itself was waiting.

I’d convinced myself that knowing Thisbe’s name might have been a coincidence. I could explain away the girl in the picture as my overactive imagination … but the carvings on the tree? I knew for certain no one had told me about that.

If those carvings were real—if those things really had happened—I knew it meant that my dreams might be more than just dreams. It meant that Alex shouldn’t—
couldn’t
—still be alive.

It meant that I really needed to talk to Mama Legba.

Twelve

After my discovery of the letters in the tree, every minute felt like an hour until Chloe pulled up the next afternoon in her blue Chevy, ready to take me to the St. John’s Eve festival. When she finally arrived, it took everything I had not to leap into the car before it came to a complete stop.

“You look rough,” she said by way of greeting as I slid into the front seat.

“Thanks,” I said dryly. There was another girl in the backseat, a sandy-haired blonde. “I’m Lucy,” I told her. “Apparently, I look rough.”

“Emaline,” the girl said with a smile. “And I’ve seen worse.”

“We go to school together,” Chloe explained. She glanced in the rearview mirror at her friend. “Lucy just moved here. She’ll be going to St. Expedite’s with us come August.”

“Have you seen the uniforms yet?” Emaline asked me. “Hideous.” She gave a mock shudder.

I shrugged, not bothering to correct Chloe. “At my school back home, we had to wear ties.” If I had anything to say about it, I’d be wearing those ties again come fall.

“Where’s back home?” Emaline asked.

“Chicago.” But when I said the word, Chicago suddenly felt very, very far away.

The ritual that Chloe took me to was held on the Bayou St. John, one of the many inland tributaries sprouting off Lake Pontchartrain. When we finally arrived, people dressed in white were already gathering at the large steel bridge that crossed the bayou at one of its narrowest points. They looked like initiates preparing for some sort of old-time religious revival.

We walked along the bayou toward the growing crowd. “Do all of these people practice Voodoo?” I asked.

Emaline snorted. “Not likely, unless half the lacrosse team’s taken it up.” She pointed over to a group of guys gathered on the outskirts of the crowd. They were dressed in white, like the rest, but each had a bottle of a sports drink that was mostly likely spiked with something. “Speaking of which … I think I’m gonna go say hello, if you don’t mind?” She never took her eyes off the guys. “I’ll meet you in a bit, okay?”

“Sure,” Chloe said, shooting me a look that said Emaline was probably over her head with that group. Emaline didn’t seem to notice, though. Without much of a backward glance, she took off toward the guys.

“She seems nice,” I said once she left.

Chloe shrugged. “We’ve gone to school together since for-
ever. When she found out I was planning to come, she kind of invited herself along.”

“Well, thanks for inviting me too.”

“No problem.” She smiled. “Come on, we want to get up front so we can see everything.”

Chloe pushed her way through the crush of bodies until we finally made it to the mouth of the bridge. “The priestess is going to come from over there and cross the bridge. Then she’ll do the invocation to the spirits and invite the rest of us across.”

On the bridge, someone had already set up a small altar made from a variety of boxes stacked in a pyramid shape and covered with a vibrant aquamarine cloth. Burning candles covered almost every inch of it. Most of the candles were white, but a couple of others had already splattered their blood-red wax on the field of blue.

Chloe must have seen me studying them. “The white is for purity and protection, but the red’s for power.”

Drums started somewhere in the distance, and their driving cadence sent a shiver of recognition through me. As the drums grew louder and more distinct, I realized the people approaching the bridge from the far end of the bayou weren’t walking, but dancing toward us. As they came closer, a movement at the far edge of the water caught my attention. Before I could figure out what I was seeing, a flame erupted that made me jump.

“They light the bonfires to guide the way for the priestess,” Chloe whispered.

Sure enough, as the drumming grew louder and the group grew closer, more fires sprang to life on the bank of the bayou. One at a time, they ignited, each one closer than the last, until the drumming was loud enough to vibrate in my chest and the group of dancers came to a halt on the far side of the bridge. They parted then, and a woman came forward dressed in an elaborate white turban and long, flowing skirts—Mama Legba.

She raised her arms and sang out to the skies above in a rich, warm song. I couldn’t tell what she was saying, but her voice rolled over the crowd. Everyone behind us stilled as someone in the procession draped a large snake over her arms.

I heard myself gasp as my vision blurred. For a moment, Mama Legba’s lithe dancing became Thisbe’s. Her graceful rhythm was replaced by Thisbe’s more erratic and disjointed movements. But then, almost as quickly as the vision came, it dissipated, leaving me shaken.

“Don’t worry, Lucy,” Chloe told me, misunderstanding my reaction to the vision. “She’s not doing anything evil. In Voodoo, snakes represent one of the most powerful of the spirits—Damballah.”

I didn’t correct her mistaken impression, just turned back to watch Mama Legba, who had left her entourage behind her and begun to dance toward us. With writhing, rhythmic motions, she twisted her body in a sensual imitation of a snake as she approached the middle of the bridge. It was reminiscent of Thisbe’s dance, but Mama Legba’s face had none of the angst or desperation that had been on Thisbe’s.

“When she reaches the middle of the bridge, she’ll do an invocation to St. John the Baptist and any other spirits that are around,” Chloe told me, pointing to the altar. “The snake will go there, as an offering.”

“She’s going to kill it?” I couldn’t keep the horror out of my voice.

Chloe shot me a dirty look. “Of course not. It’s just going to stay there so it doesn’t get trampled on. Seriously, Lucy, you’ve watched way too many horror flicks.”

“But you said ‘offering.’”

“Yeah,
offering
. Not sacrifice.” She shook her head, irritated. “Honestly. We’re celebrating the birth of the man that baptized Christ, not Beelzebub. Just watch.”

Mama Legba danced her way across the bridge until she stood in front of the altar. Slowly, she lifted the snake from her shoulders and held it high as she knelt before the candles. She called out again, her voice soaring over the stillness of the bayou, and then set the snake into a depression in the altar that I hadn’t noticed. After she covered it up, she stood and faced us.

Her voice rose again, clearly articulating strange syllables in a language I didn’t understand.

“
Anonse o zanj nan dlo
,” she cried, her voice rising and falling melodically like a blues singer, and then she raised her hands to us. The crowd answered her back.

“
Anonse o zanj nan dlo.
”

“
Ya dosou miwa, yawe yawe
,” she called, her voice growing stronger.

“
Ya dosou miwa, yawe yawe
,” the crowd replied, Chloe’s voice loud among them. They repeated this verbal dance, back and forth, with more of the observers on our side joining into the chant each time Mama Legba raised her arms.

“
Kreyol mande chanjman!
” She shouted the change suddenly, and the drums began again. She raised her hands and the crowd gave her back her chant. Then she began a new dance.

It wasn’t the sensual writhing of a snake this time, but a joyful celebration. The people who had followed her onto the bridge started dancing again as well, moving across the bridge to where Mama Legba waited. She raised her arms again to those on our side of the bridge, where most people were already moving in time to the pulsing drums. At her signal, they started moving forward.

“This is the best part,” Chloe shouted. She smiled at me and raised her own arms in the dance. “Come on, Yankee girl, let the spirit move that skinny white behind of yours.”

I laughed and started to bounce in time to the music. I started out self-consciously, moving only enough to not stand out, but Chloe’s enthusiasm and the rhythm of the drums pulled me in. Soon I was in the center of the bridge, my arms in the air and my body moving freely to the rhythm of the drummers. Occasionally, I’d catch Chloe’s bright smile, and then we would separate again and mix in with the other bodies on the bridge. At one point we found Emaline again, and in the sultry heat of twilight we all danced on like we were at some impromptu bayou rave over the murky water. Dark arms tangled with light ones, and the drummers became part of the dancers as the rhythmic sway of the crowd swirled around the small area.

We danced faster then, spinning alone and together, and the air was filled with laughter to complement the driving beats of the ever-present drumming. It became its own music in the waning light, punctuated by ecstatic shouts that echoed in the sticky night air, reverberating like a remembrance of something already past.

It was easy to dance, to give my body over to the rhythm that was unavoidable and to a freedom that seemed to snake through the air and touch us all. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly graceful or talented dancer, but as the urgency of the beats increased, I felt a freedom in my body I hadn’t known existed there before.

The light grew more golden as the sun inched toward the horizon, and the frenzy of the drumming increased until the drums were singing so rapidly that the individual beats were indecipherable and the sound became a thrumming roll. Chloe, Emaline, and I were spinning together, laughing, when a high-pitched drum broke the mood with rapid, gunfire-like beats. The crowd slowly quieted.

Above the lingering buzz, Mama Legba’s voice called out, again and again, “
Nou tout se zanj O!
” The tones of her voice undulated, like ripples on the surface of the river. Finally the crowd was silent, listening to her repeat the call until the sound of the words became a rich chorale, a blessing for the crowd. She was standing at the edge of the bridge, her hands extended over the water.

“What’s she saying?” I asked Chloe as I caught my breath.

“It’s the final invocation,” she told me. “She’s telling the spirits that we are all angels.”

“Angels?”

“We’re all spirits, Lucy. In Voodoo, angel is just another name for spirit. For life.” She pointed to the horizon. “Look there—the sun’s almost gone.”

Mama Legba continued her invocation until the remaining sliver of fire sank below the horizon, and then she went silent. She made her way to the middle of the bridge, the crowd parting silently as she came. “We celebrate tonight the great spirits who will bring us a long growing season and an ample harvest.”

The drums punctuated her words with a single beat.

“We celebrate another year, another chance to perfect our souls.” Another beat sounded.

“We ask the Loa to intercede on our behalf. To guide us on our earthly journey until we can return to the Great Beginning.” The drums rolled then, a low rumble like thunder in the distance.

“Something’s coming, my children,” she called. “Something that has been waiting for a long while to walk among us again. We ask the great spirits to guide us. To protect us in the days ahead.” A final beat sounded, and she dropped her arms. The silence over the bayou hung heavy as the night sky, and we waited for what would come next.

“And now,” she said in quieter tones, a broad smile crossing her face. “Now, we eat.”

The drums started again, but their song was less frenzied and more like a conversation. People mingled on the bridge, some placing their own small offerings on the altar, others dancing again with old and new friends. We made our way across the bridge to where a banquet was being set up between two of the small bonfires.

“Come on,” Chloe said, pulling us through the crowd. “The food’s almost better than the ritual itself. We need to get some before it’s gone.”

We piled our plates high. Chloe pointed to the different dishes and explained what they were. It was a mix of old world and new, African and Creole, the Caribbean and the Bayou, all mouthwatering and fragrant. The headiness of garlic mixed with smoky cumin and fragrant cinnamon and cloves. The intensity of the scents—the savory mixed with sweet, the sharp bite of chili cut with the earthiness of rice and plantains—was so thick in the air, I could practically taste it on my tongue.

We ate in the light of the fire and watched the crowd gradually grow. Occasionally, the rhythm of the drums would change or someone would start another bluesy call-and-response round.

“Thanks for bringing me to this, Chloe,” I said.

“You like?”

“I definitely like.” I grinned. “I have to say, though, all your talk about rituals had me nervous about what I should expect.”

“She told you it was a ritual?” Emaline asked, licking one finger daintily. “Seriously?” She rolled her eyes at Chloe.

“It
is
a ritual,” Chloe said, sulking a bit. “Mama Legba isn’t doing this for her health.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Em said, bumping Chloe gently with her shoulder. “Hey, I’m gonna go grab some more food.” She glanced over her shoulder to where the tables were still heaped with half-full plates and where a couple of guys from earlier were standing, picking at the mound of crawfish. “I might be a while,” she said, grinning back at us.

“Have fun,” Chloe called in a voice that made it very clear she knew Emaline was after more than just a second serving. Em rolled her eyes but couldn’t quite keep the grin off her face as she flounced away toward the food and the guys.

Once she knew Emaline was out of earshot, Chloe asked, “So really, what’s with the dark circles under your eyes? You kind of look like crap.”

I blinked at her bluntness.

“Seriously,” she said when I didn’t respond. “What’s going on?”

I hesitated, wondering how much I should say. “I didn’t get much sleep last night,” I told her, settling on the easiest explanation. I took another sip of my drink so I wouldn’t have to meet her eyes, but I could feel her questions hanging in the air just the same.

“Still having weird dreams?” she asked when it was clear I wasn’t going to say anything more.