Circle of Secrets (14 page)

I shake my head, trying to get rid of the fuzzy feeling in
my brain. I know I saw Gwen. We’d talked and laughed and rowed across the bayou. Just fine, too! We’d been perfectly safe. There weren’t any undercurrents. Never even saw any gators lounging on the banks sunning themselves.

That broken-up bridge fell apart because of lightning. Long as I didn’t go out there during a storm I’d be just fine. Mirage was just being bossy. Trying to keep me chained here for six months because she wants to get back at Grandmother Phoebe.

I stick my chin over the edge of the bed and stare at the rug on the floor, the rainbow colors of the threads mixing up until I go cross-eyed.

I can still remember when the big fight happened. The biggest fight ever between Grandmother Phoebe and Daddy and Mirage. The night Mirage threw her stuff into a suitcase and stomped out.

“Feel like I been chained here for years, Phoebe,” I remember Mirage saying as my grandmother stood in the door of my parents’ bedroom. “You’re always comin’ up with one excuse after the other.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about, missy,” Grandmother Phoebe had retorted, holding herself up tight and rigid.

“You’re always sick. Or you sprained your ankle. Or the heater stopped working and you’ll freeze to death.” Mirage
was on a tear, working herself up into a dither. “Then you got no money, the cars are at the shop so we gotta share yours so we can get to work or school. Everything we have goes into this here house so we never got all the rent and deposits or down payment to get our own place. We’re thirty years old now and we want our own house, our own family.”

“You have a family,” my grandmother had said coldly.

“Now, Mirage,” my daddy had said soothingly, “you don’t mean those things. You’re hurting Mamma’s feelings. We can work this out; we always have.”

I remember standing in the bedroom doorway, too. Watching Mirage throw clothes and stuff into a suitcase, all helter-skelter.

“Yes, Philip, I do mean them,” Mirage had said, her voice breaking, eyes spilling over as she searched his face. She took a shaky breath. “I’m sick and tired of always workin’ things out. I’m done. She’s held us down for years with all her guilt and excuses and stupid reasons. And you are always sticking up for her. Never me.” And that’s when she really started to sob, tears streaming down her face. “Never me, always
her.
I’m your wife and I got nothin’ to show for it.”

“Mirage —” Daddy had started, but Grandmother Phoebe cut him off.

“After all I’ve done for you!” she said stiffly. “Helping you out with school and rent. This is how you treat me?”

Mirage looked at her, shaking her head back and forth and almost laughing now through her tears. “You jest don’t get it and I don’t think you ever will, Phoebe Allemond. And now my own mamma is bad sick, probably dyin’, and I have to go help her. I’ll be back in a few weeks.”

But a few weeks passed and she never came back.

I remember it was pouring buckets as she ran to the taxi sitting by the curb. I guess she took that taxi all the way out here to Bayou Bridge. Now I almost can’t imagine Mirage sitting in a taxi like a regular person.

As soon as the taxi pulled away, Daddy yelled a bunch of stuff and curse words I don’t want to remember, banging doors, throwing shoes. He even smashed a glass into the kitchen sink, sharp splinters flying everywhere. Then he stormed out of the house and didn’t come home until the next day.

I slept with Grandmother Phoebe that night in her big, soft, king-size bed with all the fluffy down pillows. I cuddled up against her and cried into her shoulder.

“You’ll always be safe with me, Shelby, honey,” she’d whispered as I fell asleep. “No worries, my darling girl. You can always come to me. And I can be your mamma.”

The words were soothing and comforting, the bed warm and cozy as the rain drummed on the roof, washing down
the tiles and pounding in the gutters. But I remember thinking that I didn’t want Grandmother Phoebe to be my mamma. I wanted my real mamma. But in all her yelling and packing and crying, my own mamma had forgotten to take me with her. Had even forgot to say good-bye.

Getting up on my elbows, I run my finger along the silver chain of the bracelet while a tear I didn’t know I had drips off the end of my nose.

I squeeze my eyes shut and swing my legs around, my stomach sick and empty with all the bad memories. The night I watched my family break apart for good.

It takes me a while to figure out why the things I’d told Mirage on the ride home in the boat made her so angry. I guess I pretty much told her that Grandmother Phoebe was the only one who could make the rules. Like my own parents didn’t count.

But what’d she expect? I’ve lived with Grandmother Phoebe practically my whole life. And so had Mirage until a year ago. Since it’s Grandmother Phoebe’s house she’s entitled to make the rules and tell everybody what to do. We have the Rule Chart on the fridge. The Schedule. The Chores. She’s president of the Garden Club and on the hospital board and a volunteer at the old folks’ community center. That’s just how life is.

But sometimes I don’t like being bossed around by Grandmother Phoebe.

And now I realize that maybe Mirage doesn’t like it, either.

The dirty rice and biscuits and honey for supper is better than I expect, but me and Mirage hardly speak. Except to be all polite and say, “Please pass the salt.”

I just stare at my plate and lick the honey off my fingers, thinking about those first telephone calls from Mirage. When I begged her to come back home. And she said she couldn’t. That Grandmother Phoebe told her she wasn’t welcome no more. And that her own mamma, my
grand-mère,
was getting worse sick.

Mirage also said that she wouldn’t come back home until Philip, my daddy, got us our own house. That it was time we had our own home and could be our own family.

But that never happened neither. Daddy just started traveling more and more. And I kept going to school and doing homework at LizAnn’s house and wishing LizAnn’s mamma was my mamma because she sang while she dusted and gave us huge wedges of her famous buttermilk pie and told us stories about her brother who got into trouble for pulling pranks on folks when they were kids.

Thinking about LizAnn makes me sigh with homesickness as I finish drinking my milk and wipe my mouth with a
napkin. I’d like to call her again, but for the first time in my life I’m not sure she’d understand what I’m feeling.

We’re still not really talking when we finish supper and Mirage asks me to help with the dishes.

I pull out a dish towel and dry while she washes, biting my cheek and staring at the blue bottle tree through the window while I’m doing the forks and spoons, wishing I could go out there and search for more notes. I want to find a note that’s been signed with someone’s
name.
I want to find out who
wrote
those notes.

If it was Mirage, then who was she writing notes to? Was she pretending to talk to her own mamma? The one who’d died three months ago? Is that what that note meant: “She’s dead"?

What did she mean by, “I’ll never forgive myself long as I live"?

Mirage unplugs the water in the sink and lays the rag across the counter. She takes a hair tie from the windowsill and pulls her thick hair up in a ponytail to get it off her sweaty face. She clears her throat. “Got something on the back porch to look at with you, Shelby.”

Miss Silla Wheezy and Mister Possum Boudreaux are lying in the lounge chairs and Mirage says, “Scoot! You two’re lazies all the day long. Now it’s me and Shelby’s turn to sit and do nothin’.”

The blue bottles are shivering in the evening breeze, tinkling together like they’re making music.

“Those bottles sound just like that charm bracelet, don’t they?” Mirage says, leaning back in her chair like we hadn’t argued earlier. She’s still barefoot, her toes brown, the edge of her skirt sweeping the unpainted porch slats.

“Yeah,” I say as Miss Silla Wheezy wraps herself around my ankles, purring to beat the band. “I mean, yes, ma’am.”

I feel Mirage give me a sudden, surprised look when I correct my grammar, but she don’t say anything.

Miss Silla Wheezy’s sandpaper tongue scrapes against my skin. “That tickles!”

Then that silly, funny cat flies down the porch steps like she’s seen a mouse and hasn’t eaten in a week.

“You know, I got all them charms when I was a girl ’bout your age,” Mirage says out of the blue. “Well, probably started about ten or eleven. My mamma had the bracelet first, of course, but she had her own special charms and her own special memories. After she took off her own charms and gave me the bracelet like I told you the other day, my mamma did leave one of them on the chain.”

I glance up at her, curious, but I don’t let on that I’m
too
interested.

“She gave me the carved
traiteur
box. Like a replica of my
big box when sick folks come out here. All the rest of the charms I got when I was ’bout your age, charms that meant things to me. Like that little gator. Did you know I caught me a baby gator once? Tried to make a pet out of him, until my daddy found out and let him loose in Alligator Cove on the other side of town. And did you know that Mister Lenny is the offspring of my first owl?”

“You had an owl before Mister Lenny?”

“Yep, got him when I was fourteen. He was a baby and some animal got him and hurt his leg. My mamma helped me heal him up. That’s when she started teaching me about being a
traiteur.
My mamma said I had a special touch, the gift.”

“A gift? Like somebody giving you a present? Who gave it to you?”

“God Himself, Shelby Jayne. All our gifts come from Him. All our talents and abilities. That’s why we gotta use them wisely. So when I healed Mister Lenny, my mamma celebrated by giving me an owl charm. Every charm has a story, and stories can have power in our lives to help us.”

“You mean like a healing spell?”

“Well, almost. You see, the things that happen to us, the things we go through — sometimes they hurt us real bad, sometimes they can help heal us — and sometimes we just
gotta find the strength inside to keep moving forward. Stories and charms can help us figure all those things out.”

She stops talking and when I glance at her out of the corner of my eye, she’s looking off at the blue bottle tree. Then I realize that she’s actually looking
past
the blue bottle tree into the deep blue-black of the dusk and swallowing an awful lot. Her fingers clench the armrests of her chair. I wonder what’s wrong with her.

When she speaks again, her voice is real quiet, almost like she’s talking to herself. “Easier said than done, that is for sure. It’s too easy to keep looking back at all the sadness in your life. You jest want to give up, but there are some things that can’t be undone, even when you feel bad about yourself. And even though it might not be your fault, the sadness is still tearin’ your heart into little pieces of sharpness that keeps cuttin’ and bleedin’.”

As I listen to her, I feel a knot building in my stomach. I wonder what she’s talking about. Leaving me was her fault. Or is she even talking about me? I’m not sure anymore.

“Some stories jest get shut down. When I turned sixteen I put my charm bracelet away and stopped wearing it.”

“Why?” I ask. I can’t see Mirage’s face very clearly any longer, mostly just the outline of her shoulders and her knees under the long skirt.

“Partly I thought it was babyish, but mostly I had a sorrow and a melancholy I couldn’t seem to get past. My last charm didn’t give me the strength to move forward. Jest kept me back in time for years. Like that blue bottle tree. I love it and I hate it.”

“How could you hate it? It’s — it’s enormous! There must be hundreds and hundreds of bottles.”

“Yep, and they were all supposed to keep the bad spirits away, but it don’t work right. Never did.” Mirage glances away, pretending to look for Mister Possum Boudreaux. I’d swear she’s trying to hide an eyeful of tears.

And that’s when I
know,
for certain sure, that the last charm she’s talking about — the last charm she ever got — is the little blue bottle charm. I wonder where she got it and why it never healed her. She’s talking in peculiar riddles, but I know she’s not going to tell me the story. Least not right now.

“All right,
shar,
I didn’t bring you out here to talk about those dratted blue bottles,” Mirage says, getting up from her chair. “I brought you out here to show you the photo albums I stole right out from under your grandmother Phoebe’s nose.”

She gets up and flips on the outdoor light, turning the porch a hazy yellow.

My stomach takes a leap into my throat. “You stole photo albums from Grandmother Phoebe? Nobody does that to Grandmother Phoebe.”

“Then I guess I’m the first.” Mirage pulls an album out of the box and onto her lap, her voice turning razor-sharp around the edges. “She don’t own these.
I
took these pictures of you myself. With my own camera that I bought and paid for myself. She didn’t have the right to take them away and hide them in her cabinets.”

Her words are confusing and my head feels like a jumble of mixed-up thoughts. I don’t like her talking about Grandmother Phoebe that way. It just seems wrong. I remember the fight that night — I remember it all — but Grandmother Phoebe is the one who took care of me after Mirage left so I can’t help defending her. She cared about me when Mirage didn’t. My own anger deep inside my gut starts to boil all over again, like a pot that don’t have a lid to hold it all in. “If Grandmother Phoebe’s so bad, why don’t you use your
traiteur
magic and make her stop then? Why don’t you just fix
all
of us with a spell and make us just the way you want us? You could make us the perfect daughter, the perfect daddy — then you wouldn’t have to run away and leave us behind and become some kind of embarrassing swamp witch!”

“Shelby Jayne!” she cries, her voice cracking now. “I never wanted to leave you behind. I didn’t want to take you away from your home — or away from Daddy. That night was terrible. There was so much going on — so much I couldn’t fix or do anymore —”