Circle of Secrets (2 page)

“Sweetie Pie, I gotta go, you know that. That’s how the bills get paid.” He leans over, me still dangling from his neck as I hang on tighter than ever, my sneakers bumping his bony knees. Maybe if I just never let go, he’ll have to take me with him.

My chest gets a queer bubble of anxiety as he pulls my arms one by one from around his neck. Setting me firmly down on the porch, he takes a step backward, looking at me with his serious eyes.

My throat is closed up so tight, I can’t even speak.

I’m partway going on twelve now, but I’m tempted to wrap my arms around his legs so he can’t walk down the steps and back to the dock without me.

While I’m debating the pros and cons of doing that, Daddy digs into the front pocket of his jacket and pulls out a white envelope. “Here, Mirage.”

She takes the envelope and tucks it into one of her deep skirt pockets. “Appreciate that, Philip.”

“Let me know if you need more,” he adds, glancing up at her face.

Their eyes lock and it’s like their secret conversation starts up all over again. I know there’s money in that envelope. Money for taking care of me.

Daddy gives me another quick hug — so fast I can’t even get a good grip this time — then clomps down the porch steps. “I’ll call you every night,
shar,
or as often as I can get through on the phones.”

The lump in my throat has grown to humongous proportions.

Just then, a monster wind comes roaring down the bayou. Empty cans, pieces of fishing line, and bits of rope rattle across the yard and scoot underneath the house to get buried in the mud when it floods. I’ll bet there’s all kinds of things the wind’s blown under that house. I try not to think about nests of snakes and spiders hiding there, too.

Stiffly, I stare out toward the water, at my daddy climbing back into the boat, rain clouds inching closer every second.

“Best hurry back to town,” Mirage calls out. “Storm comin’.”

Daddy nods and rips the cord on the boat engine. He lifts his hand and a rush of panic comes over me like I got sucked into a tidal wave.

As I finally wave back, the tail of the boat starts to disappear around the bend of the cove. “Daddy!” I shriek, but he doesn’t hear me.

Two seconds later, he’s out of sight. Just like that. Gone. Until Christmas.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

I
WATCH THE BOAT’S CHOPPY WAKE FLATTEN OUT ACROSS THE
water, looking almost like it sucked my daddy under, and I try not to burst into tears.

“Come on in out of that wind, Shelby Jayne,” Mirage tells me, scooting my belongings into the front room next to several racks of drying Spanish moss.

I force my feet across the threshold and the front door closes. We stare at each other, but I drop my eyes real quick, wondering if she can read my thoughts.

After she moves my suitcases and boxes into the spare bedroom, raindrops start tapping overhead. Guess the storm caught up with us because within seconds, they’re coming down loud and fast, like tiny fists beating at the tin roof.

Slowly, I follow Mirage into the kitchen where the curtains over the sink are flapping wildly, letting in a spatter of raindrops.

“Hope you’re still partial to gumbo,” she says, peering into a pot of okra roux filled with chunks of chicken and sausage. I’ve always liked her gumbo real good, but I don’t say a word. I can’t tell if she’s trying to bribe me into loving her again, or if tonight’s supper is just a coincidence. Like fixing your relative’s favorite foods when they come to visit. Even if you’re mad at ’em.

“Go ahead and take a load off, Shelby Jayne. Rice is ’bout ready, but I gotta doctor up Mister Lenny first.”

“Mister Lenny?” I echo, glancing around for someone else in the room. But it’s just us. All I see are dingy walls that need painting and the old-fashioned refrigerator in the corner.

“Sit yourself right there,” Mirage says. A breeze full of rain swirls through the window before she leans across the sink and slams it shut.

Something suddenly dive-bombs at my head.

I let out a screech. “What’s that?”

“That’s jest Winifred. She won’t hurt you.”

“What
is
it?”

Mirage holds out her palm and a sparrow flits down and
grabs hold of her finger, cocking her head at me like I just landed from Pluto.

I wonder if Grandmother Phoebe packed my bottle of hand sanitizer.

I wonder if the forks are clean.

“Ma petite shar,”
Mirage coos, releasing the sparrow, which flits back into the front room and disappears behind a bookcase. Next, she reaches up to a branch above the sink and brings down a blinking owl.

“Mister Lenny,” Mirage says, “meet Shelby Jayne.”

I don’t say a word.

My mamma has a pet owl.

Doctoring him up at the kitchen table no less.

Grandmother Phoebe would have a first-rate hissy fit.

“Mister Lenny is a barred owl, Shelby,” Mirage tells me, like we’re having a science lesson and I’m her C+ student. Her eyes come alive for the first time since I got here.

“A barn owl?”

“Nope, a barred owl. Instead a spots, he has stripes along his neck, like bars of color. And he’s jest a
bébé.
Look how sweet, like a teddy bear.”

“Um, yeah, I can see the fluffiness.”

“Found him this spring, fallen from a nest, his mother disappeared. I hate to think hunters might have got him….”

I know all about mothers disappearing. “What are you doing to his wing?” I ask as Mister Lenny starts making a strange barking noise.

Mirage smoothes the bird’s feathers with her fingers and Mister Lenny cocks his head, then pecks her on the nose. Mirage just laughs. Then that owl starts hooting and gurgling.

I grip the table like I’m clinging to a life preserver. “He isn’t choking, is he?”

“Nope, jest wants in on our conversation. He gets jealous.”

“Never heard of no jealous bird before,” I tell her, rolling my eyes. I hear my own voice and wonder at how easily I’m talking like Mirage again. Grandmother Phoebe’s been trying to squeeze the swamp speech out of me all year long, teaching me how to speak more proper like ladies in the big cities instead of a bayou girl. Even though I lived out here when I was real young — before my memories kicked in. And grew up with a mother like Mirage. “So what’re you doing?” I ask again.

“He got a broken wing, and I been usin’ my healing spells on him.”

“Healing
spells
?” I wonder if she does that hoodoo magic stuff like folks in New Orleans. Does my daddy know where he’s dumped me? My gut starts to jump around like I got a mullet in my belly.

I want to grab a boat and follow him back up the bayou, but I don’t know how to row. Or which direction to point the boat. He’s probably getting soaked in all this rain. I start worrying that he’ll catch pneumonia and die before he can come back and get me.

“Today is Mister Lenny’s last prayer day.”

Mirage closes her eyes, puts her hands on top of the owl’s fluffy little head, and begins to pray, murmuring French words in a soft, quiet jumble.

At first I bow my head like for Mass, but then I peek through my hair so I can watch. If she goes into a trance and the owl starts pecking my eyes, I better stay alert.

But there’s no trance or candle lighting or incantations at all. When Mirage finishes praying, she lifts her head. “You ready for supper,
shar
? We’re havin’ crawfish gumbo. Winifred is quite excited. She loves crawfish, and I left some raw ’specially for her.”

“Thought it was chicken and sausage.”

“Caught some crawfish today and couldn’t help throwing it in, too.”

I lick my dry lips, rubbing my hands against my jeans. “What
was
that — that praying stuff? Are you really a swamp witch?”

Her black eyes turn dark and stormy. “Who said I was a swamp witch?”

“Um, I don’t remember.”

“Grandmother Phoebe, I s’pose,” she says, and I get the feeling it bothers her, but I’m pretty sure she and Grandmother Phoebe haven’t spoken two words in the past year. She always makes me answer the telephone when Mirage calls.

I think about all that icy silence in our house before Mirage left for good, and I can’t help shivering. After Daddy started traveling more with his new job, the house was dead quiet. We even started eating dinner separately.

Then Mirage started taking trips out here to the swamp to tend her own mamma, my
grand-mère,
who got sick. I’d always heard my
grand-mère
was a
traiteur,
too. I guess she couldn’t heal herself like she could other people.

After that last terrible fight, Mirage just never came back.

Grandmother Phoebe pretended Mirage never existed.

I was supposed to act like everything was normal.

Now Daddy’s left.

I think about my daddy getting farther and farther away and my stomach starts to hurt. I stare at the blue flame of gas under the pot on the stove. A dented pot sits by the back door, catching drips from a brown stain in the ceiling.

“Grandmother Phoebe says,” I start to tell her, and the words are like little darts of pain in my throat, “that’s the whole reason you and Daddy split up.”

Mirage tries to reach for my hand, but I move it off the table and stick it in my lap.

The kitchen falls into a sudden hole of silence while I stare at a tiny rip in my jeans.

She clears her throat and puts Mister Lenny back on his perch. His head swivels around as Mirage dishes up two bowls of gumbo and sets them on the table with the pot of rice. I secretly admire her purple flowered skirt and the sparkly rings on her long fingers, but mostly I’m watching her eyes, her face, wondering what she’s going to do next.

Tiny little pieces of crawfish float to the top of the roux, but I hunt down the chicken and sausage instead and take a bite, burning my lips it’s so hot.

Rain sheets the kitchen window like gray dishwater. “Bad storm, ain’t it?” Mirage says with a small smile. “Hope your daddy made it back to his car okay.”

“Me, too.” I stare at my gumbo again, fishing out some okra to chew on.

“Shelby,” she tries again. “There’s a whole long story you wouldn’t understand, but I ain’t a witch. That’s an old wives’ tale. I’m a
traiteur.
That’s French for healer.
Traiteurs
go way back when Cajuns first got to Louisiana and had no doctor for fifty miles.”

“You’re a doctor?” I say, blowing hard on my next spoonful.

“Oh,
non,
I ain’t no doctor. A
traiteur
just has a special talent for healin’ folks. I learned about plant medicine and the special healing prayers from my mamma before she died. Certain people liked to call your
grand-mère
a swamp witch because she was old and kept to herself, mostly because of arthritis that knotted her up the last couple a years. Calling a
traiteur
a swamp witch is jest plain ignorance. Most a town didn’t understand her ways, but she had a friend in her mailman who brought out her letters and groceries couple times a month. No amount of gossip or rumors could stop her from helpin’ folks.” Mirage gives a small laugh, but her voice sounds funny, almost like she’s gonna cry. “Folks liked my mamma’s cough syrup remedy better than anything on them store shelves. And after she laid her hands on your head and whispered her prayers, you felt a hundred percent better.”

“Sounds like magic,” I say, wondering if it was really true or just a story.

“Not magic. Faith in God. She had a spiritual gift, jest like the Bible says. But the healing comes from God, not her, not me. Never me.”

She gets real quiet like it’s important that I understand what she’s saying.

“So what happened to her? How’d she die?”

“She got real sick. That’s why I came out here so much last year, and then just stayed. Got so bad, she finally couldn’t get out of bed at all. Passed a few months ago in her sleep. By then she was just a wisp of a thing, but she knew just about everything there was to know about healing. I got her recipe book to keep forever. And the prayers in my head.”

I want to know why Mirage never came back to New Iberia after Grand-mère’s funeral was over and done. Why she left me and Daddy forever. But I can’t get the question to come out of my mouth.

Besides, she should be giving
me
the answers without me having to ask.

I push the spoon around my bowl, thinking about the night she left when I screamed at her to come back, to stop walking down the steps to the car.

She’d paused, then knelt to take my hands in hers. “Shelby, Grand-mère is real bad sick and I gotta go.”

“You coming back, right?”

She shook her head, but she wouldn’t look me in the eyes. Just kept staring back at the house, back at Daddy standing on the porch. “If I don’t leave now and get away from here, I’m gonna die myself.”

“That don’t make no sense,” I’d told her.

“I love you, Shelby Jayne. Wish so bad I could take you
with me, but you got school here, and everything you need. I can’t take care of you for a while. Grand-mère is gonna take every ounce of strength I have.”

But I didn’t believe her. I stopped believing anything she said.

I once wrote her a letter, but she just said it was too complicated to explain. Which wasn’t an answer at all. One of those things grown-ups do when they don’t want to talk about something. Or don’t want to admit they did wrong.

Maybe I really don’t want Mirage telling me the truth. I don’t want to know that her love was fake, that I wasn’t worth it. That she’d been pretending her whole life.

I feel a shudder go right up my spine and into my brain. Even though I want answers, I’m afraid of them, too.

At that moment the sun bursts through the clouds, wiping the darkness away as if the sun’s rays were long golden hands.

The chattering rain stops.

The trickles of water running in squiggly lines down the window slow.

And on the other side of the kitchen windows, the air is suddenly filled with an extraordinary blue light.