“WHERE IS IT?” Amos asked, his voice suddenly hungry. “How far?”
The doctor leaned in closer. She sounded like a temptress, as if this was what she had wanted all along.
“The distance isn’t important. You have to stop thinking about things the way you have before. Everything there is different. The distance, that means nothing. There is no place like it. What’s important is that you realize your daughter can find healing there. But if you go, you can never come back.”
“What do you mean? Is it outside the country? I don’t have a passport.”
The doctor lifted her hands and rubbed her temples, then repeated herself. “It’s Over There, Amos. You will, both you and your daughter, be gone. Forever. There is no coming back. Imagine a door that locks behind you, and there is no key to open it again.”
“What do I need to do?” Amos asked without hesitating. “I would do anything to keep her alive, to get her away from here. Did you know her mother has threatened to take both children away from me? A custody battle over a dying little girl—that’s all my future holds right now.”
His voice caught. He choked out the next sentence.
“I need to get out of here.”
“Why did she leave them with you now?”
Amos spat. “Bah! She had no choice. It was all very last minute, very important. She was desperate to find someone to watch them. But this will be the last time they stay with me. You don’t know her. I’m telling you. You don’t.”
The doctor sighed and stood up. She walked to each of the three dining room windows and pulled the heavy blinds closed. Her skin went from pale to gray in the shadows. She paced back and forth a few times in the fresh darkness before sitting back down and leaning toward Amos.
“There’s a woman,” she began.
“Yes?” Amos urged her.
“There’s a woman,” she said again. “Her name is Marie Laveau.”
The doctor waited a moment, as if to see if the name meant anything to Amos. It clearly did not, so she went on.
“She has a key.”
She stopped, as if reconsidering.
“If I tell you this, there is no going back. You cannot change your mind. Once you know, either you leave or everything will be much, much worse for you.”
“I want to go,” Amos said in a firm voice.
“Give me something to write with.”
“Of course, of course,” Amos stuttered, and Leo heard his chair grate against the wood floor. It banged the wall. Amos walked past the closet door, his shadow dark and cold. Leo stiffened. He wouldn’t mind if his father vanished, but he couldn’t imagine life without Ruby.
His parents’ divorce, his sister’s sickness—these things had been planted in his life, seeds of a terrible sadness, and the sadness had grown until it filled him to bursting. Ruby’s presence was the last good thing. He thought he loved her only because she was his sister, or because she was the little girl who followed him around with great devotion, but really he loved her because she was the thing that kept his belief alive. Her presence in his life was like that of a fairy, and it made him wonder if maybe, just maybe, all of those unbelievable things were somehow true.
He heard his father rummaging through a drawer in his desk down the hall. Then he came back quickly. He left a wake of scents behind him: stale cigarettes and Stetson cologne and sweat. It was a warm summer day, and the heavy stillness sifted in through the walls of the house.
The doctor took the pen and paper from Amos and scribbled a few short notes on it.
“This is her name. This is where you can find her,” she said, pointing at each line on the paper one at a time. “And this is what you need to say, word for word.”
The doctor stared at Amos while he read over the information.
“‘I need to leave,’” Amos read in a firm voice. “‘Can I use the—’”
“Stop!” the doctor shouted, looking around, angry for the first time. “Stop! Don’t say it out loud. Not now. Don’t be so foolish! Go here,” she said, and stabbed at the line on the piece of paper, “and ask for her”—she stabbed the paper again—“and say that. But not before. Not out loud. Not now.”
Amos cleared his throat. The room was silent again, but only for a moment.
“When can I go?”
“You need to go soon. Now. I can’t have someone with this kind of knowledge wandering around the city. It puts not only you at risk. There are others who would suffer if this became common knowledge.”
“But I have to pack. I have to . . .”
“You can’t take anything with you, not Over There. Nothing except the clothes on your back. Everything is there already. I don’t have time to explain it. You don’t have time.”
“Wait a second! You never said—”
“And I wouldn’t show your daughter to Marie, not at first. I don’t know that she has ever allowed a child to go. But if she refuses, tell her I sent you, and explain the child’s condition. That might sway her. She was a mother once. Remember that.”
She said it as if she was trying to reassure herself that it would work.
“She had a daughter.”
Silence. The clock on the mantel chimed six. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.
“Tonight,” the doctor said, standing. She pushed her chair in under the table. “You must go tonight or your situation will become much worse, now that you know this. Having this information is not the key to a long life in New Orleans.”
The two of them stood there for a moment staring at each other, neither one saying a word. Finally, the doctor spoke again.
“Do you have it all memorized?” she asked Amos.
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
The doctor pulled a book of matches from her pocket and struck one of them. It made a sizzling sound that lit up the dark dining room. She set the paper on fire. The smoke rose like a black promise, twisting and dancing. Leo could smell it from where he stood in the closet, the smell of burning things, the smell of endings.
“There is one more thing,” the doctor said. Leo had not thought her words could become more abrupt, more serious, but they did. Each syllable fell like iron.
“You must take this with you.”
She reached under the table and lifted something with two hands, a small plant the size of a volleyball. It looked like some type of orchid. The stem was a bright lime green, almost neon, and there were three blossoms drooping from the main stem, white as the moon. When she placed it on the table, the pot it was in grated heavily against the wood, as if it was made of stone.
Amos was mesmerized. “What is that?” he asked in a whisper so that Leo could barely hear him. “What . . . is . . . that?”
The doctor laughed, and it was a strange sound. Happy, yes, but with other things mixed in, greedy things, things that crawl out from under your bed in the middle of the night.
“This is the key to your daughter’s healing.”
Amos reached out tentatively.
“Wait,” the doctor said.
Amos’s hand stopped, then drifted back to his side.
“I have more instructions. You cannot let anyone know you have this, not here, and not on the other side of the door. No one.”
Amos nodded.
“Take this plant in the bowl to the tallest building you can find, the one in the middle of the city. Light a fire close to it. Here are some matches to take with you. There is plenty of wood in the building.”
Amos nodded again, his face filled with longing.
“Finally, and this is very important, you will need to prick Ruby’s finger and place a drop of her blood at the root of the plant.”
Amos looked disgusted. He shook his head as if almost waking from a dream. “What?”
“Listen to what I’m saying, Amos. This is her healing. The leaves on this plant, when it grows into a tree, will heal her. It will grow quickly once you light the fire and feed the tree. You must plant it in the tall building. You must guard it. The time to eat from it will come later, but in the meantime, the leaves, Amos! The leaves! Do you hear what I’m saying? Do. Not. Eat. The. Fruit. Wait until I send someone. But the leaves will heal Ruby.”
Amos’s shoulders drooped. “I don’t know if I can remember it all.”
For a moment, the doctor drew in a breath and looked ready to erupt with anger or frustration, but then she exhaled quietly. She stood up and walked around the table, her footsteps suddenly silent. She placed her pale, white hands on Amos’s shoulders, and the two of them stood there for a long time. The image made Leo uncomfortable, this strange woman with her hands on his father’s shoulders. The two of them stared at the small plant.
She lifted her hands and, for a brief moment, held tightly to Amos’s head, but her hands dropped quickly, and Leo wondered if he had even seen it happen.
“You will remember everything,” she said quietly.
She walked back to her side of the table, lifted the bowl with the plant, and placed it inside a black bag. She wiped her hands together, as if discarding small parts of something undesirable. She sighed, and everything she had said went up in a kind of drifting haze. Leo blinked, held his eyes together tightly, and opened them again.
What had just happened? He could barely remember.
“Tonight,” the doctor said again. “Be gone tonight. You have no choice now.”
She walked down the hallway in long, forceful steps, opened the front door (the door that no one ever used), and slammed it hard behind her. It made a sound like distant thunder.