That night I had a dream I had nearly every night for my whole life. As usual, I was running along a fence, baying at great and fearsome shapes outside, warning them away, running tirelessly. Only this time that woman was there—the mambo. In the dream she was as fierce as ever, but here, with the detached compassion of dream, I could see why. She was full of many colored lights, all trying to burst through her from every direction, light that hurt the eyes and penetrated the heart. It was breaking me down. I could see that normally she struggled to hold it in. That was why she held herself so still and tall all the time. She mustn’t let the lights out and blast some innocent person.
I wasn’t innocent. I was failing. She put her hand on a gate I did not know was there, and she opened it in spite of all my threatening and guarding.
Suddenly Jake was beside me, his hand warm on my back, I’m here, brother, and he brushed past me as easily as a wind, and she led him out of the gate and straight into the arms of those I had kept at bay so long. I fell to my knees howling, covering my face, although I could still see him greeting and embracing them all. The mambo put her hand on my shoulder and said, you did well, but I lifted my covered face to the sky and howled louder.
Jake was there again. He raised me to my feet and he was again my big cousin who comforted me in the nights of my exile. We embraced. A hole opened in my heart. Even with his arms around me, somehow he slid out of my heart, leaving it sore and hollow and burning like the wind which roars through the Grand Canyon. I clung hard to my cousin. He was leaving me anyway. He slid out of my arms with a kiss on my breast that distracted me, setting the wound in my heart to opening and closing like a jellyfish.
Pulsing with pain, I moved slowly away, while he turned and entered the embrace of those shining enemies who had crowded round us every night for so long, and the waves closed over his head, and he was gone.
When I awoke I lay thinking a long time about the meaning of this dream, as is the custom of my mother’s people. I had never understood that dream. Jake had declined to say what he thought of it, though sometimes I thought he was biting his tongue in exasperation.
Now I wondered. Those I had sought to keep away seemed in this dream to be the ancestors, the lwas, all the spirits of this living world who crowded around his head like moths battering against a window. Was I the window then, the barrier keeping them out? Was I somehow inside Jake’s enclosure, under his protection but guarding him? Was it even Jake who protected me?
That thought gave me a shiver.
o0o
The next day, I went to the botánica again. My deadline in France had become critical. I had to choose between honoring Jake and getting to that courtroom on time. It tore me in half to walk away before his obsèques were complete, but then, telling his stories to that woman was tearing me in half, too. And I had no time.
I decided I would tell her one more story of Jake and then be on my way.
But the mambo was not there when I arrived. I began packing up a few things that I didn’t want to send with her to New Orleans, things Jake had kept for me when I moved into the Lair.
I needed an hour or two of absolute privacy with the contents of my briefcase. To meet and defeat Henri de Turbin in a French court, I must have my geese in a row, as Baz would say. Maybe an online search for more case law would distract me from the knowledge that Yoni’s last concert, and my last chance to see Sophie, would take place tonight.
Baz had been sure that Sophie was magically affected by having intercourse with me. But how? Assuredly, our lovemaking had power. I wondered if I’d have noticed magical events in bed with her.
The sex had been magical to me because she was there.
Remembering her anguished, rageful tears as her father forced her to crawl to his feet, I wondered, why couldn’t I stop him? How had he made me helpless? I’d believed in the navel string—but I had still tried to fight it—and I’d failed.
Then I remembered Sophie speaking of a birth caul, another potent relique in her father’s possession.
Baz had said scornfully, Somebody tells you something and you swallow it. No wonder Jake did whatever he liked with you.
Perhaps I had only imagined that Jake’s commands had been reinforced with magic. But I hadn’t known about the caul in Henri’s coat pocket. I’d strained every muscle against an invisible hurricane while Henri jeered at me and humiliated my woman.
Where does power come from? I had handled my power all these years the way a fastidious woman handles a dirty diaper, at arm’s length, with tongs. Slowly my fears had eased but never passed. I never seemed to stop gaining powers. At first I was so frightened, I gave my navel string into Jake’s keeping. Don’t let me do anything terrible. He’d laughed.
Of course, he was in Samedi’s confidence all along.
Always I had refused to think about that. Then Sophie rubbed my face in it, and I ran away from her while she screamed idiot after me. Well, she was right.
Samedi had had an agenda for me, and Jake had run with it.
Samedi still had an agenda for me.
Sophie was right.
It stared me in the face now. How could I win against a gede? I’d given up everything in my headlong flight from that agenda.
For someone nobody wanted, I had cost a lot of people a lot of trouble.
Slowly, I drew a deep breath.
The un-airconditioned botánica was hot and close. The smell of long-dried herbs scented the heat with dead summers.
If I really were a person of substance, powerful, prophesied even, with big investments hung on me by everyone from my father, to the gods, to friends and relations, to my wild Sophie, then I would decide what I wanted.
And what did I want?
I wanted my title. This meant, I wanted not to be the shameful secret of my family, as well. I wanted someone to stand up for my rights, even if I had to force them to do it.
I wanted the right to walk in the front door at Montmorency and spend what lifetime I had left—I groaned, wondering how much longer—throwing pebbles into the canal and guarding my home with all the cunning, magic, and ferocity at my command.
I wanted Sophie. I wanted to make love with her in the deep grass of the marais and weave clover into her hair. I wanted to see to it that she grew up as wise and fearless as she was now, but safely, loved and protected.
That, at least, was the pipe dream. She was too young to make such a bargain.
As yet, she’d shown no sign of letting anyone protect her.
Why doesn’t Henri keep her in better order? I grumbled to myself. Obviously, because he couldn’t. I suspected that Henri was impressed with his daughter’s bright flame.
In that moment I knew I wouldn’t give her up yet.
I had to rescue her from her father.
Time was against me at every hand, now.
I owed Jake his burial rites.
I had to get to France in time to fight Henri in court.
And I must contrive to resist the power of the caul, if I was to take Sophie from Henri. Maybe I couldn’t win my title or my home, but I could save her from that loveless prison.
I could think of nothing Jake taught me that would serve.
But maybe Montmorency could teach me what he had not.
Desperate, I closed my eyes and sought deliberately, and for the first time, that part of me that ran barking along the mysterious fence in my soul.