“Pea.”
“Hmm?”
“What will you do, after the baby is born?”
Pea tilted her head slowly in her direction. She yawned. “I haven’t thought much about it.”
Tamara sat up a little straighter. “That’s a lie.” She couldn’t have known. She hadn’t spent these long months afraid that her life was in danger. Or, worse, that the thread it hung on was tied to Tamara’s self-protective heart.
“Is it? I’m not like you, sweetie. I’m not the most … natural mother.”
Tamara snorted, relieved. “Neither was mine, but we made do.”
Pea smiled and looked back out at the river. She wrapped herself again in silence, and this time Tammy didn’t dare break it. She’d nearly fallen asleep to the lullaby of kestrels and gurgling water when Pea’s voice startled her back into the world.
“My God, did they tell a good lie. Look how it even got you, Tammy. You went looking for a bad white man, and you found Victor. A bad bargain from the word ‘go.’”
“I found you,” Tammy said hoarsely, “and Dev and Walter. Not such a bad bargain.”
Pea seemed as distant as a ghost, looking back upon her life. She laughed like it hurt.
“But it’s on me for believing it. That I could make myself up in whiteface and kill for them and still come out clean … All that power they got, and here we are just wanting a nibble. And for that nibble they take our souls.”
“They can’t do that. No one but God can do that.”
“It’s just the earth, Tammy, that takes us in the end.”
“And the ancestors? The hands?”
Pea shrugged. “I only know what I’ve seen. And you have to admit, I’ve seen my share. Maybe they linger a bit, some strong souls. Some good, some cankers like our Victor. But the earth is billions of years old, Tammy. Even Methuselah’s got nothing on that.”
“The earth is … Phyllis, I don’t mean to sound ignorant, but isn’t a billion a million million? The earth is a million million years old? How is that possible?”
“Time has a habit of passing. And so do humans, and every other living creature on this green earth. And if they all got a soul, then the air ought to be full of them, we ought not to be able to see for all the spirits passing through us.”
“God is a lot greater than the earth. If He sees fit for us to have souls, then He’ll find some space for us.”
Phyllis took a soft, slow breath. “Sure, baby.”
“Well, you know plenty of folk agree with me. And doesn’t it make it worse, if those folks you killed, well, if that was all there was to them?”
“Does it make it worse?” She sounded bleak, her voice leached of color. “That every bit of what made them a person on this earth drained away when I sliced their throats? That they had existed and then they didn’t, and I’m the reason why?”
“Pea, I didn’t—”
“I watched the light leave their eyes. I hauled their dead bodies, which had lost everything of dignity, cold and wet and stinking of blood and shit; they felt like nothing alive, like cold clay … there is a soul, Tamara, I believe that, I believe that. But it dies too.”
They shared the blanket for an hour more. They didn’t speak. They just watched them pass: the river, and time, and their awareness of them both.
She waited until that night, after Mrs. Grundy had left. They sat together in the parlor, listening to a new blues record that Phyllis had ordered and had just come into the post office. When the torture of anticipation outpaced the pleasure of her last curse-free hours, she got up from the couch, turned off the music, and faced Phyllis.
“I need to do something,” Tamara said.
Pea considered that for a moment. “With the cards?”
“How did you guess?”
“You were different when you got back. And who knows better than I do what those cards meant to you, Tammy?”
“I’m an oracle,” Tamara said aloud, for the first time in her life. She pulled out the cards and they settled into her like home.
Phyllis nodded slowly. “You want to tell me what this is about?”
“After we’re done.”
Pea didn’t object. Where had she come by that easy trust when Tammy’d had to fight so hard for hers? Or maybe it wasn’t so easy for her. Pea always kept a little back, locked away in that strongbox of her heart.
Pea stayed on the couch and Tammy knelt on the carpet across from her. She shuffled in waterfalls and bridges, more than she needed to, but it felt good, and it gave her a chance to feel the cards. She needed to show that she was willing, at last, to make the trade. But she had never needed to speak to the cards before. How could she manage it?
With tricks, Aunt Winnie said, clear as the river beside her. Tamara smiled, missing her.
She found the cards she wanted and seeded the deck with them. She asked Pea to cut the deck, and made sure the card she wanted was on bottom: her old friend the suicide king of diamonds, his stubby legs flailing over an abyss. Victor and his silver smile. He should have come out of the woodwork for this, she’d almost looked forward to spitting on him personally. Still, she didn’t miss him. She had Pea shuffle the cards this time and then cut again. It was a bit like dancing, it came out without her thinking too hard about it. Pea pulled out the ace of spades, just as Tammy wanted. The curse, the knives, the angel and her corrupted justice. Her vision had been pure, the oracle told them. And now for the third card, shuffle and cut: six of hearts, death and rebirth, the oracle’s card and Tamara’s heart, bearing them both. The power of the cards was rushing down to her now. She only had time to look up, catch Pea’s eyes and Pea’s hands, and say
