A dream grabbed her, pulled her under. It was not her dream; it was the cards, it was Durga. The child was already there, as close as a breath. A baby like a wheel, spinning in a wind of blue light. She had changed, in the months since the oracle’s last reading. Her saint’s hands had transformed into something else. And behind her were more wheels and more winds, turning and turning, blowing up from below in the colors of the earth. They were coming, these dreamers with their uncanny hearts and the force of ancestors and spirits and gods and old, aching hands behind them. Rejoice! they said. For we will not await our own destruction. We will rise up to meet them and turn them aside.
Is that possible? the oracle thought. Power corrupts, and power is corrupted.
No one answered her. They were all too busy dreaming.
She felt the weight of the mother’s curse here. Smelled the blood on her hands, rotting.
Let me take it! the oracle shouted into the blue wind. Let me fulfill the bargain.
The blue wind paused and faced her. She felt them inside it: the ancestors, the oracles of her family, the long line that stretched to the slave ships, to old stories painted in forgotten languages. It will be hard for you, Oracle. We have given the child a different gift.
But I can take the curse? The mother will live?
The child and her kind will remake the world. If you accept her burden, the mother we will forget.
Relief shook the oracle, but a lifetime’s caution made her pause.
What has changed in her?
Look, Oracle! This is our gift: her heart.
But the oracle could see this was no gift, or no easy one. The child would grow up filled with dreams. Like fire she would spill them, before and behind her.
How can you make them bear this?
Aunt Winnie came to her as a thin note from that faceless chorus.
Because it is to be borne. The hands can no longer serve. What would you have us do? Sit idly by while the world turns against us? Our people have as much a need as we ever did; no, we have more. We have given you our hearts! Oracle, remember your duty! I taught you as well as I could in the time I had. You are to witness. You are to hold them to the path. You are to be our voice in the world of the living!
The oracle held out her simple hands. Give it to me, then. I will bear what I must, and I will help that child when her load grows heavy.
They swept her up so that she lost sight of the babies in their wheels, rocking like buoys in a storm. It was only her and the blue. They sang a tune she would never recall, but it pierced her like a butterfly, right to the wall. It hurt, of course it did. The smell of rot was in her nostrils now, the splattering grief of five dozen souls. It flayed her and choked her and then settled, all at once, upon her heart. Like the old roots of a killing tree, it squeezed. The oracle cried out, but she did not deny it. Then comfort, sweetly come: a soft breeze of honeysuckles and fresh-cut clover, cicadas churning the evening air. A strong voice, made soft in her ear: You done good, Tammy.
She came to facedown in the carpet, each thread in the weave as large as cornstalks in her blasted vision. Bloody saliva dripped down the side of her face. She was shivering too hard to swallow. Pea got her onto the couch and under a blanket, those saint’s hands trembling like a young girl’s, or an old woman’s. Their gazes met, stripped Tamara naked as a child.
“What did you do, Tammy?” Pea whispered. “I felt—something—”
Tammy laughed and then coughed for a good while. Her vision went white at the edges, and she might have seen old Vic there, waiting. She didn’t care. She had done it, she had done it, as well as any oracle could. Breathing again, she held Pea to her, Pea and that dreaming child, who would live.
She awoke the next morning to the sound of Phyllis on the phone, giving directions to some anonymous cop about where to find fresh evidence of old murders. They looked at one another from across the room after she hung up the phone.
“It’ll get back to Walter.”
“I can handle Walter. Are you sick, baby?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what is it?”
“Just some old ghosts. How’s Durga?”
“She’s—” Pea looked surprised, put an unconscious hand on the lower swell of her belly. “—sleeping.”
Tammy smiled as her heart squeezed to pieces.
A few days passed. The cucumbers and watermelons put up energetic shoots. She kept her cards wrapped in their silk sheath and dreamt of where they would go when the baby was born, when the war was over: Paris, Hollywood, Mexico. She wanted to dance again.
Word came again from the front: Clyde’s plane had been shot down, and he was recovering in a military hospital in an undisclosed location, but which she gathered from his thespian references was near Japan in the Pacific. (I was a dignified and potent officer, but unfortunately at the moment, Tammy, my functions aren’t particularly vital, though Doc promises me they’ll get better, a riff on The Mikado that made her laugh.) He was vague about even the details he could have shared: he’d had surgery and he’d get better, but they didn’t know if he’d be cleared to fly again. He might come home, he said. She could tell he didn’t want to, but that didn’t matter so much right then. She cried in relief and ran her fingers over his neat secretary’s hand. He’d come back. She was almost sure that he would.
There were letters from Dev in the same military mailing. A long one for Pea, and
