“Leave her be!” Tamara screamed. “Sweet Jesus, leave her be! Can’t you see it’s too late? Can’t you see he’s already dead!”
The hands, Pea’s beautiful, scarred hands, hit her like a steel bar on the jaw and Tammy slid quietly to the floor.
When she came around, Tamara was still on her back on the warped floorboards. But someone had put a blanket over her and a pillow under her head and was icing her jaw with a block wrapped in a towel.
“Is he gone?” Tamara asked. The jaw hurt but it didn’t feel broken. Her head, however, felt wrung out and stuffed with moldy towels.
Phyllis, squatting awkwardly beside her, bent forward and held out two fingers.
“Can you see me? How many fingers am I holding up?”
Tamara rolled her eyes and swatted the hand away. The earth rocked for a bit and Pea held her until it subsided. “Your hands are safe again?”
Phyllis’s jaw clenched. “They’re mine again.”
“So he must be gone.”
“Victor.” Pea’s voice was flat.
“Who else. Don’t tell me you still don’t believe me? After that little show?”
“My hands—”
“Decided to play jacks with my face. They don’t seem to know he’s dead. They still want you to kill him.”
Phyllis closed her eyes. Her voice broke. “I am so goddamn sorry, Tammy.”
Tamara swallowed thickly, past a lump in her throat as bright and salty as fresh blood. “Why didn’t you just kill him when you had the chance, Pea?”
Phyllis just shook her head. “Here, baby, can you sit up? Let’s get you somewhere more comfortable. I tried to carry you, but … well.”
Between them they got Tamara to the couch in the salon and then Phyllis busied herself making a fire. The steam was just barely coming up through the pipes and the room was so cold Tamara could see her breath. She was starting to get the sort of headache that would lay her out for days. Even the firelight made her squint. And yet, seeing Phyllis so frightened and apologetic hurt her more. What were they going to do? The hands didn’t care about Phyllis anymore, if they ever had. The corruption shall be burned from this earth and the way made clean! Tammy didn’t want the way made clean, not if it had to be like this.
She started to shake again and pulled the covers up higher. “Could you bring me some tea?”
That took Phyllis into the kitchen and gave Tamara time to compose herself. She was the oracle and Phyllis was her best friend. She would use the cards and find some way out. She would understand the hands and make them yield.
Phyllis came back and handed her a mug. “Cardamom tea. I forgot that we still had a little in the pantry.”
Dev used to make it for her too. Tamara breathed it in, recalling that bittersweet love, full of romantic gestures and empty of commitment. Her hands tightened around the mug, but she didn’t look up.
“The cards say your hands turned against you. That you did what you shouldn’t have and didn’t do what you should have, and now they’ve gone bad.”
“You get all that from a bunch of numbers?”
“Numbers and suits. It’s my calling.”
“It is that. Did they say there was something I could do about it?”
“No,” Tamara said, which wasn’t a lie, though it felt like one. If she were going to let Phyllis die like this, shouldn’t she at least tell her? But Tamara couldn’t bear the look in Phyllis’s eyes any more than she could bear the sacrifice the cards demanded to save her. She cleared her throat.
“I mean, I didn’t ask. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the hands, and how they work with the numbers. It sometimes feels as though the numbers and the hands are all part of the same ball of chance. The universe connects them, and we just get glimpses of where it’s going.”
Pea laughed. “The universe plays policy now?”
“Why not?” Tamara warmed to her theme; it felt like a way out. “It’s just luck. Just a little bit of luck that gets you ahead. You know how many of us get our start in business from a lucky hit? Every policy slip is a little pebble thrown against the system. It’s our people saying, we know they got it all now, but we’ll get ours, too, someday. Why can’t the hands be like that? But now it’s not a pebble, it’s a big rock. It might actually make a dent in that wall if you all throw at the same time.”
“But we don’t.”
“But you could.”
“Oh, now you’re talking black liberation?”
“Dev isn’t black. I’m talking global liberation.”
“Gracious, girl, you making me tired just listening to you.”
“Has that baby dreamed you anything lately?”
“Bodies. Men and women. A river of rotting meat.”
8
In April the women went outside more, now that the ground had thawed and the sun came out for more than shy minutes at a time. In her eighth month, Phyllis moved slowly but with ponderous grace. The horrors of the first two trimesters appeared to have lessened, but in the absence of physical pain she grew quieter and more reflective. She looked at Tamara sometimes with a panicked despair that neither of them could answer. The baby kept dreaming, but whatever those dreams left behind she didn’t share.
Tamara called her grandma. Just the sound of that voice made her nostalgic and aching for home—a home she couldn’t wait to get out of when she was actually there. She and her cousins had gotten together to pay for a phone line the year before, after Grandma had sworn she’d die in that old house, no use trying to convince her to move in with Tamara’s mother.
