They were heading north on Broadway, drifting west as the sun set over the distant line of the Hudson. As they moved, streetlights flickered to yellow life down the cross streets.
“Miserable.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“Her blood pressure is better. She just has to push through. No more than a few weeks left.”
“And how are you, Tammy?”
She scowled. “Crummy, and I’m sure Pea already told you all about it.”
“She said that Vic’s still paying you visits. She said that you’d been tormenting yourself with those cards and couldn’t spend any more time with her ghosts.”
“Don’t talk like that, Walter!” She smacked the back of his seat. It only hurt her hand.
“Talk like what?”
“Like I’m making all this up. Like I just got tired of her…”
And besides, were they really Pea’s ghosts? Little Sammy, Pete Williams, Aunt Winnie, her great-grandmother—hell, even Victor, if she had to say it out loud. Even Victor’s sad, puffed-up silver ghost.
“I could understand it if you had. Our Phyllis isn’t always pleasant company.”
A few more tears leaked from the corners of her swollen eyes. Baby, what happened? she would say, if she could see her now. “She is,” Tammy said, sullen as a child. “She is to me.”
“So what are you doing here?”
Her breath stuck for a moment, but she snatched it back. Her ragged nails dug into her palms. “I just couldn’t stand it. She and Dev … they think I’m like them. When I’m not, nothing like them!”
“And the cards?”
Did he know? But how could he? She only shared that with the cards and the ancestors. The choice she was making every day, even if she had refused to own it: Pea, dead in a matter of weeks. That dreaming child, growing up without a mother. She caught a sob and strangled it in her chest.
“Don’t you think they’re just parlor tricks, Walter?”
“You don’t.”
“Well, they just tell me there’s no good I can do there. I’m better back here. I missed the city!” She took a deep breath of the fishy decay blowing in from the Hudson. “Hell, I even missed the stink of it! You have to tell me everything that’s happened at the Pelican. I know you’ve been following my schedule, but I haven’t even thought about the spring season…”
She trailed off. Walter’s shrugs were always eloquent. This one smelled of disappointment and calculated silence. She let him keep it—it always amazed her how often people would rush to fill Walter’s silences. They’d say all sorts of fool things just to stop him from staring.
Walter turned down 72nd Street and then onto Riverside Drive. She rolled up the window as he smoothly accelerated. He had told her he was taking her to dinner, but she didn’t know what restaurants he fancied so far uptown.
“So you’re staying, then,” he said, finally. His voice was flat enough to skate on.
“Pea made her choices! I’m sorry she’s suffering for it now, but no one can expect me to give up my own life for hers. Christ, if you could see her, ankles fat as eggplants, back twisted like an old tree, the nightmares that baby gives her that she’ll never tell me—and her hands so thick that some days she can’t make a fist but she can still make a knife dance. That baby’s made her a prisoner in her own body. Watching her makes me want to—want…”
“What do you want, Tammy?”
Bebop and reefer till dawn, dancing in her stockinged feet on sticky floors, telling stories with Pea on warm summer nights, lingering glances with Dev and long kisses with Clyde, a whole rack of babies all the colors of the earth playing in the yard behind them, secure in the love of their aunties and uncles and free, as their parents could never be, of dreams and history and hard numbers.
She pressed her cheek against the window and counted her breaths. Walter didn’t speak for the rest of the ride. As they passed over the Harlem River into the Bronx she registered that they were far north, far from familiar Manhattan avenues, but she was remembering Pea and it was hard to see anything else.
He pulled in front of a house on a street so leafy and isolated it seemed impossible they could still be in the city.
“You know that Vic cursed Dev before he bit it. Probably hit Pea, too.”
“Pea, too,” Tamara said, balefully.
Walter turned to look at her and registered something with a short nod. She felt a jolt of fear; she hadn’t meant to reveal anything. “And her hands still have a mind of their own?”
He knew about that? Had Phyllis told him during one of their early-morning calls on mob business? “They seem to,” she said cautiously.
He raised his eyebrows. “Think they might be connected? The curse and the misbehaving hands?”
“Yeah, it’s occurred to me, Walter.”
“Yet you’re still here instead of there.”
“It won’t do her any good if I’m here or on the moon! She and Dev killed that bastard, not me!”
This time his shrug just smiled. “You really think that Victor’s ghost’ll scram if you walk out on Phyllis?”
Her heart thudded like a snare drum. “I’m not like you. Or Pea. Or Dev, even!”
“Even,” Red Man said mildly. “And yet you sure manage to spend a lot of time with us.”
Tamara thought of that awful story that Dev had wanted her to tell Phyllis, of course she did. She remembered how Dev had looked in the hospital, bandages over his left eye where they’d had to operate. He had made her swear not to tell Phyllis. But she never would have. Pea cared so much about justice, and Tammy was just the snake girl, just the jungle dancer, just a country girl running from the sound of crows in the morning boughs of the hanging tree. What was in her hands but a pair of Greyhound tickets and the stains of all the loves she had been too scared to keep?
“So,” Tamara said, just so she didn’t have to think about
