But the cards were playing with her, this time. Chaim and Rachel kept picking out the suicide kings or the ace of spades, no matter how much Tamara feathered and bridged the deck. She kept her expression light, and Miriam seemed delighted, but she wondered if Walter caught a whiff of her panic. Death and death, the cards were saying, we should have been more. You should have done more. You should have saved her. But she wasn’t going back. She’d made her choice.
It was when Rachel picked the king of diamonds again, even though she was sure that she had buried him at the bottom of the deck, that she saw Victor grinning at the head of the long table.
The twins leaned over their plates with the sticky remains of pastry and peered at her.
“Are you sick?” Chaim asked, followed almost immediately by Rachel, more to the point: “Are you pregnant?”
She shook her head. “Thought I saw a bee, that’s all.”
Victor seemed aware of them, but not as focused as before. He directed a few comments to Walter as he reached for a pastry, and his words came to her like rushing water. His expression was amiable, not particularly cruel or angry. He seemed normal, like the man Tammy had tolerated for most of her three years at the Pelican. She had forgotten to be afraid of him by that Christmas Eve two years ago.
Tamara excused herself and went to the washroom. Behind her, Rachel said loudly that she must be pregnant too. Didn’t pregnant women vomit? Her mother hushed her.
She turned on the tap and looked at herself in the mirror.
“Tamara,” she whispered to that red-eyed girl with the puffy cheeks and trembling shoulders, “Tammy, baby, you knew you were making a bargain. You asked around town for the biggest devil to hide under.”
The girl winced. Victor flashed in and out behind her. But he was blurry in the mirror, something closer to her own reflection.
“Tell him what you did, Tammy.” She was doing Pea’s voice, as though she were telling Pea a story.
But it felt like another haunting—a possession—an exorcism.
“That night,” she said, in her own voice again, “I was drunk, and I hadn’t expected it. Victor had seemed nice. There had been some shamus pawing through his office and I’d told him about it. He was in a good mood. But then he wanted to play that stupid game with Dev’s hands. He wanted…”
She choked. The water started to run scalding into the bowl, and clouds of steam put a veil between her and her ghosts.
“Tamara, I’m breaking the door in. Tamara, do you hear me?”
That wasn’t her voice. And it wasn’t a ghost, either. It was Walter smashing the door with his fist, not Victor smashing Dev’s face with a gun.
She turned off the water. Someone whimpered. Dev? No, her, it was her.
“Wait, Walter,” she said, just loud enough for him to hear. She was sweating in the wet heat of that small room. It dripped through her hair, ruining the egg-white slick-back. Victor’s ghost wavered in the steam of the mirror. A blue light was coming up behind him, a blue wind, woodsmoke and ashes, blood and backwoods dirt. It was just as her nana had always said: there beyond the flames, she saw them, the old slaves, then all the others, following: Pete Williams and Little Sammy and Aunt Winnie herself.
“What have you been doing, girl?” she whispered, just as Aunt Winnie might have. The whole line of them opened their mouths and no sound came to her, just flashes of suits and numbers sparking past her eyes with furious velocity.
You use our gift to enrich yourself? You use our gift to hide? Wake up, Oracle! Do you dream of so little? Because we dream of the children, we dream of lifting them up, we dream of changing—
The door burst inward. The lock splintered from the wood and spilled dust on the floor. Walter stood where Victor had been, where her ancestors had gathered with their terrible judgment. It felt as though Tamara were too late. Too late for what? To change, to be better, to be the woman she’d always wanted to be. The ancestors had told her and at last she was ready to listen: it was time.
Walter caught her before she fell.
“Don’t let her die,” she sobbed, “don’t let her die. I’ll do it, I’ll save her, I’ll take the curse.”
Walter was a big man, good to cry on. He took her to his office to get herself together.
He settled into his big leather chair behind the desk. “You asked about the snitch, before.”
She blew her nose, suddenly wary. “You said you found him.”
“We think so. Tell Phyllis that the snitch was giving out information about old kills. Mostly incriminated fellows who are … no longer in the business. If it ends there, we won’t have a problem. The Barkley brothers’ remains were found—an old case. The family was grateful. The police passed along an anonymous donation. From ‘an old friend,’ they said. A cousin is thinking of reopening the bank with those funds. We won’t interfere. You tell her that.”
Tamara stared at him, her thoughts still too choked and sluggish with tears to make sense of his words. The Barkley brothers? Why did that sound familiar?
Phyllis, on the phone, that morning that Tamara had read Dev’s letter. Ordering mob hits in her best white-person voice. Ordering mob hits—or informing on the mob? Old case, Walter said. She hadn’t been ordering a death. She’d been telling the police where to find one of her old kills.
Tamara gasped and gulped before she could properly decide to feign ignorance. She was losing all of her old defenses.
“Don’t,” she stammered, “don’t—don’t—please, Pea is—”
Walter nodded, as though she had confirmed something. She wanted to vomit all
