Persephone Underground Page 5

  The woman’s husband called for their Papillon to stay out of the street. He had an effeminate way about him – a little light in his loafers, my mother would have said. Glimpsing us with our big pit pull, I could see fear in his eyes because their dog, by comparison, was tiny and delicate. He called the dog back and scooped him up.

  “Oreo, you bad boy,” the man said in baby talk – an even cuter name for a black and white dog, I thought.

  Hayden and I kept moving. Before we got home, I was certain of two things: one, that Mami Wata might have the dog by as early as tonight, and two, its cute name would be changing.

  Chapter

  6

  I swear I spent all summer cleaning up Oreo’s (whoops, I mean Domino’s) hair off Mami Wata’s hard wood floors. The stolen dog took to her immediately. One day, she disappeared under the tree with him, where Hayden and I warned her the pit bull might rip it to shreds, but she ignored us. The old woman returned a few hours later with a brainwashed Domino; he responds to his new name now, and sits on her lap for hours. He is not permitted walks with Hayden, Fury and I because Mami Wata fears his old owners will see him.

  “Why didn’t you do them the kindness of wiping their memories of Domino?” I asked her one day in the kitchen.

  I was peeling potatoes for our supper. I cooked and cleaned so much in her employ my hands were getting calloused. I did all of the family’s shopping and laundry. I even helped Mami Wata make holy water and sell it to a Catholic church.

  “It will be more useful to me later on, if they remember their beloved pet,” she answered distractedly.

  Mami Wata had been busy these past few days, designing a king’s crown of seashells. The kitchen table was littered with scallops and star fish, and those jagged pieces of drift wood that surrounded the mirror in my bedroom here.

  Watching her hunched over this new art project, I let the subject drop. I didn’t tell her how much it broke my heart to hear Domino’s family – that couple Hayden and I had encountered on their move-in day – roaming the streets (with flashlights sometimes) calling Oreo!, Oreo! in vain.

  Today, the red headed lady climbed the steps to our porch, and wrapped on Mami Wata’s front door! I had the option of responding to her frantic little knocks because Hayden had taken his grandmother to The Pomegranate that blazing afternoon. I could do whatever I wanted when I was alone on the Boulevard of Champions.

  The fair and freckled woman introduced herself as Demi Springer. I felt a connection immediately. She wasn’t as pretty as I first thought, though. Her wild, curly red hair was swept into a messy bun today. She had a squat, short body and was sweating profusely. I wanted to invite her in for an iced tea, but didn’t dare.

  “You haven’t seen a little dog have you?” she asked me.

  Demi showed me a picture of Domino when he had been Oreo, a chew toy stuffed in his adorable little mouth.

  “No, sorry…but I’ll keep an eye out,” I lied. Then I shut the door in her face as quickly and politely as I could.

  As soon as I’d ascertained Demi was gone, I ran back to Mami Wata’s bedroom to check on Domino.

  He was lying in his little dog bed, filled with scarves and relics from his new master’s past in Belize, and, as the old woman told it, the enchanted forest where Teresa Rose lived; his new chew toy had originally belonged to Teresa. It was a frog prince, sewn together in green and yellow cloth. The dog enjoyed nibbling on its crown, which had started to fray at the tips.

  Mami Wata’s bedroom was a shrine to the few people who had touched her heart years ago. Pictures of the last Domino, and of Hayden’s grandfather, John Runningwolf sat in a little cluster on the nightstand. There were lots of other photos too – of Mami Wata’s high school sweetheart, Phoebe.

  The Phoebe photos were all black and white. The more recent pictures were of Teresa who resembled Phoebe to a point you got chills up your spine. Teresa’s twin daughters sat on her knee. They weren’t identical. One of the little girls had red hair and the other, hair so blonde it looked white.

  They reminded me of Rose White and Rose Red. It wasn’t a very well-known fairy tale, but I knew it. In the story, the Rose girls are stalked by a troll who just wants to steal their jewels. The troll gets eaten by a bear at the end – a bear who morphs into Prince Charming.

  Funny, you might mistake Mami Wata for a troll. I happened to know she had a safe full of precious gemstones in this house. Hayden had told me.

  Hayden also explained to me on one of our walks that his grandmother enjoyed the company of both men and women. “Maybe women even a little bit more,” he’d admitted with a blush.

  I didn’t ask Hayden any more questions about Mami Wata’s bisexuality. It never got any easier letting my intense curiosity go, but I was determined to make it out of the summer, alive. My captors told me they would let me go when school started in August.

  “By then…,” Mami Wata had said, “Hayden will have made up his mind if you are to be married or not. He might be strong enough to live without you. If that’s the case, you can just go home.”

  She had slurred her words admitting this to me, as she was drunk again on a goblet of Mama Juana. That was the one concoction around here I didn’t have to help with. Mama Juana is a Dominican red wine, and from what I understand super strong.

  Hayden and his grandmother whip up batches of it in a bathtub under that tree. I finally worked up the courage to go down there, but I have not yet drunk any of their hallucinogenic tea and done so. It’s just a tiny bunker down there. Cement walls, nothing special. It’s probably about as big as the prison cell my mother had to live in while I was in foster care. There’s an old porcelain claw foot bathtub and cleaning supplies under the tree – and dog bowls and cushion for Fury.

  When I first arrived at this funky little house on the Boulevard of Champions, I had assumed the underbelly of that tree was where Hayden slept too. But no, he has a bedroom in the same hallway, Mami Wata and I share. It’s weird how clean Hayden keeps his quarters – not a speck of dust and a bed so perfectly made, I don’t have to touch it when I enter with my mop and pail.

  Hayden’s changed a lot since I came into his life. He and his grandmother both have. They are both younger and fitter now. Hayden put on weight; his energy level’s as good as mine, and Mami Wata is standing up straighter and straighter. The bump in her back vanished, and she stopped walking with a cane about six weeks into my employ.

  “My magic is getting stronger,” she had told me this very morning.

  Mami Wata was due at The Pomegranate to do her fortune telling. Before Hayden drove her, she left my instructions for the day. I was to clean her personal bathroom. There were two full baths in the house, and Mami Wata had exclusive access to the one in her bedroom.

  I stood in her bedroom now, dilly dallying – telling myself I needed to study the pictures of John Runningwolf and Teresa Rose some more – but that was bull. Honestly, I was afraid to go in there.

  I know it sounds strange, but I had yet to step foot in Mami Wata’s personal bathroom. She forbade it until today. I could tell from the serious look in her twinkly emerald eyes this morning, she finally trusted me enough to see it.

  I took a deep breath and turned the gold door handle, walked in. It was like stepping back in time. She didn’t use an ordinary bathroom vanity; it was a frilly sitting area with another one of her handmade shell mirrors, and vintage hairbrush lying on the counter. There were golden combs inlaid with pearls that could have been thousands of years old. Did Mami Wata even have hair to brush? I marveled. The old woman’s neck was always bare, swept up in the yellow turban she wore.

  The hairs in the ancient gold brush were a chicory color – the same shade as the coffee I brewed the family in the morning and drank with them on the porch. I could probably get in trouble for it, but I picked up Mami Wata’s hairbrush. It was abnormally heavy; when I raked it through my own hair, I heard deafening sea waves. Shrieking, I dropped it, grimacing because it l
eft a spidery crack on the countertop.

  Maybe Mami Wata wouldn’t notice, or if she did – god willing, she would not punish me for this. I would just put it behind me, I decided. I had work to do! I looked around to assess the amount of elbow grease I’d need to clean and sanitize this nightmare. Her dressing table had a goblet stuck to its surface: a Mama Juana stain beneath it. I dipped the odd, heavy cup in my cleaning solution to relieve it of its stickiness. Turning it over in my hands, I wondered what it could be worth. It glistened with rubies and other jewels. Mami Wata made a lot of things, but I could tell she hadn’t made this goblet; it looked like the sort of thing you’d bury with King Tut.

  It was easy to get lost in thought in this bathroom; forget why I was there. I forced myself to return to earth and get down to business as a maid. Another claw foot bathtub dominated the space. It was filthy, but that wasn’t what made me gasp. What took my breath away was the size of the tub. It was so massive there was no room for a toilet! Did Mami Wata not go the bathroom?

  Some of the breakfast I’d eaten hours before came up in my throat. Being a slave in a house against my will was one thing, but being a slave in a house with something that was inhuman was another thing altogether. I began to cry when my loofah sponge touched the dirty surface of the tub – terrified because it came away with loose fish scales. They were too big to belong to any freshwater or most ocean fish, but I suppose I couldn’t rule it out. We made cod a lot for dinner, and maybe the old woman cleaned the fish Hayden caught in this very tub.

  Whatever the case, I wished the scales smelled as nice as they looked. The many thousands of fish scales I wrung out into my cleaning bucket were actually quite pretty. They sparkled silver and blue in the light from the window, but they reeked. But maybe they weren’t entirely to blame for the bad odor. Dead chickens’ feet and rat skulls surrounded the tub; living sand dollars I had to remove with their tiny mollusk feet still writhing.

  Mami Wata had left special instructions. I was not to run the tap in here. The water was different in her bathroom, she explained; the steam it produced could hurt me. I filled and emptied my utility bucket full of Pine Sol in the bathroom Hayden and I shared, managing to calm my racing heart with each trip down the hall.

  Chapter

  7

  Life doesn’t care when you’re trapped in a grotesque fairy tale. There are still routines, and some days pass slowly. You begin to understand how, say, a dog will get bored and choose to sleep through it all. The day I finally learned the full truth, started off like any other day that summer.

  Hayden and I woke Fury from a nap for his afternoon walk. It would be another exercise in disappointment for me, as I had so many questions to ask this boy, this person who had become a real friend to me. My tongue froze on all of them.

  I didn’t have the nerve to do anything but enjoy myself when we were together. We’d stop in parks, and he’d push me on the swings. As I pumped my legs, willing myself to go higher and higher, I’d try to build the courage to ask where in the hell his grandmother came from. Atlantis? Hell?

  I had since returned to her bathroom many times. She slapped my face for touching her brush and cracking the counter; however, Mami Wata praised the cleaning job I had done. She stopped hypnotizing me, and soon I began to see things in that house for what they really were.

  I heard an ocean churning away in all the strange mirrors, for starters. How was it, I was clearly the only one, not disappearing for hours at a time into portals that lead to other worlds?

  One day I caught Hayden, perched on a chair in my room like an animal. Caught in the act, he was attempting to climb into the mirror upon the wall. There was just one split second before he disappeared, leaving behind the white beaches and aqua blue water of the Caribbean Sea. Then the mirror closed back up again, and all it gave back was my reflection, along with a sarcastic Post-it: “Wash me! I’m dirty!”

  It had been a slow reckoning, but eventually I understood Hayden wasn’t living in that spotless bedroom down the hall. The shell crown Mami Wata had been working on when she kidnapped Domino was his to wear in the Underworld beneath their tree. This is where he had been sleeping all summer long, if not his entire life. He ruled down there – prince of a sunken world.

  There was only one week left until school. I knew they intended to keep their promise and release me. I had spent an entire summer courting the Prince of the Underworld in a surprisingly wholesome way. We went to movies and the mall. We laid blankets out at night and star gazed. I was also helping him put together a massive jigsaw puzzle of VanGogh’s Starry Night. We had a ritual of working it after we’d cleared the table and washed the dinner dishes side by side.

  Still, we were just friends, not lovers. We hadn’t even kissed. As we made our way to Our Lady in Heaven this afternoon – the place we’d exercised Fury all summer – I asked him to take me to the part of the cemetery where his relatives were buried. I knew the Furr Family, perhaps the wealthiest in town, had a mausoleum here – their own chapel guarded by a weeping angel statue. You could walk in and see where dozens of Hayden’s immediate and extended family were interred, or eventually would be.

  “Sure,” he agreed uneasily. Like his grandmother, he had come to trust me implicitly, long since realizing I knew Mami Wata wasn’t human, nor was he.

  It was a hot but gorgeous afternoon that day in the cemetery. The Furr Family crypt looked like something out of New Orleans – like you’d expect to find a voodoo queen in her eternal sleep inside it.

  Well, this is exactly what I found. I knew from cleaning their house all these months that Mami Wata went by the name Sirene Jameson sometimes. She was interred here, with a birthdate of 1888, and death one hundred years later. Next to that, my principal’s DOB was carved with a waiting dash because Miz Furr wasn’t dead yet, and between the two squares was the most disturbing tomb of all: a compartment containing a baby’s ashes.

  Infant Hayden Furr, stillborn.

  I called myself stupid for being surprised. Of course, I knew Hayden was dead, resuscitated by a voodoo witch, and kept alive by the hard labor of the living, breathing women he kidnapped. A flower holder in Hayden’s stone held a fresh, yellow rose, I felt the need to yank out and smell. The thorns cut my hand, but this isn’t why I cried. I cried because I was in love with a person who was seriously dead, and probably expected me to be too, so we could go live under a tree forever.

  I dropped the flower and walked a slow circle around all the dead Furrs and Jamesons. Under a stain glass window with Christian crosses bleeding fractal light upon it, stood a little pedestal with an open book. Dust motes danced over the old pages. At first glance, I thought it was a sign in ledger, where visitors could come in and enter their names. It was no such thing, actually. Hayden had planted his drawing pad there for me to discover. This whole morbid moment was planned start to finish!

  I thumbed through pages of charcoal drawings, of all the girls who came before me. He had a type. We were all dark haired, Hispanic or light skinned blacks. We all looked a little bit like Meghan Markle, to be honest – wife of Prince Harry. Hayden had printed our names under each amazing drawing. His artistic skills weren’t bad for a boy who had been born dead, then revived by a nasty, stinky mermaid…a woman who stole dogs, and enslaved girl after girl. Hayden had included notes about each of their prisoners, and all of them – except for me – were, he had scribbled, garbage housekeepers.

  “Can’t cook”, Hayden had written about one of them. “She went to work at The Pomegranate. I never see her and I want Grandma to disappear her…”

  I was different. Hayden related to me. Hayden drew hearts around his spot-on sketch of my body and face. He drew me naked to such detail, I shivered when I realized he must have been spying on me when I showered.

  Cora, Pauline, Antoinette, Helena, Forsythia, Claudia…and then me….these were his victims. I had no idea if any of them, save me, were still alive, but I think I knew where to look – under that dam
n tree. Tonight might be the night to drink the poison tea and go down into the Underworld, where Hayden lived with his black pit, Fury – in a secret lair you were only scratching the surface of, were you to simply take it at face value and deem it a root cellar.

  I knew too much. I just wanted to be back in my mom’s apartment; her at work and me flipping through shit reality TV and eating microwaved burritos until she got back.

  Like all the other times in this suspended nightmare I was living, my ears burned hot and I felt the room spin, but I did not black out. It all made sense now. He and his grandmother were the undead; they lived forever and showed their age when life got too hard. They needed people like me – with hearts that actually beat inside a chest of flesh – to work for them and let them rest. In all the time I had been here, Hayden was regenerating, going from the spindly, fragile husk of a human he had been into the handsome boy he was now.

  He had not morphed once into the gorgeous, Indian underwear model who helped Mami Wata kidnap me at the beginning of the summer. We talked about the why in that sometimes, sipping Calypso lemonade together, or fishing in the canal in back of the house.

  “You make me feel I am enough. That you like me, really like me – no need to put on an act,” Hayden assured me.

  We held hands and listened to bird song. Hayden made my life feel perfect. We were in that precious part of a relationship where making out and probably sex could happen at any moment. And…I must admit…I wanted him to morph into that smoking hot Indian dude when we finally got to make love.

  But that probably wasn’t going to happen, and eventually I warmed up to the idea of Hayden staying Hayden – my delightfully nerdy knight in shining armor.

  Hayden told me many times, he didn’t like who he was when Mami Wata used her magic to alter his appearance. When he left Mami Wata’s house and the other haunts along the Boulevard of Champions, he became the fake version of himself. He was set to become that version tonight on our first date.