“Aunt Alma, wait. Wait!”
She stopped in the doorway, her back trembling, her hands gripping the doorposts. I could see the veins raised over her knuckles, the cords that stood out in her neck, the flesh as translucent as butter beans cooked until the skins come loose. Talking to my mama over the phone, I had not been able to see her face, her skin, and her stunned and haunted eyes. If I had been able to see her, would I have ever said those things to her?
“I’m sorry.”
She did not look back. I let my head fall back, rolled my shoulders to ease the painful clutch of my own muscles. My teeth hurt. My ears stung. My breasts felt hot and swollen. I watched the light as it moved on her hair.
“I’m sorry. I would . . . I would . . . anything. If I could change things, if I could help . . .”
I stopped. Tears were running down my face. My aunt turned to me, her wide pale face as wet as mine. “Just come home with me. Come home for a little while. Be with your mama a little while. You don’t have to forgive her. You don’t have to forgive anybody. You just have to love her the way she loves you. Like I love you. Oh girl, don’t you know how we love you!”
I put my hands out, let them fall apart on the pool table. My aunt was suddenly across from me, reaching across the table, taking my hands, sobbing into the cold dirty stillness—an ugly sound, not softened by the least self-consciousness. When I leaned forward, she leaned to me and our heads met, her gray hair against my temple brightened by the sunlight pouring in the windows.
“Oh, girl! Girl, you are our precious girl.”
I cried against her cheek, and it was like being five years old again in the roadhouse, with Annie’s basket against my hip, the warmth in the room purely a product of the love that breathed out from my aunt and my mama. If they were not mine, if I was not theirs, who was I? I opened my mouth, put my tongue out, and tasted my aunt’s cheek and my own. Butter and salt, dust and beer, sweat and stink, flesh of my flesh.
“Precious,” I breathed back to her.
“Precious.”
Demon Lover
K
aty always said she wanted to be the Demon Lover, the one we desire even when we know it is not us she wants, but our souls. When she comes back to me now, she comes in that form and I never fail to think that the shadows at her shoulders could be wings.
She comes in when I am not quite asleep and brings me fully awake by laying cold fingers on my warm back. Her pale skin gleams in the moonlight, reflecting every beam like a mirror of smoked glass while her teeth and nails shine phosphorescent.
“Wake up,” Katy whispers, and leans over to bite my naked shoulder. “Wake up. Wake up!”
“No,” I say, “not you.”
But I knew she was coming. I could hear her echoes peeling back off the moments, the way Aunt Raylene always said she could hear a spell coming on. Katy’s persistent. Some of my ghosts are so faded: they only come when I reach for them. This one reaches for me.
“Sit up,” she says. “I won’t bite you.” But her teeth are sharp in the pale light, and I sit up warily. The only predictable thing about Katy was her stubborn perversity; she would mostly do whatever she swore solemnly she would not.
“Shit,” I whisper, and roll over. She laughs and passes me a joint. The smoke wreathes her like a cloak, heavy and sweet around us. I inhale deeply, grin up at her and say, “My hallucinations get me stoned.”
“Lucky you. It costs everyone else money.”
She blows smoke out her nose. Katy has a matter-of-fact manner about her tonight, very unlike herself. It’s been three years since she OD’d, and in that time she’s grown more urgent, not less. This strange air of calmness disturbs me. If the dead lose their restlessness, do they finally go away?
Something falls in the other room, wood striking wood. It’s probably Molly going to the bathroom a little drunk as usual, knocking things over. Katy slides up on one knee and clutches the edge of the waterbed frame. If she were a cat her hair would be on end. As it is, the hair above her ears seems suddenly fuller. I reach over and take the joint from her hand, moving gently, carefully soothing her with only my unspoken demand to hold her.
“You going to wake me up in the night,” I tell her, “you might as well entertain me. Tell me where you got this delicacy. Its mashed pecan, right? Tastes just like that batch we got in Atlanta that time we hitchhiked up from Daytona Beach.”
Still in her cat’s aspect, Katy looks back at me, her huge eyes cold and ruthless. Her expression makes me want to push into her breast, put my tongue to her throat, and hear her cruel, lovely laugh again. It would be easy, delicious and easy, and not at all the way it had been when she was alive. Alive, she was never easy.
“You an’t got no taste at all. It’s Panama City home-grown.” She comes back down on the bed, not disturbing the mattress. “You always talking ’bout that mashed pecan, but first time I got you really stoned on it, you got sick. Spent the night in the bathroom being the most pitiful child. I swear.”
“That was Tampa, and that killer Jamaican.” I draw another deep lungful of the sweet smoke. “In Atlanta, you got sick and threw up on the only clean shirt I had with me.”
Katy gives her laugh finally, and predictably, I feel the goose bumps rise on my thighs. She settles herself so that her naked left hip is against my shoulder. Her skin is smooth, cool, and wonderful. I put my hand on her thigh, and she leans forward to sniff my cheek and rub her lips on my eyebrows. I cannot touch Katy without remembering making love to her on Danny’s couch with a dozen drunk and stoned people around the corner in the living room; the tickle of the feathers she wore laced into the small braids over her ears, and the cold chill of the knife she always pulled out of her boot and pushed under the pillows, the sheathed blade that always seemed to migrate down to the small of my back.
Most of all I remember the talent with which Katy would bite me just hard enough to make me gasp, her bubbling laughter as she whispered, “Don’t make no noise. They’ll hear.” Even now, after all this time, I sometimes make love holding my breath, trying to make no sound, pretending that it is the way it always was back then, with drunk and dangerous strangers around the corner and Katy playing at trying to get me to make a sound they might hear. It was the worst sex and the best, the most dangerous and absolutely the most satisfying. No one else has ever made love to me like that—as if sex were a contest on which your life depended. No one has ever scared me so much, or made me love them so much. And no one else has ever died on me the way she did, with everything between us unsettled and aching.
I slap her thigh brusquely, pushing her back. “You should have had the consideration to puke into a pot. Ruining that shirt that way. You were always careless of me and my stuff.”
Katy nods. “A little. Yeah, I was.” She settles back on the mattress, cross-legged and still just touching my shoulder. “But I always made it up to you. Remember, I stole you another shirt in Atlanta.” Her hand trading the joint is transparent. I can see right through to her smoky breasts, the nipples dark and stiff. “That cotton cowboy shirt with the yellow yoke and the green embroidery. Made you look like a toked-up Loretta Lynn.” She gives her short, barking laugh.
“You still got that one?”
“No, I lost it somewhere.”
I remember going home for the service one of the local drug counselors organized. People were standing around talking about the shame and the waste, and Katy’s mama slapped my hand when I touched her accidentally. “It should have been you,” she’d hissed. “Any one of you, it should have been. Not Katy.” Her eyes had been flat and dry. She hadn’t cried at all, and neither had I. I spent that night in my mama’s kitchen, talking long-distance to my lover up North about how everybody had looked, and the way Katy’s last boyfriend had glared at me from beside his parole officer. I’d hugged the phone to my ear, that yellow cowboy shirt between my fists, wringing it until I was shredding the yoke, pulling the snaps off, ripping the seams. I’d torn that shirt apart, talked for hours, but never gotten around to crying. I didn’t cry until months later in the Women’s Center bathroom. I’d been stone sober, but I was standing up to piss, my knees slightly bent, my jeans down around my ankles, my head turned to the side so I could see myself in the mirror. It was the way Katy had insisted we piss when we went road-tripping.
“You’re the dyke,” she’d always said. “Keep your health. Learn to piss like a boy and keep your butt dry.”
“Piss like a boy,” I’d whispered into the mirror, into Katy’s painful memory. And just that easy her face was there, her full swollen mouth mocking me, whispering back, “Like a dyke. You the dyke here, girl. I sure an’t.”
So then I’d cried, sobbed and cried, and beaten on that mirror with my fists until the women outside came to try and see what was going on. I’d shut up, washed my face, and told them nothing. What could I tell them, anyway? My ghost lover just came back and made me piss all over my jeans. My ghost lover is haunting me, and the trick is I am glad to see her.
Katy hands me the joint again, moving her small hands delicately. She smiles when she sees where my glance is trained. She flexes her fist, opens the fingers, and wags them in front of my nose. I laugh and take the joint again.
“I loved that shirt. It was the best present you ever got me.”
“You forgetting those black gloves with the rhinestones on the back I got in that shop on Peachtree Street. We always got the best stuff in Atlanta. Didn’t we?”
“You just about got us busted in Atlanta.”
“Oh hell, you were just a nervous Nellie. Thought you were the only woman capable of sleight of hand. You just never trusted me, girl.”
“You were always so stoned. You did stupid things.”
“I did wonderful things. I did amazing things, and stoned only made me better, made me smoother. Loosened me up and made me psychic. I was doing acid when I got you those gloves. That windowpane Blackie sold us.”
“Purple haze. You always talk about the windowpane, but we only did it once. You talk about the windowpane ’cause you like to scare people with the notion of you sticking it in your eyes.”
“I only did it once with you. I did it lots with Mickey. We put it in our eyes, in our noses. Son of a bitch even shoved it up my ass.”
She crushes the joint out on the bedframe. She is smiling and relaxed now, very beautiful even though I am getting angry. Mickey was the one took her to California after I ran off. Mickey was the one who got her back on junk, left her in the motel room where she overdosed. Mickey was the one threatened me at her memorial service, with his parole officer standing right there sweating in the heat. Mickey was the one I’d told to try it.
Come for me, asshole, and I’ll cut off your balls and push them up your butt. The parole officer had smiled, and my sweat had turned cold on my back. That wasn’t like me, wasn’t the kind of thing I’d say. It wasn’t even the thing I’d been thinking. It was as if Katy had pushed the words out of my mouth. It was exactly the kind of thing Katy would have said.
But Mickey had overdosed himself at Raiford, and I’d never seen any of Katy’s boyfriends again. Just Katy, anytime she gets restless and wants to come back. I look at her now and my throat closes up. I cannot make casual conversation, cannot talk at all. I want to reach for her but I am too afraid. She is the vampire curse in my life. You have to invite them back, and part of me always wants her, even when most of me don’t. Right now all of me wants her, flesh and blood, body and soul.
Katy’s thick black eyebrows raise and lower, seeing right through me, seeing my grief and my lust. “Ahhh, bitch,” she whispers, and it sounds like lover. She slips one hand under the sheet and strokes her nails along my leg.
I catch my breath. I could cry but don’t. Will we be lovers again? Is she real enough this moment to put her filmy body along my too-tight muscles? She wants to; it shows in the unaccustomed softness in her face. I feel tears run down my cheeks.
Now she says it. “Lover.”
“Junkie.” I hiss it at her, beginning to really cry, making a hoarse ugly sound in the quiet room. “Goddamn you, you goddamned junkie!”
“Ahh well,” she drawls, her fingers still stroking my leg. “It’s not a lie.” She drags herself over, rocking the bed this time, sliding under the sheet. She arranges her body to cup my side, her toes touch my ankle and her head turns so that her mouth is close to my ear.
“Not a lie, no.” One hand caresses my stomach; the other hugs my hipbone.
“Goddamn you!” I try to lie still but start shaking.
“Don’t be boring,” she says. I feel her tongue licking my cheek, wet and almost as rough as a cat’s tongue. My whole body goes stiff, and my hands ball up into fists.
“Why do you keep coming back? Why don’t you leave me alone? You weren’t worth the trouble when you were alive and you sure aren’t doing me any good now.” I start to fight her, trying to pull away or push her away. But she is smoke only, a cloud on my skin, and I can’t escape her.
“Motherfucker . . .” I give it up to cry and turn my face into the pillow of her hair. It smells so sweet and familiar, marijuana and patchouli.
Katy’s shoulders ride up and down. She arches her back and slides her body over so that her belly is on top of mine. I almost scream from the intensity of the sensation. It feels so good. It feels so awful.
“You loved me.” She says it right into the hollow of my ear.
“You love me still. Even after you left me, you loved me. You couldn’t stand me, and you damn sure couldn’t save me. But you couldn’t stand it without me either. So here I am. Feel me.”
She drums her knuckles on my hipbone. Her teeth nip my neck. I gasp and arch up into her. “I’m part of you,” she whispers. “Right down in the core of you.”