“No, it’s real. All dead. Babies. So sad.”
“Why, ’cause you saw it on TV? ’Cause Connie’s got a cousin? How many times I gotta tell you, woman, it’s a smokescreen. You can’t trust anything that comes over that pipeline. It’s all a diversion.”
Girlie shrugs, her face flushed, poking at her plate. She felt him stiffen when she called him stupid. Why did I do that? Thank God he didn’t hit her, probably because he got out of prison today, and he’s still in a good behavior mindset. But Girlie worries her words will come back on her later, when she’s in the bedroom brushing her hair or putting on lotion. She’ll feel him behind her, hear the tone shift in his breathing. But by then it’ll be too late.
She checks her phone again. In LA, her sister, Rose, is hiding in the bathroom. The Witch is nocturnal, mostly, sleeping the day away in a back bedroom with blackout curtains. The smell of cigarette smoke signals her resuscitation, followed by the sound of deep, hacking coughs, as she brings up balls of brown lung phlegm and spits them into a coffee can she keeps by the bed. Rose brings the missus her coffee then, her eyes adjusting to the slow darkness within. Sometimes after she puts the coffee on the bedside table and turns, the Witch is standing behind her in a sheer nightdress stained brown in places by hacked tobacco spit that dribbles from her lips.
How she laughs at Rose’s fear. Laughs and laughs.
She has the black eyes of a succubus.
So these days, when the afternoon turns to evening, Rose tries to make herself scarce. A long trip to the market, an hour in the laundry room.
The Witch is a New York transplant, somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred, thin as a bone. At some point in the last fifteen years, she had lip liner tattooed around her mouth, but as the elasticity has gone out of her skin, the liner has moved farther and farther from her actual lips, until now a dark halo hovers somewhere between her nose and mouth, forcing her either to fill the gap with lipstick or accept the incongruity. She speaks in an old Bronx grind, dressed in black—pants, turtlenecks—her eyes shielded by dark glasses half the size of her face. Whenever she goes out, she perches a NY Yankees baseball cap on top of her head, like a lid on a pot. Rarely does she move in a straight line.
Rose has lived in a tiny bedroom in the Witch’s apartment for nine years. She was hired originally to be a nurse, but the boundaries quickly blurred, until now she is on duty twenty-four hours a day, cleaning, cooking, fixing drinks. Her green card status is pending, and whenever she asks for time off, the Witch will pick up the phone and threaten to call ICE, so Rose has stopped asking. She tells Girlie in whispered late-night phone calls that the Witch keeps roots and herbs in a secret trunk. That there are chicken feet in the freezer that Rose can’t remember buying. She says sometimes the Witch will give her an eye so evil, it’s all Rose can do not to cross herself and weep. Late at night sometimes, she wakes to find the Witch standing by her bed like a shadow, a living ghost. What is she muttering beneath her breath? Are those growls?
Girlie has told Rose to run. Come to Florida. We have room. But Rose is afraid. She’s afraid of the ICE men in their flak jackets and lace-up boots, afraid of the evil eye. She worries the Witch has stolen her soul and keeps it in the trunk with all her spells and potions. She and Girlie were raised in a traditional Filipino village. They know three, five, and nine are unlucky numbers, know that if you break an egg and see two yolks you will become wealthy. They know that when three people pose for a photograph, it is the one in the middle who will die first.
Avon tells Girlie he’ll drive to Los Angeles and wack the old bat if she wants him to.
“I ain’t afraid of no ancient bitch.”
But last Christmas, when Rose sent Girlie a photo of herself, Avon wouldn’t let her put it up. They fought about it, long and hard, but of course Avon won. The man always wins. This is the order of the universe. Men talk, women listen. So Girlie kept the photo in her bedside drawer. But as time went by, she realized that she never took it out, never looked at it. When it came in the mail, she was delighted. Here was her older sister, smiling on a sofa, sunlight pouring in through the windows behind her. The photo was a selfie, taken at arm’s length. And yet there was something unsettling about the picture that Girlie couldn’t articulate. Avon took one look at the thing and said no fucking way was that picture going up in his house. Girlie pressed him. What was the problem? It was her sister. Shouldn’t she get to put up a picture of her sister? But Avon was adamant. Something about that damn photo gave him the heebie-jeebies.