Mockingbird

  SEAN STEWART

  MOCKINGBIRD

  Sean Stewart’s distinctive prose has been hailed as “emotionally intense” (New York Times) and “vivid and precise” (Washington Post). Now in Mockingbird, he blends haunting simplicity with visual eloquence; magical realism with contemporary fantasy in a tale of two sisters bound by their mother’s gift—a legacy of magic…

  “There are some gifts which cannot be refused.”

  These were the words Elena Beauchamp had chosen for her epitaph. Words that were part cryptic message, part magical prank. Words that would prove to hold an inescapable power…

  Toni Beauchamp never liked her mother’s world of magic and visions and six strange gods that took over her body at will. So when her mother died, Toni and her sister Candy thought it meant a new beginning, a life free of magic. But Elena Beauchamp had one last gift for her daughter—a sip from the Mockingbird Cordial. And from the moment Toni held the drink to her lips, her life would never be the same…

  Like the sweet mimicking cry of a mockingbird, Elena’s magic would live on—forever echoing through her daughter’s life…

  ACE BOOKS BY SEAN STEWART

  Passion Play

  Nobody’s Son

  Resurrection Man

  Clouds End

  The Night Watch

  Mockingbird

  MOCKINGBIRD

  An Ace Book

  Published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  Copyright © 1998 by Sean Stewart

  Book design by Oksana Kushnir

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  First Edition: August 1998

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stewart, Sean. 1965–

  Mockingbird / Sean Stewart. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-441-00547-0

  I. Title.

  PR9199.3.S794M63 1998

  813'.54—dc21 97-36468

  CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  ONE

  When you get down to the bottom of the bottle, as Momma used to say, this is the story of how I became a mother. I want that clear from the start. Now, it’s true that mine was not a typical pregnancy. There was some magic mixed up in there, and a few million dollars in oilfield speculation, and some people who died, and some others who wouldn’t stay quite dead. It would be lying to pretend there wasn’t prophecy involved, and an exorcism, and a hurricane, and I scorn to lie. But if every story is a journey, then this is about the longest trip I ever took, from being a daughter to having one.

  It starts the day we buried Momma.

  It is embarrassing to admit that your mother can see the future, read minds, perform miracles, and raise the dead. It was something I held against her for a long time. I hated the agonizing moment when a kid on my baseball team or a high-school classmate would ask me if the stories were really true, and I would have to say yes. It would have been easier—and safer—to say no, to say that Momma was a bit eccentric but had no special powers. But I was always a willfully, rudely honest little girl. If someone asked me point-blank, I had to admit that my mother was a witch, and the little gods who ruled her were real.

  When I told folks what Momma could do they figured I was fibbing, or that my sister and I suffered from delusions brought on by too much drinking, blows to the head, or the repressed memories of incest or devil worship. Now, it is true my mother was a liar. It is true she drank too much and she slapped me more than once when I was growing up. But I promise you, worshipping the Riders was the farthest thing from her mind. They were Life’s collection agents. When Momma drew too much on her gifts, the Riders would take their due. Unless you worship the IRS, drop the whole idea that Momma loved her gods.

  Momma’s magic was real. When she predicted IBM stock would go up, it went up, and the money her investors made was real too. Once I even saw Momma raise the dead, although that went so badly that we all agreed, even her, never to do it again.

  It wasn’t exactly a person that Momma resurrected. It was Geronimo the frog.

  I had better explain that.

  The chief feature of my parents’ house in Houston, Texas, was the glorious garden in our backyard. The whole wall of the house facing it was French doors, which Momma left open all the time, so it was hard to tell where the garden ended and our kitchen began. My little sister, Candy, and I spent a lot of time in the garden, hiding from Momma and catching frogs. Now, the early seventies in Texas were a doll-crazy time for little girls. Besides a legion of Barbies, I had a bunch of Kiddles, little weensy dolls whose clothes would fit a good-sized frog just right. I still have Polaroids of Geronimo in a pink doll tutu that is to die for. At first Geronimo didn’t like being caught and dressed up, but he seemed to get used to it. After we had been acquainted a while, he would come squat on our hands and let us dress him up, so long as we bribed him with mealworms and doodlebugs.

  Just after my eleventh birthday I found Geronimo dead, floating in the little concrete pond under the banana tree. Candy and I were inconsolable. At first Momma was sympathetic, but our whining and snivelling soon commenced to aggravate her. I was a sulky girl at the best of times, and made life miserable for everyone with my moping. Finally Momma took the frog over to the cabinet where she kept her gods and stuffed him in the Preacher’s cubby and lit a candle and told us to get out of the room. Then she did something she had seen in New Orleans when she was younger. I never knew the details, but the next morning we found Geronimo in the garden again, shouldering his way heavily through the monkey grass.

  But he wasn’t really alive. He never ate, he never sang. He just staggered after us as if hungry for our warmth. He was worse than dead: he was a Zombie Frog, a horrible pathetic remnant of himself. Candy, who was only seven, started screaming whenever he came near. Finally I squashed Geronimo flat with a shovel from the garden shed. Then I stood on the blade, pinning him to the flagstone path, while Candy ran and got an empty milk carton. I could feel the shovel jerking and trembling under my foot as Geronimo tried to get away. When Candy got back I opened the spout end of the carton and shoved Geronimo inside. Then I held it closed with my foot while Candy got the big stapler off Daddy’s desk. Together we stapled the end of the milk carton shut and then we crept out of the yard and ran to the storm drain at the end of the block and stuffed the milk carton into its big dark mouth, with poor Geronimo still bumping and hopping inside.

  It was an awful episode. I mention it as an example of how real Momma’s magic was, though it wasn’t always that ghastly. I have to admit that as they lowered Momma’s coffin into her grave, I wasn’t crying and grieving like Candy was. I was listening for the sound of Momma bumping and knocking against the lid, trying to get out.

  My name is Antoinette Beauchamp, pronounced BEECH-um, and I am my mother’s daughter only in DNA. I have a degree in mathematics from Rice University and am a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries. I hate lying. Leave the prayers and possessions and the Riders in the wardrobe, the stories of Sugar and the Widow and the Little Lost
Girl—leave all that buried with Momma, along with the tears and the scenes and the Bloody Marys. Buried with her where they belong.

  Even in death my mother was a schemer. Somehow she got herself planted in Glenwood, Houston’s most exclusive cemetery. I do not doubt it gave her great satisfaction to be buried beyond her means.

  Momma should have been stashed at Cherryhurst, or stuck under a few feet of sod at the old Confederate cemetery on Memorial Drive. Or she could have been cremated, that would have been like her; her ashes sprinkled into the sea at Galveston, or worked into a clay sculpture and stuck in the garden, or mixed up with lime juice and tequila and consumed at a wake where shadow-eyed zydeco gypsies with cat familiars would play on sweat-stained accordions with cracked ivory keys. Or she could have disappeared, no body left to find: vanished into the jungle in Costa Rica, or fallen off a shrimp boat in the Gulf of Mexico, or plucked up by a tornado; one pointy-toed witch’s boot, size 7, left standing in the field below.

  Any of those endings would have made sense.

  But for her to die of cancer and be buried in Glenwood: that was a travesty. Glenwood is the cemetery of Houston’s Establishment, chock full of Hoffheinzes, Holcombes, Cullens, and Friedrichs; a little Greek Revival village of white marble cenotaphs chiseled with the same names you see in the lobbies of the city’s museums and theatres and hospitals. Howard Hughes is buried in Glenwood. Cardinal Richelieu probably should be, along with Lorenzo de’ Medici and Vasco de Gama. But my mother has no business being there.

  The first few days of being dead are very rushed. Usually I am careful and scrupulous and I pay attention to things. But in the week after Momma died, my focus seemed to slip away. Funeral plans and insurance forms and calls to relatives fluttered over and around me, half-noticed, like birds passing through a garden. I wasn’t sad, not for a minute. Candy was. Candy cried and cried. But I felt no grief. Just that lack of focus, and a tightness in my chest almost like anger.

  When old Mr. Friesen offered to take care of things, I made the mistake of letting him. I had been dreading what funeral arrangements Candy would suggest: hair fetishes, voodoo, St. Anthony’s candles at the reception, midnight Masses—God knew what kind of spookery. At the time, it seemed easier to let Bill Friesen handle it.

  My mistake. Never, never, never be beholden to anyone.

  By the time I realized Mr. Friesen meant to plant Momma in Houston’s most exclusive neighborhood—you can’t depart more dearly than at Glenwood—it was too late to make other arrangements. So Glenwood it was, on a glorious November afternoon. The gulf coast breeze blew softly through the ash and the towering white-barked sycamores, the massive live oaks and the tremendous lanky pines whose limbs branched upward like green ball-lightning. The grave was a long black gash of turned earth amid the sweet grass. Leaf-shadow trembled over it from a live oak so old its limbs were furred with moss and ferns that had rooted in its ancient bark.

  William Friesen stood before us, reminiscing at the graveside. He was mostly bald, and his bare head with its collection of freckles and liver spots was the color of mashed potatoes with a few of the peels still in. He spoke at length. Like a lot of rich men, Bill Friesen never seemed to be troubled by the possibility his stories might be boring. “In 1958 I saw a pretty girl at the counter of the House of Pies,” he said. “I didn’t think much about women at the time, I was working long hours at the office, but suddenly there she was, and there I was, with my nice suit and my pretty smile. I reckoned I had a chance. So I walked over to her stool and asked if I could buy her a piece of pie.”

  We had all heard this story many times. It seemed to be stirring up some grief for Candy, judging by a new couple of tears trickling from her pretty eyes, but I was mostly wishing I could scratch my calf where my stockings itched.

  The Grand Old Man of Friesen Investments grinned, remembering. “She turned to me and said, ‘I’m not the woman you will marry, so don’t get your hopes up. But if you still care to buy me that slice of pie, I b’lieve I’ll try the pecan.’” Bill laughed. “Well, she had me there, didn’t she? I couldn’t back out after that. I ordered the pie and tried to keep up my end. ‘Why be so sure we won’t be married, little lady? This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.’

  “‘Oh yes, we’ll be friends,’ this gal said. ‘But your wife will be a blonde, five foot four, with small hands and a pretty face.’ Well, my jaw dropped at that, and dropped again one week later when I met the woman she had described.” Bill Friesen looked fondly at his wife, Penny, who stood beside him at the grave head.

  (I am fifteen. I have just applied for a summer temp job at Friesen Investments and Bill Sr. has told this story to me during my job interview. Momma is driving me home. “Expurgated old turd,” she laughs. “What I really said was, ‘Your wife will have small hands, cold feet, little breasts that turn up at the nipples, and lots and lots of money.’ Lord but he blushed. Though I daresay he doesn’t remember it that way now. He’s very good at forgetting things, Bill is. Too bad for poor Penny.”)

  But in the end it was poor Penny standing beside the grave, while Momma lay at the bottom of it.

  “Well,” Bill Sr. went on, “Elena Beauchamp was right about my wife, and over the years she was right about a lot of other things. She had a rare talent, a God-given gift. I learned to listen carefully to what she had to say. My family has always been the better for it.” This was certainly true. It was Momma’s advice that made the Friesens rich. Unfortunately, Momma was even better at spending money than she was at making it, and we never did prosper so well as Bill Sr. had. There’s probably a parable in there somewhere. Momma could have found it. She had a story for everything.

  At the front of Momma’s plot, beyond the newly turned earth, stood her headstone, black marble with steel letters inset:

  ELENA BEAUCHAMP

  1933 – 1995

  There are some gifts

  Which cannot be refused.

  Two weeks earlier the hospital had sent her home to die with a day nurse and a supply of morphine. The weather had been beautiful beyond hope. We moved a chaise lounge from the first floor into the garden and Momma lay on it all day amid the monkey grass and hibiscus, watching the lizards scoot across the stone paths and listening to the mockingbirds.

  After an hour or so she asked me to bring her a glass of iced tea with a wedge of lime in it and a shot of vodka. She also asked for a notebook and a pen, but she was too weak to use them. I held her glass and let her take the tea in little sips, lips working, head shaking, bald from the radiation therapy. Then she made me write down that epitaph and read it back to her, twice, and promise to call the stonecutter so the headstone would be ready for her funeral. The epitaph was a message meant for me, I knew that, but Momma wouldn’t come out and say so, and I wouldn’t ask.

  She died the afternoon they called to say the stone was ready. Houston is a refinery town, covered in a hazy blanket of industrial hydrocarbons of the sort that make a sky beautiful, and that day the sunset was magnificent; long halls and galleries of cloud turning peach in the tall sky, then bright breathing gold, then smoldering down and going out in a sky darkly blue and luminous, like the sea.

  My mother could see the future. My mother said “give me some sugar” when she wanted our kisses, which she required like a Roman empress, and like tribute we surrendered them. My mother made Bloody Marys and drank them in the afternoons, walking around our tile floors in her stocking feet with her hips sashaying. There was a hole in my mother’s life that she never talked about, stretching from the time she quit high school to the day she met Bill Friesen. My mother knew a hundred ways to cry. My mother once broke every mirror in our house, smashing them with the heel of one white pump. She must have slapped me a hundred times and twice she cut my cheek with the diamond wedding ring my father bought her in New Orleans. I still remember every color of her nail polish: pearl, pink, carmine, true red, scarlet, and gold too and silver, like the black girls wear. My mother took
an hour to put her makeup on and I will remember the smell of her hair spray always. My mother wanted to go to Paris, she had boxes of oil pastels and watercolors and she painted me the most beautiful birthday cards in the world, great blooming hydrangeas or sand-colored starfish or fine watercolor horses, bay, chestnut, dapple, and palomino. My mother lied and lied and lied, to me and everybody.

  There are some gifts which cannot be refused.

  I refuse.

  After the burial Daddy and Candy and I went back to the house to wait for our condolence visits. I meant to mop the tile floors and order in some food, at least muffins and coffee, but instead I wandered through the kitchen, where pots of thyme and sage and sweet basil rested along the window ledge, along with two bushy mints Momma kept to flavor her iced tea. Overhead, wire baskets full of onions and garlic hung next to ropes of dried peppers: red and yellow chilis, green Anaheim peppers, and the darker, rounder, hotter poblano peppers that make the best chili rellenos; and also jalapeños and firecracker peppers and explosive habaneros that looked like cherry bombs and blew up in your mouth.

  Leaving the kitchen, I wandered by the long farmhouse table and the French doors that open into the garden. Finally I turned to face the tall cabinet where Momma kept her Riders.

  All her life, my mother was afflicted by possessions. Days might go by, or weeks, or even months in which she was only herself; but sooner or later she would pull out that cursed magic Gold Card and ring up a purchase against her talent. She would ask the Riders for help, which they would give—at a price. In exchange for their services, they would come into her head, banishing her God knows where, and for an hour or two these small gods could walk the earth.

  After a Rider left and Momma came back, she would be confused, shocky and shaking with exhaustion. She never had any memory of what the Rider had done or said while in her head. It was terrible, as a child, to see my mother torn up and thrown away by these little gods who mounted her, and then to watch her struggle to put herself back together like Humpty-Dumpty from the fragments left behind. When you saw her go through that hideous ordeal time after time, you could never doubt her strength. “Takes more than birdshot to bring me down,” she used to say, and she was right.