More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
They didn’t think she was Black, but she might have been Native, and God forbid they treat her as a white woman.
“Water women,” Vasyl said. “They have them here too.” “They have them everywhere,” Maryse said absently, looking for others. “There’s never a shortage of unlucky girls who end up in the water.” “What a grim thing.” “We are in a grim business, darling.”
“How lucky we are, then, to know what the dead say.” They didn’t, of course they didn’t, but it was a living, and thus better than a dying, as Vasyl would say when he was drunk.
“It’s going to be a strong one,” she said, looking up. The sky was bruised, a tinge of green to the gray, with the last of the sunlight giving it a bloodied edge. “Strong storms,” Vasyl mused. “What strange things your country admires.” It was just more of his nonsense, things he said to keep the customers suitably impressed with his etheric connections, but as they left downtown and pulled onto the wooded road, Maryse wondered. Strong storms and angry rivers. This part of the country wouldn’t love them, and while she was usually fine with that, now it made her shiver.
As she turned, however, the light hit the glass, which looked out into the night, and she saw a pair of eyes staring back at her, dark and cold and unblinking.
She tried to lie back down, but her heart took a while to slow, and when it did, she found herself lying awake. She was exhausted, but her body was restless, humming like the wires that webbed the sky in Chicago. Sometimes, she imagined rising up to touch those wires, letting the city’s power course through her until she lit up like a firefly herself, never to be dark, never to be dead, though of course she would be . . .
Maryse’s skin crawled at being so close to this dead woman, because she was dead, had been dead, would always be dead, and oh, how she smiled.
What the dead have left, Maryse thought, and it wasn’t until Nina shuddered that she realized she had said it aloud.
“I don’t know why he killed her,” Nina said softly. “What reason could he have had?” Maryse didn’t have an answer for her, but she found herself speaking, thinking of the flash of a pink palm in the water, the river women from all along the length of the great Mississippi. “As many reasons as there are women in the water,” she said.
She wondered whether she saw a hand, white this time and calloused by the telegraph’s bar, waving from the waves; whether the woman was thankful, as her sister Nina didn’t want to be. But of course she wasn’t. She was dead, and Maryse had finally learned, after five years as a medium, what the dead spoke of.
Hate. Pain. Cold. Dead. Always dead. Dead forever.
