Ashton Daigle

Victoria Davenport toweled off her face, opened her bottle of Evian and took a sip. Trisha Ellis, wife of Senator Henry Martin Ellis, did the same, as a thirty-something guy with sandy blonde hair walked past them.

“I’d like to meet him in a dark alley,” Trisha said, grinning.

“You’re a married woman,” Victoria said. “Get hold of yourself.”

Trisha merely rolled her eyes dramatically and said, “Martin has his bimbos and hot, young interns, I have the pool boy it’s a fair trade. It’s sort of a mutual agreement.”

Now it was Victoria who rolled her eyes and said, “There’s more to life than just sex.”

Trisha laughed and said, “That’s a classic call for help. You know what kind of people say things like there’s more to life than just sex? People who aren’t getting banged good and regularly,” she said, laughing.

“Jesus Trisha, must you be so crude?” Victoria asked.

“Yes,” Trisha said. “I must. We have to hit the showers and get back to Piedmont for the chaperone meeting tonight.”

“I know,” Victoria said. “I still can’t believe you’re signing up. I mean, I’m glad, it’ll be good to have some girl company, but…”

“But what?” Trish asked.

“You just don’t strike me as the Back Woods Barbi type,” Victoria said.

“Usually, I’m not,” Trisha said. “I just didn’t feel like sitting at home staring at walls. Besides, it’s off season. Julio the pool boy doesn’t come back around until spring.”

“I hear you,” Victoria said.

“By the way, I hear Ryan Hendrickson is signed up,” Trisha said.

“And this means what to me?” Victoria asked.

“Oh please, I see the way you two look at each other,” Trisha said. “I can’t blame you. The man is totally fucking hot. If I didn’t know how you felt about him, I’d sink my claws into him.”

“He wouldn’t give you the time of day,” Victoria snapped defensively, before she even knew what she was saying.

“Methinks I’ve struck a nerve,” Trisha said. “Defensive much.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just been a long day,” Victoria said.

“It’s okay,” Trisha said. “I think it’s cute, in a creepy kind of way.”

“No it’s not okay,” Victoria said. “Even if I wanted to, and I’m not admitting anything, I couldn’t. Both of his sons are my patients. I’ve been helping both of them cope with the death of their mother, of Ryan’s wife. It would be awfully damned presumptuous of me, not to mention probably professionally unethical to sleep around with their father.”

“Darling, I didn’t say anything about sleeping around,” Trisha said.

“What exactly do you mean?” Victoria asked.

“I’m talking about the long haul sweetie,” Trisha said. “It’s obvious that you two care about each other. I wasn’t kidding when I said I saw how you two looked at each other. You may not see it, or may not want to see it, but I see love there. And you know what? It makes me jealous as hell. Do you know how fucking long its been since Martin and I looked at each other like that? I’ll give you an idea. I can’t even fucking remember.”

“I’m sorry,” Victoria said.

“Don’t be, this isn’t about me, it’s about you,” Trisha said, all kidding aside. “I just don’t want you to look a gift horse in the mouth. You spend your life, every single day restoring these kids, mending their broken hearts and spirits. But you don’t do things for yourself. You don’t do things to make you happy. You deserve to be happy. You’ve earned the right to be able to move on with your life.”

Victoria nodded and they entered the woman’s locker room.

—-                                             ——                                    ——

Ethan and Bertha just stood there looking at each other for a long time. Finally, the smashing noise of the measuring cup broke Ethan from his trance.

“Bertha,” he cried out, as she steadied herself, with one hand on the kitchen counter. “Are you allright?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“What is it?” Ethan asked.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing at all. It’s probably just my blood pressure acting up.”

The lie stung Ethan almost as hard as if it had been a slap. Throughout his friendship with Bertha, the one thing he knew he could always count on was that she’d tell him the truth. She always told him like it was. She never evaded his questions, like his dad did. Nor did she try to sugarcoat things are throw big fancy words around to confuse him, like Dr. Davenport did. She always told it like it was and that’s why he loved her so very much.

“Don’t lie Bertha,” Ethan wailed, practically pleading, as his eyes filled with tears and burned hot trails down his cheeks. He was frantic.

“What is it? It’s Goody Cole, isn’t it,” he added before finally realizing it. “You’ve dreamt of her too haven’t you? You have.”

“Now shush young man,” Bertha said. “You don’t need to be screaming that out loud, they’ll send us both to Miss Davenport, if not the state mental ward. Now come on, lets get some hot tea, sit down and we’ll talk about this.”

They sat in silence sipping lukewarm chamomile tea. Neither of them said anything for a long time. Bertha looked at Ethan and he grinned, and finally she did too and said, “Good Lord, would you look at us, sitting here quiet as a church mouse, too scared to even say a word.”

“Do you think she’s listening?” Ethan asked.

“What?” Bertha asked him.

“Goody Cole,” Ethan said. “Do you think she can hear us? Is she a ghost, a real ghost?”

Bertha didn’t answer him so he called her name out.

“Just give me a second, I’m thinking,” Bertha said, still breathing heavily as she sat her cup of tea back into its saucer.

They always used saucers with their cups of tea. It was what civilized folk did, Bertha liked to tell him.

“I need you to listen carefully to me Ethan,” Bertha finally said, slowly, cautiously.

“I will,” Ethan said.

“I’m going to have a talk with you,” she said. “I’m going to have an honest talk with you, like two adults do, but about some topics that most folks would think was queer. Do you follow me?”

“I think so,” Ethan said, nodding.

“It means that no matter what, you can never, ever tell people, nobody what we’re about to talk about; not your brother, not your friends, or father, who I greatly respect by the way. And not Miss Davenport either,” Bertha said. “This is that important. Do you understand?”

Ethan nodded, shook his head and said, in a very grown up way, “I’ll take this conversation to the grave with me Bertha.”

“Ain’t no sense in getting all maudlin on me, a simple yes maam will do the trick,” she said.

“Yes maam,” he said, realizing for the first time he’d ever used such a formal term of respect for Bertha.

“Well, that’s going to have to do,” she said. “We just can’t have people running around thinking we’re crazy. And that’s what they’d think too if they heard us carrying on like this.”

“I know,” Ethan said. He paused and finally asked again, “Is she a ghost?”

“I never mentioned it to you before Ethan, because quite frankly it never really came up, but as a young girl I grew up in New Orleans,” she said.

“No, you never did say that,” Ethan said. “You always just said you were from down south.”

“There wasn’t never no particular reason for it,” she said, “just that most folks they just aren’t interested. You know anything about New Orleans?”

“Just that a bunch of people died there during Hurricane Katrina and that it’s supposed to be the birthplace of jazz, or blues, one of them,” Ethan said. “I forget which.”

“Well it’s also one of the most haunted cities in the United States too,” she said, as Ethan watched her, his eyes growing as round as the saucers that now held both their cups.

She added, “even more so now I reckon after Katrina. It’s a damned shame what happened to them people down there; folks so poor they couldn’t leave, meanwhile the city has a whole parking lot of empty buses. But New Orleans wasn’t like that when I was a girl. Folks helped each other. It didn’t matter if they was white, black, rich or poor, people helped each other. It was founded as a port city, everybody there was immigrants, so we were all more or less in the same boat. That’s the New Orleans I grew up in. That’s the New Orleans I loved so much.”

Ethan nodded, obviously moved by Bertha’s speech.

“Don’t go getting all misty-eyed on me now,” she said.

He wiped his eyes and said, “It’s just been a long day Bertha.”

“For you and me both,” she agreed. “Anyway that’s the New Orleans I loved. There’s times I can remember it like yesterday. I can remember when our mamma used to take us down to K&B on Sundays for ice cream floats. They had the best floats. Some of them did.”

“What was K&B?” Ethan asked.

“It was a drug store,” she said.

“You mean like Walgreens,” he said.

“Sort of like Walgreens, but with spirit,” she explained. “The K&B stood for Katz and Besthoff. They were the founders. My momma used to know Mr. Katz, Mr. Gustave Katz. He’d sometimes be at the Canal Street store and the one at Carrolton and Oak. It was more than just a drug store. I used to love the book and magazine aisle. Both sides of the aisle were filled up. I’ve always loved to read. I could get lost for hours on the magazine aisle, looking at the funnies, browsing through magazines. The store’s color, of their packaging, was this God awful purple color. We used to call it K&B purple. It eventually became part of the store’s logo.”

Ethan just nodded and asked, “What happened to the store?”

“It got bought out by another store,” she said.

“Because of Katrina?” Ethan asked.

“No, they got bought a good many years before that,” she said. “I sure do miss those ice cream floats though. But anyway, getting back to my original point, New Orleans is a very haunted city. Almost a ghost on every city block.”

“Did you see a lot of them?” Ethan asked her.

“Oh no, nothing like that, but I could feel them,” she said. “Some people in some families used to have serious ghost problems but we never did. All a haunt is, is a lost soul who hasn’t found their way to heaven yet. That’s all there is to it, they just lost kind of confused. Sometimes they there for a reason, sometimes to set some sort of wrong right. And sometimes they get into mischief, tossing things off of shelves, breaking stuff. We had a ghost in our house for a little while, my Uncle Gus. He was a rascal in life though, so it only seemed fitting that he got into mischief in our house.”

“Did you ever see him?” Ethan asked.

“No, he wasn’t a rev’nant,” Bertha said.

“A what?” Ethan asked.

“A revenant,” she said, slower this time. “That’s a ghost who actually shows themselves in a physical form. Gus never did that.”

“But if he never showed himself, how do you know it was him?” Ethan asked.

“Other senses,” she said. “With Gus’s ghost it was smells. We always knew he was around because we could smell Old Spice, an aftershave he used to wear.”

“What did you do about him?” Ethan asked.

“Well, Momma had it out with him,” Bertha said. “One day he flung a vase off the counter and broke it. It was an antique and it was worth a little bit of money. Anyway, it infuriated Momma so much she started yelling at him. Told him she didn’t have no problem with him, and that he didn’t have no reason to have a problem with her. She told him to stop his tomfoolery and to take his butt to get his butt to heaven and that if he didn’t soon, God and the devil might get confused and he’d end up in hell.”

“What happened?” Ethan asked.

“It all stopped,” Bertha said. “Sometimes that’s all it takes, is to talk a little sense to them. Ethan, can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” he said.

“The dreams you’ve had, what do you see?”

“There’s almost always snow in the dreams, and everything seems kinda foggy or something,” he said. “And she’s just an old lady, dressed in old time clothes, usually just rockin in her rocking chair on a porch of some kind. I ca never see her too good.”

Bertha just sighed and shook her head.

“What is it?” Ethan asked.

“I see the same thing,” she said.

“What do you think it means?” he asked her. “Is it her ghost we’re dreaming about?”

“Well, I don’t know what it means,” she admitted. “I haven’t heard tell too many times of people having the same dreams. Haven’t heard of ghosts really coming to people in dreams neither. In books they do, like in Hamlet, but truth be told, that’s not usually how ghosts do.”

“Can I ask you something else Ethan, this time something more personal?” she asked him.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Do you see your mom in your dreams ever?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “I do.”

“She ever talk to you?” Bertha asked.

“A couple times, but usually…”

Ethan’s voice trailed off.

“What is it boy?” Bertha asked.

“In dreams she talks to me, but it’s not like she’s really talking,” he said. “It’s like she sends me messages, usually it’s like feelings, mostly of love.”

Bertha nodded. She paused for a moment and then asked, “Can you ever see things before they happen?”

“Sometimes I get feelings, only time I really see things is like with tests,” he said. “That’s how I get all A’s. I can see the answers in my head without even having to look at the answers. Sometimes I can read a whole book and remember everything in it, down to the punctuation marks and page numbers. That helps me pass too.”

“Your feelings,” she asked. “Sometimes you know things before they happen?”

“Sometimes, but not always,” he said. “I can’t control them like I can with tests and my memory.”

“Well, truth be told, I don’t know why we’re both dreaming of Goody Cole,” Bertha admitted. “It might mean something, it might mean nothing. I’m gonna have to think on that.”

“Bertha, can I tell you something,” Ethan said.

“Why sure,” she said.

“I can’t always know things before they happen,” he said. “But there is one thing recently.”

“Well, go on child,” she said.

“I haven’t been able to tell anybody, because like you said, they probably lock me up and throw away the key,” he said. “But it’s about this camping trip.”

“What about it?” she asked.

“Well, it isn’t very clear, but I have a feeling that something very, very bad is going to happen,” he said. “I have a feeling people are going to die. I can’t tell anybody. I’ve been trying to talk Dad into going to my grandparents house instead for the holiday, but he’s already committed to the trip. I don’t now what I can do.”

“Maybe you’re meant to go, Ethan,” she replied.

“I kind of feel like I do but I don’t know why,” he said. “I can’t figure it out.”

“Well that’s easy,” Bertha finally said. “Maybe you’re meant to go to stop the bad thing from happening.”

“But how?” he asked.

“When the time comes, I think you’ll know,” she said. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”