“Speak my what?” I asked.
“Tell her what kind of man you want,” Kete explained.
As the water began to boil over uncontrollably onto the stove, Kete and Tante Heru joined hands and started chanting again.
I started quoting the lyrics from India.Arie’s “Ready for Love.”
The curtains blew into the room like there was a hurricane outside and the floorboards began to shake. The candles blew out one by one and Tante Heru and Kete started chanting even louder. Kete grabbed my hand and something like an electric current went right through me.
The dull light flickered and then went out. We were in total darkness.
Kete stopped chanting, but using a streak of light sneaking in through a hole in the curtain over the window, I could see Tante Heru with her eyes rolled back in her head. She seemed like she was in a trance. She kept repeating the same word: “Yemaya. Yemaya. Yemaya. Yemaya.”
The water from the pot was spilling onto the floor.
“Yemaya. Yemaya. Yemaya. Yemaya!” she shouted and then she opened her eyes. And I know I was completely drunk and struggling to see in the darkness, but I swear they were black. Fully black and shining in the dark. I nearly fell off of the table.
The water stopped boiling without anyone touching the flame. The light came back on. The floorboards stopped shaking. The curtain fell flat with no breeze.
“He come in de mornin’. Come rit ta ya. Wan he leave, ya decide whan he go. Den ya say whan he go fi good. But only fa good, baybee. Only use de third wish fa good. Ya must be sure.”
7
“Joy Cometh in the Morning”
#Thehangover . . . The bourbon in my belly pulled me from a heavy sleep that didn’t want to give me up. I’d never be able to fully recall how I’d gotten back to the hotel from Tante Heru’s—along with how I’d gotten upstairs, disrobed, and made my way to the bed—but the second my head hit the pillow would never leave me. It was like falling onto a happy Care Bear cloud I really needed. Really loved. Cool and forgiving. Welcoming like the back of the blue Care Bear; maybe the yellow one. I kissed the pillow a few times—I knew this because there were perfect puckers all over the pillowcase the next morning—and tumbled like Alice down the rabbit hole into the kind of hard, wicked sleep only liquor after a broken heart can give you. There was no chance I’d be able to recall what I dreamed. When I closed my eyes, there was just blackness spiraling everywhere in more blackness and I’m sure it stayed that way until the bourbon was tired of being inside of me.
I tried to open my eyes, but sleep had caked them closed, like they did when I was younger and got a really bad cold. My head was so viciously heavy I felt the weight of everything I ever knew. And one side of my body was rigid and cold. But still, when bourbon called my name in boils in my stomach, I had to answer, and in one second I overcame every ailment that had me jailed in my hotel-room bed and staggered blindly to the bathroom and got on my hands and knees in front of the toilet.
Everything came out of me. As my father used to say, “There just ain’t no better way to put that.” I was retching and convulsing, twisting around on the floor. Bourbon was determined to teach me a lesson. My heart was palpitating faster than I could breathe and I was so hot I didn’t care if my face touched the cool water in the latrine.
I just wanted the bourbon out of me. And from the looks of things, it seemed like the bourbon wanted the same. Maybe it was going on down into the sewer to start another party someplace else.
Lying there on the floor, I looked into the dark room to see that it wasn’t even 6:00 AM on the clock yet. Night was still outside the window and I could actually hear people still partying in the street outside the hotel.
When I thought maybe I’d emptied out the last of the last inside of me, I looked at the ceiling, cursing whatever made me think I could drink an entire bottle of any liquor. And then, like any good Southern girl, I prayed to God to make it stop. Promised I’d never do it again. I was a good person. Really. Just make it stop. I called on Jehovah and every name I ever heard Grammy Annie-Lou call the Interceder when she got the Holy Ghost in church. Sure, God likely didn’t care about drunk middle-aged women passed out on bathroom floors, but wasn’t he the God of small things, too?
I crawled out of the bathroom and managed to pull the phone down from the nightstand to call room service for more towels. Before I could hang up good, there was a knock at the door.
“Hold on,” I said, pushing myself up from the floor. “I didn’t expect you to get here so soon.” I toddled around, turned on the light, and grabbed my bathrobe. “OK,” I said, halfway in my robe as I opened the door. I reached out to grab the towels, and they were there, but it wasn’t a maid holding them. “Xav?” I grabbed the collar of my robe to be sure nothing was slipping out. “What are you doing here?”
“Morning jog!” He stepped back so I could see his sweat suit and sneakers. “I figured I should be lean and mean up there on the altar today.”
“Whatever.” I remembered Ian’s snarl at the pier and reached for the towels, but the bourbon took my hands farther than I meant for them to go and I lost my balance.
“Easy, girl!” Xavier helped me regain my footing. “Yeah, I saw you come in last night and I figured you’d be needing these towels. Got you some water, too.” He held the towels up to show me a bottle of water hidden beneath the pile.
“Oh no, you saw me? Did anybody—”
“No one else saw. Don’t worry.”
“Whatever, Xav.” I reached for the towels again and snatched them. “Look, thanks for the towels.”
“And the water!” Xavier held up the water bottle.
“And the water.”
“Can’t forget to hydrate. Big day ahead of us. Wouldn’t want you to faint at the wed—”