Mail-Order Matty. Emilie Richards
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waved Matty to a long pine table. “Tell me ‘bout your head.”
“It’s pounding. I still feel a little dizzy.”
“It buzz?”
Matty wasn’t sure where this was leading, but for the sake of harmony she was willing to play along. And besides, Nanny was right. “Yes, a little.”
“And your insides moving?”
“Like they’re training for the Olympics.”
“I’ll fix.”
“I’d be grateful.” Matty watched as Nanny eased her way around the room. She moved as if she were underwater, fluidly and in slow motion. She removed dried herbs from glass jars lining a counter, adding a pinch of this and a sprig of that to a brown pottery teapot. The water sizzled on the stove and grew louder until Nanny made her last decision and poured the water over the remedies she had selected.
Matty remembered what Damon had said about Nanny’s eyesight and sense of smell. With a sinking heart she wondered how she could call a halt to this now. She had expected traditional black tea, perhaps Earl Grey, or even something as daring as chamomile or peppermint. She had not realized that Nanny would mix her own.
“Heidi don’t like strangers,” Nanny said, without turning to see how her words affected Matty. “Already she know who her family is….”
Matty refused to disagree, although she thought that kind of perception in an infant was unlikely. “Little babies are much more intelligent than we give them credit for.”
“You pick her up, she probably cry.”
“She might very well,” Matty agreed.
“She probably cry a lot.”
“She’s certainly getting some practice right now.” Matty could still hear Heidi screaming somewhere off in the distance.
“She be mad at Damon Quinn, he go off and leave her so long, go off to git you.”
Matty still refused to take the bait. “It’s amazing how good children are at making their feelings known.” And little old Bahamian ladies, too. But Matty didn’t add that.
Nanny selected a cup from one of the cupboards, one that had obviously seen better days, then she poured Matty’s tea, squinting and lifting the cup so that she could survey its contents before she handed it over.
The cup was chipped along the rim in four different places. The handle had been broken off and glued. Matty hoped the glue held long enough for her to finish the tea. “It smells…” Words failed her. It smelled like an overripe compost pile.
“You drink it, it’ll fix you quick.”
Fix her to do what? Matty considered her options. She could refuse outright on the grounds that the tea might really end her suffering once and for all. Or she could say—quite truthfully—that her stomach was rebelling.
Or she could take up the challenge and show Nanny that she trusted and respected her. The first two wouldn’t help Matty settle into life on Inspiration, but the third might—if it didn’t kill her first.
“It smells a little like my favorite herbal blend at home,” Matty said. “Thank you, Nanny.” She lifted the cup to her lips and swallowed her first sip. The taste was vile, a cross between banana peels and some mutant relative of the cabbage family. She waited for her throat to close or her muscles to clench spasmodically. When nothing happened, she cautiously took another. “It’s so…warm.” She smiled at Nanny. “I guess it was cool out on the water.”
The kitchen door flew open, and Kevin stepped through. She saw he had dark hair down to his shoulders and the faint tracing of a mustache, but a more detailed appraisal would have to wait, since he was obviously in a hurry. He carried one of Matty’s suitcases in each hand. And as he strode past the table he left a trail of water behind.
“You be raining on my floor, Kevin Garcia,” Nanny said.
“Suitcase fell in the water,” he mumbled.
Matty closed her eyes and took another sip of the tea, but not before she had seen the glow of triumph on Kevin’s face. She suspected that fell was not the appropriate word, and that when she opened the suitcase in question she might find anything from dead fish to exotic coral formations in among her new Victoria’s Secret bras and panties.
“You leave it in bathtub, you be sure.” Nanny followed behind him, mopping the water trail with a dishtowel. “You t’ink you can spill water my house, you gotta new t’ink coming.”
“Yeah…yeah…” Kevin disappeared through the doorway.
“Kevin Garcia don’t want new faces on cay,” Nanny said.
“I’ve guessed that much,” Matty said pleasantly. “Do you suppose all my suitcases will be properly baptized, or just that one?” She took another swallow of her tea and discovered it was the last. Somewhere between the first and the final she had developed something like a fondness for it. The taste was truly terrible, but it had spread a warm lethargy through her body, weighting her limbs and even her eyelids. Her stomach was no longer an angry tempest, and the steady beat behind her eyes was slowing to lullaby tempo.
Nanny brought the teapot back to the table and refilled Matty’s cup. Matty didn’t even protest.
“Kevin’s not the onliest person on Inspiration likes t’ings the way they always be,” Nanny said.
“Nothing ever stays the same, does it?” Matty sipped her tea and contemplated how the rhythm of her own words had slowed. “But I can tell you, Nanny, that if life does stay too much the same, it’s not good either. In fact, it’s terrible and lonely. New things aren’t necessarily bad…they’re…just… new.”
Nanny was frowning. In fact, there were now two Nannys frowning at her, identical twin Nannys, who were matched wrinkle for wrinkle, curl for curl. Just as Matty was about to comment on this remarkable phenomenon the tranquility of the kitchen was shattered by a foghorn. Matty tried to remember if she had noticed a lighthouse as they had approached, wondering if even now it was signaling a ship about to enter dangerous waters. The possibility was so romantic, so thrilling, that she wanted to ask, but somehow her lips, curved into a wide smile, refused to move.
“This monster child is my daughter, Heidi,” Damon shouted above the din. “And she refuses to stop screaming.”
Matty heard Damon’s voice, and she even made some sense of what he said. The foghorn was a baby, Damon’s baby, in fact. She was supposed to turn around, acknowledge the child in his arms, perhaps even offer professional advice on calming her. Some part of Matty—a part growing steadily smaller—wanted to do just that. As for the rest…
Her eyelids gave up the fight and closed, screening out everything except Damon’s next words.
“Nanny! What the hell did you put in that tea?”
Sun poured over honey-colored walls and made feathery tracings of the palm fronds that were dancing in the Caribbean breeze just off Matty’s balcony. Matty had been watching the shadows for longer than she cared to admit. She wasn’t sure what she hoped for. That their hypnotic sway would put her back to sleep. That if she concentrated hard enough she would find she was asleep in her lonely bed in Minnesota and that yesterday was just a disturbing dream. That someone would come into her room and tell her that she had not disgraced herself again and again on the trip to Inspiration Cay, that she had not blacked out at the kitchen table at the trip’s end.
That someone, and she was afraid to speculate who, hadn’t carried her up to this room last night and undressed her as she’d slept the sleep of the dead.
She tried to remember the events of last evening. She had