The assisted living facility had three floors, and there were four corridors on each of them. My rounds included the east corridor on each floor, each of which had six resident rooms along it. It might not seem like checking in on eighteen senior citizens would take me four whole hours, but every day, it did. I was almost at the end of my shift—the sun had already started setting—by the time I had my first encounter with Mrs. Cherie Robinson, Oscawana’s newest resident.
When I knocked on the door to her room, I heard a raspy voice call out, “Come in!”
A thin, frail Black woman sat in the upholstered chair in the corner of the room. Her walker was set beside the chair, and as I entered the room she didn’t turn away from her television set, which was tuned in to the local news. “Hi, Mrs. Robinson. I’m McKenna, your evening aide.”
“I know,” she told me without looking at me. “The nurse told me somebody would come by to help me order dinner. They left a menu around here, but I can’t read a damn thing on it.”
“I can help you with that,” I said cheerfully. Many of the residents had difficulty with farsightedness, but within a few days at Oscawana they usually realized that the cafeteria options didn’t change much from day to day, so being able to read the menu wasn’t that important. My eyes scanned the room for where the nurse might have left the menu.
As I walked over to the kitchenette counter to retrieve it, Mrs. Robinson asked me, “Aren’t you going to introduce your friend?”
Startled, because I hadn’t notice anyone enter the room behind me, I looked over my shoulder and didn’t see anyone. “I’m sorry. There’s no one else here with me,” I told her.
“Sure there is. She’s right next to you,” Mrs. Robinson insisted.
My scalp broke out into a raging storm of pins and needles. It was then, as I stood at the table and took a closer look at the elderly woman where she sat in front of her television, that I noticed the milky white cataracts covering her eyes. Mrs. Robinson was completely blind.
CHAPTER 2
YOU SEE SOMEONE NEXT TO me?” I asked softly as I took a step closer to Mrs. Robinson.
She scowled at me playfully. Her white hair had been cut very short, and she wore heavy turquoise earrings that pulled her earlobes downward. “I can’t see much of anything. Can barely see you. But I can tell she’s here. Shame on you if you’re ignoring her, because she seems to be quite attached to you.”
My scalp was tingling again, and it felt as if my heart was beating loudly enough for Mrs. Robinson to hear it. I sank down into one of the chairs at the table, fully aware that I was cutting it close to the end of my shift and I might be in trouble if I clocked out a few minutes after seven. Naturally, I assumed that this woman was somehow able to sense Jennie’s presence even though I couldn’t, which thoroughly freaked me out.
“I had a twin sister,” I said, but my voice emerged from my throat as more of a hoarse whisper than I intended. “But she died almost eight years ago.”
Mrs. Robinson made a grumpy noise, kind of an umph, and I couldn’t tell if it was an acknowledgment or dismissal of what I’d just told her. After a long pause, she said, “Where I come from, we’d call her an invisible. They’re all around us, but you’re lucky. You have one all to yourself.”
She had pronounced “invisible” with such a strong French accent that at first I hadn’t understood the word she’d said. I didn’t know how to reply. At Dad’s, we didn’t talk about the fire, or about Jennie. Not ever. I was sure Rhonda knew what had happened, but it was like an unspoken rule that it was a forbidden topic of conversation in Florida. I was completely baffled by how this woman I’d never met before seemed to have known the most important thing about my childhood before I’d even entered her suite.
I asked, “Where do you come from?”
“Born and raised in Louisiana. My daughter brought me here to Florida five years ago, after I had a stroke. She said she couldn’t trust me to live alone anymore.”
“Your daughter lives in Tampa?” I asked, not wanting to press too hard with my questions in case Mrs. Robinson was upset about having been “dumped” in the assisted living facility, as several of our residents were.
“Oh, yes. She’s a big star over here. She does the weather report on Channel Eight,” Mrs. Robinson informed me with pride. “I was staying with her and her husband for a while, but I just can’t take the stairs in their house. I’ve got bad knees and bad hips. Arthritis. And the humidity doesn’t help.”
“Well, we’re glad to have you here,” I assured her. “We should put in your dinner order. It’s almost seven.”
Ignoring me, or perhaps just eager to get back onto the topic of invisibles now that she’d found someone she assumed qualified as an appropriate audience, Mrs. Robinson told me, “My daughter doesn’t like when I talk about voodoo. Especially around here. She says people who aren’t from the bayou don’t want to hear about loa and mystères. She thinks that kind of talk scares you city folk. But then you show up in my suite with an angry invisible following you!” She chuckled. It hadn’t escaped my attention that she’d referred to Jennie as “angry.” “Just goes to show, voodoo’s everywhere. It’s the way the universe works, ma chèrie.”
Before moving to Florida, I’d never been farther south than Chicago, so I knew very little about bayous or the practice of voodoo. When Kirsten had told me over the winter that I had paranormal abilities, I’d been more alarmed than delighted, and it had taken a while for me to adjust to the idea that my abilities might give me leverage in combating the evil spirits that were issuing orders to Violet. But Mrs. Robinson’s awareness of Jennie’s presence piqued my interest, even though I wasn’t convinced that I wanted to formally develop my connection to the “other side.” As much as I longed for my life to be restored to normalcy, Jennie was still reaching out with regularity, and the spell I had to cast every morning to safeguard the Portnoys was a source of stress. Perhaps this Oscawana Pavilion resident could teach me how to communicate with Jennie and find out what she so urgently wanted, as well as aid me in finding a way to break the curse on Mischa without jeopardizing anyone else’s safety.
“Okay,” I sighed, hoping Luis would be able to correct my time card when I made my way down to the first floor. I didn’t want to get in trouble my second week on the job for incurring overtime without getting approval first. And after so many months of chasing Violet in maddening circles, I didn’t want to get my hopes up too high that this woman would be able to provide me with actionable answers. “I surrender. Tell me more about this invisible and why she’s angry at me.”
Mrs. Robinson leaned back in her chair, smiling, and pressed her hands together. “She’s not angry at you. She’s trying to talk to you, and you won’t listen!”
“I am listening,” I insisted. “I don’t know how to hear her. Sometimes I ask her questions with a pendulum, but she doesn’t always answer. Do you know what she’s trying to tell me?”
Mrs. Robinson grew serious and hesitated long enough to make me uncomfortable before speaking again. “You’re in a whole lot of trouble. I probably shouldn’t even have the likes of you around here, but this life for me is almost over, anyway. Your invisible—your sister, you say? She’s stuck underwater in the dark place because she’s worried about you.”