Circle of Secrets Read Free Page A

was normal.
    Now Daddy’s left.
    I think about my daddy getting farther and farther away and my stomach starts to hurt. I stare at the blue flame of gas under the pot on the stove. A dented pot sits by the back door, catching drips from a brown stain in the ceiling.
    “Grandmother Phoebe says,” I start to tell her, and the words are like little darts of pain in my throat, “that’s the whole reason you and Daddy split up.”
    Mirage tries to reach for my hand, but I move it off the table and stick it in my lap.
    The kitchen falls into a sudden hole of silence while I stare at a tiny rip in my jeans.
    She clears her throat and puts Mister Lenny back on his perch. His head swivels around as Mirage dishes up two bowls of gumbo and sets them on the table with the pot of rice. I secretly admire her purple flowered skirt and the sparkly rings on her long fingers, but mostly I’m watching her eyes, her face, wondering what she’s going to do next.
    Tiny little pieces of crawfish float to the top of the roux, but I hunt down the chicken and sausage instead and take a bite, burning my lips it’s so hot.
    Rain sheets the kitchen window like gray dishwater. “Bad storm, ain’t it?” Mirage says with a small smile. “Hope your daddy made it back to his car okay.”
    “Me, too.” I stare at my gumbo again, fishing out some okra to chew on.
    “Shelby,” she tries again. “There’s a whole long story you wouldn’t understand, but I ain’t a witch. That’s an old wives’ tale. I’m a traiteur. That’s French for healer. Traiteurs go way back when Cajuns first got to Louisiana and had no doctor for fifty miles.”
    “You’re a doctor?” I say, blowing hard on my next spoonful.
    “Oh, non, I ain’t no doctor. A traiteur just has a special talent for healin’ folks. I learned about plant medicine and the special healing prayers from my mamma before she died. Certain people liked to call your grand-mère a swamp witch because she was old and kept to herself, mostly because of arthritis that knotted her up the last couple a years. Calling a traiteur a swamp witch is jest plain ignorance. Most a town didn’t understand her ways, but she had a friend in her mailman who brought out her letters and groceries couple times a month. No amount of gossip or rumors could stop her from helpin’ folks.” Mirage gives a small laugh, but her voice sounds funny, almost like she’s gonna cry. “Folks liked my mamma’s cough syrup remedy better than anything on them store shelves. And after she laid her hands on your head and whispered her prayers, you felt a hundred percent better.”
    “Sounds like magic,” I say, wondering if it was really true or just a story.
    “Not magic. Faith in God. She had a spiritual gift, jest like the Bible says. But the healing comes from God, not her, not me. Never me.”
    She gets real quiet like it’s important that I understand what she’s saying.
    “So what happened to her? How’d she die?”
    “She got real sick. That’s why I came out here so much last year, and then just stayed. Got so bad, she finally couldn’t get out of bed at all. Passed a few months ago in her sleep. By then she was just a wisp of a thing, but she knew just about everything there was to know about healing. I got her recipe book to keep forever. And the prayers in my head.”
    I want to know why Mirage never came back to New Iberia after Grand-mère’s funeral was over and done. Why she left me and Daddy forever. But I can’t get the question to come out of my mouth.
    Besides, she should be giving me the answers without me having to ask.
    I push the spoon around my bowl, thinking about the night she left when I screamed at her to come back, to stop walking down the steps to the car.
    She’d paused, then knelt to take my hands in hers. “Shelby, Grand-mère is real bad sick and I gotta go.”
    “You coming back, right?”
    She shook her head, but she wouldn’t look me in the eyes. Just kept staring back