Who: Jack and Zari What: Two regular folks meet in a cemetery during a ritual to talk to the dead. Where: Cemetery When: Recently Warnings: None
The sun was high, and for once it was not raining. The cemetery was the third she had visited in as many days, and this one was older than the others. She did not expect to find her father there, not in the physical sense, pero los muertos might lead her to what she sought, and so she was in a place that was close to them.
The grave she had chosen was an unkempt one, uncared for and long forgotten. She could barely read the name on the stone - Jose Garcia - and she wondered what the man had been doing so far from his home. He shared a name with the one she sought, and he felt like the right choice among the graves.
She laid out her shawl, a colorful affair of reds and golds and brows, and she pulled the candles and cleaning supplies from the bag that was carried on shoulder and hip. She set to working, singing a soft Cuban dirge as she worked, and within an hour the grave was clean of weeds and dirt and age. The candles she lined along the old stone headstone, and she looked up at the sky as she waited for it to darken. Once the gloaming began, she lit each candle, one by one by one, until six points of light lit up the almost darkness.
She closed her eyes, and the air around her crackled, and she prayed.
Jack, contrary to what one might expect, didn't spend a lot of time in graveyards. There was nothing for him there. He'd been in one once since he'd crossed over from Musings, and it had been because he'd chased a man into it. That had been about two years ago, in that long stretch when he was on his own. Those had been bad years - and for all the things wrong with it, all the misery tied to it, he could at least say that he'd felt less alone in the last year.
He killed that man that he chased into the cemetery, something that, at the time, had seemed as easy a decision to make as choosing to breathe. He wasn't quite as sure how to feel about it now. He wasn't sure that he regretted it, but nor was he as sure as he had been that it had been right. So when he passed the cemetery again, he paused outside it, looking in for a moment. Older than some of the others he'd seen around town, this cemetery had worn gravestones and monuments six feet high, weeping angels and stone monoliths. He never visited Helen's grave in Musings before he left it. It had felt as if it would make her more dead somehow, more gone, further away.
He wouldn't have stopped long at the gates, but he heard the soft sound of someone singing. The song didn't sound like English, but he wasn't close enough to tell what it was if not. It sounded sad - appropriate enough, for a graveyard - and he found himself walking in to find its source.
It was getting dark, but night held no fear whatsoever for him, and it didn't take long for him to spot the source of the singing. She had gone silent now, but the woman at the grave was the only other person in the cemetery. He took in the candles, the shawl, and the marker, clean and neat in comparison to the neglected headstones around it. What was she doing mourning at this hour? He couldn't remember ever hearing of anyone going quite this far, but, then again, before Helen he'd only had one brush with death, and when his mother had died he'd brought flowers to her grave. But this, the candles and the shawl, spoke to something unfamiliar, but reverent. He didn't know what she was doing, but it felt wrong to interrupt her. Instead, he stood a few rows back, watching her
She sensed the man at her back, but the hairs on her arms did not stand and warn her, and the air around her did not feel heavy or dark, and she trusted her saints to tell her if the man was dangerous. They did not, and she continued her ritual, hands moving over the candles, fingers touching the flames. The air around her thickened, went warm and crackled with electricity that stretched out and touched every grave marker and then went silent, the candles flickering out entirely with a gust of heat and moist.
He watched her touch each flame, and only then did he realize this was something beyond regular mourning, something apart from it. When the air started to grow thick and heavy around him stood a little straighter. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. Creation? Possibly. Unless it was all in his head, of course, but the crackle in the air was tangible. He felt as if he would be struck by lightning if he moved toward her. Then the candles all went out. He stood, still, unsure, and more than a little fascinated, and didn't speak, not wanting to break whatever it was she'd just done.
“You did not run,” she said to the man at her back. She still had not seen him, but she knew he was male, and she knew he was still there. She glanced over her shoulder a moment later, and she gave him a warm, teasing smile that still held a bit of little girl in it. “Are you not scared?”
"I don't frighten easily," he said with a small smile, taking in her easy manner. She was a little younger than he'd expected before she turned around, and he couldn't help but notice her apparent lack of concern that he had been standing behind her for so long, particularly when he looked the way he did. The fact that she knew he'd been there only heightened his curiosity. "What were you trying to do?" he asked. Whatever it was, it had sparked and cracked through the air with power, and it hadn't been quite like any other ability he'd ever seen. The cemetery was quiet all around them, the only sound coming from the street beyond and passing cars in the distance.
“Find out if anyone here knew someone I seek,” she said without reserve. She took in how he was dressed - clothes that were dark and worn, but clean - and she made a thoughtful sound, as if she had inferred something from it. She looked back at the cemetery, and she sighed. “But there is no one here,” she said, motioning in the shadows to the candles that had blown out. “Were you seeking someone?” she asked. He looked too young to have someone in this cemetery; everyone here had surely died before his birth. But he wore an old grief like a mantle, and her father would have said he was a dead soul; his eyes told her the story of it, and she needed none of her magic for that.
He shook his head. "No. I don't know anyone here." The dead were present tense, and he didn't think about it until after he'd said it. He'd been following her suit on that, but it was true, in a way. The dead didn't feel past. They felt very much here. "Who are you looking for that you thought the dead could give you directions?" He was used to having people's gazes linger around his face, but she had the kindness or the good manners not to stare.
She did not stare, because she had seen far worse. The babalwo were famous for their theatrics, and scarification was not unknown among their numbers. Her father had never subscribed to the practice, but the men who joined him around the fire did. This man was nothing frightening, not to her. When one had looked on Chango little scared them. “My father,” she said. “His body is gone, but I seek his spirit.” She could have gone about contacting her father a great many ways using her magic, but she wanted to keep him close enough to pull back. If she called him as a spirit, it might push him further. She did not want that.
"But no luck so far?" he asked. He didn't apologize for the man's death - he'd always hated that particular response himself, like it was someone else's burden that someone he cared about was dead, like anyone could apologize it away. It was a nothing response, a thing you said because there was nothing you or anyone else could do to fix it, and because polite people tried to take responsibility for problems they had no way of solving.
The thought he had next wasn't a good one, and maybe it was a poor idea to linger on it, but it presented itself all the same. And then he remembered that the only spirit he wanted to hear from was a world away and out of anyone's reach, and he didn't ask.
"I've never seen anyone do what you just did," he added at last. "Do you mind if I ask what it was?" The most he could say about it was that it wasn't Christian as far as he could tell, but, then again, he'd never known all that much about other religions. Maybe it didn’t have a name. Maybe it was just her, who knew?
“No luck,” she said, reaching for the blown out candles one, by one, by one. She blew on each one until it cooled, and then she tucked it in the bag she laid out in front of her on the colorful wrap. “I suppose it is good. Perhaps it means he is not too far gone, that he has not gone beyond the point where I can reach him,” she said, the hope in her voice a thick and tangible thing.
She glanced up when he asked what she had done. “It is just a spell. I am Yoruba, Santera, de el monte,” she explained, the words matching the thick Spanish accent she had when she spoke English. She stopped packing away candles, and she stretched up just a little and held out a hand. “Soy Zari,” she said, introducing herself.
Jack wondered what it was like to hold that sort of intense hope for anything. "Then it's not such a bad sign," he said. "I hope you do find him. How did he die, if you don't mind me asking?"
He didn't speak Spanish, but had absorbed enough from acquaintances over the years to get a vague gist of what she was saying, and the extended hand made it clear she was offering an introduction. "Jack," he said, and he took her hand. "Good to meet you, Zari." 'Just a spell' made it sound so strangely commonplace. Then again, what was strange, anymore? She looked young, but one never could tell with Creations - if she was a Creation, but he found it difficult to believe that what she'd just done had been done with nothing but faith. "Where are you from, Zari?" The question went in more than one direction, and he was curious to see how she answered it.
“Cuba,” she said, choosing the simple answer rather than the complex. She could have told him, she suspected, that she had crossed a portal with her father when she was only a child, and he might have returned the favor with a tale about that scar and what had happened to his eye, but she left it all unsaid. She was from the island, more than from Musings, and something had happened that had scarred him and left him wandering through cemeteries. It was, possibly, sufficient information.
“I do not know how he died,” she admitted, returning to her task of slipping candles into the bag. She folded the flap over once she was done, and she stood and shook out the shawl before slipping it back onto her shoulders. “How did the person you lost die?” she asked, because the only men who wandered among the dead were men who had felt the sting of death.
"I've never been there," he said, with a soft smile, an obvious joke because really, how many Americans had in the last fifty years? "Are you going back there, when you find your father?" It would make sense. He could understand that, grief pulling you further than you ever thought you would travel, and always with the silent promise that things would be normal again when you did just one more thing, even though nothing ever would be, no matter what you did. There was only soothing, and levels of solace, but once someone was gone the topography of one's world could never be the same.
Jack wasn't frightened of talking about death, didn't shy away from the subject in the way many people did. He had seen death, and brought death, and been dead. There was nothing to fear from it and no surprises left in it. "That's a good guess," he said. "You didn't even need to read my palm." He read the name on the headstone she had been working in front of. "She was murdered," he said. The language was good, distancing, like he hadn't been there, like it had happened while he was at work, the way he should have been, the way he would have been if he hadn't forgotten his phone behind him. It was ridiculous that one false move could be so important.
"Why did you pick him?" he asked, nodding to Jose Garcia's headstone.
“He shared the name of my father,” she said, looking down at the gravestone. “I do not know if I will return. I left, and it will not be easy to return there.” She smiled, but it was a sad smile, and she played with the ends of the wrap, sliding the soft fabric between her fingers. “There is not a plane you can take, or a boat that will take you to the shore. I have defected, and I have come here and sought asylum. I cannot return easily.” She sounded sad when she said it, something more than just surface feelings. Her spirits were there, her saints and her memories. She had not wanted to leave those warm waters, and she was sorry for it.
She turned toward the entrance to the cemetery, darkness falling heavy and thick now. “I do not need to read your palm to feel your loss. It sits on your shoulders, your grief, visible to anyone who cares to see.”
"I'm sorry," he said, and this time he felt he could say it, because he was, sorry for her sake. "I hope you get the opportunity someday nonetheless." Seattle was full of mysteries, like this woman, come to cold climes from an island she couldn't return to to find the ghost of her dead father. Everyone's story sounded like a fairy tale, but nothing seemed to end the way a good fairy tale should.
He turned with her. He could walk with her to the gates, at least, before turning home himself. He wasn't sure what to say, at first. "Yours doesn't," he said. "Or not in the same way. I would never have guessed if you hadn't told me." He didn't know what that meant - whether it was just that he didn't know where to look, or that he was simply worse at hiding it.
She fell into step in a way that said she expected to be walked to the gate. It came of growing up in an old place with old traditions, traditions that would be considered sexist to Americans. Even she, as a woman of the old religion, was still a woman to the men there. Perhaps a woman that was too powerful to wrong, but a woman.
“Mine is young yet,” she said of her grief. “Even the lightest burden becomes heavy over time. Your weight, it is not young. Es viejo, si? Years?”
Jack looked over at her as they walked. Despite his connection to a woman some years dead, and his feelings for a woman still living whom he could no longer find anything to say to, he did still notice other women. And he had reached a point, at least, where he didn't automatically compare them to one of those other two, which had to be counted as progress. Even if he had, though, Zari, with her dark hair and dark eyes, could have held up well against either. She clearly hadn't been out of Cuba long, since she still carried the sun on her skin in a way Seattle, even in spring, didn't allow for. "A few," he acknowledged, nodding. He paused, wondering if she had ever lost anyone before, if this was her first experience with it. "It isn't always like that," he said. His voice was still quiet. It felt wrong to speak loudly amongst the dead. "Sometimes it isn't a burden at all. You grieve and you move on, and that's that. It might be that for you."
She had thought that herself, perhaps, but it was something that had come of being too long a child, too long dependant on a caretaker, and she could not fathom it now, no matter how she tried. “Grief fades to remembering,” she said, the words sing-sing like something once told to a child. She smiled as she wrapped arms around herself to keep warm in the cooling night. “Fate is something we cannot fight, so the Orishas tell us. Whatever we do, it is what was meant to happen. Even unto death. Do you believe this? Do you believe that whoever you lost was fate, and do you accept it?” she asked, passion behind the strangely quiet words.
He dropped his head, slowly shaking it. "No. No I don't believe that. I believe that men are the reason she's gone, that men made their own decisions, that there is wickedness in man I can't blame anyone else but man for." He gestured to a grave as the passed it, topped with a rather large cross. "I was raised Catholic. Now, I think my only opinion of a higher power is that, if he is there, he is cruel." He looked over at her. "But by no means does that mean I think you should feel the same way I do. I wish I was you. I wish I could believe in fate like that, throw it to the wind and say it was meant to be, but I can't. One of my many failings, I guess."
“Fate is interesting in that it does not matter if you believe it. Fate does not care, and it does not need your permission,” she said with a quiet smile that bellowed with certainty. “Fate simply is, and only faith makes it palpable. I was raised to believe this, and I feel it in my bones, but I still challenge it.” She smiled at him. “Should we let our dead lie? Is there anything you would bend the world to return to you?” She would; it was obvious as she stepped through the cemetery gates and onto the sidewalk. “If you want a spell, something to change the sadness in your eyes, it will be waiting for you. Fate brought you to me for a reason, si?” A touch of her hand to his arm, and the electricity carried through fabric and tape to damaged skin. He would need a strong trabajo, this one. “Your hate, you must try to leave it at the door,” she warned him.
"Of course," he said, looking over to her, smiling faintly. "I expect that's obvious enough." If there was a way to bring her back - but there wasn't, and there was no use torturing himself any more than he already did by thinking too hard about it. He hesitated a moment, then added, “But there is always the question if they would want to come back, given the chance. Once you’ve been dead, would coming back only somehow make it worse? Do they want to come back here? Wouldn’t it change them, having been dead once?”
He wasn't sure how to take her offer of a spell to fix him. There was no doubting that she had power of some kind - he'd just seen it in action, more than faith, something tangible and very real. But he found it hard to believe that a spell could somehow set him to rights. There were too many things wrong in him, too many things broken. If it did work, though...what would that be like? Would it be cheating, somehow, skipping through to the end, would it simply be a trick?
He felt the tripping of something that sparked through his clothes and over his skin, and he looked up at her. "I can try," he said, still with that small smile. His expression and demeanor out of the mask were relatively quiet, still, and gentle, and when anyone could see through that it always left him a little thrown off. He couldn't help but want to know more about her, suddenly, about where she had come from and why she was here. "How should I contact you?"
Would her father want to come back? It was something she had not considered, had not thought through. Suddenly, she was in a hurry, and it showed. She would pray over it, and she would ask for a sign if her path was not the right one. “Fate brought me here to do this thing that I am meaning to do,” she told him. “If it had not wanted me to succeed, why did it not break my raft upon the shore in a million pieces?” she asked him, but there was a new doubt in her eyes that had not been there before.
“I work for the County Medical Examiner,” she said, reaching into her bag for a business card and handing it to him with a twist of her wrist and the card slipped between her fingers like silk and magic. The card had her full name, her office number and her cell, and she hoisted her bag higher on her shoulder once she had handed it to him. “You may think it over,” she told him of the offer. She did not expect him to have a ready answer, and she did not expect him to trust her. People came to her when they had exhausted all else, and she could not tell if he was at that point yet.
"You're probably right," he said. He wouldn't try to take her faith from her, not when he saw the doubt creeping in. It sounded like she was much more serious about endeavoring to bring her father back than he had thought, but he had needed to tell her that he might not want it, even if she could find a way - he spoke from experience, after all. He took the business card from her, glancing over it before tucking it into his pocket and nodding to her. "I will," he said simply. "Thank you."