Page 50 of The Women of Wild Hill
FROM HER SEAT ON HERmother’s grave, she could see the distant glow from the caretaker’s cottage. Brigid Laguerre had zero close friends. And she sure as hell wasn’t ready for family.
Wild Child
Phoebe’s father was the world-famous painter Francois Voyante. At the tender age of ten, Francois had been orphaned by agents of Papa Doc Duvalier. At twelve he built a raft out of empty bleach bottles and a door and sailed it solo across the shark-filled waters between Haiti and Key West. That accomplishment—and the press attention it received—helped pave a path to citizenship. When it became clear that the boy was artistically gifted, benefactors from around the globe paid for private schooling. He sold his first works at age twelve and had patrons by fourteen. Throughout his career, Francois shunned fame and neglected his ever-growing fortune. Though his work was displayed in the most prestigious galleries in New York City, he lived in a small, clapboard house in the Okefenokee Swamp with no indoor plumbing or electricity. The waters around the fishing shack were patrolled by gators and copperheads. Mosquitoes attacked in full force every evening at sunset. This was where Phoebe went to live after Flora died.
When word reached him of Flora’s suicide, Francois chartered a private plane out of Savannah to take him to New York to pick up his daughter. Once the two of them were back in Georgia, he returned to his everyday life, which involved ingesting copious amounts of handpicked psilocybin and waiting for his creative muse. The spirit would often abandon him for several days at a time. But when she came back, he’d paint nonstop for a week. His works famously focused on one small corner of Haiti—a lush, impossibly fertile mountainsidewhere his ancestors had escaped slave traders a hundred years earlier. There, Francois had lived with his mother, a renowned priestess known for her botanical cures. When Papa Doc’s men set the hill ablaze, Francois’s mother made sure he escaped. Unfortunately, it meant she did not.
Flora met Francois at a gallery where she’d purchased three of his paintings. Phoebe never had to ask why her mother had been so drawn to his work—or why her father was obsessed with his childhood home. The magic of the place came through in his paintings. The hill that haunted his memory bore the stamp of the Old One—and though it wasn’t a word Francois’s mother would have used, there was little doubt that she’d been a witch.
Phoebe, like so many children of gifted artists, often found herself left to her own devices. It wasn’t that her father didn’t love her. He adored her. The problem was, most of the time, he didn’t know she was there. Forced to fend for herself, Phoebe planted a garden and fished for her food. Rather than walk all the way into town to a school where people like her weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms, she educated herself, one library book at a time.
It was the loneliness that finally broke her. Six months into her two-year sentence in the swamp, Phoebe sat down and wrote Brigid a letter. Humbled and deeply unhappy, she apologized for her part in their argument and begged her sister to assume custody of her when Brigid turned eighteen. Braving the brutal Southern heat, Phoebe hiked the five miles into town to the post office where her father’s mail collected until he bothered to pick it up. Every week, Phoebe returned, hoping for an answer. There was never anything for her in the box. Finally, she contacted the lawyer who’d given her the address and demanded a phone number for her sister. When she called, Brigid’s stepmother answered the phone.
“Yes, she received your letter,” Sienna Laguerre told her in a voice so gentle that Phoebe imagined her dressed in a DisneylandSnow White costume with little jewel-colored birdies perched on her shoulders. “I handed it to her myself.”
“Did she say anything about it?” Phoebe asked.
Sienna let the long pause that followed deliver the truth. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she said at last. “I’m afraid Brigid only thinks of herself these days.”
Phoebe was sixteen years old, and she’d already lost all the people she loved. As angry as she’d been, she had never once doubted Brigid would save her. So Sienna Laguerre’s news hit Phoebe’s world like an asteroid. Everything she thought she knew was blown straight to hell. Even well into her forties, whenever she thought of the letter she sent, the hurt felt fresh. Phoebe wished she could put an end to her suffering. She’d nursed countless living things back to health over the years, but she’d never figured out how to heal her own wounds.
It was only a few months after her chat with Sienna Laguerre that Phoebe came face-to-face with her sister again. She was on her way through town to the library, her uncut hair tied back with a faded bandanna and her jeans stitched up in a dozen places. She could feel the hot asphalt through the holes in her shoes. It wasn’t uncommon for the white folks to stare at her. At first, she’d been intimidated. Now she glared right back at them. But this time when she sensed someone’s eyes on her, there was no flesh-and-blood being behind them. Staring out from a movie poster on the wall of the dinky town cinema were her sister’s two bright blue eyes. Brigid was the star of the summer’s blockbuster movie.
“That fucking bitch!” Phoebe swore a little too loudly. An old lady gasped and two teenage girls froze in their tracks. “It’s my sister!” Phoebe tried to explain.
The two teenage girls tittered and hurried away. Nobody in Nowheresville, Georgia, was going to believe that the unkempt daughter of a swamp-living, Haitian-born artist was related to a lily-white movie star.
Phoebe bought a ticket to the matinee. There, in the dark, empty theater, she watched her sister lop off zombie heads with a samurai sword and sobbed for ninety-four minutes straight.
WHEN SHE TURNED EIGHTEEN ANDcould finally access her trust fund, Phoebe was free to live as she liked. By then, there was no more princess left inside her. Phoebe had gone utterly feral. She’d learned to love living off the land, and she had no interest in being around people. There were two states she swore she’d never set foot in again—New York and California. So she split the difference and moved to Texas. She bought a ranch in the middle of nowhere, expecting to lead a lonely, ascetic life. Then one day the young mayor showed up on her doorstep to ask for her vote. She brought him inside and gave him far more than that. He was handsome and righteous and he looked damn fine in a pair of tight jeans and cowboy boots. Before long, they’d shacked up together. Less than a year after that, Phoebe gave birth to their daughter.
Phoebe was happy in Texas. Blissfully so. She didn’t dwell on the past anymore, and she had no desire to see her sister. But she had to admit that she enjoyed Brigid’s movies, and she had secret subscriptions toUs WeeklyandPeoplejust to keep up with her whereabouts.
NOW HER ONE BIG FEARhad come to pass. Phoebe had been called back to Wild Hill. The moment she arrived she knew her sister was already there. She could smell the bitch from the gate. Phoebe plucked an apple off the tree by the pond and followed the trail of pot smoke to the Duncan family cemetery, where Brigid was splayed out across their mother’s grave, dressed in black as always, with a spliff sticking straight up out of her mouth. She opened one eye and as soon as she caught sight of Phoebe, the other popped open and she raised herself up on her elbows.
“Nice tattoos,” Brigid said.
Phoebe’s arms and shoulders were lined with text written in Haitian Kreyol. Things she knew, things she believed, and all the things she hoped would come true. “Thanks.”
A leaf flew free of Brigid’s hair when she shook her head. “I always wanted a few tats, but it would have taken too much time to cover them up for filming,” she said. “Maybe now that I’m not in front of the camera so much I’ll get some.”
Phoebe took a seat on Lilith’s grave and got to business. “So I guess you got a message from the Old One?”
“Yeah.” Brigid took a toke and offered the joint to Phoebe, who shook her head no. “She wasn’t exactly subtle. The fucking house burned down.”
Phoebe chewed her first bite of apple. “You get a warning first?”
“Birds,” Brigid told her. “Three ravens. Can’t get any clearer than that.”
Phoebe understood. She knew how to read the signs, too. “Three, huh? Who died?” she asked.
“The arsonist who set the house on fire.”
“Ah,” Phoebe said. “Did you kill him?”
“Yeah. First kill in thirty years. Glad I did, though. Apparently, our house wasn’t the only one he’d torched. Wouldn’t have been the last, either. What was your message?”
Phoebe took another bite. “Feral hog showed up in my yard. I told it to fuck off and a tornado ripped my house right off the foundation.”
