Voodoo Heart Read Online Free Page B

water. He and Dex sat at the island’s rocky tip, waiting for the ambulance to appear across the bridge and take Dex to the hospital. Dex had fallen into the water making a grab at a girl floating by, and though he was calm, he could not stop shaking beneath his heavy blanket. He refused to let Pres move him inside the tower. “I’m fine, Pres,” he said, his voice ragged with tiny gasps. Frost sparkled in his beard. “Let’s just wait here by the falls.”
    “Your funeral,” Pres said, and clapped Dex on the back. He knew that the water here was shallow, and he knew that Dex was too strong a swimmer to be pulled far from the shore. But no matter how many times he watched it happen, seeing Dex fall into the river never failed to terrify him. It was the moment just after Dex hit the water that always scared him most, the instant when the current first tugged Dex toward the edge of the rock as though he were the one being hooked. But the falls could get you like that, Pres thought. He looked at the southern shore where a tree had been grabbed by the ice and moved fifty yards downriver, just plucked out of the ground with its roots intact.
    “I took a couple swallows of that water and I can feel it sitting right here,” said Dex, moving his trembling hand to his stomach. “It’s like a frozen pond at the bottom of my gut.” In Dex’s lap was the girl he’d saved from the river, who, it turned out, wasn’t a girl but a girl’s doll. She had three faces, and they turned beneath a wig fastened in place: happy, sad, and tired, with her eyes drawn half-closed.
    Looking at the doll now, Pres could hardly believe that he hadn’t seen it for what it was. But he’d argued with Claire until late the night before and he was exhausted; his eyes ached in their sockets. The fight had erupted over a present. Their wedding was approaching, and as a gesture of congratulations, Claire’s old boss, Earl Flatt, had offered to use the two of them to make molds for a new pair of background figures at the museum. Pres was excited about the idea.
    “It’ll be nice,” he said. “Like a portrait of us made of wax.” They were lying in his bed, cupped together to keep warm. Outside, the tree branches creaked with ice.
    “I don’t know. The figures always turn out sort of weird-looking,” said Claire.
    “They might come out all right,” said Pres, though he agreed that Flatt often mixed too much fat in the wax, which made the faces look eerily translucent. “I’m sure you’ll look beautiful.”
    “I’d feel too guilty,” said Claire. “I don’t think I’m going to go back and work there again in the spring, and Earl puts a lot of effort into those dummies. He sticks in each hair himself with a needle. He orders the glass eyes special from a hospital.”
    The wax museum had closed for the winter, and in the meantime Claire was working at a gift shop in town. The shop’s staple was its glass figurines, which the owner, Becca, fashioned in an upstairs workshop; glass men and women in all manner of activity: walking hand in hand, dancing, bowing to one another. Becca had taken a liking to Claire, and was teaching her how to craft the figurines herself. For the time being, she had Claire sculpting glass infants, as they were the simplest figurines the shop sold. Claire’s hours there were surprisingly long; usually she didn’t get home until after dark. It felt to Pres as though they were spending less and less time together every day. He tried to ignore the smell of the torch gas on her skin as they lay in bed.
    “It’d be romantic,” Pres said. “We can go back when we’re old and see ourselves when we were just starting out.”
    “You have to stick your face in plaster for an hour. Plus, it’s creepy. It’s like having yourself stuffed and mounted.”
    “Jesus. You make it sound so morbid. Fine, forget it.”
    “No, we can do it if you really want to.”
    He turned away from her. “Drop it,” he said,