Denise Swank: The Curse Keepers

I closed my eyes, nausea churning in my stomach. “I don’t know. I do know that I’d never seen him before until he walked into the restaurant.”

“What happened?”

I set the towel in the spare basket and began folding another. “Not much. He ordered a beer, I felt like I’d been slightly electrocuted, I nearly suffocated, then he left.”

“So it’s true.”

This was all happening too fast, the consequences too high. I’d spent the last fifteen years convinced none of this was real. There was no way I could simply accept it as truth now. “No, it’s not. There’s got to be a logical explanation why I couldn’t breathe.” I sat up and held out my palm, then quickly closed it when I saw the red scorch mark and faint lines of the circle and square still there. “Maybe I developed a sudden allergy. Like maybe to peanuts or cashews. Claire only has to walk on a plane with peanuts and her throat gets tight.”

Daddy’s confidence wavered. Flashbacks of middle school hit me full force, when I told him I never wanted to talk about the curse again. Seeing his current disappointment made me feel like I was disappointing him all over again. But nothing good ever came from believing in the curse. The only thing the curse produced was four hundred years of endless waiting. The children of Egypt searched for forty years for the Promised Land. At least they got manna from heaven for their trouble. The ancestors of Ananias Dare got disappointment and heartache. I fully intended to stay as far away from the curse as possible.

Daddy sat back in his chair and rocked for several moments, both of us sinking into our own thoughts. It was like old times, when we wallowed in the murky limbo between Momma’s death and Myra’s entrance in our lives. When it was just Daddy and me, suffocating in our grief and our guilt.

“A storm’s a brewing, Ellie.”

Daddy was right. Clouds had begun to churn and darken in the short time since I’d walked over from the restaurant. “I’ll make sure the trash cans are put away before I leave.”

His hand covered mine and squeezed. “No, a storm’s coming. I feel it in my bones.”

A chill ran up my spine. “That’s called arthritis, Daddy.”

“Be ready, Elliphant. You’re the Keeper now. You’ll have until the beginning of the seventh day and not a moment longer.”

That’s what worried me.

Sometime between leaving Daddy and slathering my hair with conditioner, I’d convinced myself that I’d gotten myself worked up over nothing. From what little I remembered of the curse, nasty things were supposed to happen as soon as it was broken. Here it was over four hours since my encounter with that man , as I’d begun to refer to him, and the worst thing to happen was I couldn’t find my new sandals to wear with my thrift store–find sundress. Honestly, that in itself was a tragedy.

But the misplacement of my sandals had everything to do with the fact my closet was a mess and nothing to do with evil spirits. What were evil spirits going to do with strappy sandals?

When Dwight knocked on my door promptly at 6:45, I answered barefoot and breathless. “Hi.” I’d crawled out from underneath my bed and my just dried, long hair was a mess, negating my five minutes of styling.

Dwight stood on my porch wearing his work clothes—gray dress pants with a pale blue shirt and yellow tie. I loved me a man in a tie. “Ready?”

I opened the door wider to let him in. “I was just looking for my shoes. Give me a second.”

“We don’t want to be late.” I heard a slight tone of worry in his voice. “All the good seats will be taken.”

Good seats in relation to the Manteo Pioneer movie theater was a relative term. “I’ll just take a second.”

As I disappeared into my bedroom, I noticed Dwight glancing around my apartment. He’d only been inside once, and this time I made sure that it was picked up. Especially since I hoped to come back here later.

I grabbed another pair of sandals and stepped into them as I walked back into the living room. “See? All ready.”

Dwight stood next to the door and eyed me up and down, taking in my pink, sleeveless dress. “The air conditioning tends to run cool at the theater here. Aren’t you worried you’ll get cold?”

I gave him a coy smile. “That’s what I have you for.”

Confusion flickered in his eyes. “I don’t have a jacket to share with you.”

I fought a groan as I picked up my purse. This man was dense. “That’s okay. I’ll take my chances.” I followed him out and locked my door. As we descended the steps from my third-floor apartment, a weird tingling tickled my palm. I felt as though someone or something was watching me. I shook it off. All this curse nonsense was getting to me.

We walked to the theater, and I snagged Dwight’s hand. The streets of Manteo were filled with tourists going to dinner and walking around the town and by the pier. The shops that lined Queen Elizabeth Boulevard, the main street downtown, stayed open late in the summer, snagging more sales of beach trinkets and Roanoke souvenirs. We passed Poor Richard’s Sandwich Shop, a small restaurant and bar.

“Do you want to grab something at Poor Richard’s? I didn’t have a chance to eat.”

He scrunched up his nose. “But we’ll be late for the movie.” In the few times I’d been out with Dwight, I’d learned he was a creature of habit who didn’t like the rules changed midstream. He’d asked me out to the movie, not dinner. To throw in dinner was like derailing a train.

“We’ll only miss the previews.” I gave him a sweet smile. “Or we could skip the movie and just talk.”

His eyes bugged as though I’d suggested we set his pants on fire. “But I really want to see this movie.”

I forced a smile as we passed the restaurant and turned the corner at the old courthouse.

“Do you ever get tired of all the chaos?” Dwight asked as we stepped around a family who’d stopped to pick up their kid’s fallen ice cream cone.

I shook my head. “No. It’s so quiet the rest of the year that I like the reminder that there’s a whole world out there outside of this little town.”

“Why not go out there and see it yourself?”

Now didn’t seem like a good time to bring up the fact that I found it physically difficult to get too far from Roanoke Island. “So what’s playing tonight?” I knew it was an action movie, one that had been out several weeks. There was one small movie theater in town, and it only had one screen.

Dwight didn’t notice that I’d avoided his question and told me that the special effects were supposed to be spectacular. He was excited that the theater had recently added digital so he wouldn’t lose all the great CGI. I nodded and smiled, hoping this evening would end up with an entirely different kind of action.

The movie was loud and packed with explosions. The theater was freezing, and Dwight was too dense to catch any hints about putting an arm around my shoulders to keep me warm. To top it off, a kid sat behind me, kicking my seat the last half of the film. When we left the theater, I was cold, hungry, and cranky. I was cursed all right.

We walked through downtown on the way back to my apartment. The sky was still overcast and the clouds churned overhead as if they were angry. The wind had picked up, and I grabbed the bottom of my dress to keep it from blowing up. Not that Dwight would have noticed.

The crowds were thinning, but I loved the excitement of the people who wandered the streets during the summer months. Wondering where they’d come from. The places they’d seen. Since I could never get more than a couple hundred miles away from Roanoke Island without a crushing pressure on my chest—which Daddy always declared was a byproduct of the curse—I had to fulfill my desire to see the outside world with the Internet and cable TV. That and the stories of home the tourists shared with me from time to time.