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Out of habit I snapped my fingers when I entered the room.
A white light flared to life overhead, giving the room a more house-like feel, though everything still glowed a greenish hue, and there was no way to completely ignore that the furniture, from benches to beds, was all formed from the gnarled roots of the tree itself.
“This is really where you grew up?” Wilder asked.
“From thirteen to eighteen. Yup.”
He cast his gaze up, looking to the ceiling which was just the interwoven branches of the sycamores. Somehow, in spire of the smallish size of the space and the fact everything was made of things from the surrounding bayou, it didn’t smell damp or boggy. The inviting smell of the fire, and whatever La Sorciere was brewing in the pot, it was all so lovely.
She jerked her chin towards a nearby bench, and I guided Wilder to it, pushing him down with a hand on his shoulder.
“Memere,” I said, reclaiming her attention as she started puttering around the room. “This is Wilder Shaw.”
She paused, then leaned her cane against the wall and shuffled over to us. She stopped directly in front of him and cupped his face in her small palm, tilting up his chin so she could get a better look at him. Turning his face side to side as if he were a contestant at the Westminster Dog Show she was determining the breeding quality of, she finally gave a faint, approving smile, and looking at me, winked once.
Then, without a single word to either of us, she returned to the bubbling pot in the middle of the room, picked up a big wooden spoon and began to stir.
“She likes you,” I said.
“How can you tell, she didn’t say anything.”
“Oh, I know.” And it was true. We’d barely been with her for twenty minutes and already the silent understanding that existed between us when I’d lived here had returned.
Memere didn’t speak traditional French. It wasn’t the Canadian French my Grandmother McQueen now favored, or the Cajun French that popped up in Louisiana. It certainly wasn’t Parisian French. She had a version all her own. Even if Wilder had spoken French fluently, I doubted he would have been able to understand her.
As it was, Wilder didn’t speak any kind of French.
And Memere didn’t care if anyone could understand her. She lived out here all by herself and didn’t have much cause to speak to anyone. When I’d lived with her she was already in the habit of getting by without many words. The sentence she’d spoken by the boat, You came home, chere, was almost as many words as I’d heard her speak in my five years living with her.
Honestly, it was sort of amazing how well you could learn to communicate with just looks after a while.
I still found it a bit jarring sometimes how much people in the real world needed to talk talk talk all the damned time. None of them had all that much to say, when it came down to it.
Memere ladled whatever was in the pot into small, hand-carved wooden bowls and offered one to both Wilder and I. It looked like a stew of root vegetables and alligator meat.
Wilder looked at me with a brow lifted, asking if it was safe to eat.
See? Wordless communication!
“It’s delicious, I swear.”
He took a bite and seemed to take a good long time deciding if I was right, or if I’d lied to him just to get a laugh at his expense. He would deserve it for all those cookie elf jokes. Jerk. But in this case, I wasn’t full of shit. Memere could make incredibly tasty food out here without the help of grocery store ingredients.
Though I’d learned, since my time being back, I couldn’t have managed it out here without my two most vital menu staples: coffee and pasta.
Wilder finally decided he liked the taste, because he smiled with satisfaction and polished off the rest of the bowl. I followed suit, eating my own stew. Memere watched us until she was sure we weren’t faking our enjoyment, then served herself. She’d made so much of the stuff I had to wonder if she’d known well in advance I was coming.
We sat in collective silence, indulging in a tasty meal before the real reason for my visit had to be discussed. Once she cleared away the bowls and put them in a little root basin by the sink to clean later, she pulled up a stool made from a large tree stump, and placed it in front of Wilder and I, took a seat, and stared at me expectantly.
“Couldn’t I just be here to say hi?” I asked, answering the question she hadn’t asked.
Yup, we were right back into our old rhythm, as if I hadn’t left.
She said nothing and I sighed. “No, of course you’re right.”
Memere folded her hands in her lap patiently, her grizzled knuckle joints looked large and painfully swollen, but they didn’t seem to bother her.
“Is she speaking to you, like… telepathically?” Wilder whispered.
