My Soul to Keep Read Online Free PDF Page B

nightmares. She found out he was some kind of expert from the music department, and he taught Spanish for fun. Just her luck. He was making her life miserable in her junior year, the year everyone said was supposed to be her most carefree, when the flow of college is under control and graduation is still a year away.
    When all of her friends were at parties, she was up late writing in her Spanish workbook. She was reciting phrases into a tape recorder and playing them back, fearful of Dr. Wolde’s reaction if she stumbled in class. He had a way of gazing at students when they made mistakes, eyebrows arched, that made Jessica want to curl under her desk. He was totally uncompromising. Jessica had always considered herself a perfectionist, and here was someone who made her feel like a slacker. She didn’t like the feeling.
    On the day of the final, Dr. Wolde had the nerve to encourage them to sign up for his Intermediate Spanish 2 course. “Honey, pleez …” the other black student, Rene, muttered just within Jessica’s hearing. “This man must be on crack.”
    Jessica passed Dr. Wolde’s class with a B-minus, souring a column of A’s and B-pluses. She didn’t know whether to shout with joy from her dorm rooftop or to slash Dr. Wolde’s tires. She swore she’d had all the Spanish she could stand.
    She didn’t realize until a week later, chatting to a young man selling roses to motorists at a red light on South Dixie Highway, that she could speak Spanish with confident ease. “Are you Dominican?” the man asked her, in Spanish, indicating the dark skin of her forearm.
    “No,” she said. “Pero, tuve un buen profesor.”
    She’d had a good teacher.
    That same day, Jessica signed up for Intermediate Spanish 2 with Dr. Wolde. The man from her nightmares, she thought ironically, smiling at herself.
    Her life would never be the same.
     
     
    “Mommy’s home!”
    Kira called through the screen door as Jessica climbed out of the minivan and let the door fall shut behind her. The driveway was a long, gravelly descent into a yard so overgrown with thick tree trunks, palm trees, and wide leafy plants that the two-story house was invisible from the street. A wooden marker pounded into the live oak just beyond the driveway identified their address, 376 Tequesta Road. They lived in El Portal, a secluded area west of busy Biscayne Boulevard, perched on the bank of the river.
    It was long after dark, and Jessica heard a familiar whistling in the treetops overhead. The noise was half human, half something else, sometimes sounding like a war cry. When visitors asked about the high, persistent sound, as Peter had once, she explained it was the call of an old Indian woman’s ghost.
    If the visitor looked at her askance, as they almost always did, Jessica told them their house was on haunted Tequesta Indian ground, like in Poltergeist, except their haunts weren’t in a pissy mood. Their property was across the street from a grassy burial mound with a prominent marker erected by the city decades before, and their yard even had a small cave built into a knoll near the street. Children and bent-over adults could actually walk into it and vanish into the solitude. The cave wasn’t elaborate, just rough limestone walls and a pressed dirt floor. No hieroglyphics. Nothing sinister. The cave was one of Teacake’s favorite daytime hiding places, and Kira took her playmates inside during neighborhood barbecues. Five or six could squeeze in at a time.
    At first, Jessica had considered the added features to their seventy-year-old house only a novelty, but now she treated the ground with reverence. Was she superstitious? Whenever she drank outside, whether beer or Diet Coke or mineral water, she poured the first sip on the ground as a libation. Jessica had decided the ghost in the trees was a woman and named her Night Song. She heard her gentle call tonight. Night Song was their neighbor.
    Jessica expected to hear Princess’s barking