The Voodoo Breast: A Novel of Healing

By Eve Wallinga

"The Voodoo Breast: A Novel of Healing" features a Minnesota woman who is drawn to New Orleans for restorative breast surgery. Her post cancer journey reveals unforeseen trials in her marriage and forces her to re-evaluate the future she had taken for granted. She finds solace and salvation while exploring the mystical city.
Ghostly jazz music, disembodied whistling, and a realistic dream of another realm fuel Allie’s fascination with a growing host of unusual events and curious coincidences, which causes Kevin, her husband and travel companion, to question her grip on reality. The novel includes lyrical descriptions of the French Quarter’s streetscapes, music, food, people, shops, traditional events and Voodoo ceremonies. Allie feels a kinship with the healing, post-Katrina city and to New Orleans Voodoo and privately names her own reconstructed breast “the Voodoo breast.” While visiting New Orleans sites and ceremonies together, Kevin begins questioning his own skepticism and must decide whether to become more open to all of life’s experiences. The couple finds their love and faith tested by time, illness and their diverging views of reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eve Wallinga
• Release date: Apr 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310877179

Eve Wallinga

Eve Christensen Wallinga was born and raised in Racine, Wisconsin. She lives and writes in St. Cloud, Minnesota, with her husband, Gary, and very small dog, Harald. She has two grown children - a daughter and a son. She and her husband are collaborative visual artists and together wrote the regional best-seller, "Waterfalls of Minnesota's North Shore: A Guide for Sightseers, Hikers, and Romantics."For her novel, "The Voodoo Breast: A Novel of Healing," Eve's attention has turned to Southern landscapes - or more particularly, the New Orleans cityscape. In 2006, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was during her travels to New Orleans for breast reconstruction that she was inspired to write this story. As with any novel, some parts are based on truth and some are fiction. In "The Voodoo Breast," the reader would be surprised which are which . . .Eve holds master's degrees in clinical psychology and business administration. She is a citizen activist concerned with environmental issues, especially the preservation of natural areas. She is also an advocate for women's health, specifically breast cancer. She helped start the Breastoration Foundation, based in New Orleans, to educate women about the many reconstructive options available today and also to aid women in financially challenging circumstances who cannot afford the associated costs for breast reconstruction. The Breastoration Foundation operates under the umbrella of The Cancer Association of Greater New Orleans.

Book preview

PART I

Chapter One

New Orleans – November 2006

Well past the witching hour, Allie woke to the sound of Dixieland jazz. She heard it before she opened her eyes. It was soft, muffled. A cornet played a rowdy, tinny tune, clarinet in counter-melody, and trombone down low. Banjo and piano cavorted in the background spaces. The music mingled with the sigh of the air vents in the hotel room in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Allie lay on her back, knees bent, in the nest of pillows constructed for her by her husband, Kevin, who slept next to her in the mahogany four-poster bed. Slowly she opened her eyes, felt a moment of disorientation. All was dark. Only the delicate brass chandelier was visible in the foyer, faintly luminous in the back-light of the transom window.

Their hotel fronted a quiet side street—St. Ann—just a block off Jackson Square. The room sat at street level, on the corner of Madison and Chartres, marked by the white-on-black street sign beyond their window. She recalled no nightclubs or bars anywhere near. The music didn’t seem to be coming from an adjoining room. Three a.m. was too late—even in New Orleans—for serenading street musicians. Certainly too late for this location, blocks from the blues of Bourbon Street, more blocks from the jazz of Frenchmen Street. It seemed to be coming from a distant place—a place not quite here. Otherworldly . . .

What’s going on? she thought.

She imagined the music voiced the heart and breath and spirit of New Orleans, of all its celebrations and trials. And for some reason, she had been woken to hear it.

Kevin breathed even and deep, a slip of a snore hanging on at the edge. But suddenly he said, You’re kidding me! That can’t be, can it?

Allie could just make out his shadowy form. He’d said the words clear as day, though this was night; like he was wide awake, though he was not.

What can’t be? she asked softly. But he didn’t answer and rolled onto his side.

There was something about the room, the air. Allie felt she floated slightly—just above her body—in a place of total calm, total peace. The ghostly music whispered on.

Then a whistle. Outside the window. Someone whistling for a dog at this hour? No. Intended for a person. Like the person being whistled to was expecting it, a pre-arranged signal: two slow tones, high and low. As if a name were attached to the sing-song notes. A two-syllable name or a one-syllable name broken in two.

She heard it again—but softly next to her—right beside her bed, just beyond her ear. Somehow, this didn’t startle her. She just listened. The phantom music continued.

Again the whistle from outside. As though asking her to follow. Should she get up? Look out the window? But if she did, she feared the music would end, the magic disperse. That pulling in the outside would disrupt it all.

But perhaps the whistler would be leaning against a black iron streetlamp, ready to take her on a mysterious tour of New Orleans in the dead of this night. Maybe to those ancient cemeteries holding their occupants of bone and dust safely above the rising waters of hurricanes—like Katrina—that haunted this town. Would they encounter New Orleans Voodoo queens, vampires, and specters in the dark?

She wouldn’t wake Kevin, couldn’t risk it. His skepticism would surely make everything disappear.

What’s happening? Her thoughts drifted back to all that had occurred these last months. The whole black clump of it. The events felt strange and removed from who she was and where she was now, like a surrealistic play she’d been attending, its storyline leading up to this time and place.

She moved her left hand to her right breast. Held it gently. Felt its weight. Its warmth.

Chapter Two

Six months earlier

Minnesota – May 2006

Late spring in St. Cloud, the snow had melted in Allie’s yard, except for stubborn patches in the most shaded areas. The last of the lucent white Mississippi River ice let go of the sandy shore. She loved to venture outside this time of year, in search of the delicate, white bloodroot flowers and the more cheerfully-named Dutchman’s breeches, which appeared before most other plants had raised a lazy leaf or frond into the still chill air.

Life seemed to hold the most promise in this season. Both of her children were graduating, one from high school, one from college. A magazine was publishing a short story she’d written. And Kevin had finally agreed to go with her to marital counseling.

She hoped they could find again what they’d had in the earliest days of their relationship—love as easy as an old Beatles song. As the years passed, though, they’d let things slip. It was hard not to, with all the distractions and stresses of kids and careers. In tiny, barely noticeable increments, their words to each other became less caring, less respectful. Frustration and anger grew. Contempt along with it. So many of the things that attracted them to each other now caused irritation. Allie had never wanted their marriage to settle into mediocrity or worse. Now that Kevin seemed willing to face their problems together, she had faith summer days lay ahead.

It was also in this hopeful season that she found the lump in her breast. The nagging thought hovering in her mind for months—that life was going too well, that the other shoe would drop—seemed a premonition. But she gave in to the temptation to put off the check-up until after the grad parties, after the relatives flew home, and maybe even after the nest emptied in August.

This night, while home composing an e-mail to her sister, an alarm rang stridently. Leaping up from the keyboard, she sprinted downstairs to the furnace room, the source of the nasally drone. The long-silent carbon monoxide detector had sounded only once before, in the middle of that terrible night five years ago, when it shrieked her awake. She’d immediately sensed her father’s presence, though she knew he was lying in a hospital bed in South Texas. Twenty minutes later her sister called to tell her he was dead.

Recalling this now, her hand shook as she unplugged the alarm. It had been an unseasonably warm day, so the furnace wasn’t even running. She plugged it back in. Nothing.

Allie resumed her seat at the computer. Maybe Dad’s trying to communicate with me. She believed things like that, though Kevin thought her delusional. Maybe something’s wrong with Mom. Her mother was eighty-six years old, lived alone. Allie glanced at the clock: 1:29 a.m. Too late to call. Crazy she should even consider waking her mother over this.

She typed, Did you talk to Mom today? and pressed the send button, got up from her desk, turned off the lamp. It clicked back on.

Sinking back into her chair at the keyboard, she typed, Strange things happening. Like after Dad died. Calling Mom in the morning. Again Allie hit send. Then froze. Why do I assume this is about Mom? Adrenaline shot through her body, and she felt sick, her chest tight. Maybe it’s me.

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

Thus, Allie found herself dressed in one of those shapeless, cotton gowns, her breast about to be crushed by the mammographic instrument of torture only a male could have invented.

The technician positioned Allie’s right breast on the square plate of glass, saying, Take a deep breath. Don’t move, then cranked the upper plate down to squeeze her flat. As if she could move or breathe, on her toes, with her breast in a vise. God, it hurts! More than usual.

Later, in another darkened room, the ultrasound sensor—run over and over her nipple and the upper, outer quadrant of her right breast. The radiologist and technician pored over the image on the video monitor. They spoke in quiet voices, and she only heard the corners of their words as the imaging equipment murmured, shhhh.

Subtle, she heard the doctor say. Very hard to see. He slid the sensor slowly back over her nipple. As the scanning continued, along with their whispered words, Allie felt rising panic that something was after her she might not outrun.

See this? the doctor asked.

Mm hm, the technician replied.

I know where this is heading.

I’m recommending a biopsy, the doctor said, loudly now. Since we can’t tell by the ultrasound.

Okay, Allie said, voice clipped, head light.

She willed her mind blank, taking slow, deep breaths as she dressed. She gingerly shrugged into her blouse. Stepped into her shoes. Picked up her purse.

The tech handed her a pink carnation as she was leaving—they were being given to all mothers having mammograms this month. Allie walked to her car, then sat, staring out the window. She started the car and switched on the radio, heard a woman say, My hope is to eradicate breast cancer within the next decade. An interview with a breast cancer researcher and author.

Allie rolled down the window and dropped the carnation to the blacktop.

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

That weekend she asked Kevin to take her far away. They headed north from their Mississippi River town, through the farmlands of Central Minnesota and into lake country. Approaching Duluth, which hung on the edge of Lake Superior, the big vistas began—glittering water with forested islands, and then the city itself, built on the steeply sloping hills that rose quickly away from the busy harbor until disappearing over the high horizon. Allie felt surprisingly free—almost as though everything was normal.

Beyond Duluth, the freeway split in two—the Old Scenic Highway 61 and the newer four-laner that ran straighter, faster, more removed from the lake. Allie knew Highway 61 connected the southern United States to the northern, more or less following the Mississippi before it wandered north the last couple hundred miles. Few people outside the state knew the river began in Minnesota with little more than a trickle out of Lake Itasca and no apparent aspiration for the important body of water it would become—what the Ojibwe had called Misi-ziibi or Great River.

When their children were much younger, Allie and Kevin had taken them to the smidgeon of a creek where the lake birthed the river. Allie had folded little Megan’s hand in her own, and they waded together, following Kevin with two-year-old Ben in front of him, grasping both of his father’s thumbs. Allie focused intently on the stream bottom, looking for the soft stretches of sand, when she noticed a white pebble shining through the clear water.

Stop a second, Megan, she’d said. She picked it up, her head leaning down next to Megan’s, as they stood examining it midstream. Not the typical sort of rock one found around here. Bone-colored. Parts rounded smooth and parts chipped, like one might find on a piece of flint or a carved arrowhead. She turned it in her fingers and saw, in the stone, the swelled abdomen of a woman, beginning just beneath where the breasts would be, with a tiny indentation of a navel in the middle. Pregnant, she’d thought, pregnant with possibilities.

At a crossroads in her life then, the decision she’d had to make was, now, unimportant. But she had felt that perhaps some power, or at least some inspiration, lay within that little stone. So she put it in the front pocket of her jeans, pushing it down deep with her thumb. She kept it on the table by her side of the bed and still handled it occasionally, rubbing the stomach, wondering what lay ahead of her in life, at the end of whatever river or whatever road.

Allie loved the landscape of the North Shore, especially where it took its stand against the elements of icy Lake Superior—the fabled Gitche Gumee of Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Here the Big Lake met the land on beaches or rocky outcrops or cliff faces that looked as though someone had taken giant bites out of the shoreline. Outlining the water, the hills sat one behind the other, the nearest darker than the farthest, the lake’s breath enveloping the most distant in mist.

Let’s have some music, Kevin said.

Allie felt for the CD case beneath her seat. She thumbed through the plastic pages, pulled out a disk and slipped it into the player on the dash. The sounds of the road gave way to the opening strains of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven.

Kevin sang harmony to the melodious guitar notes, followed by the hollow, haunting tones of the recorders.

If only I knew what the hell the words meant, he said.

They’d sung together years ago, soon after they’d met up at Marquette for grad school. Even sang a few gigs at some local bars—their lives as in synch as their voices—belting out Billy Joel or Elton John or anyone else who rode the radio waves then.

They’d been teaching assistants for the same professor for Psych 101. Had adjoining offices—little bigger than closets. Her confidence with the opposite sex soared high, and the business of studying to be a clinical psychologist languished at the bottom of her priority list.

Allie gazed back out the window at the lake blinking by, as the rock and roll beat stirred, bass joining, volume rising, mood intensifying. Then the melody slowed, and finally the single crooning voice, Cli-i-mbing a stay-ayr-way . . . to heh-eh-vennnnn.

In those early times, Kevin became her confidante, a steadying influence, someone she could count on.

A familiar, oscillating series of notes blared from the speakers, then, Born to be Wi-iiiy-ahld!

The miles ripped by, and Kevin turned in at the trail-head to Caribou Falls.

I thought we could hike to the top and cut over on the Superior Trail—there should be a good flow of water now.

Skirting the muddy patches as best they could, they ascended the dirt path. But still Allie felt the cold damp soak into her shoes. Nature decomposed all around, visible in the inky mud, the tea-colored water of the Caribou, and the lichen gnawing at the skin of birch trees.

Black canyon walls rose abrupt and sheer from the river. The cascade below grew louder, as they braved the precipitous descent, via dozens and dozens of steps, to the base of the waterfall. A small sand and pebble peninsula jutted into the saucer-shaped pool where the water pounded white and deafening.

Allie watched Kevin aim the camera to take in the scene. They both still shared, and mostly enjoyed, their time together in nature. Maybe because the focus was on something outside themselves. But the waterfall’s dampening breath cut short the photography session, so they trudged back up the stairs to an over-look of Lake Superior floating beneath them on the horizon.

Mind if we just sit? Allie asked.

Whatever, Kevin said. You okay?

Why?

He shrugged.

Allie felt surprised he’d asked her that. Surprised he’d even been thinking about her emotional state.

They plopped down on the wooden viewing platform. She closed her eyes, hearing the bellow of the waterfall, and beyond that, the cry of a gray jay. Heard the rustling of birch and pine in the updraft from the waterfall, breathed in the richness of life that existed in this boreal world. She fancied she could hear the breath of the planet, perhaps even the universe, in the sound of the wind, rivers, and ocean waves.

Tipping her face to the warm sun, one cobweb of a cloud slid across the otherwise clear, sapphire sky. If the biopsy showed cancer, she could think of no other place she would rather spend this last weekend of what seemed to her now as innocence—a naive sense that nothing really bad would ever happen to her.

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

The phone rang, waking Allie. She hadn’t slept well the last few nights.

Hi, Allie. It’s Dr. Hanson. Her family doctor. A primitive fear swept her body. If he’s calling me himself, it’s bad news.

Hi. She pushed the blanket aside, stood, and fixed her gaze out the window at the aspen trees, leaves quaking.

I have your biopsy results. I’m sorry to say they do indicate cancer.

Allie felt a wrenching shift. In the life she’d been living a few moments before, she didn’t have cancer. Would never get cancer. Her legs went weak, and she sat down hard on the bed.

She later remembered nothing of what she said to him—maybe because she had said nothing. What had he said to her? Something about the cancer looking small, in situ. She should have felt some relief, but then he said, mastectomy.

What? But he said it was small . . . The word registered, then she forcefully pushed it from her conscious mind. Somehow the conversation ended. Somehow she found herself in the bathroom, dry-heaving into the toilet.

Chapter Three

Kevin sat at his office desk deleting e-mails. Only a couple minutes until his next client. He still had the eval to write up on that ADHD kid he’d seen last week—staffing tomorrow. So much for some quick hoops over his lunch hour. Basketball lessened his stress level, the little time he had to squeeze it in. Maybe a client would cancel, and he’d have time to play some ball. Not that he wanted a cancellation. That would cut into his productivity quota for the month.

The phone rang. Now what?

Your wife is on the line, and your next client’s here.

Okay, put her through. Tell him I’ll be a few minutes.

Kevin heard some swirls of Dust in the Wind before it was cut off.

Allie? What’s up?

The doctor just called with the biopsy results.

God, how could I have forgotten about that?

I have breast cancer.

Kevin literally felt the blood drain from his face. He gritted his teeth and braced his insides, damming a flood of fear that threatened to knock him over.

The doctor said it was ‘in situ,’ whatever that means, Allie said, voice shaky. He might have told me, but I don’t remember.

Kevin’s panic turned to thoughts too terrifying to articulate. I have to take this one step at a time. Just like something he—the calm, logical psychologist—would tell a client. But this isn’t a client, this is Allie.

Yet he said, Let’s just take this one step at a time.

I can’t believe this is happening.

We’ll get through it. Everything will be okay. His words were empty, nothing substantive behind them.

But she replied simply, I know.

Her voice sounded alone. Maybe he should go home. Cancel his clients. But that would put him so far behind. And what could I tell her, anyway?

After a long, uncomfortable silence, he said, I should get going. I have someone waiting.

Okay.

Call me if you hear anything more.

Right.

Love you.

Love you, too.

As soon as he hung up, he began ruminating. How would he explain this to his family, his co-workers? He imagined crying when he told them, though he blocked the tears prickling at his eyelids now. He raked his hands through his hair.

He saw her dying. Pictured himself coming home to an empty house. There would never be anyone else like her in his life. It was hard enough, all those years ago, to open himself up to someone. He’d been so insecure. In truth, he still was. That’ll mean twenty, thirty years alone.

Why am I thinking this stuff? he said aloud. He stood, strode to the window. Damn it!

He glanced at the clock again. Ten minutes past time for his next patient.

Why am I worrying about me? He rubbed his forehead. I should have gone home.

Opening his office door, he headed down the hall to meet his client.

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

A few days later, Kevin and Allie settled themselves in leather chairs facing a vast