She’s standing there in the corner of my room, and she’s not leaving this time, even when I look at her directly in the eye. She watches me without an expression on her face, because it seems even that is shrouded in blackness, in shadow, in darkness that’s growing and spreading across my wall and my bed until it seems like it’s night even though I know full well it’s day, and I can’t see anything at all but the glint of the white in her eye, almost as though her eyes are glowing themselves, stars shining in the night sky.
I can’t speak for a long time. Fear has gripped my throat. But finally I manage to force out “Who are you?”
She stands there in the corner of my room.
“What do you want?”
She still only stands.
“I’m not a person to harass,” I spit out with fake bravery. As soon as I say it, I flinch back. I decide then and there that she’s not my mother, because if she were my mother, she would’ve come to me a long time ago, wrapping her arms around me, and I wouldn’t even care that she’s shrouded in shadow, because she would be my mother. This woman—she’s too cold to even look at fully, too distant, not even a stranger, because with a stranger at least you can feel you’ll eventually become friends, but with this woman I know that will never happen.
And I realize then and there that something else is just as clear: The woman in black is the reason my mother has disappeared.
“Did you take her?” I ask, my voice such a whisper that even I barely hear it.
She’s gone. Gone like she’d never even been there at all. Light reaches the corner of my room again, and the room fills with yellow. I stand where I am for a long time, wondering if she was only a part of my imagination, if she’s only been a trick of the light, creating shadows in the corner of my room in the form of a woman standing there, watching me.
Maybe I’m just crazy, crazier than the man that spits at tourists by the docks. Just as crazy as I’m afraid I’ve always been.
But if she’s real—if the woman in black exists as much as I do standing right here on my own two feet—then I also know she has something to do with it. With everything. She knows something about my mom. I’m going to get her back.
I don’t know for sure if the woman in black has my mom, but I do know that the woman in black has something to do with my mother’s disappearance. It can’t be a coincidence that she has continued to appear in my life, coming to me that much more frequently since my mother left, as if laughing at me—taunting me. Maybe she knows where my mother is. To find my mom, I have to find the woman in black first.
I’m not sure what makes her come sometimes and leave others. She has to have a reason for her ways, but whatever those reasons are, I don’t know them at all.
I do know one thing, though: I’ve never actually tried to call to the woman in black. I’ve never asked her to suddenly appear and scare half my life away. It’s never been something that’s occurred to me that I could try. Is it even possible to call her—to make her come, to perhaps somehow trap her, to interrogate her about my mother until finally she spreads her arms wide and my mother stumbles out from the darkness?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I think I know where I might find one.
My school has a library that used to be a classroom, with wooden and plastic shelves covering the walls all around the room, with every single book imaginable, since all the books are ones that have been donated from anyone and everyone all over the island. Hardly anyone ever goes inside, because the ones who do go inside are declared to be the strangest of misfits that no one is ever allowed to like anymore, but since I’m disliked by everyone anyway (well, except Kalinda now), I’ve always found it easy to stroll inside and spend time with myself and the hundreds of worlds lined up before me. I’ve learned endless things in this library, even things my mother would not have thought to teach me, such as the fact that there’s an entire town filled with rotting dolls near Mexico City, or that there’s a fungi that takes over the brains of ants and makes those ants do their bidding, and the fact that there could be an infinite number of universes, which means that there could be an infinite number of Caroline Murphys living on an infinite number of Water Islands—except that maybe some of those Caroline Murphys aren’t on Water Island at all. There’s an infinite number of possibilities and outcomes for each of those universes, so maybe my mother met my father while he was still living abroad, and they got married and had me while they were living in Paris. I could be speaking French in another universe. I could be happy and normal and popular, as popular as Anise Fowler. I could be in love with a boy, like all the other girls in my class. Or maybe my mother has not met my father at all in another universe, and so I don’t even exist. Maybe this is the only universe where I am here, and this is me, and there’s only one universe where there’s a Caroline Murphy.
I love the library, and I’ve spent many of my afternoons there, so I think it’s possible that the answers I need—everything I
