But I do have one friend. Kalinda. She has seen the woman in the courtyard—she can see the things no one else can see.
Maybe she could help me trap the woman in black. She could help me find my mother.
Kalinda. Kalinda. Kalinda. It’s like a song stuck in my head. I can’t think of anything else. She competes for my thoughts. Sometimes she wins. Kalinda Francis. Kalinda Francis. Kalinda Francis.
She catches me staring at her all the time, but she never seems to mind. Just keeps smiling like there’s nothing strange about it, nothing strange at all, that she would catch me watching her. I try to stop, but I can’t. One look at her sends my heart beating and bouncing against the walls in my chest, and sometimes it feels like it gets lodged in my throat too, and even though it feels like we’ve known each other since the moment we both came out of our mothers’ wombs, I look at her and I can’t speak a word.
We sit in her bedroom. I love her bedroom now even more than I love my own. I love seeing her, her dark skin the kind of brown that can’t be found anywhere else in nature, only on her, and I love seeing her twisted locks piled up onto her head. I love being near her. Love how she always smells like lemongrass, especially in the early mornings, yellow warmth radiating from her skin and clothes.
“Are you okay, Caroline?” she asks. She smiles.
Warmth spreads under my cheeks. “I’m okay,” I tell her. I’m still trying to find the courage to ask her about the things no one else can see—and for her to help find the woman in black.
She must know I’m lying, but she seems unconcerned. “I want you to close your eyes,” she says.
I hesitate. “Why?”
“Don’t you trust me?”
More than I even trust myself, but I’m not about to say that out loud. So I just close my eyes, and for a second, I hear nothing but myself breathing, the crinkling of the bedsheets, can practically hear Kalinda’s smile, and I smell the lemongrass as she comes closer, and then around my neck something cold bites into my skin, and I open my eyes to see a necklace with a seashell hanging from its end.
“I made it for you,” she tells me. I would’ve been nervous to say such a thing, but she doesn’t seem nervous about her declaration at all. “I know you said that you don’t like jewelry, but I do, and I wanted to give you something that I like. Do you like it?”
I haven’t even really looked at it. “I love it.” I love you. The thought comes to me as fast as a bolt of lightning, and I’ve never known something to be more true. I remember Missus Wilhelmina teaching us about stories of children falling in love, and saying that no one so young can really love so deeply—that we don’t even know what love truly is—but I know now, in this moment, that I love Kalinda Francis.
I fancy myself brave and think I’m the sort of person who will always speak my mind, but that’s the one thing I’m too afraid to say. I clutch the seashell in the palm of my hand. I don’t like necklaces, but I don’t think I’ll ever take this one off. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Caroline.”
Weeks pass like this, and after nearly a month of spending almost every moment with each other and not getting into fights, never tiring of each other’s presence, Kalinda and I become Carolinda, we’re together so much of the time. Most become used to it, watching us turn to exchange looks in class and mouth words to each other during morning prayer and hold hands together at our lunch table, since Kalinda has begun to let me take her fingers with mine, though it’s clear that it isn’t at all in the way that I would like to be holding hands. We only hold hands in the way that young girls do, when they’re five and skipping down the street together. Most girls our age have stopped holding hands, even if they’re friends, because that’s something babies do, but Kalinda doesn’t seem to care at all that we’re twelve years old and should not be holding hands as friends. So as we sit together, that’s what we do.
And I think some would’ve even joined us too if Kalinda and I hadn’t made ourselves a little invisible shield to say we didn’t want anyone near us but ourselves. Even a whole month later, Anise still looked bowled over by how everything had turned out, like Kalinda and I had taken turns spitting in her face.
And everything would be perfect too, except that I still don’t have my mom, and I still don’t have the courage to ask Kalinda for help with the woman in black, and I’m afraid that I’m actually insane.
But on the day that is my mother’s birthday, the house smells like spoiling bottles of rum, and I remember how my mother would buy me a gift on these days too, because she would say that she wanted to celebrate the best thing that’d ever happened to her.
I need Kalinda’s help. I know I have to find the courage to ask her.
I take in a deep breath, like I plan on sucking all the oxygen out of the air, and I let it out slowly again, same way God must have blown out through his mouth to create wind on the second day. “You can see it,” I tell her. I fiddle with the necklace she made me. It’s still cold
