She doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but she looks at me curiously. “See what?”
“You can see the things no one else can see too.”
She squints her eyes at me.
“You know.” I lower my voice. “The spirits.”
Then, quick as a flash, she puts her hand over my mouth. It’s hot and tastes like salt. “Don’t say that,” she whispers, and almost sounds angry about it.
“So you can see,” I say against her hand. Relief washes through me—maybe I’m not so crazy after all.
“Would you be quiet?” She doesn’t say anything, so it’s just the two of us looking at each other, her fingers damp against my chin. When she decides she can trust me to speak again, she lowers her hand.
“I’ll only say this once, so pay attention,” she whispers. “They don’t like being spoken about. Speaking about the spirits is like calling their names, and once you call their names, they’ll have the freedom to follow you and torture you until the end of time.”
For a second, I don’t talk, I’m so relieved she can see the things I can too. If she can, then I’m not crazy—unless it’s just the two of us together that are. Or unless she’s playing the cruelest game of all.
I finally speak. “How’re we supposed to talk about them, then?” I whisper back.
“We don’t.” She sits straighter with a finality that I guess is supposed to be the period on our conversation, but I know I can’t give up, not that easily.
“But why not?”
“I said I was only going to tell you once.”
“Just because we’re scared of them?” I sit straighter too, to match her straightness, and she looks surprised by it. I must admit, I’m surprised by it too. Kalinda has always been the one in charge of this relationship. The one who does not need me as much as I need her. She must have realized this, for it’s a plain fact, right there for both of us to see. She doesn’t take advantage of it, but in the same way that a student knows less than a teacher, I’ve always followed her around and listened to her thoughts and tried my best to answer her questions. I’ve never sat with my back as straight as hers.
“If I’m right about this,” I say, “then they have my mom. And I want her back.”
Kalinda takes in a big breath, like she also plans on taking all the air that exists in this world into her lungs, then stops and let’s it all out again. “That’s an important reason enough, I cannot lie.”
I wait for her to speak again.
“Most days I still don’t even know if they’re real,” she says. “If they’re just in my head.”
“Then they’re just in both our heads, and we’re crazy together.”
“Well, I don’t know if our heads are real either.”
At first I don’t know what she means by that, but I don’t have much time to think on it anyway, because suddenly she stands from her bed and she tells me she’ll consider everything I’ve said and will come to me tomorrow morning in the courtyard at school, and really it isn’t until I’m walking out her house and down the road past the rusted cars and the men playing dominoes that I realize what she meant. She doesn’t know if our heads are real either because she doesn’t know if we’re real either. And the idea gets me to thinking, because it’s never occurred to me before, that we might not even really exist. That we’re the figment of someone’s imagination, some crazy person or maybe spirit or god that’s just dreamed up each and every single one of us. Maybe the woman in black is real, while I’m the one who doesn’t exist.
I wait for Kalinda in the shade of a barren mango tree in the courtyard, away from everyone else. No one has touched me or laughed at me or thrown rocks at me since Kalinda and I became Carolinda, and I know I should be grateful, but for some reason, that just makes me even angrier. They won’t throw rocks at Carolinda, but they will throw rocks at Caroline? That doesn’t feel very fair at all.
Kalinda comes walking, like she promised. She walks up the stairs and straight for me, and coming up on the steps behind her is the white woman in her dressing gown.
I grab Kalinda’s hand. “You can see her too,” I say.
“Yes,” Kalinda says.
“Who is she?” I ask.
“I don’t know, but she must have me mistaken for someone else. Someone she knew when she was alive. Or maybe she knows my ancestors. Or maybe I will meet her in the future.”
I frown in confusion. “In the future? But she’s dead—she can only be a ghost from the past.”
“No,” Kalinda says, “not necessarily. Time is something we’ve made up in our heads. Time isn’t real at all. The time before I was born, and all the days that I’m alive, and the time after I will die is all one in the same, Caroline. The spirits could be friends from the future or people from our past. Who knows? Maybe a spirit I see could even be me.”
I look back to the steps, and the woman has disappeared. “I’m not sure what to think about any of that,” I tell Kalinda. “I don’t want to think about spirits or ghosts at all. I just want to know where my mother is.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve thought about it,” she tells me, “and I will speak about them openly, but only because you need help finding your mother.”
I tell her that I’m most grateful. She asks me what it is that I want to know.
I ask Kalinda, “What do you know about ghosts?”
And she says, “More than I should.”
She tells
