Will you write to me, Caroline?
I nod, and fold the letter neatly, and put it on my dressing table. I’ll have to find a lot of paper and many pens.
My father tells me at dinner that my mother has called for me again.
“Can’t she realize I don’t want to speak to her?”
“But she wants to speak to you.”
“I don’t care.”
“She loves you very much, Caroline. She made a mistake. She wants you back in her life.”
“It’s too late for that now, right?”
My father doesn’t answer. He can’t look at me.
“Isn’t it too late?”
“I told her to come over,” he says.
I get up from my chair and walk to my room and slam the door shut and lock it. My father doesn’t even try to ask me to come back outside. I hear voices, and I hear my mother, but I stay right where I am.
I return to school, and nothing has changed there either, except the fact that Kalinda is gone, and I am now alone once more. Anise takes particular pleasure in this. I’d made the mistake of thinking that perhaps we’d grown closer, and were no longer enemies, since she was not torturing me for the past week—but perhaps she had only stopped because of Kalinda. Now that Kalinda is no longer here, everything goes back to the way it was. Anise begins talking loudly about me, the smelly sinner, and in class often asks Missus Wilhelmina if I should even be allowed to go to this school. Missus Wilhelmina always agrees that sinners should be expelled, but says it’s out of her control, most unfortunately.
The group of hyenas laugh along with Anise, as always—but I can’t help but notice that Marie Antoinette isn’t laughing. Not one bit. She doesn’t even break a smile. It comes to the point where, one day passing by her lunch table, I hear Anise ask, “What is wrong with you, Marie Antoinette?”
And she doesn’t answer, of course, because that’s another thing that hasn’t changed—Marie Antoinette still won’t say a single word—but sometimes, when I catch her staring at me, I think she has much more to say than anyone else around.
After Kalinda, I find it difficult to come back to sitting in complete silence. My loneliness will sooner kill me than the ocean will. So finally, I must give in. I accept Miss Joe’s invitation to eat lunch in her office.
She has cleared some piles of papers and books from her desk, though the photos in their frames are still in their line. “It was getting a bit too messy in here, wouldn’t you agree?”
I decide it’s more polite not to say anything at all. I eat my food quietly, still angry at the woman sitting across from me, but happy that at least I’m not sitting alone.
“I heard from Doreen that you visited her,” she says.
I look at her. “You still speak to her?”
“Oh, yes,” she says. “Remember? We speak on birthdays and every Christmas. It was my birthday last weekend, you know.”
I don’t even want to wish her a happy birthday. She smiles at me, waiting. I cut my eye and sigh. “Happy belated birthday.”
“Why, thank you, Miss Murphy,” she says. She dips her spoon into a container of chicken dumpling soup, swimming in grease. She slurps. “She told me it was a difficult time. For both of you.”
“A difficult time, for her? She isn’t the one that got abandoned.”
“It’s so easy to be self-involved when you’re young.” She laughs. “Don’t look at me like you want to kill me, now. I can’t help the truth. You don’t know anything about your mother’s hardships. She made many mistakes, yes—there’s no question in that. I’m not defending her choices. But I can understand them.” She turns her head to the side, and I feel like I’m in a classroom. “Can you?”
She leaves me with that question for the day, and I roll it around in my mind all night and well into the morning too. When I go to her office the next day for lunch, I expect her to ask it again, and I’m ready with my answer—prepared to say that I do understand, even though I don’t agree with any of it, even though I’m still angry at my mother for everything. But Miss Joe doesn’t even ask. She tells me to speak to her about my adventures leading up to finding my mother instead.
So I tell her everything. About looking for evidence, and even about sneaking into this very office, because something tells me she already knows about her missing photograph anyway. I tell her about Kalinda, and the journal that Anise found—about us running away and the condo. I tell her about the woman in black.
“The woman in black?” she says.
“Yes. That’s what I call her.”
“Describe her to me.”
That’s what I do. “She’s been around since I was a young child.”
She nearly laughs. “You’re still a child, Miss Murphy.” Her smile fades. “And you believe in spirits, do you?”
I almost tell her Kalinda’s warning—that the spirits will hear her calling their name—but I stop myself. There’s much more in this life to fear than just spirits, and if I let fear rule my every move, I will become nothing more than a little ghost child myself. I want to be brave. I want to live the life I was given. So what if the spirits hear us call their names? Let them hear it.
“Yes. I do believe in spirits.”
Miss Joe is thinking hard about something. “What do you think of the woman in black?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I thought for a long time she was a demon. I thought she’d stolen my mother at first. She scared me. I thought she
