I shake my head. My eyes are starting to sting with salt water. The ocean is made of salt water, and I wonder for a moment if it’s possible that we were actually born of the sea and crawled ourselves onto these islands.
“I don’t know why she left,” I say. “I think it’s possible that she doesn’t love me anymore, and so she felt she had to go.”
Kalinda seems to listen with all her heart, eyes shining bright. “I don’t see how that could be possible at all,” she says. “There isn’t anything about you that would make me feel that you aren’t someone to love.”
She takes her hand away, and barely gives my heart a moment to stop beating before she says, “My mother stayed in Barbados as well. When she told me she was staying, months before we were supposed to leave, I thought that it was because she didn’t love me either. And I’m still afraid this is true, sometimes. She says that it’s because we can’t all afford to go, and so my brothers and sisters stayed with her, while I’m here with my father. I still wonder if she chose to send me away because she doesn’t love me.”
“That’s not possible,” I tell her. “It’s impossible not to love someone like you.”
She laughs. “Thank you, Caroline.”
She smiles and jiggles her feet as she looks at me. “Even though I’ve only known you for one day, I now think of you as my friend,” Kalinda tells me. “I don’t choose my friends easily.” She uses her adult voice, so I know that she’s very serious.
I don’t tell her that this means more to me than anything anyone has ever told me, because she’s now the first friend I’ve ever had who wasn’t my mother, and the only friend I’ve ever had since my mother left me. That would be too embarrassing to admit. So instead I tell her, “You’re my friend now too.”
“Are you still looking for her?” she asks. “Your mother, I mean.”
I’m always looking for her. Walking down the road, every woman I see with honey-brown skin makes my heart beat harder and my throat close up so I can’t swallow, can’t breathe—and then the woman turns around and I see it’s not my ma at all, and I could cry from disappointment.
“No.” I didn’t plan to lie, but that’s what I do anyway. “No,” I say again, “I’m not still looking for her.” Maybe it’s only fair that I’ve lied, since Kalinda won’t tell me the truth about the things no one else can see. Now we’re even.
Though I’m not sure I want us to be.
I can always feel the woman in black near. A shadow going in and out, like a candle’s flame flickering in the breeze. It’s impossible, isn’t it? But I always feel her there, watching me. Who is she? And what does she want to tell me? Because that’s one thing I’m sure of. She’s trying to let me know something.
The woman in black is waiting for me when I get home. Even though I’d had one of the best afternoons of my life at Kalinda’s house, I can already start to feel the whispers inside my mind, questioning if I really love my mom at all, if I can so easily forget about her for the promise of a new friend. I begin to question if I deserve my mother’s love, if I can so easily treat her this way, so easily forget all about her. And so I begin to question if I even really deserve to be loved at all—and if I don’t deserve to be loved, then perhaps I don’t deserve to be alive.
I don’t think adults expect that anyone who is twelve years old and shouldn’t have any worries in this world can think about something like that, but I wonder about it all the time. I’m wondering it as I walk into my bedroom.
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 uni
verse. 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 need to know about the woman in black—can be found here. I walk into the shadowed and empty and hot library classroom, which smells like spilled milk and mothballs, and I look for books about ghosts and spirits first, since I think this is most likely what the woman in black is, and then I look up demons in the Caribbean next, since this is, I think, another possibility.
I carry the stack of books to a table at the very back of the room, and the librarian stares at me suspiciously from her desk.
I learn more than I would ever like to learn about ghosts and spirits and demons. Enough to know that I’ll certainly have nightmares tonight, and maybe even nightmares for the rest of my life. I learn that the Caribbean is a place where spirits and ghosts exist more than anywhere else in the world—that the air is so full of spirits that I’m breathing them in, right now as I read.
I also learn that there are some who feel ghosts and spirits and demons do not exist but are made up completely in one’s own mind, and especially in the minds of those who are delusional and have been through emotional traumas to help them cope, which makes me fear that the woman in black isn’t real at all, and is only something I’ve made up in my own head—perhaps something to desperately explain the disappearance of my mother.
The woman in black—not real. It was something I’d only wondered before, but now the possibility of this truth sears through me. Her existence reminds me of when I think of something so outlandish and silly, such as the desire to hold Kalinda’s hand, and I think of saying this outlandish thing out loud, I realize how ridiculous the thought is. Yes—it’s entirely possible that the woman in black isn’t real, and the things that no one else can see aren’t real, and I’ve simply lied to myself to feel special, and to explain why my mother would have left me, when it’s clear that she left because she simply doesn’t love me.
I slam the book shut so loud that I hear the librarian clear her throat behind me. This is one possibility that I can’t ignore. But what if I’m wrong? What if the woman in black does exist and she knows something about the reason my mother is gone?
I continue reading, keep skimming, until I look at the clock and see that I have mere seconds to learn about the woman in black before the bell rings and I have to return to class, until finally in the very last book, in the very last chapter, I do learn one useful thing: a way to communicate with a ghost.
It’s a story about a man whose daughter had unexpectedly died sleeping in her bed one night, and so the man decided to call upon her to say good-bye. It’s just about the saddest story I’ve ever read, and I have to wipe my eyes quickly so the librarian doesn’t ask me why I’m crying. The book tells me about how this man managed to speak to his child again, and I know that this is what I’ll have to try if I want to speak to the woman in black. Unfortunately, the text also specifically says not to use this trick on a demon, for the demon will surely overpower and possess or even kill you. Which is a horrifying thing to read, for while I don’t know if the woman in black really exists, I’m also not really sure whether the woman in black would be a spirit or a ghost or a demon if it turns out that she’s as real as I am.
This is something I’ll have to figure out—and there’s really only one way to do that.
The bell rings. I tuck this one book into my schoolbag, as I’ve done with many other books before, and hurry out of the library before the librarian’s suspicious stare burns a hole right through the back of my head.
When I’m finally home, I close and lock my door and take my book and flip it open so it’s like a bird resting in my hand. The instructions from the man’s story are clear: I have to light a candle and speak the woman in black’s name. I don’t know her name, so I will call her “woman in black.” I then have to pray to her until she finally appears. This book says that some people have a stronger ability to call spirits and demons forward than others, but I figure I must have a strong ability, else she wouldn’t appear to me in the first place. (Unless, of course, the only reason she appears to me is because I’ve made her up in my head.) Once she comes, she won’t be able to leave, because I’ll have poured a ring of salt that she will find impenetrable, and she’ll have no choice but to stay and speak with me.
I tell myself I’m not afraid, because I’m prepared: The candle is lit, the lights off, the salt poured—but of course my heart is hammering in my chest so hard that it’s a painful beat.
I call for her. “Woman in black,” I say, but I’m not really sure what to say after that. “Woman in black,” I say again, my voice not quite as shaky as it was the first time.
I sit there for what feels like at least ten minutes, legs crossed and cramping, but when I look at the clock again, only one minute has passed. So I sit there for ten minutes, which truly feels like an hour, periodically calling for her again and again—but I have a feeling she’s not coming. And I can’t ignore the obvious explanation for why she won’t be coming to visit me. It looks like little Caroline Murphy really is as crazy as she is evil.
What should I do? Carry salt with me wherever I go so I can throw it at her and trap her and question her about my mother? Someone would notice the salt, surely, and it’d be yet another reason why Caroline Murphy should not be allowed to have any friends.
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 g
ive 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.
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