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"You don't like . . . oh. I see. The markers. "
"Yes. The markers. " My whisper trailed away to something less audible, and I realized how foolish I sounded. With a flash of paranoia I turned to her and almost took one of her scary bird hands, then changed my mind at the last moment and folded mine together, praying to her instead. "But you can't say anything to anyone. If you do, they'll send me to the pine trees, like they sent my mother, and you won't let them do that to me, will you, Mrs. Patterson?"
"No, Eden," she assured me after a perplexed pause. A quick light brightened her face for a moment, but then her forehead wrinkled again. "No one's going to send you to the pine trees. No one's going to send you away. "
Mrs. Patterson tried hard to understand, but how could she have known? I didn't know either, back then, that you're not supposed to remember those things at all, those traces of the lives you've had before; but I've carried them with me as long as I can recall. Sometimes they rise out to meet me in subtle ways—in the gentle fears and convictions that old ghosts bring when they haunt you from the inside out. But sometimes they manifest in visions, in nightmares, or in kindergarten art projects.
I went back to drawing bubblegum butterflies and marshmallow puppies. Mrs. Patterson invited the social services people to come and observe me, but I put on a good show. I could give them what they wanted. Eventually she gave up trying to co
rner me and seemed to accept the undercurrent of madness that ran beneath my crayon creations.
But once in a while the three ghost women would cry, and I'd find myself inserting their six searching eyes into plastic-wrap windows, or cotton-ball clouds, or watercolor trees.
I wanted to make sure they could see me.
II
Here's another one.
Later that same year. I'd not yet turned six.
I lived on Signal Mountain, one of a chain that surrounds Chattanooga like the rim of a bowl, split down the middle by the river. Signal is populated by rich white people on one side and poor white trash on the other, which made my family's ethnic ambiguity something of an oddity. But I was a social creature, and the mountain was a safe playground for everyone. My cronies and I had free run of the tree-covered ridges, and we spent more time carousing through the woods than we did in our bedrooms.
Sometimes it was hide-and-seek, or tag, or—before I knew any better—blue versus gray. We wandered briskly in cutoff shorts and sneakers that let our legs get shredded by the brambles, and in long-sleeved shirts that caught on low branches and trapped pine-cone seeds and needles. We stomped through streams and climbed up rocks. We chased one another senseless every day after the big yellow bus dropped us off at our neighborhood's entrance. And most of the time, it was good.
Most of the time I ran with my friends until my lungs burst, alternately stalking them and being stalked, hiding behind wide round trunks and under piles of mulching leaves in shallow ravines. Most of the time I didn't have to worry about anything more profound than spiders or ticks.
But then the women, no longer content to lie quiet and filtered, became dissatisfied.
One day, they began to speak.
I was behind a tree, squatting in a pile of leaves lest I be discovered—so I guess it was autumn. Yes, because come to think of it, I was wearing a chunky blue sweater over my shirt. When I saw the first woman she was standing still. A few dead leaves dropped from overhead, wafting back and forth until they settled at her feet. The mountain was dying its yearly death, and rot was in the air. Even the dirt between my sneaker treads smelled of compost. But until I saw them there that afternoon, what did I know of decay?
With the corner of my eye I caught a long flash of palest gray, almost white. I thought of an old dress, dangling on a wire hanger from a tree branch. I stood and turned to see better, not yet aware enough to be afraid, and even when I saw her more clearly I was only surprised. It took me a minute to remember I was not asleep.
She held there motionless, tugged only by the faint gusts that rustled the trees. The wind made her dress barely billow around her legs, so she must have been there, real in one way or another. Her face was as pallid and indeterminately hued as her dress, and her eyes were more of the same.
"Hey," I said, not to greet her but to get her attention. "Hey. "
Her eyes rolled to meet mine.
She opened her mouth but did not yet speak. Instead it seemed every sound in the forest was pulled inside her gasping lungs and I was standing in the vacuum. I knew my friends were only yards away but I did not hear their small, fast feet shuffling through the undergrowth. No birds sang and no squirrels knocked winter nuts down into empty trees. Even the shadows stopped crawling across the rocks as the sky held the clouds above in place.
My breath snagged in my throat and refused to leave my chest.
Tears came to the woman's eyes and dripped to the forest floor unchecked. Her head swiveled slowly, looking past her left shoulder and then her right. Her choked, thin voice cried out to the others.
Willa, Luanna—she's over here.
Two other women appeared, one on either side of her. They had the same vaguely African features as the first, with hair bound into submission by scarves tied in loose knots. Their faces might have been round once, but their skin was drawn back and their wide cheekbones made shelves that shadowed their hollow jaws. Their teeth were exaggerated by fleshy lips robbed of their firmness, and when they spoke to one another it was a terrible sight.
There she is, his darling one.
His pretty one.
Oh, Mae, she's returned to you. She's returned to us.
Mae crouched low to examine me with her enormous, brimming eyes. My baby, she said, reaching one scrawny arm to my face. My baby. Miabella.
