part oneTHESE LATENT THINGS
providence (noun):
The protective care of God or of nature as a spiritual power.God or nature as providing protective or spiritual care.Timely preparation for future eventualities.Providence (proper noun):
The capital of Rhode Island, a port near the mouth of the Providence River, on the Atlantic coast; population 171,557 (est. 2008). It was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams (1604–83) as a haven for religious dissenters.—Lexico.com, http://www.lexico.com/definition/providence
1MILIANI
This isn’t the first time I’ve touched a dead body.
When I was thirteen, I reached into the casket to feel death on my father’s skin. We didn’t know each other well, and gambling kept him busy. In the end, a heart attack caught him while he was playing keno at a gas station. Mom didn’t want to go to his funeral. He’s your father, she told me. Maybe you should. She sent her dad, my papa, along with me instead. As Papa and I peered down into the casket, I thought it was such a pretty body. My father had smooth brown skin, lengthy limbs, and long lashes. I wondered how his spirit felt after being disconnected, since only the body truly dies. Usually when the spirit moves on, it will leave energy behind in a place or an object.
A year later, Papa died, and I touched his body and knew his spirit was elsewhere. Moving. Finding space, like my father’s spirit before his.
This feels different. Jasmine’s body doesn’t feel spiritless. It’s firm but not hard—as if I could press against her skin with my finger and remove it to watch the blood circulate. There must have been magic in the embalming to make her feel warm. I reach to stroke her hair, run my thumb across her bottom lip, appreciate how rich with melanin her skin still is and how it contrasts with her white gown, the way it seems to glisten because she’s wearing it.
I bite my lip in search of blood. My eyes burn. My stomach feels sick. I can’t believe they put her in this dress. This isn’t why she was supposed to wear it.
Behind me, someone coughs to signal I’ve spent my turn at the casket. I don’t want to move from this spot. I don’t want to leave her. When the person groans, I remind myself there’s time to come up again, but I’m already winded when I notice Darleny standing near the entrance of the showing room. She’s staring at me, and seeing her after laying eyes on Jasmine’s body makes me dizzy. She looks more like her sister than ever before.
Jas and Darleny were identical twins, but they had distinctly different styles, and I could always tell them apart by the dark beauty mark above Jasmine’s lip or the light-green specks in her sister’s eyes. Darleny’s hair falls below her shoulder blades and covers half the bruising on the side of her face from the accident. Her eyes lock with mine across the room. They hold until I blink away, and I swear they are the color of soil instead of bay leaf.
Papa used to say twins can harness more energy than any single born on earth. This is what I told Jas when we tried to get Darleny to practice with us years ago, but even back then, Darleny would call us freaks and threaten to snitch on us for doing dark magic. She had heard terrible things from her vovo who grew up around magic in Cape Verde: stories of witchcraft that could turn its users into monsters. But no magic is inherently dark, I’d say.
I wonder if she’ll come up to the casket, slide by me, get too close, if I’ll have to hear a voice like Jasmine’s when I’m not ready.
But she goes to talk to people at the back of the room, and I’m able to slip away.
* * *
The cold weather has finally left Rhode Island, but when I step onto the patio, the bare skin below my skirt pricks with goosebumps. A little girl with chocolate on her mouth and two sleek buns at either side of her head walks over and taps my arm. “Pick a number,” she says, holding out an origami fortune-teller. I point to the number two, and she opens the flap to tell me I’ll always be ugly. I laugh and try to pick another, but she runs to tell someone else’s fortune. I’m wishing I had thanked her for mine when I pass a group of students from school and overhear a girl in a yellow beanie say, “I went to all her soccer games last season. Told her she’d be in the major leagues someday.”
My feet stop, and even though I tell myself to keep walking, to ignore it, that this happens at funerals, I turn and say, “Jasmine never played sports. You’re talking about her sister. The next time you pretend to be a dead person’s friend, make sure they’re actually dead first.”
She stares at me with a round mouth and a tucked jaw. The boy to her left inches closer to her, but everyone’s quiet until I turn away. Then, they laugh. I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth, craving the power to make them shut up, but all I have is the urge to leave Bell’s and never come back. I shouldn’t have to be here. I should be at Jasmine’s house, eating half of her couscous, even though I told her I didn’t want any, while we watch reruns of Dragon Ball Z and cuss about all the commercials. But I can’t leave without seeing her body again, without saying goodbye. And I need to see my friends.
* * *
I find Inez next to the stairs, gripping the patio rail, her knuckles white, her breathing loud. “What happened back there?”
“Nothing important,” I tell her because she’s already rubbing the bridge of her nose the way she does when she’s trying not to panic. I push hair out of her face, watch the tears make trails between the freckles on her cheeks. “Hey, you okay?”
“Of course not,” she says. “Jasmine’s dead. How are you okay?”
“I’m not,” I whisper, and turn to rest against the rail, remembering the warmth in Jasmine’s body and wondering if it was there because I wanted it to be. Because with some part of her to hold on to, it might be easier to avoid the facts: Jasmine and Darleny were in a car accident a few days ago. A drunk driver swerved into their lane and hit Darleny’s car.
Darleny is still breathing. Jasmine is not.
Inez says sorry, over and over. “I can’t believe I said that to you of all people. You’re probably in shock.” Her words don’t make it better. They make it more real. Take it back, I want to say. I almost say. She shoves her hands in her coat and looks around. “Where’s Natalie? She’s late.”
And like she manifested our best friend, Nat says, “Right here,” in that soft voice of hers.
“Where have you been?” Inez moves past me to fling herself at Natalie, whose eyes go wide before she settles into the hug. Inez’s shoulders slack, and she sobs.
Relief makes its way to me. Jasmine’s the only one who always knew how to comfort Inez. Without saying a word, she’d know how to move, when to hold her. It seemed like Jas could stop a panic attack with her presence alone. She had a similar effect on all of us. Papa used to call her a “little moon.” Controlling movements and emotions with her energy.
I don’t think I could’ve calmed Inez, but Natalie rubs her back and they bury themselves in each other, and as grateful as I am for her—for Inez too—no one can be Jasmine.
“I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere,” Nat says, and her words nick pieces of my heart, causing visions of Jas hours before her accident to flood my mind, until I force my focus on my fingers, on the fallen sign on the bodega window across the street, on my friends as Inez’s long hair rises in the wind and sweeps across them both.
I fight the urge pulling me to them, the involuntary way my body aches to be hugged too, and find myself watching Natalie as she grips Inez’s shoulder blades like she’s not sure she should let go. I know why she’s late. She’s always been more frightened of death than the rest of us, or at least than me. Once, she took a failing grade so she wouldn’t have to dissect a frog. Twice, she didn’t show up to funerals of people in her own family. Jasmine’s will be her first.
* * *
Back inside Bell’s, we say our condolences. People share memories of Jasmine; they cry a lot. I hope no one asks me to tell them a story because my brain will recount details of the last time I was with her and I can’t tell anyone about it. I’ve been trying to forget it myself. But thankfully, everyone’s so swept up in sharing I only have to listen. Her grandfather tells me that a few years ago, “in sweet summer of ’98,” Jas jumped from a tree onto his parked Camaro and dented it. He pulls me aside to tell me the same story twenty minutes later. And maybe I’m listening too hard, because I swear Jas laughs. As I watch a kid count to ten on the staircase while others sneak off to find hiding spots behind the chairs their parents are sitting in, I think I hear her again.
I walk back to my friends, sweating and searching their faces, wondering why they don’t seem to notice Jas whispering like she’s trying to reach through the veil and tell us she’s here. When Darleny walks out of the showing room, the whispers stop.
Nat unwinds the shoelace holding her hair in a puff until it falls in a protective circle around her head. “Darleny looks lost. We should go check on her.”
Inez agrees, but I quickly shake my head. Darleny and I fought the morning Jasmine died. I’m probably the only person she doesn’t want to see here. Inez doesn’t argue with me, but I can tell she wants to before they walk off.
I try to look occupied by the floral arrangements, but when Darleny steps back inside the showing room with my friends trailing behind her, I’m so anxious I consider going in after them. I wonder who’s at the casket right now, if anyone else felt Jasmine the way I felt her.
I dig my nails into my thigh until it burns, tell myself I’m being delusional. If I go back to Jasmine’s body now, it’ll be cold, it’ll confirm her spirit has gone.
I sit on a chair and try to remember which calming spell works best for Inez because with nothing else to distract me, the memories of Jasmine with a flush in her cheeks and a little rasp in her voice and a beating heart surface again. Three weeks ago, she danced on a platform at her prom-dress fitting, shaking hips that shouldn’t belong to a seventeen-year-old girl and teasing, “You see how good this hugs me?”
Now, someone decided it would be beautiful to bury her in that prom dress, but it just makes my skin crawl.
A few days ago, right before death crept up and stole her, we mapped out what would’ve been the summer of our lives: bouncing from one cookout to the next, dancing on parked cars in random neighborhoods, doing séances in darkened rooms.
My throat feels thick with a cry that may kill me.
Then I hear a scream. Faint, but clear enough it has me running.
I’m out of breath when I make it to the showing room, just in time to see Natalie clinging to the casket, her curls covering her face as she cries.
“Jasmine. Wake up, baby. Open your eyes. You’re not dead.”
Natalie’s voice seems like it’s the only sound in the room as everyone stares at her, stunned. But then she shakes Jasmine’s body and it all goes to chaos.
Jasmine’s mom shrieks, and her husband wraps both arms around her while Darleny hurries to console them. People gasp and curse and pray in Creole. A man I don’t recognize is up out of his chair, rushing toward Natalie. I walk as fast as I can, cut him off with my hands in the air. The tattoo on his neck moves when he swallows.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll handle this.”
He nods but doesn’t sit back down.
Natalie’s still bent over the casket, her shoulders trembling. I touch her back, try to coax her away, saying things like “C’mon, we have to go,” and “We can come up again soon.”
Copyright © 2022 by Riss M. Neilson
