Freshwater(22)

The two of them, Malena and the Ada, used to sit out on the redbrick porches of the old school buildings and smoke cigars together, listening to the sharp breaking calls of Dominican palos pierce the air on the humped backs of drums and seedsounds. On one of those nights, we flung ourselves through the Ada’s body, dancing to the words we could and could not hear, dark air around us. Malena watched us with slitted eyes, a cigar in her red and white mouth, smoke wrapping her face.

On another night, Malena’s body was there but Malena was gone, and a mansaint with a deep voice used the muscles of her mouth. He gave the Ada a message to give to Malena for when she got her body back, something we can’t remember now, but that is expected: the message was for Malena and not for us, after all. When the Ada passed it on, Malena was unfazed; it was normal for her, to be mounted and then left by saints, gods, spirits. The Ada was amazed but we were respectful. We loved Malena because she smelled like us.

But all these new things changed nothing; we were still ?gbanje, and back home, our brothersisters held many angers against us—for being born incorrectly, for not returning, for crossing the ocean sifted with death. Nevertheless, we were still one of them. None of their grievances would ever change that and they knew it, so they sent us messages, reminders of who we were, bread crumbs for when the Ada would unblock her ears and understand the weight stitched inside her stomach. They pushed her toward Malena, they put words under Malena’s tongue.

“There’s a claim on your head, Ada,” she told us. “Back home. Something wants you back home.”

“Who?” The Ada didn’t know the things we did. None of this sounded like anything to her.

“I don’t know.” Malena pushed her black hair off her face and poured a glass of Johnnie Walker. “These are West African gods, not mine, so I can’t speak to them like that, you know?”

She told us other things, though. “You’re the daughter of Santa Marta,” she said, early on. “La Dominadora.”

The Ada looked her up online and we all gazed at the imported image on the computer screen: a mirrored forest of black hair springing from the scalp, the scaled lengths of our mother’s ambassadors wrapped around Santa Marta’s hands. It was all the same, a million mothers with a million names all flicking their quick tongues over the clear path to our spine.

We wondered—what would Ala have said to Malena’s claim that Santa Marta was the Ada’s mother? An old god to a newer, younger one. Santa Marta, the one who raises the wind and uncovers the bones, while the humans throw up circular pinnacles of clay in Ala’s name, raking five rows in the earth on either side. Ala, the god that gives children with both hands and watches them multiply like leaves creeping over the earth, seven seas roaring under her feet. Perhaps she would call Santa Marta by her other name, Filomena Lubana, and warn her not to send her husband into the Ada’s dreams. San Elias, El Barón del Cementerio, the Baron. Whoever guards the underworld guards Ala’s womb, you see; they are the same place. The Baron stepped over an island and into twenty-one rivers to put his name on the Ada’s tongue, so she called it out. (What do you do when a lwa wants you? No, that is a different story—forget the Baron.) It would be a warning, we decided, Ala to Filomena Lubana, a warning that the child was not hers. Nine Marta bore and nine Marta buried. The Ada has always belonged to Ala, and Ala is not inclined to share. Take away those brown eggs and honey.

In Virginia, Malena watched clotted scratches and cuts erupt on the Ada’s arms. She talked to her saints and her saints spoke to her.

“They told me you were going to kill yourself,” she said to the Ada, years later. “When we were in school. You remember? You started breaking glass, cutting yourself? Yeah. That was them.” Cigar smoke. Whiskey mouth. “Your African, he was on top of you and you just couldn’t shake him. You were telling me that you just couldn’t do it anymore.”

The Ada listened while on a slow train pulling itself through the desert of the Southwest, away from Saachi’s house, toward the Pacific. Malena was in New York, deep in Queens, her voice ten years familiar by then.

“I saved your life, Ada.” She never told the Ada what exactly she’d worked or what the rituals looked like, only that they were necessary. “I held a lot of stuff that was gonna hurt you,” she said. “The problem is that when you have saints, old-school saints, trying to communicate with you, they don’t understand. It’s like talking to your grand-grand-granddaddy about the Internet.”

We wondered why Malena watched us, why she cared, who had sent her. “Thank you,” said the Ada, smiling into the phone, her head resting on the ruined Amtrak glass.

“You crazy?” Malena scoffed, thousands of miles packed into it. “I love you. I would do whatever for you to be there in my life. I didn’t want to tell you because at the end of the day you’re my sister and what I wouldn’t do for my sister and my blood.”

She paused to shout in Spanish at someone on her side of the connection and came back to the line, her voice firm.

“You would’ve done it for me.”

It is like we said, we loved her, from back when we all lived in the mountains, for the way she loved us, all of us, and never made the Ada feel insane. For the way she was a witness. She worked for the other gods, yes, but she loved us and perhaps she did help save the Ada; perhaps what she worked was part of the veil-tearing that brought As?ghara here, the third birth. We do not know these other gods, so we cannot verify the impact of what their workers wrought. It was a small mercy, though, to be around those humans who could see us flashing beneath the Ada’s skin. The worst part of embodiment is being unseen. When the Ada got married, perhaps it would have been better if she married someone like that. But she was insisting on being human and she married a human. He was a force of a human, true, with storm eyes and hands like a future, but he was still just a human.