Jasmine’s been buried for eighteen hours. She’s not far from where we sit under the hot sun at Roger Williams Park, and we should go visit her grave, but Mili is trying to convince me and Nat we can resurrect her instead. Or something like that. And there are only so many ways you can tell a person something’s not possible, or right, before you have to give up or give in.
When Miliani’s grandpa died, she stole some ashes from the urn to bring him back from the dead. Me and Natalie agreed to meet her at Oakland Cemetery in Washington Park, the one with the rusty metal gates that squeak like something out of a horror movie when you walk in. When I asked why it needed to happen there, Miliani said, There’s no place more sacred than a cemetery, even though at Oakland you have to walk on top of five graves in order to get to the one you’re looking for. But when Miliani had a plan, there was no arguing with her.
While we’d waited for her and Jasmine, Natalie took pictures of the beer cans and cigarette butts decorating the headstones to use in a portfolio she was building for future college applications. I kept busy complaining I wasn’t down to play ghost hunter, it was already dark out, and Mami would have my ass if she knew I wasn’t home. I used my palm to remove a thin layer of dirt from one of the headstones, and Natalie shuddered, watching me before saying that—even though we both knew it wouldn’t work—we should be there for Miliani because she was always there for us. Saint Miliani, in all her goodness, I joked, but kept my mouth shut later when she stirred up a concoction and pricked her finger with a pocketknife to add blood to the mix. I even bit my tongue when she made the four of us sit in a sloppy diamond shape, cross-legged on the dirt, smacking away mosquitoes while chanting something in Latin she’d found on the internet. And when her papa’s ashes never formed a skeleton and the flesh didn’t start growing back, when he wasn’t waiting for her in the kitchen with fried fish and open arms, I never told her only God should have that type of power and maybe we’d be judged for trying.
But here we are, three years smarter, three years more practiced, and Mili isn’t backing down when I tell her she’s avoiding her grief. I’m upset we’re spending time talking about this when I can hardly think of Jasmine without wanting to cry.
“Say it were possible, what makes you think she’d want to come back?” I pluck a few blades of grass and toss them. “Say she does and it works, what makes you think she won’t be some type of undead-like zombie?”
I can tell this pisses Miliani off because she stares straight at me, unblinking, and says, “You’re not even listening. She won’t be alive, not fully anyway. But we’ll be able to talk to her, touch her.” Mili hesitates. Then, “She wants this. She was sending us signs. Tell her, Nat.”
Natalie has long, straight lashes to match her slender limbs. She blinks them rapidly, then brings her knees toward her chest to hug herself. None of us have spoken about the incident at the wake. I can’t imagine how this conversation is affecting her.
“Don’t forget what you told me,” Mili challenges.
“Even if I did feel something,” Nat says, “is communicating with the dead even possible?”
Mili tilts her head. I know she’s fuming.
I’m still trying to figure out how magic can coexist with the rules of my religion, but I know it’s real. Natalie has stayed skeptical over the years, though. When we’re alone, I joke she goes along with it because she’s scared of getting kicked out of the group. She’ll tell me to shut up, she’ll laugh, but she never denies it.
I clear my throat, try to cut the tension. “Isn’t it dark magic?”
It doesn’t work. Mili sounds irritated and insulted when she says, “Of course it’s possible. My papa said he’d show me one day.” Her voice trembles toward the end, and my eyes sting again, thinking of how many people she’s lost. “And we wouldn’t just communicate with her. We’d anchor her spirit here. Besides, there’s no such thing as light and dark magic. It’s all about intention.”
“So, we’d be helping her find space?” Nat’s voice is undemanding, soothing, as she stretches back out and her dark skin catches the sun just right, glinting against the green grass she’s sitting on.
The heaviness comes down around us, thinning the air, and Miliani visibly relaxes before explaining how finding space is for spirits ready to move on. They only leave energy behind. This is different. Listening to Mili makes the earth start to spin. I look up at the sky. The movement there makes me dizzy too. Mili is telling us Jas will be a ghost we can interact with.
A few boys ride by us on bikes, smirking and making comments. One whistles and calls out that his back pegs are free if we want a ride. They wouldn’t want us on their pegs if they knew what we were talking about. Natalie doesn’t look their way. She presses her fingers to her temples, the tips disappearing beneath her hair. She sounds like she’s doing everything she can to keep from crying. “This is too much. Don’t we want her to move on?”
“She’ll be with us again,” Miliani says. “Don’t you want that? If she’s not ready to move on, why not help her stay? My auntie Lindy says she’ll tell me how we can make it happen.”
Nat’s face screws up. “Your dangerous aunt gave you this idea?”
“She’s not dangerous. And she said Jasmine’s body will be too far decomposed to bring her back from the dead when we’re ready. But this … this will work.”
“Wait.” I lean forward. “She told you it’s actually possible to bring someone back from the dead? She’s seen it happen?”
Miliani shakes her head. “I should’ve known you two would be like this.”
“We don’t know what to think right now,” I say, “but you dropped this on us and we’re trying to understand why you think it’s possible. We tried with your grandfather. It didn’t work.”
“We were kids,” Mili says. “We didn’t have my auntie’s help.”
“I just … I don’t know if it’s something I should do.”
Miliani plants her palms flat against the ground like she’s trying to shift the earth. Her deep-set brown eyes burn. “Because of a religion you pick and choose when to follow?”
“That’s not fair,” I say, but try to remind myself she’s speaking through her pain. “Just because I’m okay with some forms of magic doesn’t mean I’m okay with this type of magic.”
“I’m sorry,” Mili mutters, then pushes herself to a standing position. It’s bright out and hard to see her round chin, the dimple that sits there and her full bottom lip, but I can hear the tears in her throat. Her long curls sway as she speaks. “It’s just … Jas would do it for any of us, and you both know it. She’d at least try.”
Miliani hasn’t cried in front of us since Jasmine died, and I have a feeling she hasn’t cried on her own, either. I want to beg her to let it out so she can start to heal, but she picks her backpack off the grass. “Fine. I’ll do it myself.”
Natalie exhales, grabs hold of Miliani’s hand, and pulls her back down. “If you think we should try, then maybe we can try.”
I look at Nat in shock, but she looks back expectantly.
“No. It’s fine,” Miliani says. “I’ll figure it out.”
I want to tell her go on and do that while I visit Jasmine’s grave and grieve and imagine she’s in heaven cracking up at wild stories I’m telling her. Then I think the possibility of it working is slim: There are many miracles in the Bible, but they’re God-granted, and I doubt God will grant a few seventeen-year-old girls that type of power. But maybe, along the way, it’ll help Miliani realize Jas is gone, and it’ll allow her to move on. Maybe it’ll help us all.
I pray I don’t regret saying, “What do we have to do?”
She squints for a moment, then tells us we have to do spells to make us stronger and to thin the walls between this realm and the other side. There’s no hard time limit, but the longer it takes us, the harder it might be to anchor Jasmine’s spirit here. And the longer Jas waits on the other side, the more likely her spirit will become angry and change. “It’s a matter of weeks, not months.”
Mili doesn’t let us digest this information. She flicks open her pocketknife, and I can’t pay attention to how my heart pounds thinking of Jasmine being a spirit, an angry one.
“Let’s make a blood pact.”
I’m nervous she feels the need to bind us. “For what?”
“A promise to try to help Jasmine, even if it gets hard or scary.”
I look down at the old scar on my left hand. We all have one. The night after Miliani’s grandfather didn’t come back from the dead, Jasmine cut all of our palms and made us promise we’d be there for one another. No matter what, she said.
While Mili cried, we held hands, our blood intermingling, and I remember thinking, We’ll get through anything if we have each other.
My eyes swell as they dart back and forth from the light gleaming off Mili’s knife to the promise on my palm. She’s about to cut herself when I hold out my hand. She looks surprised before she smiles and slices my scar open in a swift three seconds.