Mili’s mom serves us bowls of beef sinigang and seems happy I want two servings. I’m happy she doesn’t mind me sleeping over. Dev’s spending the night at a friend’s house, and I don’t want to be alone with ghosts tonight. After dinner, she teaches me how to gut and clean the fish they’ll be storing for the month. Once I get started, she says I slide the knife like a natural and passes me fish after fish. I let Mili use my camera to take pictures of me while I scale them. When we’re done, we bag and freeze the batch, then clean the kitchen with vinegar and lemon water. Mili’s mom doesn’t talk much, but she does tell us she’s going to bed, and that there’s chai and crackers for snacking if we get hungry later.
“Did I mention how much I love your mom?” I ask Mili as we try to wash the smell off our hands for the third time. “She’s too dope.” Completely different than Lindy, I think. And as much as magic seems a part of Mili’s life, the energy in her house feels normal.
“Sometimes,” Mili says. “But so is yours.”
“She’s pretty cool in a wild kinda way.” I give her a grin, but it doesn’t last. “When she’s around.”
Mili wipes her hands on a towel. “Do you think she’ll be okay when she gets out?”
I feel a lump in my throat while drying my own hands. “I want to say yes, but who knows. They won’t let her have visitors yet. Leanna said it’s cause she’s not acclimating well. What does ‘acclimating well’ in rehab even look like?” I turn to sit on the counter. I miss my momma, and there’s nothing I can do about it. “And doesn’t she know the better she does in rehab, the quicker they’ll let her out? It’s almost been a week.”
Mili bites her top lip. “Do they think she’s having bad withdrawals?”
I hate the question, but I’ve been asking myself the same thing. “I think maybe she’s struggling with the structure of it all. And what if…” I pause. “What if she’s worse? Do you think that could be a consequence of using magic to wake her?”
Mili gets up on the counter too. “I don’t think our spell had a negative effect on her at all. We gave her another chance at life. It’s a good thing.” She sighs. “I hate that the séance has made you skeptical after we finally got you to believe. What about Jasmine?”
I look down at my legs, let some silence pass between us. The bathroom vent drones above our heads, and the water drips a bit. With everything going on, I can’t help but feel like Inez’s warnings about the way we use magic were right. I hope we didn’t do damage to Ma, but I keep telling myself at least she’s alive. “I still believe. I’m just scared. Even for Jas.”
Mili nods and puts her hair in a puff with a scrunchie. She looks in my eyes. “It won’t be because of what we did, but will you be okay if your mom has a hard time when she gets out?”
The sadness comes for me. “I don’t think so. I’m just so tired. You know?”
“Yeah,” she says, resting her head against my shoulder, our legs dangling. “I know.”
Mili’s room smells like lemons, and her bed is soft. It’s nice with just the two of us, but she complains about spirits not communicating with her in here.
“One reached out to me at my auntie’s the other day, but they’ve gone quiet when I’m home. I light candles and call to them, but there’s only a dull whir of energy. I don’t understand why things are getting more intense for you and Inez but not for me.”
“Me neither, but I hate it,” I say. “Never thought I’d be scared to take pictures.”
Mili lets out a loud exhale and snatches my camera. She snaps a picture of me. We both bend to look at it. The previous summer comes to my mind. A supercut plays. I see Inez carefully painting Mili’s nails a deep, iridescent purple. I see fireworks lighting up the late summer evening sky, and the four us sitting on the grass at Roger Williams, with my arm stretched high and my camera angled toward us. Jasmine is at the center. There’s no smile on her face, but you can feel the warmth in her eyes. She was happy with us. Mili has her tongue between her teeth. And Inez is beaming, her face full of love, as I smash into her side, trying to fit into the frame, happy to capture the memory.
Mili sighs, pulling me out of the past. There aren’t any shadows or signs of spirits in the photo she took. When she looks at the ones of me scaling the fish, there aren’t any there, either. But the pictures I took this week all have signs: distorted faces, white light where there shouldn’t be white light, darkness where there shouldn’t be darkness. There’s one picture of Leanna cooking with a shadow standing right beside her, like it’s cooking too. It gives me chills.
“I don’t know if it’s this house or if I took it, but something is wrong.” Mili tilts her head at me. “Maybe you should tell Devin to take some pictures. See what happens.”
My stomach goes tight. I feel like flicking her in the forehead for mentioning Dev at all. “No way in hell I’m involving my brother in any of this. He’ll touch my camera, and next thing I know they’ll be out to get him too. When I took the picture of Leanna, I could feel the oil crackling against my skin.” I run my finger along my forearm. “Like I was being burned.”
“I’m sorry,” Mili says, her lips turning down. “But are you sure it wasn’t in your head? Psychosomatic? My auntie said the spirits aren’t here to hurt us.”
“You calling me a liar? I’m anxious but I’m not imagining shit.”
Mili puts my camera down. “I shouldn’t have said that, but I don’t want to feel like I’m subjecting you to something you don’t want. If you’re feeling unsure, tell me now.”
I feel myself soften at the look on her face. “You’re not the only one who wants Jas back. Maybe I’ll stop taking pictures till this is over.”
“But what if they find another way to materialize?” When I groan, she says, “At least, they’re trying to communicate with you.”
“Are you serious?” I laugh. She can’t be serious. “Listen, you can have all your ghost friends. I don’t want them. Particularly, because none of them are Jasmine.”
Mili pulls her knees to her chest. “We don’t know that.”
“Well, if one of them is Jas, then she’s definitely pissed at me. We definitely aren’t friends.”
A few beats of silence, and then, “No, you’re right.” She gives me her best reassuring smile. “It can’t be Jas. She’s out there somewhere, making mischief where she shouldn’t.”
It takes me a moment, but I smile too. “Wreaking havoc on the innocent.”
“That’s right,” she says. “Wild as ever.”
“Can we hurry with all of this?”
Mili starts talking about how we’ll need another substantial spell, and how she needs to learn elemental magic faster. She rolls over onto her stomach and puts her face in her hands. “I feel like I’m failing everyone. The longer we take, the longer the realms stay open. And the longer we take, the more likely it is Jasmine will come back to us changed.”
I remember her confession in the car after the séance. I can’t believe Jasmine died just as they were figuring out they loved each other. “We’ll get her back in time.”
“We need to. I don’t even want to consider the possibility she’ll be different,” Mili says. Then her head shoots up the way it does when she’s convinced she’s thought of something good. “We don’t want Jas to change, but we do want your mom to change her habits, right?”
“What do you mean?” I tug on my camera strap. “Where did that come from?”
She smiles real big. “We have to widen the realms. What if there’s a way to do it and help your mom stay sober?”
“Like a spell?”
“More like a cure.”
I slide my hand over her pillow. My nerves are kicking. “But we can’t cure an addiction. And we’ve already used magic on my mom twice—what if there’s a limit before it messes with her?”
“Don’t think of magic that way,” Mili says, and pinches my wrist gently. “And I’ve seen my papa do all kinds of things. I think we can try.”
I lie flat on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Magic has helped Ma so far. If the calling spell never happened, she might have died at Betty’s house. If we hadn’t used the spell for the coma, the doctors would’ve pulled the plug eventually. These are the things I do know, and maybe I have to believe they outweigh the things I don’t.
“If you think it’s safe…”
“I do,” she says. “Let’s speak it into existence, and I’ll ask my auntie, to make sure.”
I turn on my side. Mili’s cool sheets feel good on my skin. “I don’t want to give up on her.”
“Then we won’t.” She gets up to open her window like she knew I was hot.
“We won’t give up on Jasmine, either,” I tell her.
She turns around. The wind whistles and her curls rise in the air. “I won’t let us,” she says.
I watch her standing there, her eyes lit up and her skin glowing in the dim light, looking like someone I know and someone I don’t, and I wonder how far she would go to get what she wants.