The picnic table Mom and I sit at was handcrafted by Papa years ago. His tree is flourishing with the sweetest pears I’ve ever tasted. I don’t bother washing them; Papa will take care of us without worry or fuss. We eat pears and sit in the yard in silence. Mom is even more quiet now that Octavia is gone. Last night, I caught her asleep under Papa’s tree. She mumbles about sanding down the picnic table because of splinters but runs her hand along it like she’s welcoming them. I tell her I’ll handle it. I swallow and put down my pear core.
“Mom, I need to use the sungka.” She stops eating and stares at me. “And I need you to trust me with it.”
“Trust you?” Wrinkles form on her forehead. “You’ve done nothing lately to earn trust. I don’t know what your tita is telling you, but you don’t need that board and neither does she.”
She stands and starts to walk away. It’s so easy for her to leave me.
“What are you scared of?” I call out. “Who is the spirit you’re keeping from me?”
She turns sharply, fire in her eyes, but then walks toward the garden, kneels near the planted tomatoes, and begins to dig. I come up from behind her, insistent and tired of her ignoring me.
“Is it a family member? Please speak to me.” She stops digging, sticks her hands into the dirt and unearths the sungka sack. She heads to the table and pulls out the board. The cowrie shells come tumbling out too. The wind whispers things between us as she looks at me.
When I’m close, she asks, “Do you remember how to play?” I nod. “Set the board.”
I hesitate before picking up the shells, but they don’t burn anymore. She watches as I distribute them into the pits, says, “You could’ve hidden them in the pot a little better.”
“I wasn’t trying to hide them,” I say. “I didn’t know what to do with them.”
“What happened when you played with Natalie?” she asks.
“The spirit was humming the song you’ve been singing.”
She purses her lips. “And who do you think this spirit you speak of is?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I thought it was Auntie’s child.”
Mom’s brows jump high. “Lindy’s too selfish to have children.”
“So…”
“So you can go first,” she says, and straightens her back. The sun gleams against her golden skin, bounces off the thick white streak in her hair. It looks like she’s shimmering.
She wipes her hands on her shirt, but her fingernails are caked with dirt. Little pieces of it shed off and color the shells, blend into the pits as we play. Playing sungka with her is tricky because the rules are already a little different than mancala, and her rules are way different than the rules I was taught. But she’s patient with me. She beats me in five games, and the sun is starting to set when she tells me to set the board again. There’s something different in her eyes. She usually looks away when I catch her staring, but now she looks at all of me: my face, my hands, my mouth when I speak. “I want you to blow on them before your first move,” she says.
I do as she asked, and then the cowrie shells warm my palm. When I drop them in the bowl, she takes in a deep breath. This game is slow, careful. Mom watches my moves very closely. Mom lets me win. “Why’d you do that?” I say.
She picks up a shell. “You’ll find happiness in your lifetime, my child. You’ll age well.” Her voice trembles with the next prediction: “God will grant you a very long life.”
I am stunned by her words. “You can see that?”
She nods, brings her dirty fingers to her mouth, bites at the nails. I watch her. I don’t speak. She starts to cry. “He’s back. You’ve been doing dark magic, and you let him in.”
“Who, Mom?” I reach over to take her hand. She slides it back slowly; her fingertips scrape against the picnic table. My voice grows a little higher. “Who is it?”
“Your brother.”
The earth stops spinning. Everything stills. I can’t breathe.
Auntie argues with the studies that say adults can’t remember anything before the age of three. That’s false. We can go back, deep, and find memories from way earlier, if we try hard enough. And I’ve been practicing, doing memory tricks, meditating on it, but I don’t remember having a brother. Yet Mom says I was five when he died.
“He was eleven. Very thin. Small dark eyes.” She collects the cowrie shells from the bowls. “Your Papa taught him how to fish using a net. He had so much energy. We were constantly moving, playing, hiking. You were small, but he’d try to show you how to use a knife. How to throw it. He’d use the trees as target practice. Never missing. He never missed.”
I touch my cheek. Feel the whoosh of energy, the sting like it’s fresh. I remember the gash in the wall and shudder before finding my voice. “Why don’t I remember him?”
“My sister and I thought it would be easier if we helped you forget.”
“Easier for me? Or easier for you?”
“Don’t you dare speak to me that way.” The creases in her forehead deepen. She lifts her chin at me and, with a flat tone, says, “I’m sure you’ve done worse messing with magic.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.” I shrink in my seat. “What happened to him?”
She looks like she’s done sharing with me, but she isn’t. “The sungka told me he would die years before he actually did. But even with knowing, being cautious, praying every day, I … I couldn’t stop it.” She swallows hard. “After he died, I used it to communicate with him.”
She tells me my brother had so much promise when it came to magic, but he tripped down the stairs and lost his life. Just like that. She could feel his restless spirit, so anxious. She couldn’t accept that her son would never find space; she knew wandering spirits are often the unhappiest. The angriest. When she and Auntie Lindy called upon him with the sungka, he was confused, he was scared. They kept calling to him to let him know he wasn’t alone, that it was okay for him to move forward.
“But that kind of communication,” she says, running her fingers along the sungka board, “gets addicting. He wanted to keep communicating with me directly, and I wanted the same. And each time we invited him more into our realm, the imbalance got bigger.” She looks toward the sky, hugs herself. “Eventually, I was close enough to be able to physically feel him. Why wouldn’t I want to keep it that way? I couldn’t think of a reason. So I used a spell to bind him to me,” she says. “So he can be with me”—her voice tilts into something like fear—“forever.”
For a second, I think about the anchoring spell for Jasmine and wonder if it’s the same one she used for my brother. “So why don’t you seem happy about it?”
“He means well. He does,” she says. “But he’s sick. He’s changed, and…” She stops, something catching her attention and making her slow-turn toward the empty spot beside her.
“Mom?” I say. “Is he here?”
She doesn’t tell me. She shakes it off and starts to struggle to put the sungka board back in the sack.
“I’ll do it,” I say, shattering for a second. I ache to comfort her, ache for her to comfort me. But she nods and leaves for the house.
After putting away the sungka, I can’t bring myself to go after her. The air feels stale now, as if the truth drained the potency right out of Papa’s magic. I had a brother. A living, breathing sibling, who used to play and train, who studied magic. Someone I lost. Someone who would have altered my existence if he had survived. I think of all I’ve missed: having someone to lean on, to fight with, someone to love. I think of Mom getting sick, knowing now why we moved in with Papa years ago and how much more of her I might have had if things were different. How much happier we all could have been.
For a moment, I can picture it: A boy a few years older than me, helping me season the tapa while Mom fries it. The three of us in the kitchen, laughing and joking, listening to music. Mom smiling at us. Telling us she loves us. Mom kissing me on top of my head. But then the loss of him, of her, of pieces of me, hits all at once. Sprinkles of memories come back to me, but I can’t tell if they are real or things I want to see.
I’ll never know him. I’ll never know who any of us would’ve been.