Free Spirits (11 page)

I hope that even though she can’t understand my words, she’ll know that the tone of my voice is kind.

She nods, says “
Buenas noches
” and floats back out to the surface of the water.

Mom yells from her spot on the car, “Kids! Time to go!”

We go, as soon as Abigail and Virgil have wished each other a shy goodnight.

When we get back to the house, we still have half an hour before it’s time for Adam’s dad to pick him up. We go to my room. I set the mirror down on the floor, and Abigail rises from it like Excalibur coming out of the lake in the King Arthur stories.

“So how are we going to find an interpreter who’s willing to translate for a ghost?” Adam says, once we’re comfy on the floor pillows.

“Isabella should be willing.” But as soon as I say it, I realize the problem. Kids like me can see and hear ghosts because of our special psychic gifts. Adam can’t see ghosts, but he can hear them because his mind is open to accept them. But most kids can neither see ghosts nor hear them. “But I don’t know if she’s able.”

“Well, there’s an easy way to find out, isn’t there?” Abigail says. “Invite her here one evening. If she can hear me, she should be able to hear the lady at the river.”

“This is so much fun,” Mom says, dropping dry spaghetti into the big pot steaming on the stove. “It’s like a party.”

I guess it says something about my social life that Mom thinks of me having two friends over for dinner as a big blowout.

“You know, you’re the first non-Mexican kid who’s invited me over since I moved here,” Isabella says.

“And I should’ve invited you sooner,” I say. “I guess I’m so used to kids being freaked out by me and my family that I don’t figure anybody would ever want me to invite them over. Most people in town call our place the witch house and won’t even come near it.”

“In Mexico, you and your mother and grandmother would be honored for your gifts,” Isabella says. “People here have some strange ideas.”

“No kidding,” Adam says, “like nobody will believe that Miranda’s not a witch and I’m not Chinese. Say, Isabella, maybe next time we hang out you and Miranda can come to my house for dinner, now that we’ve got that pesky ghost problem cleared up.”

Isabella laughs. “Will we have Chinese food?”

“Not unless somebody moves to Wilder and opens a Chinese takeout place,” Adam says.

We sit at the table and eat spaghetti with sauce made from the garden tomatoes Mom, Granny and I canned last summer. Methuseleh sits perched on Granny’s shoulder and occasionally dips his head down to grab a noodle in his beak. Isabella laughs, and when I accidentally slip into her thoughts, she’s not thinking that Granny and Mom and I are weird. She’s thinking we’re nice.

I think Isabella’s nice, too. And I wish I had invited her over sooner. After our bellies are full of spaghetti followed by Granny’s blackberry cobbler, I ask Isabella if she’d like to see my room. Once we’re there, she looks around at the canopy bed, the fireplace, the floor pillows. “It looks like where a princess would sleep,” she says.

“I’d like you to meet someone…if you can,” I say.

It’s no wonder Isabella looks around the room, confused. “Uh…is it a pet?”

I smile. I don’t think Abigail would like being thought of as my pet ghost. “No, she’s a friend. She’s not here now, but she should be showing up any minute.”

“She’s a ghost,” Adam says, apparently getting tired of my hemming and hawing. “A very nice ghost.”

Isabella giggles nervously.

“Does that freak you out?” I ask.

“No,” she says, “as long as she’s a nice ghost. I’ve always believed that spirits walk among us. I’ve believed, but I’ve never seen.”

Never one to miss an opportunity to make a dramatic entrance, Abigail knocks on the inside of the closet door.

Isabella gasps. “Is that her?”

Abigail steps out of the closet, turns to face Isabella, and curtsies. “How do you do? I’m Abigail.”

Isabella doesn’t miss a beat. “Nice to meet you. I’m Isabella.”

“I know,” Abigail says. “Miranda has told me so much about you. Isabella is such a beautiful name. It sounds like music.”

“Isabella,” I ask, “can you see her?”

“I can see a white cloud,” Isabella says. “Or not exactly a cloud. More like…”

“Fog?” Adam says. “That’s always what she looks like to me. I can hear her perfectly, but she always looks like a little patch of fog.”

Abigail sticks out her lower lip in a pout. “I assure you both that I’m much prettier than a patch of fog.” She smiles suddenly, then claps her hands. “Since there are four of us, we should play one of the board games in Miranda’s closet. Usually there are just the two of us to play, but playing with four would really be jolly!”

We play Clue, and even though Adam and Abigail and I supposedly have superior detecting skills, Isabella wins the game. I hope this isn’t a bad sign.

After we’ve put the game away, I say, “Isabella, there’s a reason I wanted you to meet Abigail, other than the fact that she’s a delightful person.” Abigail rests her head on my shoulder for a second, leaving it cold. “I wanted to make sure you could hear her, that you could hear ghosts.”

“Okay,” Isabella says in that way people have when they don’t really know where you’re taking them, but they’re willing to go along for the ride.

“There’s a ghost down on the riverbank who we think might know something about the guy who vandalized the restaurant,” I say. “But the ghost speaks only Spanish.”

“So you want me to translate for you?” Isabella says.

I nod.

Isabella is on her feet. “Let’s go now.”

“I don’t know if we can,” I say. “It’s too far to walk in the dark, and I don’t know if Mom will take us.”

“Well, your mom was going to drive me over to meet Dad at the restaurant at ten,” Isabella says. “Maybe she’d take us all a little early and we could go to the river first.”

“I don’t know,” I say, looking at Adam. “She took us there the other night. She might get suspicious if we want to go again so soon.”

“But,” Abigail says, with a shy smile, “your mother does know that I have a very good reason for liking to go to the river.”

“There’s another ghost at the river,”Adam explains to Isabella. “A boy ghost.”

Isabella smiles and shakes her head. “It’s certainly turned out to be an interesting evening. I guess I should go to white people’s houses more often.”

“Well,” I say, “if we’re going to try to convince Mom to take us to the river, I guess you’d better get in your mirror, Abigail.”

Isabella looks understandably confused, so Adam tells her about the mirror while I set it on the floor for Abigail. Once she’s jumped in and Isabella has recovered from yet another shock, we go downstairs so I can make my case to Mom.

She’s in the living room reading a mystery. “Um,” I say, “we were wondering if we could leave about half an hour earlier than we were planning so we can stop at the river before it’s time to drop off Isabella.”

Mom sets down her book and looks at me. “What is it with you kids and the river lately?”

As she looks at me, I think, Don’t come into my head. Don’t come into my head.

But then she glances at the mirror in my hand and smiles.“Oh, of course. Has Isabella had the pleasure of meeting Abigail?”

“She can hear her but can’t see her, like Adam,” I say.

Mom smiles at Isabella. “Well, the fact that you can hear her says good things about your character, Isabella. It means your mind is open in a way that many people’s are not.” She slips into her sandals. “Okay, let me grab my car keys and we’ll go out to the river. I won’t stand in the way of young love, though I don’t know how young it is if both parties have been dead for over a hundred years.”

“Don’t be long,” Mom says a few minutes later. “I’ll wait here.” The sky is full of stars, and the river glows with moonlight. Virgil and Adahy sit on the bank tossing out stones and watching them skip on the surface of the water.

Isabella’s eyes grow wide at the sight of the stones that seem to have been thrown by nobody.

At the sight of us, Adahy disappears into the woods, but Virgil takes off his cap and says, “Good evening, ladies.” He nods at Adam. “Good evening to you, too.”

“Hey,” Adam says. Modern boys are a lot less formal.

“Hello, Virgil,” Abigail says. “It’s nice to see you.”

“Hello, Abigail,” Virgil says. “It would be nice to see you, too.” He nods at me. “Miranda, would you hold the mirror close so I can look at her?”

Virgil comes closer, and I hold up the mirror just as I would if he was going to use it to see his own reflection. When he looks at it, though, he says, “Look how that yeller hair glows in the moonlight. Like spun gold.”

“Oh…oh, you!” Abigail says, giggling hysterically.

I hate to spoil the mood,but we don’t have much time.“Virgil,” I say, “have you seen the other spirit tonight—the woman? I’ve brought someone here who can speak her language.”

Virgil looks around. “She was here a spell ago.” He looks at Isabella. “Why don’t you holler somethin’ in her language and see if she hears you?”

“Okay,” Isabella says, as though conversations with ghosts are an everyday thing for her. She puts her hands on either side of her mouth and yells, “
Hola! Hola
!”

Within seconds, the ghost woman, with her long, black hair, her peasant blouse, and her bell-bottomed jeans and sandals, is standing before Isabella. “
Hola
,” the ghost woman says.

“
Hola
,” Isabella says, breaking into a grin. Then she says to us, “This is so cool.”

Isabella and the ghost begin a conversation in Spanish. I have no idea what they’re saying, but I can tell from their tone that Isabella is asking questions and the ghost is answering them.

When Isabella stops talking for a moment, I say, “Do you want to write some of this down so you can translate it? I’ve got a notepad in my bag.”

Isabella shakes her head. “No. Juanita—that’s her name— Juanita says if I let her be inside me for a few minutes, she can speak through me. Her Spanish words will come out of my mouth in English.”

“You mean, like a spirit possession?” I say.

“Whoa,” Adam says. “Like
The Exorcist?
Mom says I can’t see that movie till I’m sixteen.”

Isabella shakes her head again. “It’s not scary like that. Juanita is good. And she only wants to use my body for a few minutes. She doesn’t want to stay there. She doesn’t even want to stay here on this earth. She wants us to help set her free.”

“Okay,” I say, “as long as you’re okay with this, Isabella.”

“I am,” she says. She stands straight and tall, opens her arms like for a hug, and says “Juanita,
ahora
.”

Juanita opens her arms and returns Isabella’s hug, but as they embrace Juanita disappears. Isabella has absorbed her. When Isabella opens her mouth, a woman’s voice comes out, heavily accented, but speaking English. “Can you understand me?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Can you understand me?”

There’s a little pause before she says “Yes,” maybe so my words can be translated through Isabella. “My name is Juanita Gomez,” she says.

“Nice to meet you,” I say because you don’t want to be rude when a ghost has gone to so much trouble to be able to talk to you. “Thank you for speaking with us.”

“I want to speak,” she says. “I want to tell my story. I’ve been on this riverbank for longer than you’ve been alive, carrying this story inside me with no way of telling it to anybody. It is a heavy burden, and I wish to lighten it.”

“We’re listening,” I say.

“Some might say this story is not suitable for the ears of children,” Juanita says through Isabella’s moving lips. Isabella is still standing, but her eyes are closed as if she is asleep. “But I can tell you are not ordinary children, so I will tell you.

“I met Rick Boshears when I was not much more than a child myself. I was nineteen years old. I worked at a
taqueria
in Juarez, and he used to come in all the time. He was handsome, just a couple of years older than me, with ash blond hair and these eyes that were so light blue they were startling. Like a wolf’s. I was slow to figure out that he liked me. He’d had only one year of Spanish in college, so his language was limited. Maybe that made it hard for me to read his signals. But finally he managed to tell me he wasn’t coming for the tacos. He was coming to see me.” There’s a smile on Isabella’s lips, but I can tell the smile belongs to Juanita.

“We started dating—long walks at night, that kind of thing. We didn’t have much money so there were no fancy dinners out, just long walks with me helping him with his Spanish and us getting to know each other. He told me he was in Mexico so he wouldn’t have to fight in Vietnam, and I told him it took a brave man to refuse to fight for a cause he didn’t believe in. We fell very much in love. I still lived with my parents, who didn’t like Rick because he was a
gringo.
But somehow their disapproval made it all the more romantic. We were like Romeo and Juliet.” The smile is on Isabella’s lips again, but there’s something else, too, a hint of sadness.