“What is it?” I whispered. “Can I help?”
Xiomara slipped her tarot cards back into their pouch and pulled the string tight before she answered. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything.” She looked over at her boveda in the corner of the room, and sighed.
I’d been introduced to the boveda at my very first lesson. It was an altar, draped in a white cloth, crowded with framed photographs of Xiomara’s relatives who had passed on—parents, cousins, a sister, as well as some much older photographs, daguerreotypes, and paintings of relatives from even earlier generations. These images, propped up against each other as though the inhabitants were posing for a group photograph, were surrounded by offerings—fruit and treats baked in Xiomara’s Cafe, brought home and laid before these long-lost relatives as a sign of respect and also, I soon learned, as an invitation. It was at this boveda that Xiomara would convene with her relatives, who acted as her spirit guides. She described it as her own personal door to the spirit world.
“Not a door that I can open,” she hurried to clarify. “No,mija, that door is locked. None of us have that key. There is no key. But with the help of my spirit guides, I can place my ear against the gap. I can press my eye to the keyhole. It is up to me to interpret the glimpses and whispers that they provide.”
This explanation had been a comfort at the time. It made me feelbetter about how difficult I was finding even the simplest spirit communication. If Xiomara, the most powerful spirit witch in Sedgwick Cove, could only achieve “glimpses” and “whispers,” then I could hardly expect my own powers to produce much at first. Months later, it was hard not to let the doubts creep in, even as Xiomara guided me with maddening calm, and a relaxed sense that she expected nothing better. Now, however, it was her face that was crumpled with frustration, while I sat and tried to find the right soothing words to get her to talk to me.
“Are your spirit guides… whispering more quietly than usual?” I asked her.
Xiomara was silent for a moment, leveling me with a look that said she was carefully weighing her words, trying to decide how much to tell me, and how much to keep back. I was used to this look—it had been leveled at me by Conclave members, my own mother and aunts, and many others in Sedgwick Cove since I’d arrived. How much could I handle? What could they tell me without telling me everything? I was beginning to hate that look—it made me feel infantile and untrustworthy. But as I met it now from Xiomara, all I could do was hold my breath and hope that, after so many months, she might trust me enough to tell me the truth.
And then she did.
“Do not speak of this to anyone. Not Eva, not your mother or your aunts. No one.”
My pulse began to jump. “Of course.”
Xiomara rose to her feet suddenly, making me jump. She moved swiftly to the doorway and peered through to the kitchen. Maricela was no longer there. Assured no one would overhear us, Xiomara walked around the table until she stood right in front of her boveda. “I have sat for many hours this last week, communing with my spirit guides,” she said. Her voice was low, with none of its usual snappishness. “I have used every method at my disposal.”
“And?”
“Silence.”
All I could hear was the blood thudding in my ears. I turned and looked at the boveda again, at the piles of fruit, the heaps of breads andcookies, the wilting flowers dropping petals into the wax of candles burnt so low they were in danger of extinguishing themselves. I looked at the photographs, faces frozen in time, some faded and creased, winking in and out of view in the intermittent gleam of the candlelight on the glass of their carefully polished frames. They’d always seemed alive to me as they’d watched over my sessions with Xiomara. Sometimes, I’d even had to repress an urge to turn them around, so that I didn’t have to continue floundering in front of what felt like a very judgmental audience. But now, it was as though someone had closed Xiomara’s personal door that connected her to them. I couldn’t feel them watching me anymore. A few months ago, Bea had revealed her own gifts as a spirit witch by showing me her drawings. One in particular still lived rent-free in my head, a sketch she had made of Xiomara in her kitchen at the cafe, bent intently over her work, and surrounded by the ever-present forms of her spirit guides hovering over and around her, like they were constantly whispering to her as she went about her daily tasks. I wondered, if Bea drew Xiomara now, would she be alone?
Bea…
“Have you talked to Bea about this?” I asked.
Xiomara’s expression tightened. “No, I have not.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to alarm the child. She has enough to be getting along with.”
“But don’t you wonder if she’s noticed the same thing? With her own gift?”
Xiomara chewed on the inside of her cheek, and though she didn’t reply, the answer was clear on her face. Shehadwondered about it, of course, but…
“You’re afraid of the answer,” I murmured, and though Xiomara looked frankly annoyed at my choice of the word “afraid,” she nodded.
“She has just barely begun to explore,” Xiomara said. “I am not sure she understands her gift well enough to know if it has been compromised.”
“But you haven’t asked her. And she hasn’t mentioned it?”
“No.”
I wanted to argue further, but there seemed little point. Xiomara’s expression was defiant. Why did adults insist on keeping kids in the dark in moments when those same kids desperately needed the light? I mean, my mother had sheltered me so hard I didn’t even know who or what I was, and in the end it hadn’t protected me at all—it had only delayed the inevitable, and left me woefully unprepared to deal with it. Well, I couldn’t force Xiomara to talk to Bea, but there was nothing stopping me from talking to Bea myself. I was sick of these pointless curtains drawn between generations who should be working together. I would find Bea when I went upstairs and start asking the questions Xiomara wouldn’t.
“What of your work over the last week?” Xiomara asked, now eyeing me beadily. “You were meant to clear your own mental connections to your spirit guides.”
It was my turn to feel self-conscious now. I felt the color flooding my cheeks, and I dropped my gaze to my lap, trying to decide how best to explain.
Xiomara snorted a laugh. “That well, huh?”
My frustrations over my spirit abilities were not simply because it was taking a long time for me to access them; it was that the access was so spotty and unpredictable that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing right, or what I was doing wrong. It was like trying to grab a hold of something ephemeral, like smoke.
