Los fantasmas

Her great-grandmother was a medium, not in terms of her size, which was diminutive, but in terms of her ability to communicate with the dead. Doña Carmelita was famous in her small mountain town and people came from all over the island to ask her to communicate with some long-lost loved one. "Does he remember me?" they'd want Doña Carmelita to inquire for them. "Does she know where abuela's gold necklace can be found?" These were the questions that people wanted asked and answered, and Doña Carmelita obliged, never charging a single brown penny for her efforts. Still, people paid in kind, with a plump tan hen ready for a good asopao de pollo or with a gigantic green racimo de plátanos that would yield tasty fried tostones or amarillos en dulce for weeks to come

It was no surprise, then, that she, the great-granddaughter of a medium, could see dead people. Not in the Hollywood rendition of this event where the dead come and speak for some ulterior motive and create all kinds of havoc, but in the real magical sense of her island culture in which the dead just come and go, usually never saying anything, but becoming as much a part of life as the usual dreams and nightmares that populate people's sleep. She knew she wasn't sleeping when she saw the dead, though, because her eyes were wide open and although she spoke to them, they never responded. But they were just like Hollywood portrayed them: fuzzy transparent images, still discernible even in their gossamer-like existence. The dead only looked at her for a while and vanished, or glided on by as if they were on their way somewhere else.

As she grew older and learned about psychology, she figured that as long as she was functional and the dead didn't give her instructions to go kill or maim someone, she was alright. Only her parents knew that she saw dead people and they were largely unconcerned, trusting that it was not so much the symptom of mental illness as the legacy of the many bloods - African, Corsican, French, Italian, Spanish, Irish - who murmured their stories through her veins. On both sides of the family, after all, there were countless stories of what the dead had revealed to a relative in a dream or of the messages brought by a visitation.

Undeterred, the dead even followed her when, at age sixteen, she left her warm green island and went off to college to the cold white winters of the Northeast. It was in college, actually, that she figured out what was going on. In doing research for her honors thesis, which she was writing on the African influences on Cuban and Puerto Rican poets, she read a book about santería, the religious practice that mixes Catholic and African beliefs. The book had a detailed description of the visiones that the santeros have in which they see everything from a sword-wielding deity astride a magnificent black horse to eerie images of future happiness or grief. "Well, that must be it," she thought, somewhat relieved.

Among her Puerto Rican friends, she became known as La bruja because of her uncanny – especially to her – abilities, which she couldn't explain. There was the time when she saw an acquaintance walking out of the health clinic one evening and she conjured the thought that the girl had been raped. When she mentioned this to her friend, who knew the girl, Susana looked at her with spooked eyes. "How did you know?!" Susana exclaimed. "I didn't, I just supposed," she said, almost apologetically. "But why would you suppose that just from seeing her walk out of the health clinic? She was raped a week ago and only told me about it," Susana confessed.

Or the other time when she was having lunch with a friend at a student hangout. Roberto was facing the door and seated across from her as she began chattering about the previous night's dream. "So I dreamed of Alberto, you know. That he came back, that he was with us and we were having a great time. Where do you figure he's gone to? It's been, what? More than a year now, right? That we haven't seen or heard from him?" she chattered on until she noticed that her friend's face had paled. "What is it? Are you alright?" But Roberto didn't answer because his eyes were wide and fixed behind her. Something in their brown irises, something that shimmered like fright, made her turn around. Alberto, with his American girlfriend, had just walked into the restaurant and was greeting other friends a few tables away.

Or the other time when she was hanging out in a friend's room at night and decided to return to hers when it was already close to midnight. They had been idly listening to music, reading, and discussing every possible thing and nothing at all, the way college students can do, which never repeats after you leave college. She got up from the comfy chair to leave when a premonition of impending evil assaulted her with the force of an unexpected wave and made her sit down again. "I can't go," she said, while Felix looked at her questioningly. "You're going to think this is weird but I feel there's something evil out there. That something bad is going to happen to me if I leave now." That was all she could say to explain herself.

At that very moment, as if to give credence to her words, as if to convince a skeptical Felix that she was not inventing things, something or someone outside scratched at the door with that seemed like gigantic claws. Felix stared at her, and she stared back, throat closed, mouth dry, and skin prickled with goose bumps. Both of them wondered simultaneously how this could be happening. No one had overheard their conversation so no one could be playing a prank on them. And if they were, it was an odd prank, indeed. Felix rushed to the door to look through the peephole and shook his head at her, letting her know that there was nothing to be seen on the other side. He looked at her and she nodded and he pulled the door open and there was nothing, no one, nada outside. Without exchanging a single word, they both ran downstairs into the street, hoping to see a common friend laughing, running away, pleased with her or his idea of scaring them shitless. But there was nothing, no one, nada.

She actually never found out what that had been all about. They asked all their friends and no one ever came forward and confessed. She returned safely to her room that night, escorted by a determined, if scared Felix. She still tells the tale occasionally, on ghost story nights, when she can add the turn-of-the-screw comment: "And this really happened to me."

But the dead did leave one day and never returned. That was when she was so ill that she was close to death herself, closer than she knew until a surgeon told her as much. Throughout her long illness and after the disease was bested, the dead didn't seek her out. "They knew you were close to joining them," her father once said in explanation, "and they decided to leave you in peace." That is as good a reason as any she can think of and, truth be told, she can't very well miss the two little boys in blue parkas, one black-haired and one blonde, who looked at her from the foot of her bed, or the old man who stood in a corner of the room, straw hat on his head, in white shirt and overalls, staring at her.

What she still lacks, but doesn't need, is an explanation. Because, even in the harshest light of day, that time around three o'clock when the sun hits the Caribbean in late August, seemingly wanting to roast everyone who feels its pale-angry heat, or in the darkest night when a velvet blackness crawls the heavens to shade the islands in a cloak of mysterious indigo, this story remains forever, and essentially, true.