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  In Virginia, Malena watched clotted scratches and cuts erupt on the Ada’s arms. She talked to her saints and her saints spoke to her.

  “They told me you were going to kill yourself,” she said to the Ada, years later. “When we were in school. You remember? You started breaking glass, cutting yourself? Yeah. That was them.” Cigar smoke. Whiskey mouth. “Your African, he was on top of you and you just couldn’t shake him. You were telling me that you just couldn’t do it anymore.”

  The Ada listened while on a slow train pulling itself through the desert of the Southwest, away from Saachi’s house, toward the Pacific. Malena was in New York, deep in Queens, her voice ten years familiar by then.

  “I saved your life, Ada.” She never told the Ada what exactly she’d worked or what the rituals looked like, only that they were necessary. “I held a lot of stuff that was gonna hurt you,” she said. “The problem is that when you have saints, old-school saints, trying to communicate with you, they don’t understand. It’s like talking to your grand-grand-granddaddy about the Internet.”

  We wondered why Malena watched us, why she cared, who had sent her. “Thank you,” said the Ada, smiling into the phone, her head resting on the ruined Amtrak glass.

  “You crazy?” Malena scoffed, thousands of miles packed into it. “I love you. I would do whatever for you to be there in my life. I didn’t want to tell you because at the end of the day you’re my sister and what I wouldn’t do for my sister and my blood.”

  She paused to shout in Spanish at someone on her side of the connection and came back to the line, her voice firm.

  “You would’ve done it for me.”

  It is like we said, we loved her, from back when we all lived in the mountains, for the way she loved us, all of us, and never made the Ada feel insane. For the way she was a witness. She worked for the other gods, yes, but she loved us and perhaps she did help save the Ada; perhaps what she worked was part of the veil-tearing that brought Asụghara here, the third birth. We do not know these other gods, so we cannot verify the impact of what their workers wrought. It was a small mercy, though, to be around those humans who could see us flashing beneath the Ada’s skin. The worst part of embodiment is being unseen. When the Ada got married, perhaps it would have been better if she married someone like that. But she was insisting on being human and she married a human. He was a force of a human, true, with storm eyes and hands like a future, but he was still just a human.

  We should have saved her for a god.

  Chapter Nine

  Mgbe nnukwu mmanwụ pụta, obele mmanwụ na-agba ọsọ.

  Ada

  I don’t even have the mouth to tell this story. I’m so tired most of the time. Besides, whatever they will say will be the truest version of it, since they are the truest version of me. It’s a strange thing to say, I know, considering that they made me mad. But I am not entirely opposed to madness, not when it comes with this kind of clarity. The world in my head has been far more real than the one outside—maybe that’s the exact definition of madness, come to think of it. It’s all a secret I’ve had to keep, but no longer, not since you’re reading this. And it should all make sense; I didn’t want to be alone, so I chose them. In many ways, you see, I am not even real.

  When they speak so contemptuously of humans, I’m never sure if they mean me as well. Sometimes I wonder if there even is a me without them. They talk about Ewan, the man I married, as if he was nothing, because he was only flesh. But I loved him and that made him more than human to me. Love is transformative in that way. Like small gods, it can bring out the prophet in you. You find yourself selling dreams of spectacular hereafters, possible only if you believe, if you really, really believe. So in loving Ewan, he somehow became a god. I don’t mean that in a good way—he made me suffer but I still cast idols in his name, as people have done for their gods for millennia. It didn’t end there. When the years accumulated and exposed Ewan’s cracks, I covered them in gold and bronze. That’s what you do for the idols you make. But I loved him, I really did, and he loved me, and that was the danger—is there any story of a human loving a god that ends well? I was so busy pretending I was normal back then, I didn’t know enough to think of that. So maybe he made me suffer, but how much can flesh really hurt spirit? Who do you think will be bruised more in the end?

  You see, you’ve gone and caught me. I’m talking as if I’m them. It’s all right. In many ways, I am not even real. I am not even here.

  Chapter Ten

  Do you feel real when he touches you or do you still feel dead?

  Asụghara

  I wasn’t born when Ada met Ewan, but I can tell the story anyway. And I’m even glad I wasn’t there. It’s good that Ada had that for herself, before the rest of us got to her.

  Like me and Soren, Ewan happened in Virginia. It was winter and there was a party at the tennis house, bodies pressing in a crush downstairs and music thudding against the plaster of the walls. Ada had gone upstairs to one of the bedrooms, where the noise faded away into strains of reggae and blue light filtering through a computer screen. Ewan was sitting on the bed with his back to the wall, but she had no idea who he was; she’d never seen or noticed him before that night. A friend introduced them and Ewan was easy, charming, comfortable. Soon Ada was sitting next to him, both of them chatting as people came in and out of the room, smoke softening the air around them. Ewan was Irish, green-eyed, the star of the tennis team. When they tentatively held hands, Ada smiled nervously. She was only eighteen and she was still sweet.

  “My mother thinks my palms are rough,” she said. Ada didn’t feel delicate—she never had. At fourteen, she couldn’t fit into dresses Saachi wore when she was twenty-five.

  Ewan ran his thumb over her life line. “No,” he said, looking at her as if she was wedding crystal. “They’re very soft.”

  Ada blushed. She stayed with him until the friends she came with were ready to leave. The next day was a Saturday and, as usual, everyone ended up at Gilligan’s. Ada kept looking around for Ewan as the night wore in and around, but he didn’t show up and her heart sank. It began to climb again, cautiously, when she ran into one of his roommates as the club was closing out, and, giddy with luck, caught a ride back to the tennis house. She hung out with them upstairs, trying to seem casual when she was really waiting and hoping. Finally, Ewan wandered into the room and smiled to see her.

  “I had a feeling it was you,” he said, and took her down to his room, where she taught him to play cards with Maxwell playing in the background. It was four in the morning, but Ada had gotten what she wanted, to see him. She always got what she wanted, even before I showed up. There was a framed photograph of a girl in a graduation gown on his dresser, but Ada didn’t ask any questions. She knew enough to avoid certain answers, and the moment with Ewan was too significant to disturb with whatever his actual life held. All that mattered was that he made her laugh and that there was so much peace with him, she could almost see it in the air. When he leaned in to kiss her, she tasted sharp smoke in his flesh and she could see the starkness of his skin against hers. It was her first time kissing a white person, and briefly, she wondered why he didn’t have any lips. He didn’t seem real, from the thick richness of his voice and the weight of his rolled consonants to the things about his life that sounded as if they were pulled from the Frank McCourt memoirs she’d read as a child. He felt like an escape, so Ada spent the night wrapped up and tucked in his arms while he played Al Green to her. We’re dying today, she thought. I could do this for almost forever.

  She went back to her dorm room in the morning. It was finals week, so she continued studying, and in the afternoon, she ran into Ewan in the library. He leaned out of his carrel to share his earphones with her.

  “Listen to this,” he said, and played her some Amos Lee. Ada wrote down the name of the song and then Ewan kissed her cheek and left.

  In the evening, she went to a final exhibit for a photography class because she’d mo
deled for one of her friends in the class and she knew Juan, another of the photography students. He was from Mexico, slim and brown and beautiful. He used to live in the house down the hill with Luka, and he burned packs and packs of India Temple incense. One evening, he and Ada had sat together and talked about how amazing it would be if either of them could play the violin. Juan had laughed and tilted his head back. “I’d just sit on my porch with a bowl of weed and play it all day, man.” He’d held an imaginary bow and moved it against imaginary strings, and Ada had wished that all of it was real, that she was on that porch with him and the music and nothing else.

  At the exhibit, when they lifted up the first of Juan’s prints, Ada nearly choked. Every photograph was of Ewan.

  The air around her thickened. As they placed each print on the lighted ledge, a weight began to press on her, crushing her with colors and reflections and textures. She remembered everything she thought she’d forgotten from the previous nights: the scarf around Ewan’s neck with the forest-green clover in the corner, smoke wreathing up from his mouth, the taste of it from his lips and tongue. She glanced around the room, wondering if anyone could tell how affected she was by the photographs. Ewan had left for the winter break already. He was gone, and now she was left behind, asphyxiating on his image.

  Much later, I would discover that Ewan always tasted like a drug, even in his absences. But that night, it was Ada who lay on her bed in her dorm room and let the rush of him stretch out her veins. Ewan felt like a better madness to her than anything else had before. She rolled over on her stomach and pulled out her diary to write to him, since he was not there.

  “I’m returning to sanity,” she wrote, “to the real world. But I will never forget how it felt to be overwhelmed by your beauty. You made me feel so alive and so right, and I know that in the real world, I will feel nothing for you and I will move on, and we’ll follow these rules because when it comes down to survival, we have to. I envy your girl, the one who holds your heart. If you ever need to take a break from this world, call me. I will come to you in a heartbeat and we will steal time.”

  Ewan didn’t come back the next semester.

  Ada e-mailed him through his school e-mail and, after weeks, gave up on him replying. Classes began without him, the parties thudded through the houses and he wasn’t there, and quickly enough, everything she’d felt with him stopped feeling even faintly real. You can’t really sustain a madness like that without its object’s presence. Ada soon had other problems to deal with anyway. There was Soren, and then there was me, my loud birth, the summer in Georgia, and then we all came back to Virginia. The August heat was beating through the glass windows of the school gym when Ada saw Ewan again. I was inside the marble room when I felt her heart shake and I turned my head sharply to look at him.

  “Wait,” I said. “Who’s that?”

  “Nobody,” she said, smiling as she said hello and walked past. “A ghost. Don’t mind him.”

  I looked back at him as we walked away. “You know you can’t lie to me. Is he important?”

  Ada took a deep breath. “We’ll see.”

  I was curious. I went to her memories and looked up everything I needed to know. She didn’t think much of his return, that part was true. Too much had happened, too much hurt.

  But that Saturday, Ada was at Gilligan’s and Ewan stopped her on the dance floor, drunk, his accent tumbling out with force.

  “You’re the classiest person I’ve met at this school,” he said. “Come by the house. We’ll listen to music again.”

  Ada watched the back of his head as he left. She was thoughtful. By then, she was more used to me, since we had just spent our first few months together. I liked that because with me there, it meant that she was less alone. “What do you think?” she asked me.

  I didn’t even need to consider it. “Oh, I think we should go,” I said, a bit selfishly, since I just wanted to see for myself if that chemistry in her memory was the real thing, if the two of them could make it happen again. Anyone who felt like a drug was a person I was interested in. Ever since I dropped the one with the thin penis, I had been so bored. I missed having toys to play with.

  A few days later, we walked down the hill to the house Ewan had moved to, up the street from Luka. Ada was nervous because she wasn’t exactly sure if she would be welcome there. Ewan had been drunk when he invited her—maybe he hadn’t meant it. At the house, the boys had just come back from practice, rackets and sweat everywhere.

  “Oh god,” Ada whispered to me as we stepped through the doorway. “What am I doing here?”

  “Hold on,” I said, pressing against her eyes. “There he is.”

  Ewan looked up from the couch he was on and sprang to his feet, welcoming Ada with a surprised smile. He hadn’t expected her to show up but was clearly glad that she did. I watched, fascinated, as they left the house and walked to Main Street, down to the coffee shop, where he and Ada sat as she played him Nina Simone through a shared set of earphones. The mountains were tall and green around them. I sat in Ada and didn’t interfere, minding my own business for once.

  She never gave him the number to her dorm room and they never e-mailed or planned anything. Ada would just walk down that hill with the grass brushing her ankles, cool sunshine on her head, his room at the end of her journey. They would listen to music, talk, and then she started spending the night once in a while, lying in his arms under three comforters when the weather turned cold. His bed was a mattress lodged behind a dresser and braced against the wall. They didn’t even kiss. I don’t know why I left them alone—maybe I felt she had more of a right to him because she met him before I was born. But he was different, you know; he was not someone I needed to hunt. He meant her no harm. He didn’t even try to touch her. So I could, for a while at least, allow it to continue.

  On Wednesdays they danced against the bar at the Irish pub, and on Saturdays, on the dance floor at Gilligan’s. Ewan loved Ada’s short hair and she compared that with Itohan’s younger brother, who had told her with disgust that she would look like a boy. With Ewan, they just listened to music and talked about their childhoods, and it was all nice and innocent if you forget that they were humans who had hearts. Eventually, they started to wonder what exactly they were doing, and that’s how they ended up on the couch in Ewan’s room, both nervous and unsure.

  “I have a girlfriend,” he said.

  “I know,” said Ada. They looked at each other.

  “I’ve cheated on her before, with other girls.”

  They had avoided either of these truths because that was the real world, the one that wasn’t supposed to infringe on their bubble. Bringing it up scared the shit out of Ada. She didn’t want to be out there alone, so she reached for me. I came in, but I entered gently because it wasn’t time to fight yet. She just needed a little coldness, a pinch of ruthlessness. I looked back at Ewan with her eyes. “Okay?” I said.

  “I can’t do it with you,” he explained. “It would be different, I already know. I would care too much, get emotionally attached.” His words were floating up toward the old ceiling.

  Inside the marble room, I looked at Ada and she shook her head. She wasn’t looking for anything. She didn’t believe in that anymore.

  “Are you sure?” I asked her.

  She shrugged, wrapping her arms around herself. “I found him and he makes me happy. That’s enough for me. Who needs a forever?”

  I nodded. “No wahala. Whatever you want.”

  I turned back to him. “I don’t want a relationship from you,” I said, as if none of it was a big deal. I was cool, languid, casual. “I like you. You like me. It’s that simple.”

  Ewan laughed and Ada smiled back at him and the bubble stayed safe. In his bed that night, Ewan held her face and kissed her for all the time they had waited. When Ada kissed him back, it was very different from their first kiss, the one that happened before I was born. She hadn’t known desire then. This time, she had me, and he had com
e back, and so she drank smoke from his mouth like it was air. I barely even had to be there.

  His girlfriend remained a pale face in a picture frame on his dresser. Ada continued to flow through Ewan’s life: nothing holding her, nothing keeping her, nothing pushing her away. One night at the Irish pub, she danced to a Shakira song with a Brazilian friend, their hips intimate, moving in a way a white boy’s couldn’t. Ewan smiled at her from the bar where he was standing with his friends.

  “I wasn’t in the least bit jealous, you know,” he told her afterward, when she was back in his arms.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  Ewan smiled again, assured. “I know it’s me you like.”

  He was right. Still, for a while all they did after these nights out was curl up in his bed, make out, and then sleep. Everyone knew about them. His best friend couldn’t believe they hadn’t fucked yet. Even me, sef—sometimes I couldn’t believe we hadn’t fucked yet. Luka had pulled back from Ada because he and Ewan were good friends and it was clear who she’d chosen. I knew it was the right choice. Everything with Ewan was moving at a different pace, one I wasn’t interfering with, one that no one had given Ada before. I wasn’t going to fuck that up for her. My job was just to be there if she needed me. Besides, I liked Ewan. He was a typical bad boy, after all—older, popular, a writer who drank all the time and smoked weed and cigarettes and blacked out regularly. Ada was the model student—she was both president of her graduating class and, at nineteen, the youngest person in it. Everyone at the school, like in Georgia, only saw her and couldn’t see me. It was fine. No wahala. They didn’t need to see me for me to be who I was.