“My grandmother always said that.”
“What she does is detect it, block it if it’s negative, mobilize it if it’s positive. Here in town people consult her a lot, and sometimes people come from out of town to see her. Her children live in the house behind hers. She has seven kids, all boys. They take care of her and see to all her needs, but people say they never go into her house. Should we go over to the pool with Nina?”
“No, don’t worry.”
“Nina!” Carla calls out to her, and only then does Nina see us in the car.
Nina smiles. She has a divine smile: her dimples show and her nose wrinkles a little. She stands up, picks up her mole from the beach chair, and runs toward us. Carla reaches to open the backseat door for her. She moves in the driver’s seat with such naturalness it’s hard to believe she got in this car for the first time today.
“But I have to smoke, Amanda. I’m sorry about Nina, but I can’t finish this story without another smoke.”
I make an unconcerned gesture and hand her the pack again.
“Blow it out the window,” I say while Nina gets into the backseat.
“Mommy.”
“What, sweetie?” says Carla, but Nina ignores her and asks me:
“Mommy, when are we going to open the box of lollipops?”
Well trained by her father, Nina settles in and buckles her seat belt.
“In a little while,” I tell her.
“Okay,” says Nina.
“Okay,” says Carla, and that’s when I notice there’s nothing left now of the drama from before she started to tell her story. She’s not crying anymore, she’s not leaning her head against the steering wheel. She is unbothered by the interruptions as she talks, as if she had all the time in the world and were enjoying this return to her past. I wonder, David, if you could really have changed that much, if for Carla telling it all over again brought her back, if only for a moment, to that other son she claims to miss so much.
“As soon as the woman opened the door I thrust David into her arms. But people like her are sensible as well as esoteric. So she put David down on the floor, gave me a glass of water, and wouldn’t start talking until I’d calmed down some. The water brought a little of my soul back to my body and it’s true, for a moment I considered that my fears might all be a fit of madness, I thought of other possible reasons why the horse could be sick. The woman was staring at David while he played, arranging the decorative miniatures that were on the TV table into a single-file line. She went over to him and played with him a moment. She studied him attentively, discreetly, sometimes resting a hand on his shoulder, or holding his chin to look him straight in the eyes. ‘The horse is already dead,’ said the woman, and I swear I hadn’t said anything yet about the horse. She said David still had a few hours, maybe a day, but that soon he would need help breathing. ‘It’s poison,’ she said. ‘It’s going to attack his heart.’ I sat there looking at her. I don’t even remember how long I was like that, frozen and unable to say a word. Then the woman said something terrible. Something worse than announcing to you how your son is going to die.”
“What did she say?” asks Nina.
“Go on inside and open the lollipops,” I tell her.
Nina takes off her seat belt, grabs her mole, and runs toward the house.
“She said that David’s body couldn’t withstand the poisoning, that he would die, but that we could try a migration.”
“A migration?”
Carla puts out her unfinished cigarette and leaves her arm outstretched, almost hanging from her body, as if the whole exercise of smoking had left her completely exhausted.
“If we could move David’s spirit to another body in time, then part of the poison would also go with him. Split into two bodies, there was the chance he could pull through. It wasn’t a sure thing, but sometimes it worked.”
“What do you mean, sometimes? She’d done it before?”
“It was the only way she knew to save David. The woman handed me a cup of tea, she said that drinking it slowly would calm me down, that it would help me make my decision, but I gulped it down in two sips. I couldn’t even put what I was hearing in order. My head was a tangled mess of guilt and terror and my whole body was shaking.”