Mrs. Patterson tried hard to understand, but how could she have known? I didn’t know either, back then, that you’re not supposed to remember those things at all, those traces of the lives you’ve had before; but I’ve carried them with me as long as I can recall. Sometimes they rise out to meet me in subtle ways—in the gentle fears and convictions that old ghosts bring when they haunt you from the inside out. But sometimes they manifest in visions, in nightmares, or in kindergarten art projects.

I went back to drawing bubblegum butterflies and marshmallow puppies. Mrs. Patterson invited the social services people to come and observe me, but I put on a good show. I could give them what they wanted. Eventually she gave up trying to corner me and seemed to accept the undercurrent of madness that ran beneath my crayon creations.

But once in a while the three ghost women would cry, and I’d find myself inserting their six searching eyes into plastic-wrap windows, or cotton-ball clouds, or watercolor trees.

I wanted to make sure they could see me.

II

Here’s another one.

Later that same year. I’d not yet turned six.

I lived on Signal Mountain, one of a chain that surrounds Chattanooga like the rim of a bowl, split down the middle by the river. Signal is populated by rich white people on one side and poor white trash on the other, which made my family’s ethnic ambiguity something of an oddity. But I was a social creature, and the mountain was a safe playground for everyone. My cronies and I had free run of the tree-covered ridges, and we spent more time carousing through the woods than we did in our bedrooms.

Sometimes it was hide-and-seek, or tag, or—before I knew any better—blue versus gray. We wandered briskly in cutoff shorts and sneakers that let our legs get shredded by the brambles, and in long-sleeved shirts that caught on low branches and trapped pinecone seeds and needles. We stomped through streams and climbed up rocks. We chased one another senseless every day after the big yellow bus dropped us off at our neighborhood’s entrance. And most of the time, it was good.

Most of the time I ran with my friends until my lungs burst, alternately stalking them and being stalked, hiding behind wide round trunks and under piles of mulching leaves in shallow ravines. Most of the time I didn’t have to worry about anything more profound than spiders or ticks.

But then the women, no longer content to lie quiet and filtered, became dissatisfied.

One day, they began to speak.