I tapped her on the shoulder, and she startled.

I smiled, though, and whispered, “Ou vle ale la?”

She looked at me for a moment, as if deciding something.

I pointed out the doors, where a woman, her face streaked with white powder, her skirts hiked to her hips, was running past, a little boy laughing, trying to keep up with her.

Ti Me nodded, once. I took her hand and walked the two of us out of the church.

As the doors swung shut behind us, I heard the men and women inside begin to rustle, the priest call for us to return, and the whoosh of Bishop Chase’s robes as he stood up from his seat.

I had finally done something to provoke a reaction from him, and I could not stop smiling as Ti Me and I ran through the streets in the sun.

“Ki kote li ye?” I panted. Where is it?

“Simityè a,” she said. The cemetery. And then she squeezed my hand.

The graveyard in Jacmel was a little bit above the city, in the hills, so that the dead had a view of the ocean and the living in the town below them. In those days, it was not as big as it would become, but it was still an impressive place. The graves there were aboveground stone mausoleums. Some had columns and porticos; others were nothing more than solemn boxes with tops to shift off when the dead were buried. It was not like our graveyard back home, with its little pebbles, that I cut the grass from. Who is cleaning father’s grave now that I’m gone? I wondered as we ran.

I thought of my mother, now left to tend two graves alone for the rest of her days, and felt a flush of shame, again—at my hasty marriage, at my foolishness. But I did not have time to feel sorry for myself, because as we drew closer, we were swept up by the crush of people at the cemetery gate, jostling one another, pressing close, hoping to get in and join their friends.

A man stood at the gate, his face dusted in white chalk, a top hat on. On his nose was balanced three pairs of spectacles, all with the glass missing. He had stuffed white cloth into his ears and mouth, like we do whenever we prepare a body for burial. He removed his cloth only to speak in a nasally, high-pitched singsong that I could not understand. Beside him was another man, taller, who was inspecting everyone who came past. All around us, everyone was eager for his scrutiny.

I nudged Ti Me. “Kiyès li ye?”

She snorted. “You talk to me in English. It will be easier.”

“Who is that?”