“That woman is ridden by a gede. The spirits found her, and she is their horse. They will move through her body. The dead are cold, but we can warm them up. He needs piman to warm him up.”

The woman began to hunch down lower, to sing and to dance faster. A few people in the crowd joined her, others laughed, and some began singing another song altogether. Above us, the sun hung low in the sky, and I could see, from the cemetery gate, the harbor with the light shining bright over it, the sea turned to waves of white light in the dusk.

I had thought when I came here, I would be able to become a new person. That I would become someone for whom it did not matter that I had failed my mother. And, I supposed, that had happened. I became a wife and a sister and a daughter to people who could not see me. But was that any better than what I had been at home, beside my mother? I thought now, It is useless. I had thought then, It is lost.

I looked at the crowd rejoicing in the graves. The man closest to me pulled a femur bone from on top of one of the tombs and waved it in the air in slow circles. A few people walked with goats on leads or held in their arms. The sound of laughter kept up all around me. It had gone from a shock to a comfort to something that warmed me on the inside, that made my blood beat, that at least told me I was alive.

Ti Me had given up her role as nurse to me and was now standing by herself, watching the men and women sing. Sometimes, she sang along loudly; other times, she kept beat with hand claps.

Perhaps, I thought, I was destined to always be a child; perhaps it was silly to try to be otherwise. I thought of the life that lay ahead of me, a life of doing what my husband whispered to me late at night, of standing beside a Christian madwoman every day in church and pretending that her pronouncements were sane, of sitting across from a smelly old bishop who looked at me as the Whore of Babylon and had not spoken more than twenty words to me since I arrived. I thought of dying here, in this land, never seeing my mother’s face again. I felt it, suddenly, in my chest: I need her.

I began to laugh. It did not start as a giggle. It was horrible. My stomach ached with it, my lips hurt from peeling back, and my bones were shaking. I was laughing so hard I could not catch my breath. My smile widened and widened until my eyes were narrowed and I felt the tiny, hot burst of tears at the corners of my eyes. The strangest thing was that I could not hear myself. I could feel the laughter bang in my throat, but in my ears was only the roar of the people around me.