I heard him turn in the water. “Do you want to know what she really is to me? Ti Me says she is like this because our family did not serve us well. The very first words Ti Me said to Ella and me when she saw us were ‘Marasa yo rayisab.’ Twins don’t get along. Especially if they are a boy and a girl. The boy will always prosper, while the girl will suffer. Ti Me is a fatalist, like everybody here. But she believed she could help us a little. She wanted to take us to a houngan, to meet lwa yo, to set it right. Ella refused to do any of it. Even at thirteen, she called it ‘popish magic.’ Ti Me says that that is when we lost her, and that Ella will not return to us as long as she is so stubborn.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Ella has always been like that,” Emmanuel said carefully. “When we were children, she was given to fits of weeping. But then, I was, too. And we had so much to cry over—leaving America and coming here, and being hungry the first year while Father set up his ministry. We thought we hated Father then. And then Ma was gone. And then everyone else.

“Ti Me, when she came to us, she would make sure the colors of our clothes were identical, that our plates always had the same number of yams. Sometimes, if I was in the kitchen with her, I would see her switch our plates around, so that I was given Ella’s portion and Ella was given mine. I did not understand it. I said, ‘Why do you do this?’ And Ti Me said that was how you handled twins. She said because we were twins, we were very powerful and prone to resentment. That we must be satisfied and watched for jealousy. That our mother had not known to do so, and look what misfortune had befallen the family. Our poor mother had refused to learn the laws that govern the spirit here. She did not do her duty, and that is why she and our brothers died when they set foot on this land. And Ti Me said she would try to make it right.