A woman was speaking to her. She was saying, My name is Valerie. We’ve met before, but you keep forgetting. I forgive you for that. I need you to find Marlie Evans. M-A-R-L-I-E. She’s wasted so much of her life trying to find me. I was the love of her life. We fell in love when she was twenty-one and I was twenty-one. You need to tell her I didn’t leave her. There was an accident. Her voice was a whisper, close to Ayanna’s ear. The room, Ayanna opened her eyes, was filled with a pale pink light.

15

“There is a space between the worlds,” she heard herself saying. “A crack where some souls go, so they stay half here, half there.”

“Stop playing,” Stephen said. “You’re doing real Ouija board behavior.”

The room was there, but for a moment all Ayanna could see was a woman’s face, eyes dark and wide-set, thin eyebrows, and a mouth small and full, a little rosebud. Then, it was gone, pink static instead.

A voice was saying, “The place where every world needs to bleed together, so life’s tides can continue. Each life like a mushroom, connected across different forests, times, journeys,” and Ayanna could hear herself repeating it back to the voice.

Nothing was below Ayanna. She could feel only air beneath her back. A soft hand she didn’t recognize, too soft, was touching her cheek.

There was no formal name for the place where Ayanna and Olivia had gone. Some called it the meadows, others the blue lands, a few people called it Indigo, as if it were another country. But there was a feeling to being there, among all the stillness that was impossible to recreate on Earth. Ayanna felt it in these moments, she could hear voices, was aware of her own breath, but there was a stagnancy in the room that she heavily associated with that place.

“Her name is Marlie. M-A-R-L-I-E.”

Ayanna was aware of the small room around her, of Stephen sitting cross-legged and shaking her foot, trying to wake her, of Jane sleeping curled back into embryo position, and of the feeling like her own body was walking up a rocky slope. Ascending and almost slipping. The hairs on her arms were standing at attention. Valerie was saying Marlie’s name again. Someone was knocking on a door in the distance. An urgent rhythm. There is nothing fun about this, Ayanna thought, and the coherent thought echoed in her mind. She thought she could see the word fun in huge font on the back of her eyes.

“Liana,” another voice said. “You’ve returned.”

“Go away,” Valerie yelled.

Stephen was wiping chip crumbs on the rug next to her arm and muttering about needing a vacuum. He put his hand in the one-inch space between where Ayanna’s body should have been and the rug. His face was expressionless.