“I did. But I have to run down to my locker to get them, and clock out. Do you mind waiting a few minutes for me to come back upstairs?”

Hanging out with a patient on my own time after a shift may very well have been a violation of one of the terms of my employment, so I just smiled at Luis in the elevator as I rode back up to the third floor and told him I’d left something behind in Mrs. Robinson’s room. A fresh crop of zinging tingles broke out across my scalp, and I attributed them to Jennie’s awareness that I was on the brink of figuring out how to hear her more clearly. Hope swelled in my chest at the thought that within the next few minutes I might finally be able to ask her what was going on, what I needed to prepare myself for. But naturally, that hope coincided with fear that Mrs. Robinson might be a quack, and that her advice might just be another dead end.

I knocked twice on Mrs. Robinson’s door before entering, and she greeted me with, “Took your time, didn’t you?”

Her television was on at a low volume, and she sat in a chair in front of it, her cataract-covered eyes fixed on its screen as if she could see it. “How did you know it was me?” I asked. “Both just now and when I came up a few minutes ago?”

She toyed with the amulet she wore around her neck. “I could hear you! Well, not you, but them. The loa that follow you around. They’re worked up about something tonight. That’s for sure.” She then repeated for emphasis, “That’s… for sure.”

My scalp was burning; the tingles were making their way down toward my ears. I set the bottles of essential oil on the coffee table and twisted off the cap of the orange oil so that she could take a whiff. “Mrs. Robinson, I really hope you can tell me how to communicate with my sister in the dark place, because…” I paused to take a breath. “Because I think whatever she’s trying to tell me is urgent.”

The elderly woman instructed me to heat a cup of water to a boil and then place three drops of each of the three essential oils into it so that we could spray Florida water around the room. I had to improvise a little by heating the water in a microwave and then flicking our mixture around with my fingertips because I hadn’t brought a spray bottle with me. Mrs. Robinson also requested that I reinforce the layer of salt around the perimeter of her room with the eggshells. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that what I’d set down on Monday had been vacuumed up, and I scattered the eggshells sparingly. Housekeeping would definitely have something to say about finding eggshells mashed into the carpeting.

With all of that done, I sat down across from Mrs. Robinson, and waited for her to speak.