“Yes.” Her reply was loud and clear. My heart skipped a beat. I was both overjoyed and frightened at the same time—relieved to have finally made contact but also thoroughly freaked out to be having a conversation with a dead person in the “dark place” while riding the number fourteen bus. When I’d been able to talk to her back in January through the form of a ghost she’d taken, everything she’d said had been stiff and formal, and it had seemed like she hadn’t really been able to hear me clearly. So I wasn’t sure of what to expect. “I can hear you.”

I stared into the floral print of the scarf wrapped around the hair of the woman sitting in front of me, wondering if this was real or if I had finally completely lost it. I guessed I just had to believe. “Did you hear about what happened in Willow?”

“I told you that would happen,” Jennie told me. Her voice didn’t sound the way I remembered it. It was lower in pitch, and hearing it made me recoil the same way that hearing my own voice in videos did.

“Is this a good way to reach you?” I asked, automatically fearful that I might not have the presence of mind to ask her every question for which I needed answers at that very moment. The thought of our connection being broken also made me frantic; in a way, I resented having to use this precious line of communication to solve a problem instead of grow closer to the sister I’d unfairly lost so long ago. “Like, whenever I want to talk to you?”

“I’m always here,” she replied.

Thinking about how Mrs. Robinson had described Jennie as being “stuck in a dark place,” with all my heart I wanted to ask my twin if she was at peace in the afterlife. If she was safe, if she was intentionally lingering in an unpleasant state of being for my benefit so that she could contact me this way. But deep down, I suspected that was the case. And if she had been avoiding eternal peace—or heaven, or whatever awaited us after death—for the purpose of being able to help me now, then I couldn’t waste time with my own selfish emotional needs. So I launched directly into questions about Mischa. “If you knew that tornados were going to hit Wisconsin, can you tell me how to break the”—paranoid, I looked around and dropped the volume of my voice—“curse on Mischa?”

“First, you have to get there. Remind Mom about my funeral,” Jennie told me.

I thought back to that day. I had very few memories of it, as I’d been little. I suspect my parents had given me a sedative from my pediatrician. I know that I didn’t wear black because I didn’t own anything black at the age of eight, and I remember my mother arguing with my aunt Jean about how inappropriate it was for children to wear dark colors. “What about it?” I asked.