“Hoodoo belongs to the people down here. But there are women all over the world who can do what you and I do. They’ve got different names for it in other countries, but we all share the gift.”
“The gift?”
“The dead call to us,” Nessa’s grandmother explained. “In our family, there’s always been a woman in every generation who can hear them. I heard my first haint when I was your age. My auntie told me what to do if it happened. So I went out looking, and I found a body washed ashore by the river. Her name was Belinda. Her lover had held her head underwater after she told him she was with child. After Belinda, I didn’t find another girl for thirty-five years.”
“How many haints have called out to you?” Nessa asked.
“Fourteen,” her grandmother said.
“Now they’ll call to me too?”
“Not just yet, Nessa,” her grandmother told her. “If a girl’s got the gift, it makes itself known before her bleeding begins. Then the haints go quiet so you can start your own family. They won’t call out to you again till you’re older and you know what to do.”
“How much older?” Nessa asked.
“It’s different for all of us,” her grandmother said. “But one day your life will grow quiet, and that’s when you’ll be able to hear them again. Like my auntie used to say, the gift arrives after the curse ends.”
The dead hadn’t gone away completely. Nessa had always sensed they were there. Occasionally, she would pick up snippets like static on the radio. Once, when she was in college, she’d passed an accident on the highway and seen a young girl standing outside a mangled vehicle watching EMTs working feverishly to extract her body from the wreckage. The girl looked over her shoulder at Nessa as she drove by, but never uttered a word.
When Nessa began working as a nurse in Queens, she saw the dead more often. She’d walk by a hospital room where a patient had passed and see them standing at their own bedside. They always seemed resigned to their fate. Most of the ghosts didn’t even acknowledge her. They knew where they were and had no need of her gift.
One night, she’d stopped to pay her respects to a patient who’d died shortly before Nessa had started her shift. She had cared for the comatose Jane Doe for over a week, changing her bandages and cleaning her drug-ravaged body, knowing it was unlikely the woman would ever wake up. When Nessa reached the room, she found a figure standing at the bedside, hat in hand. It wasn’t the patient but a police officer named Jonathan. He was the one who’d discovered the woman eight days earlier. She was a sex worker in the neighborhood he patrolled. A client had beaten her senseless and shoved her, half naked, from a moving car. Nessa watched from the doorway as the policeman prayed over the woman’s body. He took his time and did it right. Whether he knew it or not, his prayers were the only ones aside from Nessa’s that the poor woman would likely receive.
They were married six months later, and the fifteen years Nessa spent with Jonathan were the best of her life. Then, shortly after their twin girls turned ten, she’d woken up in the night to find Jonathan standing by her bedside with a face full of sorrow. He should have been working late, interviewing an informant in an ongoing case. When she saw him there, she knew he had come to say goodbye.
It was Nessa’s frantic call that led to Jonathan’s body being discovered. Another detective, a man named Franklin Rees, later told Nessa that Jonathan might have been alive at the time of her call. That thought had weighed on her mind for nine long years. She’d been powerless to save the person she loved most in the world.
After Jonathan’s death, Nessa and her daughters had moved out of the city to live with her parents. Both former schoolteachers from Brooklyn, they’d met on a beach near Mattauk as teenagers and retired to the island fifty years later. Nessa took a job at a clinic where no one had cause to pass away, and for years, she didn’t hear from the dead. She thought maybe she’d lost the ability, but her mother thought not. Nessa still had the gift. Her life was just too loud to make use of it. Then the girls left for college at Barnard. A year later, after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Nessa quit her job. Her parents had helped her raise her daughters, and the time had come to help them die. Her mother went quickly and her father followed shortly after. The house that had once been home to a boisterous family was now silent. If Jonathan had been there with her, it would have been different. Without him, the loneliness started to pull her under.