Most days, Renata liked being surrounded by restless relatives jostling for attention, laughing at jokes that were stale millennia ago, and singing ancient songs. Today was not one of them. And while she appreciated the many things these people did for her, for example, her Uncle Cuauhtemoc, actually her great-great-granduncle twice removed, had taught her how to skip stones one oppressively hot afternoon when her family had been picnicking down at East Creek Park to escape the heat, at sixteen Renata was mature enough to understand there was a time for visiting and times when she needed to concentrate on her schoolwork.
It wasn’t the dead’s fault they kept visiting her, she admitted. Renata often sought them out because immersing herself in their lives was far better than any alternative such as texting, hanging out, or streaming a movie. Just last week an ancient cousin had entertained her for hours with family stories from the days before their world had been destroyed by the Spanish. She told how her sisters would spend long afternoons laughing and sharing gossip as they cooked together. In return, Renata explained to the old one what the world was like today. The vieja was amazed you could buy premade masa at the grocery store rather than soaking and grinding corn yourself and frightened that music could be streamed on demand out of thin air. “That sounds like sorcery,” the old woman declared.
Renata was especially grateful for the time her great grandmother told her how her father had also been afraid of the dark when he was little and had insisted on sleeping with the lights on even after being yelled at for wasting electricity. This had comforted her back in the days when she was shivering from her own nighttime fears. With the help of the dead, Renata stopped fearing the dark.
Right now, however, Renata needed to focus on her American History exam and the voices were a burden, not a blessing. Now if one of those long-gone souls had been in the US during the Civil War, Renata might have felt differently. But her family hadn’t immigrated here until the 1980s. And rather than helping her on the test, two voices were arguing over a boy they met at an 1806 dance. “We need someone to judge who is right,” a young teen named Patricia demanded just as Renata stalled out answering question number two. Patricia had died of cholera when she was fourteen, but had enjoyed music, boys, and parties while she was alive. “I saw Antonio first,” Patricia declared. “Shouldn’t I have danced with him before Juana?” Renata felt like she was back in junior high school.
“But he asked me to dance, not her,” declared her cousin in a taunting tone. “Face it, I was the better looking of us two.” Several voices chimed in to attest that Juana was a beauty with flawless red-brown skin and alluring dark eyes. She had also lost her life in the epidemic that struck the next year.
Renata rubbed her forehead in a doomed effort to silence the crowd. She didn’t know why the dead had chosen her to visit. She was just a plain, somewhat near-sighted girl in a rundown neighborhood on the East Side of Silicon Valley. She played soccer in the fall and softball in the spring, though for both she was good enough to make varsity but not talented enough to make it off the bench onto the field. She was lighter skinned than her mother but darker than her father, and of average height. In the past week, her dentist had told her she had zero cavities while a librarian had reminded her she had two overdue books–despite the voices Renata was an avid reader. “I’m an unremarkable girl,” she mumbled under her breath, “who just happens to be visited by the dead.”
“Listen to me!” Patricia yelled, frustrated that Renata’s mind had wandered away from her. “It wasn’t that he thought Juana was beautiful, he just wanted her because she had loose morals.” Renata wanted them both to go away.
She had never told anyone about these visitations, assuming they’d lock her away in a ward if anyone discovered she communicated with her dead relatives. Or just as bad, they’d dismiss their reality by assuming she was acting out. She imagined a doctor with a white coat, grey hair, and concerned brows telling her mother, “After everything she’s been through, this is just her way of healing her emotions.”
She was angry, she’d admit, and there were times she wanted to curl into a ball to stop the hurting. But that had nothing to do with her connection to the dead which had started long before the accident. From the very first visitor, a girl much like herself who lived in thirteenth century Spain. Renata instinctively knew she had to keep these things a secret. As far as Renata could tell, the only one who knew she spoke to the dead was Señora Alba, the neighborhood bruja who saw everything. “Be patient with them, mija,” she had said to her out of the blue one Saturday morning after Renata had just finished playing soccer. “They are bugging you because they are bored and no one else will listen to them. Someday you will understand that this is a gift.” Renata looked at Alba as innocently as she could, but no one can hide their secrets from a witch. That evening, an eighteenth century bruja told Renata she would have a rendezvous with Alba in the future, but now wasn’t the time.
Renata sometimes worried that her ability to commune with the dead might thwart her ambitions. She wanted to go to college to major in biology and then get a doctorate to become a researcher or a professor. As the first to get a college degree, it would make her family proud. But talking to dead souls might get in the way of that. She feared that this was a sign that fate wanted her to be a bruja like Alba, and Renata had taken to wonder if she should apprentice to become a curandera, though she didn’t believe that administering herbal teas and poultices or lighting special candles could cure anyone of anything. Renata wished she could ask her father for advice, but she wasn’t speaking to him. Her mother, wrapped in a blanket of grief and fatigue, was also of no use.
Furthermore, Renata was frequently ashamed to be talking to dead people in a valley that prided itself on being the birthplace of the modern computer era. While her more ambitious classmates wanted to be engineers, coders, and technicians who would create global commercial enterprises or fly to Mars, Renata spent her evenings listening to old men tell her how they predicted the harvest by the color of the morning sky at the equinox and old women who taught her how to use urine and wildflowers to make cloth dyes. Renata was afraid that if anyone found out about her powers, she’d be dismissed as one more superstitious Mexican unfit for the modern world.
“Can anyone help me explain how the Northern economy benefited from Southern slavery?” Renata yelled at the mob in her head. That shut everyone up for a minute. But none of them were of any help as meaningless words and phrases like textile mills, letters of credit, and export markets swirled off the mostly blank page into the air around her.
Just as Renata was about to surrender, her father showed up to shoo away the horde that was bothering her. That act of kindness did nothing to slake Renata’s intense anger at him, however. And rather than helping her concentrate, her father’s presence forced her to tightly shut her eyes to make the pain go away. She wanted to dissolve into her tears, but she didn’t want to give her father the pleasure of seeing her cry.
Unlike many of her friends, her relationship with her father had been good. A lot of other dads treated their daughters as if they walking threats to the family honor. Mostly, they would torment their daughters as they worked to keep them away from boys, not letting them go out at night, grilling them about boys in their classes, and spending their time at mass making sure no lovesick pocho was making goo goo eyes at their precious. As a result, all they did was fight with their daughters. But not Renata’s dad. Perhaps because she was the only girl out of four children, she had been her father’s favorite. He had her read to him every night while in turn he patiently explained who was who in the Lucha Libre wrestling matches they watched together. She had loved those times. Then he abandoned her.
Officially, it had been a bad traffic accident. “The road was slick because of all the rain,” the policeman had said, his head bowed in sympathy. Renata’s mother and everyone else jumped on those words to soothe their sorrow. But Renata could hear the minds of the dead. She knew that he had impulsively slammed the gas pedal to the floor, driven by depressive thoughts that Renata couldn’t understand. A darkness in his head made him swerve the steering wheel to make his car careen off the overpass that horrible night. Only Renata knew the truth.
As he entered the space in her head, Renata wanted to scream at him. She tried to conjure up cruel words and hateful sentences, anything to get her father to feel as bad as she, but to her dismay, Renata discovered she lacked the ability to purposely hurt anyone. Worse, she could tell her father was proud of her, and he was the only one who believed in her future, whatever it might be. Because she lived inside her father’s regret, she knew her father loved her despite all the anger she had for him. She inhaled her father’s remorse and absorbed his guilt so that his melancholy clouded her eyes. Against her will, she felt sorry for her father, but that didn’t lessen her anger she felt for his leaving her.
Her father spoke before Renata could overcome her fury enough to put into words all the complaints she had for him dying. “Tell me again how northern textile mills depended on southern cotton,” he asked, reminding her that he had often sought to learn from her schooling. Because her father had never finished high school, having been needed to work to support the family, she had been his portal to books and learning. “Then we can move on to the way northern banks made loans to southern slaveholders.” Feeling confident, she wrote out the answers to her father’s questions, and with his help, she aced the test.
It wasn’t her perfect grade that finally cooled her anger. It was empathy. She had never thought that adults could be complicated or conflicted. She hadn’t realized they were buffeted by whims and ruled by emotions just like kids. Renata had no idea how this new understanding would affect her, but she vowed that compassion would rule her life going forward.