Mia cracks up at that. “Do you think she ever flashes the tourists?”
“No way! Why do you think she has that private little look on her face? All those red-state puritans coming by the boatload, never once suspecting that Old Libs hasn’t got panties on. She’s probably sporting a Brazilian.”
“Okay, I need to lose that visual,” Mia groans. “And might I remind you that we’re from a red statesort of.”
“Oregon’s a divided state,” I reply. “Rednecks to the east, hippies to the west.”
“Speaking of hippies, and going commando. .”
“Oh, no. Now that’s a visual I really don’t need.”
“Mammary Liberation Day!” Mia crows, referring to some sixties holdover in our town. Once a year a bunch of women spend the day topless to protest the inequity that it’s legal for men to go shirtless, but not women.
They do it in the summer, but Oregon being Oregon, half the time, it’s still freezing, so there was a lot of aging puckered flesh. Mia’s mom had always threatened to march; her dad had always bribed her with a dinner out at a fancy restaurant not to.
“Keep Your Class B Misdemeanor off My B Cups,” Mia says, quoting one of the movement’s more ridiculous slogans between gasps of laughter. “That makes no sense. If you’re baring your boobs, why a bra?”
“Sense? It was some stoner hippie idea. And you’re looking for logic?”
“Mammary Liberation Day,” Mia says, wiping away the tears. “Good old Oregon! That was a lifetime ago.”
And it was. So the remark shouldn’t feel like a slap.
But it does. “How come you never went back?” I ask.
It’s not really Oregon’s abandonment I want explained, but it seems safer to hide under the big green blanket of our state.
“Why should I?” Mia asks, keeping her gaze steady over the water.
“I don’t know. The people there.”
“The people there can come here.”
“To visit them. Your family. At the. .” Oh, shit, what am I saying?
“You mean the graves?”
I just nod.
“Actually, they’re the reason I don’t go back.”
I nod my head. “Too painful.”
Mia laughs. A real and genuine laugh, a sound about as expected as a car alarm in a rain forest. “No, it’s not like that at all.” She shakes her head. “Do you honestly think that where you’re buried has any bearing on where your spirit lives?”
Where your spirit lives?
“Do you want to know where my family’s spirits live?”
I suddenly feel like I’m talking to a spirit. The ghost of rational Mia.
“They’re here,” she says, tapping her chest. “And here,” she says, touching her temple. “I hear them all the time.”
I have no idea what to say. Were we not just making fun of all the New Agey hippie types in our town two minutes ago?
But Mia’s not kidding anymore. She frowns deeply, swivels away. “Never mind.”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“No, I get it. I sound like a Rainbow Warrior. A freak. A Looney Tune.”
“Actually, you sound like your gran.”
She stares at me. “If I tell you, you’ll call the guys with the straitjackets.”
“I left my phone at the hotel.”
“Right.”
“Also, we’re on a boat.”
“Good point.”
“And if by chance they do show up, I’ll just offer myself up. So, what, do they, like, haunt you?”
She takes a deep breath and her shoulders slump as if she’s setting down a heavy load. She beckons me over to one of the empty benches. I sit down next to her.
“‘Haunt’ is not the right word for it. Haunt makes it sound bad, unwelcome. But I do hear them. All the time.”
“Oh.”
“Not just hear their voices, like the memory of them,” she goes on. “I can hear them talk to me. Like now. In real time. About my life.”
I must give her a weird look, because she blushes.
“I know. I hear dead people. But it’s not like that. Like remember that crazy homeless woman who used to wander around the college campus claiming she heard voices broadcast to her shopping cart?” I nod. Mia stops for a minute.
“At least I don’t think it’s like that,” she says. “Maybe it is. Maybe I am nuts and just don’t think I am because crazy people never think they’re crazy, right? But I really do hear them. Whether it’s some kind of angel force like Gran believes, and they’re up in some heaven on a direct line to me, or whether it’s just the them I’ve stored inside me, I don’t know. And I don’t know if it even matters. What matters is that they’re with me. All the time. And I know I sound like a crazy person, mumbling to myself sometimes, but I’m just talking to Mom about what skirt to buy or to Dad about a recital I’m nervous about or to Teddy about a movie I’ve seen.
“And I can hear them answer me. Like they’re right there in the room with me. Like they never really went away. And here’s what’s really weird: I couldn’t hear them back in Oregon. After the accident, it was like their voices were receding. I thought I was going to totally lose the ability to remember what they even sounded like. But once I got away, I could hear them all the time. That’s why I don’t want to go back. Well, one of the reasons. I’m scared I’ll lose the connection, so to speak.”
“Can you hear them now?”
She pauses, listens, nods.
“What are they saying?”