I was not sure what to do, until Ti Me came to the door to say “Market.” And then Ella tucked the jacket up and put it underneath the divan, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Oh, I thought. Oh. I saw now her stiff, irregular hair, her rigid dress. That she should know something of Emmanuel that I did not, even now. That he should hold this in him and only share it with her, and not with me, his wife. That he would not tell me this. I felt furious.

WHEN EMMANUEL AND I made it back to the water, I was ready.

“I did not think there was anything to tell,” he said. By now, in our lessons, I had learned to wear a pair of old bloomers and one of Emmanuel’s undershirts. He swam in the nude. I had become afraid that someone—a woman coming to wash her laundry in the dusk, a child looking for frogs in the mud—would find us, but Emmanuel seemed to almost relish the thought.

“You would not tell me about seeing those people burn?”

“You can’t … She doesn’t … You cannot always trust what Ella says.”

“She told me she longs to burn heretics at the stake.”

“She took our family lessons in differently.”

“What does that mean?”

“She is different than me. She has been for a long time. I did not want to tell you at first. It is painful, and then I worried you would treat her poorly.”

I was standing in the pool, just at the depth where the water reached my calves. Emmanuel, kneeling in the water, lay back. He said, to the darkening sky above us, “She was not always this way. Papa says she is mad, but I don’t believe it is so.”

I sank down into the water beside him. “I don’t understand why you did not tell me there was something wrong with your sister.”

“We made a pact, when she began to … began to …” I had never seen Emmanuel halt for words, except when we were together in the dark, but he did so now. “When Ella began to … talk like that. Father and I agreed. There is no one here to treat her. They do not have madhouses in Haiti. And I would not put her in one anyways—because she is not mad, I do not think. And if we were to bring her back to America, where would she live? She is best here. She is best at home. I convinced Papa of that. And if I can find something to ease her burden, then I will have done my duty by her.”

“So you expect me to live beside her?”

“She is harmless.”

“She spends all day dreaming of seeing men burn at the stake.”

“She is. She seems to have taken a disliking to you, but she would never outright hurt you.”

“You choose her over me,” I said. “Every time.”

Emmanuel had not stopped looking at the sky. He said now, “I cannot believe you would believe that. When I’ve shown and said so many times to you that you are my life.”

I heard him turn in the water. “Do you want to know what she really is to me? Ti Me says she is like this because our family did not serve us well. The very first words Ti Me said to Ella and me when she saw us were ‘Marasa yo rayisab.’ Twins don’t get along. Especially if they are a boy and a girl. The boy will always prosper, while the girl will suffer. Ti Me is a fatalist, like everybody here. But she believed she could help us a little. She wanted to take us to a houngan, to meet lwa yo, to set it right. Ella refused to do any of it. Even at thirteen, she called it ‘popish magic.’ Ti Me says that that is when we lost her, and that Ella will not return to us as long as she is so stubborn.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Ella has always been like that,” Emmanuel said carefully. “When we were children, she was given to fits of weeping. But then, I was, too. And we had so much to cry over—leaving America and coming here, and being hungry the first year while Father set up his ministry. We thought we hated Father then. And then Ma was gone. And then everyone else.

“Ti Me, when she came to us, she would make sure the colors of our clothes were identical, that our plates always had the same number of yams. Sometimes, if I was in the kitchen with her, I would see her switch our plates around, so that I was given Ella’s portion and Ella was given mine. I did not understand it. I said, ‘Why do you do this?’ And Ti Me said that was how you handled twins. She said because we were twins, we were very powerful and prone to resentment. That we must be satisfied and watched for jealousy. That our mother had not known to do so, and look what misfortune had befallen the family. Our poor mother had refused to learn the laws that govern the spirit here. She did not do her duty, and that is why she and our brothers died when they set foot on this land. And Ti Me said she would try to make it right.

“When Ella heard all that, it only made her cry harder. We used to cry together, Ella and I, spend whole afternoons crying over the books Father made us study. But I was young enough that I thought maybe Ti Me could be right. Our first Christmas here was spent with Father and the other mission families, on our knees in the sun, praying to God. That afternoon, Ti Me told us she knew what would make us feel better, and that if we wished to feel happy again, we would come with her when she called us. And she did, later that night—Father was asleep, and Ti Me came to our room and called for both of us. I went right away. Ella only followed because I went first. I remember her in her nightshirt, her eyes wide in the dark, staring straight ahead in fear.

“Ti Me took us out of the city—we walked in the dark for what felt like hours. Ti Me was like our mother, but she was only a few years older than the two of us. So we were all children and able to walk far. I remember the moon was so bright and high above us—it looked like a rib bone, curved into the sky. I would look up at it when my feet were tired. We walked on the road out of Port-au-Prince, and then Ti Me turned down a path into the forest, away from the shoreline. We walked again there, in the dark, with the leaves pressing up on my skin. Ti Me is like my mother, I’ve told you so many times, but she is not a very affectionate girl, and when I began to cry at the brush of leaves, she only sighed and told me to walk faster. Ella kept whispering to me, ‘We will be sacrificed, and it will be your fault.’

“We walked and walked until we made it to a small house, made out of woven grass, and a clearing. There was a pole in the middle, and tens of people sitting and standing, laughing, talking, greeting one another. There were maybe five or six children younger than me, awake that late, on their mothers’ laps or riding their older sisters’ hips. There were old people and young. A few women and men in white shirts, and white scarfs tied to their heads. Torches all around to illuminate their faces. It did not look like any kind of solemn ceremony. It looked more like what a picnic did back in America, except it was happening in the middle of the night in a clearing, with someone’s dog running happily back and forth and in among the people. Someone was even passing around slices of fruit. When we got there, Ti Me had us squat down on the ground alongside some other children our age. It was only as I looked at them more closely in the light from the torches that I saw how many pairs of twins were there. Boy twins. Girl twins. A few that were boys and girls, I guessed, like me and Ella. We sat and waited.

“We had left the house probably at midnight. By the moon in the sky, I would guess we sat and waited for another hour or so. I began to yawn, and Ti Me reached out her arm, so I could lie against her shoulder.

“Then the music began—you haven’t heard it yet. It’s like the drums of heaven.”

“There are no drums in heaven,” I said.

“You’re wrong, Libertie.” Emmanuel still was not looking at me. He still was speaking to the sky.

“I saw the men and women in white walk in a circle around the pole, swaying in time, the women each holding a lighted candle. Sometimes, in their march, they would stop to twirl. Sometimes, a man would come up to them and press his forehead to theirs, and then both, man and woman, would twist around each other, only their brows touching.

“I watched it all,” he said, “but Ella hid her face.”

“They had a brown-skinned kid goat and a speckled hen. They slit the throats of both and then cooked them, and then put them in a jug with three mouths and offered it to the Marasa. These are the spirits of twins.

“When the spirits had eaten, a woman came and gathered up the meal and put it in a wooden basin. She balanced the basin on the top of her head and walked around the pole three times. Then she took the basin off her head and showed it to each of us, to all the children sitting around. She kept asking us, ‘èske li bon?’ When she got to me and Ella, I nodded.