Milena had already been dead for ten years the day I spotted her at the Chicago airport. But there she was, dog-earing the pages of a book. It was a busy day: mid-afternoon, pre-holiday rush blowing by, the terminals winter-chilled. I had been entertaining myself by watching travel-stiff parents dig fingernails into their children’s arms until their small faces knotted with pain. I was flying home for the first time in several years and felt, weirdly, that I related to these children. My layover was long, made longer with my anxiety. The hours had started to feel taut around me. My face was greasy, my clothes sweaty. I was looking for a new place to settle when I saw her.
At first, she was a familiar figure who could be anyone. She wore Hollywood-style sunglasses, a slinky lavender dress, and Doc Martens. A silver hardshell luggage laid by her feet. Her hair was yanked into a messy loose thing that hung near her neck. She was sitting at gate B9, her chest rising and falling, eyes scanning the pages of a thick book, waiting like every other body. It was a romance novel with a ridiculous image on its cover: a man with hair like a horse gripping the breast of some horny supermodel. It was the cover that dispelled all doubt from my bones. Milena was dead, and she was here in front of me.
I stopped in front of her, mouth agape, frozen, my backpack heavy on my shoulders. I hadn’t seen her since I was a kid. My brain was short-circuiting. I wondered briefly if this was her lost twin. Then, slowly, like she was transporting herself from a world far away, Milena raised her gaze to me. She blinked. A smile I’d know from anywhere ripped across her face.
Jenny-baby. What are you doing here?
Of all the things she could’ve said to me, I thought this was the stupidest one.
A man with bad posture passed between us, and I remembered my uncle Vedo telling me that ghosts live inside liminal spaces: the cracks between doors, the underside of bridges, the ends of hallways.
If you want to see a ghost, look between your dog’s ears, he’d say.
I never knew what the hell he meant. He was a man with more lies than saliva, more lovers than the moon.
So instead, I tried running through the facts. In my head, I say: I’m twenty-four. The year is 2005. This is Terminal 2. The air smells sourdough-y, like Cheez-Its. I’m going home. Milena is dead. I am alive. Lo is alive. Milena is dead.
In front of me, I watched the dead girl remove the tote bag from the seat beside her. She winked and blew me a kiss through the air. When I didn’t move to the empty seat beside her, she patted the cushion, insistent. Her face was beginning to darken the way I remembered it did when she didn’t get her way.
I pulled off my backpack and sat. I turned to face her.
This is a weird joke, I thought, though I said nothing.
We first met Milena the summer of 1993, when Mariah Carey took over every radio we owned. We heard her everywhere: bursting out of our bimmer, through the creamsicle walls of my pre-teen bedroom, between the sticky vinyl bus seats that carried me and Lo home from school. Back then, the only person we knew who could even attempt hitting the notes of Mariah was Milena. We’d watch her practice on the sunburnt bleachers of the neighborhood basketball court. Her hair was usually woven in two braids that hung past her shoulders. Under the sun, she’d tap her palm against her upper thigh while clusters of boys crowded around. Milena’s hand could hold tempo for what seemed like hours.
By the time Lo met Milena, everyone was already in love with her. But they didn’t know that.
It was during Lo’s wave of awakening all the gays in Cielo. This was the nineties, full of rage and homophobia and spit, but things like that didn’t happen in our town. We were inside of and outside of time in Cielo; we were a place where the golden sun baked into our pores, where the dust glimmered inside our lungs and made everyone live longer. Grandmothers, it seemed, would not die. Our own great-grandmother was a hundred and five; her mother, one hundred and thirty-two. This left an oasis of mostly women, though there was a small sprinkling of the men who dared to stay. To be from Cielo and to be homophobic was not only a waste of time, it was pointless.
Lo had my same face—full peach lips and small muddy eyes. Unlike me, they had a jawline like the sharp edge of a knife. They left their limp hair down until it met the first metal button of their bomber, which they wore everywhere. They liked Converse and real leather, which we could not actually afford. Sometimes, they would drag me to the mall leather shop and make me wait while they smelled every piece of oaky fabric. The way to feel real leather from fake, they told me, is to rub the fabric between your fingers. Sometimes, at home, we would practice our fuck off faces together in the mirror.
Dead eyes, make your eyes more dead, they would tell me. And chin up.
Because we aren’t punks, I’d say and watch them chuckle.
At fifteen, their pull was magnetic and sure. What Lo wanted was to kiss whoever they felt like and run through summertime sprinklers forever. All of Cielo quaked when they saw my sibling coming. Needless to say, they weren’t intimidated by Milena. They never expected to fall in love with her.
I’m sorry, I said, shaking my head. I felt my body staggering back into place. It was the same feeling after stepping off a moving train. Around us in the airport, nobody acted like anything was wrong at all.
Milena’s eyebrows tugged together. Her face was slightly less plump, carved a bit with age. She had new freckles stamped across her cheeks, which felt explicitly like an alive-person thing. They were overblown in the sunlight streaming through the airport windows, but I could still count them.
For what? she asked, blinking at me.
No. I’m just, I said. I thought you were dead? Like, we all thought that? Milena, I was at your funeral.
There was no body—the water, the morning tide—but even with that, we were sure. The whole town had known Milena was gone. Grandmothers wept and coral pink roses had wilted on her grave.
My wrists felt shaky sitting next to her. I held them in my lap, cold fingers looped around bone. Milena’s ghost sighed. I realized that I was still afraid of her.
Right, she said, glancing behind us at her gate. Her flight was set to board in fifty minutes and it seemed that she had every intention of making it. With Milena, time was my enemy, never giving me enough of what I needed.
Look. Let’s go get a drink? My treat? she said, sounding so much like herself.
I didn’t trust her. Not because she was a ghost, but because she was Milena. I felt the last decade of my life collapsing. I wanted to grab her arm and pull her home with me, yelling, She’s alive, she’s alive!!! I wanted to vomit everywhere, stain the floor a bodily color just to leave a mark. My feelings stacked atop one another, elbowing for space in my body.
It became hard to breathe. I studied her to try to find a glitch somewhere. For a ghost, she looked great. I wasn’t sure one way or another. She looked so real: pores on her cheeks, wrinkles in her dress, wispy brown hair on her arms. What made her most human of all was how tired she looked. The dullness in her eyes had never been quite as noticeable in her past life, but I could sense an aliveness to it. A lack of sleep framing the tops of her cheeks, worry lines between her eyebrows. I thought, perhaps, the dog’s ears might be useful in a moment like this.
She stood, smoothed her dress, and pulled her suitcase along. I followed her, of course.
Lo and Milena might not have ever met if it weren’t for me. I was twelve, my heart still racing from tearing through the pages of some book I was devouring. I had asked Lo to drive me to the bookstore. They said no; they had plans to drink Coors and listen to the radio in Xavier X. from Maestro’s class’s garage.
Who? I asked.
No one, Jenny, they said. Cielo was like this—too small but big enough for some secrets to live. They shut the door in my face. Through it, I heard, But tomorrow.
Tomorrow came. Milena was only a little over 5’4, but her mane of hair did a lot of work. Nobody in town had hair like Milena: spiral-curled, massive, and only sometimes frizzy from the dry heat. As we walked in, I watched Lo notice her hair in the stacks. They turned to me before shuffling off after her, tossing me a Be back.
I rolled my eyes. In those days, I found Lo to be the most predictable fool in the world. They found her in the romance section. I didn’t have to see it to see it. They’d never spoken before but Lo had seen Milena around the basketball courts like everyone else.
Within five minutes, they came back grinning.
How’d that go? I asked, the spine of my new book already cracked between my hands.
None ya, they said.
But they pulled out their wallet for my book, which could only mean it went well.
Up close, I came to learn Milena had six freckles on her face. She liked potato salad and Full House. Her mom’s name was Carmela and her father’s Patricio, though I didn’t meet them until the funeral. Sometimes, towards the end of a meal, Milena would pinch the last bits of her food between her fingers and plop them into her mouth. This move would’ve sent me to dinner table jail, but not Milena. She was her own person, with two parents and a choppy laugh. But she was also ours, held between our family palms like destiny was written there.
The first time she came over to meet us, she was fifteen. She carried red peonies through our blue door. This was the moment everyone in the family fell in love with her. Grandma, when talking about her, would tell her neighbors, Y’know, she’s Latina. Puerto Rican. Prettiest face you’ve ever seen. No, I mean it. Just wait til you see.
Mom stitched her a Christmas stocking with skiing rabbits and a golden M placed in the background like mountaintops. David, our stepfather, called her over to the blender on Monday nights, a massive bag of 7-Eleven ice thrown in the sink by his side. This was his way of putting her in charge of margaritas for the adults, a position that never would have been given to me. I watched Lo lean over a million dinner chairs, stars in their eyes, kissing Milena’s hot rosacea cheek. Our world warped around her. Everyone bent closer when she was around, eager to be put under her spell.
Up close, I did not like Milena much at all.
At the airport burger joint, we sat alone.
She ordered fries and a cheeseburger from the young employee, then slipped into a table near the walkway. I copied her. She left a twenty on the counter for me. The change trickled from my palm into hers as I slid into my seat.
Her cheeks were flushed in that same old way. I noticed that strangers didn’t stare at Milena the way they used to. She seemed comfortable across from me; the kind of comfortable that only comes with aging. There was a new broadness to her shoulders. She was still so pretty it made me nauseous. Next to her, I felt my old habit of disappearing creep back. Suddenly, I feared very seriously that I might say the wrong thing.
We sat quietly. I studied her fingernails. They were painted lazily—three brushed strokes per nail, the way she always did them. The color was a purple-brown, like the bottom of a hole. For a long bit of time, a dab of bright mustard sat at the corner of her mouth. Her lips were stained rose. It occurred to me that, at this age, in a different life, there would’ve been no problem with Milena and I dating.
I took a bite of my own burger. It tasted fleshy and wrong. I stopped myself from reaching over to wipe the mustard away because, if she wasn’t real, I didn’t want to know it yet. Milena was gearing up to say something, her throat bobbing as she swallowed. I was bracing myself to grasp the sound of her voice.
When the notes began to show up, I knew I was in trouble.
Every year, starting two months after she and Lo started dating, Milena would stuff mini zines in the crack of my door. I never knew when they were coming—fourteen days before my fourteenth birthday, three days before New Year’s 1995. The paper was different every time: several sliced brown paper bags, an ink-smudged page of People Magazine stolen from our bathroom pile, a lame slip of construction paper. They were folded carefully, pressed firmly at the edges like a child’s fortune. Inside, Milena scrawled love stories about nymphs and mermaids trapped beneath mountains, throat-crushed, yearning for the sea to save them. Every story had a villain: the money-hungry fishermen, the controlling sea witches, mermen who’d been wronged and turned to merdouches. But the villains never won in the end. Either the sea would save the protagonist, or else the story would end without resolution.
The stories weren’t good. But I starved for them. I read them over and over, belly laid across five different mattresses over the years, begging new secrets to appear. Sometimes, a word I hadn’t noticed would arrive and surprise me: plumage, cloyingly. Lived.
I carried them across the country with me three times, named a box for them. I labeled it with an unsuspecting letter at nineteen—Y—, Sharpie burning my nose, trying to throw off the scent of anyone who might go digging for evidence that I missed her.
I pushed the box to the back of every deepest closet I owned. It still lives there, an anchor dropped to the sea’s pit, waiting to be found.
After the notes, I became fascinated with the way Milena licked her fingers at dinner. She had a particular posturing around the family. Sometimes, when the conversation turned away from her and she thought no one was looking, I saw her face fall dark, like the shadow at the base of a tree. I was curious about her family, about where she’d moved from, which neighborhood she lived in. Did she know about the magic in Cielo? Was that why her family came, to fortune a good life for her? Was she leaving something bad behind? Did she lick her fingers before folding a zine in half for me? Lo probably knew the answer to these questions, but I never asked.
Mostly, I was curious about what it would be like to be alone with her. I wanted to watch her hands turn the pages of a book. I wanted the same wind to hit our shoulders at the same time, and no one else’s. I wanted her to talk to me, only me, really me, without placing me next to anyone else. I wanted Lo to disappear.
The first time we ended up alone was at the amusement park. I was fifteen, she was eighteen, and I’d been begging someone in the family to take me before the summer ended. Mostly, I was embarrassed that all the other girls from school had already been going season-pass style, and I hadn’t even seen the Ferris wheel since I was a kid. We were at a family dinner, me throwing a fit.
I just feel like Lo got everything and now I get none of it, I announce to the table.
Then Milena said, Jenny-baby, can I take you? I’ve been wanting to see it, anyway, and Lo refuses to take me.
Lo nodded. They had a constitutional veto against amusement parks, particularly ones set in mall parking lots. Milena was smiling at me from across the table. I could count on my fingers the number of times she’d spoken directly to me over the years, mostly because I avoided her. I wanted to die. Mom and David clapped, cheered.
See, Jenny? And you think no one wants to go with you. All you have to do is ask, Mom said, winking at Milena. I wanted to double die.
She picked me up in the late morning a few days later. Lo had loaned us the bimmer. Milena drove wild and recklessly, with the windows down and her hair tangling up. She played whatever was on the radio and sang to it loudly. I wanted to sing, too, but was embarrassed, so I stared ahead and focused very hard on not looking tense. Lo had a crystal charm hanging from the rearview mirror. It sent vibrant rainbows dancing across the car, across Milena’s ripped jeans and exposed knee.
When it came to parking, she shoved Lo’s car on a patch of grass under a dying tree.
The amusement park was hot and noisy and overpopulated. We shared pink cotton candy while leaning up against a barricade. I watched her fingers pinch the fluff and tug rhythmically. They grew stained red. We rode several of the big fast roller coasters. On the Twister, she held my hand, but only for a moment. She kissed my cheek in the photo booth, then slipped the photo strip into her back pocket before I could get a look at it. I worried about this—that she might pull it out later and realize how unremarkably uncompelling I was. I was considering this when I ran back out from the porta-potty after chugging one of those mega-Cokes and giving myself a stomach ache. I found her by the Ferris Wheel, trading phone numbers with a rare group of guys. They wore backwards caps and dispersed when I walked up, still wiping my damp hands on my jeans.
Who were they? I asked.
Some fools, she said, and we laughed. I was not concerned with boys at that age. With Milena around, I had never considered them at all.
At the end of the day, she passed me the last note she ever gave me. It was one of those small, pocket-sized spirals that reporters pulled out on movies like Scream. I felt it sizzling in my hands on the ride home. When we pulled up out front, one of us thanked the other for the day, though I can’t remember who said what.
See you around, kiddo, she said, leaning over and kissing my cheek again. It happened so quickly, I wasn’t sure whether I’d imagined it. I stepped out of the car, cheek flushed, while she drove off to meet Lo somewhere I was not invited. I watched from the curb until the car became so small, it was nothing but air.
As it turned out, this was the last time I ever saw Milena up close. The breakup was swift and undramatic. She stopped coming over immediately. Nothing was explained to us.
Where’s mija been? Mom asked, to which Lo said, That’s over now, as if we had fallen way behind and should be arrested for it.
Once, a few weeks after they ended, I saw her in the Taco Bell parking lot, pushed up against the passenger side of a car with some guy. I remember the paint of the car better than anything else—glistening purple-brown with tiny flecks of gold and green shimmer, the same color as my favorite nail polish, and feeling like a boning knife had hit my stomach. That color and the pain melded together for me until I had to throw the bottle of nail polish away.
I didn’t see her around much after that, not even on the basketball courts. I’d never been more furious with Lo in my life. I didn’t knock on their door when I heard them crying through the wall at night. Inside me, I felt dark, cruel ivy grow inside me, covering my heart in ways that would later frighten me. In my twenties, it would follow me into the tiled bathroom; it would grab me in the car before and after work; it would trail in the rearview mirror behind me.
It only took a few weeks for me to soften. I was back to asking Lo to drive me to the mall for soggy food court fries just to give them something to do. I didn’t like to see them depressed, sleeping through meals, dragging their body around the house like a curse. I missed them feeling like an alive thing.
It was easier than I thought to forgive them for ruining things with Milena. Because, of course, I was also relieved.
The night she died, Lo was out with the Coors, with some other kids and a radio, kissing some other girl. I was in my room alone, reading nymph stories where there is no resolution. Outside, the tide was rising. The moon looked like a winter-pawed plate overhead.
After the funeral, friends from school asked me questions. If I knew, if there were any signs. How to make sense of it, losing a girl like Milena. Did I hear that Lo cheated on Milena with that girl Angel, who wore big hoop earrings and had started hanging around the basketball courts? But who could blame them? Do you think Angel’s tiger tattoo on her right rib had something to do with it? Do you think Milena always knew what she was doing, flirting with other people?
I slammed my locker shut, slipped my headphones over my ears, and went to class. I bit my cheek until it bled copper and took on a mesh-like texture. I lost a lot of friends.
At home, the whole family knew about the cheating rumors. We coped with them the same way we coped with Milena dying: by staying silent. No one ever asked what was true, but I could tell Lo felt that we blamed them. Maybe we did.
We eyed any guest who slipped into her empty seat. We kept her stocking folded in the attic, years clinging to it like dust. We switched to piña coladas even though we only liked them half as much.
We would’ve done anything to bring her back.
Once, in college, I tried contacting her using a Ouija Board. It was at a dorm kickback on a Tuesday night. I remember the floors being sticky. There were eight strangers split across two musty couches. My friend Bethany had pulled me along; she’d started to worry about my socializing after I’d turned down every invitation for several weeks straight.
The group was eager to meet the fake dead. They popped open silver beers and slapped one another’s shoulders. This was Chicago, where ten different truths could live in one room. Because of where I grew up—because of the blessing of the Cielo women—I believed in magic more than most people. But that wasn’t the case for everyone in Cielo. Lo, for example, thought the afterlife was a crock of shit.
It’s what people fetishize to feel a thrill, they once told me. No different from masturbating.
Milena’s death had changed their relationship to time, to magic, to mistakes. It was hard to remember what they thought about all of these things before. I blinked at the room. The kids I barely knew pushed at me to go next, shoving me and chanting my name. I sat on the carpet next to Beth. We placed our fingers on the planchette, barely touching it.
Whooo do you want to speak toooo, Jenny from 103? someone announced in a stupid show voice.
Milena, I said, my voice betraying me. I felt two tears slip down my face, both tapping my right knee. The room went silent. There was a kindness in that—the way they could tell I was talking serious.
That same year, plastered at a friend’s wedding party, Lo told me the breakup was not their doing. That old Mariah song had come on. Immediately, I set out to find them in the room full of bodies swaying.
I found them on the porch outside. They held a silver lighter in their hands, rolling their thumb, sparking glittering flames. They wouldn’t look at my face.
She dumped me, you know, they said, eyes puffy. Made me swear that if I loved her, I would never reach out again.
I took the lighter from their hand.
It was so fucked up, they said, voice quivering. When they turned to me, their eyes were empty. Isn’t that so fucked up?
I knew where the story was as soon as I read it, I told Milena’s ghost, now, over the noise of the burger joint.
The last story Milena gave me was unlike all the rest. In it, a girl stood trapped on the strip of land between a lagoon and the sea, the sky black overhead, the cranes out to get her. It was the Triste Lagoon, a short bike ride from our neighborhood. This girl, Milena wrote, in her terrible handwriting, held her glass heart in her fist. But no one was coming to find her.
She watched me. I could see the white of her ghost eyes. The wrapper of her burger was crinkled, laid out wavy-flat across from mine. They were bright orange duplicates of each other.
I would’ve come. It’s just that I didn’t read it for years, I said. I guess I was mad at you.
She smirked. For what?
A sharp rush hit my head. I did not say that her deciding to leave this note with me was a selfish thing to do. I said the truer thing, which was the one that made me want to cry.
For leaving, and taking what was left of the person I love most in this world with you.
The plastic of the bench was uncomfortable on my back. I felt small inside of it. I didn’t like having a body here. I wanted out of it.
The ghost sighed. We had already gone over this before, several times.
Jenny, you know I loved you. You were like… a better version of me as a kid. You know Lo loves you.
The longer she sat across from me, the less real she started to look. Time began its inevitable melt. I watched the tendons of her jaw move with an unnatural shadowing. Her eyes were not the right brown, I decided. Here were all the places I messed up—the indescribable flicker in her eye when she looked at Lo, the underside of her wrists, the texture of hair at the back of her head. I could finally see that I had remembered her all wrong.
Where is Lo? she asked. Have you been taking care of them? Why are you not with them right now?
Her eyes glowed like small oval mirrors. There was a hollowness in my spine—it hurt. Jenny, why aren’t you with them?
No, I told the ghost. That’s what you do. You keep everyone alive.
Once, there was a part of me that believed Lo and I shared the same reality. Or else, we could tell each other everything we believed, and the other would understand. After Milena died, it wasn’t like that anymore. Lo thinks I don’t know why they left Cielo, but I do. They don’t want to live longer than they have to.
When Milena’s ghost visits, she asks about them. Like Uncle Vedo, I tell her lies. I say, They found somebody they really love. Or, On Fridays, they go to concerts with their friends and call to sing me the best lyrics on the way home. Scream, actually. They scream all the wrong lyrics and annoy the hell out of me.
I tell her that Lo is happy, which is true, in flickers, probably. They’re fictions of what I wish to be true.
Good, she says, like she might believe me.
Ciara Alfaro is a Chicana writer and descendant of magicians from Lubbock, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Essays, Swamp Pink, Passages North, Southeast Review, Witness, and more. Currently, she serves as the 2024-25 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University.
Photo by: Erik Odiin