Luz turns three years dead today. Mum fixes herself up a bit (she lets her hair down) but she’s in a terrible mood. She burns the toast. I spill juice on the floor and she says ‘Perfecto’. When she goes to brush her teeth she complains that Dad, who’s just shaved, has left hairs in the sink. Dad and I mutter to each other, ‘Patience’, and when Mum finally announces, furious, that she’s not coming with us, I think we’re both relieved. Dad tries to convince her anyway, but she’s unswayable.
‘This year I have a stand-in,’ she says to him. And to me: ‘Pull up any weeds you spot, will you?’
Then she hugs me way too tight, as if she could pass on whatever it is I need to be her surrogate by osmosis.
‘Come on,’ I say from inside my headlock. ‘Let’s go say hi to Luz.’
But the name has an electric effect on her. In a flash, Mum lets go of me and walks off to her room, wrapping her hair back up in her rag. Today it’s the black silk one. It’s embroidered with silver flowers and in another lifetime it was her very special concert shawl. But tragedies take the shine out of objects. Ever since Luz died no one around here seems to care about clothes or furniture any more. Not even the instruments seem to matter much. Utilitarian things: the cello, the piano, the timpani. Just buoys.
I never knew my parents did this while we were away at camp.
‘Every year?’ I ask.
‘Every year,’ says Dad. ‘And we always stop by that flower stall there.’
He parks, gives me some money and I go by myself. In fact they’ve only come twice, which isn’t all that much. But the new life already feels old. We have new customs. The first time we went home without Luz I thought I’d never be able to walk into our room without expecting to find her there, playing with Bedtime Bear.
But now her bed is my chaise longue and Bedtime Bear is in a box somewhere and I don’t ever expect to see her when I come home. If I think about her it’s to imagine what she’d be like now: she’d be eight. Pretty soon she’d be wearing a training bra and I’d have to explain to her what to do if she gets her first period in school. I’d show her how to tie her sweater around her waist just in case, and tell her not to panic if she spots a dark stain in her knickers, to keep cool and to come looking for me in my classroom. We would be in the same school by now.
‘And Luz,’ I would say to her, ‘don’t you listen to those girls who say using tampons is like having sex, because they’re eleven and they’re liars.’
I swear some girls in my class talk about having learned to use a tampon like it was sailing across the Atlantic. All that’s missing is the slide show, like the one Grandma Emma gave us when she came back from that cruise.
The flower arrangements at the stall are for old ladies. For dead old ladies or for old ladies who think their dead were really cheesy. I take three sunflowers, pay for them and, getting back into the car, remember something basic: Luz isn’t buried where we’re going.
‘Next year,’ I say to Dad, putting on my seat belt, ‘we’ll bring flowers from our yard.’
Dad starts the car and corrects me:
‘Our vegetable garden.’
Then, smiling, he uses the name, maybe to make up for Mum’s reaction earlier:
‘Luz would have loved your garden.’
The grave is small and made of cement, not too different from the planters in the yard I’m turning into a vegetable garden, only with a lid. The lid says: Luz Pérez-Walker, 1995–2001. And underneath: Beloved daughter and sister. Be-loved. Like an order. I’ve fantasized about this moment, about what I’d say to Luz. But in my fantasies it was raining and Luz was somehow able to listen to me. Now the sun is beating down and there’s not a patch of shade in the whole cemetery. She’s dead, and I have nothing to say to her. Was she beloved? She was my sister. ‘Bina,’ she used to call my friend Pina. ‘Sana,’ she used to called me (a mix between sister and Ana, although she didn’t come up with it: our brothers used it before her). One time, Bina and I changed her outfit twenty times and put make-up on her: she’d let us do anything. Yes, I guess she was beloved. Her death certificate was made in Michigan. DECEASED, it says in capital letters. I hate this word. It sounds like diseased. But you can be cured from a disease. And, anyway, Luz wasn’t sick. She even knew how to swim. She must have got caught up in something, that’s what we think. Luz’s body is in ashes in the lake. At the time it seemed logical, to cremate her and put her to rest with Grandad. But now I can’t understand it: why would we leave her there? I wonder if my brothers think about her while they’re out fishing. I wonder if they have anything to say to her.
I brought a big pair of shears with me, but I don’t spot a single weed. I use them to cut the stems of the three sunflowers which I arrange on the grave until Dad and I agree on a nice composition. But almost straight away I mess them up again. If there was one thing Luz wasn’t, it was tidy. Dad agrees.
‘When she was really little,’ I remind him, ‘she used to get baby food everywhere.’
He laughs.
‘One day,’ he adds, ‘I had to clean her mush off the ceiling. I never had to do that with the rest of you kids: that girl had arms like a baseball player.’
A blow to the chest, there, a few tears that come to my eyes but don’t fall. ‘That girl.’ That’s what we no longer have for Luz. What is it exactly? Irreverence? Cheek.
‘You little shits,’ Dad sometimes calls my brothers.
‘Scaredy-cat!’ he says to me when I refuse to eat chilli.
Being dead means this, too: nobody dares insult you any more, not even out of love.
I feel good when we leave. Sad but interesting. And clean. The only thing missing is the soundtrack. I ask Dad to sing something and who knows why but he breaks into ‘La donna è mobile qual piuma al vento, muta d’accento e di pensiero’, a family classic. Mum used to sing it in the mornings.
‘Now I feel like a pizza,’ I tell him, and he passes me his phone.
I call Mum and she asks for a bacon-and-onion pizza, even though normally she refuses to eat anything that comes in a box. Dad cries at the wheel on the way to the pizzeria. Discreetly. No heaving chest, no little sobs, just tears running down his cheeks, like in the portraits the guy in our local park used to make: he would kneel down on the floor, and with a spray can and a spatula paint the same scenes over and over, in a matter of seconds. His favourite subject was a clown with a single tear rolling down his cheek. Now I realize I should’ve given him some credit: it turns out that there are actually people out there who cry like that, in my own home even. Isn’t this called a revelation? Some people might call it that.
When we get home, Mum’s not angry any more. She’s sad and gentle: she eats some pizza and says it’s good. Afterward, we flop on the sofa together and she strokes my head.
‘It shouldn’t be called an anniversary,’ I say.
‘That’s what your dad always says,’ she replies.
‘I invented a word.’
‘What is it?’
‘Greycholy.’
‘One of Marina’s.’
‘Yeah, I borrowed it. By the way, are you going to make up with her?’
‘If Chela and Pina made up, why not, eh?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Did you pull up the weeds?’
‘There weren’t any.’
‘Hm. It must be because there isn’t a body there.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Could you bring me a blanket?’
Dad comes with us on our second trip to the garden centre, to oversee his investment. But he’s his own budget’s worst enemy. Pina and I watch as he falls prey, over and again, to the shop assistant, but we don’t say anything. I’m glad Pina’s back and that she seems as psyched about the plants as I am. It’s another assistant today: not the pervert, but a young guy with dreadlocks. I feel awkward around him. I chew the inside of my cheek, then force myself to talk to him.
‘I’m regenerating the oxygen in my mews,’ I tell him.
‘Nice,’ he says, his eyes on Pina.
We leave the garden centre so overloaded with goodies that Dad decides to go and get the car. While we wait for him at the entrance, a lady comes up to us.
‘How much for this?’ she asks, pointing at our newly acquired cherry-tomato plant.
Pina butts in before I have time to answer.
‘Two hundred pesos, señora. Go ahead, try one.’
The lady tries a tomato and buys the plant off us. I’m so impressed I’m lost for words. By the time Dad parks up and opens the trunk, Pina is already back, a replacement cherry-tomato plant and eighty pesos change safely tucked away in her pocket. She got back yesterday, but she still hasn’t told me anything about her mum. She says to wait till she develops the photos. She took her old film camera, but now ‘Chela has a digital one’. It makes me sad that she calls her mum by the same nickname we all use for her. I must have pulled a face because next thing she says, ‘She asked me to call her that and I like it.’
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Okay, sorry.’
In total we have: two aloes, a lemon tree, a lavender plant, and various unidentified succulents. After today’s trip we can add the cherry tomatoes and two specimens of a tall plant called Monstera deliciosa, but which for some reason has the nickname ‘skeleton’. It has huge, dark-green leaves with roundish holes in them. I guess that’s where the name comes from: the holes being the eye sockets in a skull. Or maybe it’s subtler than that: the holes the dead leave behind, something you can’t say. We also got a few other pretty plants: one of them looks like a red cabbage; the others are all green. I’m going to put those ones together in the planter nearest the house, because according to the dreads guy they like the shade. I already have the soil for the planters and next week we’ll go buy the turf. I’m pretty excited about that as well. As I understand it, you just lay it out like a rug.
As soon as Dad leaves us alone in the yard, Pina lies face down on the picnic table. She’s wearing a pair of hot pants so short you can see the smile of her butt cheek poking out on one side. It reminds me of last summer: we were sitting on a bench outside a shopping mall when a girl walked by and Grandma Emma said, ‘She’ll kill herself if she falls off that skirt.’
‘Look!’ shouts Pina pointing to the basil I planted two weeks ago.
Some little flowers have blossomed on it. I call Mum and she opens the sliding door. She’d been practising in the living room and has red eyes and a vague smile, like when she tells us she’s sorry.
‘You need to pull them off,’ she says, pointing to the basil with her cello bow.
‘Why?’
‘If you leave them on the leaves fall off, and the leaves are the bit you eat.’
‘Why?’
‘Just listen to me, will you?’ she says, and slides the door shut. One by one, Pina and I pull off the little flowers. It occurs to me that if I’d known, I could have taken them to the cemetery. It’s a silly idea: they’re tiny. But Luz was too. Tiny, I mean. She used to sit on my lap, hug her legs, then curl into a little ball so that I’d hold her.
‘Squeeze!’ she’d say.
Sometimes I was scared I’d hurt her or break something, and I always let go sooner than she wanted me to. We all did. My brothers held on a bit longer, but not much. Luz always wanted to be squeezed more.
‘Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze!’ she begged Dad, and he would squeeze her with a single arm.
I don’t want to, but I can’t help imagining her in her box, in the cemetery. But that’s another silly idea because there’s not even anything in that box. It was too expensive and complicated to bring the body back to Mexico.
‘What?’ I ask Pina, who’s staring at me.
‘Are you crying?’ she says.
‘Are you stupid?’ I say, and she goes off in a sulk.
From the novel Umami