Everyone is old now, or dead. This is what Lupita thinks on the sixth ring, the one that lets her know that the person on the other end won’t pick up, that the silence between them will go on a little while longer. She’d waited a week to listen to the second voicemail, careful this time not to erase it. If this is Lupita Lopez, please call me. This is your niece, Cristina. Ada’s daughter. She… I found your number by accident months ago… My boss… I wouldn’t bother you but… I’d rather we speak than just leave messages. It’s important. Please call me.
Lupita lowers the phone away from her ear and holds it in her lap under the kitchen table where she sits. It is after eleven in New York and she figures Cristina is probably already asleep. For Lupita, it’s barely early evening, but she’s already heated up and eaten what was left of the lasagna she’d made for last week’s dinner with Jay, the neighbor she cooks for and eats with every Sunday night, a ritual that began more than a decade earlier after his wife Echo died of cancer diagnosed too late to treat. Whatever Lupita cooked—roasted chicken and potato salad, rice with ham and pineapple and peas, casseroles with hamburger meat and pasta—she always made enough so that when they split the leftovers they’d both have something in the fridge to eat through the week. Beyond this, there was little more to her diet than the yogurt she ate in the morning with her coffee, and the protein bars she bought by the box at the Harvest Market in Hanalei. It’s Saturday, and she’s already been to the Safeway in Lihue for tomorrow’s meal, a whole ham, half-price with the coupon she’d clipped from the weekly circular that shows up in her mailbox every Friday.
She’d finished her shopping after dropping the family from LA off at the airport. They were as they had been a week ago, but looser, less exhausted. The father still a soft touch with his daughters, handsome; the mother expensively dressed, kind; and the two girls languid as they dawdled and moaned. The family was beautiful, but even more so now with the dark, gold glamour of a week in the sun.
What Lupita had not seen seven days ago, in the center of the older girl’s face, were two red, raised scars extending between the top of her upper lip and the bottom of her nostrils. At first she thought the girl had been cut or hurt during her vacation. But she then saw more clearly that it was a cleft palate, something Mary and the other girls at Wells Center School once would have called a harelip. It had obviously been treated but had left what looked like a permanent disfigurement. Lupita couldn’t understand how she’d missed it a week ago. Perhaps because the girl had kept her head down at the baggage terminal after they’d landed, and later, as she’d slept on the ride to the hotel, only her forehead and hair were visible through the rearview mirror. Not seeing that particular buckle and fold of skin below her nose now seemed impossible given how profoundly it reshaped the girl’s face. Lupita did her best not to stare. As she turned the key in the ignition, she felt simultaneously relieved and ashamed of that relief that the universe hadn’t given with both hands to this girl, at least not in the way she’d first presumed; but she felt protective, too, imagining the taunts and averted glances she must have endured. She regretted her initial stingy thoughts as she peeked in the rearview mirror at the teenager who now sat straight-backed and awake next to her younger sister, as if she sensed Lupita’s surveillance. She remembered how the girl’s father whistled a week ago, his gentle tugging, Wake up, Sleeping Beauty… and she could feel a pinch of envy return. She watched now as the girl helped her younger sister with the seat belt, gently pushing the five-year-old’s meddling hands away from the strap as she pulled it across her chest and found the buckle. The young one huffed and puffed impatiently through it all, resisting the help much as her older sister had resisted her father the week before when he roused her from sleep.
The age difference between the two girls appeared roughly the same as the one between Lupita and Ada, and with their long dark hair and light brown skin, the girls in the back seat of her van appeared like better-dressed, more polished actors playing a scene from her childhood. Ada taking care, fussing, Lupita pushing her away. She couldn’t help but picture Ada with a similar disfigurement. She imagined it on her own face and considered how it would have shaped who she was, what it might have prevented, if anything.
She calls the number Cristina left on the voicemail again, but this time lets it ring a seventh, an eighth, a ninth time. She hangs up and calls again, letting it ring until she pushes the off button on the phone and reluctantly places it on the table next to her. She withdraws her hand and as she does notices the wreckage of dark spots swarming there. Wrinkled and sun-stained, her hand appears to her more like a claw or a talon. She tries to remember what the beautiful mother from LA’s hands looked like and wonders if she makes her daughters clip and file their finger and toenails every week. Did she pay extra attention to her older daughter, to the parts of her body she could control?
Lupita tries to picture her hands and skin as they once were, when she came to Kauai, but she can only see what is in front of her. She rests her bare forearms along the tops of her legs and spreads her palms across her thighs. She surveys the many spots, pocks, wrinkles, scars, broken blood vessels and veins, and after a while the weathered chaos begins to look deliberate, like a set of meticulously arranged markers, or a map, showing her exactly where she’s been.