Lyra decided to dance in the dark. She’d slough off the anxiety of her day at La Iglesia, shake it out through her limbs. She locked herself in the master bedroom and stuffed CDs into the stereo system like coins into a vending machine, twirling in its cyan glow. She threw her knees high like Jennifer Beals, whipped her head like Tina Turner with an invisible mic. Static electricity built up beneath her bare feet on the rug, tiny shocks synching to the songs and to the lightning bolts outside. She danced as she and Carmen had when they lived with the Three Marías, abandoning the traditional boleros and cha-cha-chas for disco and funk. Those long, unforgettable nights at the Salamandra Ballroom with her little sister. Lyra danced in the dark, and for a moment, she was back there.
But her heel caught the cord-button of the corner lamp, and she was back again. She was home, and she needed to check on Gabriel.
He was on his bed, fixated on his Game Boy, and he barely acknowledged her when she tapped on his open door. He was in a mood, and when she asked him about how it went at Teresa’s, all she got was a stiff shrug.
Lyra wasn’t used to him being so curt.
“Chatty or not, go wash your face and your hands for dinner,” Lyra said.
Gabriel didn’t answer. Something had shaken him. Lyra shut the door and walked downstairs to the kitchen. The question of what happened to Gabriel at Teresa’s troubled her. Why did he ask about Golondrina, and why was he now so sullen? But she fought against psychoanalyzing him. He was her son, and she wasn’t his therapist.
By Lyra’s own deduction, psychoanalyzing those she shouldn’t was a lifelong habit, used to create distance between herself and those she could potentially love, and therefore, potentially lose. Lyra would often probe the brains of her friends, sneaking diagnoses into conversation, scribbling long prescriptions in her mind. It made her, one girlfriend put it very frankly, “no fun at parties.” Conversely, Lyra had to deactivate her maternal instincts when speaking with younger clients, those in their late teens or those who reminded her of Carmen—getting emotionally involved in a client’s life was a threat to one’s own sanity.
Her therapist and former mentor described their own therapy sessions as spelunking expeditions. Together, they were exploring the crevices of Lyra’s mind, its dimensions, shadows, and echoes. “You’re the adventurer,” she said to Lyra during their first session her freshman year at university. “Even if you don’t remember the caves and nooks exactly, you carved them. Subconsciously you know where the tunnels lead. I’m merely here to follow you. I’m your partner and your lifeline. I hold the rope tied around your waist if you happen to fall. But you must have the will to descend deeper, no matter how cramped and terrifying it might get.”
Lyra now used this metaphor with all her patients. It gave them control and sessions flowed more smoothly. “But most important,” her mentor had also told her, “the therapist must always remember the escape route. If not, you’ll both plummet into the void.”
The void, Lyra thought as she set the pot to boil. How many voids did she know? The one she knew most intimately was that which lay between her mother and herself, into which all words and affections had fallen.
THE DAY LYRA and Carmen were returned to Teresa, their four-hour car ride from Liberia back to San José echoed with the Three Marías’ cries. Cristina attempted conversation through the rearview mirror, but only Carmen answered. Lyra merely eyed Cristina from the back seat, as if she’d strangle her with her own seat belt. The pink Pontiac hummed cheerfully on the newly paved highways, its leather interior damp even with all the windows down.
Teresa greeted them at the door of the newly painted house in Barrio Ávila. She’d lost weight, was paler from so many winters in the United States. White hairs sprang from her temples like weeds. But she was undeniably as beautiful as the day she’d taken off.
Lyra walked past Teresa to their old room and was surprised to find everything the same. Her favorite soccer ball deflated on the window ledge, Carmen’s Barbie sun-bleached on the dresser. Lyra still remembered the heat, the moonlight. Her memory of that night wouldn’t leave her, even when she left a year later at eighteen to attend the university.
Teresa squeezed in six years’ worth of questions during that first afternoon together. Carmen, resting her head on their mother’s lap, spoke for herself and Lyra, describing in detail the adoration they felt for the Three Marías, the starlit nights of dancing, stuffy church services, the midnight fantasies that their mother would one day return. “And now you’re back.” Carmen smiled. “¿What were you doing there, Mamá?”
Carmen asked this several times, to which Teresa never answered directly. Working. Saving. Missing you two.
Lyra couldn’t take it anymore. She stamped her foot and asked about their father, about their grandmother, and Teresa immediately left the room. Carmen tried to stop Lyra, but she followed their mother through the kitchen, the washroom, and out to the gardens of rosebushes and pomegranate trees, where she looked upon the empty lot where the guesthouse should have been. The sight knocked all the air out of her, and Lyra turned to Teresa for help. But Teresa was leaning against the concrete property wall, sucking down a cigarette. “We’ll be happy now,” Teresa said, emotionless. “Everything will be all right.” From that moment on, whenever Teresa reached out to touch Lyra, Lyra winced and dodged her.
Lyra and Carmen were enrolled in a new American school in the center of San José. Lyra made no friends. She missed the ones she had made in Liberia. The girls who taught her folk dances and how to drink coyol wine without falling unconscious in the sun. She wrote them letters but she never heard back. She phoned the Three Marías but they hurried her off the phone. “It’s not your fault,” they said. “We still love you.”
Teresa tried to force herself back into motherhood, but she and Lyra knew it no longer fit. The love Teresa once shared with her daughters had spoiled. Frustration straightened Teresa’s palms and sharpened her voice. Carmen became the one who kept the house in balance. Feeling both her mother’s and her sister’s emotions before they did, she could sway conversations away from the innumerable, shallowly buried land mines in the field of what they couldn’t say to each other.
Until Lyra left Barrio Ávila, Carmen combed her hair every night as they watched badly written telenovelas. After six years, they didn’t look like twins anymore. While Carmen had become exceptionally beautiful, Lyra’s hostility had dulled her looks. Once a week, Lyra visited Amarga’s grave on the other side of town. With a bottle of dark rum in one hand and a fat pack of cigarettes in the other, she sat next to the family vault, cross-legged in the dirt, while Amarga’s ghost patted her condescendingly on the head. The vault, human height, held four drawers meant for the Cepeda Valverde women. “You must be lonely,” Lyra said to her grandmother’s drawer. “Let me know if you want any company, Tita.” She giggled and took another swig from the rum.
Many nights, Lyra dreamed of their father—his face warped by red light. If she didn’t wake herself up shrieking, she sleepwalked to the front door to open and slam it, over and over, until Teresa or Carmen shook her awake.
With her irate, unpredictable behavior, both at home and at school, no one thought Lyra would graduate, let alone be accepted by the university. But the moment she read the letter of congratulations, she flipped off her doubtful teachers, packed a few belongings, and went to live with a friend’s brother in an apartment close to campus. Even though she left Barrio Ávila, she never let Carmen go more than twelve hours without hearing her voice. Teresa had been so good at erasing the past that Lyra wouldn’t give her a chance to scrub her from Carmen’s memory too.
When Carmen was old enough, Lyra took her for her first drink at a dive bar by the university. A first, then a second, then maybe a third. Warmed in their clutched fingers, the pilsner splashed in waves against the chipped rims of the glasses. The dimly lit bar vibrated with muffled British Invasion, and oblivious to the throng of leering men, the sisters danced just as Teresa had so many years ago, without their ever knowing it. While their mother had been an unmatched soloist, the sisters formed a duet of that same soul, split like a cloth of divine swaying silk.
After last call, Lyra and Carmen grabbed a space toward the back of the bar, next to the ratty pool tables, the dartboard, and the rainbow of Playboy posters pinned to the wall. Lyra began by saying she couldn’t fully remember that night in 1968. The night so hot it was hard to breathe.
Red light, Lyra said, still wiping her face of sweat (whether from dancing or from remembering). And a croaking sound that Carmen confirmed had been coming from inside their father’s head. Since returning, Carmen had played along with Teresa’s version of reality, the one in which their father never existed and that night never happened. But watching the burly men smack billiards against one another, Carmen sipped her beer and told Lyra she remembered everything. As if that night were a rerun that wouldn’t turn off.
There had been a sound as loud as a car crashing and a metal clanging. When Lyra and Carmen heard their mother’s footfalls, they both sat up in the bed. Sweating, as slick as newborns. Lyra was the first to her feet. She told Carmen not to be scared. But Lyra was just as afraid. Carmen didn’t need to read her mind to know that.
Lyra begged Carmen to wake their grandmother in the guesthouse. She will know what to do.
Carmen’s first thought was a wish that their father were there when they heard the crash, she confessed. To show up and save the day. Lyra sniffled, wiped her eyes, and blew the white beer foam against the glass. With that meager, childish hope, Carmen said, she held her back to walls and descended the back stairs to the guesthouse. She hadn’t known they needed to be saved from him.
“I’m the one who led Tita to the house,” Carmen said, biting her lip. “It was my fault.”
“It’s none of our faults,” Lyra said, reaching her palms to Carmen’s flat on the table, trembling. “No one could have guessed that would happen.”
“I wonder if he’s still out there,” Carmen sighed, her eyes glassy and reflective.
Lyra changed the subject. She asked Carmen about her first year at college, her girlfriends in the weekly flamenco class. Juan Julián came up, and so did some of Lyra’s romantic prospects. Then miraculously Lyra asked about Teresa, and before she could be stopped, Carmen narrated their days, sprinkling in advice to mend their relationship. Lyra half listened. When Carmen was done, Lyra walked over to a muscular man who had just slammed the eight ball into the corner pocket. He celebrated like he’d won, but he had actually lost. Lyra arrived to console him when he finally figured it out. He winked, and Lyra winked back. Carmen, reading both her sister’s thoughts and the man’s, chugged her hot beer and left.