The week began with brilliant sunshine and a cool, unseasonable breeze. Even though the warm Christmas winds were now a month behind them, that Monday brought a tickling chill that froze old women in their tracks and forced them to look up at the clear, untrustworthy sky. They rubbed their knees with arnica and hurried to the markets to prepare. Tomatoes, pineapples, and every type of lemon sold out. Anything with vitamin C, as if the country would transform into a ship, and homemakers worried only of scurvy.
Lyra stopped her cherry-red Peugeot at crosswalks and watched the nervous, geriatric scrambling with cynical curiosity. An army of aunts and great-aunts, mothers and grandmothers, invaded the streets of San José, groceries lining their bags like soldiers’ rations. At each intersection, Lyra’s vexation grew. She was running late. Gabriel, her son, had refused to wake up this morning. He had tossed around in a playful tantrum as Lyra tried to dress him. She laughed as he fought his uniform, kissed his little smirk as he stomped. “You’re ten years old, Gabby,” she said. “Stop being such a baby.” Gabriel stuck out his tongue in defiance, snatched up his lunch from the kitchen counter, and went to sit quietly in the car with his arms crossed.
Lyra had studied him in the back seat with a grin; they never lost eye contact in the rearview mirror, never let down their smiles during that thirty-minute drive to school. In front of the one-story concrete schoolhouse, Lyra unlocked Gabriel’s door, and he gestured his head for Lyra to pet him. To tousle his hair, then fix it, all for the tickle of fingernails behind his ears. “Goodbye,” he said, winking.
“A-di-os,” Lyra responded in an American accent. And with Gabriel inside, Lyra was off.
BURGEONING CLOUDS REFLECTED in the speeding car’s windshield. Lyra’s lateness was now bordering on unprofessionalism. An hour was unforgivable. By now her most punctual and vocal clients would be crowding the tastefully decorated waiting room (designed by a closeted boyfriend); these women, who often complimented the mid-century furniture, gold accents, and the healthy palm tree, would overwhelm Milady, Lyra’s secretary, who was good at filing but terrible with customer service. Lyra would be stepping into her practice with no crowd control to cushion her tardiness. When she pulled up to her office, she inhaled the last bit of pine-freshened car air and prepared Sorrys and It won’t happen again. But when she made it to the door, the lights were off, and the door was still locked. No Milady, no clients.
Lyra was an infertility counselor. She’d founded her practice ten years ago, shortly after Carmen died. Lyra poured her heartbreak into her new business, where she could use her personal experience to counsel women with fertility issues. Those who’d experienced miscarriages or the rare ectopic pregnancy. Those who reminded Lyra of herself.
She took out a loan, bought a small building with a few rooms, and, after years of hard work, had fashioned it into one of San José’s most respected practices. Lyra held private sessions and weekly grief counseling groups, with coffee and doughnuts and a small prayer her clients insisted on. Women of all ages made appointments, and most of them stayed. Many had been seeing her since she opened. Few can shake that kind of grief.
Lyra put the answering machine on speaker and tidied up in the dark. Why waste electricity on an empty waiting room? Message after message confirmed cancellations. Lyra half listened while wrestling a jug into the water cooler, emptying wastebaskets, and dusting with her bare palms. Cynthia Mora, Gladys Hernández and her sister Gloria, even the punctual Silvia Morrison—every voice mail ended with I must get ready for the storm.
Lyra was returning the last of the patient files to the cabinet when the final message played. She froze upon hearing Father Silvino’s somber, supplicating tone. The papers and envelopes spilled out of her hands and onto the office floor. Our psychiatrist, Father Silvino said after a kind greeting, has taken maternity leave. The patients here will be without care, without the therapy to keep them calm. I fear the worst, as I am not equipped to properly help. It is only for a few days, whatever you can spare, really, Father Silvino continued. That’s all I ask for until I can get a proper substitute. Please, Lyra.
Father Silvino was the founder of La Iglesia, a convent-turned-asylum on the outskirts of San José, only a short drive from Lyra’s duplex. La Iglesia served as the capital’s last resort for patients who’d been rejected by the government hospitals. Those who had attacked nurses and growled at their reflections; who had ripped out their eyelashes and those of their children; thanatomaniacs, pyromaniacs, and a sly necromaniac under lock and key. It was a notoriously run-down facility, its living conditions questionable, but the government was happy to be rid of those patients; the bureaucrats grateful they didn’t have to deal with any potential lawsuits. Lyra knew only one patient there: Juan Julián, Carmen’s husband. Well, her widower.
Father Silvino had delivered Carmen’s funeral service himself, and had been kind enough to gloss over her suicide. He’d shared anecdotes of Carmen volunteering at La Iglesia. Hers was an empathy like no other, Father Silvino sobbed at the pulpit. As if it were a magic power. If grief hadn’t welded Lyra to her seat, she would have approached the lectern to deliver her own tribute. She might have confirmed Father Silvino’s theory—Carmen’s empathy had indeed bordered on mind reading. But Lyra did not approach the podium. Instead, she sat paralyzed in the front row of the church by herself. Teresa left a noticeable absence, as did Juan Julián. In Lyra’s arms was Carmen’s baby, born the week she’d jumped from a window of the maternity ward into the rain. His name the first and last thing Carmen gave him: Gabriel.
Lyra was at a fertility clinic in Texas when Carmen jumped. The moment Lyra came of age and moved out of Teresa’s house in Barrio Ávila, she craved motherhood with an overwhelming instinct that bordered on obsession. She promised herself that she would become the mother Teresa never was. For years she tried with men she loved and those she didn’t, dreaming of motherhood’s rewards the way a child dreams of gifts on Christmas. But her periods wouldn’t leave her, and Lyra became increasingly frustrated with each month’s new blood. She berated the men she slept with, the boyfriends she broke up with, and even random suitors on dance floors for not being man enough for the job. Eventually Lyra blamed herself. And after a miscarriage, she decided that God, or the universe, or some hardheaded fate was the culprit. That she’d been forsaken for an unfair, evil reason.
Carmen’s pregnancy was the last straw. With just one thrust of her beautiful husband, Carmen got what Lyra wanted more than anything else. Lyra phoned the clinic in Texas and scheduled an appointment that night. She avoided Carmen and her inflating belly for months, couldn’t stand the idea of obsessed acquaintances rubbing it like a crystal ball. As if a baby in a womb could tell the future. Lyra didn’t attend the intimate, joyful shower, or any of the ultrasounds. She didn’t hold up sonograms to the fluorescent lights, searching for a ferocious heart or cells that would bubble into limbs. On the phone, Carmen begged Lyra to be there, to hold her hand, to yell at incompetent doctors or balance Juan Julián’s camcorder when the contractions came and he fainted.
Yes, their mother would be there, but that wouldn’t be the same as her sister.
Answering the phone was all Lyra was able to do. Those nine months that Carmen needed her big sister, Lyra marked the calendar for the day she’d land in Texas. Lyra wanted to finally get the answers for why motherhood didn’t find her worthy.
Lyra took only one of Carmen’s calls while she was there that week in the States—the day she was to visit the clinic, and the fifth morning Carmen had been with her new baby. Carmen was frantic, said Gabriel wouldn’t stop crying. It began the second they severed mother from son. Gabriel screamed in Carmen’s weakened, swaddling arms. He cried when the doctors bathed him, weighed him, examined him for all his digits. He even screeched when Carmen tried to breastfeed. (The nurses couldn’t help but slope their brows in judgment.) In the nursery, he wailed—so they moved him back into Carmen’s room. The comfortable bassinet didn’t deter him either. Carmen didn’t sleep, but she would not leave her child’s side. Teresa visited every day. Juan Julián was useless, like all new fathers. He could only twiddle his thumbs in prayer.
Nothing Carmen tried worked: soft blankets, tender kisses, mother-love. Nothing.
Lyra tried to assuage Carmen’s anxiety that the baby didn’t love her, but jealousy made her attempts halfhearted, and besides, she had her own business to attend to. “I love you, little sister,” Lyra said as she grabbed the room key to leave. “I have to go now, I have an appointment. I can’t wait to see you and my little nephew.”
But the visit to the fertility clinic bore no fruit. The specialist took Lyra’s temperature, examined her cervix for signs, asked for her journal of ovulations and periods. And as all doctors do when a woman is convinced there’s something wrong with her body, he said, Everything looks fine to me.
Lyra cursed the specialist under her breath and picked up his assistant, whom she dragged to a local bar, where cowboys danced in squares and steer horns hung over doorways. The assistant ordered Lyra cheap beer and touched his feathered blond hair too much. But Lyra considered the fun of an American baby, and she took him back to her motel room.
Lyra was smoking a lonely cigarette next to the naked man when the motel room phone rang. She answered reluctantly and hung up without speaking. The words on the other end of the line were incomprehensible. They mimicked the tacky, buzzing neon sign outside. A violent, rhythmic flickering.
THE SIESTA INN … SWIMMING POOL … FREE CABLE … VACANCY … NO VACANCY …
The phone rang again. Lyra held the receiver to her face. It was Teresa sobbing, her words made unintelligible by bouts of hollering. Lyra heard Teresa slamming her fists on something hard.
“My Golondrina has flown away,” Teresa wept. “My little swallow has finally flown away.”
Again, Lyra hung up, and the blond assistant strummed her back. “What’s wrong, baby?” he asked in that stupid way Americans ask the obvious.
“It’s all my fault,” Lyra said. “It’s all my fault.”
The blond assistant zipped up his Calvin Kleins and didn’t say goodbye, left Lyra alone in the abrasive pink glow from the sign, wet crystals studding her cheeks.
VACANCY … NO VACANCY …
LYRA REENACTED THAT night more often than she wanted to admit. After picking up a drunken man in Barrio La California or Barrio Amón, Lyra would lure him to a cheap hotel bereft of furniture, except for the bed, a barred television, and a telephone. After sex (sometimes good, usually bad), Lyra would crawl up into herself, her body a shivering cocoon, the man snoring over her racing thoughts. She would swaddle the telephone, waiting for it to ring, wishing that this time her mother or Carmen would call with news that Gabriel had been delivered without issue. That he was a slippery, happy child. She wished to hear how they couldn’t wait for Lyra to return. And when her plane touched down at Juan Santamaría, she would tell them how glad she was to be home.
When Lyra regained herself after Teresa’s call, she paid the half-asleep motel attendant, drove to the airport, and took the first flight back to Costa Rica. Teresa wouldn’t answer the phone or open her door, so Lyra made the funeral preparations by herself. Typical of her mother, Lyra thought. The escape artist.
Lyra chose a closed casket for the church service. They’d had to reassemble Carmen’s broken body. Father Silvino gave the eulogy. He spoke so sweetly of Carmen, glossed over her suicide. Gabriel lay still and cheerful in Lyra’s arms. She stared at Carmen’s photograph with a halo of flowers, a soft, grainy smile on her sister’s beautiful face.
“The rain cleaned up most of the mess,” Lyra overheard a woman say as the pallbearers loaded her sister into the marble family vault, in the space below their grandmother. Those in attendance shielded their eyes with black umbrellas and matching sunglasses.
“You know, she jumped out the window as if she were going to fly,” another woman said.
“I saw the whole thing from across the street, and if I didn’t know any better”—the first woman lowered her voice—“it looked like she could have done it.”
Juan Julián left an absence as noticeable as Teresa’s. He was driven mad after being unable to stop Carmen on that window ledge. Lyra was the logical candidate to care for Gabriel, who’d been left with no mother or father. He was now her son, and Lyra convinced herself that adopting him was done in honor of Carmen’s memory. And to bolster that, Lyra convinced everyone else of it too. She imagined that her girlfriends thought to themselves in their late-night taxis home, Wow, I wish my sister loved me so much she’d honor me like that when I die.
But when forced to be alone with herself, Lyra knew that what drove her duty to Gabriel wasn’t sentimentality for Carmen or immovable love.
Guilt is what had set Lyra down this path, guided her pen as she signed Gabriel’s adoption papers. Guilt that Lyra had been so jealous of Carmen that she refused to support her. Lyra felt that she had abandoned Carmen as Teresa had abandoned them so many years ago.
And Teresa’s absence at Carmen’s funeral was the final straw. That was why Lyra hadn’t spoken to Teresa in ten years. Without Carmen’s sweet nature to prevent it, Lyra’s bitterness went into full bloom, and cutting Teresa off was such a flawless, easy act. Easy, but admittedly painful. Painful, but so cathartic it frightened her. And an even greater catharsis was Lyra refusing to let Teresa meet Gabriel.
Grandmother hadn’t seen grandson since his birth.
Daughter punished mother as she couldn’t punish herself.
For a decade, Lyra imagined Teresa trapped by herself in that house in Barrio Ávila. Where nightmares stained the walls, and the dead held up the foundation like concrete.