Night fell, and Amarga lit a green candle to place on the windowsill. With a rocks glass filled halfway with twenty-year-old bourbon, she waited for Tácito in the dark. Amarga had watched Teresa leave to go to the theater, but without locking the gate behind her. José María hadn’t arrived home yet, so that must have been why. Amarga imagined Lyra and Carmen were still playing in their room before bed, but in this heat, it would be hard for anyone to have any fun or even to sleep tonight.
The ghost of Dolores sat next to Amarga and slipped the cigarette out of her fingers, blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling. Amarga informed her she didn’t have to sit with her every night. Death had already escorted her out of this world by the hand. Why would the dead wait on the not-yet-dead? Her mother-in-law responded that Death is nothing but waiting. Waiting for the living to understand that there’s really no difference between the two states. She handed Amarga the cigarette back.
The days Tácito’s mother didn’t manifest on the tacky velour love seat, Amarga spoke to Tácito directly, retelling the monotony of her days. Every small, intimate detail curled from her mouth, and she always finished her monologues with the same moody kiss, as she had done in bed with him. A ritual unchanged by absence.
Amarga was a creature averse to change. As if Change were a car hurtling toward her at top speed on a highway, and she, rather than switching lanes to save herself, challenged it to a dangerous game of chicken. Her bitterness, moods, idiosyncrasies, and hairstyle had all remained undisturbed for as long as she could remember. She saw Change coming from kilometers away, gripped both her hands on the steering wheel, and hit the gas. Amarga refused to be overtaken by anything.
Amarga unpinned the letter above her bed and walked back into the living room to reread it. The first four times skipping the part begging her to treat Teresa how a mother should treat a daughter. Tácito didn’t know what it was like to be a mother. Especially a mother with a daughter who reminded her of herself. He didn’t understand the nuances of self-hatred. Teresa’s dark skin, her full lips, her flaring temper as a girl: everything Amarga’s own father had rebuked in her. Amarga decided long ago that she would ask Teresa’s forgiveness on her deathbed. It would be the only moment she might ever allow Change to have its way with her.
She thought she saw José María at the gate.
Amarga focused, hawk-eyed, past the flickering candle, and could have sworn he was there with his hand on the latch. As pale as a phantom or a marble sculpture of a beast. When the image turned to run east, Amarga sprinted to the gate to try to catch him. No sign of him. Standing alone in the middle of La Guaria Railroad’s track, she looked up at the moon, who looked down at her, smiling. And Amarga, like a fool, smiled back.
AFTER THEIR GRANDMOTHER sent them to their room (unbearably early), Lyra lit a lantern and she and Carmen played Memory. Even though she was younger, Carmen was unbeatable. Years later, Lyra would suspect that Carmen had a photographic memory, but for now, she tried futilely to defeat her baby sister. Cards of anthropomorphic airplanes, bulbous blueberries, and chartreuse mongooses were all flipped and matched, claimed, stacked, and reshuffled.
The Fisherman correctly to his twin, the Spider to its ill-fated lover, the Mirror to its own reflection.
The ceiling fan set on the highest level blew several cards across the room, giving Lyra yet another handicap. But the game made Carmen happy, so Lyra played along and lost, and was a good sport about it. When they heard someone return to the house, they shot back to their own beds and pretended to sleep. The footsteps down the hallway were uneven and labored. Carmen opened the door to check, but Lyra grabbed her shoulder and threw her back in bed. If it was their father, they would be chastised for staying up past bedtime.
The heat put them right to sleep. At some point in the night, Carmen crawled into her sister’s bed and snuggled her face in her armpit. Lyra made enough room for them both. But the stagnant air pressed down on her, fat beads of sweat converged in her navel. Suddenly, a scream welled up inside Lyra. All she had to do was let it out. If it woke anyone up, she could blame it on a bad dream. She reasoned that one couldn’t be punished for a nightmare.
In hindsight, Lyra would regret the fault in that logic.
THE MOON WAS frozen in the center of the sky like a bride stood up at the altar. Her pocked, salt-white face turning red with wrath. She washed Barrio Ávila in blood-light. The full eclipse began, and so did the end.
Peering into her daughters’ bedroom and seeing them curled up next to each other like cats, Teresa couldn’t help but want to curl up next to them, too, to smell the flowers in their hair, the sticky sweat on their cheeks, their delicate hands.
Then Teresa heard something like a car crash downstairs. It reverberated throughout the house, overwhelming Teresa’s footfalls down the seemingly endless hallway and down the stairs.
At the bottom, she saw José María standing at the threshold. He’d flung the door open. The horrible crash had come from where the knob hit the concrete wall. The echo of metal on stone. José María didn’t move. Teresa spoke when the house was quiet again.
“José,” she said. No reaction at the sound of his name. “José, ¿what’s wrong? ¿What’s the matter?” Still no response. Teresa molded her tone into an affectionate instrument, meant to disarm whatever bomb ticked in his chest.
“¿What can I do?” she said. Teresa heard his breathing begin to labor, as if the mere act of standing exhausted him. His breath became something between a wheeze and a snarl.
“You’re scaring me,” she said. Something had gone horribly wrong, but Teresa didn’t know what, or how, or why. The nightgown stuck to the sweat on her back. There were four meters between her and José María. The way his body swayed, she could tell he was drunk, and with his clenched fists and heavy brow, she knew she had to act quickly. She’d seen him get to this point before—even sober, lucid—that flash men get in their eyes. José María had stood at this precipice but never acted. But his anger had always promised it, at the very least hinted at it. Now, as Teresa felt him inch closer to that precipice, lean into it, she knew he’d be able to throw himself into it completely. So Teresa sorted through the options in her head—she could sprint back upstairs and lock herself and her girls in their room, or maybe she could find some way past him to run for help.
Desiderio’s or her mother’s. Anyone’s.
“Teresa,” José María said, crying. He repeated her name three times, as if asking to return home.
Teresa recognized this tone. A child’s, terrified and neglected. The abandoned boy within him was whimpering. Teresa sighed in relief, walked toward him, arms outstretched, ready to embrace her husband’s giant frame. She hadn’t noticed his tail, reattached and writhing.
Teresa didn’t feel the first blow to her cheek, but the second knocked her to the floor. The world went completely dark for a moment. A sharp ringing radiated from the inside of her head, followed by a dull pain in her jaw. Her vision returned to her in waves of hot color and glittering specks, and then she felt José María crouch over her body, his hands around her throat.
“¿How could you?” he mewled. Tears fell to her bruised face like pebbles. In his eyes, Teresa swore she saw something else besides her husband stare back—something horrible dilated his pupils, polishing them into obsidian stones. José María repeated himself, squeezing tighter. “¿How could you have done this to me? ¿To us?”
He let go of Teresa only when Lyra intervened. She slapped his face and bit both his wrists, a rabid animal in a little girl’s body. Gasping for breath, Teresa yelled for Lyra to run. To save herself.
AMARGA STOOD BEHIND the guesthouse’s door with her longest butcher knife clutched to her bosom. A crash had ripped her from a dream, and listening with her ear to the wood, Amarga awaited whatever monsters lurked outside—vampires, rebels, escaped prisoners. Instead, a frantic knock greeted her. One that only reached her waist. Letting the knife lead, she opened the door to find Carmen there, her tiny body trembling.
“Mamá,” Carmen said. “It’s Mamá.”
“Carmencita,” Amarga said when they reached the front yard. “Go across the railroad and get Doña Cristina. Run as fast as you can and knock on their door with all your might. ¿Do you think you can do that for me? Good girl. Now, ¡go!”
Amarga didn’t wait to see if her granddaughter made it to Cristina’s. She heard a row inside—fist on flesh, muffled screams, voices growing weak. Her family was in danger. Whatever the invading force, she would make it pay. She’d lost too much already and refused to lose anything else. She reached the front door, slammed wide open. Fiendish shadow puppets danced on the walls. Amarga held the knife blade-down, its edge out and facing the enemy. It reflected José María’s back. Him, she thought. Of course it’s him. It has always been him.
When Amarga stepped into the scene center stage, she saw both her daughter and granddaughter bloodied on the floor. A stench of spoiled guaro made her wince. No one would harm her family and get away with it. Especially not him.
She lunged at her son-in-law with a jaguar’s ferocity.
DESIDERIO SNEAKED RIGHT past his wife’s unconscious body spread-eagled on the couch and changed his pants. He tried to forget the toad, drew back the studio’s curtain, and let in the moonlight.
The statue of Saint Teresa of Ávila glinted as if suddenly made of hot coals. Its ember aura called him closer. The black limestone seemed to be on fire, warm to the touch, crackling from the heat. A banging on the front door snatched him away from the trance.
On the portico, Cristina held little Carmen as she wailed uncontrollably. Something about her mother. Something about a lunatic, or a monster, or a demon. Cristina, still half drunk and rosy cheeked, struggled to decipher Carmen’s hiccups. The child’s fear was real. Without thinking, Desiderio bolted out of the house. Cristina followed her husband, staggering down the patio steps, out through the gate, and over the gravelly track of La Guaria Railroad. They left Carmen alone in the street, not wanting her to witness firsthand what might have been happening inside.
TWO THINGS SENT José María hurtling back to reality. The first was the look on Lyra’s face. Her body twitched in and out of consciousness on the floor. A bruise painted a flower on her eye. In her straight nose, in the white dots on her fingernails, in her cheekbones, in the way her feathery black hair parted to the right, he saw his sisters after their father’s beatings. Even Lyra’s posture was the same. José María saw an unmistakable family resemblance. This proved to him that his daughters were truly his.
The second thing that sent José María hurtling back to reality was the unexpected, insurmountable pain of being stabbed in his left arm. He’d seen men accidentally maim themselves in the groves before—he imagined this was how it felt. The sensation of muscles and tendons sliced from each other, the weightlessness of the affected limb, heavy and screaming in agony. Every nerve firing like a squad. José María turned around, the knife still in his biceps, and grabbed the assailant by the throat. At first, he didn’t recognize Amarga, but as she kicked and scratched at his forearm, José María knew undoubtedly that the fearless hatred he saw in those gray eyes was hers. Every insult, dirty look, snide remark, backhanded compliment, sneer, and smirk tightened his grip with the force of a metal clamp.
José María’s hand gladly reaped something other than fruit. He felt Amarga’s pulse quicken in her jugular, then slow, until it finally stopped.
Remorse is a capricious thing. It prefers to find men when they sleep. When their guard is down in the dark. In the moment something happens, Remorse usually sits back, gathers its strength for later administering. It takes different forms depending on the man or that which haunts him: a fat, effeminate boss in a leather chair, or a priest swirling wine in a chalice. Companions who stay with them for the rest of their lives. But José María’s Remorse took the form of a woman cloaked entirely in green fabric, a hood obscuring her face. She arrived and massaged his shoulders, both ring fingers broken, bent so far back they touched the backs of her hands.
José María heard ringing. Bitter spit coated his mouth. The still-stuck knife cried out for his attention. He smelled embers, metal, rosewater, firewater, river water, salt, and sand on a beach. And what he saw before him pushed him lumbering backward, tripping over Teresa’s body on the floor. Still alive. Lyra’s, collapsed into herself. Still alive. And slumped on the wall, Amarga’s. As white as death.
The woman with broken fingers showed him all that he had done. All that he’d been capable of; what he, and no one else, had chosen to do. She whispered that it was foolish of him to ever think he was destined for anything other than destruction. He was a man, after all. With a full-bellied witch’s laugh, Remorse revealed its true self: Revenge. It handed José María a match. It pointed to the door and assumed José María knew what it truly wanted. It was obvious, the path it illuminated following La Guaria Railroad’s track, which led all the way back to the plantation. And José María followed its suggestion without fighting.
CARMEN RESTED ON Cristina’s pink-painted gate. From across the railway, she saw the shape of her father push past Desiderio and Cristina before they could reach the door.
José María paused and looked toward Carmen, but then turned east, sprinting down the track. Cristina and Desiderio ran inside and screamed, but Carmen began chasing after José María, slipping on the gravel that moved like marbles beneath her bare feet. She called out to him. In his mind, Carmen felt flames and heard a moaning, disgusting croak. Carmen saw red, and heard red, and, if she could reach inside José María’s mind, would have touched red’s sticky density. But Carmen couldn’t keep up. Her legs were no match for her father’s. He’d long since left her behind.
In that moment, something separated itself from Carmen. Her shadow, her joy. There, on La Guaria Railroad’s track, Carmen was confronted by the emptiness of the world.