At nine that morning, a growing chorus of weathermen convened with their mothers to analyze the sky. They announced that a storm was indeed on its way. When? No idea. What kind? Even less information. But these meteorologists knew that the women in their lives could forecast better than any instrument—a pulsing knee’s accuracy over a barometer, a spit-slicked finger enough to predict wind speed. No satellite could compete with their rural grandmothers, who had once danced for rain. So they glued their ears to the phone and their eyes to the radar and reported what they could. And what they couldn’t, their producers filled with replayed interviews and fashion segments.
Observant clouds gathered over Barrio Ávila. Teresa sat up in her bed, startled by a flashing news report on the television. She wasn’t sure when she’d fallen asleep. Four in the morning, maybe. On most nights, sleep came quickly to her. Violently. But last night, Teresa felt as if she had waded into it slowly, almost willingly. As one does when playful moonlight splashes in the receding tide and invites you to join it. When it begs you to slip off your clothes, fold them neatly on the beach, and walk into the surf.
Last night, Teresa allowed herself to dissolve into sleep. As if she were salt, or sugar, or already ashes. Immersed in it, she felt the borders that defined her disintegrate, and what was left inside her expanded, exploded until she was everywhere and nowhere at once.
It wasn’t sleep but an impenetrable darkness that had swallowed her. A vacuum with enough gravity to warp time and space. It relieved her of her skin and each and every one of her memories: her daughters’ laughter, the echoes of their screaming; the daily aching of her bones; the sweet tickle of a lover’s bite; the aroma of sex, the stench of sex, the nostalgic, metallic taste of it. For twenty-seven years, Teresa felt that she was dying every night.
“You’re such a pessimist. It’s not so bad, you know,” the portrait of Amarga said. “Death.”
The painting of her mother hung next to the vanity. The canvas cracked, its expensive oil paint darkened by the years.
“¡Teresa! ¿Do you hear me talking to you?” Amarga continued chiding.
Teresa shuffled over to the vanity with the gait of a moon crab. She scrutinized the state in which age had left her reflection: Crows left careless footprints around her eyes. Gravity swung rambunctiously from her jowls, her breasts. Shocks of wavy white hair sprouted from her temples, giving her an uncanny resemblance to the Bride of Frankenstein.
In four days, Teresa would turn sixty. The same age Amarga was when she died.
“Add a couple of sixes,” her mother’s portrait said. “And you’ll finally understand yourself.”
Teresa gathered breath as if for a plunge.
“It’s your fault, you know,” Amarga said. “It’s your fault I’m dead.”
Teresa faced the portrait. Her mother raised her left eyebrow and let out a guttural cackle. “¡See! You know it’s true. That’s why you’re being punished. Me, your father, ¡even Carmen! We’re all gone, and you’re still here.”
Teresa sat back down on the bed to turn up the volume on the television. “Yes,” she replied weakly. “I’m still here, aren’t I.”
Same as in life, Amarga’s portrait wouldn’t let up. “You’re still here,” she said. “You’re still here, ¿but how long did it take you to get the nerve to come back?”
Of course, Teresa knew how long it took—she’d counted it to the precise day. Amarga died that April night in 1968 and Teresa fled Costa Rica. Abandoned her daughters and exiled herself in Washington, DC, where she stayed for six years, two months, and nineteen days.
When Teresa returned to Costa Rica in 1974, the house was just as she’d left it, because neighbors and burglars alike had convinced one another it was cursed. Teresa pushed open the black iron gate, its screech of metal and memory. She tried the front door, but her entry was blocked by a thick, stubborn chain. Instead of waiting for a locksmith, Teresa had slipped off her heels and trekked to the end of the property through the gardens, hoping to try the back door.
Six cycles of dry and rainy seasons had mutated the rows of manicured plants into a dense, powerful rain forest. Its canopy reached over the two-story house, while the underbrush cawed, then hushed as Teresa advanced. Trumpet flowers from the tree called Queen of the Night heralded Teresa’s prodigal return. Skull-shaped pomegranates littered the grass, seeds spilling from their surprised mouths like bloody teeth. Teresa caught sight of the dilapidated one-story guesthouse at the back of the property, to which Amarga banished herself after Teresa married José María. Amarga had refused to watch her daughter fall in love with a peasant, shuddered at the idea of living off a laborer’s salary. Amarga lived there alone and refused Teresa entry for twenty years.
No one had even bothered locking the guesthouse’s door. It opened with a slight push. To Teresa’s surprise, the lighting still worked. It revived the rooms as a mortuary artist does a corpse’s face. But what Teresa saw inside immediately made her drop her heels, slam the door shut, and sprint back through the gardens. Her voice broke as she telephoned a gardener to fell the rain forest, a locksmith to crack open the main house’s front door, and a construction company to demolish the guesthouse. All three tasks to be done as soon as possible, or she swore to herself that she would leave Barrio Ávila for good.
In the guesthouse, from every surface—the dressers, tables, chairs, armoires, bookshelves, desk, window ledges, and the old Motorola television set—green candle wax cascaded onto the floor. Coating the walls in a delicate dew. Sealing the furniture shut. Overflowing into an emerald lagoon that left not even a centimeter of tile visible. If Teresa had recovered from the sight, and left muddied footprints as she crossed the floor of wax and made her way into her mother’s bedroom, she would have found a letter pinned lovingly above the bed. A letter from Teresa’s father, Tácito, who had been a lawyer for the American Fruit Company; a letter addressed to Amarga, dated the night he vanished: August 19, 1948.
Amarga’s portrait interrupted Teresa’s memory. “I waited for him,” she said in a melancholic, disarmed tone. “That’s what the letter told me to do: wait. ‘Wait for me. Light a candle every night until I return. I will use it as a beacon to find my way home.’ And I did. I waited.
“Before he disappeared, your father told me that the plantation workers in the south were planning a rebellion, and they were sending him to negotiate. To send a lawyer to reason with peons and their machetes, ¿who thought of such an idea? A gringo, no doubt. But your father was brave. That is, except when it came to facing me. That’s why he left me a letter instead of saying a word.”
Teresa remembered the green wax, its softness beneath her feet.
“Imagine the sensation under my feet. Twenty years of wax is oily. I almost slipped every day, waiting for your father.”
Teresa estimated the number of candles. How many wicks had Amarga burned?
“Over seven thousand,” Amarga said. “Until the night I died, I lit that many candles. He never came. But you know that. We’re all dead, and you’re still here.”
The doorbell startled Teresa, and her room was silent again. No chiding from the portrait; the shut-off television became a black, convex mirror; even the chilled breeze was courteous to the quiet.
Teresa heard Cristina jangling the gate. “¡Upe! ¡Teresita! ¡We’re late!”
She’d forgotten about their trip to the market, and about the doctor’s appointment at the local government hospital afterward. Teresa wanted to cancel, to crawl back into bed and let the clouds paint her turquoise walls gray. To let the day pass until it was time to sleep again. But Cristina rattled the gate and sang with the joy of a prisoner giddy for the freedom of an execution.
“¡Coming!” Teresa yelled. She slipped on a silk blouse and some cotton slacks, but no jewelry, because muggers on buses were targeting women as old as Teresa and Cristina.
Teresa descended the stairs, opened the glass and iron door. She smiled. “¿Should we take umbrellas?”
“No, Teresita,” Cristina said. “My back’s telling me the rain won’t start until tomorrow.”
Cristina hugged Teresa harder than Teresa hugged her back. It went that way often, Cristina more affectionate, more willing to demonstrate love to others. “Come on, Teresita,” she said. “The bus should be pulling up any minute now.”
The two women walked alongside La Guaria Railroad’s track. The steel rails had dulled after so many years of abandonment. The American Fruit Company no longer existed, so the train left but a ghost in Barrio Ávila. Only the memory of its engine smoke and screeching whistle—a banshee enjoying a cigar on its way to the Atlantic port, bananas fresh from the market. The track curved like a scythe toward the main avenue, and on either side of it, ground had been broken for construction. Skyscrapers would bloom in place of the bougainvilleas that had been uprooted. Progress visited Barrio Ávila as it had the rest of the country. Half-abandoned neighborhoods—no matter how illustrious their histories or wealthy their once residents—were fair game to Costa Rica’s growing economy. Its swelling middle class, seemingly infinite lines of credit, two cars for every person. With progress came industry and technology, coffee fields patriated by Starbucks or Illy, local cobbler shops replaced with offices for call centers. Costa Rica now sold land and services as it once had fruit. It wouldn’t be left behind in the twentieth century. It would trudge ahead into the new millennium, one loan from the IMF at a time.
Cristina rubbed Teresa’s back as they marched to the bus stop. Cruel memories were reflected on the track of La Guaria Railroad. Any reminder of the American Fruit Company—where Tácito once worked and José María, too, when he and Teresa were married—stiffened Teresa’s posture, turned her head slightly to the left. A blank, avoidant stare. Cristina hummed as one does in a graveyard; it anchored Teresa’s mind until they could make it to the bustling avenue.
THEY’D MET BACK when Cristina and Desiderio, a year into their marriage, moved to Barrio Ávila. The unloading of boxes and valuables was brief—mostly newspaper-wrapped statues and padded paintings. They’d left a one-bedroom apartment in downtown San José, both having finished art school in the same semester. Desiderio would build a career in sculpture, and would even end up commissioned by the government for public arts projects. But Cristina abandoned her promise as a great painter to raise their newborn son.
Cristina cradled a cooing Juan Julián, while Desiderio directed the movers to be more careful. All of Barrio Ávila’s inhabitants appeared from their houses in steady waves of ulterior-motivated welcome—the nosiest busybodies came first, gave unsolicited advice until Cristina unbuttoned her blouse to breastfeed (nakedness scattered these people like roaches). Then came the wealthier residents who brought desserts their maids had just whipped up. This time Desiderio unbuttoned his shirt as if to breastfeed, and again they scattered. Only when Teresa rang the doorbell did Cristina pay full attention. Teresa cradled a newborn Carmen, and Cristina invited Teresa to the pristine garden of rosebushes and bromeliads to feed their babies together. They took an instant liking to each other, and began integrating their lives as all best friends do. They introduced their husbands, who took an instant disliking to each other. Desiderio found José María common, and José María wanted to pummel Desiderio to the dirt. A rich boy and a boy from poverty cannot mix, no matter their loyalty to the same masculinity.
Cristina fawned over Lyra and Carmen, bought them expensive games and gifts. And eventually Cristina warmed up to Amarga—admired her, even—and Amarga, in turn, commissioned Cristina for a portrait.
Though gossip was as fresh as spring water for Cristina, she ignored any semblance of it about Teresa’s family—how Tácito had been a successful lawyer for the American Fruit Company and disappeared, leaving Amarga and Teresa in a state of denial and poverty, how José María was known for his bouts of anger at strangers who complimented his wife. Gossip was for those one didn’t like or was planning not to like. Rumors about best friends were to be dispelled, nullified, and denied. Cristina saw Teresa only as she was—a good wife, a better mother, and a best friend.
THE BUS RIDE proved uneventful, no lurking muggers to snatch gold and purses. Cristina led Teresa to the enclosed Borbón Market, where Cristina haggled with every vendor. Teresa changed her composure—she chitchatted with a Nicaraguan man selling lottery tickets, complimented a woman for the quality of her fruit. No one this deep into San José knew Teresa, her story, so she was just another woman grocery shopping. No news of Amarga’s death to influence the tone of conversation; no condolences for Carmen’s suicide (though no one with any manners would use that particular word anyway); and no roundabout questions of José María’s whereabouts, how many decades had passed since he disappeared. No one to highlight all the human-shaped voids in Teresa’s life, including the still living, still pulsing one left by Lyra. A smaller one, perhaps the most agonizing, by Gabriel.
With enough melons, guayabas, and rambutans to fill a small barge, Cristina and Teresa caught a cab for Teresa’s doctor’s appointment. They entered the government hospital, assaulted by cleaning chemicals and the ever-pervasive, immediately recognizable aroma of death. They made their way through multiple buildings, passed crowded waiting rooms (a man sat dead on a bench, and the nurses wouldn’t notice until their lunch break), and arrived finally at Neurology. Teresa’s appointment was for an MRI scan, and Cristina her chaperone and moral support.
The doctor named Gallegos, an ex-classmate and ex-lover of Lyra’s, was waiting at the front desk, chatting with the nurse who’d taken over for the receptionist. Teresa had gone to an appointment with him two months ago, complained of a series of searing headaches, and he scheduled the MRI to perform when hospital bureaucracy deemed it suitable. Today was that day. The doctor abandoned his conversation and approached Teresa. “Come, doña,” Dr. Gallegos said. “You’ll be fine. It’ll be quick.”
But it was not quick, not for anyone involved.
Dr. Gallegos took Teresa to the room and left her to change into a paper-thin gown. The MRI machine stared at Teresa with the glint of a guillotine. When Dr. Gallegos reentered, he placed his hand on Teresa’s head reassuringly, as he would have with his own grandmother. Or a poodle. “This is just going to give me a chance to read your mind,” Dr. Gallegos said, smiling. “You’re much too quiet, ¿how else am I going to know what you think about me?”
Teresa didn’t laugh. Her mind could focus only on the terrible deformities the machine would uncover: a botfly’s larva wishing to slink out of the scalp like a flower, fungi that replace the skin in a year, memories purposely buried too deep for anyone to find.
Dr. Gallegos cleared his throat and straightened his tie. “You’re a tough crowd, doña. Always have been, I guess. Anyway, just lie down for me. It’s all going to be fine.”
The uncomfortable plastic bed pulled Teresa into the machine, trapping her in what felt like the vibrating chamber of a jet engine. She closed her eyes until it was time to be freed from this newly discovered Hell.
IN THE WAITING room, the nurse waved Cristina over with a limp, flitting wrist before reapplying purple lipstick, a Christmas present from her daughter-in-law. “I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you this, lady,” the nurse began, “but your friend, I don’t know if it’s going to turn out well for her.”
Cristina couldn’t tell if the nurse was smirking or frowning. The nurse’s eyebrows, tattooed on, couldn’t make up their minds either. “Dr. Gallegos doesn’t pull people in here all willy-nilly,” she said. “No, there’s got to be something wrong.”
“Oh, come on,” Cristina said. “Teresa told me he said it was routine.”
The nurse sucked her teeth. “Routine…”
The nurse’s tone disturbed a hornet’s nest in Cristina’s heart. Her skin pricked hot as if stung from the inside out.
“Cancer, I bet,” the nurse said. “I’ve seen it before, I’ve been here for quite a while. I’m older than I look, you know.”
“¡How dare you!” Cristina raised her voice. “I should report you, you can’t say shit like that.”
“Look, lady, I’m just looking out for you. A couple of old tortilleras like you, I figured you’d want to know what to expect. To make preparations and whatnot for your partner.”
Cristina was left speechless.
“Look, I get it. My cousin’s a lesbian. That’s why I’m trying to look out for you. I’d do that favor for her.”
WHEN DR. GALLEGOS escorted Teresa back into the waiting room, Cristina was standing by the window, watching vendors in the plaza hassle patients on their way into pharmacies. She didn’t turn around to face Teresa, not at first.
“I’ll call you next week to let you know if anything’s off,” Dr. Gallegos said to Teresa. “But I’m certain everything will be where it should be.”
The nurse rolled her eyes.
“¿How is Lyra, by the way?” the doctor asked. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her. ¿Do you think she’ll answer if I call?”
Cristina rushed to grab Teresa’s elbow to sweep her into the elevator. She glared at both the nurse and Dr. Gallegos. The nurse cowered for a moment while Dr. Gallegos clicked his pen to a popular beat. He did this often with any instrument, medical or otherwise—he made music only he appreciated. On Fridays he played in a Queen cover band.
THE TWO FRIENDS made it back to Barrio Ávila in one piece and followed La Guaria Railroad back to their houses. Teresa invited Cristina over for a shot, a game of bingo, or their favorite telenovela, anything to keep Cristina in her presence. Cristina’s conversation the whole bus ride had been muddled and her voice shaky, which Teresa found odd, and it only added to her anxiety. She’d left the MRI grateful that she didn’t die in the machine, but without Cristina’s comforting words and white lies, Teresa’s worries had free rein over her psyche. Cristina refused the company and crossed the railroad back to her house.
Both women shut themselves in. La Guaria Railroad’s line rattled as if the train rushed over it. The old horn echoed, and the wooden ties and steel rails emanated a refractory, furious heat.