It’s in the quiet of morning hours that mothers of Teresa and Cristina’s generation flourish and bloom. Before birdsongs pierce the dawn, or traffic hurtles noisily down the streets and highways. When there is time to think. Time to plan, to renew. They are unhindered by the world’s spinning, its gravity. Dawn is a motionless state, a halfheartedly drawn border between what has happened and what can be done about it. The future is born from these women’s hands in the morning. It is they who have the power to call the sun. Who make the day possible for husbands, and daughters, and one another. Coffee is served, rice is boiled, and the day is laid out in a road. Pristine and endless. A warm, inviting horizon littered with stars.
Cristina picked every star and sprinkled them into her mug like sugar cubes. Her house still cluttered with all the party decorations yet to be hung up, the lamb at spoiling point in the sink, roses picked three days ago. She ambled about completely nude, pretending to La Lora Lorca that she was getting tasks done. In the living room mirror, she caught a glimpse of herself and grinned. Just for the Hell of it, she would prance around naked for hours, until the very last minute before the party. With Desiderio’s help, everything should be done by then. And if she could be especially persuasive, she might get him to be naked the whole time too.
They had made love last night for the first time in ten years. In that lovemaking, they grieved Teresa together, poured that grief into each other, back and forth until the quantities were equal. This had released Desiderio from his spell. He spoke Cristina’s name and kissed the inside of her thighs and the nape of her neck. Cristina had almost forgotten the baritone of his voice, the space he took up inside her.
He asked if she was all right. She said she was.
He asked if she still loved him. She said she did.
All those years the ocean of his reticence nearly drowned them both, but now, on dry land, they reexamined the parts of each other that had gone neglected from grief.
Her head lying on his bare chest, Cristina remembered the first time they met. It was in her senior year at art school. She’d garnered a reputation as a genius, a painter who appears once in a generation. One day, as Cristina carried her latest masterpiece from a university building to another, she turned a corner and found a life-size marble statue of a woman with her collarbones, her eyes, and even the mole on her chin. On cue, Desiderio stepped from behind the sculpture’s shadow and held out his hand. Cristina slapped him across the face. This went on for many months, statues of Cristina sprouting all throughout the university, and red handprints on Desiderio’s cheeks. Artists are insistent, obsessive beings, and Cristina eventually relented when he’d mastered the mold of her hips.
From then on, Cristina and Desiderio became each other’s muses. In a rented apartment, they shared their bedroom as a studio and slept on the kitchen floor. He mixed her oil paints and she sharpened his tools. They made love against the windows, and prudish passersby, glancing from the street, quickened their pace and covered their ears. Almost every gallery wall in Costa Rica bore paintings of Desiderio’s face. And before long, they were married. When Juan Julián was born, Cristina paused her painting and focused all creative energy into raising their son. But Desiderio refused to abandon his work, and for a while, Cristina understood.
But as Desiderio’s career flourished, jealousy budded within Cristina. At times, lying awake beside him, she wanted to smother him for having been so selfish. But true artists are narcissists, she had come to find out.
THE MORNING GLORIES on her windowsill welcomed Lyra to the new day. Ants crawled along their petals, lifting water droplets and carrying them back to their thirsty colony. Lyra wasn’t sure when she had fallen asleep, but she woke up feeling unusually rested. Perhaps because it had temporarily stopped raining around midnight—that storm’s eye, observing all that it had done. It was the first night in days that bullets hadn’t rained down on the tin roof.
She had dreamed of Carmen again. They were in the downtown bazaar, picking out souvenirs for Americans. Carmen packed them all in a coffee sack and slung it over her shoulder, ready to dole out presents to all the needy gringo tourists. Lyra felt the lumpy sack, and its weightlessness surprised her. As if it were filled with helium or something even lighter. Carmen talked periodically about their mother, how nothing is really anyone’s fault. The universe does what it pleases, she said. Plays heartless jokes, then repents sometimes. This party, she told Lyra, was the universe trying to make it all better. To correct its mistakes. Somewhat late, Carmen admitted, but it’s the thought that counts. At the National Theater’s plaza, Lyra and her dead sister tossed silver coins to the pigeons, who lapped them up like corn kernels. Children chased them, and they flew away laggardly, weighted down by their jingling stomachs. Winged coin purses on a breeze.
Lyra sat cross-legged on the bedroom’s Wassily chair, pulled a cigarette from its pack, and stared out into the rain that had resumed right before she opened her eyes. She heard the Three Marías downstairs, bickering over who would make coffee. Their voices shrill, nostalgic, endearing.
“The party is today,” Lyra said out loud over and over. “Today is my mother’s birthday.”
Teresa’s last birthday.
Lyra would have to pick out a present. She thought back to what her mother might want. Should she let Gabriel pick one out too? Lyra wondered what she would wear, what she would dress Gabriel in. Would the truth all come out? How long could she keep up the charade with everyone staring at her, at him, holding their tongues with the pliers she had thrust into their hands?
Gabriel opened the door to Lyra’s room and sprawled facedown on her thick white comforter. “Mamá,” he said. “¿How did you sleep?”
TERESA COULDN’T LIFT herself from the bed. She felt as if an overeager seamstress had stitched her to the mattress with fishing line. Above her headboard, Jesus of the Divine Mercy ejaculated red and white light from his heart, spraying it all over the room with a placating look on his face. The hurricane recommenced its volley on Costa Rica’s roofs, slipping its fingers beneath their grooves, loosening them from the walls, wanting to get a better look at houses’ innards.
Teresa still clutched José María’s shark’s-tooth necklace. As black as the dirt, as hot as the night it had burned. She fought to make sense of it all. Today was her birthday, and at long last, she knew her husband was dead. Her mother and father were dead. Her youngest daughter too. Besides Lyra, who she knew still hated her, Teresa was completely alone. Her loneliness is what hemmed her skin to her bed, every reminder a flaring needle point.
Yet Gabriel was still there.
He had risen like a star into her reality, illuminating Death’s endless corners, chasing away its impenetrable shadows. Teresa had held him: a part of her daughter, a part of herself. She had held him as her grandmother once held her. During that day she spent with him, she loved him more than anything else. More than even the good memories. The happy ones keeping her afloat all these years. The Three Marías in a river. Tácito in his plantation office. Carmen, Lyra, and José María together in front of a Christmas tree. Teresa imagined herself, and Lyra, and Gabriel in front of the same tree, a tide of his presents overflowing around their feet. A trio of smiles and strewn-about needles. A new generation of joy.
It was a simple, mediocre hope. But its promise snipped the fishing line and helped Teresa to her feet and to her closet to pick out a dress for the party.