Hurricanes and lesser storms bring ghosts from faraway places. They’re swept up by the wind and trapped in the cyclonic eye to be deposited along the path, like seeds scattered by a carefree man. Some ghosts attempt prodigal returns, welcomed by their families in lush graveyards; others, however, set up shop where they land. They hop over fences or concrete walls, climb down fruit-bearing trees, and toss a lime or lemon high into the air as they lurk the grounds. Even in death, one inspects a property like a new homebuyer. Unless trapped outside the house by brick dust, salt, or powdery sulfur, the ghost will make its way in and scratch its back against archways and walls, leaving an ectoplasmic marking identifiable only by pets and children, indicated by obsessive barking or an ominous finger pointed at empty corners.
Then there are the living dead—walking specters, shells of men—who are also scurried by storms of large magnitudes. They’re ejected from their lairs, whether it be a drug den or a lover’s dirty bed, and forced to roam the earth aimlessly. Teresa witnessed one of these men on the second morning of the hurricane—a phantom from her past.
Teresa was preparing the house for Gabriel when she looked out the window, through the solid, undulating wall of rain, and saw Mastodonte, an addict known locally in Barrio Ávila, as he lurched along the swollen river of La Guaria Railroad. He arrived both seldom and like clockwork. His grotesque rarity like that of a corpse flower at a botanical garden, jeered at by audiences who covered their noses. Mastodonte lumbered parallel to the flooded track, his gargantuan frame weighed down by a fur coat that absorbed every last drop of rain. The mink fibers had turned green, coated by algae; and because of his size and his pace, to the untrained eye, Mastodonte was a thawed prehistoric animal.
Teresa had known Mastodonte from childhood, his father a colleague of Teresa’s father. Two lawyers of similar status who worked for the American Fruit Company. The fire that began that night in 1968 had snaked from the AFC plantation along La Guaria Railroad’s line and made it to Barrio Ávila, stopping only when it reached the neighborhood’s limits: Mastodonte’s house, a mansion painted green like a jewel. He was home that night, his mother beside him, because they couldn’t sleep. She played a lullaby on the piano as he hummed along. The visiting flames licked the gardens first, then the façade, ate through the wood-trimmed walls, and finally the parlor where Mastodonte and his mother were trapped in song. For reasons inexplicable to him, his mother did not let him save her—he tried to pry her from the keys, but she wouldn’t budge. Before that night, he had never heard a red-orange voice.
The night drove Mastodonte mad, of course. His father blamed him for not slinging his mother over his shoulder to safety. And over the decades, Mastodonte found new drugs to numb himself. When he did, on occasion, reappear in Barrio Ávila, neighbors commented to no one in particular that it looked as if Mastodonte were making a pilgrimage. And once, before she married Juan Julián and they moved out of Barrio Ávila, Carmen followed Mastodonte’s hypnotic lumbering, having heard tangled thoughts in his head.
In her late teen years, Carmen’s special power of empathy had fully matured, and she took to it with brazen confidence—she stopped hiding it from others, told them how she truly felt or, rather, how they truly felt. She lost many friends, but gained others. Girls from flamenco practice, mothers of high school classmates who claimed to see ghosts, a woman named Eugenia, who was released from La Iglesia for good behavior. They confided in Carmen their deepest desires, confessed their own abilities, and Carmen supported them. A therapist in her own right, just like Lyra was becoming. Carmen took to Teresa with special care, a unique empathy to nullify Lyra’s acrimony. Teresa then became dependent on Carmen, watched her while she slept, and kept the porch light on if she stayed out all night.
That day, Carmen paused her telenovela because she swore she heard Mastodonte’s mind rattling like La Guaria Railroad’s train. Teresa begged her to leave him be, afraid shadowing him would prove fatal. But Carmen shook off her mother’s limp grip, told her she had to get to the bottom of his journeys. She was destined to discover what exactly it was that made his mind race and buckle.
When Carmen arrived home that day from stalking Mastodonte, she told Teresa she’d followed him along the singed track of La Guaria Railroad, hiding behind coffee bushes and sometimes in plain sight. He didn’t notice her; he just yammered to himself and scratched his arms, and took off, then put on, then pulled off the mink coat that had belonged to his mother. The only thing besides himself that had survived the fire.
Mastodonte, then Carmen, arrived at the edge of the old AFC plantation. By then, new banana trees had grown unreasonably high, fed by potassium-rich soil from the fruit or from human ashes, creating an almost impenetrable barrier through which strays—dogs and children—routinely disappeared. Toucans and other tropical birds fed daily on the fruit, which if anyone would dare try, was the sweetest they would ever taste. But it was bad luck to eat bananas grown from human ashes. They said those hands of bananas would taste real.
Mastodonte (and Carmen not far behind) made it to the western end of the plantation, where the AFC’s abandoned locomotive slept. Its metal exterior painted completely green like a jewel. Even the wheels, the boiler, and its steam whistle blended into the forest of fronds. Mastodonte climbed into the cab and stayed there for hours. A few times Carmen stood up to leave—she planned to come back that night with a flashlight and thick boots for the snakes—but then from within the cab came a piano’s melody. The musical notes sat Carmen back down and allowed her to meditate, a state between nostalgia and introspection. The music was cracked, disjointed. Somehow beautiful. Carmen often thought the same of Teresa’s face when she looked at old family portraits or ignored the subject of José María: cracked, disjointed. Yet somehow still beautiful. Even when Teresa whispered Golondrina to Carmen through an aching wince.
After Lyra left Barrio Ávila, Teresa began calling Carmen Golondrina because she said Carmen kept her anchored here—to the world, to this life. Swallows guided lost sailors back to dry land, and when Teresa felt alone, out at sea, she said Carmen reminded her there was something solid to return to. If not for Carmen, she said she would have floated away long ago. Carmen saw Teresa’s dissociative spells, during which she lost all expression except for a peaceful smile, as welcomed escapes from a painful, overwhelming reality. Carmen never snapped Teresa out of them, instead let her wade in them as one does when floating in warm water, legs tired from kicking, and the only salvation left is to stop fighting.
After hours among the banana shoots and gnats, Mastodonte finally left the locomotive’s cab, then the plantation altogether, and Carmen took the opening to slip in. Her eyes grew wide—upon first sight, then when recounting it to Teresa—at a nineteenth-century fainting sofa growing out of one corner of the spacious cab. Battery-connected Christmas lights dangled from the ceiling. And in the center stood a baby grand piano, its finish stripped down to the gray, bleached wood. Keys missing like teeth in a rotten mouth, chords frayed in their middles.
At the time, listening to Carmen, Teresa thought it funny how desperately human beings held on to the past. How cruelly it held on to them back, like Mastodonte’s algae-green coat as he disappeared from Barrio Ávila, shooed along by the immense, inconsiderate hurricane.
LYRA’S THREATS RANG in Teresa’s head, and she knew she’d be unable to bring up Carmen to Gabriel—but if Teresa was lucky, she would be able to hold him: the part of Carmen that remained. So, Teresa practiced lines, innocuous questions and sincere curiosities about Gabriel’s life. In the mirror Teresa donned a doting, comforting face. She had just a few hours to succeed. Teresa would show Lyra that she truly wanted what was left of her family back. If today went well, Lyra’s heart would defrost, and she’d have no choice but to abandon this stubborn punishment.
The phone rang. Teresa thought it was Lyra calling to apologize, to give her the green light to reveal herself as Gabriel’s loving grandmother, but it was Cristina, with her happy, braying voice.
“Teresita,” Cristina sang.
Teresa smothered her disappointment with a smile. “Tina,” she answered.
“¿What are you so happy about?”
“No, nothing. Nothing new. You just make me happy is all.” Teresa twirled the phone cord around her fingers, played cat’s cradle with the slack.
“Wow, Teresita, I can’t believe you’re bullshitting me this early in the day. At least wait until noon.”
“I’m not, Tina.”
“Well, if you’re in such a good mood, I’ll put you in a better one.”
“Try me.”
“I’m throwing you a party.”
“¿A party?”
Cristina must have heard the chair drag across the floor when Teresa jumped up.
“It’s your birthday on Friday. So I’m going to throw you a party.”
“Oh, no, no, no, Tina. That’s not going to happen.” Teresa took on a lawyer’s tone. “¿Are you crazy? ¿Who will even show up?”
“We’ll invite random people from the street, Teresita. I’m just kidding. Friends, silly. Women from my book club. Anyone. You’re turning sixty. We all only get that once.”
“¿What’s so special about sixty?”
Teresa realized what was so special about it. Both women went silent on the line.
“You’re special, Teresita. You’re special to me. Please, let me do this. Just this once.”
“I don’t know, Tina. ¿Give me a couple of days to get used to it?”
“I’ll give you one.”
“I have to go.”
“¿What have you got going on today?”
“Nothing special. I promise.”
Teresa hung up and immediately felt a sharp, caustic pain in her head. She nearly fainted. One of the many headaches over the last few months. She’d almost gotten used to them, rode them out with sheer willpower and ibuprofen. This one continued as she prepared the rice for lunch.
She couldn’t help but feel selfish that she didn’t mention to Cristina that Gabriel was on his way, because she didn’t want his attention divided. Separately, and most definitely without commenting about it to each other, she and Cristina both longed for grandmotherhood, its prospect perhaps the only chance for redemption. They recognized the feeling in the other, but speaking it would make it real, and eventually that would be all they saw, and all they talked about, so it was better to keep it locked away.
Grandchildren offered women like Teresa and Cristina a second chance, because in their minds, they had taken motherhood for granted.
Mothers like Teresa and Cristina hope their child will grow up to become the first woman president, or the country’s premier astronaut, or an incomparable leader who can bring peace. And even if they don’t become the pope, or a lawyer, or a doctor with a summer home, the mother at least assumes she will be loved by her children, regardless of her mistakes.
Mothers like Teresa hope above all else that they’ll be graded on a curve. I was not so bad as, they want to say. At least I …
But that isn’t the case, and has never been the case. Even if a mother does her best, her children will reproach her for some reason or another. They’ll judge, and rebel, and kick and punch and insult everything she did. Or didn’t do. They’ll act like children, even if they’re adults. But there was always another chance with the next generation. Another shot to do it right.
Gabriel was Teresa’s second chance, and she refused to squander it.
ON THE KITCHEN television, Walter Mercado (Astrological Autocrat, Tsar of the Zodiac, Monarch of Mysticism) was in the third hour of a special infomercial. The studio cameras panned out, and next to him stood a Czechoslovakian model in a tacky metallic swimsuit. Her tan lines noticeably uneven. Her smile forced. As Walter helped lower her into a bathtub of murky water and petals, an abnormally long phone number flashed across the screen. Below it, a small, scrolling print read (in English, not Spanish) PHONE CALLS ARE $45 PER MINUTE. IT WILL SHOW UP IN YOUR ACCOUNT STATEMENT AS “LOVE WALTER…”
He dropped love-potion ingredients into the model’s bath: molasses (for the woman who asks, “Where’s my Prince Charming?”), cinnamon oil (a natural aphrodisiac), a little honey (Honey), Walter’s trademarked Florida Water (because who else will celebrate you besides you?), champagne (if you’ve got it; if not, cider; if not that, beer), and lastly, red wine. As the model steeped in her bath—perfumed, sticky, effervescent—Walter turned and asked her (in English, not Spanish) how to say I love you in her language. Apparently, Walter didn’t understand the phrase when the model said it, because repeating it, he said, “‘Mi lucha’ to you as well, my dear … And ‘my struggle’ to all of you out there. When you wish for something to come true, pour all your faith into it. Only faith can set you free.”
Walter’s viewers wondered if there was some hidden meaning behind the struggle he spoke of, what he wanted to be set free from. Some even called to ask. Their forty-five-dollar bank statement would read, LOVE WALTER …
Teresa heard the doorbell and ran to meet Gabriel at the gate. Behind him stood Lyra, who didn’t turn her head to acknowledge her.
“Gabby,” Lyra said. “This is Doña Teresa, an old family acquaintance. She’ll be taking care of you today. Don’t make any trouble for her.”
Teresa opened the gate to let Gabriel through. “Please come in, Lyra,” she said. “Get out of this rain for a moment, have some coffee before work.”
“I had two cups already,” Lyra said. “I’ll be back in the afternoon. Remember what we talked about.”
“¿What did you talk about?” Gabriel said.
“You, baby,” Lyra said. Her smile stretched like a broken limb across her face. “Be good.”
Lyra entered the Peugeot through the passenger side because of the property’s incline. When she had settled in and buckled up, she waved goodbye to Gabriel and sped off.
Teresa locked the gate. She set Gabriel’s backpack filled with toys down in the living room and led him to the kitchen, where the warm aroma of oregano and yellow peppers welcomed them both to sit and start chatting. Gabriel thanked Teresa and began poking at the plate in front of him, picking out whole cilantro leaves and too-big bits of onion. He looked around the kitchen, at first avoiding eye contact with Teresa. On the convex television screen, a fly lay spread-eagle, trapped by static electricity, tasting the glass with sponging mouthparts.
“Doña Teresa,” Gabriel said.
“¿Yes, dear?”
“¿How do you know my mother?” Gabriel ate every bean individually, frowned at those that were undercooked.
“Oh … well, I’ve known her for many years. Lyra and I were very close.”
“¿What happened?” Gabriel asked.
“Oh, you know … life happened. It always does. It always has a way of going in a different direction without your permission.” Teresa felt she was giving too much away. Gabriel’s curiosity was like nectar to her buzzing anxiety. “¿How do you like the food?” she asked.
“It’s good. It reminds me of my mom’s.”
“That’s a compliment. Golondrina loved to cook.”
“¿Golondrina?”
“I—I … That’s what I used to call your mother,” Teresa said, standing to pour Gabriel more juice.
“That name fits, I guess,” Gabriel said philosophically. “She’s strict sometimes, but she sings sometimes too. A swallow’s song, ¿right? When she’s cleaning the house or when she’s in the shower…”
“Yes, she was very special—” Gabriel raised his eyebrow. “Is—your mother is very special,” she said.
“¿Who’s that guy in the robes?” Gabriel asked. He pointed to the television, where the most famous fortune-teller of them all threw his hands up in self-adulation, receiving a psychic applause from the rain.
“Walter Mercado,” Teresa said.
“He looks like a Christmas tree. ¿What’s he talking about?”
“He says that he can see into the future,” Teresa answered sarcastically.
“¿Can he really?”
“I doubt it,” Teresa said.
This Walter Mercado character was a fraud. Teresa had never seen a grifter with such a cheery disposition. His predictions always ended too optimistically, and his sappy one-liners gave him away. If he were sitting here right now, he’d cite some constellation in the shape of a bug or a blindfolded woman, and predict what would happen next. Resolution is in the cards. Your horoscope promises healing. God wills it, Teresita. All will be forgiven.
Teresa remembered her grandmother, and tagging along with her as a girl to distribute remedies and deliver the most crushing news. Teresa reconsidered Gabriel’s question—could Walter Mercado see into the future? Absolutely not. But whether the ability existed? Yes, she had to admit. That indeed was very real.
“Cada loco con su tema,” Teresa laughed to herself. To each fool his own affairs.
Gabriel smiled. “I like that.”
In a tender reflex, Teresa began telling him stories, of ghosts and monsters, things that had excited her when she was a girl. His ooohs and ahhs loosened the noose that had been looped around her heart. But suddenly that pain bubbled to the tip of Teresa’s skull again, tickling the inside of her like a creature desperate to escape. She tried to finish the tale, but the pulsing in her head nauseated her. Teresa served Gabriel another plate and excused herself from the kitchen. She needed to lie down for a few minutes.
WALTER MERCADO’S COHOST quieted down the studio audience. She sat with him and held his hands. Tell me, ¿how does your psychic hotline work? ¿Are you on the other end of the line?
Walter stood, walked center stage, and flapped open his cape like a quetzal’s wings.
“Sometimes it’s me,” he said with his famous cabalistic tone. “Sometimes it’s one of my psychics. Visualize a tree, one with deep roots, a tree that pleads and speaks. I’m on a mission from God to help anyone in my path. Every day the tree’s roots grow deeper, because I mediate with Him, and Christ, and the Virgin, and the angels. Every branch, and leaf, and fruit of this tree are like a part of me. When someone calls, if I’m unavailable, they’ll talk to one of my psychics, who have eaten from that fruit, and will impart to the caller my wisdom. My internal light.”
Gabriel tuned out the infomercial. Rain slapped the windows, and cold wind came howling through the screen door. Gabriel left the kitchen and began exploring the hallways and rooms they led to. On the walls hung paintings with elaborate frames, photographs flecked with water stains and burns, and in one room, a crucifix painted blue. Silver powder fell from the Fibrolite ceilings. Moth larvae littered the linoleum floors, encased in their own spit and the plaster they had eaten. Gabriel had never been in a home in such a state of disrepair. Last night Lyra told him not to trust Teresa or anything she said, that she was generous but was also mad. Gabriel felt pity for her. Ambling about this carcass of a house, he wondered what old women do with their days. His mother said Teresa possessed no family, no friends. What was the point then? Gabriel wondered. What was the point of going on with no one else?
Gabriel thought of his own life, how his playmates had dwindled this past year or so. He wondered if he and Teresa were similar in that way. Had she frightened her friends away too? Gabriel didn’t know why, but a hyperactivity had been slowly taking over his sensitive mind, and many of his classmates found him too erratic to play with. Some were frightened because these surges of energy fueled his sprawling imagination, and often he terrorized the other students as a T. rex or a Transformer would: gnarling his teeth, perfecting his roar, or shooting lasers from his eyes, and chest, and palms. He challenged weaker children to games of chicken on the monkey bars or swinging competitions to see who could go the highest. Gabriel knew that deep down, the other children hated him. He was too intelligent not to know. Even the idea of him made them shudder. They averted their eyes as one does to a feral dog in an alleyway. So, Gabriel had begun throwing himself down stairs or from the top of the slide for attention. If Teresa was as alone as his mother said, what would she be willing to do to make people care about her again?
Gabriel looked to the top of the stairs, where a toad sat and croaked. Its body looked soft and smashable. Gabriel grabbed a tinfoil-wrapped brick, a clumsy weapon that had been keeping the kitchen’s screen door open. He would toss it, watch it crash onto the toad like an asteroid.
But by the time Gabriel reached the top of the stairs, the toad had disappeared, and in place of its croaking he heard moaning. Teresa’s animal, suffering voice.
THE FIRST ECSTASY OF TERESA
Teresa does not recognize the landscape at first. There is no sound here. She balances on rocks piled like a burial mound, surrounded by a turquoise pool. Lime-green moss and grass-blanketed slopes, boulders, riverbanks, and that which lies beneath the powerful, rushing waterfall. Clouds break apart—a bored child’s puzzle—and the warm sun spotlights Teresa’s mother, her father, and her grandmother, all unpacking food, chairs, and towels. Teresa is at the Río Celeste, and the dead are somehow still alive.
Teresa’s father, Tácito, does not sport his usual three-piece suit, but a guayabera and a blue Speedo. He is handsome with dark skin, a sloped brow, and long, elegant limbs. He stretches with the concentration of an Olympic swimmer. He catches sight of his daughter and winks. Teresita, she sees him mouthing. Inaudible, joyful.
Amarga cowers from the emerging sun and massages herself with zinc oxide paste. She paints herself as white as a mime, and her moving lips bear no sound, so Teresa is fooled into thinking she is one. Amarga kisses her husband, leaving his lips chalk white. He does not wipe it off. To Teresa, it looks as though he savors it.
Teresa turns and moves toward the water involuntarily, as if it is memory guiding her limbs and body to dive. With a plunge she can hear again, swirling bubbles popping in her ears, river stones echoing the current. The mechanical impetus drives Teresa deeper toward the bottom, where she sees a rosary and a pistol tucked beneath a moss-eaten rock. But Teresa does not reach for them, because they are not hers. Their owners are on the bank, unwrapping sandwiches and singing a song together that Teresa can hear in the water. She breaks the surface and takes a deep breath of fresh air and mist. Amor, her grandmother’s voice breaks through the world’s silence. From the shore, she outstretches her hand to lead Teresa to the soft, smooth rocks. You remember, ¿don’t you? This is the day you first witnessed death.
It is indeed that day. And Teresa prepares herself for the magnetic pull toward her mother, who needs company to piss in the forest, fearful as she is of snakes and scorpions. Amarga complains as they trek up the path Tácito cleared with his trusty machete. Teresa cannot hear Amarga, but her memory is enough to tell her what her mother is saying. It is a mixture of castigation, advice, confession, hatred, self-hatred, bile, and kind words in the smallest portions. Amarga stops Teresa beneath a Queen of the Night tree, its dozens of trumpets ringing perfume into the underbrush. Teresa knows it is her mother’s favorite flower, because it is the only good memory from her childhood. Amarga mouths that she used to lie with a pillow beneath the tree at night, dreaming of escaping the cruel latifundio she had been raised on. Your father saved me, Amarga mouths.
It is then that an oropendola crashes to the forest floor, just a meter from Teresa and her squatting mother. Its red-tipped beak hangs open with death, its burgundy wings outstretch with it, its soft blue eyes widen with its invitation. It frightens Teresa more than anything else has before. She sprints away, hurtles into the forest’s wall of sharp foliage. She cannot and will not witness a dead thing. It activates an ancient need within her to run, no matter how painful the path away from death is.
You cannot escape it, her grandmother’s voice whispers in her head.
GABRIEL HUNCHED OVER her, pressing down on her shoulders and making large O’s with his mouth. Panic contorted his young face. Gradually, the world’s volume returned, and Teresa felt her muscles restitch themselves. Wind and thunder, Gabriel’s hollering, and her own gasping flooded her ears. Teresa’s limbs and face still twitched. Every nerve in her body had been firing violent bolts of electricity. Tendons were tight, and her flesh felt so taut it might as well have been made of stone. Her toes uncurled as she sat up.
Neither grandmother nor grandson knew what had just happened. Teresa pulled Gabriel toward her and held him tightly. You cannot escape it, Teresa heard again.
Gabriel clutched Teresa as if trying to weigh her down, to reattach her to the physical world. She looked down at his feathered black hair and inhaled the painful memory of Carmen.
IN THE FINAL hour of the infomercial, Walter Mercado decided to read an audience member’s tarot. Shuffling through the cards, presenting only the ones he knew he could really sell to his viewers. He pulled the World arcanum, numbered XXI.
He winked. “When you have love and dedication, responsibility and passion, your future is guaranteed.”
The studio audience applauded fanatically. Walter bowed, a demure geisha in Liberace’s robes. But when he pulled number XIII, the Death arcanum (accidentally), his guest jumped out of her seat. Walter laughed nervously, probably at his producer, who gestured something like the skeleton on the card.
“Death,” began Walter, that master of improvisation, as all fortune-tellers are. Raising his manicured hands, he said, “Death is the ending we need so that a new story can begin. Just as spring dulls into summer and then to autumn and then winter, Death is merely a moment. A hiccup. We were taught to believe that Death is the finale, ¡but I’m here to tell you all that Death ends nothing absolutely!”
LYRA ARRIVED AT Barrio Ávila at dusk. The water level had risen so high, it touched the Peugeot’s bumper. She’d spent the entire day at La Iglesia completely idle, ignoring her duties and avoiding Father Silvino. She sat at her temporary desk and watched the wind flutter files against each other like butterfly wings. Most of all, she’d agonized about her decision to let Teresa watch Gabriel. Lyra parked close to the black iron gate. This place is as impenetrable as a fortress, she thought. Or a prison.
Lyra again avoided Teresa’s eyes as she grabbed Gabriel’s backpack. Teresa avoided saying anything too. Gabriel sulked through the door, and Lyra could immediately tell there was something off. He held the particular look of someone who had just discovered a connection and lost it in the same day. Teresa had it too. And in the rearview mirror as she pulled off, Lyra could no longer ignore it on her own face.
Lyra chose San José’s flooded side streets instead of the highway, the car splashing tsunami-sized waves in all directions. Stragglers who jumped out of the way cursed her for turning their evening into a disaster movie. On the dangerously slender, serpentine roadway leading up to their house in Aserrí, the swerves and dodges distracted Lyra from the intrusive thoughts insisting that her mother had revealed something, had detonated the careful reality Lyra had built; that the lie of Gabriel’s life had just been razed, after Lyra okayed the demolition.
Her therapist instinct kicked in. “¿Gabby?” Lyra said. “You’re awfully quiet … ¿Are you going to tell me how it went at Doña Teresa’s?”
“Fine. She was nice.”
“Uh-huh … ¿Anything else?”
“Mamá, ¿who’s Golondrina?”
Lyra’s hands tightened around the steering wheel. Something that tasted of rage numbed her teeth.
“¿What do you mean, Gabby?” she said.
“Well, Doña Teresa said she used to call you that: Golondrina … But I didn’t believe her.”
Did Gabriel know he was asking about his real mother? Lyra considered her options.
Would she continue to lie for the rest of their lives?
How long could she keep up this charade?
How long could the past just stand there? A sweaty, persistent salesman presenting his pitch—the greatest pitch he’ll ever pitch—even after the door is slammed in his face.
Before Lyra could lie, or tell the truth this time, or turn the radio louder, Gabriel spoke again. “It’s a really pretty name. And whomever it belonged to … she must’ve been really pretty too.”
“Yes…,” Lyra answered, relieved. Devastated. “She was.”
Lyra began to cry. Gabriel pushed his body forward against the seat belt to touch her arm. Lyra breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth (a technique she taught her clients).
Lightning carved the mountains out from the dark. Jagged lines on a heart monitor.
THE MOMENT THEY stepped through the door, Gabriel excused himself to his bedroom, and Lyra let him. She needed to shower, and change, and lie prostrate for a few hours. With a mug of mint tea to calm her stomach and her nerves, Lyra lay on her back, replaying the day, and the past ten years, then the past twenty-seven. How quickly the mind shuffles through the past. The brain merely a filing cabinet operated by an overeager secretary, determined to get that promotion. The efficiency with which Lyra extracted, analyzed, and reshuffled memories made her a skilled therapist. Inversely, however, it tortured her own personal life. Often Lyra would spend hours or days piecing together situations too long gone to do anything about and fretting over what she didn’t do, or was not able to do. If these recollections weren’t frivolous—a lost parking spot, the supermarket attendant speaking rudely, truths Lyra would have told clients if her license weren’t on the line—they all led back to that night in 1968.
Lyra couldn’t have stopped her grandmother’s death; she knew that. Teresa couldn’t have stopped it either. But what Lyra could blame Teresa for, what she had never let go of, was that instead of holding Lyra and Carmen closer the next day, comforting them as Amarga was stuffed into that cold cemetery vault, Teresa kept them at arm’s length. And after it was done, after those ashes were returned to ashes, and dust to dust, Teresa pawned Lyra and Carmen off on the Three Marías, their godmothers, and abandoned them for six years to live in the United States.
Six years without their mother to explain why their grandmother was dead and why their father had disappeared. Six years without Teresa teaching them to dance, or how to manage their first bloods, or to stand up for themselves. Yes, the Three Marías provided that and much more, but it wasn’t the same, and everyone knew it.
Carmen appeared to adapt well—she was younger and more empathetic—but Lyra knew better. Carmen never recovered. And when Teresa finally came back, she ripped them away from the Three Marías and forced them back into the house in Barrio Ávila. Lyra never forgave her mother for putting her little sister through that.
Lyra’s tea went cold. She eyed the red telephone on her nightstand. She wondered if the Three Marías knew Teresa was dying. If they’d been invited to the party Cristina was throwing in two days. For many years they had skirted long conversations with Lyra, unable to forgive Teresa for her handling of the situation. Lyra and Carmen the collateral.
Would they even show up, those triplets who lived north, in Liberia? Would they even care that cancer was eating away at Teresa just as the past had eaten away at her? Just as it had eaten away at Lyra. At everyone else too.