He did not speak with Lucia about the incident or the pills or the new doctor she saw in Cuenca from time to time. “It’s private,” she said. But this was what she’d always said, and so they returned once more to this delicate dance: he, terrified of retriggering her anger, of launching her into another episode; she, resentful of his mistrust. He hated being her minder, her keeper. “You take care of it,” he said, and she said, “I will.” But nothing was truly different, nothing made him feel safe—only time would soften his vigilance, allow his anxiety to transition into relief.
Slowly, they slipped back into their lives. He and Essy continued to paint the casita. Polka dots. Stripes. When his daughter had turned five, they’d added two more rabbits, one on each side of the door, and then the pigs, Princess and Pea, and then Fredy, who they painted on the south-facing wall, as tall as the roof, and then a cow named Victoria.
Lucia seemed to flatten out, like a spinning coin laid to rest. She brought Essy to the river, taught her how to scrub underwear with a small rock against a bigger rock, where to lay clothes in the grass to catch the late afternoon sun. Yasmin was sent away. Lucia resumed work at the gringo newspaper, too, though in some different capacity, commuted once every other week. She would start a new book, she said. “About what?” he asked. “Healing,” she said. “And El Pollo? Unheard Voices?” “No,” she said.
He was glad she read again to Essy every night. Rotated through tall stacks of children’s books borrowed from a used bookstore in Cuenca. Charlotte’s Web. The Mouse and the Motorcycle. A dog-eared Spanish-English dictionary, in which she’d highlighted her favorite words. Serendipitous. Dulcet. Vivir. Querencia. One day she brought home a brochure for a girls’ school in the city run by British expats. “What’s this?” he said. “Just to look at,” she said. “For when she’s older, maybe. Essy is really smart.”
• • •
One day she returned from a long afternoon in the woods, smiling. She had encountered a wise man, an old shaman, she said, who lived on the other side of the mountain. “You could meet him,” she said. “Some other time,” he said. Thereafter, she would often return with sprigs of herbs, seeds and seedlings, a vial of tincture, a crystal to hang in the window. She brewed tonics for Tío Remy’s arthritis, Mami’s stomach pains, Tía Alba’s cataracts, prescribed motherwort and licorice root for Tía Camila’s night sweats and hot flashes.
“This works?” asked Tía Camila. She poked a finger at the sediments afloat in her cup.
He could not look her in the eye, but Lucia did. “Try,” she said. “You have to try, Tía, and you have to believe.”
He half believed, and the half that did not humored her, downed bitter concoctions tasting of earth. “Ewww,” said Essy. His daughter wrinkled her nose, zipped shut her lips, threw away the key. He recalled how he used to take her to the candy store, how their faces puckered sucking on lemon drops, how they stretched gummy worms to nearly a foot. By now, she had long finished with the village day care, wore a proper school uniform with a green plaid skirt she’d hike up past her knees whenever her mother wasn’t looking. She no longer wore her hair in pigtails, rather a single braid down the middle of her back. Lucia taught her math. How many pigs and chickens in a barnyard with twenty-four legs and eight heads? “Four and four, of course,” said Essy. One day Lucia brought home a violin she’d found at a pawnshop in Cuenca. The screeches hurt his ears. “Essy, practice out in the garden,” he said. “But Papi,” she said. “Music is the language of the universe. Mama says.”
• • •
One day he dug into his jacket pocket and found a wrinkled bus schedule, Quito to Esmeraldas. He tossed it into a garbage can. The paper fluttered.
• • •
They spoke, occasionally, about having another child. He had always wanted more children—half a dozen, maybe more. She seemed fine. Perfectly fine. He wanted to believe it: that she was cured. Those darkest images would fade, supplanted by new memories, but the knowledge of her illness haunted him still. They made love, occasionally. He still saw Luna from time to time. Fabiana and Guadalupe had gotten married. And then Ricky, too, and Juan a few months later, to Guadalupe’s younger sister, and he could not help but wonder about her pepa, whether it was stubbly or smooth. Soon, he would have two brand-new nieces.
One day he came home to find long yellow streamers billowing out from every window of the casita. Essy had found the rolls of crepe paper in a drawer, spent the afternoon carefully hanging them with clear tape. “Hair, Papi!” she proclaimed. “Our casita has hair!” But the sight of streamers brought the Vargas house to mind. Susi. Was she still living in Esmeraldas? The thought needled him, like the splinters lodged in the palm of his hand.
He believed they were content, most of the time. Most evenings they ate dinner, played cards outside, or slipped over to Mami’s house to watch futbol on the new LCD television. Some nights Lucia still leafed through her narrow-ruled notebooks, carted out her old laptop. “What are you working on?” he asked. She had her own column now at the paper, could do as she liked, so it was ecotourism this month, an interview with the director of the senior center the next. “And the book?” She shook her head.
Four years passed. The dry season went. The wet season came. The animals grew and wandered and multiplied. When rains were severe, mud bubbled in through the seams of the casita and they lay down flattened cardboard and wore rain boots. Each time the tin roof started to leak again, he felt guilty for not having started work on a new house. There was always something else in need of his immediate attention. The future would have to wait.