‘Parem de atormentar o gatinho!’
‘We’re not tormenting him!’ Evie shouts back to Odete. ‘He likes it!’
All afternoon Evie and Magda have been dressing Luiza’s cat in their old doll clothes: little white cotton bonnets and pinafores now coated in fur and pierced with claw-sized punctures. Evie likes to trap him under her shirt so that he’s pinned against her as he tries to push his head out her sleeve, which doesn’t hurt him. But Magda swings him up in the air fast, then pulls him in close to her body, terrifying him so that he’ll grip her around the neck with his paws.
‘Look, he’s giving me a hug.’
‘Pra fora, anda! Out!’ Odete shoos them outside with a broom that tickles the backs of their legs.
Poor cat. And poor Odete, thinks Evie. They’ve driven even her crazy and she’s never shouted at them a day in their lives. Evie knows the maids are terribly sad because they’re leaving, and so is she. But it’s more than sad—ever since Carnival she’s wanted to cut up all her clothes and drag Cat’s claws deeply across her thighs. A feeling she can’t put into words. It seems like they’ve been getting ready to leave for years, talking about leaving, then packing to leave, but never actually going. The maids are always packing, the house becoming more and more bare. All the decorations, all the little knickknacks that she used to play with—the apple dolls with primitive clothes and the painting of dancing, silhouetted baianas with big bums and knotted headscarves—are gone. She pleaded with Maricota and Odete to leave a few things on the walls in the sitting room because it feels too strange to live in such an empty house, but they told her only what was absolutely needed could remain.
It’s been almost a full year since she last saw Luiza, one week since the party, and there are still two more weeks before they leave. Evie measures everything this way, triangulating between when Luiza disappeared, when the last good thing happened, and how long until they sail away, spending three long weeks trapped on the ship. She tries to remember their old life, to imagine what is coming next, but ‘now’ is a horrible limbo, her heart always straining and itchy. She picks up a book to read to Cat but then puts it back down, worried that Magda will say it is childish (never mind that it was Magda’s idea to dress up Cat). The truth is that Evie always feels pressed upon and hushed, but by no one or nothing she can see—by shifting currents in the air. By the faces of the dead at Carnival, secreted into this world. Now that they’ve seen her, they know where she is. So she goes along with Magda’s games, hoping if she does, she won’t feel quite so cold.
They are playing jacks on the front steps when a voice calls from the other side of the gate.
‘Hey. You girls wouldn’t want to entertain a lonely American girl lost in the jungle, would you?’
Brigitta, tall and wild, her hair gathered loosely on top of her head with a paintbrush. Dark red, almost auburn like Luiza’s. Not pretty exactly, but almost better than pretty, with a long, lightly freckled nose and a broad, slightly upturned mouth; a permanent little smirk. Brigitta, who told Evie at the party that she’s part Jewish and listens to jazz. Brigitta, pale and unhurried as she crosses the street toward their now-opened gate. (I am not afraid!) Brigitta, who saved her.
‘Why look—your hero,’ says Magda, scanning Brigitta up and down.
Evie rushes to speak before her sister can drive Brigitta, with all her gold dust, away. ‘Thank you! For the other night. That guy was such a bastard.’ The word feels thick in her mouth—she’s never said it before. Magda’s mouth drops open a little, but she says nothing.
Brigitta curtsies. ‘Always happy to help a maiden in distress.’
‘Let’s do something,’ Magda says, throwing her head back and fake-snoring. Evie goes pink. If Papa were here, he’d tell her to forgive her sister. She has a Protestant heart.
But Brigitta claps her hands together as though encouraging a small child. ‘Yes, yes!’ she cries. ‘Show me what the people do here. I’m so eager to spend time with real Brazilians. My aunt and uncle are so sedated.’
Magda sneers. ‘We’re American too, you know. We have passports. We’re the same as Mr. and Mrs. Cavanagh.’
But Brigitta just drapes an arm over Magda’s shoulders and trills. How delighted she is to see them again! They decide they’ll do sprints in the clearing at the centre of their property. Evie tries to protest that it will be getting dark soon, but the older girls ignore her.
‘We have to run so we don’t get fat,’ says Brigitta, smiling back at her. By the time they find a spot they agree on, it’s almost dusk. ‘You be the marker, lovely girl,’ Brigitta says to Evie. ‘You go back to the edge of the trees and hold your arms out and whoever touches you first wins.’
Evie jogs to the tree line, then stands facing the other girls, the skin on the back of her arms tightening wherever it’s brushed by some pale purple flowers that hang low on the shrub.
‘We can still see you—go back farther!’
‘No, you can’t!’ Her voice is like a little kid’s, high and cracked. ‘I can’t see you.’
‘Well, we can see you. Go back!’
She steps farther back until she trips over some tree roots, her ankles scraped and burning. ‘Can you see me now?’ No answer, so she inches slightly to the side, trying to make it look like she’s going back. ‘Can you see me now?’
Something brushes her calf. She wipes frantically at her legs, tries to pull off her shoes and loses her balance, stumbling backwards over a fallen branch. If they were in Canada right now, she thinks, lying out on bare ground, she would probably die from exposure. But it’s too warm here so maybe something poisonous will come along instead and inject her, turn her insides to soup, and then not even bother to eat her. Or that rustling behind her will leap: a giant cat, disoriented and starving. Blows against the nape of her neck, skin in loose red ribbons. They’ll find her here on the ground, her entrails unwound and spread out, reflected stars twinkling in her pooling blood. Magda’s eyes will widen, her mouth will twist with regret. Brigitta will weep gently. Evie pulls her knees up to her chest to conserve the last of her body heat. It’s coming now—what she’s been waiting for all these months, just beyond unlit corners, just out of view. A kind of hoped-for emptiness. The end of her.
‘You idiot, oh my god, we were looking for you, puta!’
She’s pulled up by her wrist, wrenched and sore, and dragged along faster than she can walk. Magda pulling. Magda dragging. Magda ahead, always ahead.
They stop in the middle of the clearing and pull Evie’s arms out to her sides, barking over and over, ‘Straight. Straighter!’ Even Brigitta is rough now, commanding.
‘No, you know what? It’s too dark here,’ Brigitta says gravely. ‘Let’s go closer to the light.’
Evie lets herself be pulled from the clearing to the stone patio beyond the veranda, then be rearranged into a scarecrow. Then Brigitta and Magda both jog backwards about a hundred feet. Evie’s arms sag a little, but she straightens up and shoots them out as far as she can when she sees them both sprinting toward her. Nobody even said Go. Magda’s hand collides with hers first and sets her spinning. After Magda does this eight more times, Brigitta finally gives up. It’s her smoker’s lungs, she says, panting comically, head bent forward, tongue hanging out, her hands on her thighs. But Magda keeps running, keeps coming at her, a flame against Evie’s hand. She rips up the dark.
With her hand numb and tingling, Evie speaks for the first time since they found her in the bushes. ‘I want a turn.’
Magda spits. ‘A turn to what?’
‘To race. You’ve had about a hundred turns. It’s my turn.’
Brigitta starts her little girl hand-clapping, foot-hopping again, then high-kicks like a cheerleader in an American movie. ‘Sister against sister. I love it! I can rally for this. I can be your marker-thingummy. Just don’t slap me silly when you come at me.’
As Magda jogs backwards beside her to the starting point, Evie watches only her new friend, and wonders if it could be her. Brigitta. Could she fill in all those empty spaces Luiza left behind? The places Magda’s too sharp for. Maybe then, Evie could stop peering into corners, hoping to find someone who fits. Who stays.
Brigitta shouts ‘Go,’ and Evie explodes toward her, running so fast she worries one of her legs might break beneath her like a racehorse’s. She doesn’t dare look back, but she knows she’s a fraction of a second ahead of Magda, and before her is Brigitta, her arms held out at her sides, one eye theatrically squeezed shut, the other staring right at Evie. A smile, urging her on. Even Magda wants this bright flare that is Brigitta, her beauty ruddy and slantwise. They are about to touch her outstretched arms when Evie drives her shoulder into Magda’s body and leaves her crumpled at Brigitta’s feet. As she keeps running past her house and through the gate they left unlocked, she knows she has saved herself from disappearing for one more day.
‘Stop! Stop!’ Magda screams behind her. ‘You can’t be outside the gates after dark!’
Under the dim pools of the streetlights, Evie runs faster now. Past every house on her street and for two more blocks until her lungs close up inside her, and she collapses on a stranger’s lawn. When a car pulls up across the street, she’s so busy tucking herself behind a bush that she almost misses seeing her mother climb out and Mr. Carmichael drive away.