Moths, silverfish, mice. The house in Petrópolis was full of them, and even from her bedroom Luiza could hear Dora hectoring the poor local woman she hired to clean, demanding she deal with the mess imediatamente! And yes, she had sent word they were coming that weekend, she certainly had. Despite her mother’s anxiety, Luiza was relieved to be there. Petrópolis was her favourite place, and now she felt calmer than she had in the past three months since they returned from Florida. She sat on her bed and lit a cigarette, balancing a teacup on her unbent knees for an ashtray, feeling brazen. If her mother smelled it, Luiza would put the blame back on her parents—they both smoked, after all. But her mother wouldn’t say anything. Like her, Dora had also been seized lately by a kind of doomsday recklessness, drinking cocktails from coffee mugs in the middle of the day.
The door swung open suddenly and Luiza struggled to put out the cigarette and shove the ashtray under the bed as Evie burst in, slamming the door behind her and throwing herself onto the bed.
‘Don’t let her in. She’s going to kill me!’ Evie cried, burrowing under the blankets.
Luiza could hear the wood floor creaking outside her door as Magda shifted her weight, debating whether or not to hunt Evie all the way into their older sister’s bedroom.
‘Stop being a bully, Magda!’ Luiza called out to the closed door. ‘This room is Switzerland.’
The shadows of Magda’s feet retreated, the thin crack of light beneath the door returning unbroken.
Evie, still red-faced, pulled the blanket off her head and looked up at Luiza. ‘I won’t tell that you were smoking, I promise.’
‘I wasn’t. Anyway, what have I told you about letting her ride roughshod over you like that? You can’t let her.’
‘I know, but she—’
‘And remember Frog and Toad from the story. What are you supposed to say when she tries?’
‘I am not afraid.’
‘Louder!’
‘I am not afraid!’
‘Loudest!’
And together they shouted as loud as they could, ‘I am not afraid!’
Evie laughed, then asked, ‘Can I stay in here?’
‘Fine, but you have to be quiet because I’m busy thinking very important thoughts. If you ask me nicely, you can come over here and I’ll braid your hair. But still no talking, okay?’
Evie slid down the bed happily until she was sitting in front of Luiza, then leaned her head back. She remained quiet as Luiza combed through her hair with her fingers, because like her, lately Evie, too, seemed to covet time alone. Ever since the family had come home, everything had felt freighted and hopeless, pressing down on them but never discussed. The doctors later explained that the lithium study suggested the drug had a ‘low therapeutic threshold,’ which meant even a slight overdose could cause serious side effects: liver failure, heart failure, depression, paranoia. But for many subjects the drug was tremendously effective, unlike anything they’d ever seen before.
‘That is, of course, the purpose of the study,’ the doctors assured them in grave, pompous tones. ‘This event could be very helpful in determining the correct dosage for Mr. Maurer. It might also be the case that your husband is one of those patients who simply won’t tolerate the drug well.’ But there would be no adjusting of dosages, no more experimentation. Her father had suffered a minor heart attack, and her mother withdrew him from the study immediately. She decided: they were going home. Across two rivers they had travelled, and a continent. A humid, sawgrass realm. All for a disaster. Maybe, her mother kept saying, some other treatment would come along.
Luiza exhaled loudly as she twisted an elastic around Evie’s first braid. The silver bullet had failed, and she kept catching herself gnawing ferociously at her nails, the ends of her hair, ashamed of having allowed herself to imagine that her father might be ‘cured’; that he would yield, become pliable, and a more manageable portion of himself, for their sakes. He was still recovering, but frail—still a shade, still half himself—and unable to have their usual long conversations, though he didn’t appear angry with her, as she’d feared. Maybe she was even avoiding him, unable to bear his disappointment, and he was too kind to say anything. Hadn’t he always known what she was thinking?
But they were here now for the June festival and she was determined to enjoy it. She had the feeling lately that she had to snatch up pleasure while she still could, before she aged and contracted like her mother and found herself forever making lists, planning what to get next from the shops. Without a true, beating heart. Dora hadn’t wanted to come, but Luiza had pleaded and charmed, knowing that, since Florida, they both felt somehow beholden to each other. Her mother, too, lost something on that trip, and Luiza convinced her this was just what they all needed.
‘It’s festa junina!’ she’d cried, seizing her mother by the arms and pulling her into a mock-quadrilha, like the country people danced at the festival. June meant it was chilly in Petrópolis, much cooler than in Rio, where there would be more spectacular celebrations, but the city parties had become too commercial and she wanted to twirl around smoky bonfires and watch the statues of saints paraded through the town square, hoisted on the shoulders of townspeople. ‘Let us not fester at home and be grey, let us go into this winter filled with light!’
Dora had actually laughed then, and let herself be led like a rag doll around the kitchen, while the girls, excited now, also begged to go. Her father, thinner, hair newly shot through with bands of grey, applauded weakly from the couch where he convalesced wrapped in his old white robe. She wanted to kneel at his feet, to plead, ‘Please don’t leave us.’ But her mother was smiling for once.
Just as Evie smiled now, running her hands over her neat, new braids, before she started at a voice outside.
‘Butchie, Butchie!’
Luiza went to her window and saw Magda frantically calling after a neighbour’s puppy that kept darting out of sight, into the long grass at the edge of their property. Her parents were outside too—Dora commanding the local gardener, Hugo dozing in a chaise longue positioned for him on the stone patio, still under doctor’s orders to rest as much as possible. Evie took an old Nancy Drew book off the shelf at the foot of the bed and began to read, so Luiza reached for another book Carmichael had given her on her bedside table. This one was by Elizabeth Bishop, who, he told her, was American but had lived just a few miles from Petrópolis, and still had a house less than five hours away in Ouro Preto. She had lived for years there with an architect, a woman Carmichael knew of through work, because he’d long admired her designs.
After reading beside her sister for half an hour, Luiza finally stretched and rose from the bed. ‘I have to get up and move around for a bit, pet. I’ll come back in a few minutes.’ She took her book of poems and was relieved when Evie didn’t follow.
Outside, she made her way through the garden, reading as she walked, then sat beneath the jabuticaba tree, running one hand over its dense, dark berries. Berries that, rather than dangling prettily from stems, sprouted directly from the bark, the branches like tumours. Had Bishop written anything about these trees, the sweet jam they made? Her poems were exquisite, Luiza thought, and it seemed impossible that they could be about this very place. Her place. Someone else had seen it through her eyes: the lenten trees during the electrical storms and the hail that followed, wax-white, dead-eye pearls among the petals. Wet, stuck, purple. She repeated these phrases to herself again and again.
And because Carmichael had given her all these books, these beautiful, illuminating, even—yes—life-changing books, she felt sometimes like she could tell him anything. How, for instance, Florida had failed, and now she understood that this was her life, and it was all right, it really was. She would find a way to be content with her family, to be useful. She would be better.
‘Failed how?’ he had asked suddenly. But then he looked around nervously, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘At any rate, we shouldn’t be seen—’
Their conversations always ended this way, cut short by his interruptions, his eyes rapidly scanning the room for his wife, for Dora. She wanted to have the last word this time. ‘I really don’t think I should say too much,’ she broke in airily. ‘It would be a betrayal of his privacy. Besides, we don’t have time—’
Just then, Lucy Baird hooked her arm through Carmichael’s and pulled him onto the dance floor. ‘You two are so dull and serious all the time. Enough talking!’
They had to be hurried, cautious—a few minutes at one of the weekly cocktail parties in Villa Confederação or at the edge of the dance floor in the Copacabana’s Golden Room while everyone spun giddily just a few feet away. These days, she always went along with friends for the nights out, even though her father, and sometimes even her mother, stayed home. At the casinos, she could at least talk to Carmichael, however briefly. It felt lonely now, sitting by herself against the back garden wall.
And secretly she liked that this man who barely knew her was curious about her life. Concerned.
‘What if we met somewhere else sometime?’ she whispered quickly one evening. ‘Just so we can talk more easily. It always feels so rushed like this.’ She suggested Botafogo Beach, late afternoon the following day. A long tram ride away to an unfashionable neighbourhood, somewhere their friends and families never went. Their secret.
As they’d walked along the beach, he asked her again: What would she do now?
‘Now I have endless things I can do,’ she insisted, for this time she had thought it through, planned her answer. ‘This is such a large, beautiful country, and I’ve barely experienced any of it.’ Now that they were back in Brazil, there were so many places she wanted to see. The Meeting of the Waters, where the Rio Solimões and Rio Negro converge, cream-coloured waters mixed with black, eddying together like galaxies before being subsumed by the milky current of the Amazon; the two rivers were such different temperatures that fish became temporarily stunned at the confluence, easy prey for pink dolphins. Pink dolphins! The swarming Amazon Basin, with its otters and giant water lilies, carnivorous plants and tiny hummingbirds. And the Flooded Forest most of all, where the waters of the Amazon rose until they spilled into the forest, fifty feet high, and piranhas swam among the treetops, fish ate nuts and spread seeds as red-faced monkeys screamed from wet branches. No dry land for miles as people teetered in huts on stilts, their chickens and pigs reared on rafts. An upside-down world. ‘Just because I stay at home with my parents doesn’t mean I can’t go anywhere or do anything.’
‘But why must you stay at home, with them?’
She told him they needed her help, and she wanted to be a better, less selfish person. And she could still find beauty, despite everything—this beautiful place! ‘Maybe without having to worry about going to school or finding a job, I could write. I could still do so much, be more than The Pretty One.’ She told him about a game she and Dora used to play when she was little. They would cut pictures from her mother’s catalogues, each choosing one outfit, one best friend, one husband and three children, then glue them onto paper. Fragments of her perfect, future life, curled and soggy with paste, all over her bedroom wall. ‘It’s always been clear, what’s expected of me. But the truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever wanted that life. I still don’t.’ She tried to smile vaguely, like Carmichael often did, but now he was frowning.
‘It’s easy sometimes, when you’re young, to get caught up in making all kinds of plans. You don’t need to decide everything now.’
‘I don’t have to decide anything, as it turns out. It’s a relief, in a way. But I could still help people. I could tell their stories.’
‘How do stories help people?’
‘You ought to know, the Great Reader.’
But the truth was, she had no answer.
Her paternal grandmother was born in England and used to tell Luiza wonderful stories about growing up on the English moors amid their dense fogs. When I was a girl in England, she liked to say, we spent our holidays in the South and ate whelks on the pier. As a child, Luiza imagined whelks as beautifully intricate, the shells you pressed to your ear to hear the sea roaring back. But then Hugo said they looked like clapped-out genitals. Eventually, Luiza found out her grandmother grew up in Acton, a pleasant but dull little suburb outside London. Perhaps it was in their genes: stories and lies. Like her absurd catalogue-life.
Carmichael become distracted then as he sometimes did when they were together. Did he want nothing more from her? To be nothing other than a family friend, a concerned uncle figure dispensing books and dry, chaste kisses when they parted?
Yet, now, with these exquisite poems in her lap, the stink of nicotine on her fingers, she decided again that, yes, there must be more to their relationship. She turned the pages. Tall, uncertain palms.… Your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life. Inscribed in the margin: made me think of you.
But by that night, whatever feeling Luiza had of being lifted away and grafted to something other, something more, had left her. She was tied again to her family, who didn’t want to go to the village to see the square dances—women in red wigs and freckles, men in straw hats and checked shirts—or applaud the country people dressed up as Country People. Her father felt too weak so instead they all bundled up in sweaters and wool blankets on the stone patio and watched the neighbours and the servants light lanterns, Bishop’s illegal fire balloons. With each one that rose tenuously into the sky, lines from the book came back to her. Paper chambers flush and fill with light.… Flare and falter, wobble and toss. And just as they headed for the mountainside, she saw them burst in her mind—phosphenes—splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff. Other, smarter people had already written whole swaths of her life, more beautifully than she ever could. What was left for her?