In the morning, Hugo wakes early, but Dora has already left the house. Quietly, he goes into the office, locks the door behind him, and again forces open the drawer to retrieve the letter he first found almost two weeks ago. He heard her arrive home late last night, but she didn’t come into his room like she usually did to say goodnight. They’ve been in separate bedrooms for several years now—it makes things easier, they tell themselves, when he has trouble sleeping, which is often—but he can usually count on a ‘goodnight’ at least, and a chat about the day, however brief. He shouldn’t be surprised by her gradual pulling away—he’d all but dared her to do it.
Once, a few years ago, when she’d turned to him in the night, wrapped her arm around him from behind, and reached for his cock, he could only cry quietly. With all the medication, he was motionless, insensate, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth. Instead, he told her to go ahead and find someone else if she needed to, never believing she really would. So many moments, he sees now, when he should have confessed to her, should have at least touched her, he absolved himself. Once his medication was sorted out, once his treatment was successful, he told himself, they would come back together. Once he was better. But then the doctors said there was no better, there was only symptom management. And so he pretended that if she did turn to someone else for a time, he could live with that—maybe it would distract her from his failings. But love? Did she love this man the way he said in the letter he loved her? He hadn’t truly believed that possible. And he is surprised, he is. In all the years since he’s been sick and the girls were young and a thousand tiny interstices widened between them, even during the periods of separation, he still imagined the other side. A future point when he would recover himself and she would again sit astride him, her skin blotchy and vivid, whispering fuck fuck fuck, a word she never otherwise said—
Suddenly, the girls come bounding through the doors of his office, waving sheets of paper in his face. Permission slips. A parent needs to sign. They want to attend a month-long day camp at the YWCA in Rio with the new girl—the one staying across the way with the Cavanaghs. She’s related somehow. Can they? Can they? Today is the last day to register. They have to drop off the forms today.
‘But you’ll be leaving soon, my pets.’ A slip. Be more careful. Say we. ‘Do you want to start and then have to stop early when we leave?’
They stare up at him; equal parts silent challenge and indulgence. This is what they’ve been hearing for months: we’re leaving soon. And yet here they stay, in Eden-cum-limbo. Now he must shine, be a giant to them, conceal all aftershocks.
‘Fine, fine.’ He whisks the papers from the girls’ hands and holds them over his head as though taunting a puppy. ‘I’ll sign. But first you need to do something for me. Tell me, where is Mummy?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Magda.
Evie echoes, ‘We don’t know.’
Magda is sullen, crossing her arms over her chest. He can tell she knows her mother is up to something, but she doesn’t know what. Her lack of power in this moment disturbs her. Evie, on the other hand—she knows something more. See how she glances away, shifts her weight from foot to foot, fists the pockets of her dress. She doesn’t want to betray her mother or set him spinning, but look how the edges of her mouth have begun to tremble.
‘I know how much you want to go to this camp with your friend,’ he says, fixing his gaze on Evie. ‘And I will take you. Once you tell me.’
‘I saw her get dropped off the other night,’ she says quietly before Magda kicks her in the ankle. ‘Ow!’
Hugo heaves her up into his arms like he did when she was little, rubs her ankle vigorously, and strides away from Magda, who follows but can’t keep up. ‘Yes, pet?’
‘She always does that!’
‘I know, love. I won’t let her do it again.’
‘It’s not fair—she never gets punished.’
‘How quickly you become little girls again. Magda’—Hugo swivels and faces her, Evie still in his arms—‘go to your room.’
Magda’s face is compressed with worry now, her anger gone. ‘But she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She sees these little things and makes up whole stories in her head. Like when you went for a walk the other day. She thought you were leaving us. Going to Canada without us.’
‘To your ROOM!’ The voice that comes out is deep, serrated, and frightens even him. Magda flies up the stairs. Evie starts to cry and buries her face in her arms, a jumble of bony corners against his chest. He traces her spine with his hand. ‘I’m sorry. I lost my temper. I’m sorry. You can go to the camp. You don’t need to say.’
‘She was with Mr. Carmichael,’ she says through her tears. ‘He dropped her off down the street.’
Carmichael. That oily pretender. They’d been friends for a time, when they worked together at BrazCan, and he had helped Hugo, covered for him at work. But over the years, Hugo has caught him staring hungrily at Dora now and then, and guessed that there were ulterior motives: an infatuation. Everyone other than his poor, sweet wife knows Carmichael is a skirt-chaser. But still, Hugo never thought much of it. He never saw Dora look back—she didn’t even seem to notice. But maybe the absence of looking was the look, something masquerading as nothing. Maybe she is far smarter than him after all.
This, at least, is one last thing he can do for his family: rid them of this interloper. If he cannot defend his girls, he fears they will be forever beset by loss. Like their sister, Evie and Magda came into the world traumatically, and he’s feared for them ever since.
As Evie continues to cry into his shoulder, all he can think about now is Dora, pregnant: she always became plump and he loved her that way. She was embarrassed by how she ate constantly, but it was endearing to him. The only time she allowed herself to lose control. He would come into the dining room in the morning, find her with crumbs on her dress, her fingers shining with butter or bacon fat, hurriedly wiped from the pan with her fingers. She was often uncomfortable, with aching hips and sciatica, but she would still place his hand on her stomach before bed, pressing his palm in harder than he ever would have. ‘Hello, baby,’ they would say, over and over. It moved far more than he had expected, ever-present yet alien.
The birth took too long. Three other fathers came and went, and occasionally a nurse appeared to say that things were not progressing well, the baby would not ‘descend.’ (Through his anxiety: the image of a tiny baby at the top of some stairs, a crowd of people in hospital whites at the bottom trying to coax it down.) In the end, Dora was cut open, which she said afterwards had been a relief—the drugs let her sleep. It seemed unfathomable—a human inside a human, the expectation that you could exit any other way but through a bloody, gaping wound. The preposterous physics of it all! Two days later, the incision was still oozing. An anxious nurse called for the surgeon. Evisceration. Bowels protruding from muscle just beneath the skin. They said she would have died had they not caught it quickly. Died? A hundred years ago maybe, but not now. Surely not now. He’d never been so afraid as when they wheeled her back into the operating room. But the rupture was tidily repaired and once she was out of recovery, she held their sleeping baby for a full half-hour. Even through the subsequent infection, she only cried when she thought he wasn’t looking. She kept saying it was all worth it. A few months after Luiza was born, he had to leave them both to go to war.
Later, two more Caesarean sections, too close together. More infections, scar tissue. When Evie came out, she was faintly blue. A week in an incubator. The doctor said no more; a uterus can only withstand so much. But that news came as no tragedy. Each time, he was more frightened than Dora—what if she left him behind?
He always believed they could get back to that first, unspoiled time when they loved easily. But has that time passed? No, he won’t lose them both.
‘Can we go to the camp now?’ asks Evie while Magda stomps around upstairs.
‘Yes, love. We’ll get your sister, then let us rejoice in our Christian souls and jubilate before God! Magda?’ Of course, she won’t come now when he calls. He’s betrayed their recent and burgeoning bond. He puts Evie down gently. ‘Go get your sister. Tell her we’re going to hand in the slips and tomorrow we will go on a great adventure!’
In the car on the way to the YWCA, Hugo puts the top down, and the girls let their hair tangle in the wind and seem to forget the ugliness just past. They sit back and listen to their father, who is fully charged, rambling, brimming with wind-muffled talk. Telling them how brave they are. Did they know? Did they have any idea how tough their ancestors were? How Dora comes from a line of flint-hearted rebels who would rather desert their homeland than live diminished. They’d travelled by ship, by makeshift steamboats, and, when the river became too narrow, by canoes manned by Indians with a paddle at each end. Imagine how terrifying, in the middle of the Amazon—dark as Egypt! And then the storms came up and lightning brightened the sky and that was worse, because now they could see the expanse of the river and nothing but jungle and water all around them. Great cracks of thunder, too, and rain fell harder than they’d ever felt. They spent nights on a fazenda and slept on heaps of rice. It rained steadily for days, but in most places there wasn’t even room for a tent, so some of the women tied their petticoats from one sapling to another, too sleepy to fear the onças. These same women, only a week earlier, had blushed when some locals had proudly shown the Americans their hand-embroidered nightgowns. Now they slept beneath their own underwear, unafraid even of jaguars.
‘These are your people,’ he tells them. ‘These are the women from whence your mother came. You are warriors. You could choke a black jungle cat with your panties in the night.’
And he thinks to himself how much better Dora’s life should have been.