As they stand side by side brushing their teeth in the bathroom, Evie is aware of Magda watching her in the mirror. Her sister spits out a mouthful of toothpaste and holds her toothbrush aloft as she says, ‘It’s your fault Papa had to go back into the hospital, you know.’
Evie tries to protest through a mouthful of foamy saliva, but it drips down her chin as she answers. ‘It’s not—’
‘And now he’s going to be there for weeks, and we’ll have to unpack and then pack everything up again. You should have just kept quiet about what you think you saw. You don’t even know what you saw.’
Evie wipes her mouth with a face cloth. ‘I do know. I just didn’t understand it before.’
‘You know he can’t handle stuff like this. You had to wait until the worst possible moment, when he was high as a kite.’
High as a kite. This was something Mama sometimes said, always under her breath, to the maids or over the phone to her sister in Santa Bárbara. Magda goes back to brushing her teeth, as though whatever Evie says next is of no consequence to her. Then suddenly, a spray of white over Evie’s face in the mirror, a wet glob of white marbled spit over her reflected eye, two rabid Magdas, one beside and one in front of her.
‘But what if Mr. Carmichael did something? Shouldn’t Mama and Papa know?’
‘Did what? Did he force her into the water? Did he make her swim out too far? He wasn’t even there. She did that herself but no one ever wants to say it!’
Evie won’t allow herself to think about what Magda has said. Magda, the Angry One. Angry even at the dead. No, instead she’ll think about how Papa’s golf club flashed in the morning sun, all that glass coming down like rain, gleaming in the grass. And how, even though Magda cried in the car on the way home, Evie was not afraid.
‘You’re just jealous because Papa made you go wait in the car.’
Magda places her toothbrush back in its cup, wipes her mouth delicately on a hand towel, then wheels around and lunges forward. Suddenly Evie is on her back, Magda’s full weight holding her down, Magda’s whole hand against her face, pressing the flat of her head into the hallway floor. She can feel the rough carpet fibres against her neck, fingertips gripping her cheeks and forehead, a palm painfully squashing her nose. Evie lies pinned for a moment, listening to their uneven breaths. When she feels her sister’s body relax, she wriggles out from under her and sprints toward the stairs, bracing herself on the banisters and jumping down three steps at a time.
‘Where are you going?’ Magda shouts, coming down the stairs after her.
If she doesn’t get out of this house, Evie knows Magda is going to kill her. And with Papa in hospital and Mama ‘away’ for a few days (supposedly to visit a sick aunt) and the maids always busy packing, unpacking, repacking, cleaning, her body probably wouldn’t be found for days.
As she runs out the front door, she remembers Luiza telling her a story once of a woman who came over to Brazil with their ancestors nearly a hundred years ago, when people were expected to die. The woman’s husband broke off from the larger group and led some people south to Juqiã, where he named the colony Lizzieland, after her. It says in their family letters that Lizzie’s death caused the colony to fail but it doesn’t say why. Losing her simply broke him, Luiza said. When Evie heard the story as a child, she thought nothing of the man’s sadness—who had feelings that long ago? But she’d loved the idea of a place named after oneself. She imagined a fairground, like the kind she knew they had in America, and all the games would be just for the girls, and they’d all be named Lizzie for the day. Dozens of little girls running around calling out, ‘Hello, Lizzie!’ ‘Hello, Lizzie!’ And always the uncanny sense that the real Lizzie was there, a ghost or a giant, her pale face gazing down from above, all-knowing. Evie can still see the scene so clearly in her mind’s eye that she thinks she must be trapped in a place like that now: a dreamscape of mirrors and tent flaps and wide, grassy avenues. She wants to call out, ‘Luiza! Hello, Luiza!’ She wants to see her sister’s face in the sky. There are moments when a presence grazes past her, something cold with hummingbird wings, but when she looks up, Luiza is never there. Luiza, who would have told her, once, what was right or wrong. Which secrets to keep.
But now Evie is outside and everything inside her is strung too tightly. She runs down the path from the house toward the gate and jumps, hurtling herself forward. She hits the ground, breath knocked free, and lies unmoving. For now, she is lighter.
Later, in the car, after they pick up Brigitta on the way to the old, stone YWCA building for their second week of camp, Evie chews the dead skin on her lips and wonders if it really is her fault that Papa is back in the hospital. The last time he’d been admitted was two years ago, in Florida, when men in white uniforms had come to the house and he fought so hard they had to stick him with a needle. Seconds later he went still, collapsing in on himself, like a puppet with its strings cut. Then Luiza pushed her and Magda back inside the house.
Evie’s almost sick from it, the idea that she’s the reason her father has to go away again, and she lingers now in the car as Magda and Brigitta hop out. As Magda sprints through the doors of the Y, Evie leans forward from the back seat and whispers in Bechelli’s ear, asking him to wait. She can’t stay here.
‘Brigitta!’ Evie calls out the car window. ‘I need your help!’
As they drive away from the YWCA, Evie knows that trusting her sister not to rat on her for skipping camp is risky, but maybe Magda will forgive her later? After all, they both know now: parents lie. They love you, but they lie. They leave in the middle of the night without explanation, without even saying goodbye. They keep secrets. Children should have their own secrets, too, and their own world with its particular, unspoken children’s code. But for now Evie has to save her father, who sometimes crosses over into their world, because he sometimes forgets how to lie.
When they arrive at the hospital, Brigitta nods her head toward Bechelli, humming in the front seat. ‘Tell him just to wait here,’ she says, suddenly taking control.
They sign in at the front desk and a nurse points them toward the elevators. ‘Room 322, third floor,’ she says in Portuguese.
But when they get to the third floor, Brigitta ignores the floor map and pulls Evie down the hallway. ‘I’ve never been in an insane asylum,’ she says in a stage whisper.
‘It’s not an asylum, it’s a recovery centre.’ But Evie’s voice sounds small and far away, even to her. Brigitta is walking two paces ahead, her neck craning forward, stopping only to peer through the small round windows set in each of the doors, Evie following behind her like a puppy. ‘Anyway, what are you looking at? We should find my dad.’
‘I just want to see… there! See? This is exactly what I expected to find.’ Brigitta stands on tiptoe squinting through a window, even though she’s tall enough to see in. ‘That poor man, left in an institution and forgotten. Doesn’t it just look like he’s imprisoned in his own flesh, fighting to get out?’
‘No!’ Evie squeaks, seeing Brigitta’s hand close over the doorknob. But the door is opening and she is being pushed inside the room and the young man in the chair by the window turns his head toward them, these twin intruders. Evie feels shrunken and prickly, her ears straining to detect footsteps coming down the hall.
‘Hello,’ Brigitta says, sitting on the bed opposite the man, her knees touching his lightly. He flinches when she takes his hand.
‘Brigitta, you shouldn’t—’
‘The problem with these people,’ Brigitta interrupts, sounding sharp and imperious, ‘is that they drug them to the point where they can’t feel anything. If they could just experience normal, human feeling again, they would be okay. Not vegetables.’
‘My father says it can be awful when you feel too much, feel all the time.’
But Brigitta ignores her and rubs the man’s hand, turning it over in her own, slowly tracing his punctured, blue veins. ‘What did they do to you?’
‘You don’t even know why he’s here. Let’s just leave him.’
Brigitta places the man’s hand on her thigh, stroking just above her knee and below the hem of her skirt. Evie shivers, suddenly cold, immobilized by Brigitta’s cool curiosity, the pushy way she leans toward this man, peers at him as though he’s an insect she’s trapped. He moans softly, but it sounds more like pain than pleasure, and his mouth is contorting into a livid, red-blue smear. The sound builds in Evie’s ears: a siren, escalating rapidly, filling the room, the hallways. And any minute, she knows, the room will be full of people—nurses, security guards, outraged visitors. But as she pulls wordlessly on Brigitta’s shirt, fear rippling through her, she realizes no one is coming, because what she hears is only the memory of a sound—the one Luiza made in the garden after her fight with Carmichael. Evie covers her ears reflexively just as she did then. After a moment, she yanks as hard as she can on Brigitta’s sleeve.
‘Come on!’
‘All right! Get off already.’ Brigitta pulls her arm away and they are out the door.
Evie walks as quickly as she can to her father’s room without drawing attention to herself while Brigitta, languid behind her, hums Bechelli’s little tune. When they arrive at room 322, Evie pushes the door open slowly so as not to startle her father, then fixes a smile on her face. But the bed is empty, and there are no shoes paired neatly beneath it, no jacket hanging from the hook.
‘Come on,’ she says again. She wants to find her father but is certain they’ll be in trouble if they linger too long. ‘We have to get out of here now.’
In a mirror on the wall, Evie sees her own red hair, her ghost-white skin stutter past. She pushes through a set of doors marked EMERGENCY, only realizing as it swings open what she’s done. An alarm sounds, real this time. But then Brigitta is right behind her and they soar, leaping over half-flights of stairs. For the second time today, she is flying. Hello, Luiza! Then there is sky, and trees, and Bechelli with a newspaper. She begs him to start the car and go, and when he asks what’s wrong, she says she’s crying because her father was so upset to see her leave.