Thwack! Magda stands in the backyard, knees apart like a batter, holding her croquet mallet, which she just found, forlorn and leaning against the garden shed. They’re not allowed to bring the croquet set with them when they go. (‘We can get new things in Canada,’ Mother said, ‘better things.’) She strikes the jacaranda tree and trembles with a fierce and perfect sorrow as purple blossoms carpet the ground. It was Luiza’s favourite tree. Next she walks over to the pink cassia tree, covered in the flowers Evie most loves to hoard away, to weave into her silly crowns. It’s not normal—a twelve-year-old girl who still believes in ghosts and fairies. She should mention it to their mother, she thinks, if she ever returns from her mystery trip. They woke up on Monday morning to find her gone again, only this time the maids said she’d be away for four or five days. (A sick aunt. More lies!) The real goodbye party at the Copacabana was last Friday, and they were supposed to leave at the end of this week, yet here they all are, still stuck, possibly for a few more weeks. Waiting. Thwack! A heap of pink flowers. Magda raises the mallet overhead and pounds the petals into a sweet-smelling mass, imagining Evie when she finds them. Will she cry? Will she officiate another melancholy little funeral? Here lie some flower petals that would have died in a few days regardless. Evie doesn’t care about anything important. She skipped camp the other day and Brigitta forged a note for them like it was nothing. Magda was tempted to tell on them, but to whom? Her parents both absent and now the maids—betrayers. Magda has devoted herself to the Y, to sport, to excellence, but no one ever asks about the gymnastics exhibition she’s been rehearsing for the end-of-camp showcase in two weeks—which she can now attend because Mother has delayed their departure yet again—or about the special synchronized swimming routine that only she and a handful of other girls were selected for. The best, most athletic girls.
She moves on to the flame tree, beloved by Odete, its boughs outstretched horizontally as though reaching away, covered in bright orange blossoms. Showy, thinks Magda. Tasteless. This time, pound the trunk and the branches. The blossoms drift like many-pointed embers against the darkening sky, the petals a soft explosion of red spikes. Carnage.
At last, the frangipani. This will hurt. Its crown has been pruned into a perfect arc that casts, in late afternoon, the perfect circle of shade. Here they sat, she and Maricota, for endless afternoons, as Magda read out loud, digging her bare feet into the grass. When she grew tired, she would lay her head in the woman’s lap and close her eyes. Maricota liked to cluck her tongue, tell her not to be lazy, to read all she could, because she could. Magda would stick frangipani blossoms between her toes, yellow centres fading into white, and try to walk on her heels. Maricota always laughed, and Magda read until her mother arrived home, looking out anxiously from the veranda door, wondering wordlessly why no one had started dinner.
She steadies herself, perfects her stance, lifts her mallet. Hasn’t Maricota’s betrayal been the greatest of all?
That morning, Magda had stood in the kitchen with her hands outstretched, the three ivory chess pieces she’d stolen growing heavy and sticky with her sweat, as Maricota and Odete, her lovely ones, indulged her, exchanging glances in that way of adults who are deciding the best way to lie to a child. Or break their hearts. Finally, Maricota took the pieces and placed them in her pocket and, for a moment, Magda felt hopeful.
‘I’ll put them back,’ Maricota said in Portuguese, addressing Odete. ‘I know where the box is.’ Adults conferring, making their own plans. Children an afterthought. When they turned their attention back to Magda, even their amazement, she thought, was phony.
Odete, always the softer of two, teared up, while Maricota took Magda’s hands in her own. ‘Querida,’ she said, frowning. ‘We can’t come with you. Those little things aren’t worth enough to get us to Canada, though that’s not the reason.’
‘But they’re ivory! And if these aren’t enough, I can get more. Mama has so much jewellery, and Papa leaves money lying around all the time.’
Their mouths compressed, their eyes moist with pity. All her newly toughened muscles unwound. She tried to retract her hands from Maricota’s, but not very hard.
‘We have families, other people who we love very much. We belong here.’
They live here. They have families of their own. Of course they do. Families who live in houses with dirt floors. Families with eighteen children and a mother who never cuts her hair. A mother who prays to God and has her prayers answered. Magda has jumped over brooms with them and placed lipstick in their little boats, an offering to their goddess Yemenjá. And yet she hadn’t even thought of them. Hadn’t imagined they might be more important to Maricota than her.
‘Please?’ she added, as though she could extract what she wanted by asking nicely. These most patient, substitute mothers—they loved her, she knew they did. Yet there were others, near strangers to Magda, who they loved better.
Now, with her knees still locked before the frangipani tree, mallet hanging limply from her hands, Magda doesn’t want to feel sorry, doesn’t want to understand. She wants to be angry. She wants to feel, again, the appalling, satisfying thud of wood against tree. She wants to see the blossoms rain down, gasping uselessly as they fall, begging for mercy. Mercy she will not grant. She lifts the mallet for the third time, determined. Now: vengeance. But shame simmers inside her. She’s no better than Evie, with all her childish wants.
Soon, there will be another life in Canada, with only her parents to show her how to be—she can’t grasp it. She reaches out and touches nothing. Maybe there’s nothing there? Canada, where her parents imagine all their cobwebby sadness over Luiza can be swept away—Luiza, who hadn’t expected enough of herself. Who left them all behind. Magda, too, wishes sometimes that she could be with Luiza, could swim away from all the adults charged with caring for them—distracted, impotent—who don’t understand they’re still needed. But she doesn’t know how to give up.
In Canada, she and Evie will be sent away to Aubrey Ladies College, with its colour photo brochure scenes: a pool, horseback riding, tennis. Soon, there would be starched uniforms and the day punctuated by bells. The medicinal smell of chlorine lingering on her skin long after she breached the water and showered. The earthy scent of a horse’s flanks as she soars on its back over rails. Sanctioned grunts of rage as her racket slams down, thrusting back balls. A chance for her to be distinct. There, she could be their family’s envoy, the one who thrives, plunged out into the world to prove they aren’t broken. She will display the same excellence that led to her being singled out earlier this week for the swim routine. Evie and Brigitta would probably laugh if she described the program planned, when in fact it’s punishing and very physically demanding, her skin now scaly from so many hours in the YWCA pool.
The mallet seems to fall from her hands and Magda stumbles backwards, loose-legged, gasping. Reflexively, her knees lock and she rights herself, her shoulder blades squeezing together, her arms shooting out like wings, as if poised for flight. Her heart begins to slow. She takes three deep breaths, then tumbles forward, completing a perfect somersault before landing in a lunge. Next, a series of somersaults, ending with a round-off, which is a little wobbly but still well executed. It’s getting darker all around her but she fights the impulse to go inside. Has anyone ever actually told her she shouldn’t go into the garden at night? Maybe that was just an unspoken warning she absorbed. Maybe the maids instilled fear in her to keep her safe and now she has to stamp it out. Or maybe she just imagined it. Luiza always said their house was a fortress. Who could get over those walls? Her body feels flexible, small yet strong, meant for something more than anger and fear. She split leaps, then punches the ground as she lands. She leaps again, her limbs extended, points on a star in the fading light.