‘What do you mean, bust him out?’ asks Magda, riding her bicycle back and forth along the sidewalk just outside their front gate. She’s too prickly from boredom to bother hiding her contempt for Brigitta, who either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
‘Like you bust someone out of prison!’ says Brigitta, with the bursting energy that, just a few days ago, Evie had wanted so much for herself. Maybe Evie is misremembering Brigitta’s prodding gaze upon the mute man at the hospital, her fitful kindnesses, how her eyes have turned cold and hard as enamel. Brigitta is the only one who imagined they could get her father out of hospital, who is brave enough to do it. Doesn’t that prove she still wants to protect people?
‘E. and I saw this poor, dreadful man there. I bet they’re all getting shock therapy. Haven’t you read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? It’s basically torture.’
Evie cringes every time she thinks of the man—the boy?—at the hospital, with his collapsed face, his silent cry. He may not even have been as old as Luiza. They left him alone in that room, disoriented and raw, to fight against his own body. Did he scream inside? Beg them to stop? How much damage had they done?
‘We’ll pretend we’re just going to visit and then we’ll bust him out!’ Brigitta continues. ‘He is your dad.’
‘I know he’s my dad,’ says Magda.
‘Well, I would do it for my dad.’
Magda looks startled, like Evie, by the thought of their father suffering some violent electric treatment. Shock therapy. She doesn’t actually know what that is, but it does sound painful and wrong, and like a lie—shot through with lightning like Frankenstein’s monster in the movie they saw, deformed and terrifying. Terrified. Like he was in Florida.
‘And when I told Brigitta about how we saw Mom with Carmichael, she said it sounds like Mom’s just shunting Dad off so she can have our last weeks here all to herself.’ Even as Evie says it, she can feel herself blinking too much, not believing it. But she needs Brigitta to inflame Magda, and herself. She needs Brigitta to make the plan and Magda to come along, to protect her and their father as they all move, perfectly and powerlessly, toward his rescue.
‘Okay. Fine,’ says Magda, folding her arms across her chest and leaning back on her bicycle. ‘But you don’t get to talk to him. He doesn’t even know you.’
At lunchtime, Brigitta forges another note and this time their counsellor barely glances out the window to make sure Bechelli is there.
On the stairwell landing, Brigitta swings out her arms, stopping Evie and Magda before they can head toward the exit. ‘As soon as we get down the stairs, we peel out of here for dear life, okay? So your driver doesn’t see us.’
‘Wait, why?’ demands Magda. Brigitta hasn’t said anything about avoiding Bechelli before now.
‘We need to do this on our own. We can’t keep relying on the help. Besides, how will the chauffeur react when he sees that your dad is escaping? Even if he were willing to help, wouldn’t that get him into trouble?’
‘Fine,’ says Magda. ‘We’ll just go the other way. He always reads the paper while he waits anyway.’
Evie gapes at her sister. ‘What happens when we’re not here at pick-up time? Won’t he get in even more trouble? And what about Maricota and Odete? They’ll flip.’
But Magda’s jaw is set and Evie knows she’s already lost. ‘In a couple of weeks, we’ll never see Maricota and Odete again. We have to think about Dad first, not them.’
Once they exit the building, they turn quickly away from the parked Silver Cloud. As they walk, they match up their strides, each leading with her left leg, and together count out their lunch money to pay for a taxi, which they hail on the tree-lined street on the far side of the YWCA building. Evie vibrates inside—this is so forbidden and foreign and thrilling.
‘Can he take the scenic route?’ asks Brigitta. ‘My aunt and uncle never want to bring me into the city. Ask him to take the scenic route.’
‘Você poderia pegar o caminho mais bonito?’ asks Evie, and Brigitta gives her arm an approving squeeze.
‘It’s like you’re a different person when you speak Portuguese. Like having a whole new friend!’
The windows are rolled down and Brigitta leans her face out. Soon they find themselves on the coast, driving once again along Copacabana Beach.
‘Is it far from here?’ asks Brigitta urgently. ‘Ask him if it’s far from here.’
Evie asks and the driver answers, gesturing with a loose hand. ‘He says it’s at the other end of the beach. It’s a pretty long walk.’
‘Tell him to let us off here,’ says Brigitta.
‘No way,’ says Magda. ‘It’s a really long walk.’
‘Don’t worry—we won’t have to walk.’ Brigitta is looking toward the beach, and once out of the taxi, she strides ahead of them, across the mosaic sidewalk, and onto the sand. ‘It’s so strange,’ she says, stopping to pick up some sand. ‘Don’t you think it’s strange, that the sidewalk ends and the beach just begins? No dunes, no parking lot, just street and then beach. I’ve never seen that before.’
Evie and Magda don’t answer because to them it doesn’t seem strange. But Brigitta’s attention has turned to some women playing peteca, hitting a feathered shuttlecock with their hands. She jumps up and down excitedly for a few minutes until someone bats the shuttlecock in her direction and she flails about wildly, uselessly trying to get it back into the air. Laughing, one of the women walks over to retrieve the peteca from Brigitta, who gives her a hug, making everyone laugh. Evie has never met anyone like her, someone who seems both older and younger than she really is, who, like Luiza, cares so little about what other people think. And now she remembers how it feels to be on the precipice of loving her.
Brigitta is standing in front of a long row of bike stands holding dozens of bikes. She finds the man who is renting them out and then gestures for Evie. ‘Ask him how much for three. I think I have enough. Can you really ride them? Ask him if they really go on the beach.’
But Evie just points at several people biking away, across the sand, which must be different from American sand because Brigitta seems so flustered and excited. Evie takes Brigitta’s money and translates the negotiation of the rental—two hours—and as they mount the bikes, Brigitta is shaking a little, smiling and red-faced, and even Magda lets out a shriek of laughter as her bike wobbles in the sand. As Evie rides easily, smoothly past them, she sees the gravity and disapproval lift from her sister’s face, sees a girl she recognizes, the child Magda once was.
A voice echoes behind her. Hello, Luiza! Hello! But the voice is quieter now, landing lightly in Evie’s ear, then ringing out into silence. When she glances back, Luiza still isn’t there. But there is something familiar, something or someone propelling her to pedal harder.
Brigitta is here, and Magda, and they all labour against the packed wet sand until their revolutions become more steady, more sure. Evie leads the way, heading for the green hills on the horizon, her father an invisible beacon somewhere at the foot of them, pulling them toward him. As slow as they’re moving, she knows what they’re doing is necessary—he needs them. He needs her.
In Brazil, Evie has been shrinking, disappearing into treetops, too thin and pale and quiet to stand out amid all the colour, this endless sunshine. But here on the monochrome beach, she shines like Magda. Like Luiza. No longer skirting the margins the way she has for months, a nice, no-one girl. If Canada is all grey and white—snow shrouding the school campus, she and Brigitta arm in arm in twin charcoal blazers—maybe she will shine there too.