Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer Read online

  Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer

  For the community of beloved hands that have caught and carried me again and again.

  Once there was and was not . . .

  —traditional opening line of Armenian folktales

  Contents

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Friday

  One

  “Oh, holy. Holy, holy,” sings the sister, Rufina. “My baby. Return.” She can skin a refrain until it’s raw, a glistening pulp of yearning. Which is to say, she won’t be the one who loses. Anyone can sing a song, hum a melody, claim a costume, but the way she tilts toward the crowd with the whole of her body, like a ready-made promise—now, that should get your attention. It’s undeniable: she means it. Don’t take your eyes off her.

  It’s the end of May and ten past four on a Friday afternoon. This high desert mountain city has already begun to swell. At the height of the season, Ciudad de Tres Hermanas will double in size, and then some. Tourists pant dry air through open mouths at 7,000 feet, waiting to be fooled. It’s dizzying. They have earned this right. Saved up for it.

  Never mind them. This is not a story about them, after all. This is a story about Rufina, and her brother, Rafa, who are performing little creatures they call songs, which are not songs at all. Not songs but eruptions of noise. Prayers, fortunes. Let’s not call it ridiculous, which it can be if you’re not in the mood.

  The plaza is a patchwork of grass, anointed with cottonwoods and box elders, pines and Russian olives. Trees are a blessing here in this place where water shamelessly flirts. Decorating the cottonwoods: crows, hungry, and black as regret. Beyond the trees, and the city limits, beyond all the one-story buildings made of mud and dirt and spit, four mountain ranges huddle, one in each direction, as if conspiring. Do you see them? Don’t you agree? Their backs toward you, peaks crowned with snow, as if royalty. And the sky, the only enduring commitment, so vast and blue it’s no longer blue, no longer sky. The crows bark, a murder of them locked on the umbrella of branches above.

  It’s as if Rufina is ten, not twenty-eight, and Rafa is twelve, not weeks shy of thirty. This is what the recent death of a mother will do, strip adulthood from grown children. Send them to the streets begging for a reason to live. You’ll see. It’s Rufina’s fault. Blame her if it doesn’t work. She’s the one who, the previous night, crawled under their deceased mother’s bed where Rafa was pretending to hide—as if his filthy feet jutting out from beneath the frame hadn’t given him away—and told him, “Look, if you want to die, too, you’re going to have to earn it. Life isn’t easy and neither is death.” Her voice was a constant hiss of air. “You’re not going to hang around here dissolving like you’re some kind of . . .” Rufina paused, searching for the right word, the right image that would sufficiently support her scolding. All possibilities escaped her.

  It had been four months since they covered their mother, Rosalinda—the small, dark worn scrap of her—in a blanket of mums and carried her away to be burned. It had been dusk and the snow had glinted in midair while coyotes split the quiet with their crying. Rafa and Rufina had studied her as her waning hours had passed as if she were a map they would never truly understand.

  Rufina inched closer to her brother’s face. Leaned toward the fleshy nub of his nose, as if it were a microphone. “It’s disgusting,” she said. “Get to living or get a weapon. Enough is enough.” She hoped her threat would work, hoped she could still manipulate her brother with a healthy dose of shame. Tricky, she knew, but worth a try.

  The day after Rosalinda’s death, Rafa and Rufina had both lain on the cold tile floor of the living room, neither of them able to will themselves to stand, put match to kindling, and tend a fire that would thaw them. Instead, they remained numb. Grief waited at the edges, sniffing the boundaries of their bodies, waiting to be let in. The house had no choice but to watch.

  On the second day after Rosalinda’s death, Rufina got up and started the fire.

  Rafa remained lost for the third day and the fourth day, the fifth and sixth, staring into space, drifting in and out of sleep. He seemed to prefer the floor, as had his mother. It was where she had stitched embroidery and painted her ink portraits, where she ate and where she sat long hours, staring out the window that stretched from ceiling to floor of the south-facing wall while a record tumbled sound and one cigarette after another clung to her bottom lip.

  With each week, then each month, Rafa had lost more weight, paled further, spoke less. Each new day had demanded he persist. He lit one of Rosalinda’s cigarette butts, stained with her fuchsia lipstick, and let the smoke fill his nose, laced with the scent of her headache-inducing perfume. He could not get enough of his mother. The woman who was no more.

  Under the bed, Rufina was close enough to see the splinters of amber in her brother’s wood-colored eyes. “We know how to do this,” she said. “Remember how they used to throw money at us?” Which was almost the truth. Nearly a decade and a half before, they had been under the artistic direction of the Explorer. He had arranged the two of them and their mother in the plaza, had them pose for hours. They were his material. His models. The money he collected on their behalf was impressive.

  Ultimately, the conversation had been one-sided and brief. In the end, Rufina was able to convince Rafa that pretending would get them just as far as practice. You could do anything in front of a crowd of tourists and get money, she reminded him. There was the way you stared at any of them, as if they were the only tourist that had ever existed; the way you smiled, as if that one and only tourist were desperate to spend money; the way you convinced the disoriented and slightly drunk tourist that they were not only welcome, but belonged. Rufina and Rafa had hours of this kind of performance embedded in their bodies. For the seven years the Explorer lived with them, acting as if he were their mother’s husband, he would march them every weekend down to the plaza and start the clock. The clock was what kept them pinned in place for hours longer than they could bear. They had to stay as still as they could, imagining anything that would help them withstand the rounds of the clock’s hands, the sun changing its tilt in the sky. The clock was a dog always baring its teeth. They dared not move. And while even more than a decade had lapsed since they stood frozen like this as children, to do it now would take no effort at all. They were experts at pretending, groomed for it from an early age—Rufina seven, Rafa nine.

  “If there’s enough money for you to leave by Sunday,” Rufina said, the smell beneath the bed sour from Rafa’s breath and unwashed hair, “you have to leave here and agree to stay alive. Pick one of your precious islands: Pico, Caye Caulker, Jicaro. It doesn’t matter.” She felt herself holding her breath. Islands were Rafa’s fantasy material. He liked to brag he’d been to more than recorded in any atlas. There was nothing more intimate than an island—a place to truly feel one’s right size, secure. “If there’s not enough,” she continued, “you can do whatever you want.” There was more gold in his eyes than she’d ever noticed. She thought of winged things trapped under glass.

  Outside the bedroom door, in the hallway, their dead mother was making a racket, pounding her feet against the door. For Rafa, the dead mother shimmered in and out of his reality. Mainly, he understood her to have taken the form of memory, though there were moments he wasn’t sure. He could sense her near—his nose prickling with her perfume, his hand warming as if touching her cheek—and then he couldn’t sense her near at all. It was death he felt near him, a kind of lullaby that overtook him. Rufina, on the other hand, had to deal with Rosalinda, who for her was undoubtedly present, still dressed in her funeral best, having emerged from her dark bedroom on t
he evening of the fortieth day following her burial to convince her children that despite being dead, she was worthy of their complete attention, a crown of mums still fastened to her head, saffron petals sprinkled down the front of her custom-made dress.

  Rafa didn’t have much to say in response to his sister’s goading. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all. His eyes were unfocused, his mouth open, bottom lip cracked, breath rhythmic and warm. He nodded. That was all Rufina needed. The nod. A sign.

  An agreement was made: they had the weekend.

  She shimmied out from under the bed, scraping her chin on the clay tile as she went, cursing her chin, the tile, their dead mother.

  “Rosalinda,” Rufina screamed at her mother, whose feet were still pounding against the door. “Enough!” Standing, she secured her good hip beneath her. The noise momentarily stopped. Then Rufina reached down, grabbed Rafa by his ankles, and dragged him to the bathroom and into the shower, where she stripped him of his boxers and cranked the faucet. As the water beat her brother, Rufina thought, of course there will be enough money, of course he will leave town. She could see him on his island, pacing the perimeter of shore. This would mean one less dead; this would mean everything.

  The sunburned tourists encircling the brother-sister duo stare. Her arms, her hands, her fingers—Rufina casts a kind of hypnosis with the way she moves, only the top half of her flying, her arms stretching up and over, her hands twirling at the wrists, her fingers seeming to flick like spiders scurrying from water. No one notices her cane, propped against the back of Rafa’s metal folding chair, which is why we’re telling you. It’s a bad habit to miss the most obvious signs. She sings of Baby, her deepest cut of love. Which is to say, once there was a baby, a real baby, her baby. And now there is not. In case you have forgotten, we will remind you that the imagination is a powerful force. For example, now, at this very moment, the tourists have been put under a spell. They do not realize how few words there are in Rufina’s songs, how she repeats them. Again, the same phrase, “Oh, my baby, return,” and yet, it means something different each time. They want more.

  The tourists have driven further than an hour from the nearest airport. Passed sage, piñon, and juniper, mesas, arroyos, and wild horses detailed in this vast south-western expanse. They have yielded to the narrowing road as it climbs toward Ciudad de Tres Hermanas and then beyond to the hills, toward the mountains, the air thinning as the altitude increases. The enchantment had been activated before they’d even reached the plaza.

  Notice how Rufina catches Rafa’s eye and directs his gaze to a husband and wife. There is the husband’s modest watch and the dimple in his chin, his ironed T-shirt, the crease down the top of each shoulder. There are the wife’s neat gold hoops and the ends of her hair turned under, her small padded bra visible from beneath her beige linen tank top. Rufina wants them to pay, which means she’ll have to cast a stronger spell. Or Rafa will have to slyly intervene when the couple starts to argue about how many bills to surrender to the collection basket. He’ll have to think about what he can do. He’ll need to orient himself toward action. He might have to steal it. Could he steal it? The Explorer taught them this skill, too, on slow days, how to make sure on the walk home through the crowded plaza that wallets were slipped from back pockets and purses were slipped from shoulders with no fuss at all. In Rafa’s mind, these thoughts are buried under wet sand. His head is not something attached to his body but rather orbiting his body. This whole scene he’s in now could be taking place in a tin can rusting in an arroyo fifty miles away. Which is to say, he’s barely here. This is a man whose soul has already begun to unhinge itself. You know what this means.

  Rufina sings again, “Come to me. Oh, my baby. Return.” And throws her good hip in the husband’s direction. If the crows watching could reward her for her earnest seduction, they would.

  “Why is he playing a guitar with no strings?” the husband asks his wife as she gobbles chili-dusted pistachios from a paper cone.

  Rafa’s face is pensive. He’s missing two teeth, top front and the one just below. If you see him half-naked—as he appears to the tourists, with no shoes, face hidden by a woven grass hat, the brim lined with mangy feathers, his limbs lean and dark—you’d think to hide your daughters. To look at him, you wouldn’t know all the countries he’s traveled to during the past nine years, the whole of his twenties. You wouldn’t know which languages he’s translated, which NGOs have cut him a check. You wouldn’t know that six months ago, in the Cala di Volpe, near Montevideo, he gripped the waist of his beloved as he towed him across the fourth-floor hallway, the diamond-patterned carpet reeking of gardenias and dank hide. Rafa had begged not to be left. To be left, his greatest fear. Then the struggle, two men pulling and pushing. Rafa and his beloved. It ended with a hasty kick to Rafa’s mouth. The casualties, two of his teeth. And his heart, of course.

  “Can’t you hear it?” the wife says to her husband. She watches Rafa’s pretend playing. “It’s part of the charm.”

  The husband shakes his head. He has failed another test. They are both desperate because theirs is the kind of marriage that grinds a pair down until they are miserable, but miserable together. They are stubborn. Their reward, many more years of shared misery. Don’t be mistaken. There are a variety of marriages and you know what they are. The kind you could tolerate and the kind that will eat you from the inside out. No need to lose heart, not yet. But this husband, this wife, these two are particularly awful in the way they choose to show love.

  “Use your imagination,” the wife offers. She doesn’t mean to sound cruel, but it has become her normal voice. Even when she hears it, she’s startled. It’s her mother’s voice and her grandmother’s voice when they grew impatient with their own husbands. The voice of a woman who believes she has only one choice—to be yoked to a man who will never fully see her.

  “I still don’t,” the husband says. He’s always the last to realize how cruel his wife is to him. This saves him from being embarrassed in front of in-laws, friends, and, when in public, attentive strangers.

  The wife ignores him. Another coping mechanism. She licks chili from her fingertips, motions for him to hand her the complementary water bottle from the hotel, which he’s stored in the back cargo pocket of his short pants, or “long shorts” as he prefers to call them. Because long shorts to the husband means out of the box, means flexible, and carefree. They remind him of the men he saw in Hawaii on their last vacation. He felt a kinship with those men. Or rather some very young, very faraway part of himself felt a kinship with those men and their attire. The long shorts. He can almost picture himself being mistaken for one of them. An independent man. This is how out of touch with reality he is. This is how severe his longing.

  It is the third day of the couple’s five-day vacation. We could say they come from the Midwest or the Northwest or the South. We could say his name is John or George or Scott, that her name is Suzie or Tammy or Mary. Tomorrow it will be another couple, the day after, yet another. Under their T-shirts and short pants, where the sun has not scalded them, they are pale with a slight cast, like yogurt gone sour. They are people who cannot really see themselves.

  Decades ago, the husband had visited this place or someplace like it. He’d been on a road trip during college break. It was his second year or third year—he can’t remember. He wants to remember very badly, but it won’t come to him. He could make it up, but that would feel like cheating. He refrains from making up facts. He’s not fond of cheaters. The wife has never been, or visited once when she was in kindergarten. Some state in the Southwest, some miniature city, mountains all around. In the days leading up to their departure, the expanse of the state on the map had made her eyes blur. She had stared at it endlessly.

  The wife had chosen Ciudad de Tres Hermanas because it kept appearing in the travel magazines—Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, National Geographic—at her allergist’s office where she went for her weekly shots. Always, the City
of Three Sisters was referred to as a place of magic, conveniently accessible sans passport: the sky, the light, the mountains, history fused with the present day, a celebration of diverse cultures, living Natives. They had come because it was her idea. Her idea meant no legwork for him. In fact, he’d be cleared from any work at all. They are different when they travel, and they are also the same as they have always been and ever will be. For example, right now, adobe storefronts surround them while historical markers shout older than old, shout Spanish crown, shout holy cross that maims, shout memories of the Wild West—portáls, dirt roads, and bullets the size of men’s fingers lodged deep in the earth, pointing. Quite the dramatic backdrop, and yet: same, same. Remember that it’s not the miles that will change you, but what you leave behind, if you choose to leave anything behind at all.

  “But she is unusual, isn’t she?” the husband says to his wife, nodding toward Rufina. A dumb smile reshapes his mouth. He takes his first steps toward her. Off again with his faulty connection to reality, with all of his longing.

  Two

  Propped against the Five & Dime as if she cannot stand up on her own is the angel. You’ll notice she is much too tall for a woman. She is fully aware of this and you should be, too. No need to act otherwise. The tourists take note and approach her. They think her another strange sight. A performer in search of her stage, perhaps, definitely worthy of putting on the list and checking off. Cameras extend for selfies. She’s always out of focus in the shots: grinning with half of her face, her hair a tornado of divine knots and curls, wings tucked out of sight.

  The angel studies Rafa and Rufina. She sees them as children again, positioned under the same cottonwood, the basket begging at their feet, the Explorer hovering behind the crowd, preparing his critique, and yet, it’s not like that at all. The Explorer is long gone and the mother is, well, you know how mothers can hover, despite distance, despite death.