Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer Read online

  “Look around,” Rufina says. “It’s just us.” Her face is arranged in a way that’s familiar to him. He knows better than to trust it fully.

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “You act like she really loved you,” Rufina says.

  “Don’t make me,” he says, threatening Rufina.

  Her arms lift, blocking him. “You were just her habit.”

  Rafa’s eyes go vacant. Rufina knows he’s breathing even if there isn’t obvious evidence of it. Rufina knows he’s gone to some memory, searching for a broken-off piece of himself. His mother is a stone, within a stone, within a stone, within a stone, at the very center of which lies his tongue.

  “You’re lying,” he says.

  The air in the room turns thick. They both know what this means. The tulips seem to point as if they were still in the ground and the sun was warming each one.

  “Do you smell that?” Rufina asks her brother.

  Rafa can smell the underarms of his sister’s oversized T-shirt, sour-tart. He can smell the damp thicket of hair at the back of her head, above her neckline, the coconut oil.

  “Copal?” he says.

  They pause, ears straining. Rufina pulls Baby in tighter. Rafa sits back in his chair, crosses his legs, right thigh over left. Switches left thigh over right, and back again. He’s not sure what to do with his hands, settles on folding them into a temple, and rests them on his top knee. He almost grins. He can’t help himself. What can still pique his interest: the angel, and the potential of flight no matter how ragged the possibility.

  “Boots,” Rufina says. Rufina can hear her brother’s heart beating. She can hear the saliva bubbles popping in the corners of Baby’s mouth. She can hear her mother’s breathing, the caustic whisper of it through nose hair.

  The smell grows stronger, the sound louder. Pounding at the door. The angel does this only when she wants their full attention. Otherwise she appears and disappears unannounced. Slipping in and out as if light.

  Rufina takes her cane and picks toward the sound at the front of the house. Rafa unsteeples his forefingers, smells his hands, recrosses his legs.

  When Rufina returns, the angel is with her, leaning against Rufina, as if it isn’t worth the trouble to stand up on her own. Dressed in stretch pants with a hole behind one of the knees, beaten steel-toe work boots, and a red T-shirt with an old Coca-Cola slogan scripted across her chest.

  Rafa slides off his seat. Offers it to her.

  “I’m not impressed,” the angel says. She lifts the tablecloth. “Knock it off,” she says to the mother, the look on her face stern.

  Rafa is too distracted with the angel to sense the mother’s exit. He’s raking his hair back with his fingertips. Hoping this time she will let him touch the spot where the skin on her back meets the tendon of wing. Oh, how he longs to fly.

  “I left the front door open for you,” the angel says to the mother. It’s a directive more than a suggestion. She knows the mother will slink out to the yard, linger near the well. The angel lights a Colt. The smell of burning cherries soaked in syrup diffuses into the air. Rafa is more fragile than even he knows. Notice there is what the angel will say and what the angel will not say.

  Crickets crack the air with their determined notes. All the house lights are off except for a single light in the kitchen. The walls appear to be leaking. Beneath them, the mud-and-straw mixture exposed, the tulips pressing open their petals.

  Under the single bulb caught in a round glass jar three feet above the table, the kitchen is the center of the universe, smelling of fish and copal, burnt eggs and moist, tired feet. It’s Baby who smells like fresh-cut melon and sweet grass. Rufina adjusts the rebozo Baby is tucked inside. Angel’s and Baby’s eyes meet. Baby squirms and wiggles, arches its back.

  Rufina sees the angel’s gaze fall on Baby. “Please don’t,” Rufina says.

  The angel has warned Rufina about Baby. Everything, she has said, has an expiration date.

  When the angel decides to make Baby disappear, it takes days for Rufina to find it again. She’s had to clean out every corner of the house, dig in the yard, tear into the trunks of trees, tie a rope around her waist and make Rafa lower her into the well. Each time, it’s more difficult. Rufina blames the angel for everything. After all, she first appeared on that morning when Rufina gave birth to Baby.

  The angel turns the chair backward, straddles it cowboy-style, places her hands on her crotch, adjusts herself.

  “Fifteen dollars?” Rufina says. She points to the wallet on the table.

  The angel nods her head.

  “Fifty in the basket?” Rufina says.

  Rafa scratches at the tattoo over his heart. “You want me to win, don’t you?”

  “I stood all day,” Rufina says. “Do you hear how hoarse my voice is? And I worked the crowd. I engaged them. I didn’t just stand there.”

  “I saw that,” the angel says.

  “You could turn up the speaker,” Rafa says, his voice a calm attack. “Better yet, use a microphone that works. You have a cane. Lean on it. Undo a button or two. You know how to pose, how to lure. Pot of gold. My Little Pot of Gold. Isn’t that what he used to call you? In German, in Italian, in Turkish. It didn’t matter what language. You would prance and squeal like he was crowning you queen.” He glances at the angel, trying to decipher her expression.

  The veins on Rufina’s neck are pulsing wires. She wraps her hair around her wrist, ties it into a knot on top of her head. “No one wants you to win our bet, except you.” She’s ready to spit. Her aim is just as good as the mother’s. Still, arguing is familiar. A sign of devotion. She prepares herself for the battle. They are fierce. They are alive.

  “I went, didn’t I? I stole the wallet.” He pushes himself onto the counter. Sits on his hands. “That’s something.”

  The angel adjusts her headband. Her wings arc up over her head and quake. It’s nothing more than a stretch. The wings are a fragile, sinewy mess, a puzzle of functionality. Rafa tracks their every move.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Rafa says. He’s done. That quick. Nothing for Rufina to tear into after all.

  “It might matter,” says the angel. “Might not.”

  “Is that all you have to say?” Rufina says. She’s never been particularly fond of the angel’s communication skills or lack thereof.

  Rafa could almost reach out and pet the one rebel feather poking out the top of her wing.

  “How about being useful?” Rufina says, clapping her hands. “Instead of posing.” She continues to clap as if directing a yard full of chickens.

  “That’s enough for now,” the angel says, standing.

  “You think?” Rufina says, trailing close behind the angel as she makes for the front door, which she quickly exits and slams in Rufina’s face. “You don’t have anything else to say?” Rufina screams into the wood and paint. “How about helping us out instead of watching us suffer?”

  The angel crosses through the yard, hiccupping. Rafa paces the table. Around and around. The mother, outside at the well, paces in the opposite direction, around and around.

  In the mother’s homeland, there was a volcano, and at the top there was a lake, and at the bottom of the lake there was a hole, and through the hole was a tunnel that led to all those who had come before. Know this: There were stories recorded in the mother’s body. They were present at her birth and present at her death even if she didn’t know how to tell them.

  Rufina doesn’t realize what she’s invoking. Prayers, demands, requests have a hundred thousand ways of being answered.

  Rufina clicks her cane down the hall into the darkness, into her bedroom, shuts her door, commits the lock. The window is open and at ground level. Still, something about locking the door. From the top of her dresser, she takes two shells, “Just like the ones from the shore of the lake where your people come from,” he had told her. She had placed them next to the dried marigolds, the gourds, the crystals, the glass jars of buttons a
nd beads, and, stuffed in a tin bucket, her collection of antique hand mirrors, the glass stained and warped in each one. Can you see yourself? he had asked her. Look how beautiful you are. She steps over her clothes, strung across the floor like a rope bridge. She leans against the headboard, Baby at her chest. After she places the shells in Baby’s palms, Baby shakes its fists. There is no sound.

  “Monday morning he’s gone,” she whispers. “It must be so. And you and I will stay and wait.” Rufina traces the rim of Baby’s nose and chin. “I am here for you and you are here for me. Together we are a family.”

  Baby taps the shells against its mouth. Hisses. Its eyes are bright a moment, but then the lids grow heavy.

  Baby sleeps curled on Rufina’s stomach. Rafa is at Rufina’s door longing to smell a woman who is related to him, longing to smell her on his skin. He wants to feel that close to himself, which he cannot feel when he’s alone.

  In the night, Baby wants milk, but instead sucks on the ends of Rufina’s hair. Breast milk is an old story told to others, but not to Baby. Baby pushes off, slinks down the length of the bed. Gums its hand. Slinks back again, curls onto Rufina’s chest. Watches her breathe.

  Down the hall, in the kitchen, the mother pulls each plate from the cupboard. All the different sizes, all the different colors. She marks the house with them. Makes a path on the floor. One ceramic moon after another to step on. This is how to know you’re going in the right direction. This is how they can find you, should you manage to escape. She was told, stay out of sight. She was told, mark your path. Here is the path. This is how they will find her. This is how she will remember where she’s been. These are her tracks. She was here.

  Eight

  It was the third Saturday of June, the first day of summer. Rafa was nine, Rufina seven. They paraded with the mother into the small city, like they did most Saturdays. Rufina, the tallest with the longest gait. Notice how both hips were stable, equal, both were once beautiful and strong. Rafa held the mother’s sewing to the center of his chest. Rufina cradled the mother’s ink drawings—mounted on squares of wood and individually wrapped in cloth napkins—stacked in a box that was cumbersome to carry, not because of its weight, as it was fairly light, but because it was twice as long as it was wide. She managed by setting it down to switch her grip every few yards. While she did this, she waited for the other two. Then, she would start off again. The mother, holding her elbows, was the last to rejoin.

  As they crossed the plaza, the mother’s skirt billowed—a kite too close to the earth. A grass woven hat shielded her eyes; the cloak of her hair fell past her waist in a thick, black expanse. Modern women scurried around her with their curled, lacquered hair, nails filed and polished into points, tight denim cutting into hip creases while they balanced on the tips of their high heels. Simple gold crosses strung around their necks. They avoided the mother. Refused to make eye contact. She noted their shadows moving across the ground.

  Rosalinda had lived here for nearly ten years, and still, every time she entered the plaza, she would stop and take it all in as if it were the day she’d arrived. She did so on this day as well. The cottonwood trees were so massive and commanding, it was as if they were pinning the plaza to the earth. Crows flicked and twirled through the air on their jaunts above. Day laborers passed through, hurrying to clock in. The Original Enduring Ones tended to their wares and watched, amused. Tourists coerced by turquoise, painted boots, and cowboy hats hauled bags, bought more and more, argued about price. The adobe storefront walls facing the plaza created edges, not unlike a box. Inside the plaza, families sprawled out on the grass, lapping at ice cream cones. In the center, a fountain with multiple tiers of concrete bowls brimming with water, coins lining the bottom. The mother slipped off her shoes, stepped onto a bench, toes gripping wooden slats, palms balancing on each child’s head, and surrendered her eyes to the sight of the mountains both near and far. She inhaled deeply, pulling all that she could see down deep inside her body. The strength of the mountains. The strength of the sky. It was not where she was from, this was true, but it was her home. She had claimed it and we could say it claimed her as well.

  She was alive.

  Her children were alive.

  She had a son, in whose face she saw her father’s and her grandfathers’ faces, her brothers’ and uncles’ faces. Men who had done their best to protect her. There were the gifts of the house, the garden, the rain every afternoon during monsoons that blessed her whether she believed she deserved it or not. Her memory had grown over with scar tissue, which meant the function of her mind kept to the pathways that were most useful, most relevant. And her body, the small, sturdy package of it, was a paradox of fierce survival and fragility. But in this place, Ciudad de Tres Hermanas, she could pretend she understood what it meant to be safe.

  The gallery owners wanted to know why the mother’s portraits were so mournful. Again, the same images? Who were these people supposed to be, anyway? What else did she have to show? Any animals? Landscapes sold well.

  These questions did not keep Rosalinda from making the weekly visits with her portraits to the various galleries occupying nearly every street in the city. It did not keep the gallery owners from asking the same questions. It did not keep them from saying no. She would point to the portraits of her family, all of them men. All of them gone. The value of a family taken, wasted. “Look at their faces,” she’d tell them. “Don’t you see animals? Don’t you see landscapes?”

  They wanted to know if she was Indian. They could promote her along with the others if that was the case. They’d have a better idea of what to do with her, although if she could do one with a coyote or a buffalo, that would help.

  “Not your kind of Indian,” she had told them. “Not the kind in the movies.”

  Her face was marked by her people, people who lived high in the mountains with the steady music of rain, the unimaginable palette of birds, and where orchids seemed to form in midair, where trees created vast tents over the land. This was where the volcano rose up. In its crater, the lake; at the bottom, through the hole, down the tunnel, was the dwelling place. In the dwelling place lived the uninterrupted memory of the people. There’s no way for you to know that this dwelling place was where the stories they sang and repeated to one another and to themselves lived. It’s likely you understand this as metaphor. Because of this tendency to rely on your mental constraints, you will never truly understand. Inside your bones are the cells that can feel the vibration of all kinds of stories. Their humming often escapes you. This is not entirely your fault, but the disbelief is. Start there.

  Rosalinda’s ink drawings were not purchased. They were never purchased. Still, she insisted on painting them. In addition, she sewed intricate hand stitches that shamed any machine. The shop that commissioned her sewing was unnamed. Hardly larger than a closet, it was full of racks of alterations in various stages of completion. Above the racks, folded stacks of material rose to the ceiling. Beneath the racks, bins of scrap material, thread, buttons, and the like. The shop was impeccably ordered but the lack of natural light and the corroded wood floor made it unwelcoming. A pale woman, smaller than the mother, ran the shop, Doña Allegre. She barely spoke to the mother or Rafa, or Rufina. Her eyes seemed habitually focused on a faraway point, while the orders stacked on the counter dwarfed her even further. Despite the shop’s looks, and its lack of a name, everyone knew its mending was unparalleled.

  On this first day of summer, while Rafa sat on the floor picking at a scab on his knee, and Rufina rifled through a bin, searching for a new button to slip into her pocket, the mother stood next to a man with a costume in his arms, holding it as if he were holding a sick child. He towered above her, an alabaster pillar, his smile overwhelming. She’d never seen a man smile like that, with all of himself, his eyes in on it, too. His whole body, it seemed, was in on it. He had asked her if she could fix the tears in the dress. He explained it was for a series of installation pieces in which he’d been
staging mannequins in the most surprising places around town—in parks, in arroyos, on the corners of busy intersections, even in parked cars left on the side of the road. He outfitted them in layers of mixed, and often contrary, inspiration. Collaging them, he’d said. As if remote parts of the world, with its remote citizens, had landed on one figure. One of his favorite pieces was a male mannequin in a gas mask, an Inuit coat, several Hawaiian leis. And on the bottom half, a Scottish kilt with flippers meant for snorkeling.

  “It’s art, you see,” he’d said, rocking the dress in his arms. “It’s about making an impact.” Then, again, his smile shining. All his shining teeth. His skin and head shining under the caustic fluorescent lights of the shop.

  The mother had avoided men. The last time she’d permitted a man to kiss her, she’d become pregnant with Rufina.

  No men needed. She had a son. She had Rafa. That was enough.

  “Please. If you’d be so kind,” the man pleaded, extending the torn dress. “I’d pay double, of course.”

  She looked at Rafa, whose scab was bleeding, and at Rufina, who was filling her pockets with buttons. She looked again at the man, at his hands twisted and swollen with arthritis. Slowly, she nodded. And when he found out she’d come on foot, he packed her things into the trunk of his Chevy Citation, ushered the children into the backseat, opened the passenger door for her, and set out for the canyon.

  “My goodness,” he’d said as he drove the last mile to the house. The yellow rose bushes alongside the road were thick with blossoms, melted over with bees. The air from the open windows tugged at their skin. “What good fortune.”

  Nine

  Rafa is desperate to be close to his sister. All his senses are detecting the mother, and yet, there is nothing he can hold. The walls of the house feel pressurized. Panic is caught in his chest—it flutters. After trying her locked door, Rafa climbs in through Rufina’s open window. He walks across her room, his feet pacing as if on some distant shore. Baby pins him with its eyes, pulls on Rufina’s hair, which makes her breathing change, makes her shift, swim her legs. Rafa lies on the floor. His head pillowed on Rufina’s discarded skirt and bundle of blouse. He can smell every moment of the day in her clothes. The moment she strained her throat to hit a note she hadn’t known existed, the moment she threw her left hip forward for too long, her right shoulder leaning back to make a bow of her body, arching. He can smell when she held her bladder for too long, where she was in her cycle. He smells the sweetness and the foulness of her, rubs his face in it. Dizzies himself. Feels somehow closer to the mother because of this. Falls asleep. Baby is nestled on Rufina’s chest, its neck a hinge, its face opening toward Rafa. Eyes ever present, tiny mirrors. Blinding.