“I’ll be the prettiest babysitter on Mariposa Island,” I say, grinning back.
“You’ll be the prettiest something,” she says, her smile turning into a smirk as she slides off the bed and heads for the door. I catch up to her and bump her hip as we clamber down the stairs to the kitchen.
“Hey, maybe we can do a full makeover,” I suggest. “That could be fun. And I never get to do that stuff.” Michelle has access to all her sister’s makeup—eyeliner and mascara and stuff I’m never allowed to buy.
We head to the kitchen, past the family room where Michelle’s mom is watching television and playing blocks with Ashley. “Sure, we can do a makeover,” answers Michelle. “But what would your mother say?”
“I’ll wash it off before I get home,” I tell her. “You know my motto. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”
“Now that,” Michelle says, pulling open the freezer to hunt down our pizza, “is the understatement of the year.”
CARIDAD
United States
1961
What struck Caridad was how quickly a person could get used to something if she had to, if she absolutely must. And how strange time was. How one moment she could be sleeping in her own soft bed with soft cotton sheets washed daily and the ocean waters of the Atlantic only yards away, and how the next moment she could find herself still near that ocean water, only now in a featureless building in South Florida, sleeping on the top of a bunk bed with a mattress so uncomfortable Caridad had to learn how to curl herself up just to avoid the pokes of the springs. She learned how to block out the murmurs and snores of the girl who slept underneath her, too, and the way the security light on the side of the building shone in from dusk until dawn.
What she could not learn was how to enjoy the milk in paper cartons that was served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It smelled used and foul to Caridad, who still remembered the thick, creamy taste of the fresh milk Juanita would pour for her after it was delivered to the back steps each morning by a man in a white uniform. In the dining room at the camp, Caridad would sit with other girls and rub her fingers along the blue-and-white cartons, moist on the outside from being stored in tubs of ice to stay cold. She would give her milk to one of the other girls, and she didn’t even ask for a trade. There was a girl named Blanca who guzzled the milk happily and seemed to be one of the few girls putting on weight, while Caridad and the others struggled to keep meat on their bones, picking through the unfamiliar food with their forks, sliding the tines over the plates slowly as if something more delicious could be dug up underneath.
Blanca was enthusiastic about learning English, unlike Caridad. Blanca was younger, and that made a difference. Her mouth mastered words and didn’t trip on the Bs and the Vs or the ons and the ins. Blanca’s eyes smiled as she perfectly executed words like Florida and popcorn and shampoo. She was a star pupil during lessons, and Caridad stoked the resentment inside of her and remembered the academic medals the Ursuline nuns had given her back in Cuba, pinned onto a sash she could drape over her uniform. She’d had to leave those medals behind along with almost everything else.
The camp was only temporary, Caridad learned. Longer than the thirty days her parents had promised her, but still only a few months. Soon, she was told, she would get to leave the place with the bunk beds and the security light and the foul milk and Little Miss Perfect Blanca, and she would move to a new place. Texas. One of the guardians who worked at the camp unfolded a paper map of the United States and put one finger on Miami and another on a dot halfway across the country.
“There, that is where you are going,” the woman said, her voice slow and loud. “You are going to a town called Healy.” Caridad wished she could find a way to tell this woman that speaking more loudly didn’t help her understand English.
The guardians who looked after them at the camp soon took her shopping for new clothes. Really they were used clothes, purchased at a thrift store. Images of her closet in Cuba filled with smart dresses and outfits tailored to fit only her crept into her mind, but Caridad pressed her lips together and nodded at every item the guardian pulled out. The white blouse with the yellowing collar. The circle skirt that had faded from forest-green to lime. The sad little socks. Caridad simply nodded—what else could she do?
Inside she fumed.
There were sporadic phone calls with her parents. They were few and far between and could only last a few minutes, and she had to strain to hear her parents’ voices, tinny through the static. Caridad tried to connect the sounds she heard with the physical objects she knew her parents were close to when they spoke with her. The silver ashtray shaped like a seashell. The large picture window that faced the street. The ceiling fan circling slowly above like a curious vulture. Picturing these things made her parents’ voices seem more real. Actual.
¿Cómo estás, preciosa?
Estoy bien.
¿Estás comiendo bien?
Sí, muy bien.
Their conversations felt rehearsed and strange, with topics limited to the superficial and mundane. The new maid’s cooking. The weather in Havana. A neighbor falling ill with the flu. Only by picturing objects she remembered from her home back in Cuba could Caridad convince herself the phone calls were even real. A silver ashtray shaped like a seashell. A picture window. A ceiling fan. Her mother’s voice.
The day she left for Healy, Texas, Caridad packed her duffle with her thrift-store clothes and stared out the airplane window while the girl next to her—another girl from the camp who was headed to another town in Texas—silently wiped tears from her eyes and twisted her fingers together and sniffed. Caridad ignored her. What was happening to her was what was happening to her, and there was nothing that could be done about it. She was going to a place called Healy, and this could not be changed. Better to let life’s wave push her forward and not fight it. Better to survive.
The girl on the plane next to her sniffed and sniffled, but Caridad shifted in her seat and turned her back to the girl, ignoring her. Even though she knew the girl’s cries signaled she needed someone to talk to, Caridad wondered how she could block out the noise for the entire flight. Because honestly, what could she possibly say?
The room was off the kitchen. That was what really bothered her. It was not even a proper bedroom but some storage room that had been put together into a fake bedroom, and haphazardly, too. Heinous yellow paint had been slapped on the walls—she supposed they thought it made the space look cheerful. Worn-out sheets and a tired quilt rested on the twin bed, and two windows overlooked the backyard, which was a patch of dirt with a rusty swing set where the little children in the family played.
There were five children in the Finney family, most of them younger than her and full of scraped knees and snotty noses, and Caridad was immediately overwhelmed by the voices and the movement and the faces and the too-eager toothy smiles and the loud English sentences spoken over and over again.
How nice to meet you!
We are glad you are here!
What can we do for you?
If you need anything, just let us know!
She was supposed to be grateful. This Caridad knew. She was supposed to be grateful for the fact that she had a roof over her head and a space of her own, when she knew that some of her campmates were being sent to orphanages. To places where there were no private bedrooms, not even off the kitchen.
So Caridad did her best to smile and nod, and when Frank, the oldest Finney boy, helped her with her duffel she smiled widely at him, and she tried to be grateful that his face was not too bad-looking at all but pleasant enough with big brown eyes and good teeth. She nodded eagerly at the dinner table and took bites of the thing they called meat loaf, and when she was asked to help clear the table and do the dishes, she did not balk, not even when she had to be taught how to scrape the chewed on, saliva-covered meat loaf leftovers into a Tupperware dish for safekeeping before carefully soaping up, rinsing, and drying each dish. Not even when her mind
was flooded with thoughts of Juanita serving her family dinner in her starched white uniform. Not even then.
What happens when your language is stripped away from you? You learn a new language, and soon Caridad found herself speaking in English and even thinking in English sometimes, skipping the exhausting step of translating in her head. She enrolled in Healy High and navigated classes, and after school the sweet Mrs. Morelli next door helped tutor her even though she was a newlywed just a few years older than Caridad herself. After school Caridad would walk over to the Morelli house and enjoy the quiet and comfort of being in a space with only one other person, and she would linger in Mrs. Morelli’s neat and spacious kitchen with the yellow gingham curtains and she would practice conjugating verbs and reciting sentences.
I go.
I went.
I have gone.
English was a ridiculous language, Caridad decided, but somehow, with Mrs. Morelli’s help and the constant, never-ending chatter of the Finney children, she began to absorb it. When Frank asked her to go on a walk one evening after dinner a few months after her arrival, she said “Yes” in English without even stopping to think about it. It was simply the word that came out. Its appearance startled her. Yes.
They walked the streets of Healy, the spring heat spilling over them. It was a stickier, more consuming heat than the heat Caridad had known in Cuba, without any ocean breezes nearby providing any sort of relief, and she hated it. She walked with her hands folded behind her, her head held high.
“I’m glad you are here with us, Caridad,” Frank said, choosing his words with care. Caridad could sense she made him nervous. She couldn’t explain why, exactly, but she liked that she did.
“Call me Carrie,” said Caridad. It was what the teachers at Healy High called her. It was easier than Caridad, more American. And Caridad liked how it split her in two, saving her better name for her better Cuban self, which existed somehow, somewhere, in the recesses of American Carrie’s mind.
“Okay, Carrie, if you’re sure,” said Frank.
They bumbled along, filling the air between them with stupid patter and silly comments, and when Frank tugged her hand and pulled her behind an oak tree and kissed her, his dry, overeager lips moving awkwardly against her own, Caridad couldn’t help but let her mind wander to images of Ricardo back in Cuba. Handsome and self-assured. Smart and good-looking. And from such a good family, too. Caridad knew if she’d been given the chance to kiss him, it wouldn’t have been like this—rushed, clumsy, and stupid. But Ricardo was dead and she was here, so she leaned back against the tree and had her first kiss with an American boy named Frank. She still could not believe this was her real life. But it was.
The phone calls with her parents became fewer and further between. There were letters, but they dwindled. The sentences her mother crafted in dark black script seemed forced and formulaic, all about how much they missed her and how the weather was on the island. Caridad spent hours sorting through the old photographs she’d been able to bring with her, her eyes lingering on those taken the afternoon of her quince by a professional photographer her parents had hired to come to their home.
She spent nights sitting up in her fake bedroom, staring out at the yard, imagining she could hear the ocean. Hoping one day she would return even though she knew, somehow, in every cell of her body that she would never see Cuba again. Sometimes, late at night and gripped by insomnia, Caridad would dig out a bottle of glass cleaner and a rag from under the kitchen sink and scrub down the eight square panes of glass in the windows that looked out to the yard, remembering how Juanita would clean the kitchen windows without leaving behind a single streak. Caridad would clean the windows in her bedroom once and then clean them again. The quiet, easy motions and the simplicity of the act soothed her.
She went to classes at Healy High. She studied with Mrs. Morelli next door. She had no real friends because she made no space for them. It grew harder to fake niceness. She loathed every moment she had to spend washing the dirty, spit-covered dishes of the little Finney children. She despised every time Mrs. Finney cheerfully asked her to “pitch in” and carry out the garbage or feed the toothless old mutt the Finneys treasured as if he were an actual member of the family when all he was to Caridad was a stinky, dirty dog. None of her daily routine provided the solace that cleaning her own windows over and over again offered.
She allowed anger and resentment to fester inside her and never scab over.
On weekends Frank would take her on walks and to the diner downtown, and in the car he would paw at her while music played on the radio, but he never pushed it. He seemed in awe of her. Overly eager. Caridad enjoyed the power she felt when she was with him even if she didn’t enjoy him as a person very much.
“You’re a lot of fun to be around,” Frank would tell her before he shoved his tongue in her mouth. In these moments Caridad would sometimes recall the warnings of her grandmother back in Cuba, who, before she passed away, liked to warn Caridad that a young woman should stay pure like a fine piece of Baccarat crystal until her wedding day. But like so many memories of Cuba, her grandmother’s words were becoming hazy, slipping from her memory no matter how hard she tried to hang on to them.
One weekend a little over a year after her arrival in the United States, Caridad was called into the den by Mr. and Mrs. Finney. When Caridad walked in, she was surprised to see Father O’Dell from the parish sitting on the sad little green couch with the weird stain on the arm that Mrs. Finney tried to cover with ugly, homemade doilies. Mrs. Finney was sitting next to him, her eyes watery and lined in pink. Mr. Finney was seated in the armchair and his mouth was set in a firm line. He had his hands clasped in his lap, but it was like he couldn’t find a comfortable position. He kept clasping and unclasping, and then he coughed.
Caridad’s body went numb.
“Carrie, why don’t you sit down?” Mrs. Finney said, patting the couch cushion the same way she did when she wanted the toothless, stinky mutt to join her. Caridad went and sat down, crossing her legs at the ankles. She recalled the little salita back home and Juanita and pink lemonade and the silver ashtray shaped like a seashell. She willed herself to be there again.
And then the priest was speaking and Mrs. Finney was crying and Mr. Finney was moving his hands over and over again and coughing. God, why couldn’t he at least stop coughing?
There’s been some confusion coming from out of Cuba.
They spoke of her homeland like it was some strange spot on a map—not a real place.
Carrie, we have to tell you something that is going to be difficult to hear.
Her mother’s Pall Malls and the sweet smell of Arpège.
The latest reports seem to indicate that something has happened to your parents.
Dancing with her handsome father at the quince before it was all over. The strained expression on his face as she stared at him through the fishbowl before getting on the plane.
We have received confirmation that they are no longer alive.
Not dead, Caridad noted. Simply no longer alive. How clever language could be. Even a stupid language like English.
There were more words about the pro-Batista movement and being turned in and neighbors reporting on neighbors, but it all slid past Caridad. She could not absorb it.
Mrs. Finney reached out to touch her, but Caridad flinched and Mrs. Finney drew back.
“When did this happen?” Caridad asked. She wished for tears so she could feel something, but there were none.
“Well, we’ve heard reports for a few months now, but we didn’t know for certain until very recently,” the priest said.
Caridad blinked hard at the priest. She took a breath.
“You knew?” Caridad said, finally feeling something at last. Anger. “You knew there was a chance they might be dead and you didn’t say anything to me?”
“Carrie, we wanted to be sure, and the reports are not always reliable,” Mrs. Finney said.
“But you kn
ew there was a chance of trouble? That something was going on?” she demanded. How good it felt to have someone to direct her anger toward. She clenched her fists and pounded them into the couch. How dare they. How dare these stupid people let her walk around for weeks—for months—allowing Frank Finney to maul her in his car, making her do their filthy dishes, letting her stare out the window into the backyard and dream of her homeland, and all the time they knew the truth about her mother and father.
“You should have told me!” she shouted. Caridad never shouted. Her loud voice sounded strange, even to her.
“We wanted to keep you happy for as long as we could,” Mrs. Finney said, her pale, pancake face offering up a weak, dumb smile.
Caridad stared at her. Happy. Mrs. Finney thought she was happy.
Mr. Finney coughed again. Why was he even in the room, Caridad wondered? He was the most useless one of them all.
Mrs. Finney was leaning back now, away from Caridad. Caridad could read her distance as displeasure. She was supposed to be grateful to Mrs. Finney. This she knew. She was supposed to be grateful and show emotions and sob into Mrs. Finney’s arms because Mrs. Finney had shown her Christian kindness. But Caridad would not give her the satisfaction.
“Perhaps we should pray,” said Father O’Dell, and only because she knew her mother would have wanted her to, Caridad bowed her head and tuned out while the priest spoke of loss and God’s wisdom and who knows what else.
When he was finished, Caridad gathered herself and stood.
“I need to be by myself,” she told them. “Leave me alone.”
And with that she walked back toward the kitchen into her sad little bedroom and shut the door. She lay facedown on the quilt that served as her bedspread, the smell of cheap detergent impossible to ignore. Her mind was flooded with images of Juanita. Of clean sheets. Of agua de violetas. Of the island life that was due to her—that had been her birthright—and that had been stripped away from her.
The Liars Page 11