Then in 2008 came Beatriz, unlike any of the others. Beatriz liked kids so much she’d come from another continent to work at the camp; she knew how to talk to them, how to teach them and joke with them and keep them moving from one place to the next. The hurdle of introduction to Lucia was cleared from day one. Beatriz and Lucia were buddies. So Andrea could bring Beatriz over to the house from the start, and Beatriz taught Lucia more chords and tricks and beginner Portuguese. Brazil was not Mexico, of course, but even the fact of Beatriz’s Latin American origins unlocked something unexpectedly deep in Andrea, a feeling of kinship and longing, a sense of rightness. Something that was new and familiar at once.
That first summer, Beatriz played shows around town and the Northwest with her band, and called and texted regularly from the road. Some nights she would sneak in after Lucia was in bed, and Andrea would be roused awake in the dark by a sheer want so strong it pushed through sleep.
Andrea couldn’t tell if Lucia knew from the start and was just playing along, or if she figured it out along the way, but a few weeks in, Lucia said to Beatriz at dinner, “You should just stay here.”
“Tonight?” Beatriz looked at Andrea, who nodded. “Okay.”
Lucia looked satisfied. She added, “Don’t go back to Brazil either.”
“I have to. But maybe not yet.”
The band went back to São Paulo at the end of July, but Beatriz postponed her ticket for another month and stayed with Andrea and Lucia, officially as a friend—until Lucia and Sydney crept into the kitchen, long past their bedtime, to sneak snacks and caught Andrea and Beatriz entwined up against the refrigerator. “Oh my gosh, they’re snogging!” Sydney said, a word they’d picked up from Harry Potter. The kids ran out the door shrieking and giggling.
Andrea tried to have a careful conversation with Lucia the next morning while Beatriz showered. Now that the thrill of discovery had subsided, Lucia sat sullen and quiet. She kicked one foot slowly against the leg of the chair she sat on. Finally she said, “Beatriz was my friend first.”
Andrea rubbed her back. “I know. And I’m so grateful for your friendship. I could never replace you in her eyes, Luz, I promise. I want a different kind of relationship with Beatriz. For one thing, I can’t play guitar at all. That’s for you guys to do. And you will always have that. You’ll always be her friend.”
Lucia didn’t look up, but she stopped kicking.
“For another thing, honestly, what I want isn’t the same as friendship. It’s a different feeling.”
“Do you love her?” Lucia asked.
“That’s a strong word,” Andrea said. Her heart thumped in her chest. “How would you feel about that?”
“Does she love you?”
Andrea said, “Jeez, I kind of hope so. What do you think?”
“Then she’d be here a lot?”
“That’s true.”
“Maybe she wouldn’t go back to Brazil.”
“Or at least she’d come back again soon.”
Lucia thought about it. She hopped off the chair.
“Where are you going?” Andrea asked.
“To wake up Syd. I’m going to pour cold water in her ear.”
“Oh no you don’t.” It was Beatriz, standing in the kitchen doorway, wet hair dripping down onto her black tank. She scooted after Lucia to scoop her up and Lucia squealed happily, which roused Sydney and foiled the plan.
What had Beatriz heard? It didn’t matter. She and Andrea said I love you by week six. “Way too early,” Beatriz said. “Definitely,” Andrea agreed. “You should never say it before six months. Maybe it’s easier for you to say it in English, because it’s like toy language for you.” Beatriz said, “Eu te amo.” “Oh fuck,” Andrea said, “now we really blew it.” And they collapsed back onto the bed.
Then came the August day Beatriz had to fly back to São Paulo. They all kept hugging and kissing at the curb, going back for second and third good-byes, and when Lucia threw her arms around them both and clung with surprising force, Andrea thought, We look like a family. They watched the airport’s wide revolving door swallow Beatriz and her guitar case and overstuffed backpack and Andrea felt like some part of her own body was being physically pulled away.
When they walked in the front door, Lucia stopped and looked around the living room. Her mouth turned down, and her eyes filled with tears. “It doesn’t feel the same,” she said.
“It doesn’t.” Andrea rubbed at the bladelike sob in her throat. “We have to get her back, don’t we?”
Andrea seldom thought of Ryan anymore, but that night, as she tried to fall asleep alone in a bed she’d grown used to sharing, she thought of the difference between Beatriz’s departure and the quiet absence when Ryan had left ten years ago. When she had realized Ryan was gone, really gone, it was like all the windows had been smashed out: she felt vandalized, yet at the same time a barometric pressure had lifted. A spell had broken. Andrea didn’t have to try so hard anymore, not in that way. The effort of attempting to feel: gone. She had breathed deep. The space was all hers. She was all hers. For only five more months, she got to belong solely to herself. Then Lucia would belong solely to her—or that’s what she thought. It was more like she belonged solely to Lucia.
Beatriz’s absence, though, was unbearable. A vacancy in the house. Andrea would do anything to get her back, and anything to keep her.
Beatriz figured out that she could stay longer on a student visa, so even though she already had a history degree from the University of São Paulo, she’d enrolled at Portland State for a second ostensible BA in environmental studies. She’d fallen in with a small crew of musicians and artists who renovated houses for a local real estate agent and were paid in cash. And so Andrea and Lucia now had Beatriz for over a year: Beatriz who could build shelves and desks and cabinets, who had rehoused all of Andrea and Lucia’s books and records in elegant light wood. Beatriz who lay back on the couch reading nonfiction books about cultish religions and true crime, and regaled them with lurid anecdotes only lightly edited for Lucia’s sake. Beatriz who made up funny songs on the spot, songs with Andrea’s name in them, earworms that Andrea found herself singing under her breath as she prepped between classes. Beatriz who made dirty jokes that Andrea loved. Beatriz who, with the exception of fried bananas, couldn’t cook for shit, comically unskilled in the kitchen, but who always took the cleanup. Beatriz who taught Lucia new fingerings on the guitar and let her use her effects pedals. Beatriz who was teaching them both Portuguese—Lucia was in a Spanish immersion program at school and caught on far more quickly. Beatriz who came to family dinner and slid right into place, refilling everyone’s drinks and talking late into the evening until Andrea was yawning and Lucia had long since conked out on a couch. Family dinner was a larger, looser affair now, every two or three months, the most reliable chance busy friends had to see each other. All Lucia’s life they’d made room for her at the table, and now they made room for Beatriz too.
Andrea wrote notes and drew tiny pictures and hid them in Beatriz’s jacket pockets and wallet. The unwritten subtext of each: Please keep us. One afternoon in July, while Beatriz was volunteering at camp, Andrea opened the drawer of the other nightstand to hide a note, and found inside all the notes and drawings she’d ever made Beatriz. A nest of slips of paper. Some contained detailed mini-letters, some—from hurried mornings—just said I love you, B in superfine Sharpie on a bent Post-it. Some were dated, many were not. Days and months were shuffled together.
Andrea thought, This is my money. On her, I would spend it all.
Stethoscope
THAT BOX OF RECORDS IN THE ATTIC HAD BEEN ON LUCIA’S mind for over a week. Finally, she couldn’t stand it. It was a Tuesday after school. Beatriz was working on a house in Southeast and her mom had called to say she had to stay an hour late at school for a meeting. Normally Lucia would have taken advantage of this by fixing herself a bowl of ice cream, three scoops, sprinkling it with anything that looked good—dry breakf
ast cereal, chocolate powder, maple syrup, cinnamon—and kicking back with an uninterrupted stretch of afternoon cartoons. But today she took the step stool from the closet and unfolded it in the hallway beneath the trapdoor.
The attic was strictly off-limits without adult supervision of the cantankerous ladder. But Lucia had watched her mother do this enough times that she had figured it out. With a toothy metal spaghetti ladle, she reached up and snagged the loop of rope that served as a handle. She tugged. Nothing happened. The door was heavier than she’d expected. She pulled harder and sank all her weight into it.
The door swung down with an indignant pop. Lucia fell back off the step stool and wiped out on the floor. Her right elbow burned and her ankle sent shooting pains through her leg when she stood, but she ignored it, righted the stool, and stepped back up to pull down the extendable ladder. She climbed into the cool dimness, heart thumping, and retrieved the top record from the box. Then she closed it up and pushed the box back to the deep corner it came from. The attic had to appear completely undisturbed.
Once she was back on the ground floor, though, Lucia realized there was no way she could push the ladder back into place, much less the entire dangling door. “I had to go back and find—no—I thought I forgot something up there,” she murmured, practicing. “I thought I left my notebook with my lyrics in it. No, my notebook for school.” All the way to her bedroom she rehearsed the line until it sounded forlorn and sincere. She shut the door behind her and pulled out her guitar.
Hers was unmistakably the same guitar as the broken-necked one on the album cover. It gave Lucia the most unsettling feeling. Most things in their home had come secondhand, and plenty of her clothes and books too, and she never knew the story of where they came from, they just showed up and settled in. Lucia had never thought about their history. But her guitar had known another life—another death, even.
Out to the living room she went, to listen for clues on the stereo.
The record’s first song, “Stethoscope,” was the best one. Lucia listened patiently to the other two on side one, and then played the first song again twice. She flipped the record and listened to side two. The fifth song was a slow one, she liked that, though she wished it were longer. The last one went on too long, like they didn’t want to let go. A draggy jam. Lucia and Sydney hated jams. Except their own, which were awesome.
She picked up her guitar, checked the tuning, and turned the record back to side one, song one. Her fingers found the first chord. “You remember this one?” she asked the guitar. The strings hummed against her fingers. Learning a song was like climbing rocks, finding foothold after foothold until the path was easy to follow.
At first Lucia had thought she wanted to play the drums. It felt good to hit something. But when she tried an electric guitar for the first time, she was hooked. She hit a single note and it rang out, crunchy and soaring at the same time. She pressed her fingers against the strings, which pressed back sharply, and strummed, and a wall of sound poured out. You could do anything with a guitar. You could make it sound watery and dark, or filigreed and delicate, or, with a quick stomp on the pedal, like a roar of dissatisfaction. You could make whole songs of your own. You could re-create almost all the songs on the radio or in your mom’s record collection on a guitar, and most were surprisingly simple to break down into their parts. The mystery was not what they were made of, but what made them good. Lucia loved how her fingers tingled after playing, how her fingertips thickened, self-armoring.
When Beatriz pulled into the driveway half an hour later, Lucia jumped up to grab the record and slipped it back into its sleeve. She slid it under her bed as the back door creaked open and shut.
“E aí, chuchuzinha? Estou em casa!”
“Olá!” Lucia came into the kitchen, where Bullet was already wagging her tail and bumping her head against Beatriz’s hand. She was getting better at Portuguese, even though sometimes she forgot and responded in Spanish. Portuguese sounded cushier, Spanish more percussive.
Beatriz gave Lucia a high five and both of them a quick affectionate scratch behind the neck. The guitar was slung across the couch, where Lucia had ditched it in a hurry. “You’ve been practicing,” Beatriz said with approval. “New song?”
“Not really,” Lucia said. “Just messing around.”
“Good kid.” Beatriz hung her messenger bag and jacket by the door and headed toward her room to change out of her work clothes. In the doorway to the hall, she took a startled step back. “Merda. Did the attic door fall down?”
Lucia wanted to say yes, but Beatriz sounded so concerned she couldn’t. “I had to get something up there.”
“You can’t do that, Luz, that thing is heavy. You could get hurt.”
What was her line? Lucia blanked. “I thought I left something up there.” What was it? She added quickly, “It was a present for you.”
Beatriz softened. “A present? Why would it be in the attic?”
“I didn’t want you to find it.”
“Was it up there? When do I get it?”
Lucia shook her head. “I didn’t find it. I might have left it at Sydney’s.”
“You hid it too well.” Beatriz laughed. “You’re sweet, chuchu.”
“Are you mad?”
“I should be, but . . . no.” Beatriz gave her a sidelong look. “Are you worried your mom’s gonna be?” Lucia strategically widened her eyes and nodded. “I’ll take care of the door,” Beatriz said. “Don’t worry.”
The question seemed so simple—Mom, where did my guitar come from?—but her mother looked stricken. She stopped chewing her spaghetti. “I’m not sure exactly,” she said, but in a way that signaled she did know something and was stalling.
“What’s up? Is that like asking where babies come from?” Lucia joked. She looked to Beatriz for a laugh and Beatriz obliged, but kept her eyes on Andrea.
“I think I got it at The 12th Fret,” she said. “Yeah, it was from The 12th Fret.”
“Did it cost a lot? Beatriz said it’s a good guitar.”
“Not too much. I did an art trade with them. I traded some design work.”
“But you don’t play guitar.”
“I thought I might learn.”
“Oh. Where did The 12th Fret get it?”
“Who knows where that guitar has been? It’s older than all of us,” her mother said. “Beatriz, do you want some wine? I think we need to finish that bottle on the counter.”
Lucia understood she was not to ask any more questions about the guitar tonight. Which only made her curiosity leap from spark to blaze.
After dinner, she put on her pajamas as instructed, but she couldn’t resist picking up the guitar, sitting down on her bed, and playing through the song again. When a song got in her head, it was all she wanted to do, work it out and play it over and over until she could close her eyes or look up from the frets and feel it move through and out of her body, part of her. Already this song was working its way in.
Andrea paused. Lucia’s bedroom door was ajar, and through the gap she could see her sitting on the edge of her bed, head down, stretching her small fingers to form the chords on her guitar. The song she was playing—what was it? Something from a long time ago. From the radio? An old mixtape?
Luz shifted to the chorus and began to murmur under her breath, in that still-sweet small voice, With you I need a stethoscope.
A watery feeling rippled down Andrea’s ribs. The Cold Shoulder. What was Lucia doing playing a Cold Shoulder song? After asking about her guitar?
It was all she could do not to push into the room and demand to know. Instead she closed the bathroom door behind her and sat down on the tile floor.
Luz’s brown hair falling over her face like that, the blue Telecaster in her lap, the specter of Ryan inhabiting her small body.
Andrea tried not to ascribe too many of Lucia’s talents and habits to anything other than the kid’s own particular nature. After all, look how differently she had turn
ed out from each of her parents. And to constantly seek evidence of herself in Lucia, though irresistible, seemed narcissistic. But whether by inheritance or coincidence, traces of Ryan sometimes surfaced. Maybe Andrea had only imagined that Lucia’s early pots-and-pans banging was weirdly rhythmic. But there was also the time they were at the river with a few other parents and kids, and Andrea watched as Lucia picked up all their discarded towels and T-shirts and tried to fold them neatly. Lucia wasn’t interested in hanging on to things either—not only did she easily let go of outgrown T-shirts and toys, sometimes she outright brought them to Andrea and said she didn’t want them anymore. She liked everything to be put away in her room. She loved Sydney and had a few other friends, and other kids liked her, but Lucia wasn’t interested in having large birthday parties or joining sleepovers. She just wanted to be with Andrea, Beatriz, and a couple of her rock camp buddies. Unlike Andrea, who loved being around people but hated standing in front of them, Lucia was an introvert yet an effortless performer.
And there was the model horse incident, at age seven. Andrea told Lucia that after she tucked her in for the night, Flynn and his girlfriend were coming to hang out at the house so she and Lawrence could see Quasi play at the Doug Fir. Lucia said she wanted to go to the Quasi show too. This was obviously out of the question—it was a twenty-one-plus show, and the headliner played at eleven. But Lucia’s soft little face hardened right up. It wasn’t a babyish tantrum—throwing a spoon, overturning a bowl, stomping, howling, going limp. There was no performance in it. No, Lucia went quiet, and then she went to her room. A minute later, there was a thud and two cracks.
Andrea found her on the floor, trying to gather the pieces of her favorite model horse, Bandit, a pinto yearling. Broken legs, a snapped tail.
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