by Sarah Faber
Now, Evie walks along the borders of the brick wall that surrounds their property—over an acre! her mother used to say proudly. Evie doesn’t know how large that is, but she understands it’s more than anyone else on their street has. Ivy brushes the back of her neck, and she wonders once again if she’s safe in here. Luiza used to promise that anyone who tried to get over that wall—with all that broken glass and barbed wire—would be torn to ribbons, and Evie always imagined an intruder’s head atop lengths of bloody string and hanging red rags. But then, wouldn’t it be the same for someone trying to get out?
She leans back and feels the points of her shoulder blades touch the concrete wall first, before any other part of her body, which according to Magda means Evie has bad posture. When Luiza comes back, she thinks, everything will go back to normal. But it will have to be very soon. Just the other day, after the ceremony, Mama came into the bedroom where Evie and Magda were listening to music and told them, without even sitting down, that it was time to start getting their things together again: now that they had ‘said goodbye,’ they would be leaving for Canada in a month. She didn’t hold their hands or kiss their cheeks afterwards like she had when she told them they would be holding a funeral for Luiza. She just turned and left. Evie and Magda looked at each other but said nothing; though they couldn’t put it into words, they shared the sense that more things were slipping away. They were all being ripped up by the roots and set adrift, like the armfuls of flowers they had dropped in the sea the day before.
But she wants to be done with worrying and crying for today, done with feeling sad, so she sprints across the lawn, past the garden to the edge of the clearing at the back of their property, untucking her shirt from her waistband with one hand and loosening her left plait with the other as she runs. The awkward movements cause her to stumble, but she doesn’t care. Grass-stained, unfastened—this is how she wants to be. Her hair is often messy these days because she almost always pulls out her plaits. Now that Luiza’s gone, Mama lets Magda braid her hair: French and tight. She’s very good at it and has fast, strong fingers that pull the plaits into two very neat, even rows. But at twelve, Evie thinks she’s too old for plaits and she knows Magda hates braiding hair—she hates many of the things she’s good at but does them anyway, and sometimes she hates Evie for not doing any of the things she dislikes. For not caring.
She liked it better when Luiza used to braid her hair. Evie would sit out on the stones of their patio, Luiza in a chair behind her, brushing out Evie’s fine, red hair. But Evie’s favourite time with her sister was during the early winter mornings at their country house, when it was still cold and she would run to Luiza’s room upon waking and climb into bed with her, and they would lie, interlaced, keeping each other warm. One morning, Luiza had come to Evie’s bedside first and whispered to her to come see, then led her by the hand back to her room.
‘Look!’ she whispered, pointing to the open window, where white fog spilled through. ‘A cloud is coming in the window!’
‘Close it, close it!’ Evie cried, and Luiza slid the window closed again before they hurried back into bed, their feet reaching uselessly for the limp, tepid water bottle from the night before.
‘Tell me a story,’ Evie begged Luiza then, as she so often did when they were alone together.
‘Okay, but it has to be from a book,’ she said, yawning. ‘I’m too tired to make something up.’
Once upon a time there was a miller’s daughter who was smart and brave and beautiful and loved books more than anything. One day the devil came and promised her father riches for whatever stood behind his mill. The man thought he was losing nothing more than a crooked, old apple tree. But on that day, the girl sat reading beneath it, and so her father had signed her away. When the devil came to collect her, she was so free of sin the devil couldn’t touch her. He swore then he’d take the miller instead, unless he chopped off his daughter’s hands, which he agreed to do.
‘But then she cried so hard, her stumps were washed clean and the devil was thwarted once again.’
There was more to the story than Evie can remember now, so she had thought it had a happy ending. But Luiza shook her head, and stared out the window for a moment before finishing.
‘She can’t touch anything now. She can try, and people will feel something, but they won’t really have been touched by her. She’ll always be separate from them.’
Evie hadn’t liked the story, and still doesn’t understand it, but she wishes she could hear it one more time. This time she would understand. But there are no more stories or soft hair brushes. Just jam on an old shirt and Magda’s rage seeping into her braids, which she’s sure she feels leaking into her skull, so she must keep pulling out her plaits, mussing the strands all around her face, and take off again. A disgrace on the run.
Suddenly, Magda is coming across the clearing toward her; she is on the hunt, her own blond rage-plaits flying behind her. Evie keeps running.
‘What are you doing?’ Magda keeps shouting. ‘Stop running around! We have to look tidy to go into the city. Mother says she’ll take us shopping as a treat.’
Evie knows that when her sister catches her, she’ll pound her for running away, but she can’t stop. She wants to run from Magda (angry), from Maricota (heartbroken), from her parents (shattered), from what happened before Luiza disappeared. She runs until the feeling of running inside her is faster than her legs can manage. Once she has built up enough momentum, she leaps, launching herself as hard and as high into the air as she can. When her body hits the ground, she lies still with her limbs splayed, all breath forced out, dazed yet pretending to be dead, moving only to turn onto her back and stare up at the sun.
Every few days for months now, whenever the pressure of everyone’s sadness builds up, becomes too much, she does some version of this. She walks calmly by her parents, smiling, until she reaches the edge of the orange grove and climbs up a tree trunk into its canopy. Then she jumps and tries to fly, arms flapping, legs a pinwheel of freckled white until she crumples in a heap on the ground, smelling dirt and azaleas. Luiza gone, Papa still sick, the family getting ready to leave Brazil—when her body can’t hold it all in and begins to itch and hum, only moving helps her feel something else. Running, that half-second of flying when she throws herself through a shred of sky (where Luiza might be) to the earth (where Luiza might be), and the shock of something cool when her face hits the ground. Sometimes she wonders what her parents would do if they knew, but they never notice anything. Not even when she scrapes her knees and palms, or bruises her elbow as she lands on twisted tree roots.
Evie thinks she knows now why Luiza filled her head with fairy stories, fables, tales about handless maidens. She and Magda sometimes thought Luiza meant to frighten them, keep them tethered to home and inside the walls, just like the maids do. But at last Evie understands: their sister was giving them secret knowledge of where she is. She lives beneath the surface of the water now, black pearls in her hair. She is a ghost, a point of light that hovers always in the corner of their eyes. But Evie doesn’t tell anyone this. She doesn’t tell any of Luiza’s secrets. Like how the day before she disappeared, Luiza had been so angry in the garden, standing under the cassia tree, and Evie couldn’t bear to ever see her like that, like a changeling or an ugly witch in one of her stories—Luiza’s mouth bent and angry, her lips pinched, eating themselves. But she’s not a witch; she’s a spirit, and Evie will find a way to tend to her. She won’t think about the cassia tree, the way her entire body vibrated afterwards, even her teeth. Inside her ears. Instead she runs quickly in and out of rooms, opens her eyes underwater, peers up at cloudy skies. She whirls around suddenly every time she detects a tremor of light, a ripple among the ferns, a beetle skittering across a rock, and she whispers, ‘Luiza?’ Her sister told her those stories so she would know how to examine the world more closely. Like this little thing here, lifeless and raw; a baby bird beneath Evie’s favourite pine tree.
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sp; When Magda finally catches up to her, Evie is crying, hunched over the bird in her cupped hands. ‘It must have fallen out of its nest.’
It’s bald and alien-looking, like the birds Maricota prepares before they go in the oven, but with a head much too big for its body, and folds of translucent, pimpled skin. As soon as she’s close enough, Magda reaches out and knocks the bird out of her hand.
‘What are you doing?’ Evie drops to the ground to pick the bird back up.
‘It’s disgusting! It could have a disease.’
‘It died of a broken neck.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t touch it.’
‘I’m going to bury it.’
And so they have to go through the entire ritual, just as Luiza showed them whenever they inevitably found the wretchedly appealing corpses of tiny animals: mice killed by the neighbourhood cats, birds that smashed against windows, their eyes two tiny, sorrowful black lines. All those froglets they accidentally crushed in Florida. An empty matchbox from the maids, a handkerchief to make the box more comfortable, a few amandine flowers from the garden. A cross of two sticks bound together with long grasses. Evie recites the ode of St. Francis, who loved all God’s beasts—the same one Luiza always used to recite. ‘All praise to you, Oh Lord, for all these brother and sister creatures.’ She says it under her breath, as though they’re cursing, because she’s scared Mama and Papa would be angry if they overheard, even though they’re nowhere around.
Before they fill in the hole with dirt, Evie says, ‘I want to give him these.’ She unclips the double gold hearts from her velvet Mary Janes. Magda fastens them to the outside of the matchbox. They’re lovely, gleaming against the dull, grey box.
‘You could give him your amethyst ring too,’ Magda says.
‘I just got it.’
‘He is going to be all alone in the ground.’
‘But I gave him my hearts.’
It’s coming again, the buzzing tension, as though somewhere inside her is about to rip open. But it would be rude to run away from the bird’s funeral. Tears slide down her cheeks and suddenly Magda looks tired, scratching the backs of her arms. She tells Evie it’s okay—she should keep her ring.
‘At least this time,’ Magda says, ‘we have something to bury. And anyway, we barely knew him.’
HUGO
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Hugo whispers to Evie and Magda, sprawled and sullen on the veranda floor, playing a weary game of cards.
Evie is already on her feet, but Magda keeps her cards fanned tightly, hidden even from him. ‘Where?’ she demands.
‘Let’s just go for a little tour and see where we end up, shall we?’
He forces brightness, but the truth is there are things he needs to understand, things only the girls can tell him. But Dora would not like it, what he’s asking of them. She mustn’t find out. She must think he was comforted by the ceremony earlier this week, as she was.
The funeral was, after all, for her. Like all of them, the chorus of do-gooders and well-meaners, she wants to move on. The ceremony was beautiful, in the way of many lies, and everyone came, which matters only because it matters to Dora. Some even cried, including Hugo’s former colleague Carmichael, though he tried to hide it. But when Dora cried, he forgot everyone else, and was ashamed to realize that it surprised him, her animal pain. He wanted to hold her, but she didn’t seem to notice when he moved closer, put his arm around her. And the breach between them widened. Then a show of self-control, the rearranging of garments, more psalms. Delicate breezes. For a few hours afterwards, catharsis: the sense they had been somehow purified. Or perhaps it was just a welcome respite from sensation, a kind of emptiness, because for those few hours he focused on shaking hands and accepting condolences. And on the beach after, with the girls and the flowers, that had been real to him at the time. A fugitive moment in which he believed that he could say goodbye, move on. But to where? There can be no other place, no life without Luiza. Whatever peace the ceremony gave him, it did not last.
Now he lays his hands gently on the girls’ shoulders as he eases them alongside the house, toward the front gate. ‘If you’re very good, we’ll go for ice cream afterwards. It will be our little secret, won’t it?’
Magda rolls her eyes.
They walk past all the houses in their neighbourhood, grand and gated like their own, then head down toward the beach, the girls walking ahead of him. They pass the banana grove and the old cottages that smell of wood smoke and hyacinth, brambles tangled around windows, tapping the panes. One cottage has a wooden nameplate: Shangri-La. He stops walking once they arrive at the dusty beach parking lot. He needs time to prepare himself for the girls’ memories, to ask them the questions they’ve already answered countless times. Even though they carry their beach buckets, red towels, a folding chair (he told them to bring whatever they had with them on the day Luiza disappeared), there is nothing of their chubby, child bodies left. How big they’ve grown, how tall and thin Evie’s become, while Magda is athletic. They are suddenly grown-up and strong. But so was their sister, and it hadn’t saved her.
At the beach, the water is glassy, the sun a blinding disc above the horizon.
‘Well?’ says Hugo, affecting a detached curiosity as best he can. ‘Where did you sit?’
‘Over there, by that stump,’ says Magda, pointing about fifty yards away.
They head toward the sheltered part of the beach, just before an outcropping of rough rocks that forms the breakwater, where they’ve sat countless times over the years with friends. This afternoon, their section of the beach is empty, and there’s nothing on the shore but some weathered logs, stumps—makeshift seating around a few scorched twigs. But Hugo can almost see their old things scattered about—beach balls, rough blankets, their battered, wicker picnic basket. The remembered remnants of past beach evenings, their skin a mottled lavender in the twilight. He lurches inside. It occurs to him that, as many times as Evie and Magda have had to answer these same questions, point out the relevant landmarks, he was never present. He couldn’t—Dora, the neighbours who were there that day, the police, even the maids!—they all came back here, looked this way and that, calculated distances, proposed where Luiza might reasonably be expected to swim. Or wash up. But until today, he couldn’t bear to come, to picture her last day too clearly.
‘Luiza was reading her book,’ Evie is saying now, ‘so we went over to play by the rocks.’
The girls run ahead to the outcropping, shovels knocking inside their buckets, which is a relief because he doesn’t want to arrive at the point of his absence too quickly, when he should have been there, protecting Luiza.
He had always tried to protect her. Like he had when she was little and they stayed at their country house in Petrópolis. Their cottage was primitive at first: a propane camp stove for making tea, wood heat. (Your Saxon blood! Dora teased. It makes you crave cold and privation.) Winter mornings and evenings were cool there, but it warmed enough to eat outside in the daytime. There were great hills all around them, rounded and lushly forested, so unlike the jagged, snow-capped Canadian mountains he’d seen in his youth, and waterfalls just steps from the house. And at night, monkeys and owls—both!—calling from the trees. A place where even the men who worked on the house used to ask if Luiza was a good baby, how much she ate, if she slept well at night. There was no country in the world, he was sure, that loved children better than Brazil. And he thought gratefully how almost by accident he’d ended up having a family here, among such peculiar and perfectly sentimental people.
When Luiza was a child, he had led her by the hand, winding around the garden beds until they found night-blooming angel’s trumpets. The flowers were large and white and flared at the bottom, hanging straight down from their stems like little pointed hats.
‘You must be careful,’ he chided gravely. ‘Remember that they have poison.’
‘You say that every time, Papa,’ Luiza answered, already wilful. ‘You can stop always say
ing.’
‘You stop saying, you little tyrant!’ Laughing, he lifted her up over his head so she could see the escarpment and the mountains beyond. ‘Now, touch the mountains and kiss the sky goodnight.’ And she wriggled about in his arms, performing a ritual of movement that was always the same, always unseen, until finally when she fell still and quiet, he would let her drop down into his arms and carry her to bed.
It wasn’t long after that Luiza was twice assaulted by the insect world in one month. First, she was hit on the head by a wooden swing at a park and knocked to the ground for several minutes. The gash on her forehead was easily stitched up, but soon it swelled, red and angry, its edges white. The doctor found eggs beneath the skin, a gelatinous mass of gametes laid in her wound. A week later, she stepped into a shoe hiding a poisonous spider and was left paralyzed for a month. It was a sign, he decided, from the animal kingdom that this country, however paradisiacal and lush, was a threat to his family. He dismantled all the wooden swings in all the parks in nearby towns for miles, bought every can of pesticide he could find, sprayed any insect he saw. He filled their shoes with newspaper and turned them upside down. Not even the beautiful, milky blue fireflies Luiza loved were safe. They hovered eerily toward him in the air, still steady in the tropical downpour. He reached for them, each a bright, slow-moving eye in the gloom, easily closing his fist around them. Finally, he pulled up all the angel trumpet flowers by their roots and told Luiza a storm had come in the night. During those early days, he was aware enough to try to hide most of this activity from Dora, and she said again he must be under too much stress. She begged him to get more sleep. But he knew then that even in Petrópolis, their secret haven, Luiza wasn’t safe.
‘This is where she fell asleep while we buried her,’ says Evie now. ‘We had to keep doing her feet over and over because she kept moving.’