All Is Beauty Now

by Sarah Faber

  ‘I don’t know. She really didn’t confide in me that much. Sometimes I think she just wanted to get away from Villa Confederação for a little while.’

  ‘She was barely speaking to me that last year. Not since we got back from Florida.’

  ‘Girls that age always torture their mothers. It’s the natural order. Otherwise you’d never let them go.’

  ‘She must have said something to you.’

  ‘She sometimes talked about being a writer. And of being useful in some way.’

  ‘No, no—’ says Dora, batting her hand. ‘I mean yes, she said that but she never actually did any writing. That was her problem. She was always dreaming. She may as well have wanted to be a unicorn. I kept encouraging her to pick a field, to look into schools. In Canada, she could study anything. I just wanted her to focus. To choose something.’

  There is tension in his face, muscles clenching. He kicks at a loose stone. ‘I think you’re right. I don’t think she knew what she wanted.’

  ‘But did she tell you anything? Tell me what she said.’ Dora’s voice is low, strangled, threatening violence and tears. She pulls him to her now, gathering the open collar of his shirt in her fists. She tries to resist actually touching his body, out of disgust, out of fear. Because she might not let go. ‘Tell me.’

  He exhales, grinding the fingers of his left hand into his forehead. ‘She said that when she told you she didn’t want to go to Florida, you insisted she had nothing else in her life. No better options. She said you made her feel as though she had no life of her own.’

  Dora is silent now, staring into the mud, startled that Luiza actually listened to anything she said. But her words are barbed and layered now, in ways she never intended.

  ‘I did this to her,’ she says. ‘I can’t—I can’t tell him. He’d never forgive me.’

  ‘He did this,’ Carmichael says, wrapping his hands over hers, still gripping his collar, though almost absentmindedly. ‘He keeps doing this to all of you.’

  But she’s barely listening to him anymore. She was the one who failed Luiza, and in countless ways.

  Somewhere in her sinews, her slackening ligaments, she registers his arms encircling her, pulling her up, closer. A sparrow lands in a puddle a few yards from her feet. Even here, there are sparrows. Maybe Luiza washed ashore here and saw this very one. Dora remembers that most of the people they’ve met in the village have been genuinely kind. Surely nothing bad would have happened to her here. Maybe she simply kept going. But Dora cannot hold off the fear, the terrible image of her daughter, vulnerable and without money, nearly naked, and these poor, hungry people eating her alive.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she says, straightening. ‘Tomorrow you’ll take me. All the places you went with her.’

  As she steps back, she feels his arms loosen, and it’s a relief, to be released from the glut of his need, his always wanting more.

  ‘Yes,’ he repeats. ‘Tomorrow.’

  EVIE

  Evie could tell that Magda was in one of her hungry, black moods. Luiza used to warn her to stay away from Magda when she was bored. She’ll eat you up. But even when she saw those hunting eyes fixed on her, she couldn’t stay away; when Magda is bored, Evie is all she has to play with. So now they are locked together in their toy house, with its scaled-down table and chairs and shrunken tea set, each holding a tiny teacup containing half a bottle’s worth of aspirin so they can see who can swallow the most before throwing up. Everything is diminutive and insufficient. Even the pills are child-sized, pink and powdery, although Evie can already feel how they’ll drag down her throat because they have no water and Magda pushed the key under the door so they can’t get out. In here, Evie can’t run or jump—she can barely move around. This is the first time they’ve played alone together since they ran heats with Brigitta yesterday, and all Evie can think about is how to get back to her new friend, where else they might go. But where else is there?

  Soon enough, they’ll be together all the time, with endless things to do. She had told Brigitta that once they arrived in Canada, she and Magda would be going to Aubrey Ladies College. ‘It’s the sister academy to the private boarding school where my father went to high school on a scholarship,’ she said. She’d overheard her parents discussing it, found the colour pamphlet in their bedside drawer.

  Then Brigitta said, ‘I’ll go too! My parents will be happy to get rid of me.’

  It struck Evie that maybe her parents felt the same way: after all, they were sending her and Magda even farther away.

  When they pledged their plans to go to Aubrey Ladies College together, Evie saw their faces alone grafted onto all the photos from the school’s pamphlets: she and Brigitta at the Commencement Day garden party wearing white fluttery dresses, pinning corsages to each other’s collars; Brigitta riding horseback and Evie laughing on skis, holding a rope attached to her saddle, trailing behind. She and Brigitta at graduation, wearing their caps and gowns, connected to all the other girls by that long, flowered garland but separate in their hearts. In those frozen, future moments, there were tear-streaked faces, oaths of devotion.

  But first Evie must survive Magda. After she forces down her first aspirin (Evie always has to go first), she reminds Magda about the book Luiza used to read to them about a doll named Gertrude, who is beaten by her owner and runs away.

  ‘Then she bought a little girl named Annie,’ says Evie, ‘at a store that sells children to toys who lead them about on leashes. Sometimes the toys have parties and eat heaps of ice cream and candy and give nothing to the children.’ One night, Gertrude gives Annie a bath, but then she decides she’s hungry and eats up all her dinner before going to bed. In the night, she wakes up quite suddenly and realizes she’s left her child alone in the bath, and when she finds her, Annie is blue, her teeth chattering; she never called out or complained, not once. Gertrude sews her new clothes and takes her to a party. ‘In the end, they agree children shouldn’t belong to dolls, or dolls to children. But only after Annie is nearly eaten by a lion.’

  ‘She never read us a book like that,’ says Magda, her mouth still a flat line, even after four aspirin. ‘We never even had that book.’

  Evie doesn’t bother arguing with her, even though she knows they did and Luiza used to tell her if she wasn’t careful, she’d end up as Magda’s child. Evie hadn’t understood what Luiza meant. She’d always thought of herself as Luiza’s child, or Maricota’s child, or Odete’s, because they were more like real mothers. They read her books and played games with her and never lost their patience or told her to go find something to do. Maybe she could be Brigitta’s child now? Brigitta, who seems to know about distant worlds and who, as Magda ran into the twilight, whispered in Evie’s ear that she was the pretty one. Brigitta, who she wishes she could run to right now. Because being Magda’s child means she’ll have to be nearly devoured before getting any mothering. But even when Magda hurt her, Evie always felt like they were almost one person. So Evie studies her sister now and tests her, silently asking, Magda, why haven’t you said anything? Why aren’t we telling anyone? And when there is no answer—just Magda pretending to pour tea from the tiny teapot into their teacups—Evie knows her sister can’t hear her; they are separate people. Still, it seems impossible that she could know something Magda doesn’t, that such a separation could exist between them.

  Evie keeps hoping Magda will ask her—demand to know—because the pressure of holding what she knows inside her is too much. Luiza’s face, white and puckered and awful, the flowers slipping over her eye, her fingers gripping Evie’s shoulders, impossibly strong. Even stronger than Magda. But still Magda says nothing, asks nothing, doesn’t even look up. Tell. Evie wants to, but it’s all muddy now, shameful and red in a way she can’t express. Luiza didn’t want anyone to know, and Magda will not tolerate uncertainty.

  Who will rescue her? With Mama gone every morning before anyone wakes up and Papa getting more and more wound up, and the maids preoccupied, she
is trapped here in this toy house, pinned by Magda and her pitiless attention, while a whole world waits outside. A world with sky and sea and Brigitta and other, nameless mysteries. So Evie, too, sets her face, folds up into the smallest possible version of herself, and thinks about how to escape.

  Finally, Magda speaks. ‘Remember that time in Florida when that trashy girl called you a jungle monkey? And I saved you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  But that’s a lie. When they had first arrived in Florida, children circled them on the sidewalk outside their rented house, asking all kinds of questions. The boy from next door was always chewing gum like an animal, and there was a girl with dirty feet who had a game of jacks but wouldn’t let them play with her because, she said, they were forun. There was a queer girl in the neighbourhood who twitched and couldn’t talk, yipping out the same sharp sound—Nya! nya!—as she lurched over warped legs. One day she limped by and the dirty girl threw rocks wrapped in candy wrappers at her. The nya-nya girl jerked around on her crooked spindles trying to pick them up and it was the worst thing Evie had ever seen, her face turning red as she wrapped her arms around herself, and that’s when the dirty girl called her a stupid-jungle-monkey-crybaby. Magda went inside and came back out with Dora’s jar of white rice. She removed her sandals and white socks, filled one sock with rice, and tied a knot in it. She began to swing the rice sock up over her head to build the necessary momentum, and the little boy went running, still smacking away on his gum, knowing what came next. The rice-sock hit the dirty girl in the head and knocked her out. The nya-nya girl was sitting now, still opening candy wrappers, while Evie just stood there crying.

  ‘But you were safe,’ says Magda.

  That’s one thing that has always been clear between her and her sister: Magda is allowed to torment Evie, but no one else could. That was Evie’s thin bit of reward. And she has always tolerated Magda’s occasional brutality because there was a sense of justice to it. No longer. Their world has gotten too small. Without Luiza, there is no one left to help draw Magda away. And now, new terrors: captivity.

  ‘I have to pee,’ Evie says, and Magda hands her the little teapot, white with pink flowers, her lower jaw protruding.

  ‘First tell me that you remember.’

  The windows—she remembers the windows. Evie jumps up and forces a handle with the heel of her shoe, and it opens just enough. Squeezing out of the little house, she feels gigantic, chalky aspirin rising up in her throat.

  Magda is shouting that they’re not done and grabbing at the edge of her skirt, her trailing leg, but Evie kicks at her with all her strength and manages to wriggle out the window. She sprints and only looks back once she’s at the back patio doors. Magda’s a giant now too, halfway out the window, Godzilla beating on the roof of their toy house.

  Evie keeps running, heading toward the trees at the back of their property. But then she stops, pivots, and turns back. Magda isn’t the only person who will protect her. She hurries through the narrow passageway alongside the house, then through the front yard toward the gate. Toward Brigitta.

  HUGO

  In the morning, Hugo wakes early, but Dora has already left the house. Quietly, he goes into the office, locks the door behind him, and again forces open the drawer to retrieve the letter he first found almost two weeks ago. He heard her arrive home late last night, but she didn’t come into his room like she usually did to say goodnight. They’ve been in separate bedrooms for several years now—it makes things easier, they tell themselves, when he has trouble sleeping, which is often—but he can usually count on a ‘goodnight’ at least, and a chat about the day, however brief. He shouldn’t be surprised by her gradual pulling away—he’d all but dared her to do it.

  Once, a few years ago, when she’d turned to him in the night, wrapped her arm around him from behind, and reached for his cock, he could only cry quietly. With all the medication, he was motionless, insensate, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth. Instead, he told her to go ahead and find someone else if she needed to, never believing she really would. So many moments, he sees now, when he should have confessed to her, should have at least touched her, he absolved himself. Once his medication was sorted out, once his treatment was successful, he told himself, they would come back together. Once he was better. But then the doctors said there was no better, there was only symptom management. And so he pretended that if she did turn to someone else for a time, he could live with that—maybe it would distract her from his failings. But love? Did she love this man the way he said in the letter he loved her? He hadn’t truly believed that possible. And he is surprised, he is. In all the years since he’s been sick and the girls were young and a thousand tiny interstices widened between them, even during the periods of separation, he still imagined the other side. A future point when he would recover himself and she would again sit astride him, her skin blotchy and vivid, whispering fuck fuck fuck, a word she never otherwise said—

  Suddenly, the girls come bounding through the doors of his office, waving sheets of paper in his face. Permission slips. A parent needs to sign. They want to attend a month-long day camp at the YWCA in Rio with the new girl—the one staying across the way with the Cavanaghs. She’s related somehow. Can they? Can they? Today is the last day to register. They have to drop off the forms today.

  ‘But you’ll be leaving soon, my pets.’ A slip. Be more careful. Say we. ‘Do you want to start and then have to stop early when we leave?’

  They stare up at him; equal parts silent challenge and indulgence. This is what they’ve been hearing for months: we’re leaving soon. And yet here they stay, in Eden-cum-limbo. Now he must shine, be a giant to them, conceal all aftershocks.

  ‘Fine, fine.’ He whisks the papers from the girls’ hands and holds them over his head as though taunting a puppy. ‘I’ll sign. But first you need to do something for me. Tell me, where is Mummy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Magda.

  Evie echoes, ‘We don’t know.’

  Magda is sullen, crossing her arms over her chest. He can tell she knows her mother is up to something, but she doesn’t know what. Her lack of power in this moment disturbs her. Evie, on the other hand—she knows something more. See how she glances away, shifts her weight from foot to foot, fists the pockets of her dress. She doesn’t want to betray her mother or set him spinning, but look how the edges of her mouth have begun to tremble.

  ‘I know how much you want to go to this camp with your friend,’ he says, fixing his gaze on Evie. ‘And I will take you. Once you tell me.’

  ‘I saw her get dropped off the other night,’ she says quietly before Magda kicks her in the ankle. ‘Ow!’

  Hugo heaves her up into his arms like he did when she was little, rubs her ankle vigorously, and strides away from Magda, who follows but can’t keep up. ‘Yes, pet?’

  ‘She always does that!’

  ‘I know, love. I won’t let her do it again.’

  ‘It’s not fair—she never gets punished.’

  ‘How quickly you become little girls again. Magda’—Hugo swivels and faces her, Evie still in his arms—‘go to your room.’

  Magda’s face is compressed with worry now, her anger gone. ‘But she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She sees these little things and makes up whole stories in her head. Like when you went for a walk the other day. She thought you were leaving us. Going to Canada without us.’

  ‘To your ROOM!’ The voice that comes out is deep, serrated, and frightens even him. Magda flies up the stairs. Evie starts to cry and buries her face in her arms, a jumble of bony corners against his chest. He traces her spine with his hand. ‘I’m sorry. I lost my temper. I’m sorry. You can go to the camp. You don’t need to say.’

  ‘She was with Mr. Carmichael,’ she says through her tears. ‘He dropped her off down the street.’

  Carmichael. That oily pretender. They’d been friends for a time, when they worked together at BrazCan, and he had hel
ped Hugo, covered for him at work. But over the years, Hugo has caught him staring hungrily at Dora now and then, and guessed that there were ulterior motives: an infatuation. Everyone other than his poor, sweet wife knows Carmichael is a skirt-chaser. But still, Hugo never thought much of it. He never saw Dora look back—she didn’t even seem to notice. But maybe the absence of looking was the look, something masquerading as nothing. Maybe she is far smarter than him after all.

  This, at least, is one last thing he can do for his family: rid them of this interloper. If he cannot defend his girls, he fears they will be forever beset by loss. Like their sister, Evie and Magda came into the world traumatically, and he’s feared for them ever since.

  As Evie continues to cry into his shoulder, all he can think about now is Dora, pregnant: she always became plump and he loved her that way. She was embarrassed by how she ate constantly, but it was endearing to him. The only time she allowed herself to lose control. He would come into the dining room in the morning, find her with crumbs on her dress, her fingers shining with butter or bacon fat, hurriedly wiped from the pan with her fingers. She was often uncomfortable, with aching hips and sciatica, but she would still place his hand on her stomach before bed, pressing his palm in harder than he ever would have. ‘Hello, baby,’ they would say, over and over. It moved far more than he had expected, ever-present yet alien.

  The birth took too long. Three other fathers came and went, and occasionally a nurse appeared to say that things were not progressing well, the baby would not ‘descend.’ (Through his anxiety: the image of a tiny baby at the top of some stairs, a crowd of people in hospital whites at the bottom trying to coax it down.) In the end, Dora was cut open, which she said afterwards had been a relief—the drugs let her sleep. It seemed unfathomable—a human inside a human, the expectation that you could exit any other way but through a bloody, gaping wound. The preposterous physics of it all! Two days later, the incision was still oozing. An anxious nurse called for the surgeon. Evisceration. Bowels protruding from muscle just beneath the skin. They said she would have died had they not caught it quickly. Died? A hundred years ago maybe, but not now. Surely not now. He’d never been so afraid as when they wheeled her back into the operating room. But the rupture was tidily repaired and once she was out of recovery, she held their sleeping baby for a full half-hour. Even through the subsequent infection, she only cried when she thought he wasn’t looking. She kept saying it was all worth it. A few months after Luiza was born, he had to leave them both to go to war.