by Sarah Faber
Brigitta is standing in front of a long row of bike stands holding dozens of bikes. She finds the man who is renting them out and then gestures for Evie. ‘Ask him how much for three. I think I have enough. Can you really ride them? Ask him if they really go on the beach.’
But Evie just points at several people biking away, across the sand, which must be different from American sand because Brigitta seems so flustered and excited. Evie takes Brigitta’s money and translates the negotiation of the rental—two hours—and as they mount the bikes, Brigitta is shaking a little, smiling and red-faced, and even Magda lets out a shriek of laughter as her bike wobbles in the sand. As Evie rides easily, smoothly past them, she sees the gravity and disapproval lift from her sister’s face, sees a girl she recognizes, the child Magda once was.
A voice echoes behind her. Hello, Luiza! Hello! But the voice is quieter now, landing lightly in Evie’s ear, then ringing out into silence. When she glances back, Luiza still isn’t there. But there is something familiar, something or someone propelling her to pedal harder.
Brigitta is here, and Magda, and they all labour against the packed wet sand until their revolutions become more steady, more sure. Evie leads the way, heading for the green hills on the horizon, her father an invisible beacon somewhere at the foot of them, pulling them toward him. As slow as they’re moving, she knows what they’re doing is necessary—he needs them. He needs her.
In Brazil, Evie has been shrinking, disappearing into treetops, too thin and pale and quiet to stand out amid all the colour, this endless sunshine. But here on the monochrome beach, she shines like Magda. Like Luiza. No longer skirting the margins the way she has for months, a nice, no-one girl. If Canada is all grey and white—snow shrouding the school campus, she and Brigitta arm in arm in twin charcoal blazers—maybe she will shine there too.
LUIZA
MARCH 1962
After she helped her father gather the flowers for the goodbye party, Luiza gave up looking for an excuse to tell her mother and simply snuck away to the tram stop. Taking the tram especially pleased her because it was something her mother would never do—she drove or was driven everywhere. Luiza found a seat and leaned into the open window, lulled by the repetitive sound of metal against metal. The constant clicking reminded her of going to the beach in Ipanema during those long summer months she spent with her grandparents, a memory that gave her no comfort now, unsure of how much of it was hers and how much she’d absorbed from others.
But one thing she knew for certain: as a child, she had been indulged. Tap-dancing lessons, horseback riding, Girl Guides, ballet performances at the Municipal Theatre. And yet it had felt very grave at times, being a child. Like some rough gale, blowing me all about… while I blaze and swoon, she’d once written to Carmichael. She blushed now, humiliation surging through her again when she remembered the stolen phrases scattered throughout her letters to him. My talents, I know, are thin.
The air around Luiza soon changed, cut by the smell of sea water. The tram was now rolling down Avenida Atlantica, approaching the expanse of Copacabana Beach, green mountains on either side and swarmed by surfer boys and bikini girls. They’d better not be going to the beach, she thought. Carmichael hadn’t said to bring a swimsuit. Their time together recently had felt strained. He was often distracted and never asked her to stay, and there were often long silences, periods when she hoped he might say the kinds of things he used to, that proved he was paying attention. Still, it felt exciting to go somewhere downtown she’d never been, some place her parents wouldn’t want her to go. She imagined how he would look at her, eyes just wet but not tearing, and how he’d say he never meant to fall in love with her—it was all supposed to be good fun—but he had. And she would answer that she was sorry if she hurt him, she’d never meant to, but what else could she do? They were her family and they needed her more.
And then, as though she’d conjured him, there he stood, waiting for her at the next stop, his perfectly smooth hair combed back and shining in the sun, watching people go by with his particular mix of bemusement and disdain. There he was, promising something else.
He led her to a small underground nightclub, practically deserted on such a beautiful, sunstruck day. Before sitting down at the sticky table where he had pulled out a chair for her, she took off the white kid gloves she wore to annoy her mother.
‘My hands, at least, can be washed. These are antique.’
‘A bit seedy, I know,’ he said without glancing up from the menu, ‘but tucked away. And don’t worry. They’ll still put an umbrella in your drink.’
Once they had ordered, Carmichael folded his hands on the table in front of him, as though she were a business associate he was making a show of deferring to.
‘So, how is the mood at home?’
‘Oh, tense I suppose. The maids are running themselves ragged. Mother is directing. I haven’t even begun to pack up my room and I emote whenever I get the chance. My father is… gardening. I suppose he’s the only sensible one.’
She wanted so much to seem detached and sophisticated, but she could feel the tears at the corners of her eyes and was paralyzed trying to decide which was the greater humiliation—to wipe them away or let them fall. Ever since she found out that the family would be moving, she had cried every day. For Carmichael, for her family. For the blurred outlines of the coming life she couldn’t make real in her mind.
‘Hey, hey. No tears allowed.’ Carmichael reached over the table with a napkin, which he handed to her, rather than wipe her eyes himself, as she’d hoped he would. ‘Maybe this will be good for you. No, I mean it. There are fascinating things happening in North America. Civil rights. Shouting in the streets. All those things you’re interested in. Have you decided what you’ll do there?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, everyone’s always saying they’re so much more advanced than we are. Women up there can do all sorts of things.’
‘Everyone’s always saying that, but nobody ever says what. What sorts of things? What should I do?’
He gave a weary little smile, the one that always made her feel defenceless, infiltrated in some way. She thought sometimes she wanted him to really see her, but not this part. Not this girl, suspended at the edge of adulthood and weeping despite having, as people kept reminding her, every advantage.
‘You could go to school! You’re very smart. All those books I gave you—you understand them better than I do.’
It was as though he were talking to an especially precocious child, offering admiring blandishments tinged with pity (for smart children always suffer). She had expected more, some frantic last-minute petition for her to stay. A few grave, stifled tears, at least. Not this embarrassing, abridged sympathy. She was about to leave for the ends of the earth, and he was being kind again.
‘I guess that’s what I will do,’ she said, trying to dab inconspicuously at her eyes with the rough napkin. ‘But I feel like I’ll be missing something here, I don’t know what exactly.’
‘Luiza—’ She looked up. He almost never said her name. ‘Nothing will change here. You could come back in twenty years and the same handful of millionaires will still be running the country, and all those people you say you want to help will still be scrabbling to survive, and those few of us in the middle will be just the same. Go do something for yourself.’
They were quiet for a long time and finally Carmichael put his hand over hers, for once unconcerned that someone might see. Maybe he was coming back to her at last. ‘This place is changing so fast,’ he said. ‘It’s getting more and more crass. You’re better off going to somewhere new. Somewhere clean. Some part of me wishes I could leave too.’
Then he pulled his hand back again. Urging her to go.
She struggled to keep her face calm. ‘I don’t know. My father left Canada for a reason. He always felt like a misfit there. Here, he fit in.’ If they stayed here, her father could live unashamed, unrestrained. ‘I think people here
barely notice. It’s my mother who is forcing this on us.’
Carmichael watched her intently, then picked up her hand again, slowly, before enclosing it in his own. ‘People notice. They just don’t say anything. Luiza, your father lost his job. I suppose they told you he retired?’
Luiza nodded. ‘To get treatment.’
‘Well, the company has been generous and he’ll get his pension, but with the inflation here it won’t be enough. Your mother is just trying to protect you all.’
Her neck felt suddenly blotched and itchy, and she scratched at it, unable to stop, in what she knew must be an ugly way. Her family exposed again. New, abrading truths: the money, the public fact of her father’s madness whispered about behind their backs. And again more thoughts of herself, always her tiresome, unavoidable self: she had hoped that he would ask her not to go, or that she would find the courage to stay, alone. But there really was no choice. Their money was nearly gone. In Canada there would be free care, maybe some peace—life viewed through a telescope, circumscribed. These were the best her family could hope for. She had to go.
Carmichael stood up abruptly. ‘Things are getting too solemn around here,’ he said, suddenly loud. ‘I think we need a song.’
And he was off to talk to the barman, bantering about music in that hollow, confrere way he dialled up with other men. He returned to their table and led her to the dance floor as the music began. Trumpets, clarinets, an up-tempo song that for some reason they slow-danced to. A voice that sounded tinny and far-off: I found my love in Avalon, beside the bay. She saw her own scraped knees and, behind them, her parents’ bisected bodies; headless torsos with languidly shuffling legs that had hypnotized her at the top of the stairs when she was six years old, folding her legs up uncomfortably high in front of her to avoid detection. I left my love in Avalon, and sailed away. She remembered her mother’s body swaying, legs intertwined with her father’s. The two of them moving in and out of her field of vision, her mother always laughing in the same way, his finger tracing and retracing a line back and forth across the small of her back. Every morn’ my memories stray, across the sea where flying fishes play. That particular laugh—throaty and warm—had become a kind of touchstone in her memory: when she heard it that night, sitting there on the stairs, even as a young child she knew that it was a sound she hadn’t heard in a long time. And as the night is falling, I find myself recalling, that blissful all-enthralling day. She had loved that laugh, soothed by how easily her father could bring out her mother’s lightest self. (Though, thinking of it now, she wasn’t sure she’d heard it since.) I dream of her in Avalon, from dusk till dawn. Maybe she’d laugh now, emulate her mother’s warm, quiet joy, try to force herself to feel carefree. But unease was creeping under her skin, which tickled unpleasantly, recognizing the familiar line traced on her lower back before she did. And so I think I’ll travel on, to Avalon. Then the collapse of space between what she remembered seeing and what she now felt against her skin, her hand reaching behind her to push Carmichael’s away until he stepped back. Close to my heart I pressed her, upon that golden yesterday. He stood facing her now, in the same way her father used to stand before her mother after they danced.
Luiza studied the line of his mouth, tired and turned down, set into a face so aged by disappointment. By her. He was bewildered, then genuinely concerned as she began to tremble violently. All these years, she had grafted her father’s head onto a body whose face she never actually saw. This body: Carmichael’s. She heard herself gasp, and static filled her ears. But the shame was as loud as the shock. She couldn’t let him decipher her bald reaction, to see any more of her.
‘I have to go,’ she stammered. ‘I’m sorry. Something at home.’ She turned and hurried out the door.
Now, in the chapel, Luiza struggles to stay upright and keep her gaze fixed at the back of the chapel, avoiding eye contact with her mother—who is staring at her from the front pew—so she doesn’t fall apart. Mother is here. She is here, she is here, she is here.
After the service, the sisters file out while her mother continues to wait in her seat, unmoving and staring blankly. She must be in shock to have sat still all this time. It will be awful, Luiza thinks, when she finally comes out of it.
All through Midday Prayers, she thought only of her parents, of Carmichael. Of herself. Did she even sing? She can’t remember. Studying her mother, she reddens with an old shame. She’s been here almost a year, and after the endless hours spent in prayer and meditation, still she can’t be a better person. Can’t rinse herself clean. She was still ugly inside, still angry. Maybe she was a fraud, after all; did it rise off her, a brackish stink? Could everyone tell? The same thoughts loop endlessly, and some days she finds she’s more tired than when she first arrived. She prays: When you lie down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet. But it always feels like begging.
Luiza unfastens and refastens the scarf she wears to keep her hair back, then hesitates for another moment before going to her mother, still hoping some pure feeling, some truth, will purge her, before all the questions begin.
DORA
Standing outside the doors of the chapel after Midday Prayers, Dora watches Luiza carefully, half expecting her real daughter to burst through the body of this changeling. But Luiza is motionless and silent—a contrived calm—as though waiting for her mother to speak first.
Dora doesn’t protest as she’s led, once again, out to the gardens behind the convent. She follows Luiza, unsure of how her body can be moving even though she is empty. What is propelling her forward? She watches her legs move in front of her, but they don’t feel like her legs. They can’t be. A little voice is telling her that she should be shouting, she should be thanking God and shaking her daughter and embracing her. But she is too numb to do anything but follow. Her body craves emotion, waits for it, but nothing comes.
The air outside is cooler and damp, fragrant with orchids. Pennywort climbs the plaster walls, its leaves like tiny lily pads, and purple passion flowers tangle behind the concrete bench where they now sit. Luiza seems older, inelastic somehow, more austere, a newly boyish haircut framing her face. She keeps staring at Luiza’s hair, thinking how short and dark and strange it is now, and how vain she used to be about its beautiful auburn colour.
‘You’ll come home,’ Dora says finally, with such sudden force that, for a moment, Luiza looks startled, as though she might believe her.
Luiza touches her mother’s arm tentatively, then says quietly, ‘I can’t.’
Dora slaps her hard, but her tingling palm, Luiza’s sharp intake of breath, the pink stripes across her child’s cheek she now reaches up to touch—none of this brings relief. Luiza limply tolerates the strangling, minute-long embrace that follows, but just as Dora is about to let go, Luiza holds on to her so tightly that she feels hopeful. Everyone else is attending to afternoon chores inside, so the grounds around the convent are empty, but soon Luiza disentangles herself, seeming embarrassed and claustrophobic, and pulls Dora up by the wrist. She begins to lead her around the orchard, nervously pointing out the monkey banana and maracock trees, and how well tended they are and how their fruits are the same kind they had with breakfast this morning. But Dora pays no attention because she’s focused on Luiza’s hand holding her own, absorbed by its network of veins, its thin tendons. This real hand, intact, with blood moving through it. Not waterlogged or decomposing.
‘You’ll come home,’ Dora says again. ‘We’ll find a way to explain it all.’
‘I know how awful I must seem to you,’ Luiza says. ‘But I did this for you. For all of you. For Evie and Magda most of all.’ Her arms stiffen at her sides, just like they did when she was a child and had something terribly important to proclaim. ‘I’ll hurt them,’ she keeps saying, her skin splotching red in places. ‘I’ll hurt you.’ Then realizing she’s pulled a handful of leaves off one of the wild cherry trees and crumpled them in her fist, she lets them fall to the gro
und, astonished, all her affected serenity exhausted. ‘Look what I’ve done,’ she whispers now, almost to herself. ‘Everyone here loves these trees.’
And though her daughter stands before her, unquestionably alive, spattered with a hot rash, Dora can hardly recognize this woman as her own child. She wonders if her daughter, too, has been subsumed, like Hugo. If Luiza was somehow driven to this place, to cruelty. To another kind of madness. What if Carmichael lied? What if he hurt her in some other, more permanently wounding way he couldn’t admit to? What if what if what if? Those two words have tormented her for a year, and now their register, the breadth of their possible answers—it has all changed, and it should be beautifully so. She doesn’t need to wonder what happened to Luiza anymore, only why, a question that will, in time, be answered. No more imagining, again and again, lungs filling with water. Maybe now she’ll stop dreaming about Luiza’s body rotting in a tangle of seaweed, nipped at by fish.
Deus, in adjutorium meum intende.
The windows of the chapel are open, and chanting comes pouring out. Something bristles in the small of Dora’s back and tiny quills rise up all through her body. She allows herself to imagine that they are singing for her before turning back to Luiza, who is gazing at the open windows.
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.
‘I know about Carmichael,’ Dora says.
Amen. Alleluia.
After a long pause, Luiza says, ‘You don’t know everything. And he’s not why I left.’
‘Then why? What makes you so special, so very threatening, that you’re unable to live with your own family?’
‘There’s something wrong with me. Just like Father. I wanted to protect you.’