by Sarah Faber
How hollow and comical the story rings in her ears now that they’ve been with the same man, now that she’s been so exposed. She rolls onto one elbow to look at Luiza, her anger, for the time being, drained away.
‘Carmichael… we didn’t know what he was. I think he must be sick, and it was him after all who did everything, not us. Maybe it doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters.’
‘But maybe it won’t when we leave here and we’re in a new place and we don’t have to see him.’ Dora hears her voice grow thinner rather than lighter. ‘Maybe we won’t even feel like ourselves anymore. We’ll be new people, Canadian people. We’ll be stoic and hardy. We can still hide what you’ve done. Come up with some story. I know we can fix it.’
‘You left too. Can we fix that?’
‘I never left! I never—’ She can’t pretend she doesn’t know what Luiza means.
‘When Father was in the hospital and he started coming. You may as well have left.’
But Dora can’t answer, can’t acknowledge what she knows to be the first, the smallest heart broken in all of this. She lies back on the bed. Hoping feebly to exploit any feelings of love and nostalgia for their family that the elevator story might have inspired in Luiza, Dora tells her about the ship they’ll take to Canada, tears sliding into her ears. There are performances every night, and a full band and a swimming pool. They’ll bring you breakfast in your room with a single rose in a doll-sized vase. But as she speaks, Dora hears herself listing off the kind of diversions that could only please the child she lost years ago, so then she tells her the truth: as you move out into the deeper water and the land behind you disappears and you see nothing but water for weeks, something in you changes. You feel distilled, reduced to your essential self, and lesser things fall away. You moult, leaving your old, shedded skin behind you in the waters.
‘And what about when you arrive? And you have to move in, and unpack, and fill out hospital forms and school applications. What then?’
Dora can think of nothing to say, so Luiza answers for her.
‘I love you all so much, I do,’ and here her voice catches and Dora knows that, for now, she’s telling the truth. ‘But I already have a new self here. Or I could. But I don’t think I can keep hold of it if I leave.’
‘And when you tire of this,’ Dora says finally. ‘What will you do then?’ She asks this matter-of-factly, almost robotically, without any accusation in her voice.
‘I could be different. Better. I could do some good.’
LUIZA
For what feels like hours Luiza and her mother lie together on her tiny bed, arguing and explaining and tiring themselves into a long silence that Dora finally breaks.
‘Are you awake?’
Luiza doesn’t answer. Her neck has seized up from curving into the crook of her mother’s, but she tries not to move. She can hear the prayers carried through the open windows, and she feels both trapped and like she’s surging inside. Wide awake. She came here to get some peace. All she wants is for her mind to stop for a while, to be still. Even if she doesn’t yet believe what the sisters believe, couldn’t she live as they do? Meditate, pray, contemplate. Be content making candles or helping a poor child? Wouldn’t that be a better life for her?
Dora asks her again, ‘Are you awake?’
They both know she is, but Luiza remains silent. She wants to ask about the girls, about Evie especially—is she all right? Or has she changed, been permanently damaged in some way—but she can’t bring herself to ask. The shame still sits in her throat, undissolved. Eventually, Dora turns her back to her. She doesn’t feel those first little twitches of sleep in her mother’s body, but at least there won’t be any more talking for now. She almost wishes she could have thought up some dramatic story to tell her mother, an awful lie about Carmichael—rape, impregnation—something that might make her flight to the convent more comprehensible. Some tale that would reassure her that Luiza was innocent—that someone, in all of this, might be innocent.
She rises quickly from the bed, unwinding her mother’s arm from around her shoulder. ‘I have to go for the Antiphon of Our Lady,’ she says quickly. ‘I’ve missed so much already. I have to go.’
Luiza kisses her mother’s hand in a hurried awkward way, then asks her to stay and rest until she returns in an hour.
‘I’ll bring you some dinner,’ she says, still not meeting her mother’s eye. ‘You can sleep in my room tonight. I’m sure they won’t mind.’
As she leaves the room, she sees her mother, hollow-cheeked and bewildered, staring at her from the bed.
Luiza manages to arrive at the chapel a few minutes early, and watches the sisters file in; so many creamy brown, smiling faces, like those of Maricota and Odete. She wonders if her mother thinks she’s a monster. What else could willingly abandon its own family?
But what Luiza hasn’t told her mother is that she’s haunted by them, even here. In the convent orchards live Evie and Magda, running wild, hanging from trees that, if she unfocuses her eyes, almost become the trees behind their house. She thinks of Dora whenever she makes anything—how Dora would do it better, more precisely. More beautifully. Of course, she misses her father most of all, but she pushes those thoughts back. She repeats her own prayer, Not forever. Just for now. She’ll find him again one day, she tells herself, and maybe he’ll be only the best parts of himself. She tries to imagine her family as little figurines she takes in and out of an imaginary dollhouse, shrunken down and manageable, unchanging, never ageing. But at night they unspool, balloon back into their real, cumbersome human shapes and sizes, crowding her dreams, their faces etched by grief.
Already her borders are dissolving, and everything she’s done to safeguard herself is slipping away. Soon she’ll break down and be reabsorbed by them. Her family, seething with need.
Luiza had convinced herself that she’d never see Carmichael again. After her awful realization at the café that afternoon, surely he wouldn’t dare seek her out. Once they left Brazil, she could begin to forget him and try, in time, to face her mother again but never, ever tell her the truth: That she couldn’t even have an affair without following in her mother’s footsteps! It was too perverse, too shameful to think about. For now, she busied herself helping the maids prepare for the goodbye party and carefully avoided looking at her mother. There had been more tension between them as their departure date approached, allowing Luiza’s guilty hostility to slide beneath the troubled surface unnoticed.
She was still arranging the long, thick stalks of bird of paradise in a vase when she saw Carmichael calmly crossing the threshold of the front door, handing his jacket to Maricota, and smiling indulgently as Magda, always tasked with greeting guests, curtsied. (And where was Evie? She was supposed to be helping.) He appeared as bored and insolent as ever; it had never been sadness, or a turbid inner life—she’d only imagined a better story for his empty face. But as Dora walked up, apologizing for not being there sooner to greet them, his face relaxed, became a new face. Why had Luiza never noticed it before? And poor, meek Alice standing behind him, folding her coat neatly before handing it over. Luiza’s hands closed into fists, the stiff tongue of the plant’s blossom digging into her palm. It was clear to her now that he’d always go back to Alice—he probably even loved her, in his way. Maybe he would have left her for Dora, but from that point on, his affairs were just shallow cuts in a dreary forever-marriage. Luiza was just another girl, unseen, unheard. Waiting for a man to notice her.
Try as she might to dismiss Carmichael as a scrap of material for later use in a book about dead marriages and miserable, used-up people, Luiza knew that he saw her. Her vanity and her effort, trying to play at adulthood and sophistication. She had liked having a secret, liked seeing Alice at parties and knowing something about her husband that his own wife did not. But an ugliness soon sprouted from her, some greedy, entitled outgrowth hidden from everyone but her. It demanded things—that was how she thought of it;
it wasn’t really her. And Carmichael, too, played a part, seemingly unable to resist her, even though he kept saying it was all so wrong.
Together, Luiza and Carmichael had been negligent. They’d never gotten caught, but she knew their lies had wounded people. The tissue between herself and her parents, between Carmichael and Alice, was damaged. All because she’d wanted to grasp a few thin pleasures. And then she’d begun to care for him, assigning qualities and depth to that opaque hole at the centre of him. That Dora-shaped hole.
The stem of the bird of paradise now lay bruised in her hands, and she did her best to hide it in the vase behind the other flowers. When Luiza glanced up again, Carmichael was staring at her in such an uncharacteristic way, his face softening. Open. He seemed so sad, so sorry—was it all calculated? She went to change the music to something upbeat and then danced, too eagerly, clapping her hands until they stung and trying to shake her hips like the girls on American television. The guests had to move back to make room for her. As she danced, she tried to see out of the corner of her eye if Carmichael was watching, but he was gone, and the living room was getting crowded now. She couldn’t find him in the kitchen. Maybe the garden. Luiza went to the glass doors that opened out onto the veranda and looked out.
Yes, there he was. And her mother too.
They chatted politely, but then of course they knew that anyone could be watching them, as she was. Was her mother leaning back slightly, uncomfortably, or was Luiza imagining it? Yes—almost undetectably. Trying to get away from him. Not even wanting him. Luiza slid the glass door open as quietly as she could and strained to hear.
‘Yes, still so much to do,’ her mother said, still leaning away from him. ‘In fact, I should probably get back.’
‘Well, then. I won’t keep you.’
He had to reach forward to take Dora’s hand. He kissed it, then curled it into his own. When he let go, the white corners of a note poked past the fleshy web of her closed fist. Her mother seemed to shake her head at him, then stopped herself and shoved both hands deep into her skirt pockets. An audible intake of breath as she moved toward the door and saw Luiza standing there.
‘Hello, darling,’ Dora said as she pushed past her. ‘Enjoying the party?’ And then her mother was gone, absorbed into the crowd inside.
As Carmichael went to follow Dora back into the house, Luiza put her hand out to stop him, knowing how dangerous it was. When he turned to face her, she raised her eyebrows, begging him to deny it. But as he squeezed past her in the doorway, his mouth was a white line, shut tight, denying nothing.
Smearing away her tears, Luiza headed to the back of the garden. She found a quiet place behind an orange tree and took out her cigarettes and lighter, then startled when she heard a small voice. She dropped a cigarette and ground it into the grass with her heel.
‘I made this for you,’ said Evie, crawling out on hands and knees from under the branches of the pink cassia tree. There was a crown of wilted pink and white flowers sitting slightly askew on her head. ‘It was very hard because these aren’t the right kind of flowers,’ she said, taking the crown off her head and placing it on Luiza’s. ‘You can’t pierce their stems, so I had to sort of braid them together.’
‘It’s so pretty. Thank you, baby girl.’ Luiza forced a smile, though she wanted so badly to be alone. (Why couldn’t she ever be alone?) She repositioned the crown slightly on her head and kissed Evie on the forehead. ‘There we go. Now I’m a real princess. But you had better go help Magda with the cocktail onions. You know she hates the smell, and she’ll come looking for you soon enough.’
‘But now you’ve made it crooked,’ Evie said, reaching her hands up. ‘It’s supposed to be like this.’
‘It’s fine. Just go now.’ And as she swatted her younger sister’s hand away, she saw disappointment film over her eyes. Careless, she thought. She was becoming a careless person, but she didn’t know how to stop. She repositioned the crown uncomfortably low on her forehead, as Evie demanded. ‘There. I fixed it. Now run along. I promise to wear it all night, even if Mother gets cross.’
Evie seemed placated and skipped off, and Luiza went in among the orange trees again, angling her body so that her back was to the house and garden. She lit a cigarette and was inhaling deeply when a voice behind her made her jump.
‘Miss me?’
When she turned around, she saw Carmichael’s tall, easy stance and his full, scornful mouth, and for a moment she had the impulse to kiss him. Instead, she brought her cigarette to her lips again and then, exhaling, said, ‘You’re vile.’
‘I’m sorry about just now,’ he said, reaching for her, muttering consolations, but she pulled away. ‘You know I couldn’t risk your mother seeing.’
She touched at a speck of tobacco on her tongue, imagining it made her appear harder, uncaring. ‘But I saw you.’
He gazed at her, confused. Always that same weak smile. But then his hands fluttered up in an uncharacteristically sincere gesture of supplication, and she held her breath.
‘It was because of gestures like that,’ she said, now shifting her body away from his, ‘that I’ve sometimes believed I actually care for you, that I might matter to you. But you already know that. The effect you have.’
‘You do matter to me,’ said Carmichael, yanking on her arm, trying again to get Luiza to face him, which she finally did.
‘Well, you disgust me. You’re a sad, middle-aged man who can’t let go of a woman who finished with you more than a decade ago. You’re worth less to her than a madman.’
His face scarcely twitched but she saw it—deflation. His body registering that she knew the truth. Then, a slight flush of colour in his cheeks.
‘And you’re just as heartless as she is,’ Carmichael spat. He thrust his arms out violently and grabbed her at the waist with one hand and between her legs with the other, pulling her toward him as he did. It hurt more than she could have imagined and she gasped, tumbling into him, grabbing his shoulders to steady herself.
He spoke into her ear, clear and vicious, ‘But she tasted so much better than you.’
Her whole body seemed to fail her, and she buckled, sliding to the ground, surprised by the sound of her sudden, dry sobs. She watched his legs step back from her—a ruined animal—slowly and deliberately, and turn to walk toward the house. Even as she lay heaving in the dirt, there was a part of her that wanted to call him back. Wanted to stay in Brazil and be her mother’s deficient surrogate, to cease to be herself. If she remained there long enough she might extinguish, breath by breath, until she vanished altogether. Despicable thought. She was willing herself up off the ground when two scraped knees appeared before her, two feet enclosed in scuffed Mary Janes. Evie reached out a trembling hand to help Luiza up.
She sat up quickly, trying to wipe her eyes and smooth her hair and brush dirt from her dress all at once. ‘Hello, pet! Don’t cry… we were just play-fighting. Just playing a little game.’
‘You have to tell Mama he was mean to you. She’ll make him leave.’
‘No! Evie, you can’t tell anyone. Promise me? Don’t tell.’
‘But she’ll get angry at him. So will Papa. He was so mean to you.’
Luiza rose up on her haunches and pulled Evie down roughly so that the girl knelt before her, still trembling in the face of her sister’s clouded, staring eyes. ‘Mother can’t know about this. She’ll get hurt. Promise me. Don’t tell.’
Evie looked down, and Luiza knew the child was incapable of keeping a secret. Her little sister always wanted to please, and every feeling she had flickered across her face, intelligible to anyone who knew her.
‘Promise?’
Still, Evie said nothing and Luiza forced her chin upwards so that they were face to face, Evie screwing up her face so as not to meet her eyes.
‘Evie, promise me!’
‘No!’
Evie tried to push away, and something awful rose up in Luiza then, from the floor of her stomach into her
head and hands, which became rigid and ferociously strong as they dug into Evie’s upper arms, seizing her, holding her there, then shaking her again and again, longer and harder than Luiza herself could understand, because it was as though she was watching it happen rather than doing it herself. It was someone else growling through jaws ground tightly together, Promise me. It wasn’t the sight of Evie’s head rolling back and forth on her little neck that made Luiza stop, but the strange, almost soundless staccato of forced breaths her sister pushed out her nose, like the faint snuffle of a pig. Not a human sound. When she let her go, Evie crumpled to the same spot where Luiza had fallen, in shock and silent now. Luiza waited, nauseated, for Evie to seize or vomit, but she just lay there for several minutes as Luiza rubbed her back, saying, ‘I’m sorry’ over and over again.
Eventually Evie sat up, bleary-eyed. ‘I promise I won’t tell anyone,’ she cried before running away.
Gratitude washed over Luiza: Evie was lucid. But also a sickening relief: her parents would never find out about her lies and perversities, the violence that exceeded even her own worst memory of her father, how upset he became the night she swam out, how he’d gripped and shaken her. But not nearly as violently as what she’d just done to Evie.
Who could hurt a child? Only the worst kind of person. She could no longer pretend to be the martyred caretaker; she was brutal and bitter and even more guilty than him for having no disease to blame for her anger. And Evie, poor Evie—some day she, too, would be dismissed as too sensitive, too sentimental. People like her felt things more deeply, and Luiza wondered if her attack on Evie would stay with her sister forever. What if this was the critical moment that shaped her, that arrested her in a damaged state? She had imprinted a child, this child she loved and who was so much like herself, with fear. Because now Evie knew that Luiza was a person who would rather break her little sister’s heart than tell the truth.
Mother benign of our redeeming Lord,