by Sarah Faber
Star of the sea and portal of the skies,
The sound of their voices rises—it is bells, it is birds, it is a vibrating cord pulled taut.
Unto thy fallen people help afford
Fallen, but striving still anew to rise.
Voices layered upon voices, as half of the singers reach out with their throats and the other half answer back. The first group leans slightly forward as they sing, then back as they’re responded to, the second group now tipping gently toward them. Gentle inhale, exhale. Together, they are the breath of a sleeper’s lungs.
With them, communion. Gone now.
She can’t slip under into peace and relief, because there is still so much more to say. There is more she needs to tell her mother, but there is water all around, closing over her. She’s disappearing.
‘Mother!’ she cries out into the quiet murmur of women leaving the chapel, and some of them look at her sadly, unsurprised.
Luiza pushes through the sea of black-draped bodies and rushes down the hall, nearly breaking into a run. She bursts into her room, pushing the door open wide. But the room is empty and dark, except for a white piece of notepaper left on the bed.
DORA
As she rushes through the darkening streets of Salvador, Dora is grateful for her prescriptions: one to help her sleep, one to keep her awake, and the one she’s just taken to quell the electrical storm beneath her skin. This one makes everything feel like a dream, like it’s not really happening to her. Everything is more colourful somehow, but also so much gentler, and the babble of people in the streets is familiar and comforting. Soon the enormity of what has just happened is going to hit her, and the ground will give way again, but she’s not ready. Not yet.
She walks the steep streets, past farmers packing up crates of watermelon, bananas, maxiera. Past multicoloured buildings and gilded seventeenth-century churches; the thought of their many carvings, their baroque and dimly lit interiors, make her feel queasy. Then through the market, with its stalls filled with flour sacks of beans, a man selling hot peppers spread out on newspaper and wedges of squash. And the black women wrapped in shawls and wearing big tiered dresses, colourful fabric wound around their heads—they are here, just as she’s seen in photos, at Carnival, on tea towels, at the borders of neighbourhoods she never goes into.
She wonders if somewhere behind one of these painted doors is a scene like the ones she saw in a magazine years ago, of women with shaved heads in dresses of white cotton and lace, armbands made from cowry shells and twine, wrists covered with silver bangles, white dots painted all over their brown skin, a single feather tied to their foreheads. They were being initiated into Candomblé, a kind of fusion of Catholicism with indigenous and African religions. In some of the pictures, they were covered in blood and feathers from a sacrifice, and in others they simply sat with their heads tipped forward, their eyes closed, appearing unearthly and at peace. The pictures had caused a stir—Brazilians as savages, the brides of bloody gods and all that. Dora wishes she could find them now, have them perform some sort of reverse exorcism on Luiza. In the convent, as soothing and alluring as it was, Luiza had already seemed less embodied, less alive. Her daughter wanted to believe she was being restored, even transfigured, in some way, but she already seemed less of a person than when she’d disappeared. The Candomblé initiates had looked, Dora remembers thinking, as though something had been put into them, not taken away. They looked full, serene. Whole. Or haunted? Filled with ghosts. Luiza would probably be angry with her if she said any of it out loud. So much of her own country remained a mystery to Dora.
How can she leave her here? In this old, cluttered city, teetering on high cliffs above a bay. It startles her, the force with which the conviction comes—she has to.
Even now Dora can see her, Luiza as a small child, not even three, running on the beach. Of course they went often, but on this day Luiza behaved as though it were the first time. She ran and squealed, her face widening, seeming to expand as if to hold all that joy, the white shine thrown off the waves. She pulled off her clothes and ran, crying out to no one, I go far! She ran until she was a pink dot on the horizon, where the water and the sky became indistinguishable, hazy and golden.
How can Dora hold these two things inside her at once? This memory and the acute, painful love she feels for Luiza thinking of that day, and the simultaneous conviction that she must leave her behind? Because it is necessary, she tells herself, to save the girls, and Hugo too, and because she will come back. She will come back for her child, whom she loves, who she knows is suffering in some unutterable way. All of her daughter’s justifications—she hadn’t believed them. There was still something Luiza wasn’t telling her, but Dora couldn’t stay. A small fissure had opened between them years ago. She has to leave before it is a complete rupture. At some point it will hit her, all they’ve lost. But right now, there isn’t time. The weight of the rest of her family, the pressure of them waiting, waiting as they always did for her to decide, to tell them what to do—she can feel it. Hugo, Evie, Magda, all in unsteady orbit around her. How far would they spin out with her gone? No hospital doors could contain Hugo if he really wanted out. We are getting away! repeat shrill, wild voices in her head. Voices, terror, madness—is it all catching?
Hugo must first be stabilized before he can spread any more chaos. But if Hugo or the girls were to find out Luiza was alive, none of them would ever agree to go to Canada. And how many people can she drag across two continents, resenting her for it every step of the way? No one can know, not yet. Once they have a new home ready for her, a new life that is gentler and real—then she’ll come back for Luiza.
For now she has to go to them, collect Hugo from the hospital, get them all on the ship. Sometimes, she imagines them aboard without her: Hugo giving the girls one of his ‘lessons,’ moving like an unstrung puppet, a parody of himself, silent though his mouth is moving. And yet when she pictures them now, they are just three—Hugo, Magda, and Evie. For almost a year, whenever Dora has seen the three of them together, she would focus on the empty space beside them where Luiza ought to have been and wonder for a moment where she was. Now, just as flesh can heal around a foreign object, they’ve grown into other versions of themselves, shaped around her absence.
Brazil is the place where, for years, they’ve been stuck, unspooling, radiating grief. Maybe once away from here, Dora can gather her family back up again, shape them into a single cord, trembling and alive.
— V —
EVIE
At home, everything is finally, truly packed. The furniture is gone, shipped ahead of them. The walls are bare except for some nails.
‘Remember,’ Mama has reminded them in a tired voice. ‘Just one suitcase each for the trip.’
Since Mama’s return, over a week ago, she has been different, kinder yet also further away. At times, she has followed Evie and Magda from room to room, startling them with suffocating hugs. But she has also spent whole days sitting on the veranda, chain-smoking and sliding a thumb up and down her thigh, just below where her skirt meets her flesh-coloured pantyhose.
Yesterday, as the maids finished cleaning and Magda ferociously rehearsed her gymnastics routine in the backyard, Evie had drifted about the house with no one to cleave herself to. For a long time, she stood watching her mother on the veranda from the back doorway, as if by hovering so close she could silently absorb some understanding of her. She sensed she shouldn’t interrupt, but then Mama suddenly spoke.
‘Once we leave, I’ll be better.’ Then, still without even turning to look at Evie, she added, ‘I promise.’
Evie hadn’t known she could see her, and retreated quietly, leaving her mother pinned to the bench, her stocking puckered with runs at the knee.
When it was time for the family to say goodbye to the help this afternoon, Mama seemed more like herself, and actually hugged them all goodbye: the maids, Bechelli, even Georges. She also gave them lovely gifts and said they were from
the girls. Evie cried so hard her throat hurt, her arms wrapped around the maids’ doughy waists, bodies she once felt were almost her own, more familiar to her than her own mother’s. Magda, who had been sullen for ages, held on to Maricota for so long that Mama had to come up to them, lingering alongside, murmuring gently that they were running late to pick up Papa from the hospital.
‘We’ll come back!’ Evie and Magda promised, waving frantically as they climbed into the car. Maricota and Odete echoed them again and again. ‘You’ll come back!’
Tonight, the family will spend a night in a hotel near the harbour in Rio, and tomorrow they will at last set sail for New York City. From there, they’ll take the train to Toronto. But first, they have to attend the final exhibition for Evie and Magda’s day camp.
Outside in the back field, all the girls spun in circles with transparent scarves, Evie twirled around a maypole, and Magda performed her tumbling routine. As Evie joins her parents in the stands around the swimming pool to watch Magda, her mother says, ‘You were pretty as a picture,’ and her father kisses her on the cheek. The air in the bleachers around the pool is warm and humid and caustic-smelling, harsh in Evie’s nostrils. The men unbutton their collars while the women roll up their sleeves and slip off their shoes.
Magda comes out in her shiny blue swimsuit, all rigid muscle and stretched skin, a mantis behind her goggles. She parades to her starting block and positions herself. The Wilson twins, to her left, were the prettiest girls at the camp, lightly tanned with long, blond, natural curls. They are good at everything, but maybe their excellence has been diluted, portioned out between the two of them, because today Magda looks electric beside them. When the whistle blows, she enters the water a full head in front of them and finishes first by three full seconds. All the adults go crazy, clapping and cheering, slapping the backs of their plastic chairs. It’s been so long since Evie has seen her parents like this, excited, or at least trying to be. At last, they are trying again.
Next is the backstroke, which Magda also wins.
‘Bravo, my girl!’ shouts Papa, suddenly animated, jumping to his feet with his fist in the air. ‘You devoured them!’ When he sits back down, he breathes dampness into Evie’s ear. ‘Your sister is vulpine. She absorbs the spirits of her enemies like Caesar upon his execution of Vercingetorix. Their extinction is her animus.’ Bright parts of him are sparking, Evie notices with relief. He’s not all gone.
A few minutes later, the overhead lights are switched off so that it’s almost completely dark but for a cluster of five candles that emerges from a corner before gradually spreading out into a perfect line across the pool. Evie can see nothing but points of candlelight shimmering on the water, and she’s transfixed as she watches the flames move apart and bob back together, then form a constellation of five swimmers that rotates in circles. A quincunx, she thinks.
Papa grabs her hand in the gloom. ‘Alight,’ he says. ‘Not merely living but lit up, brightly. Alighting, there, like birds upon the water.’
Everyone seems to hold their breath, the wobbly constellation throwing gold scales onto the black surface of barely lapping water. All those days she goofed around with Brigitta, doing nothing, tormenting that poor man at the hospital, Magda was absorbed with others, a perfectly synchronized part of a whole, making this, the loveliest thing Evie’s ever seen.
The lights go down, then back up to dim, and there is Magda with the other girls, all swimming upside down in the pool, ten feet pointing up into the air, then flexing.
‘How lovely!’ her mother cries. ‘What did they do?’
Everyone is clapping as the lights come all the way up and the swimmers climb out of the pool. Magda glances up at her family and waves, and even smiles slightly, her candle strap sliding a little across the front of her bathing cap. Evie sees how their father looks at Magda, amazed, and she, too, is warm with pride. She thinks how she might never astonish anyone; she’ll scribble little grey horses in the margins of her school notebooks, forget to pay attention in school, and remain resolutely average. But then Papa turns to her, takes her face in both his hands.
‘You girls. You two are bright stars.’
Before she can think of anything to say, he is pulling her by the hand to find Magda in the crowd.
As they wait for Magda to get changed, Evie tells her parents that she’s exchanged addresses with Brigitta, then instantly regrets it. They both smile tightly and say nothing. But it’s as though she can’t stop talking, telling them all about how sophisticated her new friend is, and how she’s read the complete works of Byron, and how she, too, wants to go to Aubrey Ladies College. Evie wants so much for it all to be true, this version of Brigitta.
‘To start a little losers club of two?’ Magda is behind them, her hair tied in a fierce, wet knot.
‘Shut up,’ says Evie. Tumbling, swimming—excellence makes her mean.
‘She’s such a phony. All the other girls hate her. You know that, right?’
Evie knows. That Brigitta pushes and provokes helpless people just to see what will happen. That Brigitta never loved her back. Even so, when she speaks she’s just a dumb kid again. ‘Drop dead.’
‘Now, girls,’ says their father, but he’s waving at someone across the pool, distracted now, while their mother pushes them all toward the exit.
Evie reminds herself that it’s all the better for her character that she should suffer, and thinks of everything she and Brigitta promised each other that was good: They would be loners. They would not associate. They would take art classes, despise all jocks, and disdain ‘school spirit.’ So something like a daydream was lost when, a few days after their visit to the hospital, Brigitta told her that she wouldn’t be attending Aubrey Ladies College after all. She said she couldn’t bear the idea of being so stifled, so conformist. And though Evie had known for days it was all just a story they made up, she still felt sad that someone else decided how it would end. Maybe she wasn’t really as brave as she thought.
Now, when she sees those scenes from the school in her mind again, she is alone, and yet she senses someone else is there. Luiza is gone. Magda is indeed a separate person. Brigitta has abandoned her. But she’s never truly alone. There is the residue of everyone who has loved her, and the brightness of Magda, and her parents, cheering. Straining and fumbling in too-loud voices, but still crying out: we are here.
So for now, Evie lets herself imagine all the best things she might do, she with her family, she with her ghostly, conjured friend—such lovely things!
HUGO
Mutiny on the Bounty, thinks Hugo, is a strange film to show on a ship. The girls have seen it three times already in the onboard theatre, and now they’re off to listen to the jukebox in the ‘teen lounge.’ They seem to bounce happily enough around the ship all day, and find their parents at mealtimes. As Hugo and Dora continue on their daily walk about the ship—Dora’s idea—he wonders if weeks of travel might be a gift. Goodbye by a thousand tiny degrees, unlike travelling to Canada by plane: a rupture too sudden and shocking to consider.
It’s been almost a week since the top of Sugarloaf Mountain disappeared in the humid fog that hung over the city, obscuring the tops of buildings and Christ the Redeemer. Next vanished the city’s smaller, jumbled peaks, and the tall lamps in the harbour, their hazy lights receding, dimming, then extinguished. Soon, the wheeling, flattened V-shape of gulls circling the boats was gone, then the contours of the shore, until finally there was nothing left of Brazil to see. Eventually, the muddy waters of the Amazon merged with the blue-green of the Atlantic, and from the promenade deck, they inhaled salt air and the white paint freshly applied to the corroded railings and blistered iron shell of the ship. Their voyage barely begun, Hugo already found himself suppressing swells of nausea from the sway of the boat. From leaving Luiza. A few times he’s caught himself imagining her tangled in the ship’s rudders, hair and skin and sinew churning in their wake, following them all the way to Canada. The ugliest part of
his mind is still the quickest, and has the habit of horror. But his medicated brain doesn’t hold on to these thoughts the way it used to: they streak through, then just as quickly evaporate. He can’t hold anything for long. So he thinks of other things. He feels the breeze on his skin. Looks into the sun. Hears the crackle of a woman behind him fondling her packet of chips. These are the moments when he almost feels free.
Hugo and Dora spend their time on the ship stretched out among the other idle bodies on chaises lining the promenade deck, or joining card games, drinking cocktails, staring out to sea. Since his treatment, he doesn’t have much desire for alcohol, but he drinks to join in, to keep Dora company. She is frequently distracted, often staring out into the distance, drinking more than usual. Yet she stays close by his side, as though pulled there. But even as they were embarking at the dock, surrounded by families weeping, embracing, she kept looking around, then over her shoulder as they boarded, a mass herded up the gangplank. Had she hoped he would come?
Now, as they walk around the ship together, she keeps her hands curled around his upper arm. Little is said. Nothing of consequence. He moves carefully, his arm pressed gently at her back. He doesn’t want to startle her.
‘It’s cocktail hour in the ballroom,’ Dora says to him now. ‘They’re going to have music of some kind.’
And so they go, and for a while it is the usual big band with some samba, some jazz thrown in to make the passengers feel more adventurous. One giant entertainment, this ship: buffets, a show every night, a swimming pool, shuffleboard and crokinole and bridge tournaments on deck. The saxophone player comes toward the microphone, his face glistening with sweat.
‘And now, what’s new?’ he says slowly, enunciating carefully and lingering on sibilance. What’sss new? He gestures to the piano player to begin as he turns and wipes his face and the back of his neck with a cloth, sweating under the bright stage lights.