Drink the Sky

by Lesley Krueger

Looking after the boys, Cida answered, “No one else is going to bring up my kid.”

  “’Your kid,’” Holly said, feeling stung. “So maybe you don’t really want an abortion?”

  “I need one,” Cida answered. “My mother’s going to kill me.”

  “So you’ve told her.”

  “Of course not. She’d kill me.”

  Holly leaned against the door frame.

  “Cida, what do you really want? If things could be perfect, how would they be?”

  “Things aren’t going to be perfect, and I’m never going to get what I want.”

  She uncrossed her arms and glared at Holly.

  “That’s why I want an abortion.”

  Holly felt fatuous, foreign, and far older than the girl. There was no use asking why she hadn’t mentioned this before, or where the father was, or what she’d done with her salary for the past five months. Each question was too grim a reproach. Also irrelevant, when she both wanted the baby and didn’t.

  Cida started crying. “That stupid boy. He said it wasn’t even his. He said it could have been anyone’s. But I’m a good girl. I wouldn’t say it was his if it wasn’t.”

  Holly walked over and put her arms around the girl, who sobbed dryly against her shoulder.

  “Where is he now?” Holly asked.

  “Foi embora.” Went home. Took off. Disappeared. “He was working on the condominiums up the hill.”

  The three mammoth towers under endless construction. They’d been working on them ever since Holly arrived, and were still nowhere near finished. They weren’t even doing any work there at the moment. Every so often, the developers seemed to run out of money and the work shut down. How long had it been shut down this time? Two, three months. But six or seven months ago, the site had been a hive of workmen layering the concrete shells of apartments out from the central elevator shafts, each floor a deep cell open to the air. By day, the men clambered up and down the scaffolding. At night they sometimes threw parties, laying in some cachaça — white lightning — and inviting the neighbourhood maids. One night, not long after Tânia’s party, Holly heard the deep bass thrum of their boom box and slipped out into her garden. Through the trees she could see the elongated shadows of dancers thrown by their lanterns onto the layers of ceilings above her. They weren’t close. There was a wide buffer of forest between Holly and the party, but the bent light and long dancers seemed to strain toward her, speaking to something distorted in her until she started dancing alone in her garden, transformed into a shadow herself: elegant, languorous, disjointed; stretching elusively through the dark.

  Cida wouldn’t go to those parties at first. At the time Holly hired her, the future towers had been no more than slippery holes in the mountainside, and it must have seemed dire, hellish, to party there. She’d also been more timid, perhaps still cowed from her previous job, or still too closely tied to her careful upbringing. Cida had grown up in a house Tânia had bought her mother years before, in the north-zone neighbourhood she’d discovered when first helping Sister Celeste open her crêche. It was a stolid cinderblock house much like the one Erenilda and her husband had built, with a deep porch and a bright red hibiscus trained around the walled front yard.

  Cida’s mother lived at Tânia’s six days a week while her own mother brought up Cida and the boys. Strictly, Holly gathered. Both of Cida’s brothers were successful. One worked in an office, while the older had a business distributing newspapers. Only Cida had missed graduating from high school, and Holly suspected she was the family’s cherished failure, its bruise. It hadn’t seemed so, at first. The girl was eager to please. Yet a couple of months after saying she’d never go to those parties, Holly heard her steal in at dawn on a Sunday morning and sway off to bed. She looked fragile the next afternoon. Precarious; perhaps a little too eager to please? Holly wondered whether to make an issue of it. Caution her, forbid her to go back. Why? On what grounds?

  Cida was nineteen. Her belly was hard against Holly’s now, her dry sobs unending.

  “It’s all right,” Holly soothed, although she still wasn’t sure what to do. Over Cida’s shoulder, she could see beads of water rolling down the cardboard carton of milk. The butter was melting, pooling on its plate. From downstairs came the manic sound of the boys’ new video. If Holly wasn’t mistaken, they’d taken advantage of the situation to put on a violent cartoon she’d banned. She rubbed Cida’s shoulder, perhaps a bit less patiently.

  “You’re all right,” she told the girl.

  “I’m all right,” Cida echoed, disengaging herself and going to stand by the counter. She took some tissue and daubed at her eyes.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” she said. “You can take me and the baby to Canada. I’ll say I’m divorced.”

  Divorciada. She looked Holly directly in the eye as she said it and raised her chin, suddenly firm, and challenging her. What? Holly felt confused. Was the girl daring her to say that no one would believe she was divorced? They’d never believe she’d been married, much less divorced. Was that it? Or was she saying that Holly would probably be divorced soon, and would need her help in Canada? Was it that?

  Or worse. That if Holly didn’t promise to take her to Canada, she’d tell Todd about Jay. Then we’ll see who’s divorced.

  Holly walked quickly to the table and snatched the butter and milk, putting them both in the refrigerator before taking them out and putting them back on the table. The boys had to eat.

  “Cida, I can’t take you to Canada. I know some people who wanted to bring their nanny back from Hong Kong, but there were so many regulations, it took them a year and a half to get her a visa. And this was a woman of forty without children. I don’t think the government would let a young girl into the country alone with a child.”

  The girl shook her head impatiently. She’d turned confident, her lips ripe, her posture proud.

  “Doutor Todd is an important person. He’s on television all the time, and he’s a personal friend of the governor of your state.”

  Evan. She’d got that from Evan. The longer Todd was away, the more Evan boasted about him, to an extent that sometimes troubled Holly. She didn’t know what to do about it, although at the moment she preferred not to undermine the boy with Cida.

  “You could talk to Doutor Todd about arranging a visa,” the girl went on. “Or I could do it myself if it’s too much trouble. Would you like me to talk to him myself?”

  It was unmistakable now. Her voice rose high into the realms of insincerity. Holly pursed her lips, feeling — what? An odd sort of amused distaste that she didn’t like about herself. It was too cruel, too superior. Yet didn’t Cida deserve it? The girl was behaving badly. Yes, she was a poor child dealt a bad hand in life, but there were better ways to handle this. Blackmail was wrong; Holly shouldn’t be the one to feel apologetic. She did that too often and look how it ended, with people rolling all over her. “Sir, we’ve secured the village.”

  Maybe not.

  “Evan is very proud of his father,” she said carefully. “But I’m afraid Doutor Todd really isn’t that important.”

  It was true. Todd wasn’t that important, and Holly felt liberated finally saying it. The girl could tell Todd about Jay if she wanted. Tell him everything she knew or suspected, whatever she cared to embroider, and Holly would survive. The marriage might not, of course. It might not anyway, but in the meantime Holly refused to be blackmailed. Holding Cida’s eye, Holly told herself she’d had enough of trying to meet unjust demands and absurdly high expectations. She was sick of falling short, of falling back, of feeling second-rate. That was really what she’d been trying to tell Todd, wasn’t it? She was worth far more than he’d been giving.

  Holly drew herself up, feeling so confident now that poor Cida drooped. The girl’s mouth twisted bitterly as she cupped her hands over her unprotected belly. Holly felt a stab of ten
derness, wondering if it might really be possible to take her to Canada, after all.

  “I’m going to think about what you said, Aparicida. And I want you to think about it a bit more, too. We’ll talk again after we’ve slept on it. But now the boys really have to eat.”

  Holly went to get her sons, parting the resistant waves of heat with furious energy. She could handle this. She could handle all of it. Like making a painting. How good it was to finally feel in charge.

  18

  Night. Holly’s studio. She’d been working mainly in acrylics lately, and mostly on one big canvas, although she’d learned lately that it went better if she kept too many other projects under way and felt pressed for time, turning to her canvas only when the work had built up inside her and refused to wait any longer. That way, the lines snaked boldly from her brush and the colours stayed stark, lucid, more blazingly tropical than if she paused to think. The day after Tânia’s party, working in a delirium, Holly finally realized she’d always thought too much about her art. She could block in a painting quickly enough, but then she’d start to change her brushes obsessively, worry at her palette, and agonize so long over every daub at the canvas that she’d finally lose her vision of the image as a whole. No wonder she’d abandoned so much work, overwrought, frustrated, daunted by the enormity of what she was attempting, the absolute gall of creation.

  No longer. She blazed away at her canvas, which stood in a brightly-lit corner of her studio, the off-centre focus to the large, air-conditioned attic room. This had originally been the house laundry, and two big sinks with built-in washboards dominated one wall. Above them was a clothesline with sheets of remade paper waving like banners, the colours subtly herbal: blue-grey, green-grey, a faint camomile yellow. The herbs she used for tinting the paper were pinned to a second line. The studio was rank with the oily, nose-prickling stench of the freshest herb, the erva-de-santa-maria. In English it was wormseed goosefoot — such an absurdly Anglo-Saxon sound, blunt, assertive; as rooty as quick repeated fucks. How ironic: the market women whispered that it would bring on a miscarriage if the lady wanted.

  Cida.

  Holly’s arm dropped. She closed her eyes, but only saw Cida’s bitter face, and opened them unhappily. After putting the boys to bed, Holly had come straight to the studio and disappeared into her work. Not that she was acting in bad faith; not at all. In telling Cida she’d think about her situation, Holly meant she was going to not think about it, let it seep underground, percolate there, and see what came out in her art. She’d been doing this more and more successfully lately, mucking around in her subconscious, playing around, fooling around, playing the fool. Which explained her relationship with Jay, she supposed. But it also meant she wasn’t avoiding Cida’s problems. She was doing the opposite, plumbing for solutions — although it was true Holly found vertiginous pleasure in digging this deep. She stood there loving her free-fall into the subterranean, even though it had always terrified her before. She hadn’t been able to bear the idea of losing control, nor stand to picture what might come out if she plumbed too far. What was she really like? What did she really think of Todd/Jay/Cida? She hadn’t wanted to know before, suspecting she’d find her feelings inconvenient, her true self common and her art superficial. If you try to do what you’ve always wanted, there’s a chance you’ll fail. And then?

  Holly didn’t care anymore. The scene with Cida this afternoon had shredded off the last of her hesitation. Wasn’t it better to rage out in flames than shrivel up in the corner? She was determined now to seize life, and give back whatever was inside her. Let it all come out, everything she knew about transient, transitory, transmogrifying Rio. Cida, Todd, Jay — let them all appear.

  Though it was curious: neither Jay nor Todd ever appeared in her art. They were almost stubbornly absent. Nor did Holly see anything of Cida as she turned back to her canvas. Cida might have emerged that evening as Holly touched up Fuegia Basket’s face. The big canvas showed Darwin and Fuegia on the beach that once bordered Botafogo. It was painted in Holly’s evolving style, the naive edging toward surrealism — which left plenty of openings for Cida. But the girl simply wasn’t there, and as Holly frowned at the painting, she was distracted by remembering that wormseed goosefoot had been grown in the Canary Islands, where it was used to embalm corpses. Had it been used in seafaring days, to ship corpses home? The book didn’t say, and Holly was left to wonder whether Darwin had known it. Maybe he’d used it to preserve specimens. But if it was that strong, what must it do to girls like Cida?

  Holly shook her head impatiently, willing Cida away. She would get to her through Darwin; get to everything through Darwin. But first she had to get Darwin himself. It was a trying fact that after working for months on his portrait, Holly still hadn’t got Darwin’s face. It remained a scraped crater in the centre of the canvas — and if Holly couldn’t paint the contours of a face, how could she trace the infinitely more subtle shape of the truth lying beneath the skin?

  Holly seized her brush and dug a swath of colour into the bare canvas. Darwin and Fuegia were bright figures, both foreigners in Rio, equal for once in being equally misplaced. The background glowed silver, with flat, grey Corcovado behind them and the fine sand of the beach below. Darwin was sprawling against a driftwood log on which Fuegia rather primly sat, both of them in evening dress, the line of Fuegia’s tilted head and square torso falling into the angles of Darwin’s slouch, his comfortable shoulders and extended legs. Inset into the top left corner was Darwin’s favourite daughter, Annie, standing inside a serrated white border that made her look like a snapshot from the family album. Annie was born ten years after Darwin lived in Rio and five years after he returned from his voyage. She died when she was ten — about the age of Fuegia Basket when Darwin knew her.

  Working quickly, Holly sensed rather than saw her copy of pug-nosed Annie’s photograph on the wall beside her canvas, the photograph Darwin was said to have cried over for thirty years after the girl’s death. This was Holly’s Darwin wall. She had a copy of Captain FitzRoy’s sketch of Fuegia, his sketches of Fuegia’s future husband, York Minster, and of young Jemmy Button; sketches, portraits of FitzRoy himself and everywhere of Darwin; young Darwin, old Darwin, Darwin middle-aged. Around them all were words, Darwin’s words, or other peoples’ words about him; phrases that caromed off each other so vividly Holly didn’t know why they wouldn’t tear holes into his bland and wary young face.

  Look at the way he wrote about Tierra del Fuego. He seldom wrote about Fuegia herself, but he’d filled many pages describing their fraught arrival in her homeland, from which she’d been kidnapped four years before. Holly could see painting a second canvas of Darwin and Fuegia surrounded by Fuegia’s people — the “savages” whom Darwin described in such an odd tone of sexual dread. One full-grown woman would be standing naked in her canoe, the salt spray and sweet rain trickling down her body. Another would be nursing her baby while sleet fell and thawed on her exposed breasts. Darwin had seen her, described her, watched the sleet not only fall, but thaw: he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Around them would be the blunt beech trees that so disturbed him; erect still, he’d said, yet decayed to the heart and ready to fall. Holly suddenly realized that to do this, she’d have to go to Tierra del Fuego, which would mean going soon. The far southern summer was a brief window, a cool brightening which ended almost as soon as it started.

  But before starting another canvas, she had to get Darwin in Rio, where he’d been almost as oddly preoccupied by tales of torture, big and small. He’d described wasps that half-killed caterpillars and spiders, stuffing them in their nests so their hatching larvae could eat the living, paralyzed victims; described another wasp in lengthy battle with a large spider, which was injured and attempting to hide in a clump of grass as the wasp harried it, teasing like an English hound bringing a fox to ground — Darwin’s description; he’d watched it all, an enthusiastic hunter himself. Darwin loved B
razil, wandering through the cathedral forest, writing “hosannah” to the twining vines. But he also hated it. He was shocked to learn that a woman living near him used thumbscrews to punish her slaves. He loathed slavery, and twice heard screams from tortured slaves that would haunt him all his life.

  Shuddering hosannahs: how much of his tortured mood in Brazil had to do with the letter he’d received from his sister? His sweetheart at home had waited scarcely a month after the Beagle set sail to accept another man’s proposal, and by the time Darwin held the letter, his dear black-haired Fanny had become the untouchable Mrs. Biddulph. He cried over the news, and wrote back that Corcovado would make a good lover’s leap. Meanwhile sharing a cottage in its shadow with Fuegia Basket, “who daily increases in every direction except height.”

  She was developing, reaching puberty in fertile Rio. Holly looked at the breasts she’d given Fuegia on her canvas, rounded as distant foothills of Corcovado. What leaps could be made from there? Especially when Darwin’s younger daughter warned ambiguously, “He was passionately attached to his own children, although he was not an indiscriminate child-lover.”

  What was he, then? Who was Charles Darwin? It was absurd that after months of furious work, Holly still couldn’t get his face. She worked feverishly, as she’d worked so many times before, knowing that she’d probably end up scraping if off again. At best it would be unconvincing, and there were times when it was far, far worse.

  It was Powell. The odious Powell kept emerging. He was emerging again now as Holly painted, smirking out at her from the canvas. Blond as Darwin, bland as Darwin, but evil and malicious. Holly shuddered, dropping her arm and turning away. Until this started happening, she thought she’d recovered from the terror of Powell which had gripped her so powerfully after she got home from the Amazon. Her first day back, she’d rushed to develop her photos from the trip and thrust one at Cida — her hands, voice trembling — insisting that Cida never, on any account, let this creature in the house. After which she sat down limply and watched her boys squabble. Time and again, her frenzied activity gave way to near-paralysis, then she erupted once more with uncontainable energy. Yet in a surprisingly short time, Powell’s influence began to wane. They saw no sign of him. Possibly — probably — they never would. People moved on, got distracted, found other temptations. God knows, she knew how that happened. Days would go by in which she wouldn’t think about Powell. Yet he still emerged from her brush when Darwin wouldn’t, or Todd, not even Cida, his powerful smirk burning from her canvas like St. Elmo’s fire.