“Ay, Dios!”
She turned to see who had snuck up on her, but there was no one. The sun was blinking through the branches of the jacaranda and the birds were chirping like crazy. Maybe they saw who touched her.
“Quién es?” Beatriz called out. “Who’s there?” She stood up, wiping the tea from her knee and shaking the liquid from her hand, as she turned around. She could see she was alone, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Hello?”
This was not the first time this had happened to her. In bed, she could say it was just a dream, but when the weirdness began to happen when she was awake, she started to wonder.
One time she felt the hand on her shoulder when she was alone in her office. Another time, she was reading e-mail on her laptop at a coffee shop and was convinced the woman next to her was playing tricks on her. When the woman moved to another table to avoid Beatriz’s darting glances, Beatriz decided the woman was probably innocent. Probably. No, this was not the only time Beatriz felt the strange sensation. The first time it happened, she was a little girl. Her baby sister, Perla, loved to sneak up on Beatriz and make her jump out of her skin. Beatriz didn’t know how she did it, but every time, no matter how on guard Beatriz thought she was, somehow her sister found her and scared the living molé out of Beatriz so bad she would get angry and chase the little girl, who would run off, laughing devilishly.
“Chiflada! You gave me un susto!” Beatriz would scream. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”
Perla was the baby of the family—that last surprise and the only other girl after Beatriz and four brothers. The little girl adored Beatriz, who was twelve years older than her, and was the new light of their very tired daddy’s dimming eyes.
“Leave me alone!” Beatriz would yell angrily, still horrified that her elderly parents had managed to, well, you know, produce this spit of a little girl whose only value seemed to be to make Beatriz’s teenage years miserable.
Perla only laughed before running off to play with the other kids. One of Beatriz’s last memories of Perla was not as a young woman but as that mischievous little girl with the gummy grin, the long, knobby-kneed legs, and skin as dark as molasses from playing in the sun.
Ay Perla, Beatriz thought. Ay, Perla.
Larry was coming out of the shower when Beatriz walked back into their bedroom. She shut the door behind her and walked over to the window that looked out into the backyard. Larry was humming to himself and drying his hair with a towel as he walked into the main part of their bedroom and saw Beatriz.
“Why, hello, señorita,” he said in a pronounced Texas drawl. “May I say, you shore are the purtiest woman to walk into this room.” He walked over to his wife and kissed her.
“Here’s your coffee,” Beatriz said.
Larry gently took the cup and placed it on the nightstand near them and took Beatriz in his arms.
“Happy anniversary, mi corazón.” He pulled Beatriz up toward him and kissed her again, a long, lingering kiss that was fueled with all the pent-up passion he wasn’t able to spend the night before. “And thank you for being the prettiest woman to walk into my life.”
“Oh, my!” Beatriz said, suddenly feeling the hardness of her husband kneading her belly.
“I think we have some unfinished business,” he murmured into her ear.
Beatriz smiled. “I think we do, too.”
Larry hoisted his wife up off the floor and she wrapped her legs around his hips. They fell onto their unmade bed, and he continued to kiss Beatriz on her face and neck, pushing her up so he could cover her breasts with kisses. Beatriz was liking this. She was liking this a whole lot. The dream, the weirdness in the backyard, it all burst like a bubble. So, when the doorbell rang just as Larry had circled his tongue around Beatriz’s nipple, she gasped.
Ana. Beatriz had forgotten she’d asked Ana to come early.
Reluctantly, knowing the moment was lost, Larry reached for his pants. “I’ll get the door, mi amor. You get dressed to meet your comadre.” Pulling his shirt over his head, he added with a wink, “And then I’ll see you back here later.”
By the time Ana came upstairs, Beatriz was already showered, towel-drying her hair while standing in front of the closet, deciding what to wear—the eggplant-colored dress that was comfortable, or the white, form-fitting dress that she knew would drive her husband wild?
“Hola!” Ana said, as she tapped on the door and poked her head inside the room. “Can I come in?”
“Sure. How are you?” Beatriz exchanged kisses on the cheek with Ana.
“How am I? How are you? What a big day! Do you need help with anything?”
Beatriz held up both dresses for Ana to see. “What do you think?”
“I like the white one,” Ana said.
Beatriz frowned.
“Okay, I like the purple one. Wear whatever you’ll be most comfortable in,” Ana said.
Beatriz laid both dresses on the bed and began to shape her hair with her fingers.
“And don’t worry about anything. I’ll take care of those annoying details that come up at the last minute. Oh! That reminds me—I got the new guayabera for Larry. The one you asked me to pick up?”
“Uh-huh,” Beatriz said, looking at her face in the mirror, trying to decide how much makeup to put on.
“Okay, then. Well—maybe I should leave you alone,” Ana said, unsure of what was going through Beatriz’s mind. “Are you okay?” she asked, as she reached the door.
“What? Sure!” Beatriz said. “I’m just—I don’t know. I’m kind of out of it, I guess.”
“Did you and Larry have a fight or something?”
“Oh, no,” Beatriz smiled, imagining what their morning could have been like had they not had the party to deal with. “It’s just—I wish everybody could be here, you know?”
“Ah, sí,” Ana said, closing the door and leaning against it. “You mean your parents?”
“Yeah. I really miss them at times like this, you know?”
“Sure, sure,” Ana said. “They would have loved this. When I walked in the house, something smelled so good, I thought your mother was cooking. But at least your brothers and their families are coming, right?”
“Yeah,” Beatriz said faintly. “It’ll be nice to have us all together again.”
But that wasn’t true. Sure, all the Sánchez brothers were coming in with their wives and children, but there was one sibling who would not be there: Perla. Beatriz wondered if any of them would dare bring up her name.
The guests began to arrive around eleven o’clock. The first wave was colleagues from work who dropped by to offer well wishes and intended to stay for only a couple of hours. But some of those guests were still lingering by the time the relatives began to show up around noon, their voices and laughter bubbling from the house and into the yard. Beatriz had forgotten all the weirdness from the morning, too busy greeting people, accepting dishes of food, giving directions, and, finally, enjoying all the activity. It wasn’t until her oldest brother, Erasmo, showed up, that Beatriz was reminded of the earlier strangeness. Erasmo was the brother who looked most like their father, and as he got older the resemblance only became stronger. She hugged her big brother at the door, welcoming his family into her house. Her eyes were tightly closed as she hugged him close.
“Qué pasó?” Erasmo asked, when he could feel she was holding on to him a little longer than normal.
“Nothing, it’s just that you look so much like ’Apá.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I get that a lot. But we’re here, so they’re here, too.” He patted his sister’s shoulder as he edged his way past her to get a look at their baby brother and his new wife, pregnant with their first child. Beatriz smiled a sad smile, thinking of what her brother said. He was right, she thought, as she closed the door to join the crowd. But as she looked out the door, she saw something that made her pause. A little girl was standing on the curb near her brother’s truck, standing and waiting. Beatriz recogni
zed the dress the little girl wore, and she blinked her eyes against the sun to try and see the girl’s face. When the little girl smiled a gummy smile that Beatriz instantly recognized, a jolt of adrenaline shot through her.
“Erasmo! Erasmo!”
But Erasmo was lost in the loud bellows of hellos and laughter that come from too much time passing between seeing relatives and friends.
“Erasmo!”
“Mande!”
“Come here!” Her heart was racing now. If she was seeing what she thought she was seeing, she wanted Erasmo as a witness. He was the one they would believe.
“Erasmo!” she said, yelling into the house so she would be heard.
“Sí, sí, sí. Qué pasó?” he said, marching to the door as soon as he saw his sister’s shocked expression.
“Did you bring that little girl?”
“Who?”
“Over there, the little girl standing by your truck.”
When Erasmo looked out the door he reared back a little. He looked at her and shook his head.
“Little girl? That’s my girl Angie, and her friend Lidia,” he said. “No problema, eh? The more the better, verdad?” he asked, looking into his sister’s anxious face. But the girl he was referring to wasn’t the girl Beatriz saw, but a young woman walking up with Angie. Both were a year younger than her Carlos, who had just turned twenty.
“Hola, Tía,” Angie said obediently, giving her aunt a kiss on the cheek. “This is my friend Lidia. ’Apá said you wouldn’t mind if she came.”
Beatriz looked over the young women’s heads back where she thought she saw the little girl, but there was no one. It was a long moment before she realized that the two young women were still standing before her expectantly. Lidia glanced at Angie nervously.
“I hope it’s okay I came,” Lidia said.
The embarrassment in the girl’s voice brought Beatriz back to the present.
“Discúlpeme! Of course! Of course, you’re welcome! Please forgive me, I have a million things on my mind. Any friend of Angie’s is a friend of mine. Pásale, mi’ja. Pásale.” The girls slipped past Beatriz into the house and sought out the other young people in the crowd. Beatriz scanned the street for the little girl.
I saw her! Beatriz thought. I saw her.
But of course, that wouldn’t be possible. Perla wouldn’t be a little girl anymore; she would be a full-grown woman by now. But it was her, Beatriz thought. She knew it.
When Larry came behind his wife and slipped his arm around her waist, Beatriz shrieked.
“Jesus! Larry!”
“I’m sorry, love. My uncle James is asking for you. He’s over by the bar,” Larry said. Then, he noticed the stricken look on his wife’s face. “Baby, what’s wrong? You look like you saw a ghost!”
“I did—I mean, I thought—it’s nothing. It’s okay. I think I need to eat something.”
“Well, then—you came to the right place,” Larry said, swooping his wife back into the house.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BELINDA ACOSTA has written and published plays, short stories, and essays. As a journalist, her work has appeared in the Austin-American Statesman, the Austin Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News, the San Antonio Current, AlterNet, Poets & Writers, and on National Public Radio’s Latino USA—the Radio Journal of News and Culture.
Belinda received a master’s of fine arts in writing from the University of Texas in 1997.
She lives in Austin, Texas, and is the TV columnist for the Austin Chronicle.
Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz Page 27