by Paul Pen
“Can’t you see we can’t? We’re very busy,” Dahlia said.
“Can’t you see we can’t? We’re very busy,” Daisy repeated.
“All right, all right.” Iris exchanged a teasing look with Mom.
“OK, you don’t have to fight, you can both fit on here just fine.” Mom touched the highest and broadest rung on the folding ladder. She let Dahlia climb up first, then showed Daisy where to put her feet. The two of them gained access to the tops of several flower-filled branches of the cactus. “You can start picking them, but watch out for those spines, please.”
The girls sniffed the flowers.
“They smell so good!”
“They smell like melon!”
“They smell like melon!” they repeated in unison.
Mom asked Iris to pour her a glass. “Let lots of ice fall in.”
She drank without letting go of the base of the ladder. Up top, the twins were laughing. They were counting off each plucked flower before letting it fall into the basket on the ground at the foot of the cactus.
When they’d finished the first one, they moved all the equipment to the neighboring cardón. On their return to land the twins took the chance to gulp down a glass of the homemade drink. As more flowers rained down on the basket, Iris observed Melissa, a few yards from them.
Sitting on a rock, she was cutting open the back of the shirt with the scissors, from the neck down. She also made a large cut on one side of the pants, from the waist to the bottom of the leg. Then she stood on the rock and dressed a cactus in the clothes. They stayed on perfectly, pinned onto the spines. Melissa adjusted the corners of the shirt collar and smoothed out the pants. She did up some of the buttons.
“Do you think she’s too old for all that stuff?”
Mom’s question surprised Iris. A couple of white flowers fell to the ground from the top of the ladder. The little girls’ tally was approaching thirty. Iris shrugged and looked at Melissa, who was giving a little bow in front of the cactus.
“What’re you going to call him?” Mom yelled.
Melissa turned around.
“I said what’re you going to call him?” Mom repeated, even more loudly.
From there, Melissa showed them a flat stone on which she’d written Thorns in black tempera.
“Hi, Thorns.” Mom raised a hand as if greeting a real person. “And hello to you, too, Needles and Pins. I hadn’t said anything to you guys yet.”
Beside the cactus that Melissa had just dressed were two others also wearing men’s clothes. At their feet, their names were handwritten on stones. Melissa baptized the third cactus by placing the stone at its base.
Then she approached Mom and Iris.
“Can I use the ladder to put this on him?” she asked, gesturing at the cap on her head.
Instead of answering Melissa, Mom yelled to the cactus. “Don’t worry, Thorns, as soon as the twins have finished picking the flowers, we’ll put your cap on for you.”
Iris had to make an effort to stop herself from laughing.
“Mom . . .” Melissa looked down at the ground, nudging little stones with the toe of her shoe. “You don’t need to speak to them . . . It’s . . . it’s my thing. They’re just cactuses. They can’t hear you.”
Mom scratched the back of her neck and changed the subject by asking the twins how the picking was going. Three flowers fell into the basket, which was now almost full.
Iris picked it up and sniffed it. “They smell so good.”
“They’re ours!” shouted the little girls from up high.
“OK, but come on, you have plenty,” said Mom. “It’s time to stop.”
Iris rounded the cactus to show the twins the contents of the basket. There were more than enough flowers to make six necklaces like the ones from yesterday.
“There’s one left!”
“There’s one left!”
They gestured at a large flower at the very top. Iris took a step back to see it clearly.
“I’m going to get it,” Daisy said, stretching out on tiptoes on the ladder.
“No, I am.” Dahlia leapt to get ahead of her sister.
Seeing the dangerous maneuver, Mom scolded them.
Daisy screamed.
“What is it?” Mom yelled. She gripped the ladder hard, her shoulders hunched as if she was expecting one of them to fall. “Iris, what is it?”
The large flower from the top of the cardón had come away but hadn’t reached the ground. It was skewered on one of the cactus’s spines.
“You pushed me!” Daisy burst into tears. “Look what you did!”
She showed Dahlia the consequences of her impatience.
Iris could see it, too. “She’s scratched her arm on the cactus.”
“Right, that’s enough,” Mom said. “Daisy, come down!”
The little girl obeyed. She climbed down crying, her chin wrinkled and pressed against her chest. Iris approached to get a better look at the wound. Daisy had a scratch on the inside of her forearm. Five red scores stood out on an irritated area that stretched from the wrist to the fold of the elbow.
“It’s nothing.” Mom blew on the marks. “Just a graze. There’s not even any blood.”
The little girl sobbed. “Dahlia pushed me.”
Mom was so angry as she climbed the ladder that the contraption’s legs ground against the earth every time she stepped on another rung. At the top, she grabbed Dahlia around the waist. The little girl resisted. She was stretching out an arm, trying to reach the detached flower.
Mom began to chide her.
But suddenly she broke off.
She fell silent.
She stood motionless, her eyes fixed on some point in the distance. The little girl was still stretching for the flower, twisting in her arms, but Mom didn’t seem to care anymore.
“What is it?” asked Iris, who was still trying to console Daisy. “What can you see?”
Mom went on tiptoes at the top of the ladder. She narrowed her eyes, straining her sight.
“What can you see, Mom?”
Iris followed her gaze, but from the ground she could only see cacti and rocks.
Melissa came and stood beside her. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Iris whispered, “but Mom’s seen something.”
Their mother moved her lips, murmuring something to herself. She turned her head back toward the house. She looked at Melissa, at Iris, at Daisy. Her eyes inspected the contents of the basket. They stopped on the pitcher of agua de Jamaica. On the five glasses. She looked into the distance again. She let out a deep sigh as she bit her bottom lip. Thinking. Calculating.
“Mom, what’s going on?” Iris said. “You’re scaring the girls.”
The anxiety in her voice alarmed even Dahlia, who paused her efforts to reach the flower to observe Mom.
Mom seemed more tense than angry. More nervous than annoyed.
Her breathing was audible.
“Mom, please,” Iris repeated.
Then Mom reacted. She held Dahlia tight and climbed down the ladder in a hurry. She almost pushed the little girl to get her to stand beside Daisy, who was putting the fingers of a hand in her mouth and spreading saliva over her scratches.
“One of you, to your bedroom.”
“Is Socorro coming?” asked Melissa.
Mom didn’t answer.
“Come on, which of you two is going?”
The twins didn’t even look at each other, angry as they were with one another.
“Why does one of them have to go?” Iris pressed her. “Who’s coming?”
“It’s Socorro,” Melissa concluded with a smile, her hands gathered at her chest.
The look Mom gave her made it clear it wasn’t.
“Dad?” Iris put forward, though the twins never hid for their father.
“If you don’t decide between yourselves, you both go.”
Iris didn’t like the tone Mom was using with the twins.
“You
go,” Daisy said.
“No, you go,” Dahlia replied.
“You go, because you did this to my arm.”
“You go, because I went yesterday.”
“But yesterday it was for class. This isn’t class. This is because a stranger’s coming. And the last time a stranger came, I hid.”
“Liar! We both hid!”
“Well, it was years ago, so it doesn’t count.”
It hadn’t actually been years, but Iris was glad that her sisters remembered Edelweiss’s homemade funeral as something remote.
“Mom, if it’s not Socorro who’s coming,” she asked over the twins’ voices, “why do they have to hide?”
“Not you, too . . .” Mom answered. “Anyone who sees them could spread word around the houses, around the town.” Her eyes flicked to one side. “Do we want Socorro to find out that she’s been teaching class to four girls instead of three?”
“I’m not going!” yelled Dahlia.
“Well, neither am I!” yelled Daisy.
“Then you both go. Iris, take them to their room.”
“Me? Why? Melissa can take them.”
“Honey, please. You’re not six years old.”
Iris turned to Melissa to pass the task on to her, but her sister was no longer by her side. She’d climbed to the top of the ladder. On tiptoes, shading her eyes with her hand, she was looking into the distance as Mom had done. Her mouth was open.
Iris felt excitement in her stomach. “What is it?”
A smile was painted across Melissa’s astonished face. Before she could reply, Mom turned Iris around by the shoulders and pushed her and the twins toward the house.
“Take them. Now. And you, Melissa, come down right away. Let’s see if we can all start behaving ourselves.”
Daisy sat on the ground. “I’m not going.” She tried to cross her arms but separated them with a groan when her other arm made contact with her wound.
Iris went to pick her up. She wanted to take the twins away and get back as quickly as possible to find out what was happening.
The little girl lay down, twisting her body. Mom bent down for her. Daisy resisted.
Iris ended up just taking Dahlia. She ran, pulling her along by the hand, not bothered that the little girl’s stride wasn’t big enough to keep up with her. She heard Dahlia’s shoes dragging over the dirt. She heard her yell and cry. They crossed the porch in just three paces. She picked Dahlia up to climb the stairs. When they reached the bedroom, Dahlia threw herself facedown on her bed and cried against the sheets.
Iris went over to the window.
She opened the curtains.
She had to blink several times to make sure what she was seeing on the road was real.
It couldn’t be true.
She rushed out of the room and locked it from the outside, leaving Dahlia inside. She went down the stairs two at a time, three at a time. She opened the screen door with so much enthusiasm that the latch hit the wall. She could have floated over the porch.
She returned, her breathing labored, to the place where her sisters and mother were standing. She regretted rushing so much, because she’d broken into a sweat. Hair was stuck to her face, and she could feel moisture on the seam of her neckline. She separated the material from her skin and blew, feeling the coolness down to her belly. She combed her hair with her fingers, nervously, then adjusted her underwear through her dress, straightening the elastic. She rearranged her breasts in her bra. Seeing Mom’s look of distaste, she stopped. Her mother was kneeling, loading everything she could into the wicker basket. Daisy asked her to be careful not to squash the flowers.
“I’m real angry at you,” Mom said. And although she said it to the little one, she didn’t take her eyes from her eldest daughter. Iris thought about saying something to justify her nervousness, but that was when she heard the boy’s voice and everything was reduced to the sweet, deep sound of his words. Imagining the tongue that moved inside that mouth to utter them generated an electric current in Iris’s body. She felt the heat from that energy concentrate in her chest, in her stomach, between her legs.
When she saw the stranger, Melissa thought of the photo of James Dean she’d cut the eyes out from two days before. The young man had the same thick lips, the same broad forehead with the hair combed back. His gaze was as intense as the one in the magazine image before she’d transplanted it to a stone. He wore a white T-shirt similar to the actor’s, the sleeves rolled up to the top of his biceps. A line of dust marked the damp patches around his neck and under his arms. The knees of his jeans were so worn that the material, of a washed-out blue color, threatened to tear open on the next bend of his legs. He wore elaborate boots, with big soles and long laces. A backpack hung from his shoulders. Melissa saw Iris wet her lips and found it easy to trace the trajectory of her sister’s eyes over the boy’s body.
He observed them, too, and Melissa didn’t know whether the intensity with which he inspected their faces was normal in encounters between people. The depth of his gaze, the way he studied the faces in front of him, reminded Melissa of the way she examined the rocks on the ground, searching for specific features.
His eyes lingered on Iris for so long that she finally blushed.
Mom pulled her back.
Melissa was overcome by an attack of shyness she was unable to control. She crouched on one side of Mom, like a small child. Even Daisy seemed more comfortable than she was, sitting by the basket and counting her flowers as if a visit from a stranger was a normal occurrence and not something that was happening for only the second time in Melissa’s memory. And on the first occasion, only Mom and Dad had dealt with the priest who’d conducted the mass for Edelweiss in Spanish.
Melissa felt Mom straighten her back, facing the young man as if protecting her daughters from the unknown. The three of them formed a barrier. Despite the firmness of Mom’s posture, her hand began to tremble. She hid it under her arm.
The boy held up a hand, showing the palm.
“¿Ho . . . hola?”
He spoke Spanish with an accent like Dad’s when he talked to people in the town.
“Hola,” Mom replied.
“Qué suerte enc—”
“We speak English,” Iris let slip.
Melissa heard Mom click her tongue.
The young man’s expression changed noticeably. Furrows appeared on his forehead.
“Seriously? You’re Americans, too?” His eyes widened, emphasizing his surprise. “Today must be my lucky day. I haven’t seen anyone in four days. Not a single person. And when at last I do find someone, you speak my language. You don’t know how happy I am. All I can say in Spanish is más cerveza, por favor, and quiero otro taco. That would’ve been a very boring conversation for everyone.”
Melissa would have liked to respond to the comment, or laugh, but the force with which Mom squeezed her shoulder made her sense it was best to keep quiet. Iris didn’t say anything, either. She just blinked at the boy, a foolish look on her face.
“I’m Rick,” the young man added.
He took a step forward with his hand held out, offering it to Mom. She reacted with a flinch, moving away from him.
The boy retreated. He hooked his thumbs in the straps of his backpack. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“What’re you looking for?”
Rick cleared his throat.
“I’m . . . I’m not looking for anything, to be honest. A little company, I guess. I’ve been walking for twenty-seven days and haven’t seen anyone in four. I’m about to start talking to the rocks.”
“To the rocks?” Melissa was openmouthed. The stranger was proving to be interesting. She could tell him a lot about the need to speak to stones. Mom squeezed her shoulder even harder, commanding her to be quiet.
“In fact,” Rick went on, “I’m happy just to hear my own voice right now. What a relief! Let’s see how I sound. One, two. One, two. Everything seems OK. Seriously, I was beginning to think I
’d forgotten how to speak.” He rounded off the remark with a lopsided smile.
Iris sighed.
“Well, you haven’t forgotten,” said Daisy from the ground, “because you haven’t stopped talking since you arrived.”
She had just blurted it out. There was a moment of surprise, of comical shock. Even Mom’s eyes searched for her daughters’. It was Rick himself who started laughing, his half smile turning into a guffaw that showed the brilliant white of his teeth. The laughter then infected Iris, who laughed more loudly and in a higher pitch than she normally did. Melissa joined them soon after, without taking her eyes off Rick, whose T-shirt was now tight against his tensed abdomen. When he took in air, the muscles in his chest expanded so much that the garment seemed to shrink, revealing the buckle on his belt. Daisy was laughing, too. Mom needed a little shove from Melissa to get her going. When she did, she laughed heartily, the tension in her muscles disappearing. She eased her grip on Melissa.
“I like your honesty,” Rick said to Daisy. “If only we adults were as honest as kids are, huh?”
He directed the question at Mom. Both Melissa and Iris fixed their eyes on her, hoping she would be friendlier.
Mom looked Rick up and down. “You’re not wrong,” she said. “The world would be a much better place.”
She held out her hand to Rick, who wiped his own on his pants before accepting it.
“I’m Rose.”
“Pleased to meet you, Rose. And you are?”
“They’re Iris, Melissa, and Lily.”
Mom used the twins’ shared name, as she did with Socorro.
“You all have flower names. How nice.”
Mom smiled. She seemed to like the fact that the young man had noticed the detail. Melissa was struck by the interest with which Rick listened, giving all his attention to Mom.
It was almost as if he was taking notes in his head.
While they made their introductions, Iris picked up the pitcher of agua de Jamaica. She filled a glass, intending to give it to Rick, but Mom stopped her from approaching, holding an arm out as a barrier.
The young man held up his hands.
“I’m harmless. I swear. And that drink looks fabulous. With all that ice. I don’t know how many days it’s been since I had a cold beverage.”