“I’m sure you’re a wonderful skipper. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“No, not that. It’s Miranda.” He hunched over and took a huge breath. “She’s dead.”
“Miranda can’t die, moron.”
Robbie peered at me, a deep sadness in his gaze. “We pulled diseases out of a hat today. Most kids didn’t get anything bad. Some got chicken pox. But Miranda, she got SIDS. If you don’t know what that is because you didn’t do your homework, it means sudden infant death syndrome.”
“I know what SIDS is,” I said. “What are we supposed to do now? Throw her away?”
“But we can’t,” Robbie whined. “It’s Miranda.”
I stared at him for a long while, counting how many times he blinked without tears rolling out of his eyes. Then I said, “I have an idea.”
Robbie and I parked our bikes near the edge of the hill overlooking the dig site. I had wrapped Miranda in a black pillowcase. She resembled a baby nun. I pulled her from my handlebar basket and one last time arched her face to the heavens. There was a mass of gray clouds. They spread evenly over the land like a patchwork of fog. “Look,” I whispered. “Even the sky is sad for you.”
Robbie stood beside me at the border between the hill and the dig site. He reached out with a thin chicken wing of an arm and patted Miranda softly on the head. We stood at the edge of the hill for some time, listening to the grumbling moans of the clouds and the far-off crackling of thunder. I picked out a spot easy to aim for in the middle of the pit. Then, tipping back, I readied myself to launch Miranda above my head with both arms, but Robbie stopped me. “You’re going to throw Miranda in there?”
“What else can we do?”
With those big sad eyes, he looked into the dig site. Then he looked at me. “I can kick her farther.”
“You’re going to kick our baby into her grave?” The wind carried my voice away from me as if it wasn’t my own to begin with.
“I play soccer, Sierra.”
Taking her from my arms, he delicately set Miranda on the edge of the hill, her limp body leaning mostly to the left. He backed up a few steps, and then pushed himself forward with huge strides, his arms flying. When his tennis shoe made contact with Miranda, her body lifted from the earth as though she was nothing more than a helium balloon. She twirled in the air as her sugar insides spiraled out of her body from a hole Robbie’s foot had torn in the bag. The sugar blew with the wind, sprinkling the dirt with bits of white. How pretty, I thought, and she landed with a thud.
SABRINA & CORINA
My grandmother called with the news. Though I wasn’t entirely surprised, I had to ask her four times to repeat herself. “Strangled,” she said over the phone. “That’s how it happened.”
I was doing makeup at Macy’s at the time, and after finishing my last face of the day, I drove to her house, where my youngest cousins played tag in the yard. I made my way past them through the chain-link gate, holding my purse above my head as they yelled my name and swirled around me, trying to get me to join their game. Inside, in the front room, my father was splayed out on the couch with a Rockies cap pulled over his eyes. One of my uncles leaned beside him, lightly clutching the remote. Another sat motionless on an old recliner, his eyes to his glowing cellphone. From the back bedroom came the howling cries of Sabrina’s mother. The men flinched but carried on watching the muted television screen. No one acknowledged my arrival.
In the kitchen, my grandmother stirred three restaurant-size steel pots with a wooden spoon. Her nails were golden and long and her silver hair was up, bouffant style. I had experienced enough Cordova deaths to know one pot was filled with green chili, another with pintos, and the last one with menudo. Deaths, weddings, birthdays—the menu was always the same. “Here,” my grandmother said, pointing with the spoon to a mound of raw pork on the table. “Make yourself useful.”
I took my place among the women. My mother and I silently chopped the pork into small pieces for the chili. One of my aunties made a pitcher of lemonade, another chopped onions, and another readied plates of food for the men. We worked quickly and silently, shouldering past one another in the small kitchen. A few cousins sat Indian style on the linoleum floor, sorting through a Payless shoe box of family photos. They passed around photos of Sabrina as though they had suddenly forgotten how she looked. Such thick, long black hair, they said. Look at her blue eyes in this one. They had always admired Sabrina, copying her makeup and her clothes. She was the family beauty, the gorgeous cousin, their lovely doll. It was only a matter of time, I thought, before they emulated her in other ways. One of them had already been suspended for showing up to math class drunk from the night before. She had been with a boy, her knees were bleeding. My youngest cousin gazed at a photo of Sabrina bikini clad along the creek in Boulder. “What a pretty figure,” she said, pinching her own stomach and sulking.
I carried the cutting board to the stove and pushed the pork into a skillet. My grandmother stood beside me, smelling of Vicks and the Chanel No. 5 samples I had given her from work. She looked at me with her tiny brown eyes iced over with bluish cataracts. I wondered how she saw anything. She stirred the pork until the chunks were browned and then submerged them in the chili, little by little, with her wooden spoon.
“You knew her best,” she said abruptly, still staring into the pot, her tone like an accusation directed toward anyone. “You knew her best, Corina.”
The other women stopped what they were doing. They stared at me, their ears nearly rising out of the strands of their black hair, wolflike, as they waited for my response. I didn’t tell them I hadn’t seen or spoken to Sabrina in months, and by that time, she wasn’t the Sabrina I knew anymore. I placed the cutting board in the sink and washed my hands.
* * *
—
When I was eleven and Sabrina was twelve, we crawled barefoot out of our grandmother’s attic window and stood on the roof above the porch. Though it was nearly fully dark, under our feet the shingles still felt warm from the evening sun. We took in the view of Denver’s budding skyline from my grandmother’s Westside neighborhood. Skyscrapers rose like granite cliffs, whitish and bleak against the night. Our family’s church, St. Joseph’s, stood nearby on the corner of Sixth Avenue, bells ringing as indoor lights twinkled through stained-glass windows.
We lay down, our hair spreading between us, our arms folded beneath our necks. Above us, miles into the sky, an airplane’s red light coasted through the dark. Sabrina held her left hand in front of her face, moving it closer to her eyes and then further away. Her nails were sparkly blue and the friendship bracelet I had made for her moved up her wrist. “What’s your first memory in the entire world?” she asked.
“I can’t remember.”
She lightly slapped my arm. “Try.”
I closed my eyes and I saw Sabrina and myself as babies near a mountain lake beneath a blanket the color of marigolds with plastic mirrors woven into the fabric. The blanket caught and held light, as if covered in a small portion of the sun. A honeybee floated down from the cloudless sky, landing on my cheek.
“It’s probably that time I got stung by a bee,” I said. “We were little and with our moms in the mountains.”
Sabrina squinted into the murky night. Very few stars were visible, and there was no moon. “You’re such a copycat, Corina. That was me. I was the one who got stung.”
“No way,” I said. “I felt it. It burned me all the way through my face and neck.”
She sat upright and with closed eyes shook her head. “Go ask our moms. I’m the one who was hurt.”
* * *
—
Around eleven, the men began snoring on the couch and the little cousins had passed out like sloppy drunks on the floor. The women made funeral plans in the kitchen. All of us were there except Sabrina’s mother, who had taken a Xanax and fallen asleep in my grand
mother’s bed. The rosary and viewing would be held in two days at Ramirez Mortuary. The funeral Mass would be the following morning, then a short trip to the cemetery, and a reception afterward in the church’s basement. One of my cousins said she could get us a deal on a karaoke DJ, but fortunately another cousin told her she was a tacky idiot.
We couldn’t agree on a closed casket. My grandmother was against it. She spoke of funerals where an outdated picture of the departed was presented to a room of teary-eyed mourners. “Nothing like that,” she said. “It’s so phony, disrespectful. With no body to view, it’s like they never were on this earth to begin with.”
“It might be better that way,” my mother said. “Carlos at the mortuary said her neck looks awful, real ugly and swollen.”
“He’s just being lazy,” said my grandmother. “Carlos can do all sorts of things these days with the new creams and chemicals.”
One of my aunties groaned and reminded everyone that last fall, after Auntie Celia passed away peacefully in her sleep, Carlos made her face look like a pickled pig’s ear. “I can only imagine what he’ll do to Sabrina,” she added.
“If you’re all so worried about it, Carlos doesn’t have to do it.” My grandmother pointed in my direction. “Corina can.”
“Do what, Grandma?” I asked stunned. “Her makeup?”
“Yes, jita, and her hair. That’s your job.”
I thought of the quinceañera the previous winter, where my wrists felt like they’d fall off after I did makeup and hair for eleven cousins and their friends. I had been encouraged to learn cosmetology partly because I was good at it and partly, I suspected, because my family loved free services and products. “I know you get them samples,” my aunties would say. “Hook us up with some lipstick or that antiwrinkle cream. That shit’s so expensive.”
“I don’t do makeovers on dead people,” I said.
“Nonsense.” My grandmother smacked the table. “Put the makeup on Sabrina and make sure she looks good. Pay special attention to her neck.”
“I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t know how.”
My grandmother looked at her lap and then at the stove. Her throat trembled and she wiped her face. It was as close to crying as she ever got. She turned back to me and I knew to say yes.
* * *
—
Sabrina loved our grandmother’s house. She especially loved the bathroom. The lighting was warm and rosy and on each of the four walls was a full-length mirror. My grandmother believed every woman needed to know how she looked from any angle. It was important, she said, to know how the rest of the world viewed us.
When Sabrina and I were in middle school, she stole a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses from the dollar store by shoving them into her sock. The next time we were both at our grandmother’s house, she wore them all day, fluttering around like some starlet, flicking her wrist and puffing out her hair. At one point, she convinced me to climb onto the bathroom’s pink countertop with her. She had us turn our bodies so we faced one another, our legs bent in the bowl of the sink. All around we were reflected in the four mirrors endlessly, like one tangled spider of a girl.
“I think,” Sabrina said, making a kissy-face at herself, “that I could be a model or an actress.”
Her face was a delicate oval with high cheekbones and a heavy bottom lip. But her most noticeable feature, her eyes, was covered by the sunglasses. Their pale blue color alone was striking, but the shape of them—very round and wide—is what made them unusual. Even strangers on the street said she resembled a living doll. “We should move to Cali when we’re older,” I said. “Become movie stars.”
“We should.” Sabrina clapped her hands. “I can be like Salma Hayek or go blond and be a real bombshell.”
“Blond? Who wants to be blond?”
“My dad was a blond. At least, he was in those pictures my mom has.” Sabrina often mentioned these photos, the only glimpse either of us had seen of her father. He took off before she was born. My grandmother told me he was a nobody—some white guy with a name like a stuffy nose, Stuart or Randal.
“I don’t care if your dad was blond. You look better with hair like me and our moms. You’d look adopted if you had stringy yellow hair.”
“And I don’t look adopted now? Not even with my blue eyes?”
“No way. You look like a Cordova,” I said. “So, if you’re Salma Hayek, who am I? Which actress?”
A look of deep concentration came over Sabrina’s face. She smiled. “You can be my personal assistant.”
“You wish,” I said. “What about Dolores del Rio?”
“Who the heck is that?”
“She’s from Grandma’s old-time movies. The kind without words.”
Sabrina slid the heart-shaped sunglasses off her face, her eyes bright beneath them. “That’s just dumb. No one wants a girl who doesn’t talk. You might as well be dead.”
* * *
—
Ramirez Mortuary was on the corner of a busy intersection north of downtown, an undistinguished house with reflective windows and plastic marigolds lining the cement pathway to the entrance. Nothing about it, inside or out, had changed much over the years. The carpet was still seafoam green, the walls still creamy pastel, and the sofa in the sitting area, where I was to meet Carlos, was still bubble gum pink.
I sat down and glanced through some pamphlets on loss and grief spread over a glass coffee table. They all had glossy photos of beautiful white-haired people with pinched features and light eyes. Sabrina would have looked like that, had she grown old. Our cousins used to give her a hard time. “With eyes like that,” they’d say, “you look like one of those dogs. A husky or maybe a wolf.” My grandmother told Sabrina to ignore them. She said people will find the loveliest part of you and try to make it ugly. “And they will do anything,” she always said, “to own that piece of you.”
“I can spot a Cordova from a mile away,” Carlos said, marching toward me, one hand on his hip, a short man with a thin mustache and a paisley western shirt. His black hair had thinned since I last saw him at Auntie Celia’s funeral.
I tossed the pamphlets back onto the table and handed him a duffel bag of Sabrina’s things—a modest red dress, a quartz rosary, silk flowers for her hair, an old photograph. “Like you asked for. I didn’t bring any shoes, though. My grandma told me you wouldn’t need those.”
“Dead people,” he said, “are like white people. They can’t dance.”
I laughed a little. “You make that one up?”
“Oh, yes, honey. That’s how it goes.”
He led me down a carpeted hallway with yolk-colored squares. After my godfather died of hepatitis in the early nineties, Sabrina and I used those squares to play hopscotch. At the end of the hallway, he opened a door to a showroom of caskets. Many were dark wood, some shiny metal, and a few radiantly white. In the corner were smaller versions, for children. Carlos leaned against the smallest one. “Before we head into the other room, I want to go over some things.”
I nodded.
“Number one, if you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to. Number two, you have two hours. The wake starts then. And number three, this is a favor for your grandmother. Don’t tell anyone I let you do this.”
“So, that’s it? There’s nothing else?”
“Wait here. I’ll go ahead and put on her dress. I’ll call you in when the body’s ready.” Carlos pulled a set of keys from the retractable chain on his belt. Before opening the door, he said, “And I’m sorry about Sabrina. She was a beautiful girl. Really, she was.”
* * *
—
We were inseparable in high school. Sabrina was my best friend, my closest cousin. My father would give me a hard time, ask if I ever tired of carrying her deadweight, but Sabrina was fun. She was vivid and felt everything deeply, from heartbreak to t
he drunken nights we stayed up until 4:00 A.M., mapping out our tiny lives with enormity only Sabrina could imagine. To her, everything was possible—money, true love, a way out of Colorado. Even after she dropped out in eleventh grade to work at a sports bar downtown, I used to do homework in a back booth, marveling at the way she glided between tables, sleek and fluid with her long hair curled around her elegant neck. Men would follow her between their bites of onion rings and beer-battered fish, insatiable, as if my cousin was just another symptom of their hunger.
After graduation, my father offered to pay for cosmetology school. He said that I needed to do something besides run around like other Cordova women. He mostly meant Sabrina, of course, who by that point had started showing up to family dinners smelling like a barroom floor. But it wasn’t just her. There was the distant niece whose infant son was taken away by the state, the cousins who died messing around with heroin, Great-Auntie Doty left blind after a date with the wrong man, and Auntie Liz, found dead in her Chrysler, the motor running and the garage door locked. My grandmother hardly mentioned Auntie Liz except to say that what killed her had killed them all.
While I was studying cuts and colors, perms and relaxers, Sabrina continued working in bars and sleeping with men who all looked alike: tall, thick-necked, green eyes or blue. In my mind, these men formed a lineup of indifferent masculine faces, a continuation of the withdrawn expression I had seen in those old photographs of Sabrina’s father. Sometimes she’d visit me at the beauty college. She would stand at my station in wrinkled clothes, looking like she’d just woken up at noon. While the other girls snickered and popped their gum, Sabrina would scoop away her hair and I’d see the bruises, hickeys like rotten goose eggs down her throat. “They’ll send me home from work,” she’d say, and I’d always help her conceal everything.
Sabrina & Corina Page 3