There were enough people crowded in the front room that the air was humid. A few unfamiliar faces were perched on the spiral staircase, sipping beers and drinking tequila from the bottle. It was dark save for a few dim lamps and a string of twinkling Christmas lights. In the hallway, I leaned against the wall and looked on at the kitchen, where people moved to an old doo-wop song. Women danced before their men. They lifted their hair, fanning their necks, their silver hoop earrings butting against their shoulders. That’s when I saw someone break away from the dancing. She pushed through the crowd, heading for the hallway. When she stepped closer to me, I saw that it was Sabrina, skinny and wet with sweat. I hadn’t seen her since her birthday.
She smiled with her blue eyes. “Where you been so long, Corina?”
On the porch Sabrina told me that she was moving to California, that she’d met a guy who was opening a bar, that she’d make tons of money. “You should visit me once I’m settled,” she said.
I told her maybe I would. A black SUV pulled up outside the party. The headlights remained on and I could hear the dull thud of bass. Sabrina waved to the driver, who was hidden behind tinted windows. She threw her faux-leather jacket over her shoulders and hurried in stiletto boots down the porch steps. Halfway across the yard, she turned back. “What’s your first memory in the entire world?”
“You know it’s that time I got stung by a bee, but you claim it didn’t happen to me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sabrina said. “You can have that memory if you want.”
She climbed into the black SUV, slamming the door behind her. As it pulled away, the window rolled down. Sabrina appeared from the shoulders up, shouting something I couldn’t make out. It was winter’s end. The road shimmered with black ice. All I could see was Sabrina’s long hair coiling around her neck, pale as the moon.
SISTERS
…and the blind man looked up and said, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.”
MARK 8:24
In the weeks before Dolores “Doty” Lucero had her eyesight stolen from her, she witnessed her life as if it were ordinary, taking for granted the way sunlight pressed through lace curtains as she woke in the mornings. She didn’t pay special attention to her younger sister, Tina, slumped on her side and snoring loudly in her bedroom, one of her breasts slopping out of her satin nightdress. She didn’t stop to behold their familiar kitchen with iron skillets drying on the rack and cracked eggshells in the wastebasket. And outside, beyond their front windows, Doty didn’t consider the cottonwood trees and Sunshine elms on their side of town, the Northside, along Federal Boulevard, a neighborhood of duplexes and low bungalows.
On the morning the flyers appeared across the city like snow in early July, Doty went outside to fetch the newspaper after starting breakfast with Tina. She stepped out their duplex’s screen door with her hair crisp in black curls and her makeup impeccable and bright. As she bent down to scoop up the Tuesday edition of the Rocky Mountain News, Doty caught sight of a misplaced whitish square. Walking barefoot over the grass, she stopped at the cottonwood tree, pulling a flyer down from the bark. The flyers were printed on cheap, brittle paper with a photograph of the girl, borrowed from the 1955 North High School yearbook, sitting dead center on the page. Missing, Lucia Barrera, nineteen-year-old girl of Filipino descent works in leather goods at Montgomery Ward’s, 16th Street and Tremont Street.
Doty’s chest ached with a hardened sadness. She lifted her gaze, eyeing the quiet street, almost hoping the missing girl would suddenly appear beside a mailbox or a parked automobile. Doty walked back inside through the sitting room, past the sofa, beneath the stucco archway, and into the kitchen, where Tina sat at the table with a plate of fried potatoes and flour tortillas piled before her. She was in her nightdress. Her hair was folded against her scalp with pins.
“This was on our tree,” Doty said in Spanish, setting the flyer on the table and taking a seat.
Tina gave it a glance. She shrugged.
“You don’t recognize her? She goes to Benny’s and wears those fluttering cowgirl dresses. She goes to St. Catherine’s, too, one of those Filipinos. You know, the girls who show up early for Mass and always bow lowest in the front pew.”
Tina stared at her sister with dismissive and faraway eyes that sat deep in her face, surrounded by mounds of cheekbones and dark brows. She could be flippant, downright oblivious, but she was Doty’s best friend and only family in Denver. Tina kindly looked at the flyer once more and told her sister that she’d never seen that girl in her life. “I don’t really pay attention to the backs of heads at Mass,” she said in English. “But I guess you do.”
Doty swiped the flyer from the table and held it in the sunlight. She certainly knew the girl. She had first noticed her months earlier and often found herself watching her at church. Once, after Lucia had received communion, her head bowed and hands clasped in white gloves, she’d walked away from the priest and shocked Doty. Lucia had glanced in her direction, stuck out her pink tongue, and revealed the white wafer inside her mouth. She then smiled, disappearing back into her pew. Doty felt something like heat spread across the center of her dress. Lucia was very beautiful, with strong, precise eyes, and Doty felt an urge to know her.
Doty said, “I know you’ve seen her at church, Tina. What could have happened to her?”
“Maybe she’s dead.” Tina gulped a glass of orange juice. “Someone could have chopped her right up.”
“Don’t say something so ugly. That’s horrible.”
“Fine. She probably had a boyfriend,” Tina suggested, her voice strained with annoyance. “I bet they ran off and wanted to get married in a hurry.”
“I don’t think so. She didn’t seem interested in that.”
Tina carried her dirty dish to the sink. She scraped the soggy remains of a half-eaten breakfast into the wastebasket while humming a country tune, her shoulder blades jutting from her back like stunted wings. “Come off it, Doty. Only you aren’t interested in finding a man.”
Doty said nothing. She reached for the flyer, running her fingernails down the missing girl’s eyes as if putting her to sleep.
* * *
—
Tina and Doty had lived together for two years, since they left southern Colorado at sixteen and seventeen years old. Their mother had stayed in a town called Durango. She’d taken up with an older Anglo rancher named Weiss. In the beginning, he seemed a comfortable choice for their mother after her first husband drank himself to death. But Weiss began showing Tina and Doty attention neither wanted, hovering over their beds as they slept, placing his fat, callused palms across their cheeks as they dreamed. Though they pleaded with their mother to leave him, she was too broken inside. What did they expect, she had said. Weiss had a taste for pretty Indian and Spanish girls. As a parting gift, their mother gave the sisters twenty-seven dollars and some advice. “You girls get married sooner rather than later. You’re good-looking enough.”
The sisters found work downtown as receptionists for a hematologist. Doty had the morning shift, while Tina worked afternoons. Doty enjoyed the calm pace, the stack of new magazines, and the high-rise view of Civic Center Park. From her desk, she marveled at the gradual way the aspens, which grew in slim rows along the park, shifted their leaves. They went from green in summer to a color in autumn that resembled a thousand gold coins, flipped endlessly by an unseen hand. Tina tolerated the job because it held a special place in her heart. Four months earlier she had met her boyfriend, Randy, after he made a delivery on a Tuesday. That night over dinner, Doty was shocked at the certainty in her sister’s voice when she said, “He will ask me to marry him someday. I know it.” Doty meanwhile didn’t plan on the servitude of marriage. She had no interest in men. She sometimes wondered if she’d get married at all.
* * *
—
That evening a
fter the flyers appeared, Doty looked up from where she sat on the lime-colored sofa to see Tina walk in through the screen door. Her makeup had warmed in the summer heat, giving her face the look of a glazed doughnut.
“Get up,” Tina said, jabbing her sister’s leg. “We’re going to the movies.”
“It’s Tuesday.” Doty was already in her lounging clothes—cigarette pants and an old billowing blouse. “The Santa Fe isn’t open on Tuesdays.”
“We aren’t going there. We’re going to the other theater on a double date.”
The other theater never played pictures in Spanish, and Doty suspected that, as usual, Tina had found her a date with a white man. Her sister had a thing for Anglos. They made more money, they could live and go anywhere in the city, and Tina believed each of the sisters could end up married to one. After all, they were both light-complected. But Doty felt white men treated her as something less than a full woman, a type of exotic object to display in their homes like a dead animal. The last time Tina had set her up, Doty endured a night out with an insurance man named Rustin Mitchel, who stank of sour mop water. At the end of the night, despite Doty shaking her head no, he moved in for a kiss. Doty leaned so far back that it became a game of limbo.
Tina said, “I ran into this guy outside the office fixing some trees for Dr. Marcus. His name is Joey Matthews. He’s got a good job as an arborist or whatever you call it. He’s real good-looking. Tall and, oh, Doty, he has these baby-blue eyes. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Sure I have,” Doty said. “Green eyes, blue eyes, black eyes. I’ve seen them all.”
Tina pulled Doty up by both wrists from the couch. “You’re going. End of it. And be nice this time. Maybe you’ll know him the rest of your life.”
* * *
—
Joey Matthews stood on the stoop and introduced himself with his cowboy hat dangling from his hands. He had milky skin the same color as his hair and perfectly square teeth. Above his thin upper lip, reddish seams from a scar, a harelip corrected, quivered as he spoke. He lowered his blue eyes, as though Doty’s gaze could burn his face. “Pleasure,” he said with a weak handshake, and then motioned for each of them—Tina, Randy, and Doty—to hop into his four-seater Ford pickup idling along the curb. Tina and Randy practically sat on each other’s laps in the back. Up front, Doty pressed herself against the door as they drove away from the Northside, the sun setting, reflecting pink and gold over the rushing Platte.
Silhouetted against the low light, Joey turned to Doty, asking what sort of music she liked, his face cloaked in shadow. “Bet you like a lot of that Spanish junk,” he said.
“No, not very much. I prefer Patsy Cline.”
The ride was quiet after that.
At the drive-in, Joey parked with the truck’s flatbed facing the screen. Everyone got in back on a thicket of woolen blankets. Doty carefully pulled herself up with one hand on her cotton dress, keeping her legs covered. The crowd was the usual Eastside variety, blond girls in expensive store-bought dresses and their boyfriends with big shiny cloud-colored Chevrolets. Doty could see a far-flung corner of the drive-in, the colored section, populated by friends from the Northside and Benny’s dance hall, the area where she and Tina normally were seated. She found herself searching for Lucia’s face. Maybe she had been found and was out enjoying the warm night at the movies. But Doty soon realized the colored section ended in a tall wooden fence, where several flyers for the missing girl had been posted. Lucia’s pretty face was nowhere within the drive-in, and Doty felt that same hardened sadness sinking from her throat to her stomach.
The last glimmers of dusk cooled behind the jagged mountains and the movie screen blasted with light. From the crackling speakers, circus music played while on-screen a cartoon hot dog danced with gloved hands and socked feet. The automobiles around them were hazy with cigarette smoke and mirrored lights. Doty felt anxious waiting for the picture to begin. She couldn’t place the emotion’s origins within herself, but she watched carefully as Joey breathed with his mouth slightly open, spit shining across his square teeth. Tina let out a piercing laugh from the other side of the truck bed. She looked like a little girl in a party dress, blue ruffles clear to her throat. She leaned into Randy, and threw her arms around his.
“Let’s get a Coke, baby,” she said, and they jumped off the truck, weaving between parking spots, her black hair and his felt hat bobbing between automobiles.
Joey slouched toward Doty; he smelled vaguely of soil. She scooted away. The movie’s opening credits had started. A long black road rolled over the screen until the camera stopped on a platinum-blond actress in a torn black dress, her shoulders and hips exposed as she screamed, her hands sandwiching her pale face, her mouth open with dangly tonsils. Soon the camera cut behind her where ants the size of elephants with lasers for eyes descended upon the earth from an oval spaceship.
“Pretty night,” Joey said.
“It’s a night,” said Doty.
Joey leaned back on his elbows and readjusted the blankets beneath them. Movie light poured over his face in changeable shades of white and gray. Doty caught herself staring at his scar, his knotted flesh. He covered it with his fist and went on.
“Listen,” he said. “Have I done something to offend you?”
“No. Not at all.” Doty pointed to the screen. “I’m just watching the picture.”
“It seems a little ridiculous, don’t you think?”
Doty laughed. Of course it was ridiculous. It was a movie with giant ants. “It’s supposed to be. Funny, that is.”
Tina and Randy returned with Cokes and small red bags of popcorn. They were arguing about something that had happened at the concessions stand. A young man Tina and Doty knew from the Northside had been thrown out of the theater for raising his voice when, after asking for a Coke, he was given a water. Tina wasn’t upset it happened. She was going on about how it was normal. She couldn’t understand how Randy never noticed.
“It’s called getting the water treatment,” Tina said, gripping the tailgate with one hand. “You’ve never heard of that, Randy? It happens to us all the time. You’re at a nice Woolworth, and just like that the clerk closes her register when it’s your turn. Or you’re at some diner on Colfax and when you order a grilled cheese sandwich, the waitress comes back with an empty plate.”
“Why would I notice that?” Randy asked, lowering his face to his hands and biting straight from the popcorn bag.
“Because you’re a big tall American boy,” said Tina, sarcastically.
Randy smirked. “And you’re my little Spanish girl.”
Tina smacked her lips and rolled her eyes. She then went to hoist herself onto the truck, but she slipped and fell backward, landing on the ground with a crack.
Doty sprang forward, peering over the truck’s tailgate. “Don’t just stand there,” she said to Randy. “Help her!”
“Jesus, baby,” he said, kneeling in the dirt at her side. “Are you okay?”
Tina threw her head back and let out a whimper. “It hurts so bad.” She bent her left arm and showed everyone the blood pouring from her elbow, dripping into the dark soil. Randy handed Joey the concessions. He lifted Tina from the ground and slung her injured arm around his neck, getting blood on his collared shirt.
“She’s a graceful one, your sister,” Joey whispered to Doty and laughed.
Doty was shocked. She could laugh at Tina. She had laughed at her her whole life. But they were sisters.
“It’s not like we’re out dancing,” Doty said, but her voice was muted by the movie’s swelling music. The platinum-blond actress cried out in agony as the queen ant hoisted her from the earth. The sounds of flesh tearing filled the night as the image of a severed arm, dripping with blood, cascaded across the screen.
* * *
—
The next eveni
ng, Tina returned from work with a bouquet of lilies. They had yawning petals the color of sap. She placed them on the kitchen table, where Doty sat in a cotton blouse buttoned to her throat. Her fists were balled beneath her chin. In the corner, a new Patsy Cline album spun beneath a needle.
“Always this sad country stuff with you,” Tina said, unzipping her work dress.
“Looks like someone got flowers for her boo-boo.”
Tina was taking off her clothes, her mauve dress peeled from her shoulders and dangling around her waist like an extra layer of skin. She bent her arm, showing Doty the wound wrapped in gauze. A dark spot of blood seeped through the bandage. “Actually,” she said, blowing on her elbow, “these aren’t for me. They’re for you. Joey sent them while I was at work. I guess he likes his women uptight and unaffectionate. Meanwhile, Randy doesn’t so much as call to check on my arm. I mean, it could be broken. You saw how far I fell.”
“You’ll live,” Doty said, petting the flowers. They were as soft and silken as a dog’s ear. There was a note near the stems: Something pretty for someone the same. Doty withdrew her hand, as if it had been bitten. She felt an unfamiliar jolt below her ribs. She had never gotten flowers before. “Joey wasted too much money on these. I hope he doesn’t expect anything in return.”
“Why would he expect anything?” Tina slipped into her bedroom to change. She reappeared seconds later in a towel. “I forgot to tell you. They found that missing girl’s jacket near the Platte River today. Right there beneath the bridge from the Northside to downtown. One of the patients at work was yapping on and on about it. ‘What kind of world?’ she kept saying. ‘What kind of world?’ ”
Sabrina & Corina Page 5