Sabrina & Corina

by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

  But Doty didn’t stop. She kicked and squirmed, and realized the entire weight of her body dangled from Joey’s arms. When it was clear that he would not let go unless she went back to the truck, Doty gathered wind in her lungs and screamed into Joey’s face. Against her voice, he held his neck straight, the long bulb of his Adam’s apple falling with a swallow. Doty sucked in another breath until her lungs ballooned with the night. She opened her mouth, releasing a cry, but Joey reached up and muzzled her face like an animal. “You shut up,” he said, throwing her backward.

  Doty landed belly-down, her head loudly splitting against a severed car door. She reached up to her right temple and felt her hair wet and warm like a swamp. Doty waved her hands before her face, but in the space between her eyes and the world, there was only darkness. She felt the unmistakable liquid warmth of blood leaking into her eyes, stinging all the way into her mouth. She sifted her fingers through rocks and broken glass, telling herself to see something, anything. “I can’t see,” she frantically screamed. “I can’t see.”

  Doty quieted as weakness overcame her body. She listened to her labored breaths and Joey’s boots crunching gravel before she felt the familiar tug of his arms lifting her from the hillside and carrying her body into his truck. She heard Joey’s truck sputtering to life, and the radio, low like it played inside a tin can. They glided over what Doty suspected was Thirty-third Avenue, a street more desolate than the main road. Joey stopped the truck at maybe a red light, and Doty could feel blood on her palms and smeared across the vinyl seat.

  “You’re not very bright,” he said, the soil smell coming from his mouth. “Drinking so much you fell.”

  “I can’t,” said Doty with great difficulty. “I can’t see.”

  “Lucky for you I was there. Just the two of us, and I saved you.”

  Doty faded out of consciousness just before she felt the familiar curve of the park where she walked each morning under the coolness of the aspen trees.

  * * *

  —

  As quickly as the flyers came, they fell from the cottonwood trees and Sunshine elms. They littered lawns and gathered in gutters. Old men crept out from their houses and hosed them away. Lucia Barrera’s face flowed down streams and into the sewers, where it disintegrated into nothing more than ink-laced dust. In time, her face was forgotten, leaving the bark as naked and twisted as it had ever been. But then came an unusually warm morning in mid-September, when the faces of women rushing about the neighborhood on their way to work were slick with sweat and melted cosmetics. Many of them stopped, blotted their faces dry with silk handkerchiefs, and widened their coal-lined eyes as they received the news that Lucia Barrera, like most missing things, had been found. A mailman had spotted her north of the city, exiting a highway diner with glass doors. The Rocky Mountain News printed a photo of Lucia flanked by her parents, her shoulders bent inward, her chin tilted down.

  “Isn’t there more to the story?” Doty asked Tina over breakfast.

  Tina shook out the paper. “Of course, but no one’s saying a word.”

  Doty leaned over her plate of fried potatoes. “How does her face seem?”

  “Relieved, I’d say. God only knows what she went through.”

  For a moment, Doty allowed her mind to wander. “God only knows.”

  * * *

  —

  On Tina’s wedding day, nearly nine months after Lucia had been found alive, Doty sat on the toilet’s closed lid, twisting a tube of coral lipstick between her hands.

  “A little much on your bottom lip.” Tina looked on, propped against the doorframe in her wedding dress. Her gardenia perfume mixed oddly with the odor of mold as she passed behind her sister, tearing a piece of toilet paper from the roll. She worked Doty’s face as if it were a fogged windshield.

  It was many hours into the reception when a girl with an easy, somewhat deep voice asked Doty if she’d like a drink. She took a seat at her round table near the edge of the church’s grassy courtyard. It was dusk, and the air was turning sharp, bitter. The girl sounded familiar, and the unseen parts of her, her voice and perfume, were musical and sweet in the way they collided. One gin and tonic turned into three and soon the girl blurted out an apology before asking Doty what happened to her eyes (it wasn’t that they were ugly, just turned every which way). The other guests had moved onto the dance floor. Doty could feel white streamers blow over the grass, their own kind of shadows.

  “I had an accident.”

  “Oh, no,” said the girl, scooting closer to Doty and squeezing her hand. “I bet people say you’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Doty, “no one says anything about it at all.”

  REMEDIES

  A dermatologist with a can of liquid nitrogen can remove a wart in four to five seconds. I can remove one overnight with a clove of garlic and a Band-Aid. Your fingers will stink for days, but the wart will never come back. You won’t have to bite or scratch at it until blood rushes over the spongy lining. You can hold someone’s hand without shame or embarrassment.

  I learned how to do this from my great-grandmother Estrella. She taught me all the remedies she learned from her own grandma on their pueblo in northern New Mexico. If you have a stomachache, drink chamomile tea with honey at the hottest temperature possible without scalding your tongue. If you have a headache, put slices of potato at your temples and let them draw out the pain. If you have a cold or a broken heart, drink a warm cup of atole made only with blue corn.

  * * *

  —

  Our lice came from Harrison, though Mama didn’t realize it was him the first time. She just tried washing my hair with mayonnaise. She heard about this trick from another hygienist at the dentist’s office and came home with a big jar of Kraft, the good stuff. She held my head over the kitchen sink, took a serving spoon, and plopped hunks of mayo across my scalp. With a Marlboro Light bumping up and down on her lip, she swirled the mess into my long brown hair until my entire head was soppy and warm. As she puffed smoke in and out of her lipstick mouth, I could see the missing tooth on her right side, the spot she always hid from everyone, including me. After she finished, she put a plastic bag over my hair, tying it at the middle of my neck with a rubber band.

  “Here,” she said, pointing with her red nails to a chair at the kitchen table. “Sit for fifteen minutes, jita.”

  She dashed out her cigarette on a saucer and parted her own dark hair, leaning over the countertop and examining her pale scalp with a teal Cover Girl compact mirror. Her gaze went up and down and back again. Mama then snapped shut the compact and looked at me.

  “All right, baby girl. Put your head over the sink.”

  With my face dropped into the sink’s chrome basin, Mama rinsed my hair as her large breasts pressed into my back. Hot water spilled over the front of my Tweety Bird T-shirt, soaking my neck and chest. I whined, fighting back nausea from the egg-smell of my own head.

  “Mama,” I said. “Why can’t we just ask Grandma Estrella about lice?”

  “Look at me.” She turned my body around and dried the water from my face with the bottom of her T-shirt. “You can never tell your grandma Estrella you have lice.”

  I tried to ask her why, but Mama shoved my head back under the faucet and kneaded my hair with her strong hands the way I had seen Grandma Estrella knead masa on Christmas Eve. As my brown hair wetly twisted, water rushed into my eyes, blurring my vision, but I swore I saw white lice eggs against the drain’s black pit.

  * * *

  —

  It was snowing the first time we picked up Harrison. Mama drove us to an apartment on Grant Street in downtown Denver and we huddled in our scarves and secondhand Sorels beneath the red-tarp awning at the front entrance.

  Mama pushed a button on the intercom and a sleepy voice answered, “Who is it?”

 
“It’s us,” she said. “Millie and Clarisa.”

  A quick buzz vibrated the brass speaker box and Mama pulled on the lobby’s door handle. Before we stepped inside, she hesitated, looking down at me.

  “Now, this is your brother,” Mama said quietly. “I know you haven’t met him and I know that we never see Daddy anymore, but Harrison isn’t as fortunate as you are, so be kind to him.”

  After I promised to be nice, we went inside, where the carpets were puke green and the ceiling was made of tin. We walked up a flight of creaking stairs while competing smells of garlic and mildew followed us. At the end of the second-floor hallway, Mama knocked hard on 13B.

  Harrison’s mom answered the door. She wore an enormous pink sweatshirt with the neck cut away, showing a star tattoo on her upper left shoulder. Her thin blond hair was pulled high on her head in a sloppy bun, and when she smiled, her teeth were very crooked.

  “Oh, hi,” she said. “Harrison, come here, Son.”

  He appeared next to her, hunched over and skinny, looking downward at the floorboards.

  “Have fun with your sister,” his mom said in her drowsy voice before handing him a backpack. She leaned over and kissed Harrison on the forehead. Behind her, I could see some of their apartment, a dusty living room with a sagging brown couch covered in laundry. There were pairs of crinkled and silky underpants beneath a grimy glass coffee table.

  Harrison’s mom rubbed her eyes with both hands, smearing her makeup until a speck of mascara floated inside her left eye. “He never said you were such a nice lady.” She then blew a kiss to her son before closing the apartment door.

  Mama flashed a warm smile. “Do you remember me? I met you when I came over to talk to your mom. You’re going to stay with us for a couple days.”

  Harrison nodded and scratched his head. “You brought Tootsie Rolls.”

  “Gross. That candy sucks,” I whispered.

  Mama jabbed the back of my neck with her long red nails. “This is Clarisa. She’s your half sister. You guys are almost the same age.”

  “You’re ten?” Harrison asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’m eleven. I’m short for my age.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “My mom says I get that from my dad.”

  The three of us started down the hallway, and I was surprised when we walked past a bathroom built into the wall, like a lime-green coat closet. I peered inside at an old porcelain bathtub with claws at the bottom. Grandma Estrella had a tub like that in her upstairs bathroom. I asked Mama about it and she told me that in the old days people shared bathtubs. They shared everything, she explained. But later when I asked Grandma Estrella, she told me those hallway bathrooms were only in buildings where dirty people lived, people who did awful things for a living, people she prayed for each night before she rubbed cold cream on her face in slow upward strokes, because downward caused wrinkles.

  * * *

  —

  Grandma Estrella lived in a red-brick Victorian house on the edge of a park named Benedict. She was a short, wide woman who wore long colorful skirts and carried on her skin the scent of rose oil and Airspun face powder. She lived alone, since my great-grandpa passed away before I was born and their only daughter died in a car crash when Mama was just four years old. Mama and I lived with Grandma Estrella after Daddy left, and even after we got our own townhouse in Northglenn, we visited her every weekend—except when Harrison came over. Mama said it was because we were busy, but I knew the truth. While Grandma Estrella hated all of Harrison, she only felt that way about half of me, my father’s half, the white half.

  One weekend, while I was staying over Grandma Estrella’s, we baked cookies she called biscochitos. We were in her big kitchen with all the windows open, the yellow curtains rising and falling with a breeze. We watched Bewitched on the countertop TV, and when the episode ended, Jerry Springer came on.

  “Ah, mija, I hate watching these hillbilly white people,” Grandma Estrella said. “Look at this man.” She was using a large wooden roller to point at the TV. “He was given every chance to make it in this world and what did he do? Threw it away on booze and drugs and can’t take care of his family. Just like your father.”

  “I guess,” I said, licking my spoonful of raw cookie dough.

  “Him leaving your life was the best thing that ever happened to you and your mother. If he wouldn’t have left on his own, I would have chased him off myself.”

  I laughed. “You’d chase him, Grandma Estrella? With what?”

  “A broom, or maybe a coat hanger. There are many tools. Now, my baby, switch the station. I want to watch my stories.”

  I wiped my flour-covered hands on the white-lace apron she had made especially for me and clicked the dial to channel seven. The picture was soft on purpose, part of the show. White people with diamonds and pretty eyelashes kissed or lied and cheated on each other. That’s how Grandma Estrella liked her people on TV—rich and scandalous.

  Grandma Estrella said, “Doesn’t Tiffany look gorgeous this week? Why don’t you grow your hair like that, mija? A girl’s hair should always be long.”

  I looked at the ends of my brown hair. “It quits growing after my shoulders.”

  “Nonsense. I know some herbs you can make into a tea.”

  Grandma Estrella closed her tiny eyes behind her large glasses and silently moved her lips as if she were reading different scraps of paper in her mind. After some time, she opened her mouth, the ridges in her face spreading wide and smoothing over, making her appear young again, if only for a second.

  “I’ll tell you the recipe for long hair, mija, but you must be cautious with this tea.”

  “Cautious?” I asked.

  “Vanity is risky, my baby. Let me tell you, you had a great-great-aunt, Milagros, the same Milagros your mother is named after, and she used the herbs too often and her black hair grew so long and so beautiful that all the men in our pueblo and even from far away wanted to marry her, but she would not choose one because she believed the longer and more beautiful her hair grew, the better her choices of husbands would be until one night, when the rest of the children were sleeping soundly in the same bedroom, her hair coiled around her neck like a snake, squeezing all the life from her throat.”

  “That really happened?”

  “Of course! You’re calling me a liar?”

  I pushed my dough scraps into the wastebasket and wondered what my own hair was capable of.

  * * *

  —

  Whenever Harrison stayed over, Mama pulled out the extra comforter, the one with holes and all the cotton bunched together in the corners. She’d spread it over the couch, making up a little bedroom for him, where they’d sit for hours, watching movies and laughing. Mama often asked Harrison questions, and they were usually about our dad.

  “Does Daddy ever send you presents?”

  “One time he did. A Hot Wheels set.”

  “Oh, wow,” Mama said, reaching out and stroking his neck. “What about your mama? Does he send her money to help out?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “I hope so. He can afford it. You know, Harrison,” she added with a sincere smile, “you look so much like Daddy. It’s like you’re him but as a little boy.”

  Each time I walked into the living room, I looked at Harrison’s slumped-over body on the couch and felt something like hot blacktop tar in my guts. I hated to be around him. I didn’t care that Mama said I should feel sorry for him because our dad was long gone and his mom had problems with drinking and taking pills. Imagine if I slept all day, Mama told me. You’d never get a warm meal.

  With Harrison in our living room, the whole townhouse smelled as bad as his apartment building. He had dark bags under his eyes, like someone hit him real hard and never let him heal. His T-shirts had holes in the sleeves and his jeans were worn t
hin, covered in a fine layer of dirt at the butt and knees. The worst part, he smelled like pee.

  “Hey, Harrison, why don’t you use that bathtub in the hallway at your crappy apartment?”

  “No one uses that, Clarisa. It’s busted and old.”

  “You probably should. You smell like a litter box.”

  “No, I don’t. I took a shower today!”

  “Why does my mom have to take care of you, anyway? What’s wrong with your own mom?”

  “Nothing. She’s just my mom.”

  Harrison never had a comeback and he never told on me for being mean. Instead, he acted crazy. In the middle of the afternoon, he’d open my dresser drawers, stick his face against my T-shirts and jeans, turn on and off our microwave, and ask annoying questions that made me wonder what his life was like at home.

  “Do you get recess even when it snows real bad?”

  “No, we have an inside day.”

  “How about your teacher—is she nice? What color is her hair?”

  “For your information, my teacher is a guy.”

  “A guy, really?”

  “Leave me alone. Don’t you go to school, too?”

  “What about our dad? Why doesn’t he want to see any of us?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want lice.”

  He was only a year younger, but even then I knew we were worlds apart. What I hated most about Harrison—besides that each time he came over, the lice came back—was that my mother was right. He looked like my dad. Even as a little boy, he looked like Daddy.

  * * *

  —

  I was nine years old the last time we spent Christmas with Daddy. He was up unusually early, no black bags under his eyes or sour breath reeking of beer and cigarettes. He was happy, smiling and kissing Mama on the mouth. We played airplane and he whirled me around his one-bedroom apartment, giggling and cheering, my arms open like little wings. Mama cooked all day—ham, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, cornbread. No Christmas tamales like at Grandma Estrella’s, though. He never liked that.