Sabrina & Corina

by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

  “There are other jobs, ones with better insurance.”

  “No,” my mother said. “It’s too risky to quit. I’ll go to Cynthia’s when it’s time.”

  Cora tugged on my left arm, edging us up from the floor. She had a severe, worried expression and her dark eyes were cloudy. “Why should Mama live there?” she whispered. “We can take care of her.”

  * * *

  —

  Miss Cynthia and her husband, a barber we called Uncle Rex, lived several blocks away in a house even older than ours. It had chipped teal paint and a long wooden wheelchair ramp that I liked to imagine was a pirate ship’s plank. That evening, after we left Julian Plaza, Cora and I stood on their porch covered in thick vines and dried leaves while my father knocked on the red door.

  “Oh, my little Atencio dollies,” Miss Cynthia said as she ushered us inside, a boy toddler on her hip. Miss Cynthia was a Castillo, an old Spanish name that my father said was somewhere on our family tree, though I didn’t see a resemblance. Her black eyes were seeds behind round, scratched glasses and her hair was silver, braided in a bun at the nape of her neck. She was a thickset woman, her breasts weighing into her waistline. She always wore a rooster-print apron with lumpy pockets filled with pacifiers, and her sneakers were clunky and beige. Though she was old, Miss Cynthia was what my father called spry.

  She led us through the kitchen, where cookies and baby food rested on the table. Across the checkered linoleum floor, we passed more toddlers playing with blocks and a plastic rocking horse. Miss Cynthia stepped over them and stopped at the back door, where my mother stayed.

  “She’s loopy today,” she said to our father. “It’s them new pills. They’re no good.” The boy toddler on Miss Cynthia’s hip stared at me. When I waved, he turned away.

  In the back room, before a three-paneled window, my mother sat in a used metal wheelchair, her head tilted lightly to the right, her wrists dangling over the armrests. She looked outside and appeared to watch the fruitless peach trees quiver in the yard. It was sunset, the sky gold and lavender. The room was built into the shape of a half-moon with its own outside entrance, as if Uncle Rex had built onto the house as an afterthought, an extra way to charge rent. My mother’s sick things were displayed beside her on an aluminum tray. An airbrushed painting of the Virgin Mary, a pink phone with a curly cord, a pig-colored bedpan, school portraits of Cora and me, and many orange pill bottles.

  “Hi, Mama,” I said, soft and low.

  My mother hummed and wetted her mouth with a sip of water. “Alejandra, the alley cat.”

  “Can I show you something?”

  She bowed her head of loose hair.

  Sitting at her feet, I pulled the chapter book from my backpack, showing her illustrations of Marcus, a greenish horse, riding a comet’s tail. “He can fly into other animals’ dreams.”

  “Ah.” My mother spun her index finger in circles around my temple. “I can do that, too.”

  “Are you a bruja, Mama?”

  She smiled with her eyes.

  We sat around my mother like she was a tree, hooking onto her limbs, smoothing her scratchy Pendleton blankets. My father told stories of work—the new tenants, the old ones who had passed, and the renovations to the eighth-floor deck. After a while, he was quiet and let his forehead rest against her crown. Before my mother was sick, he often slid his arms around her waist as she cooked dinner. He sniffed her curls and kissed her shoulders and earlobes. She used to giggle, shaking him off, saying, “Stop that, Ramón, the babies don’t want to see that.”

  My mother asked, “Where’s Cora?”

  She was in the corner, sitting on the bed, studying a tray of orange prescription bottles when my father motioned for her. Cora hopped down. She walked sluggishly to our mother, giving her one kiss on the cheek. She eventually told her how much she missed her, speaking first quietly and then more urgently, telling our mother she wanted her back home. “I wear your T-shirts to bed. I like the Betty Boop one.”

  My mother nodded several times, her eyelids lowering like a weighted baby doll’s. She was suddenly in and out of sleep, snoring and whistling like the vents at Julian Plaza. Cora grimaced and retreated to the bed. She stayed there for the rest of our visit.

  Before we left that evening, my father spoke to Uncle Rex. He was in the main room, arched over a fat man in a black barber’s cape. Uncle Rex was giving him a shave. He looked up and said hello to us with a flick of his razor. My father paused between an open set of French doors. “I’ll check that bathroom light now, Rex.”

  Uncle Rex nodded, smoothing a puff of shaving cream over the fat man’s neck.

  My father then passed Miss Cynthia a handful of bills that she buried in her lumpy apron.

  * * *

  —

  For dinner, my father made goulash. “Goddamn,” he said, “it may be cheap, but, babies, it’s good.” He set the pot on the table and Cora and I slid over each of our bowls. My father spooned heaving plops of noodles and ground beef into the blue plastic. He then grunted and took his seat, unfolding a white paper napkin over his grimy jeans before we prayed.

  “How was work today, Papa?” I asked.

  “Not great,” he said. “Mr. George Baker put in a call at noon for a dishwasher repair, but when I arrived, he didn’t have a pulse. He was bent over the tub, naked as the day he came into this world. Except his socks. He had on those.”

  “How disgusting,” Cora said, in between sips of water.

  “It is what it is,” my father said. “But that man had no one. Not a soul. It’s a hard way to go—alone like that, but, my God, was he hoarding. Watches, coins, electronics, all kinds of stuff.”

  Cora looked up from her goulash. Though she appeared to have something she wanted to say, she only glanced out the window, then looked back at her noodles, sliding her fork’s prongs through three of them.

  I thought Mr. George Baker was one of the poorest men at Julian Plaza. He had moth-eaten suits, wilted fedoras, and no one ever visited him, something Cora explained was a whole ’nother type of poor. “Do you think he has a family?”

  “Everyone has a family, Alejandra,” my father said. “It just depends on whether that matters to them. I’d say it wasn’t something Mr. Baker cared much about at all. Some men are like that. Real lone wolf types.”

  I imagined men in the mountains, wild with long hair and bloodied fangs for teeth. “I’m glad you’re not like that, Papa.”

  My father chuckled—the creases around his eyes and mouth deepened. When we finished dinner, he kissed our hands and asked us to do the dishes. “If you need me,” he said, “I’ll be out back.”

  I washed while Cora stacked and dried. Through the window above the sink, I watched my father and a short man silhouetted against the garage light. They were looking at a television, walking around it, crouching down, pulling the cord straight. My father handed him a stereo and something else that was in a smallish cardboard box. The short man carried the items to his pickup and my father shut and locked the garage. I handed Cora a cup with an image of Tinker Bell, stuck, jamming her wide hips through a keyhole.

  “You know, he steals all that stuff,” she said. “From the dead old people.”

  “That’s not true. Papa wouldn’t do that.”

  Cora took the last dish from me. I turned off the faucet and watched my father take a handful of cash from the man.

  “You don’t know what anyone would or wouldn’t do,” Cora said. “You’re just a baby. That’s Mr. Baker’s TV. I guarantee it.”

  * * *

  —

  Within a couple weeks, spring had shifted into the beginnings of summer. School had finally let out and Cora and I spent more time at Julian Plaza than ever. On a Monday in early June, my father’s shift ended an hour early and he drove us to Miss Cynthia’s in his small maroon pickup. He
put on a Steely Dan CD as we rode along Park Avenue, the windows down, a warm breeze riding through our hair. The music was like a soundtrack to our neighborhood—little old ladies with white parasols, homeless men with spotted dogs, policemen on black bicycles in green vests, and all the other cars and trucks with headlights and grills like shining, optimistic faces. My father was singing “Dirty Work” when he pulled over outside of a big black Victorian house. He opened the truck’s door and stepped onto the sidewalk, crossing a patch of grass until he stood beside a lilac bush. He retrieved his work knife from his back pocket, cutting off a branch. “Smell those babies,” he said, as he stepped back inside the truck. “Your mama’s favorite.”

  “Isn’t that stealing?” Cora asked coolly from the front seat.

  “Nah. They went over the sidewalk. It’s a public service.”

  I laughed from the middle seat and my father winked before setting the flowers in my lap.

  * * *

  —

  In bed, tiny beneath thick quilts, my mother smiled as we approached her side. My father presented his lilacs, arms out, as if he carried an exotic purple bird. “Pretty,” she said, and my father placed the flowers on the mantel across the room, their lightness and sweet smell overpowering the stale stench of sickness. My mother uncoiled her palms, laying her hands open across the bed, as if she were absorbing our visit through her skin. We each took a turn with greetings and kisses. We rubbed her forehead, kissed her cheeks. She had recently lost so much weight that bones I never knew existed rose from her face, carving deep shadows around her eyes. Somehow, despite her body shrinking away, that afternoon it felt calm and restful in her room, as if the four of us were napping together in some enormous white bed.

  After a long while, Miss Cynthia stepped through the back door, her rooster apron sashaying like gutter leaves caught in the wind. Cora and I moved to the window, where we sat on the long wooden bench. “She’s due to be shifted,” Miss Cynthia said and my father nodded. Cora and I watched as they considered my mother’s body like a puzzle. With my father’s help, Miss Cynthia maneuvered my mother onto her left side, propping pillows beneath her neck and arms, positioning her in a way that I imagined mermaids rested if they ever found themselves beached. “She isn’t a high risk for bedsores,” Miss Cynthia said to my father. “But you can never be too careful.” I had no idea what bedsores were, but I pictured a bed with sharp teeth ready to puncture my mother’s legs and hips, ripping full chunks from her body.

  Once my mother was comfortable in her new position, Cora stood from the wooden bench and approached my mother with a small jar of Carmex from the side table. She dipped her pinkie inside and then ran her finger over our mother’s lips. “You’re chapped, Mama.”

  “My big helper Cora,” she said, smacking her lips together and kissing the air.

  * * *

  —

  That night I dreamed of my mother before she was sick. I was five years old and we were visiting my grandfather far away in a town called Saguarita, where my mother had grown up. The land was a wide valley surrounded by the bluest mountains with the whitest peaks. Cora and I were playing tag in the big field behind Grandpa Marcelo’s tiny adobe home. The grown-ups watched from the lighted wooden porch. They were speaking softly and sipping beers, listening to Spanish songs on the radio, a strumming, sad guitar. Cora and I would turn back and wave to them before chasing each other again, twirling and giggling in all directions.

  We had made it to the edge of the property, a place where a barbed-wire fence split the land in two. I was close to tagging Cora’s arm, but she lunged to the side, her long black braid slithering through the air. That’s when I stopped running and gasped at the sight of a baby deer very still in the tall grass, two bright lights for eyes. “Are you all alone?” I whispered. “Where is your mama?”

  Cora stopped running, too, and she backtracked to stand beside me. “Maybe she was abandoned,” she suggested. Cora smirked and I felt the edges of my mouth mirror hers. Like blackbirds silently shifting direction in midflight, in that moment we understood one another without words. We wanted to take that baby deer home with us, where it would sleep beneath our beds, graze throughout our yard, drink water from our tub. Our new sister, the animal. But we heard our mother then. She was sprinting in our direction, her hands gripping the bottom of her long yellow sundress as she shouted, “No, baby girls!” She looked taller and stronger than usual as she ran in strappy leather sandals. Even in twilight, I could see her face, determined and poised. She looked like fire burning her way across the valley.

  By the time my mother had reached Cora and me, the baby deer had bolted to the other side of the barbed-wire fence. “Her mama is only out gathering food,” my mother said, between heavy breaths. “I promise you. She’ll come back.”

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, I found Cora on top of the garage. She was like a Christmas decoration in the middle of summer. Her hair was a black mess, unbrushed and unbraided. She paced in our mother’s Betty Boop T-shirt, which fell past her knees. When I stepped into the backyard, she paused and lifted her arm, as though blocking a bright light. “What up, Alley Cat?”

  “Can I come up?”

  Cora pretended to yawn. “Walk over by the fence. I’ll help you.”

  I could see our entire neighborhood. The mountains, my elementary school, Julian Plaza with its middle floors surrounded by a ring of green treetops. The clouds sagged over the city like a blanket of air. Cora stood beside me, her hand resting on her hip, her eyes scanning the city. She pointed toward Colfax Avenue with its hurried traffic, lined by motels and bars.

  “Mama’s over there,” she said. “Behind the Burger King.”

  “It doesn’t even look that far,” I said.

  “I know,” Cora said. “She should be home with us.”

  “Mama can’t live with us,” I said. “Who would take care of her?”

  “I can. I’m probably much better at it than Miss Cynthia. What does she know, anyway?”

  I thought about how before my mother left, from the living room window, Cora and I watched her collapse in the front yard as she went to get the mail. We both waited a moment, as if she’d stand up and brush herself off. When she didn’t, we ran outside without our shoes and coats. We tried to lift her and bring her inside, and when that didn’t work, we attempted to drag her thin body into the house. We lived on a block where lawnmowers and bikes were stolen from garages in broad daylight, but no one walked by to help us. I cried and lay next to her while Cora ran inside and called our father from the kitchen. He drove home from Julian Plaza in record time.

  “I think Miss Cynthia’s a good lady,” I said. “She does Mama’s hair and gives her nice blankets.”

  “Look, she only takes care of Mama because she’s getting paid. She doesn’t care about her. She cares about money.” Cora then slinked with one slender leg and then the other onto the wooden fence. “Come on, Alley Cat. We need to get ready.”

  * * *

  —

  “You’s walked all the way here?” Miss Cynthia asked, scooting a plate of sugar cookies over her kitchen table in our direction. Her glasses were coated in dust. Two wiry black hairs poked out above her top lip and she had a toddler I hadn’t seen before in her lap, a little girl gnawing her entire hand, her forearm covered in drool. Miss Cynthia wiped the baby’s mouth with her rooster apron.

  “Yeah,” Cora said, refusing a cookie. “It isn’t far.”

  “And you didn’t get lost? I mean, you and the baby girl just found your way on your own?”

  “We’ve been coming here for months. We know the way.”

  Miss Cynthia broke a cookie against the table and offered some to the baby. “Smart girl. I’m not sure if you’re more like your mama or papa.”

  “She’s like both,” I said, biting into my cookie. “W
e both are like both.”

  Miss Cynthia smiled. Some teeth were brown with black gaps. She held her grin for too long and rose from the table, setting the toddler on the linoleum floor. The tot stood wobbly for a moment before crawling to the plastic rocking horse in the hallway. Miss Cynthia stood next to the telephone and adjusted a crucifix with baby Jesus nailed to the cross. He bled pink around his crown of thorns. “Listen, girls, your mama isn’t well today. She’s been having an especially rough morning. Her sickness is in her bones, now. It’s everywhere.”

  Cora said she understood.

  “Don’t you want to wait for your papa? He brings you over almost every day, anyway. That way you can be with them both.”

  “No,” Cora said. “We’d like to see our mother right now. Thank you.”

  Miss Cynthia lifted the plate of sugar cookies from the table, setting them down again on a countertop. “If you insist. Your mother is in the back room, in bed.”

  * * *

  —

  Cora and I had been around sick and dying people our entire lives. People, we learned, weren’t permanent, and neither were their illnesses. When I was six years old and Cora was eight, our mother regularly visited a woman named Billy at Julian Plaza who had long, droopy ears and one leg. Cora told me the leg was chopped off because of a disease that made your limbs die before the rest of you did. Once, while we watched The Price Is Right with Billy, Cora looked away from the spinning wheel and said, “If doctors wanted to take my leg, I’d try to get it run over by a train or a bus.” My mother shrieked and apologized for Cora. Billy died later that year, but I never forgot how her apartment smelled, like dirt inches below a garden’s surface, where roots twirl into one another. That day at Miss Cynthia’s, I sniffed the air and realized my mother’s room smelled exactly like that.