I think she was smiling. Later, I wanted to remember if she was smiling so bad it hurt. I hoped we weren’t visiting another old church: pretty as they were, they didn’t mean more to me than an hour in the shade. Walking around them, my mother looked sort of bored, revived only when she saw tiles or woodwork that would look great at the summer house she was trying to persuade Dad to buy. I followed her uphill now, stopping to sip water and whine about the bugs picnicking on my arms.
‘There’s nothing here,’ I said.
I looked around at cattle sheds, the odd house with a rickety tile roof.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘I think.’
I panted behind her towards a white stone house. A skinny guy stood leaning against the wall, watching us approach. My mother took a handkerchief out of her purse and wiped the dust from our shoes. The man walked towards us, not smiling, just watching our clean shoes.
‘Hello. Is this the right place? We’re here to see, we heard…’
My mother fumbled in her purse, digging for her phrasebook, buried under breath mints and flyers.
The man nodded and held out his hand, palm to the sky.
‘Yes, of course.’
She handed him pesos, I’m not sure how many, and we followed him into the house.
‘Here? Thank you.’
My mother zipped her bag closed over her camera, like she did before we went into churches.
‘What is this? Some cheese-making place or something?’
‘Sshhh,’ she said.
We stepped into a narrow hallway. My mother’s hand rested on my back. Someone, an old woman, was coming out of the door at the end of the dim hall, rubbing her eyes. I squeezed in my stomach to let her pass. She stopped right in front of us and, cupping my cheek with the walnut of her hand, she cried, ‘Señorita gorda encantadora. Señorita gorda encantadora.’ There were tears in her eyes. I stared at her lips, like a drawstring bag, tightened around contents I couldn’t recognise.
‘Bendígale. Bendígale,’ she said.
She rushed past us to cry at the unsmiling man outside. My mother nudged me through the door at the end of the corridor and I lurched into the room. It was bare. A girl lay on an iron bed. In the corner was a woman on a chair. She stood, her hand gesturing us to the bed. She spoke in short bursts.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘my daughter. She not eat since year of too much rain. Crops fail. Only small water touch her tongue for two years. Yet she alive. Is miracle. She a saint, everyone say.’
Her English was as bare as the room. She made a cross with her fingers over her shoulders and head. My mother followed, dabbing on a cross like perfume. I don’t know why, but I did the same. I stared at the girl asleep in the bed, the light from the shutters making gold bars across her pale face. Her eyes were closed, her eyelids dark. I could hear her breathing, I thought. The white sheet, pulled up to the neck, barely moved.
The mother lifted the sheet for us to see stick legs, twig arms poking out of a white nightdress. Through it, I could see ribs, frail as a house of matchsticks it looked like a sigh could blow down.
‘We lost cattle. Corn. My daughter dream about angel. She know she did not have to eat,’ the woman said.
My mother nodded as if she understood. Something about the woman looked proud. My cheeks burned hot and red. I stared at the girl, then the mothers. Why? I wanted to yell, Why are we here? What good does it do? How can this happen? Who let it? Who would it save? I looked up at the shutters and had the urge to throw them back, let sun flood the room, drown us all. I wanted to grab my mother’s purse and drop mints in the girl’s mouth one by one, feed her like a bird. I glared at my mother, opened my mouth and not a word came. I was close to the bed. I couldn’t move. My hand touched the back of the hand of the girl, so cool it washed the heat from my own.
‘Thank you,’ my mother said. ‘Bless you.’
The words were alien, spoken like a child repeating something it didn’t know the meaning of, but wanted to know. The mother of the girl looked at me and patted my mother’s hand. The door opened then, and the skinny man and a boy with crutches came into the room. My mother and I stepped into the slim hall, following the jangle of coins in the man’s pocket outside.
Traipsing down the hill, my mother said we were lucky to see a miracle, a living miracle, in our lives. Even if it wasn’t a miracle, they believed it, she babbled, they really believe.
‘How many people can say that?’ she said, opening her purse to take a picture of a farmer skinning a duck, that little extra bit of local colour rammed into her purse.
I didn’t speak. I walked behind her, sun strapped to my back, our shadows swallowing each other if we got too close.
‘We have to hurry,’ she said, sipping water. She handed me the bottle. I shook my head, refusing the breath mints she offered. I just marched on, downhill towards the colectivo, the village, a little gift shop in town where we found a plastic money box of some saint with pink paint smeared on her lips and a slot in her crown.
‘Your gran would love this!’ Mom said. She combed tangled fringes on my shawl. ‘Is there anything you want?’
I shook my head. No. There was not.
Shine On
The shop is all about rabbits, ladybirds and drifts of blankets so soft I want to bury myself in the folds. There’s barely time to be here, I know. The visit’s at four. I’ve cleaned, but nothing smells of lemons. I’m out of furniture polish and I haven’t been able to shine for days. I’m aching to shine, even for a second, so I drag my friends to Babylove to concentrate. Blake’s laughing. Shania sucks a frozen lolly like a Sex Ed teacher gone rogue. It’s October, but that doesn’t stop her. Once, I saw her buy ice cream in the snow like she was daring herself to feel all of the cold.
‘No one taught us this at school,’ Shania says, draining red colouring from the lolly. She grins, all stained mouth and white ice.
I say ssshhh, but not loud. It’s a ssshhh for me only, like the hush I get inside whenever I come here. We blurt into the store and the door makes an alarmed drone. The woman arranging sippy cups looks like she’d prefer a proper silver bell. She says, ‘Can I help you?’ like she’s breathed in a fly on her morning run. I say I’m just looking and browse like I’m loaded. Shania and Blake hit the breast pumps, howling. I pick up a blanket and can’t see them. I’m all about soft fleece, the silk wings of a bumblebee embroidered above the hem. I close my eyes to shine in on Kensay, baby fingers flicker and fade. The shine is like a torch with duff batteries, I’m all off. The girls laugh me out of the zone. Blake’s holding up a snowsuit. I picture Kensay in a chrome pram like a miniature Formula One driver and long to shine again. Blake asks if I’m alright, looking at me funny, like the time I told her about the shine, or tried to.
We were better friends between boyfriends. Me and Stan had split up, and Blake got dumped by the guy from the garage. In her bedroom, Blake dragged out her Love Book — folded card nicked from art, hole-punched spine. Each page listed the progress of love. February — first time we kissed. March — first time you called me your girlfriend. April — first time we got jealous, first time we punched a wall. May — first time you proposed.
‘Are you ever with him when you’re not there?’ I asked.
‘You mean like online?’ said Blake, playing with her eyelashes like a butterfly had landed on her fingers. I could never stick them on straight.
‘Close your eyes,’ I said, ‘and shine in on where he is now, what he’s doing.’
Blake blinked, her eyes opened that fast. She didn’t want to imagine anything, in case she imagined stuff no one needs to see. I tried to tell her to not imagine, just see. She replied, ‘You’re even crazier than me.’ And I couldn’t say anything about the shine, how even not seeing Stan, I saw him every day. Strangely, it was easier to shine for him then than now, like I just did what I had to. The social worker filled in forms. I stared at her defeated umbrella and was elsewhere. I didn’t even have to close my eyes. I saw Stan peel rubber off his trainers in his room as if he was just lying around, missing me like a full-time job. Then, I shone in on Kensay, crying at a milk bottle because it wasn’t me. It made me feel better somehow.