The other thing Pina told me was this: when she came back from her mom’s beach, Beto finally agreed to show her the letter. It’s just one sentence; one that none of us could have ever imagined. I think that’s actually what’s brought on the insomnia, because how many years have we spent wondering if it was a suicide note, or if Chela was really a spy and had been forced to leave on a mission? Basically, wondering if she wrote something that shed the light on her disappearance. But what’s breaking my heart is that the letter doesn’t say anything. The letter says: Pina, I only ask that you finish high school.
*
At home, the screen door to the yard is open. At first I’m worried, but then I walk closer and see my mom out in the middle of the lawn with a cup of coffee in her hands. She looks lost there, still in her white nightgown and with a woolen shawl wrapped around her half-heartedly, staring at it all as if she were deciding whether my plants are fact or fiction.
‘What are you doing here?’ I ask gently, taking her hand.
She’s barefoot too, and her wheat-colored hair is loose. Her wedding ring hangs between her collarbones. She never liked wearing it on her finger. Dad says she put it on a chain three weeks after their wedding. I realize then that it’s been ages since I saw this part of her body: it moves when she breathes, up and down, and the ring catches in the light of a streetlamp. Her shoulders look like two tennis balls implanted under her skin, the same as my brothers’: I didn’t remember that. Has Mom been hiding her body, too? I run a finger along the furrows between my braids and the itching starts up again. We look down at our feet. Mom holds on to my arm and shows me how, if you go in to touch the grass from the side, the droplets land on your toes. We have the same feet, too wide for pretty shoes. And now we have this too: dew, silence, green things.
Mom clenches her toes and pulls out a few blades of grass. She regrets it immediately and looks at me like a little girl who’s just done something naughty. I shrug my shoulders.
‘It doesn’t matter. We’ve got more. More of all of this.’
Then Mom blinks at me slowly, which I know means ‘thank you’.
2003
They’ve only just sat down when Chela says, ‘Now we’re going to talk about happy things.’
The crepes, the cutlery, two plates and a selection from Chihuahua’s jelly collection are laid out on the table. They’ve also decanted some water from the twenty-liter bottle in the kitchen into a pitcher. Marina, who never sits at the table, feels like she’s taking part in a simulacrum.
‘You start,’ Chela says.
‘I invent colors,’ is the only happy thing Marina can think of.
‘With paint?’
‘With words.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Like… this one I thought of earlier. I’m still not sure if it works: “blacktric”.’
‘An electric black?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Nice. You got anymore?’
‘Scink is the pale pink you find after you pull off a scab. You know the one?’
‘Totally!’
‘Dirtow is the dirty yellow on the edges of sidewalks where you’re not meant to park. Cantalight is that melony orange you only see at twilight. Briefoamite is the ephemeral white of sea foam.’
Chela has her mouth full so she says yes with her index finger. ‘Go on,’ she gestures.
‘Green-trip is the color of ecological guilt-trips.’
‘Amazing!’
‘Suddenlue is when you’re fine one minute and sad the next.’
‘Amazing!’
‘Hospitachio is the pistachio green color of hospitals. Burgunlip is the color of your mouth after a few glasses of red wine. Insomnlack is for the dark rings under sleepless eyes. Rainboil is that complex blend of petrol colors you see on the tarmac at filling stations. You know the one?’
‘You’ve got a talent, missy,’ Chela concludes. ‘And remember: talent doesn’t grow on trees. My happy thing is my hotel.’
It’s not actually hers, but that’s what she calls it: ‘my hotel’. Entitlement never goes unnoticed by Marina. Chela recaps her three years on Mazunte beach: she started out waiting tables, and slowly climbed the ladder to become manager. She talks about the turtles and their little eggs, about the police bribes, and the insufferably ignorant tourists; she talks about a Colombian, an Irishman, the best sex of her life, the best weed of her life, high levels of THC. Or did she say OCD? Marina can’t concentrate with the food there in front of her. And because she doesn’t like how Chela interrupted her: she had more colors, tens of colors to tell her.
‘How old are you?’ she asks.
‘Thirty-nine. I told you in the kitchen.’
‘Right.’
Marina pushes pieces of crepe around her plate. She ate almost half of it with relative ease, when it was still hot. But now that it’s gone cold and sticky she can’t face another morsel. And right there and then, as she tries to think up a way to clear the table without offending Chela, she decides whose side she’s on. Even if there are no sides here, she doesn’t care. She’s on Pina’s side. She’s on Linda’s side. She’s with Belldrop Mews. She stands with the people who face city life head on; who take the rough with the smooth. What is this beach-creature — this siren, this goldfish — doing in her house anyway?
Chela is showing her photos of the hotel on her phone, but this only disenchants Marina further. From somewhere inside of her, her brother demands, ‘Is-this-what-you-left-your-daughter-for? For a tan and a nametag? For a joint and a hammock?’ As much as Marina wouldn’t mind having a go at all those sunny, jaunty, multicultural experiences herself, they just don’t seem appropriate for Chela. Not at her age! Her nametag reads Isabelle. Please! Marina is presented with the clearest picture of Chela’s particular brand of confusion — the kind that smells of Indian Sandalwood but is barely distinguishable from the scent of church incense —, and she feels nothing but disgust for it. At the same time, and quite unexpectedly, Marina welcomes a new, spontaneous admiration for her mother, who is very submissive, it’s true, but at least isn’t confused. Señora Mendoza distrusts all kinds of smoke. She never bought into either the hippies or the puritans, and she boils cloves and orange peel at the first whiff of a cigarette in the house.
Right there and then, Marina knows what she has to do, and not just as an excuse to get away from the food on the table, but because what she’s about to say has to be said. She’s known since the kitchen and has just been putting it off. So now she gets up and carries her plate to the sink, and when she comes back she puts one foot up on a chair, props herself against her knee, lights a cigarette and says, ‘I have to tell you something, OK?’
She’s doing it all wrong. She knows she’s doing it all wrong, but the hospital jargon has taken the reins.
‘Empowerment,’ she hears in her head. Power is a bucking bronco. You have to mount it. It’s a rabid bronco and you have to take a single running jump to get on. At least that’s what goes on in Marina’s head every time someone mentions empowerment.
Chela has her eyebrows raised, amused but also attentive, open. She puts her phone down.
‘Luz. Linda and Víctor’s little girl?’
‘Yes…’
Marina sits down. The bronco has bolted. She looks at the table, suddenly ashamed. She doesn’t want to be the one to say it. It’s not a happy thing, for starters, and moreover it has nothing to do with her. There’s a spot of caramel on the plastic tablecloth. Marina rubs it off with a serviette and the serviette gets all clogged up in the caramel, breaks apart and makes tiny paper tacos.