Irma Voth

TEN

WE WERE ALL SITTING IN THE little courtyard drinking hot coffee and eating eggs and beans and oranges. Natalie had run out to buy formula and a plastic bottle and some diapers for Ximena from the little store across the street. Aggie tried to drink from the green garden hose and I whispered to her in Low German that she shouldn’t. Hubertus pretended not to have noticed and quickly brought us a bottle of water and some pineapple juice. Aggie thanked him in Spanish and told him she’d been dying of thirst. She poured some of the water out of the glass bottle into her hand and splashed it on her face.

Aggie, I whispered. It’s just for drinking.

You are sisters and you are Mexicans? he said.

Yes, I said.

What language are you speaking?

Spanish, I said.

I know, he said, but to each other.

Low German, I said.

I’ve never heard of Low German, said Hubertus. Is it like regular German?

Yeah, sort of, I said. Natalie had returned with the baby stuff and was preparing the bottle in the little kitchen next to the courtyard.

Irma, he said, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable but there are some questions I have to ask.

All three of us stared at him and he laughed.

Don’t be afraid, he said. You should see your eyes. All six of them! You girls are funny.

Sorry, I said.

Sorry for what? said Hubertus. He laughed again. I could tell that he was a little spooked by Aggie’s wolf eyes, or maybe he wasn’t. But she could go for ages without blinking like she was challenging you to fill the empty whites of her eyes up with something better than what she was seeing right then. She could wait forever.

Okay, he said. I have to ask you. Why are your little sisters here with you? I’m so sorry if this is a difficult question to answer. Is it?

Yes, I said. I tried to put the pieces of my life together in my head before I blurted out a stupid answer. I wanted to tell the truth but the truth, in its plain dress, was so ugly. I didn’t want to say those words in front of Aggie because I thought they’d make her feel lost and helpless all over again. If I were somebody else I could answer with a mural or a tango down by the pond in the park or a poem. If I were Wilson. Or a gun if I were my father.

I’m sorry, said Hubertus. But if your parents are looking for you, I need to know. Your sisters are only children, still.

Natalie came trotting out of the kitchen in her high heels holding the bottle up like a victory flag. Here! she said. Let me feed that poor baby. May I? I handed Ximena over to Natalie and whispered that I was sorry she was so filthy. Natalie waved that all away, nonsense she said, and held X. close to her chest while she fed her.

They’re not, I said.

They’re not children? said Hubertus.

They’re not looking for us, I said.

The only sounds in the courtyard were birds and Ximena ferociously sucking. I thought she might devour the plastic bottle itself and live forever with its outline bulging in her stomach.

How can you be sure? said Hubertus. Are they dead? I’m sorry for asking.

No, I said. They’re alive as far as I know. Hubertus smiled and nodded. Aggie took a sip of pineapple juice. I noticed a plane flying high in the sky and spelling out a word with its jet stream, but then it disappeared.

My father doesn’t like us, I said. He doesn’t like girls. He doesn’t like it when we get older and … there’s something about his daughters that makes him crazy and … that’s all.

Natalie looked up from her job feeding Ximena, and Hubertus looked at her and then at Aggie who may or may not have blinked.

My God, said Natalie.

Natalie, he said.

What? she said. Am I not allowed to speak?

Does he know where you are? said Hubertus.

No, I said. Nobody does.

What about your mother? he said. Won’t she want you to come back?

Not if he’s there, I said.

Hubertus nodded and tried to look grim. He spread his fingers out and examined the backs of his hands. He made loud breathing sounds. Then he rubbed his thighs vigorously. He looked at Natalie who had gone back to feeding Ximena. She ignored him. The birds continued to sing, or to make noises anyway.

So, said Hubertus finally. And you lost all your money when Aggie here (he nodded at Aggie and smiled) decided to enrol in an impromptu tango class in the park?

Yes, I said. She put the bag down.

Well, said Aggie, you can’t dance the tango with a farmacia bag.

But you can dance it with a baby? I said in Low German.

What was I supposed to do? she said.

You could’ve stayed on the bench and not danced at all, I said.

I wasn’t going to—

You could have stayed out of trouble, I said in Spanish.

Well, said Hubertus, what’s life without trouble?

Yeah, Irma, said Aggie. What’s life without trouble?

Yeah, I know life isn’t life without trouble, I said, that’s pretty clear. I’m just saying that you don’t have to be the one to cause it all the time. Why don’t you give somebody else a chance every once in a while?

I’m not! said Aggie. You’re the one who married a—

Aggie, I said. Shut up.

You’re married? said Hubertus.

Yeah, I said, but I don’t know where he is, my husband.

Does he know that you’re here? said Hubertus.

No, I said.

Hubertus asked Natalie to join him in the office of the bed and breakfast where their computer and desk were. Are they fucking now? said Aggie when they were gone.

If you want to live in a big city, I said, you have to learn not to say the first thing that comes to your mind because there are actually people here who can hear it. There’s a population here.

Yeah, but they’re strange people, don’t you think? she said.

When they came back they told us we could live in a little room that was a part of the bed and breakfast. It was upstairs and in the back, overlooking other rooftops. It had a big bed and a pullout couch and a bathroom and a sink and a little fridge and a microwave oven and some painted pictures of fruit and other things on the wall and a tiny balcony. I would make breakfast for the guests in the morning and clean rooms and run errands in the afternoon. Aggie would go to school. Ximena would hang around being taken care of by me or by Natalie or Hubertus. In the evening I’d teach Natalie English so that one day she could pursue her dream of reading the complete works of Charles Dickens in their original form. Or something like that. She and Hubertus were laughing their heads off when they said it.

I don’t know how to thank you, I said. I’ll never forget your kindness.

Let’s go, said Natalie. I’ll show you your room and you can get some sleep and when you wake up we’ll have lunch.

I don’t know how to thank you? said Aggie in Low German. That’s a stupid thing to say. We were lying in the giant bed with Ximena clean and fresh-smelling and drunk with satisfaction between us. You say thank you, said Aggie. Like this. Thank you.

I wish I was as smart as you, Aggie, I said.

I know, me too, she said. I pray for that every night.

Thanks, I said.

I’ve almost given up, though, she said.

Yeah, I understand, but thanks anyway, I said. Not only are you exceptionally smart you’re also kind-hearted and considerate.

She moved her shoulder over a few inches so that it touched mine and then she moved back.

Are you being affectionate? I asked her.

When we woke up, Ximena had soaked the bed, right through her diaper and sleeper, through the blanket and the top sheet and the mattress protector and the mattress.

Shit, this kid is a lot of work, said Aggie.

We rinsed all that stuff in the shower and hung it over the balcony railing to dry. It was getting dark again. We went downstairs to find Hubertus and Natalie but they weren’t around. There was a note for us. It was written on the back of an envelope and taped to the door of the office. They would be back late and there was some cash in the envelope that we could use to buy some food and diapers and there was also a small key to the kitchen, where the washer and dryer were. I’d start work in the morning. We went into the kitchen and ate some tortillas and cheese and salad. Then we wandered off into the neighbourhood to find a place where we could get our hair cut. We would use some of the food money. We wanted what we referred to as pixie cuts. Jagged and short. It was the only style I could remember from when I lived in Canada. Katie got one before she left for Vancouver, before she tried to leave for Vancouver, and it was maybe the first step on the road to our father’s mad ness. I remember her showing it to me in our room and her whispering to me that it was called a pixie cut and this’ll make him blind with rage and me agreeing and experiencing intense pain in my chest and stomach while she pranced around admiring herself, smiling at her reflection, fearless.

While we were getting our hair cut in a small shop on Avenida Michoacán the power went out and we were in the dark. The haierdresser asked us to wait for a few minutes but the power didn’t come back on and Ximena was getting restless in my lap and banging her head against my collarbone and I was pulling bits of my hair out of her mouth and off her face and so we decided to pay and leave. The hairdresser asked us to come back the next day so that she could finish cutting our hair. When we got outside we saw each other in the light of the street lamp and Aggie laughed so hard she said she thought she’d wet her pants and I told her to try not to because she only had one pair.

You look like Wilf! she said. Wilf was my younger cousin, the one who lived in the filmmakers’ house before he and his family went back to Canada. Three men walked past us and called us ugly gringas and Aggie swore at them in the coarsest Spanish slang I had ever heard. Not even from Jorge. Or Diego. We went back to the bed and breakfast and went into the kitchen and found a pair of scissors and took them back to our room. We brought a chair onto the balcony and Aggie finished cutting my hair. I picked up the blond strands and felt their baby softness between my fingers and then I threw them into the garbage can. I put my feet up on the railing. I offered to finish cutting her hair too but she said she liked the asymmetry of it and I shouldn’t bother. Then we stared off at the city of Mexico, the D.F., the borough of Cuauhtémoc, our new home. We stayed out on the balcony for a long time looking at the lights and listening to the traffic and all the sirens. Way off in the distance we saw a building on fire. We talked a little bit about the things we had left behind, but not much. We talked about the universe, about loneliness. We talked about how to fall, the right way and the wrong way, to prevent injury, and if we could see our shadows from the light of Venus. We got a little cold but neither one of us wanted to go inside to get our sweatshirts because Ximena was dormant on the bed and we didn’t want the sound to activate her.

That night Ximena woke up every hour on the hour howling at the world for all its timid resignation and coy duplicity and also, I think, at me directly for having no hair that she could twist around her little fist and pull until it came out by its roots. She could still vomit on me, though, so she did that a couple of times and then to top it off she head-butted me in the nose which actually brought tears to my eyes and made me plop her on the bed next to Aggie more roughly than I should have. Aggie woke up and said no, get her away from me and I said no, you have to walk around with her for a while now. I have to sleep.

I don’t know what happened after that because Aggie took over and I lost consciousness. When I woke up they were both lying on the pullout couch, their eyes closed, their mouths wide open like sleep had caught them by surprise. If they’d been my captors this would be the moment I’d choose to run. A vile odour emanated from Ximena’s ass. I peered closely at her chest and saw it rise and fall and rise again and thought: you live.

I went into the tiny bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. Short and jagged. Good. I stroked the naked nape of my neck. I lifted up one lock of hair near my ear and measured it. One, maybe one and a half inches. Good. I looked at myself some more. Did I look like Katie? I don’t know. I wanted to show my mother my new haircut. She would have smiled and shaken her head and kissed me. She would have been afraid for me. She would have covered her eyes and then peeked through them. She would have admired my daring. She would have rejoiced quietly, silently, and stored this moment in some dark and hidden pocket of her soul. I stared at myself a bit longer and tried so hard to see Katie. I tried to see my mother and I even tried to see my father.

The stuff that happened next was almost calm and manageable so I won’t go into much detail. Aggie started school in September. She has a navy blue and white uniform that she hates and a clarinet that she practises on the balcony and one or two friends that come around every once in a while. She is drawing murals on our walls, on large sheets of wrapping paper that Hubertus buys in bulk. She has a so-called boyfriend whose name is Israel and who is also, coincidentally, a hemophiliac, so they must be careful when they punch each other and play around or he’ll bleed to death. That’s her type. The kind of kid who understands a soft and wounded interior. Israel told her that even sharp words can injure him but that was just a joke. His latest plan is to become a chainsaw artist. I’ve seen Israel run up the side of a building and then do a backwards somersault and land on his feet. He says that’s his calling card.

I’m working. Cleaning rooms, making meals. Ximena, my antagonist, sits in her baby chair and watches me. Aggie and I both have cellphones. I tried to phone Jorge again and the operator told me that number was no longer in service. Otherwise I have Aggie’s number and Hubertus’s and Natalie’s numbers and also Noehmi’s number. We go for beers sometimes when she’s not too busy with university classes and anarchy. Sometimes I walk over to the park to spy on that bookseller. I think and wonder a lot about Jorge. I wonder if he ever thinks about me or if he misses me at all. I wish I had been a better wife. And sometimes I pretend that I see Wilson. In bed, before I get up to work, I lie in the dark and imagine conversations with him and I remember the way he moved his hand across my body.

Ximena has learned how to bite and sit and point and lure people with her good looks. The tourists here at the bed and breakfast love her at first and then she starts to fight with them, stiffening her body into a blunt weapon, grabbing their noses and cheeks and lips and ears and twisting, screaming like an injured bird, and they give her back to me. Natalie says that when Ximena learns to walk Mexico City will know destruction similar to the scale of the 1985 earthquake.

Aggie’s murals are almost all of our family. But they’re conceptual, she says. Katie is a ghost that hovers over every scene and sometimes takes the shape of a crow or a breeze and Aggie is a rabbit. Our little brothers appear, when they appear, as raindrops. Our mother is a barn and I’m a tractor and our father is a big bell or the wreckage of the broken crop-duster. Aggie paints murals with these figures in different positions and doing different things. Sometimes she has us saying things, even the barn, but not usually. Aggie doesn’t talk much about her murals and I’ve learned not to ask too many questions. One thing I like to ask and she doesn’t seem to mind answering is: where’s Katie in this one? I don’t know if the purpose of each of her murals is to create a picture in which Katie can appear, or if she feels more free talking about the thing that represents Katie because she doesn’t remember much about her so she isn’t hampered by reality. One day I asked her where God was in her murals and she said TBA. I asked her what that meant and she said she didn’t know but I’m pretty sure she does.

The other day I went out to buy some avocados and I took a different route to the store. I noticed a building with a sign on it that said Citlaltépetl Refuge House. There was a white poster in the window at the front of the building and there were black words on it that said, When I came to Mexico City, I was dead. And here I started to live again. There was a small open archway at the front of the building that led into a quiet courtyard. I walked inside and stood next to a wall with photographs on it. A woman came out of a little office and asked me if she could help me with anything and I told her I had seen the white poster in the window and it had made me curious about the building.

What happens here? I asked her.

We are a refuge for exiled writers, she said. The words on the poster are a quote from the Kosovar poet Xhevdet Bajraj.

Oh, I said.

Where are you from? she asked me.

From here, I said. I’m Mexican. I live a few blocks from here.

We have a few apartments for writers who are forced to leave their own countries, she said. And a small bookstore and library and a little café, as you can see. We have readings here sometimes and different types of events. Music, drama. We’ve tried to create a comforting and stimulating environment. She pointed at the tables set up in the courtyard.

Why are they forced to leave their own countries? I said.

For various reasons, said the woman. She explained some of those reasons to me and I nodded.

How do they leave? I said.

In different ways, she said. But always with unfinished business and a broken heart. Freedom has its price.

Where is he now? I said.

Who? she said.

The poet.

He lives nearby, she said. Here in La Condesa.

Well, I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I thought of something. I have to go buy avocados, I said.

The woman said she understood. She loved them too. She thanked me for visiting and told me to keep one eye open for future events.

Last night Aggie agreed to guard Ximena, as she puts it, and I went out for a beer with Noehmi at a place called Tinto’s which is sort of a halfway mark between her neighbourhood of Tacubaya and my neighbourhood of La Condesa. We sat across from each other in a red booth and she told me about the play she’s working on.

It’s a one-man show, she said. It takes place in total darkness until the very end. The audience hears voices and sounds but they don’t see anything. She explained to me that at first the audience will hear the voice of a man, obviously suffering in some way. Then we’ll hear the voice of a woman talking to a different man, then other voices, of kids, older people, a teacher. Gradually we’ll realize that this man, the first man, is stuck in an air duct in the attic of a pawnshop that he’s trying to rob so that he can buy drugs. It’s his friend’s pawnshop. The woman is his girlfriend and she’s in the shop asking his friend if he’s seen her boyfriend. He’s been missing for days. His friend says he hasn’t and starts flirting a bit with the woman. The man in the duct can hear all of this and it’s killing him. But he’s dying anyway. He’s been there for a couple of days and he’s dying of thirst. We realize that the other voices are the voices of the people he’s remembering, the people in his life, his parents and his brother and his high school teacher. They are the voices of the people he is leaving behind as he dies. At the end of the play the lights come on for the first time and we see a man in a glass duct on the stage. That’s all. There’s no sound. No more voices. His face is pressed against the glass and he is dead. People don’t know if it’s over. They don’t know if they should leave. Then, eventually, everyone does leave. They figure out that the play is over.

What do you think? said Noehmi. Do you think it’ll work?

Definitely, I said.

Dupont is making the duct right now at his mother’s apartment.

I’d like to see it, I said.

Actually, said Noehmi, I was wondering if you would provide one of the voices. It would just be a recording. But obviously the voices are really important because there’s nothing else. I have to get them right.

I’d be one of the man’s memories? I said.

Yeah, said Noehmi. I think your voice would be good for his second grade teacher. When he remembers her telling him that he can accomplish anything in life if he works hard and wants it badly enough.

I don’t speak Spanish very well, I said.

Yeah you do, said Noehmi. You have an interesting accent and that’s why your voice will be cool in the play. It’ll stand out a bit from the others so that when your voice is heard the audience will be able to differentiate it more easily from the other female voices. You know what I mean?

I guess, I said.

He really likes her sandals and wants to marry her, said Noehmi. They’re white and red and have three straps on them that cross the foot and a wedge heel. He starts putting on a bolo tie when he goes to school and slicking his hair over to one side to impress her.

The teacher?

Yeah, said Noehmi. And once, in the hallway after recess, he asks her to dance and that makes her laugh.

Does she dance with him? I asked. I thought about Jorge trying to teach me that dance, how I had failed him so spectacularly.

Well, I’m not sure if that will be explained, said Noehmi. I’d say no, she doesn’t, so he dances alone in the hallway. But he doesn’t mind because he knows that he’s impressed her and made her laugh.

Ah, I said. I smiled. For some reason, I don’t know which one, I remembered my missionary aunt explaining to me in great detail how the jungle tribes of Ecuador used hot rocks to shrink heads. The features of the shrunken face remained exactly the same as they had been normally, except they were much smaller.

So? said Noehmi. Will you do it?

Of course, I said.

The next day I went for a walk, late in the day, before dinner. I took X. with me because Aggie was busy being taught skateboard tricks by Israel and I didn’t want to go through fathoms of grief asking her to babysit. I had an uneasy feeling in my gut. I was a little nervous. There’s a word in Low German for the way I felt but translated it means on top of and below a runaway horse which … well, I don’t really know how to describe what I was feeling. It was too complicated and I was too stupid to unravel it all.

I walked past the bookseller in the park. Then I walked past him again. And one more time until I worked up the nerve to stop and say hello. The bookseller asked me if we had met once before and I said yes and that he had given me a book which I hadn’t paid for. I handed him some money and he said thank you and asked me if I wanted another book and I said yes, but now I had no more money.

Again! Credit, he said, to keep you coming back. He smiled at me and I looked at the trees. He asked me if Spanish was my mother tongue and I said no. He said then what is? English?

No, I said. German. He rummaged around in his pile of books and gave me a copy of a book called Jakob von Gunten. It was written by Robert Walser, in German, a long time ago, around the turn of the last century. The bookseller told me that he kept books in different languages for tourists who happened to wander past looking for something to read. Robert Walser liked to walk around a lot, he said. He lived in a mental asylum for twenty years and somebody asked him if he was there to write and he said no, I’m here to be mad, and then one day he went for a long walk and lay down under a tree and died, said the bookseller. That’s all I know about him. I hope you like the book. I thanked him and said goodbye. Then he asked me what my name was and I said Irma Voth.

What’s yours? And he said it was Pushkin. But that I could call him Asher.

I stared at my new book. I flipped it over and flipped it over. What’s it about? he said. I think it’s about a boy who goes to servant school, I said. And then at the end he and the principal walk off into the desert.

All right, said Asher. Is that your baby? he said. Yes and no, I said. She’s my sister actually. Asher waved at Ximena who stared at him soulfully. Natalie had bought a stroller for her and sometimes when she was in it she became curiously reflective. Asher handed X. a cardboard baby book and she took it and put it in her mouth and gnawed at it with a terrible hunger. Then she flung it so that it barely missed Asher’s head and it fell onto the ground. He picked it up and gave it back to her.

Ximena and I kept walking. I pushed the stroller down the sidewalk towards the house of refuge for exiled writers. There were posters on the windows advertising different types of classes available to the general public.

The Bubbling Phenomena and Non-Compactness.

The “Almost Nothing” Precariousness in Art Since the 60s.

Taming Complexity.

Did Homer Describe an Eclipse in the Odyssey?

I read these posters and said the words out loud to Ximena. What do you think? I asked her. Did he or didn’t he? She craned her head around and up to glare at me while I read. She had black rings of dirt around her neck. She wanted to keep moving.

When we got back home Aggie was alone and lying on the bed on her back. She told me she had something to show me and then she lifted her sweatshirt and showed me her belly button. There was jewellery stuck to it. I had it pierced, she said. Israel paid for it with his allowance. There was a tiny blue heart on a silver ring.

Does it hurt? I asked her.

Of course! she said. But I’ve got stuff to keep it clean.

Ximena had fallen asleep in her stroller so I left her there and lay down on the bed next to Aggie and closed my eyes. She asked me what was wrong and I said I didn’t know. I was tired. I told her that I had used expensive perfume to kill some ants in a guest’s room instead of going to the supply bin in the cellar to get the real bug killer because I didn’t feel like going all that way. Then I panicked because the room smelled like perfume and I was sure that the guest would tell Hubertus or Natalie that I had used some of it for myself. So I lit a match to get rid of the perfume smell and then the room smelled like sulphur. I tried to turn the overhead fan on but the guest had hung wet clothing on it to dry and it was so heavy that the fan didn’t spin very well and then stopped altogether and started to smell a bit like smoke. So then I opened the window to get rid of the sulphur smell and the smoke smell and the perfume smell but the screen was missing so a zillion flies flew into the room. Then I had to spend the next twenty minutes killing them and cleaning their bodies off the various surfaces and the whole time I was sweating like a horse because I was so afraid that the guest would come back to her room.

Did she? said Aggie.

No, I said.

What kind of perfume was it? she said. Poison?

Is that a kind? I said.

Yeah, said Aggie. Christian Dior.

What do you mean? I said.

Christian Dior is the name of the designer who makes the perfume, said Aggie.

How do you know that? I said.

Me and Israel get samples for his mom, she said.

I told Aggie that all the noise and confusion on the streets was overwhelming me a little bit. I told her that I missed the stars in Chihuahua and the sound of the wind rustling the corn.

Me encanta este lugar, said Aggie.

I know, I said. She was speaking mostly Spanish these days. She had told me that she liked it here.

I asked Aggie to tell me about her day in Plattdeutsch.

Why? she said. It was boring.

No, I mean just talk to me about anything in Plattdeutsch, I said.

She told me that she had gone to the museum of anthropology that day with her class and that she had really wanted to steal a tiny little artifact, a charm or something, that had once belonged to an Aztec warrior.

But you didn’t, did you? I said.

Of course not, she said, you can’t. They’re under glass.

Oh, I said. But you wouldn’t have anyway, would you? I said.

I don’t know, she said. I might have if I thought I wouldn’t be caught.

You would? I said.

Maybe, she said.

Don’t, I said.

Why not? said Aggie.

Because it’s stupid, I said. And you know it.

Then we started talking about Katie because I had remembered the time she’d been arrested for assaulting a police officer. She’d been walking home late from a bush party and the cop had stopped to ask her what she was doing out so late and she was kind of drunk and she kicked his car and told him it was none of his business so he drove along beside her saying stupid things and she was getting madder and madder and she threw her lip gloss at his face and so then he made the decision that it was his business after all and he stopped the car and dragged her into the back seat. She kicked and screamed and swore and that resulted in more assault charges or maybe mischief or something or other and she had to spend the night in jail.

She spent the night in jail? said Aggie.

Yeah, I said.

That’s so fucking cool! said Aggie. Nobody ever tells me anything about Katie. What kind of lip gloss was it?

I don’t know, I said. Chocolate mint.

What happened after that? said Aggie.

You don’t want to know, I said.

I do so! said Aggie. You can’t stop the story there. You don’t know what I want to know and what I don’t want to know.

Don’t you know? I said.

No, she said. How would I know?

Well, I said. How do you think someone like Dad would have felt about his daughter being arrested for assaulting a police officer when she was coming home drunk from a bush party and then spending the night in jail?

All she did was throw lip gloss at him! said Aggie.

Aggie, I said.

What? she said.

You know exactly what, I said. You don’t have to use your imagination.

After that Aggie did fun things to try to cheer me up. Sometimes she’d grab me around the waist when I wasn’t expecting it, yell surprise and throw me down on the bed. I tried to do it to her one time and she laughed but said that I had to be careful with her belly button. She made up a game she called Baby Detective. I’d be lying in bed reading my new book or sitting on the balcony tying my shoes to get ready for work and I’d feel something. I’d sense that somebody was watching me. And I’d turn to see Ximena’s big, spooky eyes. Sometimes from low down, close to the floor, and sometimes from high up, near the ceiling. Aggie would stand behind the open door and hold Ximena in different places so that only her spying little baby face poked out.

Then one afternoon when I was finished cleaning I went into our room to have a short nap. Ximena was in a playpen in the courtyard and Natalie was keeping an eye on her while she fixed up the planters. It was a very bright day and I had opened all our curtains in the morning when I went to work so that the sun would wake Aggie up for school. But when I walked into our room the curtains were closed and it was completely dark. Much darker than usual. I couldn’t see anything. And there was a strange noise. I whispered Aggie’s name and waited. I stood perfectly still for a minute trying to understand what was going on. Slowly, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I began to see little dots of silver light. At first I saw only a few but as time passed the room was filled with them and soon I was surrounded by them. I smiled. I understood. Aggie had covered the windows with thick, dark material she had found somewhere, maybe it was painted cardboard from school, and had used a pin or something tiny to prick hundreds of holes into the blackness to create sunlit stars. I took a step into the darkness and bumped into something hard. It was a floor fan, a small one, that Aggie must have tied strips of newspaper to and the fan was blowing them to make a noise like wind. I backed up a bit and felt the wall. It was cool and smooth. I carefully sat down on the floor and leaned against the door. I sat in the dark. I stared at the stars and listened to the wind.

I was still sitting there when Aggie came home from school and barged through the door and knocked me over. She switched on the lights and then said oh, you’re here! There was a gecko on the wall beside my head. Aggie put her face next to it and said hey there, little gecko boy, did you enjoy your trip to Chihuahua? I thanked her for her gift of wind and stars and she said yeah, no problem, it was easy and then she showed me a giant painting she’d done in art class. It was of Katie in jail, doing a karate kick in her cell, her braids flying straight out behind her, trying to kick out the walls.

It’s called Chocolate Mint Lip Gloss, said Aggie.

Wow, I said.

We laid it out on the bed and looked at it.

Did you ever meet her boyfriend? said Aggie.

What boyfriend? I said.

The boyfriend who hit her with his car, said Aggie.

What are you talking about? I said. I thought you said nobody ever talked to you about Katie.

I’m talking about her boyfriend who hit her with his car after their big fight, said Aggie. Mom said he couldn’t see her in the snow or whatever. What are you talking about?

I put my hands over my eyes for a second trying to see something that wasn’t there. Then I clasped my hands together so that my fingers met and formed a tiny pocket that held nothing. I looked at the wall and the gecko was gone. We had sunlight and traffic noise and breath. We had art. We had each other. We had ourselves. We had memories and we had lies. Those were the difficult-to-insure contents of our room.

What’s your problem? said Aggie. Where’s X.?

In the courtyard with Natalie, I said. In her playpen. Katie didn’t have a boyfriend.

Yeah, she did, said Aggie. Mom told me.

Well, I said, no, she didn’t have a boyfriend.

Well, said Aggie, whatever.

So, it couldn’t have been the boyfriend who accidentally hit her with his car in a blizzard after a big fight, I said.

Who hit her then? said Aggie. She got up and went into the bathroom. I could see her reflection in the mirror. She was cleaning her belly button with a Q-tip soaked in sterilizing solution, dabbing it gently over and over, thoroughly.

Dad hit her, I said.

She stopped dabbing at her belly button.

She told him she was moving to Vancouver and he said she couldn’t go and she said yeah I’m going, or something, and then she took off and was running down that road behind the second barn. I guess she was trying to get to the highway to hitchhike to the city and he took off after her in the truck and hit her.

She shouldn’t have told him she was going, said Aggie.

I looked at her reflection. She had started dabbing at her belly button again, that little portal that connected her to her past. She kept dabbing while I talked so that eventually she had the cleanest belly button in all of Mexico.

Well, actually she didn’t tell him that she was going, I said.

You just said she did, said Aggie.

I mean she did tell him that she was going, I said, but only after I told him.

You told Dad she was going to Vancouver? said Aggie. Why would you do that?

Because I didn’t want her to go, I said.

You shouldn’t have told him, said Aggie.

She was really excited about going, I said. I mean she was sad to be leaving but she was also really happy.

Uh-huh, said Aggie.

And it made me so mad, I said. That she was so happy about leaving. And she made me promise not to tell Dad.

So you promised you wouldn’t? said Aggie.

Yeah, I said.

But then you did, said Aggie.

I know, I said. Yeah.

And then Dad went after her in his truck which is what you wanted him to do, said Aggie.

Yeah, I said, but to bring her home.

You shouldn’t have told him, said Aggie.

And then he came home and told Mom he couldn’t find her, I said. He put the truck in the garage and just waited around for a day or two for it to snow hard and then he told the cops that she had been upset about a fight with her boyfriend and had run off onto the road into the blizzard and still hadn’t come home. So they went looking for her and found her body in the ditch. They said she had been hit by a car or a truck.

Dad said well, it must have been the boyfriend who hit her, and the cops said okay, who’s her boyfriend and Dad said he had never met him and didn’t know his name. He told the cops that Katie had been upset before she left and he had asked her what was wrong and she had said she and her boyfriend had had a fight. So then the cops said oh, okay, we’ll ask around in the community. We’ll talk to some of her friends to see if we can get some information and Dad said yes, thank you, that would be good. The cop asked Dad if he had a photograph of Katie and he said no. The cop said no photographs? And Dad said no again. He said our families don’t have photographs.

A couple of days later the cops came back to our house and said that nobody in the community knew who her boyfriend was. Maybe it was a boy from the city, said Dad. And the cops said maybe. Then they said maybe it wasn’t her boyfriend who hit her. And Dad said maybe not. He said maybe it was a trucker or a farmer in the area who had thought that he had hit a deer or a dog and had just kept going. Dad said the snow had been blinding that night and it would have been impossible for anyone to have seen her especially in the dark. The cops asked Mom and Dad some questions. They asked them why they thought Katie was running in the dark in a snowstorm wearing a light jean jacket and runners. Dad said she was upset about the fight with her boyfriend, he had already told them that. They said yes, but the fight must have happened earlier that day or even before that and why had she waited until so long after the fact to run off into the night. That didn’t fit with their knowledge of human psychology and impulsive behaviour. Dad said well, he had thought that she had been talking to him over the phone that evening so the fight may have occurred over the phone immediately before she took off. The cops said well, they had contacted the Manitoba telephone system and there was no record of any phone activity that evening at all. None. Well, said Dad, the fight may have occurred earlier but Katie may have taken some time to work herself into a frenzy and then made the rash decision to run off into the night. Maybe, said the cop. Then he said that the autopsy had indicated that Katie’s body had been in the ditch for longer than just that evening. Maybe two or even three days. Dad said that didn’t make any sense at all and questioned the reliability of science. The cops asked Dad if maybe he had got the day wrong. They wondered if Katie had gone missing two or three days earlier, when the weather had been exceptionally clear and sunny and anybody driving down the road would have been able to have seen a running girl on the shoulder. Dad said no, he would have noticed if she’d been gone all that time, obviously. Then the cops were quiet for a second and asked Mom and Dad if they could talk to me alone.

Mom and Dad went outside into the yard and the cop asked me what kind of a girl Katie was. I said she was a fun girl. He asked me if she had had a boyfriend. I said yes. I was lying. The cop asked me if I knew who the boyfriend was. I said no, I had never met him. The cop said but she talked about him? I said yes, she did sometimes, not often. Then the cop made me tell him what she had said about her boyfriend and I said all she said was that he was funny and easygoing and made her laugh and liked her a lot. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know anything about what boyfriends might be like. The cop asked me where he was from and I said I didn’t know. Maybe the city. The cop asked me how Katie would have met a boy from the city when we were living so far away from it and she didn’t have a driver’s licence. I told the cop I didn’t know. Then I thought of something and I told the cop that Katie had told me that her boyfriend had a really bad temper. That sometimes she’d say something or do something, anything, like tap the dashboard of his car with her foot, and he’d fly off the handle. He was really violent.

The cop said well, first he was funny and easygoing and now he’s violent? I told the cop that he was both of those things, according to Katie. The cop asked me if she had ever called him by his name or had always spoken of him as her boyfriend this and her boyfriend that. I said yes, that she had never called him by his name. The cop said okay, can you tell me if there was any fighting between your dad and Katie? I said no, never. They asked me if any of the things she did ever made him angry and I said no, not at all. They asked me if I was sure about that. They said it was normal for fathers to sometimes become exasperated with their teenage daughters, to yell at them, or to forbid them from doing certain things. I didn’t say anything. They asked me again if Katie had ever made Dad mad and I said no, never. Then the cops left and Mom and Dad came back into the kitchen. Mom went to take care of you and the boys, you were in the other room, and Dad asked me what I had said to the cops. I told him and he said that was fine. Then the next day we were on our way to Mexico.

Aggie came out of the bathroom and took off her shirt. She put on a different one. Yeah, she said. That’s when Mom told me about the boyfriend. When she came into the room where me and the boys were playing. She lied to me too. Then Aggie took that shirt off and put the other one back on. She took Chocolate Mint Lip Gloss and taped it to the wall beside the door. Then she walked out.

I found a blue emergency candle in the washroom cupboard and lit it and stuck it into an empty jar and brought it to the bed and set it there under Aggie’s art. For the next hour or two I watched over Katie as she kicked out the walls around her. Finally around midnight or one in the morning Aggie came back and squeezed into bed next to me and Ximena and fell asleep in her clothes. In the morning I got up before she did. I got ready for work and then I woke her up for school.

After that Aggie painted a giant mural on brown paper and hung it over our bed. It was our family praying and holding hands around the table in our old kitchen in Canada. Katie’s body was lying in the centre of the table and there were other regular dishes of food with spoons in them and steam coming up. All our eyes were closed except for our father’s and he was staring straight at me. She painted a mural of a police lineup with three girls, herself, me and Ximena, looking out at the camera, dirty and dishevelled and lost.

I asked Aggie if we could take those murals off the walls and put them in the closet. Why? she said. You don’t want to be reminded of the fact that you’re the daughter of a killer? I told her I was sorry for telling her the truth and she told me never to lie to her again.