Night at the Fiestas: Stories

NEMECIA

IN MY EARLIEST MEMORY OF MY COUSIN NEMECIA, WE ARE walking together in the bean field. I’ve been crying, and my breath is still juddering and wrecked. She holds tight to my hand and says cheerfully, “Just wait, Maria, wait ’til you see.” I don’t recall why I was upset or what my cousin showed me that day. I remember only that my sadness receded like a tide, replaced by a new quiet fizz of anticipation, and that Nemecia’s shoes had heels. She had to walk tipped forward on her toes to prevent them from sinking into the dirt.

Nemecia was the daughter of my mother’s sister. She came to live with my parents before I was born because my aunt Benigna couldn’t care for her. Later, when Aunt Benigna recovered and moved to Los Angeles, Nemecia had already lived with us for so long that she stayed. This wasn’t unusual in our New Mexico town in those years between the wars; if someone died, or came upon hard times, or simply had too many children, there were always aunts or sisters or grandmothers with room for an extra child.

The day after I was born, my great-aunt Paulita led seven-year-old Nemecia into my mother’s bedroom to meet me. Nemecia was carrying the porcelain baby doll that had once belonged to her own mother. When they moved the blanket from my face so that she could see me, she smashed her doll against the plank floor. The pieces were all found; my father glued them together, wiping the surface with his handkerchief to remove what oozed between the cracks. The glue dried brown, or maybe it dried white and only turned brown with age. The doll sat on the bureau in our bedroom, its face round and placidly smiling behind its net of cracks, hands folded primly across white lace, a strange and terrifying mix of young and old.

Nemecia had an air of tragedy and glamour about her, which she cultivated. She blackened her eyes with a kohl pencil, and wore glass beads and silk stockings, gifts from her mother in California. She spent her allowance on magazines and pinned the photographs of actors from silent films around the mirror on our dresser. I don’t think she ever saw a film — not, at least, until after she left us, since the nearest theater was all the way in Albuquerque, and my parents would not in any case have thought movies suitable for a young girl. Still, Nemecia modeled the upward glances and pouts of Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo in our small bedroom mirror.

When I think of Nemecia as she was then, I think of her eating. My cousin was ravenous. She needed things, and she needed food. She took small bites, swallowed everything as neatly as a cat. She was never full and the food never showed on her figure.

She told jokes as she served herself helping after helping, so that we were distracted and didn’t notice how many tortillas or how many bowls of green chili stew she had eaten. If my father or little brothers teased her for her appetite, she burned red. My mother would shush my father and say she was a growing girl.

At night she stole food from the pantry, handfuls of prunes, beef jerky, pieces of ham. Her stealth was unnecessary; my mother would gladly have fed her until she was full. Still, in the mornings everything was in its place, the waxed paper folded neatly around the cheese, the lids tight on the jars. She was adept at slicing and spooning so her thefts weren’t noticeable. I’d wake to her kneeling on my bed, a tortilla spread with honey against my lips. “Here,” she’d whisper, and even if I was still full from dinner and not awake, I’d take a bite, because she needed me to participate in her crime.

Watching her eat made me hate food. The quick efficient bites, the movement of her jaw, the way the food slid down her throat — it sickened me to think of her body permitting such quantities. Her exquisite manners and the ladylike dip of her head as she accepted each mouthful somehow made it worse. But if I was a small eater, if I resented my dependence on food, no matter, because Nemecia would eat my portion, and nothing was ever wasted.

I WAS AFRAID OF NEMECIA because I knew her greatest secret: when she was five, she put her mother in a coma and killed our grandfather.

I knew this because she told me late one Sunday as we lay awake in our beds. The whole family had eaten together at our house, as we did every week, and I could hear the adults in the front room, still talking.

“I killed them,” Nemecia said into the darkness. She spoke as if reciting, and I didn’t at first know if she was talking to me. “My mother was dead. Almost a month she was dead, killed by me. Then she came back, like Christ, except it was a bigger miracle because she was dead longer, not just three days.” Her voice was matter-of-fact.

“Why did you kill our grandpa?” I whispered.

“I don’t remember,” she said. “I must have been angry.”

I stared hard at the darkness, then blinked. Eyes open or shut, the darkness was the same. Unsettling. I couldn’t hear Nemecia breathe, just the distant voices of the adults. I had the feeling I was alone in the room.

Then Nemecia spoke. “I can’t remember how I did it, though.”

“Did you kill your father too?” I asked. For the first time I became aware of a mantle of safety around me that I’d never noticed before, and it was dissolving.

“Oh, no,” Nemecia told me. Her voice was decided again. “I didn’t need to, because he ran away on his own.”

Her only mistake, she said, is that she didn’t kill the miracle child. The miracle child was her brother, my cousin Patrick, two years older than me. He was a miracle because even as Aunt Benigna slept, dead to the world for those weeks, his cells multiplied and his features emerged. I thought of him growing strong on sugar water and my aunt’s wasting body, his soul glowing steadily inside her. I thought of him turning flips in the liquid quiet.

“I was so close,” Nemecia said, almost wistfully.

A photograph of Patrick as a toddler stood in a frame on the piano. He was seated between Aunt Benigna, whom I had never met, and her new husband, all of them living in California. The Patrick in the photograph was fat-cheeked and unsmiling. He seemed content there, between a mother and a father. He did not seem aware of the sister who lived with us in another house nine hundred miles away. Certainly he didn’t miss her.

“You better not tell anyone,” my cousin said.

“I won’t,” I said, fear and loyalty swelling in me. I reached my hand into the dark space between our beds.

THE NEXT DAY, THE WORLD looked different; every adult I encountered was diminished now, made frail by Nemecia’s secret.

That afternoon I went to the store and stood quietly at my mother’s side as she worked at the messy rolltop desk behind the counter. She was balancing the accounts, tapping her lower lip with the end of her pencil. As always by the end of the day, a halo of frizz had sprung around her face.

My heart pounded and my throat was tight. “What happened to Aunt Benigna? What happened to your dad?”

My mother turned to look at me. She put down the pencil, was still for a moment, and then shook her head and made a gesture like she was pushing it all away from her.

“The important thing is we got our miracle. Miracles. Benigna lived, and that baby lived.” Her voice was hard. “God at least granted us that. I’ll always thank him for that.” She didn’t look thankful.

“But what happened?” My question was less forceful now.

“My poor, poor sister.” My mother’s eyes welled and she shook her head again. “It’s best forgotten. It hurts me to think about it.”

I believed that what Nemecia told me was true. What confused me was that no one ever treated Nemecia like a murderer. If anything, they were especially nice to her. I wondered if they knew what she’d done. I wondered if they were afraid of what she might do to them. My mother afraid of a child — the idea was outrageous, but it explained, perhaps, the little extra attentions she gave my cousin that so stung me: the brush of her fingertips on Nemecia’s cheek, the way, when kissing us goodnight, her lips lingered against Nemecia’s hair.

Perhaps the whole town was terrified, watching my cousin, and I watched Nemecia, too, as she talked with her teacher on the school steps, as she helped my mother before dinner. But my cousin never slipped, and though sometimes I thought I caught glimmers of caution in the faces of the adults, I couldn’t be sure.

The whole town seemed to have agreed to keep me in the dark, but I thought if anyone would be vocal about her disapproval — and surely she disapproved of murder — it would be my great-aunt Paulita. I asked her about it one afternoon at her house as we made tortillas, careful not to betray Nemecia’s secret. “What happened to my grand-father?” I pinched off a ball of dough and handed it to her.

“It was beyond imagining,” Paulita said. She rolled the dough in fierce, sharp thrusts. I thought she’d go on, but she only said again, “Beyond imagining.”

Except that I could imagine Nemecia killing someone. Hell, demons, flames — these were the horrors I couldn’t picture. Nemecia’s fury, though — that was completely plausible.

“But what happened?”

Paulita flipped the disk of dough, rolled it again, slapped it on the hot iron top of the stove, where it blistered. She pointed at me with the rolling pin. “You’re lucky, Maria, to have been born after that day. You’re untouched. The rest of us will never forget it, but you, mi hijita, and the twins, are untouched.” She opened the front door of her stove with an iron hook and jabbed at the fire inside.

No one would talk about what had happened when Nemecia was five. And soon I stopped asking. Each night I thought Nemecia might say something more about her crime, but she never mentioned it again.

And each night, I stayed awake as long as I could, waiting for Nemecia to come after me in the dark.

ANY NEW THING I GOT, Nemecia ruined, not enough that it was unusable, or even very noticeable, but just a little: a scrape with her fingernail in the wood of a pencil, a tear on the inside hem of a dress, a crease in the page of a book. I complained once, when Nemecia knocked my new windup jumping frog against the stone step. I thrust the frog at my mother, demanding she look at the scratch in the tin. My mother folded the toy back into my palm and shook her head, disappointed. “Think of other children,” she said. She meant children I knew, children from Cuipas. “So many children don’t have such beautiful new things.”

I was often put in my cousin’s care. My mother was glad of Nemecia’s help; she was busy with the store and with my three-year-old brothers. I don’t think she ever imagined that my cousin wished me harm. My mother was hawkish about her children’s safety — later, when I was fifteen, she refused to serve a neighbor’s aging farmhand in the store for a year because he’d whistled at me — but she trusted Nemecia. Nemecia, almost an orphan, the daughter of my mother’s beloved older sister. Nemecia was my mother’s first and — I knew it even then — favorite child.

My cousin was fierce with her love and with her hate, and sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference. I seemed to provoke her without meaning to. At her angriest, she would lash out with slaps and pinches that turned my skin red and blue. Her anger would sometimes last weeks, aggression that would fade into long silences. I knew I was forgiven when she would begin to tell me stories, ghost stories about La Llorona, who haunted arroyos and wailed like the wind at approaching death, stories about bandits and the terrible things they would do to young girls, and, worse, stories about our family. Then she would hold and kiss me and tell me that though it was all true, every word, and though I was bad and didn’t deserve it, she loved me still.

Not all her stories scared me. Some were wonderful — elaborate sagas that unfurled over weeks, adventures of girls like us who ran away. And every one of her stories belonged to us alone. She braided my hair at night, snapped back if a boy teased me, showed me how to walk so that I looked taller. “I’m here to take care of you,” she told me. “That’s why I’m here.”

WHEN SHE TURNED FOURTEEN, Nemecia’s skin turned red and oily and swollen with pustules. It looked tender. She began to laugh at me for my thick eyebrows and crooked teeth, things I hadn’t noticed until then.

One night she came into our bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. When she moved away, she crossed to where I sat on the bed and dug her nail into my right cheek. I yelped, jerked my head. “Shh,” she said kindly. With one hand she smoothed my hair, and I felt myself soften under her touch as she worked her nail through my skin. It hurt only a little, and what did I, at seven years old, care about beauty? As I sat snug between Nemecia’s knees, my face in her hands, her attention swept over me the way I imagined a wave would, warm and slow and salty.

Night after night I sat between her knees while she opened and reopened the wound. One day she’d make a game of it, tell me that I looked like a pirate; another day she’d say it was her duty to mark me, because I had sinned. Daily she and my mother worked against each other, my mother spreading salve on the scab each morning, Nemecia easing it open each night with her nails. “Why don’t you heal, Maria?” my mother wondered as she fed me cloves of raw garlic. Why didn’t I tell her? I don’t know exactly, but I suppose I needed to be drawn into Nemecia’s story.

By the time Nemecia finally lost interest and let my cheek heal, the scar reached from the side of my nose to my lip. It made me look dissatisfied, and it turned purple in the winter.

AFTER HER SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY, Nemecia left me alone. It was normal, my mother said, for her to spend more time by herself or with friends. At dinner my cousin was still funny with my parents, chatty with the aunts and uncles. But those strange secret fits of rage and adoration — all the attention she’d once focused on me — ended completely. She had turned away from me, but instead of relief, I felt emptiness.

I tried to force Nemecia back into our old closeness. I bought her caramels, nudged her in church as though we shared some secret joke. Once at school I ran up to where she stood with some older girls. “Nemecia!” I exclaimed, as though I’d been looking everywhere for her, and grabbed her hand. She didn’t push me away or snap at me, just smiled distantly and turned back to her friends.

We still shared our room, but she went to bed late. She no longer told stories, no longer brushed my hair, no longer walked with me to school. Nemecia stopped seeing me, and without her gaze I became indistinct to myself. I’d lie in bed waiting for her, holding myself still until I could no longer feel the sheets on my skin, until I was bodiless in the dark. Eventually, Nemecia would come in, and when she did, I’d be unable to speak.

My skin lost its color, my body its mass, until one morning in May when, as I gazed out the classroom window, I saw old Mrs. Romero walking down the street, her shawl billowing around her like wings. My teacher called my name sharply, and I was surprised to find myself in my body, sitting solid in my desk. I decided right then: I would lead the Corpus Christi procession. I would wear the wings and everyone would see me.

CORPUS CHRISTI HAD BEEN my mother’s favorite feast day since she was a child, when each summer she walked with the other girls through the dirt streets flinging rose petals. Every year my mother made Nemecia and me new white dresses and wound our braids with ribbons in coronets around our heads. I’d always loved the ceremony: the solemnity of the procession, the blessed sacrament in its gold box held high by the priest under the gold-tasseled canopy, the prayers at the altars along the way. Now I could think only of leading that procession.

My mother’s altar was her pride. Each year she set up the card table on the street in front of the house. The Sacred Heart stood in the center of the crocheted lace cloth, flanked by candles and flowers in mason jars.

Everyone took part in the procession, and the girls of the town led it all with baskets of petals to cast before the Body of Christ. On that day we were transformed from dusty, scraggle-haired children into angels. But it was the girl at the head of the procession who really was an angel, because she wore the wings that were stored between sheets of tissue paper in a box on top of my mother’s wardrobe. Those wings were beautiful, gauze and wire, and tied with white ribbon on the upper arms.

A girl had to have been confirmed to lead the procession, and was chosen based on her recitation of a psalm. I was ten now, and this was the first year I qualified. In the days leading up to the recitation, I surveyed the competition. Most of the girls were from ranches outside town. Even if they had a sister or parent who could read well enough to help them with their memorization, I knew they wouldn’t pronounce the words right. Only my cousin Antonia was a real threat; she had led the procession the year before and was always beautifully behaved, but she would recite an easy psalm. Nemecia was too old and had never shown interest anyway.

I settled on Psalm 38, which I chose from my mother’s cardboard-covered Manna for its impressive length and difficult words.

I practiced fervently, in the bathtub, walking to school, in bed at night. The way I imagined it, I would give my recitation in front of the entire town. Father Chavez would hold up his hand at the end of Mass, before people could shift and cough and gather their hats, and he would say, “Wait. There is one thing more you need to hear.” One or two girls would go before me, stumble through their psalms (short ones, unremarkable ones). Then I would stand, walk with grace to the front of the church, and there, before the altar, I’d speak with eloquence that people afterward would describe as unearthly. I’d offer my psalm as a gift to my mother. I’d watch her watch me from the pew, her eyes full of tears and pride meant only for me.

Instead, of course, our recitations took place in Sunday school before Mass. One by one we stood before our classmates as our teacher, Mrs. Reyes, followed our words from her Bible. Antonia recited the same psalm she had recited the year before. When it was my turn, I stumbled over the phrase, “For my iniquities are gone over my head: and as a heavy burden are become heavy upon me.” When I sat down with the other children, tears gathered behind my eyes and I told myself that none of it mattered.

A week before the procession, my mother met me outside school. During the day she rarely left the store or my little brothers, so I knew it was important.

“Mrs. Reyes came by the store today,” my mother said. I couldn’t tell from her face if the news had been good or bad, or about me at all. She put her hand on my shoulder and led me home.

I walked stiffly under her hand, waiting, eyes on the dusty toes of my shoes.

Finally my mother turned and hugged me. “You did it, Maria.”

That night we celebrated. My mother brought bottles of ginger ale from the store, and we shared them, passing them around the table. My father raised his and drank to me. Nemecia grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

Before we had finished dinner, my mother stood and beckoned me to follow her down the hall. In her bedroom she took down the box from her wardrobe and lifted out the wings. “Here,” she said, “let’s try them on.” She tied the ribbons around my arms over my checked dress and led me back to where my family sat waiting.

The wings were light, and they scraped against the doorway. They moved ever so slightly as I walked, the way I imagined real angel wings might.

“Turn around,” my father said. My brothers slid off their chairs and came at me. My mother caught them by the wrists. “Don’t go get your greasy hands on those wings.” I twirled and spun for my family, and my brothers clapped. Nemecia smiled and served herself seconds.

That night Nemecia went up to bed when I did. As we pulled on our nightgowns, she said, “They had to pick you, you know.”

I turned to her, surprised. “That’s not true.”

“It is,” she said simply. “Think about it. Antonia was last year, Christina Moya the year before. It’s always the daughters of the Altar Society.”

It hadn’t occurred to me before, but of course she was right. I would have liked to argue, but instead I began to cry. I hated myself for crying in front of her, and I hated Nemecia. I got into bed, turned away, and fell asleep.

Sometime later I woke to darkness. Nemecia was beside me in bed, her breath hot on my face. She patted my head and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Her strokes became harder. Her breath was hot and hissing. “I am the miracle child. They never knew. I am the miracle because I lived.”

I lay still. Her arms were tight around my head, my face pressed against her hard sternum. I couldn’t hear some of the things she said to me, and the air I breathed tasted like Nemecia. It was only from the shudders that passed through her thin chest into my skull that I finally realized she was crying. After a while she released me and set me back on my pillow like a doll. “There now,” she said, arranging my arms over the covers. “Go to sleep.” I shut my eyes and tried to obey.

I spent the afternoon before Corpus Christi watching my brothers play in the garden while my mother worked on her altar. They were digging a hole. Any other time I would have helped them, but tomorrow was Corpus Christi. It was hot and windy and my eyes were dry. I hoped the wind would settle overnight. I didn’t want dust on my wings.

I saw Nemecia step out onto the porch. She shaded her eyes and stood still for a moment. When she caught sight of us crouched in the corner of the garden, she came over, her strides long and adult.

“Maria. I’m going to walk with you tomorrow in the procession. I’m going to help you.”

“I don’t need any help,” I said.

Nemecia smiled as though it was out of her hands. “Well.” She shrugged.

“But I’m leading it,” I said. “Mrs. Reyes chose me.”

“Your mother told me I had to help you, and that maybe I would get to wear the wings.”

I stood. Even standing, I came only to her shoulder. I heard the screen door slam, and my mother was on the porch. She came over to us, steps quick, face worried.

“Mama, I don’t need help. Tell her Mrs. Reyes chose me.”

“I only thought that there will be other years for you.” My mother’s tone was imploring. “Nemecia will be too old next year.”

“But I may never memorize anything so well ever!” My voice rose. “This may be my only chance.”

My mother brightened. “Maria, of course you’ll memorize something. It’s only a year. You’ll get picked again, I promise.”

I couldn’t say anything. I saw what had happened: Nemecia had decided she would wear the wings, and my mother had decided to let her. Nemecia would lead the town, tall in her white dress, the wings framing her. And following would be me, small and angry and ugly. I wouldn’t want it next year, after Nemecia. I wouldn’t want it ever again.

Nemecia put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s about the blessed sacrament, Maria. It’s not about you.” She spoke gently. “Besides, you’ll still be leading it. I’ll just be there with you. To help.”

“Hijita, listen—”

“I don’t want your help,” I said. I was as dark and savage as an animal.

“Maria—”

Nemecia shook her head and smiled sadly. “That’s why I am here,” she said. “I lived so I could help you.” Her face was calm, and a kind of holiness settled into it.

Hate flooded me. “I wish you hadn’t,” I said. “I wish you hadn’t lived. This isn’t your home. You’re a killer.” I turned to my mother. My words were choked and furious. “She’s trying to kill us all. Don’t you know? Everyone around her ends up dead. Why don’t you ever punish her?”

My mother paled, and suddenly I was afraid. Nemecia was still for a moment, and then her face clenched and she ran into the house.

AFTER THAT, EVERYTHING HAPPENED very quickly. My mother didn’t shout, didn’t say a word. She came into my room carrying the carpetbag she used when she had to stay at the home of a sick relative. I made my face more sullen than I felt. Her silence was frightening. She opened my bureau and began to pack things into the bag: three dresses, all my drawers and undershirts. She put my Sunday shoes in too, my hairbrush, the book that lay beside my bed, enough things for a very long absence.

My father came in and sat beside me on the bed. He was in his work clothes, pants dusty from the field.

“You’re just going to stay with Paulita for a while,” he said.

I knew what I’d said was terrible, but I never guessed that they would get rid of me. I didn’t cry, though, not even when my mother folded up the small quilt that had been mine since I was born and set it into the top of the carpetbag. She buckled it all shut.

My mother’s head was bent over the bag, and for a moment I thought I’d made her cry, but when I ventured to look at her face, I couldn’t tell.

“It won’t be long,” my father said. “It’s just to Paulita’s. So close it’s almost the same house.” He examined his hands for a long time, and I too looked at the crescents of soil under his nails. “Your cousin has had a hard life,” he said finally. “You have to understand.”

“Come on, Maria,” my mother said gently.

Nemecia was sitting in the parlor, her hands folded and still on her lap. I wished she would stick out her tongue or glare, but she only watched me pass. My mother held open the door and then closed it behind us. She took my hand, and we walked together down the street to Paulita’s house with its garden of dusty hollyhocks.

My mother knocked on the door and then went in, telling me to run along to the kitchen. I heard her whispering. Paulita came in for a moment to pour me milk and set out some cookies, and then she left again.

I didn’t eat. I tried to listen, but couldn’t make out any words. I heard Paulita click her tongue, the way she clicked it when someone had behaved shamefully, like when it was discovered that Charlie Padilla had been stealing from his grandmother.

My mother came into the kitchen. She patted my wrist. “It’s not for long, Maria.” She kissed the top of my head.

I heard Paulita’s front door shut, heard her slow steps come toward the kitchen. She sat opposite me and took a cookie.

“It’s good you came for a visit. I never see enough of you.”

The next day I didn’t go to Mass. I said I was sick, and Paulita touched my forehead but didn’t contradict me. I stayed in bed, my eyes closed and dry. I could hear the bells and the intonations as the town passed outside the house. Antonia led the procession, and Nemecia walked with the adults; I know this because I asked Paulita days later. I wondered if Nemecia had chosen not to lead or if she had not been allowed, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

I stayed with Paulita for three months. She spoiled me, fed me sweets, kept me up late with her. Each night she put her feet on the arm of the couch to stop the swelling, balanced her jigger of whiskey on her stomach, and stroked the stiff gray hair on her chin while she told stories: about Cuipas when she was a girl, about the time she snuck out to the fiestas after she was supposed to be asleep. I loved Paulita and enjoyed her attention, but my anger at my parents simmered even when I was laughing.

My mother stopped by, tried to talk to me, but in her presence the easy atmosphere of Paulita’s house became stale. Over and over she urged me to visit her in the store, and I did once, but I was silent, wanting so much to be drawn out, disdaining her attempts.

“Hijita,” she said, pushing candy at me across the counter.

I stood stiff in her embrace and left the candy. My mother had sent me away, and my father had done nothing to stop her. They’d picked Nemecia, picked Nemecia over their real daughter.

Nemecia and I saw each other at school, but we didn’t speak. The teachers seemed aware of the changes in our household and kept us apart. People were kind to me during this time, a strange, pitying kindness. I thought they knew how angry I was, knew there was no hope left for me. I too would be kind, I thought, if I met myself on the road.

The family gathered on Sundays, as always, at my mother’s house for dinner. That was how I had begun to think of it during those months: my mother’s house. My mother hugged me, and my father kissed me, and I sat in my old place, but at the end of dinner, I always left with Paulita. Nemecia seemed more at home than ever. She laughed and told stories and swallowed bite after neat bite. She seemed to have grown older, more graceful. She neither spoke to nor looked at me. Everyone talked and laughed, and it seemed only I remembered that we were eating with a murderer.

“Nemecia looks well,” Paulita said one night as we walked home.

I didn’t answer, and she didn’t speak again until she had shut the door behind us.

“One day you’ll be friends again, Maria. You two are sisters.” Her hand trembled as she lit the lamp.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. “No,” I said. “We won’t. We’ll never be friends. We aren’t sisters. She’s the killer, and I’m the one who was sent away. Do you even know who killed your brother?” I demanded. “Nemecia. And she tried to kill her own mother too. Why doesn’t anyone know this?”

“Sit down,” Paulita said to me sternly. She’d never spoken to me in this tone. “First of all, you were not sent away. You could shout to your mother from this house. And, my God, Nemecia is not a killer. I don’t know where you picked up such lies.”

Paulita lowered herself into a chair. When she spoke again, her voice was even, her old eyes pale brown and watery. “Your grandfather decided he would give your mother and Benigna each fifty acres.” Paulita put her hand to her forehead and exhaled slowly. “My God. So your grandfather stopped by one morning to see Benigna about the deed. He was still on the road, he hadn’t even made it to the door, when he heard the shouting. Benigna’s cries were that loud. Her husband was beating her.” Paulita paused. She pressed the pads of her fingers against the table.

I thought of the sound of fist on flesh. I could almost hear it. The flame of the lamp wavered and the light wobbled along the wide planks of Paulita’s kitchen floor.

“This wasn’t the first time it had happened, just the first time your grandfather walked in on it. So he pushed open the door, angry, ready to kill the man. There was a fight, but Benigna’s husband was drunk and your grandfather wasn’t young anymore. Benigna’s husband must have been closer to the stove and to the iron poker. When they were discovered—” Paulita’s voice remained flat. “When they were discovered, your grandfather was already dead. Benigna was unconscious on the floor. And they found Nemecia behind the wood box. She’d seen the whole thing. She was five.”

I wondered who had walked in first on that brutality? Surely someone I knew, someone I passed at church or outside the post office. Maybe someone in my family. Maybe Paulita. “What about Nemecia’s father?”

“He was there on his knees, crying over Benigna. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ he kept saying.”

How had it never occurred to me that, at five years old, Nemecia would have been too small to attack a grown man and woman all at once? How could I have been so stupid?

“It was terrible for your mother, you know. That day she lost her father, and she lost her sister, too. Oh, how those girls loved each other.” Paulita laughed without mirth. “But Benigna won’t be back. She barely even writes.”

If my mother didn’t fear Nemecia, then the love she showed my cousin was just that: love. Love for her sister, love for her father, love for a child terrified and abandoned, love for an entire life lost to my mother forever. It was even possible that amid all that loss, caring for Nemecia was what had saved my mother. And there was absolutely nothing — no recitation, no feat of strength — I could do to shift that.

At school I watched from across the yard for signs of what Paulita had told me, but Nemecia was the same: graceful, laughing, distant. I felt humiliated for believing her, and I resented the demands she made on my sympathy. Pity and hatred and guilt nearly choked me. If anything, I hated my cousin more, she who had once been a terrified child, she who could call that tragedy her own. Nemecia would always have the best of everything.

NEMECIA LEFT FOR CALIFORNIA three months after Corpus Christi. In Los Angeles, Aunt Benigna bought secondhand furniture and turned the small sewing room into a bedroom. She introduced Nemecia to her husband and to the miracle child. There was a palm tree in the front yard and a pink-painted gravel walkway. I know this from a letter my cousin sent my mother, signed with a flourish, Norma.

I moved back to my mother’s house and to the room that was all mine. My mother stood in the middle of the floor as I unpacked my things into the now-empty bureau. She looked lost.

“We missed you,” she said, looking out the window. And then, “It’s not right for a child to be away from her parents. It’s not right that you left us.”

I wanted to tell her that I had not left, that I had been left, led away and dropped at Paulita’s door.

“Listen.” Then she stopped and shook her head. “Ah, well,” she said, with an intake of breath.

I placed my camisoles in the drawer, one on top of the other. I didn’t look at my mother. The reconciliation and tears and embraces that I’d dreamt about didn’t come, so I hardened myself against her.

OUR FAMILY QUICKLY GREW over the space Nemecia left, so quickly that I often wondered if she’d meant anything to us at all.

Nemecia’s life became glamorous in my mind — beautiful, tragic, the story of an orphan. I imagined that I could take that life for myself. Night after night I told myself the story: a prettier me, swept away to California, and the boy who would find me and save me from my unhappiness. Cuipas slept among the vast, whispering grasses, coyotes called in the distance, and Nemecia’s story set my body alight.

We attended Nemecia’s wedding, my family and I. We took the long trip across New Mexico and Arizona to Los Angeles, me in the backseat between my brothers. For years I’d pictured Nemecia living a magazine shoot, running on the beach, stretched on a chaise longue beside a flat, blue pool. As we crossed the Mojave Desert, though, I began to get nervous — that I wouldn’t recognize her, that she’d have forgotten me. I found myself hoping that her life wasn’t as beautiful as I’d imagined it, that she’d finally been punished.

When we drove up to the little house, Nemecia ran outside in bare feet and hugged each of us as we unfolded ourselves from the car.

“Maria!” she cried, smiling, and kissed both my cheeks, and I fell into a shyness I couldn’t shake all that week.

“Nemecia, hijita,” my mother said. She stepped back and looked at my cousin happily.

“Norma,” my cousin said. “My name is Norma.”

It was remarkable how completely she’d changed. Her hair was blond now, her skin tanned dark and even.

My mother nodded slowly and repeated, “Norma.”

The wedding was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I was wrung with jealousy. I must have understood then that I wouldn’t have a wedding of my own. Like everything else in Los Angeles, the church was large and modern. The pews were pale and sleek, and the empty crucifix shone. Nemecia confessed to me that she didn’t know the priest here, that she rarely even went to church anymore. In a few years, I too would stop going, but it shocked me then to hear my cousin say it.

They didn’t speak Spanish in my aunt’s house. When my mother or father said something in Spanish, my aunt or cousin answered resolutely in English. I was embarrassed by my parents that week, the way their awkward English made them seem confused and childish.

The day before the wedding, Nemecia invited me to the beach with her girlfriend. I said I couldn’t go — I was fifteen, younger than they were, and I didn’t have a swimming suit.

“Of course you’ll come. You’re my little sister.” Nemecia opened a messy drawer and tossed me a tangled blue suit. I remember I changed in her bedroom, turned in the full-length mirror, stretched across her pink satin bed and posed like a pinup. I felt older, sensual. There, in Nemecia’s bedroom, I liked the image of myself in that swimming suit, but on the beach my courage left me. Someone took our picture, standing with a tanned, smiling man. I still have the picture. Nemecia and her friend look easy in their suits, arms draped around the man’s neck. The man — who is he? How did he come to be in the photograph? — has his arm around Nemecia’s small waist. I am beside her, hand on her shoulder, but standing as though I’m afraid to touch her. She leans into the man and away from me, her smile broad and white. I smile with my lips closed, and my other arm is folded in front of my chest. My scar shows as a gray smear on my cheek.

WHEN SHE LEFT FOR LOS ANGELES, Nemecia didn’t take the doll that sat on the bureau. The doll came with us when we moved to Albuquerque; we saved it, I suppose, for Nemecia’s children, though we never said so out loud. Later, after my mother died in 1981, I brought it from her house, where for years my mother had kept it on her own bureau. For five days it lay on the table in my apartment before I called Nemecia and asked if she wanted it back.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I never had a doll.”

“The cracked one, remember?” My voice went high with disbelief. It seemed impossible that she could have forgotten. It had sat in our room for years, facing us in our beds each night as we fell asleep. A flare of anger ignited — she was lying, she had to be lying — then died.

I touched the yellowed hem of the doll’s dress, while Nemecia told me about the cruise she and her husband were taking through the Panama Canal. “Ten days,” she said, “and then we’re going to stay for three days in Puerto Rico. It’s a new boat, with casinos and pools and ballrooms. I hear they treat you royally.” While she talked, I ran my finger along the ridge of the cracks in the doll’s head. From the sound of her voice, I could almost imagine she’d never aged, and it seemed to me I’d spent my whole life listening to Nemecia’s stories.

“So what about the doll?” I asked when it was almost time to hang up. “Do you want me to send it?”

“I can’t even picture it,” she said and laughed. “Do whatever you want. I don’t need old things lying around the house.”

I was tempted to take offense, to think it was me she was rejecting, our whole shared past in Cuipas. I was tempted to slip back into that same old envy for how easily Nemecia had let those years drop away from her, leaving me to remember her stories. But by then I was old enough to know that she wasn’t thinking about me at all.

Nemecia spent the rest of her life in Los Angeles. I visited her once when I had some vacation time saved, in her long, low house surrounded by bougainvillea. She collected Dolls of the World and Waterford Crystal, which she displayed in glass cases. She sat me at the dining room table and took the dolls out one by one. “Holland,” she said and set it before me. “Italy. Greece.” I tried to see some evidence in her face of what she had witnessed as a child, but there was nothing.

Nemecia held a wineglass up to the window and turned it. “See how clear?” Shards of light moved across her face.