Two days prior to the ten-year anniversary of my mother’s death my sister called. I let the phone ring seven times before I picked up.

“Hello?” she asked with surprise as though it were me who’d rung her.

“Hello,” I said.

“Tati, I need you.”

Already I regretted answering the phone.  

“I need you,” she repeated. She need me, she need me. Her voice was high and particular, it wheedled in my ear. The thought crossed my mind that whatever had possessed my mother now possessed her.

“I love you and I miss you, it’s not right that we’re apart. It’s been years!” she cried. She had a penchant for theatrics—it had been a year at most.

“Yes, yes,” I said. I echoed “yes” many times.

Sensing my resistance, her voice grew soft and pliant. “I have a little gift for you,” she said in a cunning tone.

Little gift for little sister. I wondered what it was. She already had my mother’s jade bracelets, her silk dresses, wool coats. It was true that they fit her better and that she’d inherited all the best parts—her smooth complexion, long, dark lashes, delicate wrists and slender pianist’s fingers. When my mother died my father insisted on an open-casket service so everyone could behold her. So much beauty, he sobbed, flinging himself around, and all of it gone to waste! I remember my sister looming over her body as though to claim it as her own. 

“I fly in tomorrow evening,” she continued. “I came all this way to see her. Let’s visit Eternal Valley together. It’s what she would want.” 

The dead want for nothing, I thought. That was the best part about being dead. 

Instead I agreed. “I’ll meet you Sunday.” 

My sister then began to weep—“I’m happy and I’m sad,” she said between big, bombastic sobs. She carried on this way for a while. When she finally regained her composure she sent me the address of the hotel where I should pick her up.

*

Later that evening I ate the dinner my husband had made. For hours Federico had braised pork belly and eggs which he served with rice and pak choi. No matter how long the day he made sure to cook dinner and always did the dishes, too. I enjoyed watching him while he labored in the kitchen–his apron drawn taut over his chest, strong arms working away in the sink or at the stove. His large hands, how he held me in them. 

He supported me and even when we argued we still made love. Sometimes I thought back on how I’d initially refused him and reprimanded myself for once being so careless.

I savored the pork. I savored the egg. Halfway through dinner I made my confession. “I’m seeing Rini Sunday,” I said. “We’re going to lunch and then to visit my mother.”

“It’ll be ten years,” he nodded. “It’s the right thing to do.”

I watched him place a piece of pork in his mouth, chew carefully and swallow. His full and shapely lips glistened with a sheen of fat. “I love you,” he said, placing his cool palm on mine. 

After dinner Federico stepped out to the backyard for his nightly cigarette. I pretended to read in the living room but really I was studying him through the glass doors. The flare of the embers warmed his thoughtful expression. When he finished he ashed it outside, carried the butt in and disposed of it in the kitchen trash. God, I thought. I would never in my life find another man as good as him.

He sat down next to me and I inhaled the cloves on his shirt. I pressed my cheek to his shoulder and listened to him breathe. “Remember,” he said, stroking my hair, “No one will torture her as much as she tortures herself.”

*

On Sunday I woke violently from a dream which fled as quickly as it came. I ate breakfast and got ready to leave with the clothes I’d laid out the night before. Earlier that morning my sister had sent me an email of an exact itinerary detailing her plans for the day.

Pickup at the Beverly Hills Hotel (11:30 in case of traffic)

Lunch at Santa Monica Café (reservations at 12:15)

Jean Pascal Florist (for lilies and peonies)  

Eternal Valley (3PM)

Already I was irritated by her doing too much. Earlier, I’d forewarned her I made plans for dinner and though I was vague on the details I was clear she was not invited. In general, my sister was eager for my company, and I’d been taken advantage of far too many times. During her last visit, she forced herself upon me and Federico. Back then I complied out of anxiety, knowing that the prospect of loneliness made her hysterical. So it was at the end of the night that we found her passed out in our bed. 

I pulled up to the entrance of the Beverly Hills Hotel and spotted Rini immediately. She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a smart white suit; the sort of thing an older, rich woman might wear for her third wedding. As I approached I noticed she’d gotten a blowout, meticulously painted her face and was wearing a very large, gilded cross which dipped suggestively into her abundant cleavage. 

“Tati, you look wonderful,” she exclaimed when she saw me. She drew me in close and patted my breasts, my hips, my waist. “You’re tiny and your skin is flawless.”

I did not know what to say to this. Against my best instincts I felt flattered.

“You look good too,” I said mildly. Despite the spectacle she looked extraordinary and always did. We climbed into the car and pulled out of the Beverly Hills Hotel, sped down the thoroughfare with the warm wind and a canopy of palm trees whipping high above.

Los Angeles was a fantasy, she remarked ecstatically. She thought she should return more often. Though she lived in New York, she hated America; she felt it held her back from her true potential. One day she planned to move to the coast by the Ionian Sea, where the air was cool and clear, there were fewer microplastics, she’d read, and she could put all the bad stuff behind her. When I told her the Mediterranean economy was in freefall and the region was saddled with a debt crisis she nodded and gazed mournfully past my shoulder: “Such a price we pay for beauty.”

“And how’s Federico?” she asked, applying lipstick in the rearview mirror.

“Good, good,” I said. She always asked after him—I resisted telling her more. 

“Still at Gregorian?”

“Yes, still there.”

She asked me earnest questions about our home, our life together and our careers. I answered that we were still paying off the mortgage, I was busy at the nonprofit and that Federico was assured he’d make partner by July. As I rendered my life in broad strokes I grew aware and resentful of the fact that I was trying, always and instinctually, to impress her. I hated even more how she responded in over-the-top proclamations.

“Yes, Tati, yes,” she fawned, gesticulating wildly. “You’ve done everything right. Federico loves you and will never let you go. You’ve done wonderfully for yourself and I’m so very proud of you.”

*

We arrived at the Santa Monica Café on time for our reservation, but our apologetic hostess informed us our table was not yet ready. So, we waited by the bar. There, my sister ordered us mimosas with freshly squeezed juice. 

“I made reservations,” Rini hissed in my ear, “Look at them, getting seated right away.”

I steadied my gaze; I was determined not to let her wear me down. Meanwhile Rini continued to point out the table she’d booked for us on the patio, underneath the café’s famous wall of fuchsia bougainvillea. She said she’d looked up photos online to find the best spot and that a friend of a friend recommended the sturgeon. I drained my glass and thought she’d always known how to spend money she didn’t have.

Eventually the hostess returned and brought us to our table. My sister thanked her profusely and asked her to take our photos. Though the hostess complied, her gaze darted back towards her podium. Of course, Rini did not notice. One, two, three, four, five… a dozen from three different angles, some with flash, some without. “Yay!” my sister screamed when she was handed back her phone. I glanced at the false face on the screen and found my expression stiff and unconvincing.

We ordered cold crab and salad, the sturgeon and vegetarian tart. When the food came Rini piled my plate high with each dish. “Eat, eat,” she gestured, “You’re wasting away! I love you and we’re together at last!”

I ate as she watched me. She seemed very pleased. I thought the food tasted of nothing, and I yearned to return to Federico.

Rini, on the other hand, chewed every bite twenty times. “It’s good for my digestion, but there’s no need to copy me. You’re already too skinny: think of your health.” After some salad and some tart she proclaimed loudly that she was full. Then she grabbed my hand and proposed a big toast.

“Tati,” she said. “I’m so glad you came. Here’s to our good fortune and our mother, who bore me and then you.”

I accepted her toast and downed my glass in one go. The waiter appeared, with a bottle on ice. Then I felt the white heat of the sun sear the back of my head, the ripe scent of wine wafting from my pores. When I looked up the bright mouths of the bougainvillea murmured secrets to me.

“Tati,” my sister said, “Look at them, how horrible. Do you think they’ll stay together? Do you think they’re in love?” I looked to where she was pointing, at the couple who were seated before us. Their faces in my periphery appeared smooth and expressionless. 

“He may be rich but he has no chin,” continued my sister, forking sturgeon into her mouth, “I’m glad I’m not her. Can’t you see you’re so lucky to have someone handsome who supports you?” 

I flinched at my sister’s depiction of Federico. She was confused in her desires and thought I’d fallen into everything by chance. Life was work, I wanted to say, even love was hard work. Instead I mumbled, “I support him too,” and swallowed another gulp of wine.

Rini frowned, her mouth full of fish. “Of course you do,” she said, her eyes welling up with emotion. “You both support each other. I don’t have anyone, Tati, no one. You’re my only sister and my best friend and you don’t even like me.”

I glanced at her wine glass all smeared with red lipstick. I did not try to deny her claim. “You have a gift for me?” I asked.

“Oh my god!” my sister cried, throwing her hands up. “I nearly forgot!” She pulled out her purse and began rummaging through its contents. “Here, for you.” She handed me a little white package, unmarked, loosely tied with string.

“What is it?” I asked.

She gestured for me to open. I fumbled with the string: a small red square fell out. It was an old, plastic thing, with three stickers pasted across the front. The stickers had faded so I could just barely make out puffy, cartoonish flowers. On the bottom right corner there was a pair of initials Sharpied in my mother’s signature curlicues.

“It’s Mama’s little pocket mirror. I found it the other day. I thought you’d want it and that you should have it.” Rini beamed at me with pride.

I opened the latch and the mirror fell open like a book. One object became two and I held both in the palm of my hand. I looked down and two identical faces peered back at me. I made a face and saw it, duplicated. I raised a brow and four furious eyes stared back. I regarded my nose, my squinty eyes. From whom I had inherited these features I did not know. I slammed the latch shut and tossed it in my bag. “Thank you,” I said stiffly.

“Don’t you like it?” my sister asked. “Remember how she carried it around?”

“No,” I said. I felt the flush shoot to my cheeks. The heat, the drink, the smell of the bougainvillea. “No, I remember nothing.”

My sister, my stupid sister, I thought. Her stupid fucking tears. She humiliated me constantly, and thought she raised me so well. She would like me to congratulate her, to take credit for everything I’ve done. I thought sadness, on her face, looked grotesque indeed. 

“Have I upset you?” she asked.

Just then the waiter came by to deliver us the check. I grabbed it and slapped my card on the bill. 

“Are you sure?” whispered Rini. “We could split in half?” 

“No,” I insisted. “No. This one’s mine.”

*

The year after our mother died I was fourteen and Rini was seventeen. We were always at odds in those days. Once, she burned me with a curling iron. The wound left a glowing, pink pucker on my right shoulder. This I recalled at Jean Pascal Florist.

“White lilies,” my sister said cautiously. “Peonies…” she continued.

It had been about a boy, though we weren’t fighting over him, exactly. I was asked to homecoming and she was trying to bully me into disclosure. 

“Who is it?” she’d asked. “Who is it?” she’d menaced. She brandished the burning rod in her hand. She was teaching me how to use the iron in preparation for the dance. I remembered the hot curls falling away like big scrolls of paper. 

Now I could not remember his name, but at the time I guarded him closely. Ro-ger…or had it been Robert? No matter what I’d refused to relinquish him to my sister.

“How many would you like?” asked the florist. 

“Can I pick them out myself?” my sister asked.

I stood in the corner and watched the exchange. I never bought flowers, and Federico had long ago learned not to gift them to me. I could not look at cut blooms without thinking of the inevitable. 

My sister stood at the counter examining the array. She discerned that this one’s petals were too large and that one’s stem should be cut two inches to make the bouquet proportionate. The flower shop was cold and filled with a false, powdery smell. It was nearly Valentine’s Day so the whole place was bedecked with bears and red roses.

In the car ride over we had not spoken even a little. I was drunk but I knew how to steady the wheel. I suppose even then I was considering how she’d burned me.

It hadn’t hurt at first—I was more surprised than upset. Slowly I grew aware of the spot on my shoulder, blistering, pulsing madly. I looked in the mirror and saw my sister glaring back. A faint smile played on her lips as she applied the rod to my skin. “How am I supposed to protect you if you won’t tell me his name?” she asked. She lifted the iron and amid charred hair and chemical spray, rose, the smell of burning flesh. 

It took six months to heal.

“That will be $70,” said the florist. The bouquet was big, resplendent. Even I had to admit it was tastefully done.

“It’s worth it,” my sister muttered, to no one in particular. She pulled out her wallet and began counting out cash.

*

I could count on two hands the number of times I’d visited Eternal Valley. Twice a year from the time I was fourteen till I turned eighteen and now, a decade later. 

My mother’s grave was small and diminutive like a rounded tooth. From afar it looked like any other. My father, in those early days, had made a big show of things. He had invested in a stone with a single lily sprouting from its center. Rini said it was the nicest thing he’d ever done for her.

She now led the way; I followed behind. On the path over my sister blazed white like the sun. Somehow she’d managed to keep her suit immaculate. She looked like how I imagined the angel of death. 

I thought about the fact that though Rini had dreamt all her life of an extravagant wedding she’d never even come close to getting married. She’d always yearned for kids and maintained a list of baby names. A boy and a girl, like new dolls out of a box. Andrew and Angelica, she contemplated. Stella and Sean. Marco and Mariana. One big, happy family in a capacious house by the sea.

The tombstones sprawled out before us on the glittering lawn. The air was still, hot and dry. Amid the rows and rows of teeth and statues streaked with grey we appeared to be the only living beings in the world. There wasn’t any shade save the pall cast by grand mausoleums. No one had bothered to plant trees or perhaps hadn’t wanted to. 

I couldn’t remember the spot of the grave. The map the guard had given us looked like scribbles in my hands. 

Rini found it first. Of course she did. “Here!” she proclaimed, pointing at the headstone. It was dull grey, no longer so white. There was the lily and there was our mother.

Evangelista Santos

1977-2013

Beloved wife, mother, sweet child of God

Rini set the vase down. I confessed it was beautiful, that the bouquet livened up the scene. In comparison the stone next to my mother’s was adorned with cheap, fake hydrangeas. 

We stood there for a moment, mired in a prolonged, heavy silence. My dress felt unbearable with the heat pooling between my legs. We waited there with bated breath. Waiting, waiting, and for what, exactly?

My sister trembled. “Mama,” she gasped at last. Rini grasped for my hand; my fingers felt bloodless in hers. “We miss you terribly. You were sent to us straight from heaven. We are so lucky to be your daughters. And look at us—look at Tati, she’s doing so well.”

I nodded as my mouth flooded with a bitter taste.

Rini nudged me. “Say something. Go on Tati, tell us a story of her.”

I shook my head. 

She gripped my hand. “Think, Tati. Anything,” she urged. “Tell Mama you love her.”

I thought. I tried, I worked to concentrate. But the act felt vulgar and pointless, as though I were sticking my arm into some mucky hole, flailing for buried treasure. Rini couldn’t understand how in my mind, the shapes of things had come undone. I felt a great heaviness in my chest, all I wanted was to lie down.

“You must remember something.”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

I remembered little of the day my mother died, and of the funeral even less. All I retained were a child’s impressions: a cup of water in my hand, its surface slowly warming. Black patent shoes on a green lawn, a pair of dangling, stockinged feet. The smell of my father mingled with the stench of his cologne. 

Only my sister seemed in possession of real details. She clarified that the woman who’d fainted was an older cousin of my mother’s. My father wore Guerlain because it made him feel lucky. When she reminisced over the past she indulged in the most minute and insignificant specifics as though to boast of how well she’d kept the history we shared. 

Sometimes I wondered if I hadn’t fabricated my mother, if I’d lost her true essence amid the foreign memories forced upon me.

I opened my mouth. My tongue felt thick and woolly. “You remember when we were kids  you were always falling ill. Asthma, the flu, strep, you name it. The worst was when you were nine–you came home sick from school with pneumonia. Your forehead was as hot as an iron and you couldn’t take three steps without falling over.”

Next to me Rini was swaying, as if drugged.

“Mom put you in bed straight away,” I continued. “She wouldn’t leave your side. I kept trying to offer help, to speak with her, but she ignored me. I was completely shut out. Eventually our father told me to behave and to leave you two alone. So I sat there outside your room, waiting for her. Through the door I listened to her scold you then beg you to eat. I remember thinking that if it were me, I could not have refused her. 

“Days went by and you wouldn’t recover, so they transferred you to the hospital. A week passed before Mom began to really pray. At first, it was the usual–our Father, hail Mary–but as time went on she grew more and more hysterical. She herself stopped eating and then stopped sleeping altogether. In the middle of the night I heard her cry: Take me God! Me, instead of her! Never in my life have I felt sick from such terror.

“I did not want to visit. I worked myself up into a frenzy, scared of what I would see. But when I finally came, you were lying on the bed, nothing special. Mom was already there, holding your hand. I envied you for that. I remember thinking: Mom looked so frail, so worn and wasted. Drained of her essence, a shadow of her usual beautiful self. When I kissed her on the cheek she looked down at me without expression. I remember she said, ‘In the end, God takes what’s His.’”

I swallowed. In the absence of words the silence rang hollow. On the horizon, the heat rippled up in great, undulating waves. For a moment I wondered if Rini hadn’t heard me, or if the words had never left my mouth. 

Suddenly I felt her hand slip from mine. “Tati!” she gasped, collapsing onto the grass. “When did it all go wrong?” She stared up at me with an anguished expression. “Everything is bad, it’s all rotten! And no one understands!”

I looked down at the shape of my fallen sister. Her body seemed soft and malleable below me. Everything is not so bad, I thought, it’s only you who has made it so. My mother had bestowed her beauty and my father, the ability to perform. It was Rini’s very abundance of gifts which had caused her to squander them. In her greed she had consumed everything, forgetting the past had its own hunger. 

Rini’s wails grew louder. She tore at her chest and beat the ground. Still no one appeared—we were alone, though together. 

“Oh, Mama!” she yelled, “Oh, Tati!” she cried. “When will it end! Who can tell me! I can’t bear it any longer!”

I stared at Rini. Her face was wet and swollen. Garish streaks of mascara streamed from her eyes. Once again she had succeeded in making herself ugly. No, I thought gently, it was over for us.

I bent down. “Shh…” I said. “Shh.” I wiped each of her cheeks with the sleeve of my dress. She closed her eyes and acquiesced to my hands.

“You still love me, Tati,” she said slowly. “You love me, right?”

I licked my thumb and drew it under her eyes. I did this several times, tasting the salt of her skin. When I finished I drew back and regarded my work. Not bad, though not nearly perfect. 

“Come on,” I said as I hauled her to her feet. She felt heavy in my arms, heavier than I’d imagined. I glanced down at her beneath me, those bright features gone dull. In her large, shining eyes I saw my face, reflected back in new proportions. Somehow I was not stricken as before; above all, my sister looked neat, ordinary. I thought to myself: it was the best I could do.