‘On purpose?’ I asked her.
‘By accident,’ she said, ‘but can’t you see? It was his fate.’
I shove the note under the door, then kneel down to see if it went through OK. There’s a pair of feet standing still in front of me. My heart starts pounding. I scramble up and sprint back to the mews, the red trolley making a racket against the cobbles. Once safely inside the mews, I pounce on the first door I come to. How creepy, those feet standing there right next to the door but not opening. It must be Daniel, I tell myself. He must have another woman.
*
Bitter happens to be the first house. Marina lives there. My brothers call her Miss Mendoza, which is what she wrote on her mailbox, but she’s told me before that ‘this whole Miss thing’ makes her feel ‘old and saggy’, and that she’s ‘only’ twenty-one, which in my eyes practically makes her the local spinster. She’s definitely the token single tenant. Pina and I are also technically single, but Pi has no intentions of staying that way beyond fourteen. She swore she’s going to find a summer fling (those were her words) in Matute, or whatever her mom’s beach is called.
Sometimes Marina lives alone and sometimes she lives with a boyfriend. There’s always some new guy hanging around, and they’re usually so good-looking that if I bump into them in the passageway I have to recite poetry in my head just to stop myself from blushing (Brown and furry caterpillar in a hurry, take your walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each). It never really works though: I always turn bright red. And maybe good-looking isn’t the right word either. Let’s say: tall. And when I say Marina is the ‘local’ spinster I mean inside Belldrop Mews, which is where everything that happens in my life takes place, apart from the way too many hours I spend at the school around the corner and in La Michoacana on the next block. What measly perimeters us city-kids are dealt.
A few months ago, the Neighborhood Association got hold of several liters of a horrible rosy red paint that the hardware store on the nearby avenue was selling off cheap. It was Marina’s fault: she’s obsessed with colors, particularly their names, so she chose it because the tins said Coral. I guess she thought coral would bring her closer to her marine-a habitat or something. We all had to take turns painting. Even my mom came out of her little bubble to paint for a while. Now, if you happen to be walking along the street when someone opens the door to the mews, it looks like you’re peering down a larynx: like the long passageway is made of a living tissue, and the dew-like sunlight dappled across the textured walls is saliva.
Marina opens the door to me in jeans and a white blouse. I reckon I’ve spent more time observing her style than any other fashion trend. I don’t really get it, but I love it. When she first came to the mews, Marina babysat us while Mom grieved for Luz. She would make us sit down with the instruments in Sweet House, where my parents have their music school, and we would spend whole afternoons drawing and painting. It was boring as hell, but from the window we could spy on the cortège of women processing through the mews to visit Mom. Slowly and deliberately, they’d file along the corridor, which was purplish back then, a shade Marina used to call ‘asylilac’. And that’s what they looked like, the women; a line of loony asylum runaways, always on edge, in a rush, fresh out of a traffic jam or just stopping by between errands. Some would spot us through the window and pop into the school to deliver death-grip hugs. Then they made their way over to our house, and if they were lucky Mom would drink wine and tea with them, in which case they’d leave all serene, my sister’s death like a pill that put their own mini-dramas into perspective. Other days, she wouldn’t even open the door to them, so the deeply distressed cortège would come back to Sweet House, and we’d have to make excuses for Mom.
‘She’s at a rehearsal,’ we’d say. And sometimes she really was.
‘What about your dad?’ the women would insist.
And I’d tell them the truth, which amounted to the same thing: ‘Rehearsal. He has a concert coming up.’
Sometimes it feels like they spent that entire first year locked away in a permanent rehearsal while we sat among the untouched instruments in their silent music school, the hallway piling up with gift baskets. Something I understood then is that the Mexican gift industry may be well and truly gringofied at Christmas, but when it comes to death, our own comfort foods trump everything. I’ve never received so many bags of Mexican sweet treats — pepitorias, palanquetas, jamoncillos — as I did when my sister died. I found it dumb and pretty insulting, them bringing us candies. Not that that stopped me eating them. My mom and Marina also used to meet up for wine or tea, until last year when they stopped talking to each other. I never found out why. When I ask Mom she says Marina’s a traitor, or that she sided with the enemy or something along those lines. But the last time I tried to get her to dish the dirt she stood there thinking for a while and then said, ‘Because I’m like Corleone, you better don’t mess with my people, or…’
‘Or…?’ I asked, but she just stuck out her tongue at me.
I don’t dare ask Marina what went on, but once she let it slip that she thinks Mom is ‘rancorous’. She also said it’s ‘pathological’ that she’s still mourning, and that she lives ‘shut out from the world’. But she doesn’t, really. Mom still rehearses and she’s gone back to teaching in Sweet, and if we put on a play or show at school she always comes. She doesn’t play in concerts anymore, though.
‘So why rehearse?’ people ask her.
‘Because it keeps my head above water,’ she answers, as if the lifeline music throws her were material and evident: a big, fat buoy at the base of the cello, keeping her from slipping under. As if we weren’t all wading in the river of shit that Luz’s death left in our home. Except that it’s not even quite a river, our sadness: it’s stagnant water. Since Luz drowned, there’s always something drowning at home. Not everyday. Some days you think that we’re all alive again, the five remaining members of the family: I get a zit; some girl calls Theo; Olmo plays his first concert; Dad comes back from tour; Mom decides to bake a pie. But later you go into the kitchen, and there’s the pie, still raw on the wooden countertop, half of it pricked and the other half untouched, with Mom hovering over it, clutching the fork in midair. And then you know that we too, as a family, will always be ‘almost six’.
*
Marina greets me like she greets everyone: by grabbing you by the back of your head and planting a kiss on your cheek (and if you don’t know her, and if you’re as dumb as my brothers, you might think she’s going in for the mouth). From this angle, I can see her black bra. Maybe I need me one of those. Thirteen is definitely the age for one’s first black brassiere. It’s too embarrassing if Dad takes me, but maybe Pi will want to come along when she gets back. I go into Bitter. It’s always a surprise when you step through the door. Firstly, because it’s different every time, and then because there’s something over-the-top about it. Something bubbly. The décor consists of piles of cushions on a chicken-yellow sofa, the only constant in the whole place. Some of the cushions have tiny little mirrors that twinkle depending on where you stand. Marina donated me some cushion covers, which now take pride of place on my chaise longue. I filled them with plastic bags, just like she showed me. Luz would say Marina is the queen of recycling. She gets all those clothes I like second-hand. With her hands on her hips she says, ‘Yes, miss?’