The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters Read online

  “Aracely say you like dogs.” Pilar pointed at the trio of boxers. “Come meet. This is Dulce. Shake hands.”

  The dog she indicated glanced at me and yawned, but politely extended a paw.

  The rough pad and cool nails rested lightly on my palm. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “This is Ynez, and this is Barbara.”

  I jiggled each dog’s paw, and noting a space on the sofa near Barbara, I asked Pilar if I could sit there.

  She turned to the dogs. “Will you be good?”

  They wagged their stumpy tails and grinned at her, as only dogs can.

  “Okay,” she said. “But if they are bad, you tell me.”

  “Sure.” After I settled beside Barbara, Ramón handed me a fresh drink. “Gracias.”

  “De nada.” He bowed and vanished with his wife.

  As soon as they were out of sight, the dogs began nudging one another, pulling on their sweaters, and whimpering. Barbara tried to stick her wet nose under my dress.

  “Hey, hey.” I pushed her head away. “Don’t start.”

  At the same time as the dogs decided to plunge off the couch and make for the snack table, Aracely’s voice rang out from the next room. I wandered over to find her quarreling with Cary near the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”

  “I told him exactly what to get me for Christmas.” Aracely’s lower lip trembled. “I even showed him the store, told him my size, everything.”

  Cary shrugged, his face blanched.

  “And, guess what?” She blinked back tears. “He didn’t get me nothing!”

  Cary shoved his big hands in his pockets. “I told you we don’t have the money.” He had quit working as a typist to earn a teaching degree. My gentle, lumbering brother dreamed of becoming a kindergarten teacher. He was about to start student teaching, for which he’d receive no salary. The two had moved in with Aracely’s folks, getting by on small paychecks from the dental office where Aracely worked as a receptionist.

  “No fight,” called her mother from the kitchen. “Come help in here, Aracely.”

  She moved off, glaring at Cary.

  He set his empty beer bottle on the dining table and slunk from the room, his eyes on the floor. A chubby little boy appeared and tipped a drop of beer from Cary’s bottle onto his tongue.

  “Good idea,” I said. “Think I’ll switch to beer, too.”

  But Aracely burst from the kitchen, handing me yet another frosty margarita, which sloshed onto my knuckles. “I can’t believe it. That asshole! He just took off!”

  “What?” I dried my hand on my dress.

  “Cary left. I saw him from the window.” She stormed through the Christmas tree room and disappeared into the hall. Deep in the house, a door slammed.

  “Um,” I said to the little boy, “how am I supposed to get back?”

  He shrugged, giggling.

  Pilar emerged from the kitchen, hefting a roasting pan that she set on the table. “Having a good time?” Her face shone with perspiration.

  I nodded.

  “Can you give the velas? I don’t know how to say.”

  “Candles,” piped the chubby kid.

  “Sure.” I set my drink on the table.

  Pilar produced a brown paper sack containing several three-inch tapers and a box of matches. “Give to everybody, okay? Light with these.” She extracted a match from the box and demonstrated how to strike a flame, as though inability to speak Spanish indicated imbecility on my part.

  “I think I can do that.” I gave a candle to the boy. “I’m not going to light yours yet, so hold on to it.” I headed back to the den, presenting a candle to anyone in my path, saying, “una vela,” now that I knew the word, and lighting it.

  A handsome man with longish sideburns jabbered back at me with a stream of Spanish so fast it made me dizzy. I smiled at him, saying, “Sí, sí, bueno,” and put a candle in his hand. “Una vela.” I lit it and moved on to the next person, who, I hoped, would just take the thing without comment. By the time I’d given everyone a candle and returned to light the little boy’s and my own, my face felt stiff from grinning.

  Soon off-key singing filled the two rooms as Aracely’s mother brought forth a ceramic Nativity scene from under the Christmas tree. Much like the one Nilda produced during the holidays when we were young, this included a mismatched baby Jesus, one so large he could have more easily given birth to Mary and Joseph, both, than the miniature Virgin could have delivered him. People clustered near the tree and around Aracely’s mother as she held aloft the crèche. Faces glowing in the candlelight, they sang in desultory voices while the dogs howled in pain. I didn’t know the words, so I just moved my lips, hot wax tears dripping from my candle onto my fist, until the singing was done. Then, poof, we blew out the flames, and the dark room filled with smoke.

  I set about retrieving the candles. “Gracias, gracias, gracias.”

  The talkative man with sideburns didn’t have his.

  “Vela?” I held open the bag.

  He turned up his palms to show they were empty. His fingers rippled like a magician’s. He pushed up his sleeves before reaching toward me and pulling out the candle as though it had been hidden behind my ear the whole time. Of course, this struck his friends as uproarious.

  I thrust the sack at him. “Just put the vela in the bag, por favor.”

  After I had retrieved the candles, I found Pilar, handed them to her, and said, “Do you mind if I use your telephone?” It was time to call a cab.

  “How was it?” Bette was stretched out on the sofa watching television, a glass of wine and lit cigarette in hand.

  “Okay, I guess. They had dogs there.” I took off my jacket and hung it in the front closet, which was now almost bare. The bags of clothing and junk had also been removed from the condo. “Where is everything?”

  “We took it all down to the rec room. The manager said we could keep stuff there until Goodwill arrives.” She muted the set. “Dogs? You must’ve loved that.”

  “It was all right.” Vet school and then my practice cured me of my infatuation with animals. No room for sentiment in the lab, at the off-campus agricultural centers, or in the clinic. I never forgot they were sentient creatures, but there were so many that sometimes I handled them like matter. Long after my parrot, Saint Vincent, died, Chris discovered a stray kitten in our yard, so these days we kept a cat, but as a cat —not as a small furry being, anthropomorphized by my imagination.

  “Oh, before I forget. Chris called.” Bette set down the wineglass, as though mention of Chris’s name conjured her censure of alcohol.

  “What’d she say?”

  “Something about a trip to Guatemala —she wants to check some dates with you.”

  I glanced at my watch. It would be nearly one in the morning in Georgia. “I’ll call her tomorrow.” I’d already told Bette we were arranging to adopt a baby girl from Central America. “She must have heard from the agency.”

  “I hope it’s good news.” She arched her brow. “But how will that be? I mean, a gay couple adopting a baby in the South?”

  “It’ll look like a single woman, a professional, adopting an underprivileged child from a Third World country.” The adoption, we’d agreed, would be in my name, in case Chris’s age might raise questions. “No reason to bring up our relationship in the proceedings.”

  “I hope that works out.” Bette lifted the wineglass to her lips.

  “Do you remember that time you told me to lie to Luis for you? You were going somewhere, didn’t want him to know, so you asked me to say you were taking a nap?”

  “Vaguely,” Bette said, shifting uncomfortably on the couch.

  “You said you owed me one —a lie, and I was just thinking, with the baby —”

  “It’s not a lie, Loretta.” She smiled. “You are going to be a good mother.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I’m positive.” Bette rose to fill her wineglass. “You want some?”

  “No, I�
��m going to bed.” I was anxious to hear Chris’s news. Because of the time difference, I could call her as early as I liked. “I’ll sleep in Dad’s room tonight so you can watch television.” And deal with that lumpy couch, I thought. The previous night, I had tossed and turned over the loosened springs and hard metal frame while listening to the constant roar of traffic from the street.

  “Suits me.” Bette yawned. “Remember, tomorrow the real work begins.”

  I phoned Chris as soon as I woke, but she wasn’t home or at her office. She probably had an early surgery. Claiming to be hopeless at names, Chris had insisted I name our baby. I teased her that I would call our daughter, Gertrude, Helga, or Madge. She said I may as well christen her “grunt,” “helmet,” or “mud,” if I wanted ugly-sounding names. In truth, I had no ideas and was beginning to feel some pressure.

  “What do you think of Ruby?” I asked Bette when she woke.

  “Not really my color,” she said. “It looks better on you or Sophie.”

  “No, the name Ruby. What do you think of it?”

  “It’s all right.” She pulled the blanket over her shoulder and turned away.

  After breakfast, we hurried down to the storage room —a cubicle near the laundry room —to sort through more of Pam’s belongings before my father’s release from the hospital, and, more important, before Rita showed up.

  What we found in that dark, musty closet was more junk, but of the less interesting variety: Pam’s old receipts, bills, and yellowed tax records, catalogues, Reader’s Digests, and even old telephone books. We loaded most of it into the recycling bin outside. But behind a short wall of boxes, we discovered the bird’s-eye-maple trunk.

  I wiped the furry coat of dust from it with a rag. “I forgot all about this.”

  “Nilda had it for a while,” Bette said. “Remember? It was in the front room of her apartment. When she moved to New Mexico, she must have given it back to Dad.”

  “But why keep it hidden down here?”

  Bette furrowed her brow, as though wondering how I could ask something so obvious. “Because it’s exquisite, because it’s tasteful. Think about it, how would something like this fit into Pam’s decorating scheme? She’d have cluttered it with crocheted toilet paper hats, porcelain shepherdesses, and plastic roses in no time.”

  “True.” I lifted the heavy lid as Bette crouched beside me. The scent of cedar whooshed out at us. The trunk contained photo albums, baby books, yearbooks, and boxes of loose snapshots. Accordion files filled with papers and certificates lay atop plastic wrapped piles of clothing.

  Bette pointed to a sheathed bundle of yellowed lace. “Mom’s wedding dress?”

  “Probably.” I lifted another parcel, a packet of papers, bound with twine. A thin envelope sailed out.

  Bette reached for it and pulled out a letter to read its spidery script. “I don’t believe it!” She took the parcel of pages from my hands and gently removed the string. “You know what this is, don’t you?” She flipped through the pages once and then fitted them back into the parcel. “I’m going to make copies, one for each of us.”

  Part of me wanted to take the package from her and read the pages then and there, but another part suspected letdown. How could this stack of yellowed sheets possibly satisfy what I had longed for over all these years? So I was relieved Bette whisked the parcel away and tucked it into her oversized bag of “keep-ables.”

  In the afternoon, we retrieved our father from the hospital. It was no trouble getting him home, but he had problems after the catheter was removed, causing inflammation. This created a sense pressure, making him believe he had to urinate even when his bladder was empty. And since the surgery, he was moving even slower than usual, so we had a lot of false starts —trips to the bathroom, which he announced with a hollow, high-pitched whistling sound. “Whoo-whoo-whoo” followed by, “Man, I got to go!” Whoever was nearest leapt to her feet and helped him to the toilet.

  By dinnertime, the condo was crammed. My sisters and I, Rafe and two-year-old Danni, Elena, Aitch, Cary, and Aracely —who was wearing a new rabbit’s fur jacket to go with the smug look on her face —sat in the living room eating take-out pizza. I couldn’t resist sidling up, pointing at her jacket, and saying, “I hope that’s not real.” She shrugged, but Cary gave me a tight smile, an apologetic look. Afterward, we settled Dad in bed for the night, and Bette pulled out the copies she’d made of the packet we discovered.

  “What’s this?” Rita backed away as though Bette were about to hand her a summons to appear in court. Rafe, though, took the sheaf of pages. Sophie accepted hers without a word, as I did. Bette even made a copy for Cary.

  He started flipping through the pages, but Aracely snatched the stack from his hands. “Let me see that.”

  “Loretta and I found this when we were clearing out the storage area.”

  “We found the maple trunk,” I said.

  Rita narrowed her eyes at me. “Why didn’t you call us?”

  “Anyway,” Bette continued, “this was there —our real gift from Fermina.”

  Rita’s mouth dropped open. “So none of that other stuff was true?”

  Bette shook her head, grinning. “I’m a natural liar.”

  “But isn’t lying unnatural?” I pointed out.

  “Not for me,” Bette said with pride.

  “I never believed in that business.” Sophie smirked. “I mean, what kind of a crappy gift was I supposed to have gotten —a shitty life, but ha-ha-ha, isn’t it hilarious?” Even as a child, Sophie claimed to reject our ideas about Fermina’s gifts. But from the look on her face, I could see she was stunned. “Is this the book then?”

  “They’re reports from Heidi Vigil’s interviews. It’s the story of Fermina’s life,” Bette said. “Read for yourself.”

  “Thank you, Bette,” Rita said in a strange, low voice.

  I cut my eyes at her to see if she was being sarcastic, but her expression was soft, her eyes shiny and full. She took her copy and disappeared into the bathroom for a long time. When she emerged, she took the sleeping Danni from Rafe’s arms and stepped out onto the balcony. Through the parted drapes, I could see her under the mothy nimbus from the porch light, swaying back and forth, as though waltzing in place, her cheek against Danni’s, her eyes closed, and a fullness in her face I had never seen before. “Has she always been so lovely?” I said.

  Rafe nodded, but Bette said, “When she’s not all uptight, that is.” She drew Elena into her lap. “Are you getting tired, m’ija?”

  Elena shook her head, but relaxed into her mother’s embrace, nesting her head under Bette’s collarbone. With a pang, I remembered my mother would hold me this way, and when she spoke, I would snuggle into the hollow above her breast to feel her words buzzing through my bones.

  That night, my sisters left me alone with our father. I was to care for him over the next few days until I flew back to Georgia. After they went home, I found one of the copies that Bette had made. I had put mine in my suitcase and remembered seeing my sisters with their copies in hand as they left. This had to be Cary’s. Just as well —Fermina never meant for him to have it. I shook off my reluctance to face disappointment, and starting with the letter, I settled into the recliner to read.

  Niñas Queridas,

  Irina writes this letter for me in English for you. You call me Fermina, but my name is Nuvamsa. Nuvamsa means the flares of snow we asked of Nuvak’china, so we would have water in springtime. I am Nuvamsa, and my mother was Poh’ve’ha. This means lily blossom of the water. These pages have the story of what happened long ago. This is my gift, so you will know me, and my mother.

  It was at the wedding of Decidero and Eulalia that I learned of my mother. There, I met a servant from Hano, on the First Mesa. She told me that my mother was not killed on the wagon road where I was taken away. She rose up from the dust and walked thirty miles on that road to Fort Wingate. With blood in her hair, she walked to the fort. There, people helped her talk to the
leader. She told what happened to us. A man named Shaw tried to help her get me back. They learned that Chato Hidalgo kept me, and they brought him to the fort. But he said I was given to him by a man who owed him money. I had to stay until the debt was paid. My mother asked to go to me, to work in his house, and he said that is fine. But he sold her to a sheep rancher. From there, she escaped that winter. She froze to death during a blizzard. They found her body on that same wagon road, where she was walking back to find me.

  How could I know what she had done without hearing this? It was her last gift to me. Now that I have lost so much, I still have this, and through this, I have my mother with me. I close my eyes and I see her, with blood in her hair, walking through heat and dust and again through a snowstorm, walking all those miles, all these years, just to find me. I am Nuvamsa, called Nuva by my mother.

  I am your great-grandmother, and this is my story, so you will know how far I have come to be with you.

  Con cariño,

  Nuvamsa

  I read through the photocopied sheets, numbly, as if I’d stumbled into someone else’s dream that was nevertheless familiar and as powerful as a trance. When I reached the last page, my arms and legs tingled as though my father’s steamy apartment had grown as cool and clear as a night in the high desert. A mesquite-fragranced breeze swirled past like a diaphanous veil. My inner ear buzzed with swelling silence that exploded into a cacophony of sounds: voices in an unrecognizable language, the snap of flames, hooves drumming the hard-packed earth, and weeping —the unbroken and copious wailing of a child borne away from home, from childhood. Then stillness fell. Light and shadow sharpened into distinct forms and clean lines. Holding the pages, I could see in the way I peer through my microscope, after twisting the lens for keen focus. The script on the page wavered, blurring as hot tears stung my eyes, but it was sure and true in the inexorable, undeniable way that one is at last confirmed in what one knows without knowing, feels without speaking about or thinking.