The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters Read online

  I wish Rita had come with us. With the stink of incense, the heat, and the gallons of scent dousing the women here, I know I’d be able to count on her to faint. She is a first-class fainter, even at age six, and church is her element, where she does her best work. Whenever Rita keels over, I haul her to the bathroom in back, where we happily wait out the service.

  I expect we are going to sink to our knees and start the praying, but my father and Nilda lead us past the first pew and up toward the coffin. The last time I looked in a coffin, my mother was inside, holding a prayer book; rosary beads threaded through her long fingers, but she looked nothing at all like my mama. I stare at the floor as we file toward Fermina’s coffin, but my eyes wander over and I see her. “Fermina. Fermina?”

  The church full of faces, the coffin, the altar boy swinging the thurible, Jesus on his cross with painted blood dripping to his chin —all of it swirls and dips like I’m riding the whirligig at Pacific Ocean Park. I hear people speaking, but I don’t understand what they’re saying. Voices break apart. And then Loretta whispers, in a slow, strange voice: “Remember her as she was.”

  A cool, sparkling darkness covers me, like I’m wearing a dazzling cloak of stars strung together by loose black webbing. Maybe I’m dead? But I hear a siren whine, cars whooshing past, and Loretta scoffing, “No, you’re not dead, stupid. You’re in the car.”

  “What happened?” I feel groggy, but rested, like a shipwreck survivor washed onto the broad upholstered lap of the front seat.

  “You had some kind of fit,” says Loretta, nose-deep in Dog Diseases, my father’s big ring of keys nested in her lap.

  “I fainted?”

  “I guess.”

  “Did you bring me here?”

  “Heck, no. Dad lugged you out. He made me stay with you until you feel better. I’m missing the beginning of the Rosary,” she says, turning a page.

  “I fell all the way down and everything?”

  She nods. “You kissed the floor.”

  “Down,” I ask, “you mean straight down, right? Not sideways?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And . . . nobody could see my underwear?”

  “Nope.”

  I let out a huge sigh. Accidentally showing panties is the kind of thing a person never stops worrying about.

  “Nobody saw a thing when you fell,” continues Loretta. “But when Dad carried you to the car —whoo-ee! —free showtime at Sacred Heart of Mary.”

  “You liar!” I sock her shoulder.

  “Knock it off,” she says. “I’m kidding.”

  “Honest?”

  “Yeah, honest. No one saw your underwear.”

  I straighten my dress, smoothing down the hem to make sure it would have been long enough to cover my nalgas even as I fell.

  “We better go back,” says Loretta, not knowing the first thing about fainting in church.

  “You’re nuts. After a person faints, no one expects them to return to church.”

  “Fine, you stay. I’m going back to pray.”

  “Since when do you pray?” I remember how Loretta became so disgusted when she didn’t turn into a saint and fly up to heaven during her First Holy Communion that she gave up on religion.

  “I didn’t get to say good-bye to Fermina.”

  I snatch the keys from her lap. “You can’t leave the person who’s fainted, dummy. It’s not safe.”

  “You seem fine to me.”

  “Look, Loretta,” I say, dangling the keys. A spark, an idea is catching. I run the keys through my fingers like coins. “I bet I could drive us somewhere, and we’d be back before the Rosary ends.”

  “You can’t drive.”

  “Sure, I can.”

  “Lie,” says Loretta, biting on a cuticle.

  “Really, I can drive. I drove last summer when Dad and the uncles got real loaded that time at Octavio’s ranch. How do you think everyone got back to Tía Beatriz’s?”

  “That was just in the country.”

  “Once you do it, you don’t forget, like riding a bike. I’ll show you.”

  “So you’re going to steal the car?”

  “You can’t steal a thing that belongs to you, right? And this is our family car, right?” I say. “Now move over.”

  She slides over me, and I slip into the driver’s seat. “What about Fermina?” she says. “I didn’t get to say good-bye.”

  “There’s always the funeral.” I stab the key in the ignition and stretch my leg for the gas pedal. I can barely reach it, so I scoot the seat up as far as it will go. Driving in the city is way better than bumping over country roads. Once I maneuver out of the lot, the paved street feels smooth as butter under the Impala’s fat tires.

  “You have any idea where we’re going?” Loretta asks.

  “I was thinking we could go to Elysian Park. It’s close,” I tell her.

  “Yes, the park!”

  After a few blocks, we head up the twisty road that spirals into the park. It’s superdark, even with the headlights on, and I’m driving at a crawl, so we don’t flip over a guardrail and tumble down the hill. Finally we reach the picnic area, and I glide the car into a parking slot. I pull out the key, flip off the headlights, and sink back into the seat. Driving can make a person pretty tense.

  “It’s like being blind,” Loretta says, “when the moon is gone.”

  Without moonlight and streetlamps, there’s barely enough light to make out the barbecue pits and picnic tables. I scroll down the window to a cool, damp breeze that smells of eucalyptus and burnt charcoal. I slide open the ashtray to find whatever butts might still be smokeable.

  “What’s that?” asks Loretta, cocking her head.

  “Don’t try to spook me. You’re always —”

  “Shush! Listen.”

  Something feeble whimpers in the distance. I can barely hear it, but I can tell this something feeble is not human. And I start to freak out. But Loretta swings her door open and leaps out like we’ve just arrived at Disneyland.

  “You can’t go out there,” I tell her.

  She races through the picnic area toward the trash bins. Then I lose her in the shadows. Jesus, I’m thinking, they’re really going to be pissed at me if she vanishes like those people in this book I read called Disappeared! I fish out a half-smoked butt, straighten it, and plunge in the lighter on the dashboard. No point in my vanishing, too. The lighter pops and I put the butt to my lips, drawing in a raspy lungful. Besides, I know Loretta is too big a pain in the nalgas to disappear this easily.

  Sure enough, she’s already striding back to the car, bearing a cardboard box like she’s a peanut vendor at Dodger Stadium. “Guess what I found!”

  “Money?”

  “No, dopey, look. Look!” She rests the box on one hip and opens the car door on my side to shove it in my face. Under the dome light, I see two wet-looking black things, writhing like miniature seals on a greasy rag.

  “What are those? Rats? Ugh, get them away!”

  “Puppies! They’re newborn puppies!”

  My eyes focus. “They’re sick,” I say. “What’s that on that one’s eye?” Rice grains fill the hollow of the smaller pup’s socket, but these grains are twitching. My stomach plunges. “Worms!”

  “They’re just maggots,” says Loretta. “Let’s take them home. I can cure them.”

  “Put them back, Loretta. I’m not driving maggoty dogs around in the car.”

  “You have to! Or I tell that you stole the car and kidnapped me and” —she sees the butt burning between my fingers —“and you’re smoking!”

  “Like they won’t know something’s up when we come back to church with a box of puppies.” I crush the cigarette out.

  “I already thought of that. We can drop them off at the house. I’ll hide them in the cuartito, and then we can go back to the Rosary.” She glances at her wristwatch. “We’ve got just enough time.”

  “I do not drive with maggots.”

  “Come on, please,
Bette. I swear I’ll be your friend forever.”

  “I already have plenty of friends.”

  “But you don’t have me,” she says, standing there and holding on to the box so tightly that I can tell she’s never going to let it go.

  “Put them in the goddamn trunk.” I hand her the keys, and she practically skips, rounding the car to stow the creepy things.

  Turns out, she’s right. We do have just enough time to stop home to drop off the puppies. Just as we’re about to make a clean getaway, though, we run smack into Señora Trejo trudging up the driveway with an apronful of weeds. She spills these when she sidesteps to avoid crashing into us. Loretta and I help her scoop them up, but it’s so dark we can’t see too well.

  “Yerba buena,” she says, raking the cement walk with her bony fingers.

  I ask the viejita if Cathy is still sick. She nods and hurries away.

  “Poor Calfie,” says Loretta, clucking her tongue.

  Then we run our asses to the car and tear back to church.

  People haven’t even started filtering out yet. I pull into the front parking lot, feeling smart and wicked for getting away with this, when Loretta groans. “Oh no!”

  “What?” I ask, but then I notice the problem, too. A Volkswagen Beetle is hunched right in our parking space. There are no other places to park in the front of the lot. But do I lose my nerve? I do not. I just cruise around and around like my father did earlier, searching for a spot. Nothing turns up. There must be some Holy Roller event at the social hall, because although we loved her, Fermina really wasn’t popular enough to fill a parking lot. “We’ll have to use the lot across the street.”

  “How will you explain how the car got there? Strong winds?”

  “I’ll think of something,” I say, not sure I have time to come up with anything really inspired. “You just go along with it, okay? Whatever I say, you got to act like it’s God’s own truth, got it?” At least with Loretta, the good kid, on my side for once, I might be able to get away with this. We practically have to fly across the street to get back to the church as the mourners trickle back to their cars. We don’t have to wait long. I make out Dad’s pin-striped suit and Nilda’s black shift emerging from the vestibule.

  “How are you feeling?” my father asks, handing us each a holy card, a funeral keepsake —the picture of the Virgin Mother on one side, Fermina’s name, the date, and a prayer on back.

  “Still dizzy,” I say, working for sympathy, “a little feverish, and headachy.”

  “You go straight to bed when we get you home,” says Nilda, putting a cool hand to my forehead. “All that makeup you had on, no wonder you’re sick.”

  “Hey,” my dad says, already sounding worked up, “what’s going on here?”

  “Where?” asks Loretta. She tucks her holy card in her pocket.

  “Where’s the car?”

  Nilda scans the lot. “Dios mío!”

  “They had to move it,” I say.

  “Who? Who moved my car?”

  “Delivery men.”

  My father narrows his eyes. “Delivery men?”

  “Yeah, well, they needed the spot to bring in the . . . delivery, so they had to move the car.” Not great, I admit, but better than nothing.

  “They needed to bring the delivery,” Loretta says.

  Dad swells up, but since he’s right outside the church surrounded by people, he controls himself. “Qué delivery, ni delivery?”

  “Doughnuts!” I say. “Doughnuts for the social hall. They’re having some kind of thing in there, and they needed all these doughnuts and coffee.”

  “Tons of doughnuts,” Loretta pipes in. “Loads of coffee.”

  “Doughnuts,” repeats Nilda in a doubtful way. My father just shakes his head. But a gaggle of Holy Rollers wander out of the social hall and right past us, bearing doughnuts on paper plates and steaming cups of coffee. “Hmm . . . ,” murmurs Nilda. “We better stop at the bakery and pick up something to take over to Stella’s.”

  Dad shakes his head, but he doesn’t say anything more as we lead him to the basketball court to find the car. Despite my queasy gut, he and Nilda ride up front, so she can jump out —if there’s no parking —to buy the sweets at the bakery.

  “Who changed the seat?” my father barks.

  “The delivery guy,” I say. “He was real short, so he moved it.”

  After that, he and Nilda ignore us as they talk about who sent what flowers and who showed up and who was too lazy to bother.

  When we’re in bed, Loretta whispers, “Soon as everyone goes to sleep, I’m going out to the cuartito to take care of the puppies.”

  “Seriously, Loretta, they look real bad,” I tell her. “They’ll probably die.”

  “No, they won’t. I can make them well. That’s my gift from Fermina.”

  “Come on, you don’t really believe that.”

  “I do believe it, and I believe you got your gift, too. You can tell lies that people believe. That’s your gift, almost as good as mine.”

  “Get out,” I say, but this gets me thinking about how well that doughnut bullshit played out. “They only swallowed the delivery story because you went along with it. Plus, those guys showed up with doughnuts.”

  “That’s not why. You’re the one who told the lie they believed. Try it out tomorrow. Whatever you say, I bet people believe you.”

  We both go quiet. My father’s slippers shuffle in the hallway, and the newspaper rattles. I remember today’s headline, that article claiming the world champion boxer is, of all stupid things, afraid to fight. Everyone lies. But some lies are way more idiotic than others. Maybe my gift is to tell smart lies —lies that are not an insult, like the one in the paper. Maybe I can tell lies smart enough to be believed.

  Loretta whispers, “Listen, I don’t want anyone to know about the puppies. Not while they’re sick.” Then she goes on about how she’s going to cure them. She has a sack of stuff: eyedroppers, peroxide, tweezers (I’ll never touch those again), gauze, and adhesive tape.

  I turn on my side, so Loretta can’t see, and give my pillow a little hug and a kiss.

  “How come you do that?” she asks.

  “Do what?”

  “Kiss the pillow like that. I see you do it every night.”

  “You’re crazy,” I say, and turn away from her, pulling the covers over my shoulder. The pillow thing is just something I started after Mama died. This used to be her pillow, see. I swapped it with my old pillow right before her funeral, when everyone was too busy to notice. Even now, when I bury my face in it, I can still smell her hair oil and the crushed fern and coriander scent of her. I cuddle the pillow to me like a baby as I drift off to sleep, and sometimes I sneak it a little kiss. It’s not like I can’t fall sleep if I don’t —just takes a superlong time, is all.

  Loretta tiptoes out to the cuartito, and I think about Fermina and the gift thing. Who was she, really? I feel like I should know, like I need to know. Before long, I’m kind of whispering to Fermina, like she’s right here with me, asking her this and that. I pat my pillow, and since Loretta’s gone, I slip it another kiss. I love you, too. Good night.

  SUBJECT: FERMINA/FOLKTALES

  WPA: 6-17-38 —DC: HMS

  June 14, 1938

  Words: 539

  OWL CHILD

  Of the folktales Fermina heard when young, one that stays with her is the story of an owl that claimed a human child. In this tale, parents of a temperamental girl would put her outside when they could no longer bear her tantrums. Late one night, while the father was worshipping at kiva, the girl raged when her mother tried to get her to sleep. The exasperated mother cursed the child, threatening to put her out if she did not settle down. She refused, so her mother cast her into the night. The child sobbed until she fell asleep. An owl flapped to her side and nudged her, hooting gently. This roused the girl. She reached for its feathery breast, and the owl carried her off.

  When the girl’s father returned, he
asked where the child was. Her mother admitted putting her out. But the man had not seen his daughter outside when he returned from kiva. Alarmed, her parents summoned the other villagers to help them hunt for her. They searched until dawn without finding a trace of the child.

  After several days, a hunter from Oraibi stooped to drink from the spring in Hotevilla, when he heard a child laughing. Following the sound, he found a girl in an owl’s nest. She sprouted short brown feathers on her arms, her chest was furred with down fuzz, and her small nose had begun to harden and crook like a beak. Her dark-ringed eyes glowed amber from the shadowy nest, and when the hunter called to her, she hooted in reply.

  The hunter returned to his village on the Second Mesa and described what he’d seen. Soon the news reached the girl’s parents, who sought the hunter. He described the place where he had seen her, and the girl’s father led a party of men to retrieve her. When they found the nest, the owl was perched in it. It surrendered the girl to her father, explaining it had claimed her because she had been cursed and cast out. “When you return home,” the owl said, “you must seal the child up in a room for four days. You cannot look upon her during this time. The fourth day, after sunrise, you can look in. Fail this, and you will lose your child forever.”

  The father agreed, and the party returned to the village with the feathered girl. The parents shut her in a room and sealed the door. They followed the owl’s rules until the morning of the fourth day. Before dawn, the woman woke the man to ask if she could open the sealed room. He forbade her and went back to sleep. But the mother reasoned that since this was the fourth day, what difference would an hour make? She broke the seal, and the door burst open. An owl emerged, flapping from the home toward Hotevilla.

  The commotion woke the man. He was furious and then heartbroken to learn that they had again lost their child. The woman wept for days, but received no consolation from the villagers, who realized that one should neither curse a child nor cast her out, for an owl may snatch her and never bring her back.