Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer

by Jamie Figueroa

  Rufina was at the door. “Rafa,” she said above the sound of the mother’s kicking. “Raphael!”

  In her bed, under the sheets, tucked into himself, he could almost feel her close. Were there any more packs of cigarettes under the bed? He should look. He would crawl down and look.

  Rufina tried again, louder. “Unlock the door, Rafa. I’ve got an idea. Let’s use the weekend.”

  This is how it began, where it took root. And still, Rufina had to wait days before prying open the door, crawling under the bed, and making her brother swear.

  While Rafa made his sister wait, he’d willed himself to feel his mother close. Pushed her away. Pulled her close. Pushed. He felt the absence inside himself, the hole within. He spoke the mother’s name like a mantra, calling her back to him. Rosalinda, Rosalinda, Rosalinda. His mouth open, empty, bottomless. Searching for her nipple, for her attention to nourish him, to remind him he was still alive, among the living. A man, a boy, an infant.

  Six

  Dusk has begun the slow opening of its cloak as Rafa and Rufina step off the road and onto the path that takes them through the woods, alongside the stream and back home. Being on this path is not being in the city at all. A crease of canyon, it flushes in green overgrowth. Dense canopy of leaves—bush and tree—the path becomes more and more narrow, winding. Walls of trees and bushes force Rafa and Rufina to walk single-file. Hummingbirds flit and a sparrow hawk rustles its kill in the brush. Butterflies perch on hedgehog and cholla cacti. They hear children’s voices calling out to each other in laughter but cannot see anyone. Rufina thinks she can smell them. Children emit a particular fragrance, part animal, part blossom, to which she is sensitive. “You’re it!” a voice yells out. More laughter. “I’m always it,” another voice responds. Laughter continues. The voices slowly quiet. Trickle out. Rafa thinks they’ll come upon the children at any moment. Instead, once they hit the clearing, he sees an empty tire swing, twirling.

  At the end of the path, they have to climb a steep incline. Rafa lifts the wagon, carrying it to the top, where the road appears again. As he does so, his toes dig into the dirt.

  Rafa and Rufina make their way up the drive, the wagon tilting and jumping across the gravel. Rafa picks it up and sets it under the portál. There is Rosalinda reclining on the diseased couch under the apricot tree with its fresh shoots. Rufina points her cane at Rosalinda, walks past, ducks under the low frame of the back door, closes it behind her. Goes for Baby in her bedroom. Which is to say, she goes for this infant that has been an infant for fourteen years, that has never left the house, and has been seen only by Rafa and Rosalinda. What is Baby if not armor against her mother, armor against being unloved, unnecessary. With Baby in her arms, her focus narrows. While her forehead is against Baby’s, she can feel the imagined breath. Because there is Baby, Rufina is a mother, too, loved and needed.

  “What took you so long, mi conejito?” the mother asks her son, her hands cupped over her heart. “Come lie down with me,” she says. She is no taller than she was at twelve. Her skin two shades darker than either of her children. “Why won’t you wear shoes?” she asks her son. “Did I cross countries, rivers, mountains, deserts, beg for my life in order for you to be born, so that you could grow into a man, and not to wear shoes?”

  His toenails need attention. He’s unwashed. He sags into the couch, as if he’ll surrender, then stands back up. He hears the mother. He doesn’t hear the mother. He paces the yard, circles the well. He pauses by the compost, looking for worms, for evidence of skunk. Just beneath the soil, energy simmers, the earth is moving, opening, seeds are shape-shifting.

  Rafa heads into the house, ducks under the low frame, leaves the door open. He squeezes lemon into water, adds salt and sips while he stares out the narrow, horizontal window stretched above the kitchen counter. The “lookout” window, the Explorer used to call it. As in, no one passing by could go unnoticed. Who needed a guard dog when you had a window like this, he used to say. As if looking out a window were protection. You, of course, know better. Know that seeing happens with more than your eyes.

  The Grandmothers to All parade past on bicycles. They ring the bells on their handlebars and wave at the house. This has been their routine for decades. We could say that the Grandmothers to All consist of elderly women who live at a compound farther up the canyon. They may or may not have ever been married. They may or may not have had their own children. Retired from working as lawyers and professors, genealogists and archivists, hospice specialists and midwives, they now keep a library of seeds and decorate altars with them. They tend to the bees and hundreds of varieties of lavender, which they distill into essences that can heal whatever begs to be healed. Notice they also grow garlic. Once harvested, they braid the leaves, pinning the green plait to archways all over the compound. They’re sap collectors as well—the Grandmothers to All—piñon, cottonwood, cedar. Resin mixed with the lavender essences. Which is to say they understand what is cyclical, natural, and sacred. In addition, they rescue women in need. Because aren’t women just an extension of the natural world? Just like you? Know this: it was the Grandmothers to All who were waiting at the border nearly thirty years ago with blankets, food, and water for Rosalinda. Two of them lifted her off the ground and carried her into the car. They led her into the house in this canyon where she would birth both her children, raise them, and then, years later, return her body to the earth. Meanwhile the Grandmothers to All were close by, watching.

  The mother calls to Rafa from outside, from her couch nest. She is always calling to him. She longs to feel his warm body. He senses something, uncertain. “Lie down with me. Come and lie down.”

  In the kitchen, he walks in circles around the table. Finds a bottle of hot sauce, squirts it onto his tongue. Pretends he’ll squirt it up his nose. Rufina enters, her hair wet, a long T-shirt aiming for her knees, the baby strapped to her back. Her cane ticks the floor like a lazy clock grown tired from keeping time. She has a fresh scratch on her cheek from Baby’s nails. It’s hot pink and glistening. Baby’s eyes are large and seem to swallow everything in the room.

  Rufina gives her brother a look. “How old are you, and still acting like you’ll shoot it up your nose? Yes, you exist. Pain tells you so.” She takes the bottle from him. “Enough.”

  “Can you hear that?” Rafa asks. He’s touching his ears as if Rufina doesn’t know what ears are.

  “It’s nothing,” she says, returning the bottle to its rightful place on the top shelf in the fridge. Under her breath she mutters, “Our lady of longing.”

  “It won’t stop.”

  “Ignore it,” Rufina says.

  “Is it her? Do you hear it?”

  Rufina adjusts Baby’s neck, gathers eggs, cracks them into a ceramic bowl, beats them frothy with a three-pronged fork. She aches for their mother more than Rafa could ever comprehend. Rufina’s ache is older than her teeth. It cements her neck and back, forms a shield across her entire chest. Keeps her breath shallow.

  “Can you see her?” he asks. Rafa snaps his arms, from the elbows down, as if he could propel himself far away, high above, to someplace else. His arms are a blur. He is three years old again. He is a bird. Which is to say, he thinks he can fly.

  Rufina stops frothing the eggs. She watches her brother’s undoing. It splits her heart. She acts as if she were the eldest, as if she were the mother, as if she were the surrogate wife. “Enough,” she says. “It’s the same for me as it is for you.”

  Rafa’s arms melt. He worms his hand into his vest pocket. Pulls out the wallet. He’s unsure if he can trust the bet, Rufina’s silly game, the timing of the weekend, his intermittent resolve to live.

  “Check the wallet,” she says.

  “This isn’t going to work.”

  “There could already be plenty of money,” she says. “We might not have to go back for more.” She pulls Baby around to her front, who swats at Rufina’s cheek. She tightens the knot on her rebozo, kisses the top of
baby’s head. “What about our bet?”

  The things Rafa has had more of than Rufina—money, stamps in his passport, attention from the mother, lovers—and still, he will always want more. Rufina knows this, knows how competitive he is. And yet, she will always be the one who is stronger.

  “I might be winning,” she says. At this, Baby stops squirming and grins. A rind of flesh. “Open the wallet.”

  The slots are crammed with plastic cards. Inside the cash pocket, the sole reason for the bulge: a collection of receipts. Rafa’s fingers sift through one and then the other, throwing them to the floor. They flit and arc and twirl as if confetti. Baby watches, rapidly blinking. There is a desperate magic to it.

  “Money,” she says. “How much?”

  He pulls out two bills, a ten and a five.

  “Not possible.”

  “I’m winning,” he says.

  The iron skillet on the stove begins to smoke. Rufina pours the scrambled yolk. Immediately the air stinks of burnt eggs. A charred film forms on the omelet, dark and rubbery as leather.

  “Not fucking possible.”

  Rosalinda stands at the threshold. She has one foot in. Look at her face. She’s about to cry, don’t you think? Poor mother, always in need of comfort. The formal bones of her face. Poured from the same stubborn mold of her mother and her mother’s mother. A particular kind of face, a brown woman’s face, cast from the earth itself. She peels the dress from her body as if clothes were unnatural. There, her slack breasts, the black wire thatch between her legs, a giant tangle. Her feet, flat against the rug, standing there with them. Her body, their home country. Her body, their creation story. Her body, the catalogue of all the relatives they will never know.

  “Cook the fish,” Rufina says. It’s a command meant to distract him. She can see he’s spiraling into memory about the mother. He isn’t conscious of how close Rosalinda is, but deep within, he’s activated. Another wave of memory and grief—crashing.

  As Rafa unwraps the fish and splashes oil, all he sees is the mother. She is pocket-sized. Even smaller. He sees her as if through a pinhole in his memory. She is a riddle he was once taught and then forgot. A moment from the past seizes him. He thinks: Was I the one in the bath with her? Or was I the one standing over her? Was I three or sixteen? Was I the one washing her? Or was she washing me? The soap gathering around her thighs. On her knees in the water. Was it winter outside? My mother with her skin, the territory of my mother. My mother in the bath on her knees. The oil of the soap filming the surface. Watching the soap, a brick of white, submerge. The ferocity with which she scrubbed herself, the hair and the mouth, and the tongue and the lips, all of it wet and opening. The kind of dirty that would never come clean. Still, he watched as she scrubbed and the water frothed and grew, the suds tripling in size, white the color of making it better, froth the size of countries, the size of continents. White, the color of tourists, the color of politicians and priests, the color of the Explorer. Water sloshing the sides of the tub as she rinsed and rinsed and rinsed. “No more,” she’s screaming. He feels nauseated. Which is to say these times he remembers in the bath with his mother are times he has tried to forget. He’s never been sure if it was her shame he was feeling or his own. Was he supposed to save her or was she supposed to save him?

  The fish is white, too, like the soap, like the water, and slick with oil. The oven door is open. Heat spills out. The pan is before him. He covered the fish with lemon and tin foil. Surely he did this, moments ago, even if he doesn’t remember. He stands to the left of the oven door. Walks around to the right. Again, to the left. Heads for the right. Rufina intervenes, grabbing the glass dish and placing it inside. Rafa laughs at himself. There is something just beneath his skin. Rufina sees it, the thing that won’t let him rest, that won’t let him fully commit to living.

  She hands him a jar of olives. He tips it back, drinks the juice. She passes him an avocado and a knife. He sinks the blade, begins to peel.

  Rosalinda is now on her hands and knees. She crawls under the table, beneath the cloth draping it. Hides among her children’s legs.

  Everything in the kitchen is chipped because of Rosalinda. Even when she was alive, she had to assert her own existence with one mess after another. Rufina can’t stand the way she moves the dishes at night. Juice glasses, sauce bowls, platters—littering the counter, the living room floor, the bathroom sink. The tink and clank of them against each other, against the stacked rings on Rosalinda’s fingers. She nicks them with her clumsy touch, not quite sure of the edges. Edge of cupboard, of shelf, of glass, of her son’s body. Edge of a police gun barrel, a rebel’s machete, a soldier’s sharp zipper. Which is to say, surviving stained her, stained her children, too.

  Instead of slicing the avocado, Rafa squeezes it. He’s lost in the sight of it despite the fact that he cannot feel the wet slime of it between his fingers.

  You can’t have him anymore, Rufina thinks. She wants to aim it at Rosalinda but swallows it instead.

  The Grandmothers to All pass by the window again on their bicycles, whistling and waving, headed this time in the opposite direction, bells ringing. They rotate pedals slower uphill. An hour has lapsed since they were headed to town, and yet in this house, time feels viscous. It could’ve been a year. Rufina wishes her mother had been like this. A woman who rode a bicycle to the market with a clot of women strong enough to part traffic and bend laws. Who smiled instead of cried. Who knew the songs to sing to seeds so they would thrive. Who would’ve held her until the shards of self-doubt and confusion of girl-turning-woman worked their way out. Who would’ve held her. Who would’ve said, “My darling, how could it ever be your fault?”

  It’s a wish Rufina would never dare admit. Instead, she has been the one who waves from the window, from the front porch, from the drive, as the Grandmothers to All pass by.

  Rosalinda, as if reading Rufina’s mind, pinches her thigh.

  It makes Rufina jump. “Fuck you, Ma,” she says, angry that her dead mother still has the power to scare her. Angry that her dead mother still does not love her as much as she loves her brother. Angry that her mother is dead.

  Rafa reaches across the table, grabbing at air as if he’ll finally touch what is there, only to find it not there, again.

  “Is she here?”

  “Stop it,” Rufina screams.

  “You can see her, can’t you?”

  He turns on her, goes for her neck. He’s slower than usual. This is his signature move, a leftover tactic from childhood.

  Rufina leans back, beyond his reach. She outweighs him by flesh, heart, and will. The last time he tried to strangle her, she punched him, then held a frozen plastic bag of green chili to his face as he lay with his head in her lap, mumbling some unrecognizable combination of words. Grateful she hit him.

  “Pain tells me I exist,” he had said. “How many languages would you like me to translate that into?” Now Rafa is saying, “What do I have? Tell me what I have.”

  Seven

  While the mother crouches under the table, Rafa and Rufina settle down again. They eat with their hands. Baby licks its palms. Reaches for Rufina’s mouth. The walls around them appear as if they were dipped in water, painted blue, faded and streaked, darker toward the floorboards. It’s as if the legs of the table, Rafa and Rufina’s feet and the mother, crouching, were sliding into some unnamed body of water. It’s enough to make anyone not in mourning nauseated. The gold tablecloth is faded and streaked, threadbare. The hand-stenciled design at the top of the walls, also gold and fading, is more evidence that the Explorer did exist and that he stationed himself there for a time. The kitchen was his post, where he stewed, canned, baked, sautéed, battered, and fried. The day after he left, the mother burned his apron. Rufina has gathered tulips from the yard and placed them in a collection of old mescal bottles. There are twin stems and triplet stems arcing, dark pink and purple mouths in various states of opening.

  “It’s like what he did to u
s,” Rafa says, a fleck of fish hanging from his chin. “Posing us for money. His toys.”

  Rufina throws her napkin at him. “Wipe your face,” she says. “It’s not like what he did to us. We didn’t want to do that. He dressed us and told us how to stand. We had to pretend there was glass between them and us. He kept all the money. And she was with us.” Rufina mashes a cube of avocado in her palm with her fingernails. “We make our own decisions now. We have voices.”

  “It’s exactly the same,” Rafa says. He can see the dress rehearsal in the living room. The costumes the Explorer discovered—in thrift shops, the flea market, estate sales—and sewed to embellish. The makeup, the jewelry, the scarves and the shawls, the hats, and all the other props. He is assigning roles. There are no speaking parts.

  “We’re even using the same basket,” Rafa says, “to collect money.”

  “It’s not the same,” Rufina says.

  “We’re doing it to ourselves,” he says, then goes to pick at something in his teeth.

  Rufina stuffs fish into her mouth. Bites at the avocado under her nails.

  “But you always liked it,” Rafa says, “didn’t you?”

  Rufina glares, then pinches her eyes shut.

  The mother whimpers, which is better than the wailing. Outside, trees loiter alongside the road, blocking any starlight. Grass blankets the yard, high enough to hide the gravel kicked up from the occasional car. Skunks waddle alongside the trickle of river while raccoons wash and prepare their feasts.

  When Rufina thinks Rafa isn’t looking, she stomps her good leg in the direction of the mother.

  “I made you,” the mother says. Her voice is tar. “You exist because of me.”

  “That’s enough,” Rufina says. “No one even invited you.”

  “What’s going on?” Rafa says. “Do you see her? Is she here?” He stands up, leans across the table.