Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer

by Jamie Figueroa

  When the mother finishes with the plates, she gathers the glasses and the bowls, turns each one upside down. Arranges them in rows of four as close to the walls as she can get, makes triangles on the rug in the front room with the utensils, and on the rug down the hall, rectangles and X’s.

  The angel leans against the elm across the road at the bottom of the hill—the land pulses. She scares a swarm of dragonflies from their restless sleep, stares up at the house. The canyon is aware of the house and what happens inside. They understand each other’s place. It has always been and will always be this way. The air is spiked with alertness.

  If you slow and quiet yourself, you’ll notice water bubbling up from the ground. You’ll feel, beneath your feet, hidden in the soil, the movement of seeds constellated like stars, the webbing of roots. Try orienting yourself this way. The future happens in multiple directions and what came before is always embedded. It’s quite possible you will not understand how the canyon is a living, breathing presence. How the house is a living, breathing presence. A presence that sees and knows, feels, hears. It holds them all—Baby, the brother, the sister, the mother, and memories of the Explorer. The house holds lifetimes, real and imagined, living and deceased.

  The angel climbs through Rufina’s open window, first one exceptionally long leg, then the other. As she shakes out her wings, a spray of mites litters the floor. She sees what is not here: Rufina, age ten, at her desk, cutting out images of landscapes from photography books, gluing them together. She sees what is not here: Rufina, age twelve, brushing her hair before wrapping it in a long scarf, knotting it at the back of her head, singing. Lucio Armijo clipping up the drive to his post outside her window. Two chile rellenos fat as hearts, wrapped in a paper towel, the grease already soaked through, the batter already cold and soft. His need to provide and protect stronger than it ever should be at that age. Rufina, age fourteen, in bed, seven months pregnant, commissioned to embroider the collar of a woman’s blouse. Doña Allegre surprisingly supportive with the sewing tasks she gave to Rufina. “You’re fatter than my girls ever got with their firsts,” she’d said when she’d dropped the work off at the house. Tiny Christmas lights strung in a mess from the ceiling, as if a clump of galaxy. A tapestry like the one her mother’s people could have made is draped on the wall behind her bed. A series of black ink portraits her mother painted, that no one ever wanted, fills one entire wall. Family Rufina would never meet. Not like Rafa’s or Rufina’s fathers. Men worth knowing.

  The mother on her hands and knees in the front room continues arranging butter knives along the thresholds, zigzags them, hums. Saucers come next, then wooden spoons. In the morning, like every morning, the sink and dish rack will be empty, as will the drawers on either side of the stove, the bottom cupboards as well as the top cupboards. Rufina is always first to find and return them to their proper places. Erasing her mother’s tracks. While Rosalinda finishes, she speaks to herself in a language her children had once accused her of making up. What do they know about her language? Not like those languages Rafa learned, that all sounded the same, like the Explorer’s languages. There were stories she was told. There was a particular way in which they were told. They were to be used as medicine. She was to carry them with her. They would keep her alive. They would keep her children alive. This is what her mother had told her when she journeyed with her to the top of the volcano, at the shore of the lake, when she blessed Rosalinda. Years later, when she escaped, the stories were the first thing to be stripped from her along with her people’s name and her name. Never to return. All her life and never once did the stories return. No matter how hard she tried to force them, no matter all the different ways she tried making them up.

  Now, to remember her steps in the dark there is a saucer, a glass, a bowl. A way to keep track. How many of these will equal the distance to her birthplace? Which configuration will unlock her ability to trace what has gone missing in her memory? If she uses enough plates and utensils, where will it take her? Back in time? To her village? That far? Or will it take her to him, to the Explorer, again? Such an ordinary thing, a kitchen and what’s used there to support the task of eating, to support the daily effort of living—and yet, not one item does Rosalinda take for granted. Her hand on each item is a comfort, and there is so little of that. Her body is brittle. Nothing will cradle her with as much tenderness as she needs. Not even her son can hold her. Her joints are marbles trying to roll away from her. Why does everything want to escape her?

  In addition to seeing what is not there now, the angel also sees what is there. Rufina nursing her own shadow with a dry breast. Unconsciously, in her sleep. Rafa flopped on his sister’s clothes. Breaking open, breaking apart. Remember this, everyone needs to be careful.

  The angel sits on the trunk at the end of the bed, hiccupping. Signals to Baby. If only the coyotes lapping at the trickle of river would cry, like they have done so many times before, offer a warning for Rufina and wake her, but instead, it is a vast kind of quiet. Know this: The only thing the angel loves more than Baby is Rufina. In no time, Baby is in the angel’s lap, like a charm. It weighs more than the angel. It trills, curls it toes.

  Ten

  The angel is out the window, down the drive, past the water, into the hills, beyond the tree line, wings begging purchase, as if the whole contraption of her functions by some unseen hand crank. There now, she rises and is carried along. The Grandmothers to All witness this commotion in the night sky as they light candles and climb into the trees.

  The angel will be back before morning to catch the mother and force her down the well in the backyard. You know, of course, why this has to happen now. The angel has bent toward the broken pleas of Rafa and Rufina for years, enabled them for far too long. Both of them now are capable of being eaten by their insistent grief. It threatens to swallow both of them whole. The angel knows this just like you know it.

  Meanwhile, down below, under more heavens than can be counted, Rufina dreams of the Grandmothers to All, which in her dream look not like their wrinkled, pale versions, but instead resemble her unknowable ancestors. Rather than riding bicycles, they are perched on rocks. They scrub Rufina with red willow bundles. Their hands pull her hair, her fingertips, her ears, her breasts. They pound her knees, her feet. She is mud. She is being made. The volcano is sacred earth, towering above. They are howling. “Oh baby, return.”

  It’s quite possible you will not understand how Rufina could trust the bet she made less than Rafa, who doesn’t trust it at all. Pay attention to how she resists this knowing. She does not want Rafa dead; she does want him out of the canyon, out of town. She wants to dig into the house for the rest of her days and nurse—one breast for her dead baby, one for her dead mother, who for Rufina are always present. Which is to say, she wants to dig into the reality her memory provides. Let’s not forget this is where the Explorer still exists and the couple she wanted so badly to call mother and father. While she doesn’t know the volcano, or the lake, or what dwells in the bottom, let alone comprehend the language her mother and her ancestors spoke, she still has the instincts. From her bloodstream, her ancestors still call to her. There is what needs to be remembered and embraced. She has no idea when she sings, “Return,” that it’s her own strength she’s calling to.

  Rafa must go. This is true. He’s almost done it before. Pills. Handfuls of them. Swallowed, then brought back up. This small city, this canyon, this house has had that effect on him. Time and time again. It’s only when he’s traveling on a plane or is on an island that he’s calm. When he can draw the edges of land, quite easily located, on a napkin at the shoreside bar of such a place, then the great surrender. Full breaths. The water helps, he’s not sure how.

  Notice how desperate he is to be held. At night, when he curls on the floor of Rufina’s room, he’s waiting for her to wake and invite him into her twin bed, her childhood bed. It’s Baby who takes up too much space. A force he cannot see but feels strongly. Its force keeping
him from getting too close. And yet, he feels more crippled than his sister with her limp and her cane when there’s no one to embrace him.

  The containment of arms. The containment of land.

  What he sees is the angel, who appeared at Baby’s birth and has always lingered.

  Never mind Rufina hasn’t thought this weekend through. Never mind the angel knows exactly what she’s planning and will never let it happen.

  Here’s the difficulty with rescue: It’s more demanding for you than anyone else. Which is to say, while everyone has a role, if you don’t take the lead in your own saving, everything and everyone will be damned, including you. Rosalinda knew very little as she traversed territories and borders as she headed north, but she knew this: If she gave up, no amount of assistance would matter. Remember this.

  Officer Armijo has been put in charge of enforcing permits this weekend. Difficult with these two, given his record of loving Rufina. He loved her when he was a boy. Waiting outside her bedroom window, just like he waited for her at school. He loved her when he was getting married and when he had his first son. And he loves her still, but not in the way you think. Not in the way of sinking into her, planting himself, and claiming her. Not in any way she could possibly imagine. A love that doesn’t need or want anything in return. There is desire, it’s true, but know this, Lucio Armijo always has been and always will be in awe of Rufina Rivera.

  Rafa can’t get himself to imagine living without his mother’s arms. He’ll never understand the way in which a small island and all that water re-creates the feeling he had in baths he took with her. Until that last one, of course. He can barely finish a sentence worth any importance, but don’t let this fool you. He has something deep in there itching to live that he doesn’t know about. It could go either way.

  The angel is all about pushing at this point. Similar to when she sat on the trunk at the end of Rufina’s bed when Rufina was fourteen and Baby was crowning. The angel had willed Rufina to push as Rafa cried, holding his sister’s head, his tears dripping on her face. The Grandmothers to All crowded Rufina’s room with plant potions and prayers while the mother sat in the rocking chair on the roof. The angel is about pushing. Rufina will be pushed and Rafa will be pushed and one of them, or both of them, or neither of them will sprout the skill they need for the next part of their lives, which by the way has grown weary with waiting.

  Notice the house. Like a loyal family pet, ever patient, unconditional. Notice how it softens edges of walls, loosens locks, dims the corners, allows Rosalinda to make a mess with the dishes without disturbing anyone. Stays so very quiet. Only the house measures each gesture of longing as equal. Gathers these gestures, records them. It’s the house that continues to provide shelter to all despite living or dead, continues holding, regardless. And the shadows writhing in Rufina’s bedroom—all those ink portraits on the wall and what they have seen, even the mirror forced to reflect the misfortune—still, the house tries to protect her as best a house can.

  The house knows many things, knows east and west, north and south. Knows how to listen. Hears the laughter, the wailing and the pleading. The house knows how to cradle whomever is inside, knows how to nurse simultaneous stories. It seems as if the house birthed itself and rebirthed itself over centuries, one layer of mud plaster after another. It is older than any municipal archive. It knew they would be coming even before they could imagine such a thing—the brother, the sister, the mother, the Explorer.

  Saturday

  One

  When Rufina wakes, she focuses her sight on the sunlit wall, where a crude pattern of lace curtain is projected. She’s sweating. Fists behind her neck, legs knotted at the knees. Her head aches with confusion. Her mother is deceased, but refuses to leave; her rescue plan for Rafa may or may not be interrupted by Officer Armijo; after one day of performing for the tourists, they have a wallet with countless receipts and fifteen dollars cash; the angel that stalks her refuses to manifest any spectacular acts, refuses to answer any of her prayers. Rufina presses this list of worries to the back of her throat. Her hip throbs. It feels twice its size, dense and heavy, as if packed with wet sand. The temptation to let the pain pin her to her bed for the day is overwhelming.

  Baby is not in the crook of her lower back, nor on the pillow next to her, its head on her cheek, breath puffing against her neck. Her brother is no longer on the floor, fileted like some sacrificial lamb—curls greasy, shadows printed under his eyes, drool on his chin, limbs flopped this way and that. Once the mother had settled, the house opened, his panic dissipated, Rafa had climbed back out through the window, his bare feet on the dirt. He’d settled on the couch under the apricot tree as dawn neared.

  Heaviness settles in her lungs. Dread is a slow act of suffocation. Her mind races to a pleasant moment. It’s an act of self-preservation. She remembers herself twelve and waking on a Saturday morning. She goes into the kitchen. There’s the Explorer, apron-clad, making breakfast. Whipped cream, sliced and spiced fruit, links of browned chorizo, pancakes, thin and crisp, all piled high and ready for the pillaging. There are the kisses he was so generous with, one at each of her temples, this was her blessing when she appeared at his side. She can feel the weight of his arm around her shoulders, the bristles of hair on his forearm against the skin of her neck. She can see, in one corner of the kitchen, the mother’s sewing machine. A mound of material is heaped on a nearby bench, a separate pile for the hand-stitched work. Draped on a velvet hanger, suspended from a nail in one of the vigas above, is the dress he picked for Rufina to wear for the day’s performance. And in the opposite corner to the sewing machine, Rosalinda. Cigarette at a sharp diagonal secured in the corner of her mouth as she balances on a stool. Scraps of cloth pieced and pinned together on her body, necessary for creating the perfect fit. The Explorer and his perfect fits. There is Rafa hovering at her feet, having completed the task of polishing her toenails a shade of distressed copper, not unlike the color of her skin. There is Rafa tying the silk ribbons into her braids and wrapping the ends in bells. Her headdress of giant paper flowers, waiting. And listen, there is the soundtrack. One of the Explorer’s records twirling sound. Voices never singing in English.

  Rufina continues to remember this childhood routine—when they acted like a family, they were a family—as she forces herself to sit on the edge of her bed. See how easy it is for her to be a girl again with a family? She can put herself there once more, make it so.

  Her mind fights her, and it’s thoughts of Baby that force her to lift the sheet and the pillow, scanning for a sign. She lowers herself to her hands and knees and peers beneath the bed. No Baby. She reaches for her cane, and with it in hand, her movements quicken. Her robe sways open as she makes her way down the hall. Sweat dampens her skin. She has a whistle she uses for Baby, teeth against bottom lip, tongue curled, more inhale than exhale, a breathy soft sound. The floor of the house, littered with dishes, makes it difficult to step cleanly. She picks her way through, her cane knocking over a glass and splitting it. She uses her cane to sweep the assortments out of her way. Her racket upsets the quiet of the house. It sounds as if everything is breaking. She gathers the dishes, throwing them into the sink. Morning sun rings the floor. As she steps toward its spotlight with one foot, she drags the other leg behind her. Baby is not in the hall on one of the shelves, not on the couch or under the couch, not on the table, not in any of the cupboards.

  It is not only Baby who cannot to be found, but Rosalinda, also seems to be missing. She’s not hanging around on the hallway floor or out circumambulating the well, or in the rocking chair on the roof.

  Instead of Baby or Rosalinda, Rufina has found Rafa in the yard. Rufina spies his feet, dirtier than the soles of worn shoes, jutting out past the cushions of the couch. The pointed rays of the morning sun nearly reaching him.

  Baby’s absence is a physical pain that increases in intensity. This makes it harder for Rufina to breathe. She tries to soothe herself, but instead, her bre
athing speeds, becomes sharp, stops, and then restarts with gasping. She knows that no matter where she searches—in the back of all the closets and all the cupboards, under the sink, behind the toilet, on the roof, in both woodpiles—Baby will still be missing. The house cannot give her what she is desperate for. Instead, it prepares itself for what will be.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  This is how she reasons with her panic.

  One. Never mind the mother for now. She is an impossible feat of immortality.

  Two. She will drag Rafa off the couch and through the yard, if need be. She will douse him with peppermint water, hand him a salted corn tortilla with butter, and a jar of coffee with milk and honey, shove his hat down on his head, push him all the way down the hill to the plaza if she has to. But not before she sorts through everything he’s touched. Not before she’s discovered a fresh stash of pills. She will not let him die, too. She will not.