by Paul Pen
“You look . . . gorgeous.”
Daisy took Dahlia’s hand to swivel her around, showing their sisters the dress she wore. Flowers covered the garment’s shoulder straps, the chest, the back, the skirt. Then Daisy stopped spinning and did the same with her twin, who also wore a dress of flowers, turning her while the others showered her with compliments. The little girls thanked them with a bow.
“And these are for you.”
From their necks they took flower necklaces for everyone. Daisy put one on Melissa, Dahlia on Iris. Together, they gave the most luxuriant one to Mom.
“You’re the best mommy in the world,” they said at the same time.
“Thank you, girls.” Mom smelled the flowers on the twins’ shoulders.
Dahlia took off another necklace.
She left it on one side of the blanket, where Edelweiss would’ve sat.
Melissa saw Mom’s eyes glisten.
“And Dad?” asked Iris.
“Dad has a surprise, too.” Mom’s eyes went even brighter. “You’re going to love it.”
She gestured at the porch, onto which he came out at that moment. The twins leapt with joy when they saw what he was carrying, then sat down on the blanket with the others. Iris hooked an arm through Mom’s. Melissa took the other arm. The five of them settled into a semicircle while Dad caught up with them. When he arrived, he stood in front of them, without treading on the blanket.
“Wonderful, Dad,” said Iris. “At last.”
He cleared his throat. His temples filled with wrinkles when he smiled.
“Here goes,” he said. “I hope you like it.”
The first chord he played on the guitar revived in Melissa so many memories of Edelweiss that she could see her sitting with them, wearing the flower necklace that Dahlia had left in her place.
“I want to live with you among the flowers,” Dad sang, his fingers so accurate on the chords that nobody would have guessed he hadn’t played for more than a year, “with them and me you’ll never be alone . . .”
The twins stood up. They danced to the music that Dad played just as they danced to the record player in the living room. Melissa smiled when she saw the two whirls of white happiness spinning among the rocks, their dresses giving off the sweet smell the flowers produced at dusk in the desert. Next, she looked at Iris. She was listening to Dad sing with her lips pressed together, humming to herself while she dreamed of a new romance in which a boy showed his love for her with a bunch of flowers. Mom exchanged a look with Dad, the man who’d given her the most beautiful bunch that had ever existed, made up of five daughters with flower names. Melissa also smiled at the floating image of Edelweiss, sharing with her a secret thought about Rick and his mother. And then she closed her eyes. She smelled the flowers, the lime in the drink. Silently, she asked her family to forgive her for her secret visit to the post office. Until they found the house among the cacti, Melissa could carry on enjoying Dad’s voice, the twins’ laughter, Iris’s soft humming. She stroked Mom’s hand, feeling proud to be her daughter. Until everything changed, she wished life could be like a drawing in which her family was happy forever.
NEVADA
From the kitchen, she saw the raised lid of the mailbox on the street while she was making her son’s breakfast. A bigger envelope than usual, or a parcel of some kind, had prevented the mailman from closing it. She spilled the orange juice she was pouring into a glass.
“Are you all right?” Her husband was spreading peanut butter on a slice of bread, his tie over his shoulder to keep it clean. He was very careful with his work suits.
She went outside without replying. Something in that unusual delivery unsettled her. She didn’t know why she was smiling. When she took out the parcel, other letters fell onto the ground, getting wet on the newly watered lawn. She inspected it right there, standing beside the mailbox. She could find no sign of who had sent it—not even their own address was complete. She tried to tear the envelope open down the middle, but the trembling in her fingers prevented it. She yelled her husband’s name. He ran out after her, the soles of his shoes thudding as he approached.
“What is it?”
“Open it, we have to open it.”
“Who’s it from?”
“Open it, please . . .”
Nerves gripped her stomach painfully, and her voice sounded like a wail, but her hands were gathered at her chest, as if awaiting good news. Her husband ripped open the corner of the yellow envelope. He peered inside.
“What is it?”
He let her take it out. It was a rolled-up piece of paper, in the form of a tube. With a fingernail, she unpicked the piece of tape that kept it together. An explosion of color appeared in her hands when the paper unrolled, when the sun lit the surface covered in little plastic beads. Red, yellow, green, pink, blue. They spelled out one word:
MOMMY
As she read it, she fell to her knees, gripping the mailbox post. Her husband knelt beside her, grass and wet earth sticking to his suit pants. It was he who turned the piece of paper over.
The twins made this picture, using beads to color in the letters that I drew for them. I love having them as sisters. They are fine, they like doing everything together. They even say things at the same time. They are very happy.
—Melissa.
The woman held the picture to her face as if she could see her daughters reflected in the beads with which they’d decorated the word she’d never heard them say.
“Mom?” the boy asked from the front door. “What is it?”
She looked at her son with a smile. She let her husband hold her. They both collapsed onto the grass, not caring that it was wet. They laughed in a way they hadn’t laughed for six years. They kissed each other as if they thought they would never kiss each other again. The boy joined in the celebration, leaping on top of them in an imitation of his favorite football team. They were still there on the ground when the school bus arrived.
TEXAS
The mailman’s knuckles repeated the sequence of knocks that informed the recipient that today’s delivery didn’t fit through the slot in the door. She waited a few minutes before answering. She preferred not to have to say hello to him, or to listen to his remarks on how sad it was to see the garden so dry, when before what happened it had been filled with flowers each spring. The parcel toppled inward when she opened the door. She picked it up without looking at the barren soil in front of the house, forcing herself not to remember the happy times when she had tended that garden, imagining how her daughter would chase the butterflies that fluttered among the flowers.
She returned to the living room testing the weight of the parcel, trying to guess what it contained. Deliveries without a sender or exact address tended to be from people who’d read about her in the newspapers, who’d noted down her name and the town and had felt the need to write to her. They were messages of encouragement that really did help, but they had arrived mostly in the first few years. It had been a while since anyone had sent her something.
She sat in the armchair next to the side table, where she’d left her second cup of tea of the morning. With the parcel on her knees, she took a sip—it was still hot enough that the steam moistened her eyelashes. She pinched a corner of the envelope to open it without it breaking, as her mother had taught her to do. When she lifted up the flap, she saw the top edge of a book.
She frowned as she took it out.
She rested it on her legs.
From the side table, she took some reading glasses. Her sight had waned noticeably in the past few years. She always said that her eyes had been ruined by so much crying. She put them on, and read the cover.
“Pride and Prejudice.”
As she did with any book, she held the edge to her nose and breathed in the smell of the paper. Among the smells of ink and dust, she discovered another scent. A sweet note that, without her understanding why, filled her broken eyes with tears. For years, it had been something that could happen at any moment.
This book smells of your daughter. She has spent hours with it. She loves reading and can do it all day long. She especially likes romantic stories. Sometimes it is as if she is in the clouds, but she is a very smart girl. She is sixteen, she is a wonderful sister and she has been happy all this time. Very happy.
—Melissa.
The woman closed the book before the tears that fell on the paper could blot the ink. She smelled the pages with a deep sigh that filled her lungs in a way they hadn’t filled in sixteen years, since she’d smelled her baby’s little head the last time she held her in her arms. With her eyes closed, she breathed in the aroma imbuing its pages. When she opened them, she examined the corner of the envelope, trying to decipher, in the blurry ink of the stamp, the name of the city from which the parcel had been sent. Through the window, she saw a butterfly fluttering in the garden.
COLORADO
On the letter that reached the post office, only a name appeared, with no address other than the town and state, but everyone in that town knew the intended recipient. The mailman who took it to her mailbox was the same one who’d covered the street for twenty years, since before the disappearance. When she heard the postman arrive, she interrupted the letter she was writing and went out to receive him. She sat on the porch swing with the envelope, in the shade of the elm trees that flanked the front of the house and cloaked in the scent that the sun-warmed roses gave off. From the cushion, she plucked one of the white hairs that now populated her blonde head, much whiter than befitted her age. Her hair had also begun to fall out. Before opening the envelope, she touched the unfamiliar childlike handwriting in which her name was penned.
From inside the envelope she took out two pieces of thick paper, which she identified as belonging to a sketchbook. She narrowed her eyes when, on the first page, she discovered a portrait of herself, in pencil. Unable to imagine who could have sent it, she wondered whether it had been some friend from the past, someone secretly in love with her who years later had drawn her from memory, as he remembered her from when she was young. Then she looked at the second page. A portrait of her son, so handsome, sleeping on an unfamiliar bed.
“Rick,” she whispered, her hand on her chest, “I was writing to you. Where are you?”
Hearing her own voice, an impossible idea flickered in her mind. She looked at the woman in the first drawing again. Hypnotized by the face rendered in pencil, she went back in time with each blink of her eyes until she recognized in the portrait the little face of the baby she’d kissed every morning, the one in the single photograph she had of her daughter.
“Elizabeth?”
It had been a long time since she’d said the name aloud.
“Eli—”
The rest of the syllables were swallowed by her tears. All at once the whole world tasted to her of salt. She examined the two portraits, searching for a signature. She turned over the one of Rick. She turned over the one of Elizabeth. She dried her eyes to read the text written in the same handwriting that was on the envelope.
Rick found his sister. Now they are resting together in the most beautiful landscape that exists. She had a happy life in a family that loved her a lot, she was the best sister I could have had. I miss her every day and think of her whenever I hear a guitar. She had a beautiful voice and always smelled like honey. Rick told me she looked just like her mother, like you. I hope you can see this in my drawing. I’m sorry for what happened, I wish I could do something to change it. I hope we can meet one day, I would love to tell you more things about her.
—Melissa.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © E. P. V. Rubaudonadeu
Paul Pen is a Kindle top-three bestselling author, as well as a journalist and scriptwriter. His novel The Light of the Fireflies has sold more than one hundred thousand copies worldwide, and an American film adaptation is under way. Following the Spanish digital publication of Trece historias (Thirteen Stories), a powerful collection of short tales, Pen returned with another international release in 2017, Desert Flowers, bringing his unmistakable brand of literary suspense to readers around the globe. For more information, please visit www.paulpen.com.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2017 Colin Crewdson
Simon Bruni is a translator of fiction and nonfiction from Spanish, a language he acquired through “total immersion” living in Alicante, Valencia, and Santander. He studied Spanish and linguistics at Queen Mary University of London and literary translation at the University of Exeter.
His literary translations include novels, short stories, and video games, while his nonfiction portfolio spans fields as diverse as journalism, social geography, early modern witchcraft, food security, and military history.
He has won two third-place prizes in the John Dryden Translation Competition: in 2015 for his translation of Paul Pen’s harrowing short story “The Porcelain Boy,” and in 2011 for Francisco Pérez Gandul’s slang-driven novel Cell 211. His translation of Paul Pen’s novel The Light of the Fireflies has sold more than a hundred thousand copies worldwide.
Simon serves on the executive committee of the Society of Authors’ Translators Association (TA) and is a member of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). For more information, please visit www.simonbruni.com.
