can see why she left,” I remarked. I tried to catch Faith’s eye, but she was still winded from the climb and didn’t notice. She looked almost grey in this light. Mom just shrugged.
The landlady and landlord were at their front door as we climbed back down the ladder. Both were of a stocky build but dressed for a younger, slimmer age. He wore an open-necked shirt and jeans, she a long white T-shirt over black leggings. The woman came over first, smiled, and shook our hands. Mom pulled her aside as her husband stepped up to greet Faith and me. “¡Qué linda familia! ¡Qué placer infinito es encontrarles a las hijas de nuestra gran amiga! Soy Miguel.” I smiled in spite of myself. Somehow, after seeing the spartan maid’s room, I’d expected the owners to be stern-looking, penny-pinching. Instead, Miguel’s effusiveness, the kind where nothing is just fine, but everything is beautiful, every pleasure infinite, reminded me sharply of Papi. As did his courtly gesture as he opened the door for us and ushered us into his house. I remembered Papi’s bewilderment back home when such an act of courtliness on his part was interpreted as chauvinistic. I had returned to another generation as well as another land. It made me see Papi in a new light. How stifling it must have been to always have to tone down his effusiveness, his chivalry, his lifestyle, his tastes.
Mom and the landlady, Graciela, had finished whispering. Graciela nodded and looked at us, “Of course, come in, come in.” We soon discovered that Mom had asked if we could visit the altar Graciela and Miguel had set up for the Day of the Dead.
The irony didn’t escape me: our father, the non-Canadian, had been the one intent on showing us the real Canada during our cross-country trips, now it seemed it was our mother, the non-Mexican, who was bent on showing us the real Mexico. In this case, the real Mexico’s fascination with death. Papi quoted Octavio Paz to me once, and I remembered it still because, at the time, it seemed such a strange thing for a father to say: “by refusing to contemplate death, we cut ourselves off from life.” Now I wondered if there was a country somewhere in the world that contemplated people disappearing instead of dying and built altars in their name.
The first thing I noticed was the full baby bottle and soother nestled in between sugar skulls and skeleton figures surrounded by flickering candles and burning copal incense on the top tier of three what looked like orange crates covered in purple crepe paper. My sandals slid, then caught, on ashes and marigold petals scattered at my feet.
“Careful,” said Graciela. “The ashes are to show up his footprints when he comes.” She took a framed picture of a little boy, a toddler, from the place of honour on the altar and held it out to us. “He was our son,” she said.
Faith’s stomach chose that moment to rebel. She mumbled something about the incense and motioned for me to help her beat a quick retreat to Mom’s home.
Once back in the apartment, Faith headed straight for the bathroom. Mom, who had followed us out, headed for the juicer — “I should have offered you something to drink to begin with. You must be dying of thirst” — and reached for three glasses as she explained that the oranges came from the tree poolside, and that there were bananas too and mangoes, such a luxury to have a private source of fruit outside the front door. I grabbed a glass just as it was about to fall, motioned for Mom to concentrate on the juice, and took down the last two glasses from the open shelf. Her voice blended with the whirring of juicer blades. I scooped emptied orange shells from the sink, dropped them into the garbage can, and let her words wash over me in waves of sound, remembering how I only learned what silence was after Mom left Montreal. Where had Papi’s voice fit in, an occasional swell or the tide washing out?
Faith came back finally and dropped into a chair. Mom kept talking with only the briefest glance in her direction. “There you are, Faith, I was just telling Hope about all the fruit we have growing right in the garden here, but even homegrown you can’t be too careful, it all has to be washed in purified water and soap, scrubbed with a brush, or else diarrhea strikes. Remember how you always used to call it ‘dire rear,’ Hope? Or was it you, Faith? Oh well, it doesn’t really matter, does it? We got a lot of laughs out of that. Speaking of the Aztec two-step — that’s what they call it here — you don’t look too well, Faith, a little peaked? Nothing wrong I hope, you always have had the stronger constitution, not like Hope what with her heart murmur...”
I broke in, “Innocent, Mom, an innocent heart murmur.” The words brought back the anxious wait nine years ago in the cardiologist’s, Mom holding my hand. A murmur no doctor had mentioned before. Maybe it had been shocked into existence. In any case, the cardiologist pronounced it innocent, but it was a verdict Mom never believed.
It was as though I hadn’t said a word.
“Now it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see you get sick, Hope, your defences must be so weakened from all those paints, the turpentine, the charcoal dust you work with all the time, you really should be careful. You must install a fan in your studio, I’m sure no one has thought to do that for you and you know how harmful toxic fumes can be and who knows about the added risk just from breathing the air in Mexico City, really I wish you’d asked them to send you here instead...”
Faith broke in before the next wave could gather any strength. “No, there’s nothing wrong, Mother.” It didn’t look like Mom caught the sarcasm. I certainly did. “Other than the fact that I’m pregnant, that is.”
Mom and the blender stopped together. A neighbour’s rooster crowed outside. And I was the one who was broad-sided.
Mom’s exclamations, her questions, were only so much background to my whirling thoughts. I went back for the bottle of Tequila I’d noticed on the top shelf and added a shot to my orange juice. I could see the coming months so clearly. Marc, who had always been there for my sister, would of course drop everything and rush to her side. She would have the family I had not, the family I had hoped to rediscover by embarking on the search to find Papi. And I would have José or another man and our tentative attempts at closeness until sex was not enough and he dumped me or I dumped him. Did I want to do it all over again?
Growing up, every single friend I ever had liked Faith best. Quite the testament to friendship if you asked me. The power of those two extra years she had on us spurred my friends to look for inclusion into her world. As if Faith needed them. Did she ever suck her thumb for company or drag an old blanket around until nothing was left but a pocket-sized shred? No. Because she had no need for things or people.
First at everything, me last. Not that I wanted a baby, not now. But still. It made me sick. I added another shot. Not that anyone was going to give a damn if I threw up.
“I’m going to do this myself,” Faith was saying. What had I missed?
Mom didn’t like that. “Oh, Faith. I think it’s a big mistake to set out to do it all yourself. The kind of mistake I made with your father.”
“What do you mean?”
Mom ignored the question, clammed up.
Which was a relief.
VI
The search for Papi, the visit with Mom, everything seemed to have been cut short by Faith’s announcement. Even the trip Mom had so been looking forward to.
All three of us did leave together on the bus to Xihuatanejo — the land of women, Faith informed us, her Nahuatl lessons already starting to bear fruit — as planned, although Mom didn’t hesitate to voice her qualms given Faith’s impending motherhood. The beach house that belonged to friends of hers was liveable, however, even if only just, but it soon became obvious Faith would not be able to stay there
