Читать книгу The Santiago Sisters - Victoria Fox - Страница 11

Argentina

In the autumn, without explanation, Señorita Gonzalez was fired. Diego appeared to make the decision overnight, and Calida didn’t dare question it—except to her sister.

‘What happened?’ she whispered.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think he found out what she was really like?’

‘Maybe. Who cares? She’s gone now.’

Teresita was flicking through one of their mama’s romance novels. Calida frowned: she could read her twin just as easily as the words on the page.

‘You know something,’ she said. ‘About Gonzalez—I can tell.’

‘No, you can’t. You don’t know everything about me.’

‘I know you can’t actually like those books. Come on, A Prince’s Affair?’

Teresita bristled. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ she countered.

Calida could list the reasons from the covers alone—plastic men in open shirts with chests like dolls, smooth and hairless, and bright white teeth; how Julia swooned over their aeroplanes and chunky watches and forgot about the life that was right here in front of her. Calida thought the books looked like nonsense, but she didn’t say so, because she didn’t want to prove her twin right. They did know everything about each other—and in that case Calida didn’t need to explain what she disliked, nor Teresita what she enjoyed, so it seemed safer to walk away, and to try not to think about what Teresita was keeping from her, and why she hid it so deep, out of sight.

A month later, the girls were watching television in the barn when the phone rang.

Calida went through to the house. She lifted the receiver.

‘Hello?’

The voice on the line sounded far away. It was a woman.

‘Es la policía,’ it said. ‘My name is Officer Puerta and I need to speak with Julia, wife of Diego Santiago. Is that her?’

They manoeuvered Julia into the back of the Landrover with difficulty: she hadn’t taken the car out in years and professed to have forgotten how—and besides, how could she operate a vehicle at a time like this? She was a wife in crisis.

‘My husband,’ she kept gasping. ‘What’s happened to my husband?’

‘We have to get to him, Mama,’ said Calida. She was terrified but she couldn’t show it. She had to stay strong. She helped her sister into the passenger seat and held her hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ she told her firmly. ‘It will be all right.’ Teresita gazed back at her with a stoic expression, and it was an expression Calida couldn’t decipher. She couldn’t find a way into it. It closed on her as firmly as the car door.

Calida had driven on the shrubland before, but never on the roads and never without Diego. She crunched the gears as they rocked and bucked down the pot-holed drive, and she tried to remember what her papa had taught her about checking her mirrors and coordinating her feet. It helped to hear his voice, guiding her.

Please be OK, Papa. Please, please be OK.

Eventually, they met the highway. Vehicles rushed past at speed. When a gap opened in the traffic she set the Landrover in motion and immediately stalled, trapping them across the oncoming lane. ‘Move!’ screamed Julia from the back.

Calida floored the gas and the car lurched forward. Car horns screeched. The wheel spun in her fingers and she grappled for control, finally setting them straight.

She followed the police officer’s directions. Everything was alien, sinister. Thoughts whirled as she turned south to the waterfront. Mauve clouds streaked the sky over the town lake. Calida could see the pulsing red beams from the police vehicles and the lump in her throat swelled.

You’re going to be OK. You have to be OK.

In her heart, though, she knew.

All her life her father had been a rock, as solid and constant as the mountains of home—but lately, he hadn’t been right. Since Gonzalez had left, Diego had become unpredictable, suspicious, checking up on the girls, calling them trouble, shouting at them for the tiniest thing. What had happened? What had changed? Once, he would never have left them at night while he went to town. Now, it happened more often than not. She had listened at the door while her mama spoke to Officer Puerta, watching Julia’s knuckles grow paler by the second. There had been an accident.

They reached the blockade: a ribbon of tape, police talking grimly into their radios, and, beyond that, into the dark, dense fog of the night, a shape she couldn’t make out and didn’t want to see. Calida brought the car to a stop. They opened the doors and climbed out. Calida attempted to be close to her sister but her sister didn’t want to be close. Instead, Teresita wrapped her arms round herself and turned away. Calida swallowed a lump of sadness. I need you, she thought. Don’t you need me?

A woman saw their approach and crossed the tape.

‘Come with me,’ she told Julia. ‘The girls stay here.’

Teresita was watching the police lights. ‘What’s happened to Papa?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is he dead?’

The question stalled Calida. She knew the word that wanted to form on her tongue, the natural, logical word, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

Calida would reflect on that moment and the tormented days that followed as frozen segments in time, as still and silent as the images on her camera. Diego pinned against the tree, the brief, ruthless frame of his body before he’d been covered; Julia with a handkerchief to her face, crying for him or for herself; Teresita refusing to weep, even once, and refusing her sister’s sympathy and shutting herself away.

It transpired that Diego had been drinking. Not just that night but every night before. Calida didn’t understand why. Her papa was a responsible man—not a drunk who got smashed in a bar and walked out into the middle of the road in front of a truck and got hit so hard his lungs collapsed and his heart stopped beating.

Diego had been her compass, her anchor and her ally. Now, he was gone.

Calida mourned him quietly and alone. Her mama’s door remained closed.

‘Are you awake?’ she whispered into the dark.

Weeks later, in bed, listening to her twin’s sleeping breath, Teresa shivered. She thought of her papa picking her up when she was five and swinging her over his shoulder, tickling her until she screamed with laughter. Tears sprang to her eyes.

You killed him. You have to live with that for the rest of your life.

Guilt and confusion hounded her every minute.

Papa died because of me.

Teresa had pushed him to it. In telling her father what she knew, she had set the wheels in motion. She had watched his face fall, heard his pleas not to tell her twin, delighted when he’d dismissed Gonzalez. She’d enjoyed that he spent more time in the bars, away from the farm and away from Calida. She hadn’t considered that his shame had turned him into an addict, or that he would wind up killing himself.

How was she to know that?

‘Are you awake?’ She tried again.

Silence came back at her. Perhaps, if it hadn’t, she would have told Calida the truth. Her sister would have kissed her and told her she wasn’t to blame—it would all be OK; they would get through it together. But there the silence was, cold and accusing. Teresa sat and climbed down the ladder, her feet meeting the floor, pale toes against dark wood. Her nightdress was thin and her legs were bare. She crept into Calida’s bunk and lay down next to her, felt the heat of her sister’s body, and put an arm round her slumbering shape, using the other to pull the blanket up to her chin.

Calida moaned as a freezing ankle touched hers.

A yawn, a sigh, then nothing. Sleep.

Teresa longed for the same oblivion. She snuggled into her twin’s back and held hard, thinking if she held hard enough they could be close again, like they had been when they were little. Everything seemed so complicated these days. It wasn’t simple, like it used to be, when all that mattered was each other. She had kept her father’s secret because she’d been scared—and then because she had wanted to shelter Calida in the way Calida had always sheltered her; she hadn’t wanted her sister to lose faith, like she had, in the only man in their life. But the more time passed, the deeper this wedge drove—a point of divergence on the cusp of adolescence. Teresa inhaled her sister’s skin, a scent she would never lose because it lingered on her own body, and wished she were more like Calida. She had thought she was doing the right thing in getting rid of Gonzalez—but since when had she been any good at that? Calida was the one who did the right thing, who fixed, mended, and made better.

Since Diego’s death, Calida had set to with grit and purpose while Teresa hung back, thinking, I’m twelve. I don’t want this to be my life.

Every time she looked at Calida, she saw her own failings—at having robbed them of their papa, at not wanting to stay and toil, at wishing she could be far away from their home—and the reasons why Calida would always be the better twin.

At last, she withdrew from the covers and left the safety of her sister’s side. For a moment she stood alone in the gloom, the boards scratchy beneath her feet. Through the window, the gate at the foot of the track seemed alive, pulsing in the moonlight, lit up like a pearl. She returned to her own bed, her heart thundering.

I’ll get away from here one day. I’ll make Mama proud. I’ll be rich and successful and all the things she wants me to be. Then I’ll have done something right.

Comforted by this, Teresa reached for Fortune’s Lover and read it beneath the blankets for a while, until her arm started to ache from holding the torch.

When at last she surrendered to sleep, the story grasped for her unconscious and, in her dreams, she walked through the farm gate and kept on walking.

She dreamed of billionaires and red carpets, of palaces and yachts, of sparkling blue swimming pools and satin purses stuffed with notes.

She dreamed of the elusive heroes of her mother’s novels, their shirts crisp and parted at the collar. So unlike any of the men she had encountered, these men were of a different breed, exotic and treacherous and holding out for her.