Chapter 20
As the days passed, the landscape grew more and more arid, covered with dust. The earth cracked and turned gray.
Each day, the dusk gilded everything: the dirty streets and emaciated dogs, the littered riverbed on the cusp of running dry.
At dusk, the townspeople poured into the streets.
Parents carrying children; men pursuing love; girls with linked arms; musicians toting their instruments without cases, their mariachi suits straining, their buttons iridescent.
Bella, meanwhile, still hadn’t laid her first egg.
“It’s because she needs more protein,” Louise said one afternoon, and we dutifully fanned into the empty building site to hunt for bugs.
I can still see Henry and Ida darting among the chalk-white, half-built structures.
Their bleached hair, their darkly tanned faces.
Ida trying to catch a butterfly. Henry squatting, intent; then, with a triumphant cry, lifting his cupped hands, in which he’d trapped a cricket.
He cried when Louise killed it, refusing to watch. Ida watched. As always, she was an eager student, keen to understand the world as it actually is, in all its cruelty, her intelligent face very still.
“Now we’ll be able to drink an egg right from the shell,” Henry said to console himself.
“But doesn’t she need a rooster?” Ida asked.
“No.” Louise laughed. “That’s the beauty of it.”
Whereupon Ida laughed, too. She adored Louise and listened to her the way a dog listens to its master, cocking its head this way and that, happy.
She was struggling at school, at war with the other girls in her class.
She’d recently renewed her demand to cut her hair short.
She had begun to express dislike of the school uniform that she’d at first been excited to wear, scowling into the mirror as María braided her shoulder-length blond hair before school.
Around this time, she bought a chintzy crucifix at a stall outside the town’s most famous church that she declared beautiful and wore on a piece of ribbon around her neck, imploring me to take several pictures of her wearing it over her school sweater, standing on our terrace against the white wall of our house.
I’d never seen her take so much overt pleasure in her appearance.
And yet there was a strange intentionality, an inscrutable solemnity, as if she’d been cast as the Catholic schoolgirl in the play of her own life.
Of course the same might have been said for me, playing a rich housewife, a writer, Louise’s Mia.
One morning when I was working on a story I’d begun—I still had no idea what it was about—the school secretary called to say that Ida had a headache and was refusing to return to class.
When I arrived, the woman drew me aside and explained with a smile, as though reciting some accepted fact of life, “The other girls are teasing her.”
Ida said nothing during the ride home. She stared out the window in the back seat, eyes welled with tears she would not let fall.
“I’m sorry about the girls in your class, sweetheart,” I said.
“Why?” she said sharply, as if my sympathy were an insult, catching my eye in the mirror with a look of challenge. “I like them. They’re my friends.”
What was I supposed to say? No, they aren’t?
Those were the times I was most grateful for Louise.
I would run to her the following morning, pleased to make coffee or sweep her floors or tidy her things, engaging in the domestic work that I no longer enacted in my own home, relieved to feel that particular happiness of a straightforward job done well.
Sometimes I would see men working in the building site across the way as I arrived.
Every so often, I saw Tom there, a head taller than everyone around him, his sandy hair bleached almost white, come to monitor their progress.
I had gotten into the habit of parking my car around the corner, out of sight.
I watched him through Louise’s window as though regarding a statue of a handsome stranger.