The Aguero Sisters (32 page)

Here by the river, Reina thinks, she has no name. And there is only this persistent, velvety fear.

The water is remarkably clean. Reina lowers the bucket into the river with a long loop of rope. Then she unknots the white cloth from Constancia's head, and they kneel together by the river's edge.

“We travel in the family,” Constancia says.

“We travel in the family,” Reina echoes, as the santero directed them. Then she swings the bucket in an arc through the air and pours the languid river over both their heads.

It is four in the morning
by the time Reina and Constancia set out in Heberto's motorboat from Key Biscayne. Their first stop is Key West. Constancia plans to charter a fishing boat there that will take her to Cuba.

A storm of pelicans is driving fish into shallow waters, the better to catch their prey. The birds drift and turn in tightening circles, drop to the water like fired shots. To the west, the city is a smoky exhalation of yellow, the air still turbulent from the hurricane that nearly came ashore last week.

Reina maneuvers the boat along the coast. The chronic churning of the engine is oddly bolstering to her, like a radio played for company after a lover's uncertain departure. The wind shifts this way and that, turning the sleeping sea. The exhaust from the motorboat's engine trails the sisters like a billowy spirit.

Reina is still annoyed with her sister for painting Heberto's motorboat in a garishly floral motif to promote her new perfume: Flower of Exile. Its name is immodestly trumpeted on either side of the little boat; in English on the left, and in Spanish—
Flor del Destierro
—on the right. Constancia even imbued her fragrance with a citrusy scent so that it would match the José Martí poem:

Reina feels ridiculous in this gliding advertisement for her sister. She protested the paint job
and
the historical
appropriation, but Constancia remained nonplussed. “A little extra publicity can't hurt,” she retorted. Reina considered repainting the boat to its former blood-orange glory, but Constancia would only accuse her of undermining her business plans.

Despite her misgivings, Constancia agreed to follow the santero's instructions and have her sister come along on the initial leg of her journey. Reina donated one of her regulation jumpsuits so that Constancia could travel incognito in Cuba, borrowed a top-of-the-line wet suit from a diver she knew, even assisted in preparing and packing the cargo Oscar Piñango specified: one large fresh shrimp-and-watercress omelet, to appease Oshún; five six-packs of orange soda; a silk Spanish fan with a copper handle, which had to remain in constant motion until they reached Key West.

On the first morning of their voyage, the santero also advised, Constancia must swim naked in the ocean for an hour, straight into the horizon. She must empty her mind as she swims, imagine herself unnamed as the sea around her, organic and anonymous. Only her arms and legs must twitch with exertion, consume the present like a fugitive. The sun, Piñango warned, might burn Constancia's skin, lift blisters on her back. But still she must swim, fixed on the distance before her.

The boat is less than a mile from the Florida coast, but to Reina it seems to have no relation whatsoever to land. The current is strong beneath them, presses them darkly through the waves. Underneath her life jacket, Constancia's white dressing gown clings to her thinly pleated ribs. Even through the padding, Reina can see that her sister's back is soft and curved as an invertebrate's.

“What do you think we're supposed to remember?” The wind nearly swallows Constancia's words.

Reina notices the tiny cleft of their mother's dispirited chin, the familiar ravaged expression. How drawn she is to it, how tempted by its promised tenderness. How easy it is to believe that their mother might still exist.

“We're supposed to remember what happened,” she says irritably. It occurs to Reina that even the worst of lies, if sustained, devolve into hard, bright facts.

At the prow of the motorboat, Constancia wanly flutters the Spanish fan. The wind lifts her hair until it looks like a quivering nimbus about her head. She senses an absence in the breeze, the metallic taste of an old emptiness.

She recalls her father's face when he first told her about Mamá, his forgone eyes. Then, a year later, he confessed how she'd really died. Constancia knew for certain then that she couldn't save Papi, wonders now whether she can save herself.

“Could you ever kill yourself?” Constancia asks loudly, cutting through a swell of wind.

Reina pops open a can of orange soda, floods her mouth with its acidic sweetness. Even the most humdrum of days had a hint of a surprise, of possibility. Reina would miss that if she died. “I'd probably sooner kill someone else than myself.”

“Have you ever …?” Constancia wants to know what her sister is capable of, where her empathies lie.

“What?” Reina is distracted by a school of flying fish, by the unrestrained optimism of their leaping. She wonders if all their jumping serves any biological function.

“Killed someone. Have you ever killed someone?” Constancia insists.

“
Casi, casi
,” Reina recounts how she nearly murdered the mayor of San Germán once, a hirsute fellow with a mouthful of baby teeth. It was 1964. Reina didn't consider
herself severe by nature, but she never said no unless she really meant it. The mayor was exceedingly lucky that she only broke his nose.

The boat pitches to the left, disrupting the ocean's tread. Constancia notices that the strip of Dulcita's skin on Reina's forearm has dulled to the color of butter. There is light enough from the half-moon to catch a flash of her own reflection. Nothing in focus, just a vague ocean promise of her presence.

Constancia leans over the side of the boat, seeking a better view of herself. She yearns for her own face, for the precise pink hue of her skin. What separates her from her mother's resemblance? What ultimately divides their blood? And to whom does she owe allegiance? All these years, Constancia thought it was to her father. She's no longer so certain.

“Animals are blind to sin,” Reina says. “Mami told me that once.” It was the thick of spring, and she and her mother were in the Havana woods, watching a pair of crinkly lizards mate. The male turned from green to deep purple before scurrying off into the leaves. Why is it that people rarely perceive the underlying violence of nature? Its quiet, sensational dramas? Since when, Reina thinks, has there ever been a trusting species?

“Mamá didn't drown,” Constancia says flatly, bouncing hard as the boat slaps against the roughening waters.

“
¡Claro que no!
” Reina snaps. “I told you what I saw in the funeral home! You never believed me!” Reina remembers that morning, the bloody disorder of Mami's throat. Worst of all, their father offered no apology, no repentance, only his sorry, self-indulgent end. That was the darker crime. To pay his debt of flesh, and nothing more.

“Mamá shot herself. Papi told me not to tell you, Reina, that it would only make things worse.” Constancia lurches
backward in the tossing boat. She twists her wrist, clinging to the Spanish fan, suddenly raises her voice. “She used her own gun. She held it to her throat.”

The outboard motor catches fire without warning. Smoke belches heavenward, voluminous and black. The sight inexplicably appeases Reina. Then the wind dismisses the scarring smoke. The motor dies with a last sputter. The little boat is covered with soot. It creaks and complains in the rocking vastness.

Reina calmly lifts an oar from the hull of the boat, holds it perpendicular to her neck. With both arms outstretched, she strains for the blade of the oar, tries to aim it at her own brown throat. “Mami couldn't have done it. She couldn't have reached the trigger.”

Reina nestles the narrow end of the oar into her right shoulder. Points the blade straight at Constancia. Around them, the waves spangle like autumn foliage. Reina approaches her sister slowly, refines her sight to the center of Constancia's throat. Her sister's eyes are green and wary. Their mother's eyes.

“You think the dead just lie still, Constancia?
Coño
, just look at yourself.”

Constancia is motionless, studies the convex edge of the oar. She'd welcome its relief, the blackmail of total peace. Then she looks up at Reina and sees something she's never noticed before. A dark mistake in the set of her face.

“Papá killed her.” Reina fixes the oar on her sister, doesn't shift it an inch. “He shot, her like one of his birds, and then he watched her die. Mami fell into the swamp, and he watched her die.”

Constancia senses a quick alertness in her flesh. She lunges forward, sick and trembling with her father's claims. She falls, tears her dressing gown. Tries to stand again. Loses her balance. Fights to wrest away the menacing
oar. Then she blindly claws at Reina's arms, leaves streaks of blood down her sister's mismatched skin.

Reina breaks the oar in two with her foot and discards the splintering halves. With one hand, she lifts her sister by the throat. To choke out the final lies. Papá's lies. Constancia's willful, stone-blind lies. Reina is sweating profusely, rivers of salt laving her face and back. A wild blood storms up from her heart. She smells the wet earth, Mami's freshly dug grave.

The sight of her sister's pale breast stops Reina cold. She loosens her grip on Constancia, drops her to the deck.

Constancia scrambles to retrieve the broken oar. She lifts the paddle end and, with all the force she can muster, brings it crashing against her sister's head. Reina falls into the ocean. Tumbles underwater for an immortal moment. Constancia tries to calculate how long it would take for her sister's body to disintegrate. To become one with the enveloping blue.

A moment later, Reina resurfaces among the silvering waves. She is shaking hard. Her head is forced back, her temple split and bleeding from the impact of the oar. The constellations seem jumbled and overburdened above, as if tired of the same senseless repetitions.

“It's all a mock history,” Reina whispers. The wind oddly amplifies her words, transports a gust of her harsh scent.

Constancia grabs the silk Spanish fan. Urgently flutters it in the air, trying to dispel the smell. She fights the urge to push Reina's head underwater again. To shatter her sister's skull with the oar and call it home.

“I needed to believe him!” Constancia plants one foot on the rim of the boat. She wants a megaphone. No. Some rumbling thunder to back her up. “
¿Me oyes?
”

Above her, the sky rotates forward a degree. The half-moon presses down, robust and stained blue.

Reina is drifting away from the boat. In a few weeks, she remembers, the sun will cross the equator, and day and night everywhere will be of equal length. Then a buzzing begins inside her head, as if minute stars were vibrating in place. There's a pressure in her lungs too, like milk or mercury.

A slow warmth encircles Reina, laps at her thighs, her hips, the soft swell of her stomach. She closes her eyes. “
Así. Así mismo
.” Her mouth opens and shuts of its own accord, gradually fills with sea water, with anxious moonlight.

Knowledge is a kind of mirage, Constancia decides, watching her sister drown. What could the truth subdue now that regret already hasn't?

The horizon is crimson with sunrise. Constancia drops the fan, sinks the blade of the broken oar into the ocean, paddles hard toward her sister. She hooks Reina by the collar of her sodden jacket and, with more unexpected strength, drags her back aboard. Constancia bends over, seals her sister's mouth with an open kiss. Forces in breath until Reina's chest rises and falls of its own accord.

Constancia leans back and reaches into their hamper of food. She serves her sister a hunk of the shrimp-and-watercress omelet. Then she cuts a piece for herself. It tastes good cold, she thinks, like something just fished from the sea.

T
he squall is condensing
in the southern sky, querulous with an almond moon and a million stars. Constancia senses the ferment of every dying thing, the liturgy of the vast green salt. There is lightning in the distance, a radiation of clouds. The air scrawls its moist messages on her breath. Constancia touches her uncle's letter in her sweater pocket. Its damp presence reassures her.

After Reina dropped her off in Key West, Constancia hired another fishing boat and a geomancer captain she met at the Blue Cockatoo Bar. “I could've been a water diviner,” he said, his only joke, before lapsing taciturn. Constancia is grateful for his silence at the helm. The journey to Cuba is long, and there's so much else to listen for.

Heberto is dead. Constancia heard this yesterday on Radio Así. She's not surprised, although the odds against his dying within a week of Gonzalo must be high. She consoles
herself with the knowledge that matter never expires, only takes unforeseen new disguises. Heberto, Constancia expects, soon will send her a sign.

The storm gets closer, unleashing a warm-colored rain. The horizon is a confusion of light and fog. Constancia feels a dry gnawing at her center. She's eaten very little in the past two days, since she and her sister uneasily took leave of one another at the Mallory Wharf. Each time Constancia thinks of that night, of Reina collapsed to mere flesh in the ocean, it takes away her appetite.

But suddenly Constancia's hunger is enormous, like a beast's crude need for a mate. There are ham sandwiches in the cooler and a six-pack of Mexican beer. Constancia unscrews the cap of a gold-labeled bottle, puts it to her lips, tilts back her head. Then she eats four of the sandwiches in quick succession and a bunch of overripe grapes. She'll need all her strength, she decides, for the landing ahead.