The Santiago Sisters (11 page)

‘Madame’s going to kill me,’ she despaired as she climbed back into the car.

Alex thought about it. ‘I have an idea.’

Moments later they stopped outside the Café Convivial,
round the corner from Madame’s. Alex forced her to drink three espressos in a row and go to the bathroom so she could splash her face with cold water. When she emerged, she felt better.

‘You know you never told me your name,’ he said, when she sat down.

‘It’s complicated.’

‘How can it be complicated? It’s only a name.’

‘It just is.’

‘Parents divorced?’

‘No. My parents are dead.’

Alex stalled. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise—’

‘It’s OK. My name’s Tess.’

‘You look like a pirate.’

‘You say weird things.’

They sat in silence. Alex watched her. ‘So who kidnapped you?’

Tess scratched her nail around a check on the red and white cloth. She looked up into Alex’s green eyes and couldn’t decide if he was laughing at her or inviting her to laugh with him. She didn’t know why, but she told him; something in her craved to tell a stranger so she could try the story on for size, see how it sounded out loud, all at once. She told Alex Dalton everything, from the beginning, through Simone’s first visit to her being taken away, from London to Paris, from news they had sold her for cash to news of the robbery and the obliteration of her family and her home. She could talk about everything and keep her emotions in check but when she said Calida’s name she choked. She was tormented by every bad thought she’d had against her twin, every bad thing she’d said. It was no wonder she’d wanted to get rid of her.

I wish you’d just disappear …

With each revelation, Alex’s expression sank. His eyes lost their humour and his brow tightened. He didn’t interrupt; he listened.

‘I thought you were joking,’ he said quietly, when she’d finished.

‘About what?’

‘When you said you were kidnapped.’

‘I suppose I wasn’t kidnapped,’ she admitted. ‘I told myself that because I couldn’t face the facts. I couldn’t accept that they did this thing to me.’

A tear rolled out of Tess’s eye and plopped on to her skirt. ‘Why didn’t my sister want me?’ she whispered. ‘Why did she let me go? Now she’s gone and I …’

Alex took her hand. She thought how small hers looked, under his.

Alex wanted to say something meaningful, something that would help, but there were no words big enough. He kept his hand there, with his thumb stroking the back of hers.

‘Come on,’ he said eventually. ‘You’re tired.’

He walked her back to Madame’s. Outside, on the steps, she hoped he wouldn’t try to kiss her. But all he did was to touch his lips briefly to her cheek.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, rubbing her nose. ‘I’m a mess. You must see so many girls like me, in your job—you must be sick of sorting them out.’

‘There aren’t any girls like you,’ Alex said. ‘Good night, Pirate.’

Tess was through the door and straight into the glare of an anxiously waiting Hélène Comtois, before she realised he hadn’t asked for his jacket back.

Argentina

C
alida arrived at the coach station and bought the first ride out of there.

‘I’ve got one headed for Mendoza,’ said the woman at the counter, tapping on her keyboard. ‘Leaves at three. You’ll have to be quick.’

‘I’ll take it.’ Calida fumbled in her bag and pulled out a stash of loose change. She handed it over, coins spilling across the desk.

The woman counted it. ‘That isn’t enough,’ she said.

‘It isn’t?’

‘No. You’re two hundred short.’

Calida scrabbled in her bag for more, even though she knew that was all she had. ‘Do you have anything cheaper? I don’t mind where I’m going.’

The woman frowned, but checked the system again. ‘Not until tomorrow,’ she said. She folded her arms. ‘How come you’re so desperate to get away?’

‘I’m not desperate.’

‘You look it.’

Calida started scooping the coins back into the palm of her hand. The woman watched her, then covered the remainder and swept it into the kiosk.

‘Aca tienes.’
She peeled a ticket out of the machine. ‘Platform 9.’

Calida’s hand shook.
‘Gracias.’

‘Keep the rest. But do me a favour? Get something to eat.’

The journey was long. Calida’s eyes threatened to close but each time she jolted herself awake. Night fell over the road. Miles vanished as they sailed up the
Ruta Nacional,
the landscape changing from green to ochre and finally to black. They passed farms and lakes and forests, crossed bridges and wove between mountains, carved a line across open plains and rugged lowland. Calida had never been out of her region and the enormity of her country rolled away from her in all directions. The towns fascinated her, buildings filled with people and lives; dramas, hopes, and fears just like hers. She couldn’t decide if this was a comfort or not; there was a sense of entitlement over her anguish and she wasn’t sure yet if she wanted to share it.

They stopped to refuel. At the side of the road a young boy found her eyes through the window. His feet were bare and he was holding a bucket out for change. His T-shirt was ripped and his arms were thin and brown. Calida couldn’t see his parents, or that he was with anyone. She smiled and the boy stared back, uncertain.

They moved on. Sunset deepened. Melting gold seeped across a wide mauve sky. Shades of coral chased the fading blue and a heap of bloodshot clouds gathered on the horizon. Calida held her camera to it but the motion of the coach made it difficult to capture. A few people in the surrounding seats threw her curious glances and she wished she could take their pictures as well: the cracked-leather face of the old man
opposite or the smooth-browed child making her dollies kiss. It made the moment she was in real and concrete, permanent, rocks in a sea of relentless change.

She arrived in Mendoza just after nine. Her neck ached from the deep well of sleep she had toppled into as dawn was rising, unable to fight it any more. Dreams of Daniel hung on, intoxicating, the night she had spent lying next to him just one moon passed but at the same time impossibly far away, surreal, as if it had never happened.

By now he would be wondering where she was; maybe he’d even be worried. But sooner or later Daniel would forget about her. He would find a new girlfriend—maybe he already had one—and Calida’s face would quickly fade from memory. He would understand there had been no future for her on the farm, in spite of how much she had loved it. Her papa was lost. Her sister was lost. So was her mother. The last person she had clung on for, the final string of hope, had been lost to her all along.

‘Esta es la última parada.
’ A steward was holding an open litterbag and picking a wrapper from the adjacent seat. ‘This is the last stop. Are you getting off?’

Calida blinked from her daydream. She was the only one left on the coach.

‘
Sí. Gracias.
’

Grabbing her bag, she descended the steps and retrieved her suitcase from the luggage handler. She heaved it up the concourse and took a sweltering breath.

Mendoza was furiously hot. The coach station was packed with travellers, teenage groups with their arms slung round each other and clusters of excited backpackers, tired mothers
fanning themselves and families passing round food packets, the younger ones asleep on their parents’ laps. An old woman on a bench was sucking a
mate
straw and eyeing her beadily. Music played from a snack kiosk.

Calida went inside and washed her face. In the terminal, she joined the ranks of tourists checking the Departures board. Two magic words danced out at her:

BUENOS AIRES.

The elusive capital … There, anything was possible.

Calida checked her cash: enough for a sandwich and a drink but that was all. She had to turn her fortunes around. She had got this far only by chance, and from here on in had to forge her own luck. Resourcefulness had always been on her side—that same nature that Teresita had dismissed so cruelly. Teresita might have had the dreams, but Calida had the brains. All she had to do was come up with a plan.

Feeling light-headed, she found a stall and bought a packet of crackers and a bottle of water. She should save the rest of her money. Calida was no stranger to sleeping under the stars, and as she emerged on to the street and began her enquiries at every shop and bar in town, every booth and garage, asking after any opportunities for work, however sporadic and however thinly paid, and received only refusals, she prepared herself for sleeping rough over the next few weeks. Come late afternoon she was exhausted and found a park to collapse in, the grass, by now cooling, a welcome cushion for her weary bones. The park was emptying, day-trippers trickling out and the stone fountain dwindling to a stop. Calida laid her bag and coat beneath a tree.

That night she slept soundly, the day’s upheaval plummeting her into welcome oblivion. But the next day was the same, and the next, and the next.

Then, on the fourth night, something happened. Calida was on the cusp of sleep, starving after her funds had run dry, and, when she heard their voices through the onset of sleep, creeping closer, she thought they could be part of her dream.

The kick to her stomach put paid to that. It was sharp, sudden, an unbelievable shock. The boys began to beat her with unfettered enjoyment. She curled up in a ball with her arms wrapped round her head as they beset her back and legs, bruising her shoulders and slamming their heels and fists into every scrap of trembling body they could find. They took everything, her bag and her case, all but the clothes she wore. The only item they left was her camera. Before she passed out, Calida heard one of them say, ‘Piece of shit,’ before tossing it to the ground. Comatose, she grabbed the neck strap, held on to it like a lifeline, and watched them rush away into the dusk, laughing and hooting like dogs, while tears of pain and humiliation soaked her face. Later, she would feel satisfaction at imagining them opening their spoils and finding so little. A few pesos she had been saving—that was all. She hoped it was worth it.

Next morning she woke, every part of her aching. A kind face hovered.

‘Are you all right?
Díos mio,
you poor girl …’

Calida fell back into unconsciousness. The ground shook with approaching footsteps and a seam of new voices threaded around her, like a host of angels.

Her recovery unfolded on a vineyard outside town, owned by a man named Cristian Ramos. It was a pretty, hidden estate off a country lane, next to an ivy-covered church, and Cristian was a jovial, generous-hearted winemaker, who had been out
walking his dog at dawn when he had come across a bruised and battered eighteen-year-old whom at first he’d thought was dead. Cristian was a gentle, honest man, father to three young boys and husband to his wife of twenty years.

‘Stay here as long as you need,’ the couple told her, after listening to her story.

Calida protested, as much as her depleted state would allow, but they would hear none of it and said she could earn her keep by working on the vineyard. So she spent her days amid the vines, rows of pink-skinned grapes that panned as far as the eye could see towards the crust of the Andes, perspiring beneath the sun and picking until her fingers were stained. The grapes discoloured and roughened her hands, dark juice engraved her palms, while the riper fruits, ready to burst, left their skins beneath her nails. Now and then she startled at a noise that turned out to be a flap of wings or a stir in the plants, and tensed, the ghosts of her attackers always at her back.

Gradually, she made progress. Those scars that could heal healed. The others, the invisible ones, she kept to herself, and tried to avoid touching them.

Weeks turned into months and the season changed. Cristian hooked her up with a contact of his who owned a restaurant in town. Calida started waiting tables there during the evenings and slowly her pockets filled. Cristian and his family refused to take any of it, though she tried to press it on them.

One day, Cristian called her in from the vineyard to tell her she had a visitor.

It was Daniel.

He was in the living room, his back to her, looking at a picture of Cristian and his wife on their wedding day. Part of her wanted to drop to her knees with happiness and beg him to take her home; another, stronger, part kept standing.

‘How did you find me?’

Daniel turned, and a series of emotions crossed his face like the wings of a dark bird: sorrow, heartache, confusion, relief—and finally anger. He looked different at Cristian’s house, smaller somehow. ‘You’ve been gone three months,’ he said. His voice was steady but his eyes gave him away: hopeful, yet guarded, like the
guanaco.
‘Three months, Calida—do you have any idea what you’ve put me through?’

No, was the answer, because she had chosen not to think about it.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry? That’s it?’

‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’

‘You can start with an explanation. Tell me how you could—’ Daniel’s jaw set. ‘Without even an explanation, just vanishing like that. Coming out here all alone.’

She disliked that this proved him right; that after all she was clueless, unable to survive anywhere but on the farm, naïve to the point of risking her own life. Teresita could survive in the big bad world—she was special—but Calida? No way.

Daniel’s blue eyes searched hers. ‘At first I figured you couldn’t have gone far, but no one in town had seen you. In the end I tried my chances at the coach station. That woman remembered you, said she felt sorry for you, gave you your fare.’

Frustration sparked in her belly.
Why do I have to answer to you
?

Teresita didn’t have to answer to anyone. Teresita never had. Not like Calida. Good old boring, reliable Calida, who never did anything out of the ordinary.

‘When I got here,’ said Daniel, ‘I checked the hospitals. I
was convinced I would find you and that would be it. Then your name came up. The doctors told me a man had brought you in. From there I found Cristian’s address.’

‘Go back,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Go back to the farm. You’ve found me now, haven’t you? And I’m fine.’

‘I don’t understand—’

‘I can’t stay there,’ she told him, coldly. ‘There’s nothing left for me.’

‘And there is for me—without you?’ Daniel took a step towards her, then a warning flash as her head rose, and stopped. ‘Did I do something wrong?’

‘No.’

‘Why, then? I thought … Calida, I’m not someone who has to do this. I’m not someone who talks about things—I just … I just
do them.
After what I told you,’ he searched for the words, ‘it took a lot for me to tell you that. I haven’t told anyone else. There are two people in my life that I trust, and one of them’s myself.’

Calida closed her heart to his words.

Daniel will never look at you because you are desperate and embarrassing.

‘I trusted you,’ he said. ‘I trust you. And then you ran out on me.’

Calida was sick of being trustworthy. Trustworthy wasn’t exciting or sexy or daring. Trustworthy was a friend, not a lover. ‘I’m glad I left,’ she said.

‘No te creo.
I don’t believe you.’

She was measured—she stepped into Teresita’s shoes for a moment and let herself be hard. ‘I don’t want the ranch any more and I don’t want our friendship.’

The edge of compassion in his voice evaporated. ‘You don’t, huh?’

A beat elapsed in which she could have spoken, but didn’t.

‘You get to run away while I stay behind to pick up the pieces?’

‘That’s what Teresita did.’

‘That was different.’

‘If it pains you to go back then don’t,’ she lashed. ‘The farm doesn’t belong to you anyway—Julia only took you in because she felt sorry for you.’

There was a terrible silence. Calida knew she was being vicious, but now the poison was spilling she found she couldn’t go back; as if this exchange was happening with her sister, all the hate and upset stacked against Daniel because he was here, because he could take it. It was easier to drill deeper than to turn back.

‘Get rid of it,’ she said, ‘even if you have to give it away. See if I care.’

‘You do care.’

‘No, I don’t. Why should I?’

‘You can’t cut me off like this.’

‘Like she did?’

‘It’s nothing like that.’

‘I never want to see that place again. OK? I never want to see you again. Who knows, Daniel, if you’d never come into our lives none of this would have happened.’

‘Calida—’

Daniel reached for her, a last attempt. She backed away. In that instant, she knew she had lost him for good. His body closed. ‘If that’s how you feel,’ he said.

‘It is. I hate that place.’

‘Just like you hate me?’

She looked him square in the eye. ‘Right now, a little less.’

Daniel absorbed the final blow. In his gaze she saw a stranger reflected and, even now, especially now, registered some satisfaction at her reinvention.

At the door, he lifted his head a fraction, as if he were about to say something more, something that would unpick this and make it right. Anything.