3

Today they were moving back to the city because their mother never liked it here in the country, near the woods. Inside the house, the boxes were packed for the movers who would arrive in twenty minutes. Their mother watched the three children from her bedroom window, a tall window with old and rippled glass. Nora waved. Her mother waved back and let the curtain drop. Soon, Nora thought, that window would belong to a thin and pale woman whose children were already grown. Nora imagined her standing at the upstairs window and staring out at the yard like a ghost.

An untended garden ran along the back of the house. In it only hardy mums and wildflowers seemed to grow. The grass hadn’t been cut for weeks, but Nora didn’t mind—the wilder, the better.

Nora was seven, the oldest. Then came Elijah, who was four, and the baby, Maria Paula, two. They were playing Pioneers, a game of Nora’s invention, which consisted of picking up bits of flowers and leaves and berries and pretending to make a meal of them.

“Elijah, make dinner!”

On his hands and knees under the maple tree, his red hair falling into his eyes, Elijah obeyed and began to dig a pit for the oven.

The baby shoved a handful of grass into her mouth.

“Don’t eat it for real,” Nora scolded. “How will you survive in the woods, if you don’t listen to what I say?”

Elijah stood from his crouching position, the denim of his knees streaked with mud. “I know we’re not really going to live in the woods.” He looked over his shoulder at the dark trees.

Only Nora played there; the small ones were afraid. She and her best friend Naomi had built dozens of forts along the creek in the woods. In the late summer, when the water was low, they hopped along dry stones to the other side. Today, Nora’s mother had said, “Stay in the yard where I can see you. We have to be ready.”

Nora was not ready. But their mother had found a good job in the city. She had friends there, too, and a sister she adored who had a bathtub in her living room. Nora did not want to live in an apartment whose small windows looked out on other people’s windows. Once, on the subway, she’d stared as a skinny father fed his fat baby potato chips from the bag. And there was the woman shuffling through the aisle, singing “Over the Rainbow” into a tinny microphone. Her shimmering skirt brushed the dirty floor, and there was a real bird’s nest pinned to her white head, with blue robin’s eggs inside it. “Don’t stare,” Nora’s father had said, without looking up from his novel.

“Of course we’re going to live in the woods,” she told Elijah. “That’s where pioneers live, because of all the things to eat, and the trees for shelter, and the animals to keep us company.”

Rocking forward, Maria Paula collapsed onto her knees and yawned. It was almost nap time. Their mother had said she could sleep in the car on the drive down, which would take almost five hours.

The pine trees of the forest swayed in the breeze, a bright cardinal flitted from one branch to another, and Nora pointed at him as he disappeared.

“He’ll show us the best places to fish and hunt.”

The three of them turned to look at the house and wave at their mother, who had appeared again in the window. She tapped a finger on her watch. Elijah hung his head, resigned.

Nora lifted Maria Paula and held onto Elijah’s grimy hand. “In the woods,” she told him, “I’ll carve a beautiful chair from the stump of the oldest tree in the world. When you sit in it, you’ll have magical powers.”

“I want to make explosions come out of my fingers.”

It wasn’t what she would choose, but she nodded.

For a second, Nora’s toes felt frozen to the earth, like in her nightmares, but then she put one foot in front of the other. Together, the children walked into the woods.

2

The children walked into the woods wearing long dresses that dragged in the dirt.

Next to the creek, they found an old canoe on its side against a rock. Nora thought she’d seen the boat before, but Naomi said that it had appeared overnight.

“Help me turn it over,” Naomi said. She put her hand on the mossy prow and pushed her veil out of her eyes. “We’ll take it down the river, and the fairies will guide us.”

“How many wishes will they give us?” Nora wondered, half-listening. The hem of her mother’s wedding dress was already muddy, and she realized she would be in trouble.

“No wishes, dummy. They’re not genies.”

Nora’s parents had gotten married twice, in New York and in a small town in Colombia, where her mother was from. She was wearing the dress her mother wore in the Colombia wedding. Now Nora regretted taking it down from the attic, without her mother’s permission. She regretted listening to Naomi, who had encouraged Nora to wear the dress. Naomi’s dress was dirty, too, but her mother wouldn’t care. Naomi had an entire closet full of dress-up clothes, and they were all machine washable.

Leaning over to help Naomi with the boat, she noticed the blood on the rocks near the creek bed. And some blood on the leaves around the boat. She lifted the skirt of her dress, as if that would help.

When they turned the canoe over, they saw the rabbit, lying still in a nest of leaves. Nora leaned down to stroke his soft, black fur, and he did not stir. “Poor baby. Someone took a bite out of his ear.”

“Help me bury him,” Naomi said.

Together, they dug a small grave next to a tree stump. Placing the rabbit’s body inside it, they sang a quiet song for him, one with made-up words to the tune of “America the Beautiful.” Then they covered him lightly with leaves and twigs and a few lilies of the valley.

Washing her hands in the cold creek, Nora saw that her lace sleeves were now dotted with blood.

She turned at the sound of rustling leaves. The rabbit was moving.

“He’s still alive,” Naomi said. She stared at the rabbit, his fluttering eyelids, and she looked afraid. “What should we do?”

Nora bent down, pushed aside the leaves, and lifted the rabbit gently into her arms. He reared his head back, thumping his foot against her chest. Her mother would know what to do. She pressed him to the dress and kissed his head. His heart beat wildly next to hers.

1

His heart had beat wildly next to hers. Nora’s mother remembers leaning into Daniel, thinking, “This is a crazy idea. He has no money. His Spanish is terrible.” But Luisa had said yes because she liked how nice he was to her parents. She liked how sure he acted about things. About her. Six months later, she had moved with him to the United States. First to New York, where her sister lived, and where she actually felt happy. Five years after that, they went upstate for his job at a small college in the middle of nowhere.

This was Luisa’s life now: for five minutes, she was locking herself in the basement with the dirty laundry, just so she could have some time alone. Her mother was here for two weeks, looking after the children. Luisa could hear them upstairs, getting the better of their Abuela, crashing around the playroom and demanding to go outside. Her mother did not want to go outside, not in this terrible, North American winter. It was only a matter of time before Elijah realized where Luisa was and came to pound on the door to the stairs, begging to be stuffed into his snowsuit.

Luisa took the opportunity to light a cigarette. Her husband was dying of pancreatic cancer. Whenever she pictured the world without him, it looked a little like this: low-ceilinged, smoky, filled with dirty diapers and children’s tiny, mismatched socks. Sitting on the dryer felt like practice. Later, she would go to the hospital with the children.

Upstairs, she heard a toppling sound and Nora laughing and Elijah saying, “Stop doing that, Nora. Leave me alone.” And then the baby crying, and her mother’s voice: “Tranquila, tranquila, tranquila.”

From her husband’s hospital-room window, you could see the tops of the trees, the ice hanging from the branches like crystal chandeliers.

She put out her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe and sprayed a can of lavender air freshener. At least if Daniel had been having an affair with his student, she’d have the right to be mad at him. She was thinking of the blonde one who waitressed at that vegetarian restaurant Daniel liked, the girl who’d kept touching him on the shoulder the night of his birthday dinner. At the end of the meal, she’d said to Luisa, “I just have to tell you how much I’ve always adored Romancing the Stone.”

Always. Adored. Luisa had wanted to laugh but instead adopted a serious look, to mirror the girl’s: “Frankly, I don’t think it’s Danny Devito’s best film.”

She and Daniel had left the restaurant smiling, their arms around each other. Only later did she feel annoyed with him for not saying anything in defense of her—but what was there to defend? It was 1995, and there were only three things Americans thought they knew about her country: Romancing the Stone, cocaine, and Pablo Escobar. They had no idea that, at her family’s house, the bougainvillea tumbled over the whitewashed walls in the courtyard, where she and her siblings had drunk morning tea made of spearmint from her mother’s garden.

Now she heard footsteps and Elijah calling for her. Here they come, she thought, her beautiful and needy children. “Ya voy,” she said, climbing the stairs. When she opened the door, the gray light of day surprised her.

Elijah threw his arms around her legs. “We couldn’t find you,” he said, breathless.

Nora stood apart from everyone, her hand on the pile of winter coats by the door. Her eyes were dark and secretive, and Luisa’s chest filled at the sight of the girl’s good posture and dirty fingertips. Her long braids were coming apart. Just then, Luisa’s mother came in, holding the baby.

“It’s time to go,” Luisa said. Nora was already putting on her coat.

______

Photo credit: cragproductions. / Foter / CC BY-NC