“What are you watching?” Jessica asked, sitting on the edge of the couch. She yanked on the corner of the blanket to try to gather enough to cover her legs. “Anything good?”
“Go away.” Iridian swatted at her sister’s arm. “There’s no room.”
Jessica took another noisy slurp of soda, and the sound caused Iridian’s headache to pulse.
“That lady has a weird mouth,” she said, nodding toward the screen. “Seriously. These actors are so ugly. Where do they find these people?”
Jessica scooted her butt back, squashing Iridian’s feet into the cracks between the cushions. “Get your giant-ass crane legs out of the way,” she said. “You should write for soaps. You’d be good at that, right?”
“I . . .” Iridian hesitated. “Maybe?”
What was happening? Iridian stared at the side of her sister’s face, which was lit up by the flashing screen. Who was this alternate, compliment-bearing version of Jessica? It wasn’t the sneering version, the one who talked to Iridian as if she didn’t have a brain in her head or a heart in her chest. It wasn’t the hard and silent version, the one who wanted everyone to believe she was made up of wires and cold plates of metal, welded together tight.
This version of Jessica was just hanging out, sucking on a Diet Coke, seeming totally absorbed in a scene on low volume between a middle-aged woman wearing a slinky designer gown pointing a gun at another middle-aged woman wearing a slinky designer gown. Everything seemed so normal. Jessica hadn’t said another thing about Ana or Ana’s hand or the writing on the wall.
With her gaze still on the screen, Jessica pulled more of the blanket toward her, tucking it up and under her chin. Iridian was left with a corner that only covered her from the waist down. She was sort of cold now, but it actually wasn’t that bad: two of the Torres sisters sitting together on the couch, watching soaps.
“This blanket smells,” Jessica eventually said.
“You smell,” Iridian replied.
Jessica cracked a smile, and Iridian ate it up.
Jessica
Jessica had only two memories of her mother, but they were both so old she didn’t know if they were real or if she’d invented them. The first was simple. It was of her mother standing outside, backlit by the sun. Her bare legs were copper-brown, and there was a crease of sweat behind each of her knees. Her nails were short, round, and not polished. She was wearing three gold rings that Rafe had given her on three separate occasions, all stacked up on one finger. Aside from those rings and a small gold cross that hung around her neck, she wasn’t wearing any other jewelry.
The second memory Jessica had of her mother was of them in the car together. Ana was also there. This memory Jessica was almost positive she’d made up, because she would’ve been only four years old and strapped in a car seat in the back when it had happened. Ana was in the front, even though Jessica knew now that her sister would have been too young to be riding shotgun. It was cold outside. Ana was wearing a puffy pink coat that was dirty around the wrists and had probably been bought secondhand. The heater wheezed. After easing through a stop sign, Jessica’s mom reached over and took Ana’s hand.
“Hold your breath,” she’d commanded.
They’d been driving through a graveyard. It was on both sides of the car, as if the cemetery had been there first and the street had later been plowed through it. There were tall iron gates and tilted stones. Most of the writing on those stones had been rubbed smooth. Names and the dates of long or short lives had dissolved along with the bones below. The graves went on and on. Jessica’s eyes were starting to water from holding her breath for so long.
Finally, after they’d driven through to the other side, Jessica’s mom dropped Ana’s hand and told both of her daughters a story. It was about how, when she was a girl, she went to her uncle’s funeral. She didn’t have a good coat, so she stood there shivering throughout the graveside service in a long-sleeved wool dress. Once she got home, she stood in front of the radiator until the sun went down, but she couldn’t get warm. At dinner, she ate chicken soup that turned cold when it hit her tongue. After dinner, she took a hot bath, but she was still freezing. She put on a bunch of clothes, heaped blankets on her bed, and climbed into it. Still, she shivered. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She told her mother she thought she was sick. Her mother—the girls’ grandmother—brought her hot licorice tea and told her that, no, she wasn’t sick. She was just unlucky. Some of the dead people in the graveyard, her mother said, release mal aires, which enter a living person’s body through the holes in their heads, like their nostrils and their mouths. It can happen any time of year, but especially in winter, when the ground is frozen and the corpses are uncomfortable.
“That’s what happened,” Rita Torres told her daughters.
During the funeral, mal aires had worked their way into her body. They wrapped around her bones and fastened themselves to her muscles. They dug in and gave her chills. They wanted her to know what it felt like to be dead. Rita’s mother told her the feeling would pass in a day, and if it didn’t, she’d take her to a lady who knew how to deal with these kinds of things.
The feeling didn’t pass. It got worse. Jessica’s mom woke up in the middle of the night with aches in her ears. By morning, one of her eardrums had burst. Fluid started leaking down the side of her neck. There was something in her head, pushing against skull bones, and it wanted something—it wanted to get out, or it wanted her to get out and make more room.
Jessica’s grandmother drove her mother across town to some lady’s house. That lady had just finished making ham sandwiches for her young sons when they’d arrived. She washed her hands and led her mom into a back bedroom. Once there, she rubbed alcohol on Rita’s head, pressed her thumbs across her eyebrows, and whispered a short prayer. She told Rita to go home and take baths in hot salt water, twice a day.
The next morning, Rita was still a little chilly, but better. The day after that, she was back to normal.
Many years later, long after their mother had died, Ana asked Jessica if she remembered this story. Jessica said she did—she remembered sitting in the back seat, looking at Ana’s dirty sleeves, and watching their mom reach over and grip her small hand.
“So you held your breath?” Ana asked. “That whole time?”
Jessica nodded. “I still do—every time I go past a graveyard. What about you?”
“I never even tried,” Ana said, with a flash of a grin. “So who knows how many angry spirits I’ve been carrying around with me all this time.”
Jessica
(Friday, June 14th)
“Sign Peter’s card?”