The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

made a shadow across her body. My brothers argued. Artur yelled at Edgar that yes, a corpse was natural and that he could use it to barricade his fort. Edgar disagreed. Joao was already digging up sand around Rita

“Stop!” I yelled. “Don’t touch her! Get away from her!” I walked up to Artur and pushed him hard. “No one can use her for their fort,” I screamed, “Go play somewhere else.”

Edgar smirked. Joao obeyed.

Artur narrowed his eyes. “I can do whatever I want.”

I pushed him a second time and he fell to the sand. Edgar laughed and clapped me on the back. Artur started to run for the house to tell our mother, but Edgar grabbed his shoulder.

“Don’t be a baby, Artur. She's right. I told you you can’t use the body. It's not fair for the rest of us. Come on, let's build down the beach over there.”

Artur considered this, then walked down the beach without looking at me. Soon, the three of them were laughing and yelling, scampering in the sand, fighting for pieces of wood and tackling each other for tufts of seaweed while I sat next to Rita. Her red lipstick had come off and her lips were pink and dry. Sand had crept into the corners of her mouth. I pictured Rita underwater, her body loose and free, her dress fluttering like a fin. I could picture the salt water going into and out of her, a sea creature taking up residence in her open mouth, small fish hiding in her hair. It was a shame she had been washed ashore. I thought of the rocks and shells I liked to pick up off the beach. They were so brilliant and colorful in the tide, but always dried off when I brought them home and became dull without the shine of the water. Like Rita, they were more beautiful in the sea. I took a handkerchief from my pocket-a small square of fabric that my grandmother had embroidered for me, decorating it with flowers and butterflies and my initials, LCR. I began to slowly wipe the sand from Rita's face.

Two days before we found Rita's body on the beach, I had gone to her room and was surprised to find her there. Grandmother Dulce had taken an unexpected nap, complaining that she had not slept well the night before. Rita stood over her dresser, admiring a new gold box of chocolates and deciding which one she would have first. She saw me, looked surprised, then smiled and invited me in.

“Come here, Lucia,” she said.

She brushed back hairs from my face. Her nails felt so good on my scalp I almost closed my eyes.

“Do you want one?” She motioned to the box.

I looked at her, unsure.

“I promise I won’t tell anyone. Our secret.”

I nodded.

“Which one do you want?”

I pointed to the dark one, the one with a pink swirl. She took it from its wrapper and handed it to me.

“Try it.”

I did. It was filled with a caramel creme that dripped on my chin. I smiled. So did Rita. She wiped my chin with her thumb. She took a nutty one out of the box and popped it in her mouth all at once. I heard it crunch. She gave me another, then another.

“It's a shame,” she said, smiling, “that your mother doesn’t let you eat these things. She shouldn’t deprive her child. But she's a child herself, your mother.” Rita took a chocolate between her fingers and stared at it. “She's too young up here,” she pointed to her head, “to appreciate these things, but you aren’t, are you? No, you aren’t.”

I felt Rita was trying to say that she and I were alike, and I felt flattered by this. Rita seemed different than the other hired help-more elegant somehow, more ambitious. As a girl I was fascinated by her ambition because I could not see the viciousness in it, or how useless and sad it was for a person in her position to even harbor it.

By the end of the afternoon we had finished the whole box of candies. Rita lay on her bed while I sat beside her, one leg up on the mattress, the other dangling above the floor. We made an appointment to go for a walk the next morning, together, during low tide. We would leave early so no one would even know we were gone. Rita liked to take walks along the beach in the mornings when the rocks and tide pools were exposed. I knew she took these walks because I had often spied her leaving in the mornings, silently closing the screen door and heading out to the beach without shoes on.

We took our secret walk the day before Rita died. She and I came back to the house giggling and whispering. The sun was out by then and we heard sounds in the kitchen. We had planned on separating; Rita would go in through the back door as usual and I would sneak in through the front. But just as we were about to part, we heard the back door open and my mother came out of the kitchen. She held a dishrag in her hand. Raimunda stared from the doorway with a concerned look on her face. My mother did not say a word. I thought she was going to slap me, but instead she hit Rita square across the face, then dragged me by the arm up to my room. I looked back and saw Rita holding her cheek in her hands.

I was confined to my room all day. I did not know what I had done wrong. I could only hear the murmurs of my parents’ yells from my room. I was not allowed to have lunch. I felt feverish. I wept until I fell asleep. I woke up again and it was dark outside. I crept downstairs to try to sneak into the kitchen for some food, and saw that the lights were on in my fathers study.

He was sitting at his desk and looking out the window, and I could not tell if he was staring out at the darkness on the other side of the glass, or at his own reflection. Then he saw me in the doorway.

“Tough day, wasn’t it Lucia?” he asked, smiling slightly. He looked tired and old.

“Yes,” I replied.

He invited me in. Then he did something he had never done before- he searched his bookshelf and handed me a copy of Robinson Crusoe. We were never allowed to touch my father's books. Their different-colored leather bindings and illegible writing-most were written in German- fascinated me. My father had studied electrical engineering in Germany before the war, and had even worked in America, in New York City, until he was called back when Grandfather Chico died. I’ve always wondered what it must have been like for him-to have seen so many exotic places and then to come back here, to Recife, at a time when even simple electricity was a novelty to everyone but him.

He spoke very little about those sorts of things. It was only when he was older, in his late seventies, that he spoke about his time in Germany. I was the only one in my family who still visited him at that time, so I got to hear his stories. He had left my mother, had moved out of our family home and began living with a young black manicurist in a rough part of town. She was my age at the time, in her thirties, and I remember she liked to kiss him on the top of his bald head and this bothered me.

“You should read this, Lucia,” my father said that night in his study as he kneeled next to me. The chair I sat in was made of mahogany and was so tall my twelve-year-old legs could not touch the ground. “It's very good,” he said. “It's about a man who is all by himself in the world,” and he went on to tell me the entire story as I turned the book around in my hands.

I went to bed with the book under my arm and did not wake up until morning, when the first light started to peek through my windows and I heard the screen door slam and knew it was Rita.

Rita's body was almost dried off, but the water was lapping over her ankles. A smell, like bad breath, came from her. I stared at Rita's clean face. I had woken up that morning, my father's book in my arms, and had heard Rita leaving for her walk. A cluster of seaweed washed up near my feet. It was bright green with little seed balls that were the size of pearls. I popped these pearls between my thumb and forefinger, then looked at Rita's outstretched arm. I took the strand of seaweed and made a bracelet for Rita, tying it loosely to her stiff wrist. I searched for another strand and made her a necklace. Then I combed her hair with my fingers and made her a crown.

As I arranged her hair I heard a siren and knew that the Recife Civil Police had finally arrived. They pulled onto the sand in a green jeep accompanied by an old station wagon ambulance whose lights and siren were broken. Everyone remembered the body then, and came out of their homes. My cousins stopped their football game, my brothers forgot their forts. My uncle Paulo and my father spoke with the officers-two short men in green military uniforms-while two paramedics told me to move aside as they checked Rita for any signs of life. My father explained that we had found her that way, already stiff, brought in by the tide. The men in green were silent. Then I saw my uncle slip both of them fifty cruzeiros, “to avoid any confusion.” The men in green nodded and said it was awful, how many accidental drownings there were this time of year on the beaches.

The paramedics brought over a stretcher. They lifted Rita by her shoulders and feet and plopped her on it.