I have no memory how we filled the intervening night and day. I remember walking to the department store and taking the elevator to the top floor. There were racks of sale clothing pushed to one side and tall windows overlooking the city. There was an empty café in one corner.
The tightness in my chest increased. I stood up and sat down and tried to focus on my breathing.
Christine saw her first. ‘She has your walk,’ she whispered as Rebecca strode towards us. She looked so solemn and determined. She wore a blue pantsuit with a white blouse and pearls. I was wearing a light blue skirt with a cream shirt and pearls. I was trembling with anticipation. We hugged and there it was. That thing no one can explain. An instant and complete recognition. My little sister.
She stared at me. ‘You look so like Mummy,’ she said.
Recently I learned about quantum entanglement. Objects with no physical contact can exert a push or pull despite their separation. Einstein thought it impossible. He called it ‘spooky action at a distance’.22 But a few years ago scientists discovered that entanglement is real. Two particles, separated by light-years, can change their properties in response to each other. It is, the scientists say, as if an obscure communication channel connects them.
Despite this, science has yet to open its mind to the mysterious ways humans connect. To acknowledge the entanglement of genes, of our souls and blood. Or the random chance of standing beside a telephone in an abandoned house at the exact moment a call comes in.
24
Game of statues
On that trip to Spain, I read surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s autobiography. My Last Sigh is frank and fascinating and includes his recipe for an excellent dry martini. And the best place to drink it — most often with his friend Hemingway, at El Chicote, a cocktail bar in Madrid, which Buñuel describes in burnished detail. The revolving doors and the polished mirrors, the mahogany bar as the altar and the cocktails as gods.
Rebecca knew the way. We entered the revolving doors as an elderly white-coated gentleman greeted us. Through Rebecca, I told him I’d come from New Zealand and held up the book. He stepped back and bowed.
‘I am Don Luis,’ he said. ‘I am the boy in the book.’ He’d served Hemingway and Buñuel, running errands, lighting cigarettes. He told us the great men were very particular, and showed us to the booth they always sat in. We ordered the exact same vodka martinis. And then we ordered again.
I caught glimpses of Rebecca in the mirrors that surrounded us. Snippets of me, particles of my daughters, a note in her laugh — it all felt so familiar. It seemed I’d always known her, my sister the total stranger. The distance between us dissolved with the vodka. My children were my first blood relatives. But now I was a person with a sister, another human connected by something beyond the imposition of adoption.
I drank too much and for a second, before the room began to spin, the world stopped. No one moved. As if in a game of statues, my old life was frozen in place as I crept up on my new. And for that moment Rebecca and I were the only people alive in the world, our faces reflected in the glowing room.
At midnight, Rebecca’s boyfriend arrived to take us to the station. He’d removed the back seats of his Deux Chevaux, and Christine and I sat on the metal floor with our bags between us. We were catching the overnight train to the south of Spain. We had planned to hire a car and drive from Almería up to Barcelona. On the way, we would find my mother’s home. We would peek through the windows of Cortijo Grande. But Rebecca had called ahead. Dana, her younger sister, my sister, would be there.
‘She wants you to stay,’ Rebecca said as she hugged us goodbye.
On the train, we lay on opposite top bunks in a crowded sleeper car. In the early morning light, and with the clarity of a hangover, I realised the weather house I’d given J was a bad omen. The little wooden couple would never be in the same place at the same time. They could not wrench themselves free from their sun or their rain.
‘I’ve made a huge mistake,’ I whispered across to Christine, and started to tell her how I felt about the marriage.
‘I wish I’d said something at the beginning,’ Christine said. ‘It was fast and seemingly perfect, I did wonder if it was a courtship con.’
The old woman in the bunk below rapped on the railing with her walking stick. The sleeper car smelled of stale alcohol and ageing bodies, and we arrived dishevelled and sleep-deprived. We hired a car and Christine drove the winding way along the coast up from Almería.
We stopped outside the ancient whitewashed town of Mojácar. The cobbled lanes woven with history were wide enough for horses or handcarts. Four thousand years of families had lived in that town, generation on top of generation. On the walls and doors I noticed the Indalo Man, a prehistoric, magical god with a rainbow strung between his uplifted arms. As if hope was always at our fingertips.
We ate fried fish at a café on a small square and the locals ignored us, as though we were ghosts in their world. We stopped to watch a butcher with eleven fingers chop meat with a cleaver. The extra finger, we heard, was a family trait, passed down for generations, along with the butchery.
The sense of history, of belonging to such a place, of coming from somewhere, squeezed my heart. We’re tribal, I thought, individual but communal, somatic but part of a spiritual whole. Such belonging is understood only by its absence.
El Cortijo Grande, my mother’s house, was in the hills above the village. Dana opened the door. We hugged and looked at
