Funny how the mind protects us. Dolores can remember nothing of what happened after that and has only imagined scenarios. She must have tiptoed back into the house. She must have shut the door behind her. How did she creep up to Daniel as he snored? Was she behind the sofa or before him? She must have stabbed him dozens of times, there was so much blood. So much blood could only have come from slash after slash into Daniel’s chest and stomach, slash after slash after slash.
What she does remember: Daniel waking at some point and screaming. How she feared the girls would hear and wake or a neighbor in the distance would catch hold of the desperate shouts and come running, phone the police. (Were there police? Who was in charge, now that the rebels had defeated Batista?) But Daniel had been unable to stop Dolores in his drunken stupor; his screams had quieted quickly. All that was left then was Dolores breathing hard with a blood-streaked machete in her hand, was Daniel still as the moon, covered in sticky wounds, and soaking red deep into the couch.
Dolores waited even later—it must have been two in the morning. And panting and sweating and heaving, she pushed that whole couch out the back door and into the little plot behind the house. Few people could see into the back of Dolores and Daniel’s home. The nearest neighbor was a mile away, and she couldn’t make out the house past the thick bushes and palm trees. She took the coals they’d used to roast the pig and spread the same gasoline over their stony surface. She assembled wooden planks she’d saved to make a pit. She lit that whole couch and her unmoving husband on fire and watched them blaze into the sky, into the night. She watched the flames pop and crackle like a million gathered fireflies. There were no stars that she could see, but the flames were enough. As if a moon had descended into her own backyard. She could hardly believe what she had done.
Not until morning, when all that was left was a pile of ash and Dolores looked down at her body covered in blood and soot and sweat and could have jumped into the fire herself. But what of Carmen and Elena then? She’d done what needed to be done. She’d had no choice. She would spread the word—of her hero husband, a martyr who died bravely in the mountains. When people would claim they’d seen him, she’d question their dates, play the confused grieving wife. She’d tell the girls their father had left again, one final battle; it wasn’t victory yet like he’d said. She’d stand at the road as the parade heralded Fidel Castro through the streets in a couple of days and she would weep, she would laugh and weep and wave, she would hold her girls in the air and tell them the time for crying was over. She would dance.
How was she to know that Carmen had stood at the back door that night? That she’d seen her father’s face slowly consumed by licking flames and tiptoed back into the house? In fifteen years, Carmen would board a plane to Miami, and Dolores would never see her again. She would think it was politics that had divided her from her firstborn daughter.
11OTHER GIRL
Jeanette
Miami, 2006
The first time I see the woman, she is buying cold cream. What she wants, she says, is a moisturizer that doesn’t feel heavy, doesn’t sit on her skin like so much weight. I lay out her options: whipped argan oil, cold-pressed and refined; our new microbeading exfoliating lotion with gentle 7 percent alpha hydroxy; the bestselling hyaluronic-acid-plus-B-vitamins gel with all-day-stay technology, patent pending. Her red fingernails tap the counter as she slides a credit card with her other hand. She buys all of them.
I can’t take my eyes off her. She reminds me of my mother. I think this is what draws me to her, what makes it so I can’t take my eyes off her. I haven’t seen her, my mother, in a month. I have only one day off from the store each week, and I have to choose: spend my day off with her or with Mario. My mother doesn’t know about Mario. She only knows I have a job again. I haven’t lost it again.
The woman reminds me of my mother because she looks breakable. But also immaculate. Breakable and immaculate. I see her almost every single week, and she always shops during the day, like so many other women. She wears red-soled heels, carries snakeskin bags. Looks like she smells of Chanel No. 5—no, something even more expensive, that Jean Patou thousand-dollar bottle with ambergris from sperm whales and eight thousand jasmine flowers. I make ten dollars an hour, but the lexicon of wealth still roots in me. I can’t scrub my childhood off. You’re simply and unobtrusively classy, like a Celine bag, I say to her in a daydream.
The same day she buys cream from me, the woman tells me her name. I say Isabel is a beautiful name. I get the feeling that she doesn’t want to leave the counter; she lingers. Her skin is so bright and taut that it glistens. It is the skin of expensive facials, chemical peels. Things I do not seek at nineteen. You have beautiful skin, I say, because I do not know what else to say. My mother has the same skin, and I see her leaning into the mirror sometimes,
