echo “Ask the angel.”
That’s exactly what Nina did. Her companion’s expression didn’t change from where he towered over her abuela’s grave—he stared stony and gray, with the chiselled edges of a solemn mouth as she told him about the secret she’d kept tightly locked up all day. Laying back on the grass, curly hair damp with dew, she said, “Mami lied again. She forgot to pick me up from school yesterday. She gave me a sorry hug and kiss, because she had an important thing to do last minute. But Lucy said she saw her and Coni at the diner with waffles and milkshakes.”
She picked at the scab on her knee. “Mami’s angry with me, isn’t she? I tried asking but she won’t tell. That’s why I’m talking to you.” A thought occurred to her, and she paused. “Señor won’t mind if you speak to me, right?”
The stone angel did not blink, but a bird cooed somewhere. She took it as a sign to continue.
“I hate Coni,” Nina said, and waited. When nothing happened, she confessed sullenly, “But I love her too.”
She thought of her younger sister. Coni was entirely Mami’s, all the way down to her tiny bones—doe-eyed, a round soft face laced by straight cocoa hair, and a gentle sloping nose. Nina always felt she was rougher, bigger, closer to her Papi. She had a nest of ashy curls tumbling down her neck, sharper features, and skin tanned olive with sun like his. She wasn’t pretty, not like Coni was. She knew that. After all, she had five tíos and all of them adored Coni best—cooing at her at every reunion while Nina was wallpaper. She skulked, and faded, and that was that.
“Why?” Nina asked.
She wasn’t entirely sure what she asked. Why didn’t Mami love her like she does Coni? Why did Señor only make Coni perfect? Why was the sun so hot on her skin? Why was every afternoon swelteringly long and sticky? Why didn’t it rain? Why was she just so—
Alone. Invisible.
The wind trilled mournfully. The clouds swirled, cotton candy pink and swollen. Nina exhaled and heard only the drumbeat of her own heart and the air rustling like leaves in her ears. She stayed there until evening broke and the light faded away. The mausoleum on the hill was silent as it bid her farewell—school bag slung over her shoulder, she skipped through the unruly fields of yellow grass and bindweeds. It was nice to be wanted, even if it was just pale thistles and burdocks that reached for her bare ankles.
Nina took the shortcut through the trees, scaling the fence with a practiced ease and landing with a soft thump on the other side. The tarmac of the road scraped at the soles of her shoes as she kept her head down and headed for home. Passing the grocery store, she spotted Arlo nestled in the crack of an alley, his padre’s guitarra held to his chest, worn fingers sprawled over the taut strings. He smiled when he saw her, a yellow toothy grin, and even more so when she dug into her pocket and gently dropped a handful of dimes into the copper tin by his foot.
“Mija, you’re growing every time I see you,” he said, already starting to strum the opening chords to her favourite song. “Same as always, eh? La Paloma.”
“Sí. Gracias.”
Arlo’s brows furrowed, even as his hazy eyes remained lax with ease. His fingers slid across the guitar as he plucked the strings, coaxing the notes gently out into the humid air. There was a peace sliding over his face, like the calm water of a tranquil lake, a spark of something deep and joyous that could never be tampered out. He was humming softly under his breath as he worked halfway through the song.
A minute later, a honk from the street over broke the spell. Nina glanced up in time to see a large sedan barrelling down the narrow road, kicking up plumes of smoke and gravel as it sped by. Enraged, the other cars joined in the clamour.
Arlo stopped. A familiar look of confusion seeped into his expression. His gaze panned around and found nothing. He was looking at her and then through, like she hadn’t existed in the first place. Slowly, he set the guitarra back down on his chest and rocked back to lean against the side of the alley. He checked the tin by his feet, puzzled but grateful, and then whispered a prayer of thanks through chapped lips.
“Bye, Arlo.” Nina mouthed, and then walked away, slightly sad.
But it was a good day.
This time, she’d gotten to hear more of the song before he forgot her again. And Mami had even remembered to cover some of the paella on a plate for Nina! The rice was a bit cold but the chorizo and chicken were wonderfully warm. She finished up her dinner and then washed the plate, tip-toeing to reach over the kitchen sink. The staircase creaked a rhythm as she stepped on the wooden planks—though if she really wanted to, she could be a ghost.
Nina tucked herself into bed. She pretended to be asleep when Mami came in to kiss Coni goodnight. Deep down, she wanted Mami to cross the room to do the same for her, even if she was a big girl now and not a baby like her sister. Her eyes stung, squeezed shut, as she stared at the churn of white stars through the black fog.
She stayed cold beneath the blanket.
She’s three years old, and her Papi turns the house upside down trying to find her. It’s a memory that’s startlingly vivid even after all this time. She remembers standing in the cluttered living room, her tiny fingers gripping the hem of her bright blue dress as she watches her Papi run from room to room, his face scared, as he calls her name—he coaxes, and shouts, and pleads. “Nina! Mi ángelito! Papá está aquí. I’m here, Nina!”
“Papi.” Nina starts to chew on her fist. She sits down on the rug with a thunk. “Papi!”
They’re playing hide-and-seek, she knows. It’s been hours and she’s winning. But she’s also getting hungry and tired, so eventually she gets back on her feet and waddles over to the guest room. She finds him kneeling to check under the bed. In the meantime, she grabs a handful of his white work shirt and crawls onto his back. “Papi,” she says loudly into his ear.
He bolts to his feet, nearly dropping her in shock. He doesn’t, though—because at the end of the day, he’s Papi, and so he always catches her in time. That’s just another fact of life.
“Nina! Mi cielo.” Papi’s next breath is almost a sob, as he tucks his big arms around her to carry her up. She doesn’t understand why he looks so sad. He does not speak for a long time. Just holds her tight and close to his chest, blotting out the rest of the world the same way the grey clouds do to the sun. Like he’s afraid she’ll hide again.
She’s seven years old, and Coni is born.
Nina has wished upon a falling star once before, that she did not want to be alone anymore. At first, she thinks that she finds the answer in the pink blanket Mami brings home from the hospital—the tiny creature swaddled within makes her curious. Hermanita has the softest skin and feathery wisps of hair, but when she stares at Nina from the crib, it is with eyes black as night, as dark as coal. And so the stars realign—everything Mami does revolves around Coni, Papi pulls away and drifts out of their orbit, and Nina wonders if she has ever been a part of this solar system.
The house doesn’t grow smaller, even if the space Nina occupies does.
She’s eleven years old, and she stands on the side of the road as Papi loads his suitcases into the car. The sun paints his expression grim and tragic, the circles under his eyes darker. He’s mottled with exhaustion. He closes the boot too firmly and his chest leaps at the resounding thud. He steadies himself against the railing. It creaks, forlorn. The house is vacant in a way that matches the hollowness inside of her.
She knows it’s been coming for months now. She desperately does not want it to.
“Papi.” Her throat is too swollen to speak. “When will you come back?”
“Nina, I don’t know! Alright?”
Nina says, “You still love me, right?”
Papi stops. He exhales as though he is punched, the air is dragged painfully out of his lungs. His grey eyes flitter wanly. When he crosses around to the other side, a miniscule twitch of his arms by his side is all it takes for Nina to dash forward. She hides the streak of tears on her own face by burying it into his shirt. She gasps in the familiar smell as if each breath is her last. Papi’s fingers tremble lightly against her shoulder.
“Oh, Nina,” he says. “Mi cielo. Always.” He presses a kiss to the top of her head, then kneels to her level. His face is already a blur through the haze of her tears. He drops to the softest whisper, feathery and light as a lullaby, “There are things even I don’t know the answer to. But you know what I do, mija?”
“What?” She sniffles.
“I ask the angel,” Papi says. That’s the last time she ever sees him.
In hindsight, it’s easy to slip out of a life that was never really yours after all. It’s like being a snake—there is a moment where the old skin begins to molt, coiling and silvery, and a part of you breaks away for good. It feels like fire ants, beneath your skin. It tastes like grief, sea salt sweet on your tongue. You were never the sum of parts but now, now, you have become even less of a whole. You suffer the process and mourn the loss, but when it is finally over, you realize—
This was how it was meant to be all along.
Nina once loved fairy tales. It was a kindness—the lie of solace and comfort, as she read the books her father used to read to her, putting on his gruff voice and trying to remember that cadence every night. But she’s starting to learn that happy endings exist only on ink and paper. Still. She held on to it as long as she could, with nails scratched into the fading wallpaper and toes dug stubbornly into the coarse backyard sand. She’s grimy with the effort of it.
She’s always been the selfish one, hasn’t she?
Days pass. Months stretch and distend, fat and gorged, trickling like sand through the cracks of her clenched palms. A couple of years tick by, and she prods at the passage of time in fascination.
Knives and forks clatter against porcelain plates on the dinner table. Hers is chipped. Awash in the golden light of dusk, Mami sits at the head of the table with Coni, regal and poised, at her right hand. Warm chatter flows back and forth between them like the ebb and flow of a river. Nina scrapes a silver spoonful of rice. The sound goes unnoticed. Even her shadow has long since fled.
Ever so often, Mami’s gaze cuts to her. A cloud darkens her eyes – confusion and surprise. Nina can tell exactly what she’s thinking. Who is that girl, that stranger, that interloper at my table? Mami opens her mouth to speak. Nothing escapes. She closes it. Her pupils sharpen. Her pupils dilate. Her breath stalls.
Undeterred, Nina continues to eat.
The moment passes. Mami glazes. She turns back to Coni. A soft smile twists her mother’s lips once again.
You want a bedtime story, chiquitina?
Here’s one:
Once upon a time, there was a family. There was a Mami and a Papi, and a little girl called Nina. They lived in a house at the end of the road, with a white fence and a small sprawling garden that the Mami tended to, growing large red tomates and fresh espinacas. One day, Nina’s hermanita is born—beautiful baby Coni, who loves you the same way you love her too. This time, Papi stays. And Mami has enough love in her heart for two and never forgets her firstborn hija.
And they lived happily ever after.
The duffel bag dropped noiselessly as she set it down in the living room. Nina hesitated, and then found herself picking up the photograph on the mantel. Her thumb wiped away the thin layer of dust clinging to the frame. She stared down at the smiling faces of her mother and sister. There was a place where her Papi once stood—he was gone now. Where she herself once stood. But the ink was not dry then. It is now. Mami’s arms are draped over empty air.
The same thing happened to every picture in the house. This was just the last of her reflection to leave, Nina knew.
It was time for her to go. Like an ave, leaving its nest.
She walked past the couch on the way to the front door. The television was still on, the volume muted, running a film she did not know the name of. The woman and girl asleep on the couch were as much as strangers now. There was no inkling of familiarity as Nina gazed upon their faces. Her skin gleamed silvery and pale in the moonlight as she passed by the window.
“Goodbye, Mami. Coni.” Faint as the wind, she half-doubted if she said it aloud at all.
Pinched between the arid sprawl of the capital and the Enol reservoir, there was the narrow strip of land with a large town called the Carrows. It was a strange place. She boarded the train shortly after midnight. A two-hour ride later deposited her there—in that place her father once let slip used to be his home town. As far as Nina knew, he had never gone back there after she was born. But maybe. It was a distant hope, but one nonetheless.
She disembarked at the local station, the train ticket uncollected and still tucked into her jacket pocket.
Rain started to drizzle, tapping musically against the rusty tiled roof above her head. In the distance, thunder rumbled and lashed the dark skies with a crack. A surreptitious glance around revealed a sparse crowd still populating the platform. Not one glanced her way. Her attention was instead caught on the far east wall of the station—pinned against the wooden panelling was a sizable map of the Carrows. She studied it, and then thought she had a better idea regarding her next move.
As she waited for a cab by the curb, she looked down at the town from the station perch. Sprawled around were the tight cloisters of brownstone buildings and commercial stores, arranged with little rhyme or reason. A steep hill rose similarly in the horizon, dotted with the monotone pinpricks of houses in a distant mirage—a blur of suburbia swallowed by the algae tide of vibrant greenery. Chokingly narrow roads twisted and turned, outracing the other, only to sporadically disappear into the dark maws of unlit alleyways. The tunnels and flyovers rose and fell, aflame with the glow of streetlamps, burnished by the hellish scorch of stalled vehicles.
A city on fire, she thought.
A shallow cough from nearby drew her attention. A woman stood nearby, ducked beneath an umbrella, reddish hair frazzled and expression deeply hounded. Beneath the thick scruff of her boots, a murky puddle of water and soil squelched. She wound the scarf tighter around her neck and for the briefest flash, Nina caught sight of the dappled skin at the side of the woman’s throat. Her gaze flicked up, and a chill shot right through her.
Grey eyes, as pale as the stormy sky, stared directly at her.
Nina said nothing.
“You’re not where you belong, aren’t you?” the woman said at last.
She shrugged. “When have I ever been?” Nina replied.
It took a remarkable effort to find a place to stay, especially as her unfortunate talent at being nondescript meant that very few people could remember her long enough past a conversation or two. But closer to the outskirts, she managed to secure a room in a modest flat. The small balcony attached creaked tremendously, like thunder trapped within a ship’s hull. Another thing she’d quickly learnt was this—all the way up on the tenth floor, the wind would alternate between eerie stillness to wild billowing as it saw fit.
An untamed town, housing even stranger inhabitants.
A three-day stint as a waiter. A month spent as a high school janitor. And it didn’t stop from there—the longest was when she held a job at a cafe for about five weeks before being kicked out by the manager under charges of ‘impersonation’, no matter that she’d been legitimately hired. The frustration that welled up was particularly painful during that last one, because she had genuinely tricked herself into settling in.
She laid down her apron for the final time. “Bye, Lis,” she said absently to her roster partner, and by the time she reached the door, Lisa Arman—college student, twenty-three years old, serial Netflix binger and fellow Star Trek enthusiast—lost the expression of conflicted hurt on her face and flashed her a customer service smile in farewell. Not an ounce of recognition remained, and Nina told herself it was for the best.
Standing by the side of a shop, there was someone, leant against a narrow alcove in between the cafe and the butcher’s. He was around her age, dark sunglasses covering his eyes, with a leashed dog flopped and nudged up against his feet. An ill-fitting coat was draped around his shoulder, making him appear smaller. Frailer. Except that the telltale wisp of smoke escaped the cracks of his clenched hand. Nina’s nose twitched.
He took a long drag of the cigarette. Perhaps too hastily, because he broke into a startled coughing fit after that.
“You know,” Nina said, “Those will kill you.”
His head jerked up in surprise. But by the time he registered those words, she was already long gone.
The thing was, she could always revisit old stomping grounds. She convinced herself otherwise because it wasn’t sustainable to keep earning a living the way she was doing it. That was partly a lie. Rather, she was angry and tired, buckling underneath the weight of this—this Sisyphean task of carving out a place in the world that did not want her. She scratched out more names on the map, waiting, daring the list to finally come to an end.
In July, she cleared out a hefty sum from the casino and got away scot-free.
She found that she was particularly good at pool. It was a marvel how many times she could walk into the same pub or game room to play the part of a naive newcomer, edging on the stakes until she left victoriously flush with cash. Any seething whisper in the atmosphere evaporated quickly and she made favourites out of the exact same marks. She drained Elias Johnson and Garrett Terres out of thousands this way, patiently bit by bit, until neither showed their faces again.
A month later, she copped a posting as a bartender down at one of the newer clubs. The night frenzy often died down by the stroke of midnight—one night, she was occupied with clearing away the stacks of emptied glasses when she heard the uneven shuffle of footsteps, the echo of a rhythmic tap. Then the telltale scrape of the wooden stool against linoleum. Her back was facing the counter, in the midst of rinsing the Hawthorne strainer in the torrent of tepid water churned out by the back sink.
Without turning around, she grunted, “We’re closing up for the night.”
“Thought I’d try my luck.” The voice was soft, harbouring a curious lilt to the words. It was in a tone she could not place, and that gave her pause.
Her head lifted. The feature wall in front of her, translucent and studded with reflective black rocks, acted well enough in its capacity as a fogged mirror. His reflection betrayed him—a man with a scruff of hair coiled demurely up to the nape, sporting a faint trace of stubble. The rest of his face was covered by tinted sunglasses.
Recognition dawned, but Nina said nothing. There was no point to it.
She turned to regard him. He did not look away. Instead he smiled unsurely, like he had forgotten how to, and said, “Didn’t kill me yet.” She stilled, and the silence stretched. He quickly tacked on, “The smoking, I mean. I quit sometime ago.”
“That’s good,” Nina offered after a while. She felt wrong-footed and distinctly off-balance.
“Six minutes,” he continued. “That’s, uh, something my mom used to say to me to get me to stop. She’d say, Matty, a cigarette takes six minutes off your life. And every time she caught me lighting one, I would feel so guilty because she also made a habit of saying, That’d be six minutes less I’d spend with you.”
“Did it work?”
“She passed last year,” he said.
“I’m sorry.” Nina said.
He grimaced. “That’s not why—no, it’s, it’s about what you said. About smoking, and it killing me. I broke my promise to my mother because I think…I think that’s what I wanted,” he admitted miserably, and took a deep breath. “I couldn’t… put it in words before. But hearing it like that, I needed it. I know it’s not what she would have ever wanted.”
He said earnestly, “So, thank you.”
“It’s been almost a year since then,” she said carefully. There was a curious flutter to her chest, hope and disbelief warring with the other. “And you—recognized it was me?”
Unexpectedly, he laughed. He reached up to take the sunglasses off his face, setting it down as he waved the other hand in front of unresponsive grey eyes. “Not exactly. I’m guessing you noticed this too. Friend of mine coincidentally recommended this place, so I thought I’d stop by. I only realized it was you from your voice. It’s very distinctive.”
“It is?”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s a first,” Nina said, keeping a straight expression. “I’ve been reliably informed I have one of those faces that are easy to forget.”
“Well,” he quipped, “I wouldn’t know.”
The warbled chime of the clock as it signalled twelve startled them both.
“If I come back tomorrow,” he said slowly, “can I get that drink?”
“The bar’s open all day,” she said. “But, yes.”
He held out his hand. “I’m Matthew. Liesal.”
“Nina Cafaro.” They shook on it, and the jolting memory of that warmth—for the first time in years—lingered with her long after.
Writer: Trishta
Editor: Amberlyn
