Muñeca

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One

The last time I was in this room it was shiny with tinsel and presents, the air blue with cigarette smoke. Now, in full daylight, both Mrs. Miramontes and her ivory wallpaper look like they've aged way more than six years. They're both faded and sprouting lines, and I think if Mr. Miramontes had had his way, they'd both have been replaced a long time ago. The calendar on the wall assures me it's May 1968, but everything else-the fading sofa, the damask curtains and their dangling threads-looks like it's been dormant for a hundred years. Even the warm air feels fast asleep.

I'm enjoying the itchy panic taking over her face when she realizes she doesn't remember me at all. I was the invisible girl who came to the house a few times a year to help out her mother, mostly for their big parties, the ones that shrank every year, along with their fortune. I guess being a parasitic landowner's not as lucrative as it used to be.

She recovers quickly, though: "You look so different, my dear. The years have agreed with you." I look basically the same as when I was eighteen, when I was last here, except that my hair's gone from a flip to a bun. But I smile and thank her, the way I'm supposed to.

"So do you have any real sense of what this job entails, dear? Many girls have found it too . . . taxing."

"Yes; I ran into one of your previous housekeepers at a party and we got to talking." I take a sip of tea, to busy my shaking hands. "She told me that your daughter is bedridden, and she needs constant care."

"That's correct, but I'm afraid it's more dire than that." Sorrow washes over her face, and I feel a tiny bit of sympathy for her. "Violeta was stricken three weeks after her honeymoon. From one day to the next she couldn't walk, couldn't talk, couldn't even sit up in her bed. She can breathe on her own, but nothing more." She takes a long sip of her tea, and I see sorrow all over her face, but, underneath that, a flash of fear. "The doctors have all been without a clue. She's been studied and poked and prodded and to what good? There she stays."

"I understand. I took care of my mother when she got sick, so I've done this sort of thing before."

I look straight into her eyes when I say this, something the help is not supposed to do.

"Yes, dear. I was so sorry about your mother. She was such a hard worker. So reliable and committed, unlike some of our girls." Girls. My mother was thirty-two when she came to this house, and forty years old when she died. After the funeral they sent me a bouquet of white roses and a card with sixty dollars inside-the equivalent of a week's pay. I threw everything straight into the trash and then after a few minutes I went back and rescued the bills.

"Thank you, ma'am. I was sorry to hear about your husband." I keep my face and my voice as neutral as I can. Of course, I never heard that he died of a heart attack in Acapulco with his twentysomething girlfriend, my blank face says. That detail stayed out of the papers, but the servants' grapevine has long tendrils when the gossip is that good. Mrs. Miramontes has to keep her expression as neutral as mine, but her teacup pauses a long time on its way to her mouth.

"That's very kind of you. And you won't feel lonely in this big old house? Only Sundays to go back to your . . . family?"

"I'll manage. This place brings back such memories." That's not a lie, exactly. I just didn't say what kind of memories they were. "And it's so good of you to keep Violeta at home with you."

"Thank you, dear." I can see she's not going to explain any further. There's something slightly off about her: Her eyes are a little too soft, her voice a fraction or two slower than it should be, like a record playing at 241/2 rpm instead of 331/3.

"Well, your references were glowing, and of course you know this house and how we like to do things. Perhaps now I should take you to see Violeta." Now it's my turn to fumble, spilling the rest of my tea on the tablecloth. I try to cover it up with chatter.

"Did Taleitha and Ruth-Anne both retire?" Taleitha started at this house before I was even born. I remember listening to her and my mother talk about bus boycotts and lunchroom sit-ins while I was pretending to scrub the silverware.

"Oh, I had to let them go years ago." Now it's her turn to grow clumsy, nearly dropping her teacup on the floor instead of the table. "But I must tell you that with those riots we saw last year I was so glad I did. I just wouldn't have felt safe otherwise. And then again with the horrors of last month. Such an undignified response to the loss of that poor man." She looks at me over her horn-rimmed little glasses, her face already expecting me to agree. And I have to say nothing and follow her up the stairs. As I get to the landing I see a torn piece of rug trying to curl up and out of the way, and I shove my boot in, hard, to tear it open even more.

"Well, here we are." She opens a room off the second-floor landing, a room I remember was saved for less-than-distinguished guests, with its tiny window and fading wallpaper.

"I'll leave you two to get acquainted." She doesn't even look into the room. I was wrong before; that sigh wasn't pity for her daughter, locked inside her own body forever, no way out. It was much simpler: Her only living child is defective. Violeta's not making babies or hosting parties or managing the crumbling house, so for these people, what good is she?

This room looks like someone set out to decorate purgatory and then got bored. Wallpaper the color of faded buttercups, braided rug that used to be bright blue and green. A tiny window that looks out to a light well. A shelf with a set of Punch and Judy puppets, and a little-girl doll with blond pigtails. No pictures on the walls, no books for anyone to read to the body in the bed. So many things I can bring in to make Violeta's days better, to earn the gratitude I'm going to need if I want my plan to work. The radio is just babbling away to itself, some guy ranting about the scourge of the anti-war movement and the specter of women protesting in the streets instead of staying at home. I switch him off.

Her eyes widen when I come in, which of course they would, to take in a new visitor. They follow me as I pull up a chair to the side of the bed, piled with a thick comforter even in the afternoon heat. I haven't seen her eyes leave me once, and it looks like her chest is rising higher and faster than when I came in.

"I think you remember me. And I think you're in trouble. And I think I can help you get out."

Two

There are men looking at me all over this house, painted eyebrows collecting dust along with their frames. General Mariano Vásquez Del Valle, Mrs. Miramontes's great-great-grandfather, watches me in his nineteenth-century gear as I slip into the kitchen and find a crystal bowl. His hands are gratefully receiving a land grant from the colonial government, the land this house still sits on. Some other ancestor stares down while I steal a pair of roses from a vase by the door. Another surveys his sprawling estate while I carry the bowl, filled with water, past his portrait glaring down at me from the stairs. A gray and tired-looking maid passes through the hallway below, and I duck out of sight just in time. I can't go losing this job before I've even been technically hired.

Inside Violeta's sickroom, I set a wooden tray over her still body and rest the bowl carefully on top. Then I whisper words over the water, words I haven't used in more than ten years, and I'm humming the bolero my grandmother sang when she taught me how to perform this test.

Violeta's mouth is trembling just a little and my hand starts shaking as I pick up the roses, and a few grains of pollen spill over the quilt. I take the first blossom, the petals fresh and pink and just beginning to unfurl, and I set it inside the bowl and tell Violeta to watch what they do.

Her eyes never leave the petals as the water soaks through them, and instead of floating they instantly shrivel up and die. I set the second rose in the water, and we both watch as it happens again, just like the first.

"I know why you're stuck in your bed. I know why you're stuck in your body. The doctors couldn't see it, because this won't show up on their tests. And they can't fix it, but I can." I try not to let the hunger creep into my voice, my hands already practically counting the bills. Or the thrill that this test actually worked, and that I'll be returning to a part of myself that for more than a decade has been hidden in a dark little box. A box my grandmother gave me, that I'll have to open again, with all its shining dangers waiting inside.

I take the wilted blossoms and hide them in a bowl of potpourri, with its horrible dead smell that reminds me of hospital rooms. Then I lean over to Violeta, close enough to smell the lavender soap they must bathe her with. My voice is soft and low, as if I don't want to frighten her.

"You can understand me, can't you? Blink once if you understand." Instead her eyes begin fluttering madly around, in a pattern that reminds me of a bird frantically trying to escape its cage. Then a heavy smell rises over the sweetness of the soap. Old leather, mustache cream, aftershave. I turn and follow Violeta's eyes behind me, to the door.

"I see you've met my wife."

O


The last time I saw Violeta, my senior year of high school, she was twenty-one, glowing in a baby-blue dress, spinning around the parlor on the arm of the man whose diamond glowed on her finger: Señor Andrés Guzmán de Torrijos. He was maybe forty years old and fresh out of Cuba, having fled Castro with a bank account full of cash but no land, sniffing out Violeta’s family-land-rich, cash-poor-the way a shark smells fresh blood. The lights from the Christmas tree glowed green on his face as the two of them swayed to the tune of “Perfidia.” Violeta looked like her body was there but nothing else, and her eyes kept glancing over everything but landing nowhere. Until they caught mine, and for a second I could read the expression inside: trapped, sad, those black eyes wide in her white face. The face that’s now almost as pale as her bedsheets, as Andrés steps over to her bed. He introduces himself, his Cuban accent draped over his English like lace over a chair, kissing my hand. If he recognizes me-why would he?-he gives no sign anywhere.

"Did my mother-in-law warn you of the difficulties of this job? Almost none of the girls lasts very long." That's no surprise if Andrés looks at them all the way he's looking at me, like I'm a fresh young pheasant ready to be served on a plate.

"I'm used to hard work, sir. Tell me: She really can't communicate?"

"I've tried and tried, but unfortunately it all comes to nothing." Violeta's breathing is slowing now, eyes fluttering closed as if she's fighting off sleep.

"It's all right, my dear. Get your rest." There's a silver bracelet on her wrist, etched with floral designs. It stands out, bright and shining, especially when she's wearing no other jewelry. He strokes the silver now as he talks, as her eyes shut against him.

"She has nurses and others who come in-bathe her, do physical therapy, check her feeding tube, things of that nature-so your main role is just to be here. My mother-in-law is so busy with her charity work, and I have investments and concerns on several continents. For the most part it will be just you and Violeta, and of course she can't speak. So don't be surprised if you feel lonely sometimes in this big old house."

"Yes, sir. Thank you for your concern."

"It can feel very quiet at night," he continues, striding over to the far wall and opening a door to a narrow, windowless room, an iron-framed bed where I'll sleep, if I get this job. He runs his hands over the bedspread, and I turn my face to the wallpaper so he can't see me recoil.

"I'm sorry your room is so small. This house was built in the 1860s, in the days of ladies' maids sleeping right next door. But Violeta's on one side of your wall, and my study is right on the other." He smiles down at me, wolflike. "Please shout if you need anything. Even if it's late."

And with another appraising glance he's gone, shutting the door with a click. As if the click was some kind of spell, her eyes snap open and I lean down again, close to her face.

"I'm going to ask you some questions, Violeta, and you answer with one blink for yes, two for no. First: Do you remember me?" I know she saw me, that night of the Christmas party, but that was a long time ago. She was hardly ever here when she was growing up, always away at boarding school. I wonder what it was like to only come to this place for holidays and vacations, to feel like a visitor in her own house.

She blinks slowly at me through her thick eyelashes: Yes.

"Does your husband know you can communicate?"

Two blinks, one quick after the other: No.

"Is he dangerous?"

Yes.

"Understood. So those flowers? They were my test. They wilted because you're under a spell." I pause, to let her take this all in.

"I came here to help break it. And I want you to help me in return."

One quick blink: Yes.