Maybe it was their age difference. By the time Nora was old enough to play with dolls and toy trucks, Salma had already moved on to Clue and Monopoly. Or maybe it was their personalities. Nora loved to listen to music alone in her room, but Salma was always with her friends from the volleyball team. They didn’t even look like sisters, because Salma has light skin, like her father, and Nora is dark like me. As the years passed, I spent most of my time alone, while my husband was at work, one daughter at practice, the other with her music. We were like a thrift-store tea set, there was always one piece missing.
After Driss died, Nora came back home, which was a comfort to me, because I couldn’t stand being alone in the house, and I let her take care of all the small things, like mailing out payments to the mortuary, going to the dry cleaners to pick up a suit her father had dropped off a week before the accident, driving his car home from the street where he had parked it. In between all these errands, she would go into the master bedroom, run her fingers on the bristles of her father’s hairbrush, open the closet and smell the sleeves of his jackets, or take one off its hanger and wrap herself in it. That was how I found her the day before the school play, sitting on the bed, wearing her father’s suit jacket, staring at her feet. “Nora,” I said, but she didn’t hear me, I had to touch her shoulder before she noticed me standing there beside her.
She looked lost, and in a way, she was lost. She always had her head in the clouds, that one, and I think this was why her father left her a bit of money, to help her make a fresh start, maybe choose a better career this time, though of course the money only upset her sister, and caused them to have this terrible argument in the school cafeteria. I could hardly pay attention to the play that night, my heart was aching from hearing my daughters fight, like strangers rather than sisters, and I slowly let myself sink into the fog again, that hazy place where Driss and I were still young, still together, still a family.
Efraín
Elena was going to play one of the good fairies, and she was excited because she had to wear a blond wig. I could see it in the way she was looking at herself in the dresser mirror, tilting her head a little, smiling at her own reflection. Only eight years old, and already mimicking the women she saw on television. As soon as Marisela finished pinning the wig on her, she teetered forward on the chair, trying to reach the plastic clip-on earrings that sat on top of the dresser, between the bottle of cologne and my pain-relief ointment. “Why are you wearing a wig?” I asked from the bed. Elena’s hair was black and glossy, and it was also long enough that it fell halfway down her back. It was perfect for the part, I thought. “Can’t the good fairy have black hair?”
“Fairies have blond hair, Papá,” Elena said.
“Is that true?” I asked Marisela. I had seen Sleeping Beauty once, on television, but I couldn’t remember much about the story other than the princess falls asleep for one hundred years. I had been getting so little rest lately, I almost wished I could sleep that long myself.
“Fairies are supposed to have hats,” Marisela said, “but the teacher ran out of them, so she gave us the wig instead.” She smoothed a sheer pink cape over Elena’s shoulders and turned to me. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.” I took Daniel’s hand and followed Marisela and Elena out of the apartment. The walk to school takes about fifteen minutes, and when the desert wind blows, those fifteen minutes can be unpleasant, but that afternoon there was only a soft, cooling breeze. I could feel the day’s tedium and irritation lifting from me, replaced by the simple pleasure of being with my wife and children. Elena had only one line, which she’d practiced so often that all of us knew it by heart—“Little princess, I give you the gift of grace”—but it was punctuated by a wave of the magic wand. That was her favorite part, waving her magic wand.
The performance was taking place in the school’s cafeteria. As soon as we took our seats, I leafed through the program booklet, looking for the good fairy with the blond wig. There were two dozen names on the cast list, but I found her easily enough: Elena Aceves Mendez. I felt a small thrill, because I had never seen my surname printed on anything other than my ID papers. I remember pointing it out to Marisela.
“We should save the program,” she said with a smile.
Daniel pulled my sleeve and asked when the show was starting; that boy has always had trouble sitting still. While Marisela tried to distract him with a game of cat’s cradle, I went back to the program. That was when I noticed the name I had been trying so desperately to erase from my mind. It appeared twice on the cast list, as if to double my shame. Aida Guerraoui Darwish. Zaid Guerraoui Darwish. I closed the program booklet, but nothing seemed right after that. The performance started late, two women in the front row argued loudly with each other, and when the moment came for my daughter to lift her magic wand and bestow her gift on the princess, she sneezed and dropped her wand. The evening I had looked forward to all week, thinking it might bring me joy, or at least some distraction, turned into a kind of purgatory. I had to sit in that darkened cafeteria, burdened by the feeling that the Guerraoui family was also sitting somewhere nearby, waiting for their children to appear. Night watchmen, both.
I told myself that it was just a coincidence—this town is small and there are only two grade schools, so the old man’s grandchildren were bound to attend one or the other—but that didn’t help. I felt I had been robbed of what little peace I had, and strangely this made me think of Alonso. He was the son of my mother’s sister, born only a day before me, so that we grew up more like brothers than cousins. We even looked like brothers: we had the same cloudy eyes, the same widow’s peak, the same small nose lost in a wide face. One night, when we were thirteen, Alonso and I left school at the usual time, but instead of going home with me, he went to help a friend of ours move house. It took longer than he expected, and later Alonso found himself waiting for the last bus in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Two street urchins, little more than children, came out of the shadows and asked for his money. When Alonso laughed and said no, they pulled out a switchblade and slashed the left side of his face. He ended up losing his left ear. After that, he was different. All his goodwill disappeared, he became full of self-pity. You couldn’t talk about anything, a girl you wished to court, a job you wanted to have, a trip you dreamed of making someday, without Alonso rattling off a sad list of everything that could go wrong. And whenever we were alone together, he always stared at my left ear, as if he envied me for it.
That was the feeling I had now. I envied all the people around me in the cafeteria, everyone who hadn’t seen the accident on the 62. More than anything, I wanted their ignorance, their innocence, their peace of mind, because I knew I had lost those things for good. After the performance, when it was time for us to go, I left the program booklet behind on the chair. It cost me a great deal to do that, but I did it. I couldn’t take the chance that Marisela would see the old man’s name in it and tell me yet again that I needed to do the right thing. What I couldn’t get her to understand was that I was already doing the right thing. For us.
Jeremy