This is not important.
I know, David, but you’re still going to listen to it all. It takes a minute for my eyes to get used to the darkness in the house. There isn’t much furniture but there are a lot of random things. Such ugly and useless things, little angel ornaments, large plastic boxes piled up, gold and silver plates nailed to the wall, plastic flowers in giant ceramic vases. I had imagined a different house for your mother. Now Carla sits Nina down on the sofa. It’s a wicker sofa with cushions. Across the room in the oval mirror I see myself, flushed and sweaty, and behind me I see the plastic-strip curtain over the front door, and beyond, the poplar trees and the car. Carla says she’s going to make the iced tea. The kitchen opens up to the left; I see her take an ice cube tray from the freezer.
“I would have straightened up some if I’d known you were coming,” she says, reaching for two cups on a shelf.
I take two steps toward the kitchen and I’m almost next to Carla. Everything is small and dark.
“And I would have baked something. I told you about the butter cookies I make, remember?”
I do remember. She talked about them the first day we met. Nina and I had arrived that morning, and my husband wouldn’t be there until Saturday. I was checking the mailbox because Mr. Geser had told us he would leave a second set of keys there, just in case, when I saw your mother for the first time. She was coming from her house carrying two empty plastic buckets, and she asked me if I’d noticed the way the water smelled too. I hesitated, because we had drunk a little as soon as we’d arrived, yes, but everything was new and if it smelled different it was impossible for us to know if that was a problem or how it always was. Carla nodded worriedly and went along the path that edged the lot our house was on. When she came back I was already settling our things in the kitchen. Through the window I saw her put down the buckets to open the gate, and then put them down again to close it. She was tall and thin, and though she was carrying a bucket on either side, now apparently full, she was upright and elegant as she walked. Her gold sandals traced a whimsically straight line, as if she were practicing some kind of step or movement, and only when she reached the veranda did she raise her eyes and look at us. She wanted to leave me one of the buckets. She said it was better not to use the tap water that day. She insisted so much that I ended up accepting, and for a moment I wondered whether I should pay her for the water. Out of fear of offending her I offered, instead, to make some iced tea with lemon for the three of us. We drank it outside, with our feet in the pool.
“I make some mean butter cookies,” said Carla. “They’d go perfectly with this iced tea.”
“Nina would love those,” I said.
“Indeed, we would adore them,” said Nina.
In the kitchen at your house I fall into the chair beside the window. Your mother adds lemon to the tea and hands it to me with the sugar.
“Put a lot in,” says Carla. “It’ll clear your head.”
And when Carla sees that I’m not touching the sugar, she sits in the other chair and stirs it in for me. She looks at me out of the corner of her eye.
I wonder if I’ll be capable of getting myself out to the car. Then I see the graves. I just look outside, and there they are.
There are twenty-eight graves.
Twenty-eight graves, yes. And Carla knows I’m looking at them. She pushes my tea toward me. I don’t see it but its cold nearness fills me with disgust. I won’t be able to, I think. I feel bad about it for your mother’s sake, but it’s going to be impossible to drink anything. And yet I’m very thirsty. Carla waits. She stirs her tea and we are silent for a while.
“I miss him so much,” she finally says, and I struggle to understand what she is talking about. “I checked all the kids his age, Amanda. All of them.” I let her talk and I count the graves again. “I follow them without their parents’ knowing. I talk to them, take them by the shoulders to look them right in the eyes.”
We have to move forward. We’re losing time.
Now your mother looks toward the backyard too.
“And there are so many graves, Amanda. When I hang up the clothes to dry I always look down at the ground, because I tell you, if I step on one of those mounds . . .”
“I need to go to the sofa,” I say.
Your mother gets right up and goes with me. With one final effort I fall onto the sofa.
I’m going to count to three, then let’s get you up.
Carla settles me in.
One.
She gives me a pillow.
Two.
I reach out my arm, and before I fall completely asleep, I hug Nina tightly against my body.
Three. Grab the chair, like that. Sit down. Do you see me? Amanda?
Yes. I see you. I’m very tired, David. And I have some terrifying nightmares.
What do you see?
Not here. Here I see you. Your eyes are very red, David, and you have almost no eyelashes left.
In the nightmares.