Chapter 5 CHAPTER 5

Julia’s POV.

I knocked his hand away.

It was a small motion, nothing at all, but in that room it sounded like I had turned over a piece of furniture. Margarita stopped fussing with her necklace. Catalina lowered the ice pack.

“Say that again,” he said, in a low voice.

“Don’t touch my face.”

The first slap landed before I finished the sentence. The second came back the other way, with the back of his hand, and split my lip against my teeth. I tasted blood and had to grab the back of a chair so I wouldn’t go down in those heels.

“Go upstairs and take off that whore’s outfit,” he ordered, shaking out his hand as if it had gotten dirty. “You wash your face, you take off that paint and you put on what I taught you to wear. In this family the women don’t put themselves on display.”

I ran my thumb over my split lip, looked at the red smear on my finger and straightened up slowly.

“No.”

The room went completely silent.

“What did you say?”

“I said no.” I lifted my face. “You don’t dress me anymore.”

He moved faster than I expected from a man his age. He grabbed my neck with one hand and shoved me back against the wall, and the frame of a painting dug into my shoulder. His fingers tightened.

I dug my nails into his wrist and drove my knee into his thigh, and the air came back into my throat with an ugly sound. Then I put both hands on his chest and shoved him with everything I had. He stumbled and caught himself on the edge of the table.

Nobody moved to help me. Neither one of them.

“Do you want to die like your mother?” he said, straightening his jacket.

The word mother went through me. I knew nothing about that woman, not even her name, and that man had just told me how she died.

I looked him in the eyes and I didn’t look away.

“I’m not afraid of you anymore. I’m Alejandro Villegas’s wife. You can’t touch me.”

He let out a short laugh. Margarita put a hand to her chest as if someone had told her a joke, and Catalina laughed behind her, with that little laugh she uses to play brave when there’s a man in the room.

“Did that blow really leave you crazy, girl?” He came closer again. “You want to push your luck?”

“You’ve got it backward, father.” I dropped my voice until mine was the only one in that room. “If you put a hand on me again, I won’t be responsible.”

I turned around and walked toward the stairs, my cheek throbbing and my lip swelling, counting my steps so I wouldn’t run.

And on the first step my body betrayed me.

The white marble opened up in front of me, my knees went loose and the image came of my sister rolling down it with her head hitting every edge. My hand went to the banister on its own and I gripped it so hard the iron hurt my fingers. My vision blurred and for a moment I didn’t know whether the marble was below me or above me.

I heard his shoes behind me.

He caught my arm, right where the sleeve covered what couldn’t be seen, and spun me around to face him.

I didn’t scream and I didn’t try to pull free. I stayed still, I looked at him, and I let him see what was in my face.

The old man hesitated. I watched his eyes shift a fraction, searching my face for something he recognized, and for half a second his thumb went slack on my arm. He didn’t back off, but he hesitated.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re planning,” he said through his teeth, “or what the hell got into your head, but don’t you forget who you owe everything you are to, right down to the air you breathe. You married that Alejandro, fine. You’re still mine.”

He shoved me.

I caught the banister with my left hand and my shoulder slammed into the iron. I hung there off my own arm, my heels sliding on the edge of the step and my heart kicking in my throat, and folded over like that, I held on.

He had already turned around. He went back to the armchair, picked up his whiskey and carried on the conversation with his sister as if he had just put out a cigarette.

“As I was saying, Margarita, the lawyers want to go over the papers before Thursday…”

I went up.

I went up step by step, holding the banister with both hands, my legs shaking and Catalina’s laugh chasing me up the stairs, and I didn’t cry until I had locked the bedroom door.

Then I slid down the wood to the floor and covered my mouth with both hands, and the crying came out of me in jolts, silent, my lip burning and my jaw clenched. Damn that house, and damn me for getting here late.

I got the phone out with clumsy fingers and called Consuelo.

It rang. And rang. And went to voicemail.

I called again. Voicemail.

“Consuelo, answer me,” I said into the message, my voice in pieces. “My father is alive. He’s sitting downstairs. I need you to tell me right now everything you haven’t told me.”

I hung up and stayed on the floor a while, the phone in my hand and the screen going dark on its own.

Then I got up, washed my face with cold water, put ice on my lip and went into the closet, because I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for somebody in that family to decide when I was going to die.

I emptied the drawers. I felt along the back of the cabinets, took the shoeboxes down one by one, reached behind the hangers of all that gray clothing. And on the highest shelf, all the way at the back, under a folded blanket, I found an old leather suitcase.

I brought it down, sat on the floor with it between my legs and opened it.

Folded scarves, a rosary, and underneath everything a notebook with worn covers, the corners eaten away by damp.

I opened it at random, and my sister’s handwriting hit me straight in the chest.

He hit Mom again today in the kitchen. I covered my ears and counted to a hundred, the way she taught me, but it sounded the same.

I turned the page with my thumb.

He punished me for breaking a glass. Mom stepped in front of me and told me to run. I didn’t run. I’m not leaving her alone.

Three days in the back room. They passed water to me under the door. When he let me out he made me thank him.

Mom says the worst part isn’t the beatings, the worst part is that you get used to them.

My throat closed. I had to rest my forehead on the edge of the suitcase and breathe with my mouth open, because the air wouldn’t come in and my stomach was climbing into my throat.

I kept reading, and the handwriting kept getting smaller, tighter, as if over the years my sister had learned to take up less room even on paper.

I tried to call the police. He took the phone away and slammed the study door on my hands. They went black. I can’t write properly today.

I lowered the notebook and looked at my knuckles.

The same hands. Hers with white lines on top of white lines, and mine, with their perfect manicure, stroking a screen on the other side of the world while somebody crushed my sister’s fingers in a door for trying to ask for help.

A wave of nausea doubled me over. I made it to the bathroom, knelt in front of the toilet and threw up everything I had, and I stayed there a while with my forehead against the cold porcelain and the taste of blood from my lip in my mouth.

I crawled back to the closet and picked the notebook up again, because she had written it so somebody would read it and I was the only one left.

Further on, in the big round handwriting of a child:

Mom told me last night that there are two of us. She said she sent my sister far away the same day we were born, with the only person she trusted, and she made me promise never to say it out loud. I asked her why she left me here. She hugged me and didn’t answer, and she cried all night. I’m not angry with her. If she could have, she would have gotten us both out.

My whole life believing I was the one left over, the one handed off like a package. And it turns out that woman, with that man on top of her, in that kitchen, did the only thing she could do.

She didn’t throw me away.

She saved me.

I turned the last pages with my hand shaking, and there was the handwriting of the final months, a woman’s now, firmer, more tired.

Today I met the man I’m going to marry. My dad says it’s already arranged and there’s nothing to discuss. His name is Alejandro. He’s cold, he didn’t smile once, and he talks like a man used to being obeyed. I just pray to God he isn’t one of the ones who hit.

And two pages later, the last entry in the notebook:

I get married Saturday. I’m scared, but when I get into that car I’m getting out of this hell. It can’t be worse than this house.

I closed the notebook slowly and left both hands on top of it, as if I could still cover the eyes of the girl who wrote it.

It couldn’t be worse than that house.

My sister signed a marriage to escape one hell, and two days after the wedding she was lying at the foot of a marble staircase with her head split open and no way to tell anyone who pushed her.