All About Jane's Ranch

CHAPTER TWO

Lili sat up, pulled from sleep by an anxious dream. She’d been walking on a beach, the waves rushing in, foamy and cool, but the waves kept getting bigger, dangerously so. When she tried to run, the sand liquified, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t escape the tidal wave, rising black and huge, ready to crash over her.

Only a dream, Lili cooed to herself. Nothing more.

Under her window, she heard water sloshing from a bucket. Just someone cleaning the walkway. No deep meaning, just the strange world between the waking life and the dreaming one. She lay back down, relieved to be out of the nightmare, and then she remembered Vivienne—another kind of bad dream.

She scanned the room for a clock, surprised she’d been able to get back to sleep after waking in the middle of the night and seeing Yarabi Molino smoking on the terrace. She swung her legs to the floor and walked into the living room. Light poured in from the big south-facing windows. She’d slept away half the morning.

Glancing through the French doors to the roof’s terrace, Lili saw last night’s windblown petals scattered across the tile and over a chaise lounge. Her head pounded from whiskey, from no dinner and too little sleep. Massaging her throbbing temples, she wandered around Vivienne’s small, useless kitchen, opening cabinets, one after the other. She rustled up a bright yellow can of Café Bustelo, but no coffeepot or filters. Of course, since when did Vivienne have breakfast? She had Gabi to send out for sopes and cappuccinos once she got to work. Lili dug a small, forlorn saucepan out of a cupboard next to the stove and dumped coffee, water and sugar into it. She counted out the seconds as she waited for the coffee to boil, the numbers drumming out the fear gnawing at her. So much to do, so many places to look

When the oily, blue-black bubbles began to foam, she poured the sludge into a Talavera mug, swirling the silt at the bottom. Too bad Gabi wasn’t around to read her future in the coffee grounds. You will find your sister. You will return safely home. She sipped the burned brew, hoping it would give her the spirit, as the Mexicans would say. Darle la anima.

Warming her hands on the mug, Lili wandered the dining room, picking up vases and ashtrays, staring at a Dia de los Muertos altar on the sideboard, sugar cube skulls lined up in rows like bowling pins. She studied the large black-and-white photos of Vivienne covering the dining room wall, looking for one she might use for a missing persons flyer. In the first, Vivienne straddled a chair dressed in an Indian huipil, fishnet stockings, and Rockette style stilettos, her head thrown back, a large Havana stogie in her mouth. Try putting that one up in the metro, Lili thought. In the next, Vivienne was on her side, her back to the camera like an Ingres Odalisque. Lili pulled down one of Vivienne lying down, her hair spread around her like a drowned Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia. She removed the back from the frame and studied the picture. If she cropped the photo so Vivienne’s hair didn’t stick out, she figured it would do. The flyers were a long shot anyway. She recalled the paper littering the metro—a young girl’s quinceanera picture, a man’s military service photo smeared with the grid marks of footprints, grey sidewalk crud, too filthy to pick up and look at.

She knew she had to make some kind of list for herself— if only to check things off, to feel she was accomplishing something. First, maybe she should talk with Gabi and Hanes about what they had already done—whether the police or reporter had gotten back to them—and she had to get the number for the firm in Texas that helped families of kidnapping victims.

She opened the door and looked up at the pale square of sky above the courtyard where the fountain now gurgled quietly. A damp blouse and apron were draped over its scalloped edge, drying in the weak autumn light. Circling the third floor balcony, she headed down the drafty, stone stairs and rang the lower doorbell, then rang again. As she turned to go, the door opened and Hanes peered around looking older than she’d seemed last night in the dark, her hair braided in a thick cord down her shoulder, her bathrobe stained and smelling of spilled booze. “Oh, it’s you,” she looked stricken.

“Sorry,” Lili said. “ I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you. I’ve been up for a while and wanted to start looking for my sister. I thought I’d talk to you and Gabi right away.”

“Gabi’s not here.”

“Perhaps you could…”

“Give me a few minutes to put my face on, then I’ll come up.” Hanes eased the door closed.

Lili retraced her route back to Vivienne’s apartment. With the door shut behind her, she felt the empty silence of the rooms swirl around her like fog, thick and treacherous, a fog you could get lost in. Sitting down at the dining room table, she killed time, doodling notes with a fat black marker on brown paper she’d found in the sideboard— call her school-district’s long-term substitute line, get name of reporter who filed the story for The Mexican Herald, call the embassy, the police.

There was a gentle knock at the door and then Hanes let herself in. “What’s all this?” she asked, sinking into a chair.

“I’m trying to make sense out of everything.”

Hanes sneered, her eyes squinting, the little lines fanning out around them. “Good luck. Can I use this?” she asked, reaching for an ashtray on the sideboard. She slid a silver cigarette case out of her pocket. “At least Gabito smokes,” she said, flicking her lighter up to her cigarette.

“Great. Then you can both die of cancer like my parents. How romantic.”

“Ah, a recent convert to the no-smoking cult.” Hanes inhaled, then blew smoke toward the high ceiling. “How long since you quit?”

“I never started.” Lili reached for the open cigarette case and removed one of the Delicados. “I guess I just used Vivienne as an object lesson. Things not to do in life.”

“Did you ever try to stop her? People like you usually do try to stop us self-destructive types.”

“And who are people like me?” She waved the unlit cigarette in the air.

“Nice people. People like you are nice people.”

“Too nice, probably. And the short answer to your question is yes, I did.” She ran her finger over the monogram on the heavy sterling cigarette case. Pinckney Hanesworth Baxter.

“Southern generals all.” Hanes told her. “The first were Confederates, in spite of one of them being loosely related to the Pinckney who signed the constitution, and the Baxter was from the Revolution. But even he was a Tory, so, you see, I’m destined to be on the losing side it seems. Anyway, I was Pinkie back in the States. I came here and changed my ahdentity.”

“That explains the accent.”

“And how did I get here, you’re wondering. It’s the global economy. I’m an academic bracero. Only fair, don’t you think? Mexico gets me teaching Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. Americans get cantaloupes delivered by truck-driving speed freaks.”

Lili dropped her unlit cigarette onto the table. “Who called the papers?”

Hanes shrugged.

“Gabi?”

“You must be joking. Never. Mexican paranoia, shugah, but as Gabi says, even paranoids have real enemies.” Hanes got up and walked to Vivienne’s altar, pulled a small sugar skulls out of her pocket and added it to the collection. “Two more,” she said.

“Two more what?”

“Hood ornaments. You know, decapitated heads. They’re all the rage with the cartels. I told Vivienne she should do an installation—-only with life-size sugar heads singing narco-corridos.”

“What do you mean real enemies? Did my sister have them?” She heard the question fall from her lips, not as rhetorical-sounding as she had hoped.

“Don’t we all, dahlin’?” Hanes overdid the drawl a bit. “I don’t know. Again, you’ll have to ask Gabi.” She aimed her cigarette at the table. “Did she owe anything? Did anyone owe her anything? I’d certainly put money as category numero uno down here.”

“Viv’s done this kind of thing before, you know, just disappeared out of el blue-o. ”

“I was wondering why you seemed so sanguine about the whole thing. Here,” she said, reaching into a sweater pocket. “The kidnapping service in Texas.”

Lili glanced at the name, the number, the address, set the card on the table and stared out the French doors. The autumn light, filtered through the smog and palm leaves, cast lacy patterns on the concrete. “Beautiful terrace, isn’t it?” Lili nodded at doors and sighed. “Lucky Vivienne.” She stood up and headed down the hall to the bathroom. Hanes followed.

“A few years ago, Viv took off for Nepal,” Lili said, opening the medicine cabinet. “What do we have here? Let’s see Percodan—almost gone. Diazepam, ditto. Lithium, prescribed by, who’s this?” she squinted at the bottle. “Dr. Bernard Jolet, almost full.”

“That’s a start,” Hanes said. “Jolet. He’s very famous. He’s at the British Hospital.”

“Jolet.” She looked around the medicine cabinet. “Leg wax, cough syrup with codeine, of course. Attivan, condoms, four left.” She filled her arms with Vivienne’s prescriptions. “Anyway, a couple of Australian trekkers took Vivienne to Sydney. Otherwise she would have been floating face down in the Ganges. I’m going to write all this down.”

Hanes blocked her way. “Lili, Mexico isn’t Nepal. It’s not full of your do-good types. You don’t know what you’re up against.”

“And you do?” She ducked under her arm.

“That’s what Gabi thinks.” Hanes followed after her. “That you don’t know what you’re up against.”

Lili dumped the bottles on the dining room table and scrawled Meds on the brown wrapping paper. “Oh really? Did he read that in the cards? Okay, she filled the percodan on September twenty-ninth. There were a hundred. Jesus. Speaking of Gabi, where is the fortune teller?”

“Lovers.” Hanes lit another cigarette. “There’s another category.”

“Lovers,” Lili wrote, underlining it for emphasis. Vivienne always had interesting ones.

“Friends, of course, are bad.” Hanes coughed. “But lovers, they can destroy you completely, can’t they?” Hanes stood in the middle of the room, her shoulders sagging. She shook herself and straightened up. “The fortune teller? By now he is already in Zihua, checked into a hotel on the beach, and he’s getting ready to pick up a few vacationing gringas. He does this periodically.” Hanes shrugged. “Don’t look so stricken. It’s a national pastime for Mexicanos. I’m afraid gringas don’t have such stellar reputations down here, and besides, he’s always very contrite afterwards.”

“Contrite?”

“We must be grateful for something.”

“Aren’t you worried about AIDS for God’s sake?”

“He’s careful. At least, he says he’s careful.”

“That’s what they all say. You mean he just decides to cheat on you like someone decides it’s time to go to the gym?” Now, she understood why Hanes had stood in her doorway, bleary-eyed, stunned from an early-morning bender. She knew what it was like to need to forget. Her mother screaming at her father in Spanish. Pendejo. Borracho. Asshole. Drunk. Glass chips everywhere. Smell of spilled whiskey. Her mother waving the incriminating phone number or lipstick smeared collar in her father’s face.

“Not exactly, although now that you put it that way.” Hanes hesitated. “He says Mexican men aren’t honorable, but they have honor. Whereas American men are honorable, they just have no honor. I looked it up in the dictionary once. There’s actually a semantic difference between honor and honorable.”

“Hanes, there’s a word for this line of thinking. I believe it’s called bullshit.”

“No,” Hanes said. “It’s love.”

“And you can forgive him? You can love anything?”

“Anything the little bastard does, yes.”

Lili stared at Hanes, thinking of what to say next. Tall and slender, Hanes could have been a model, except for the lines on her face and around her lips, except for a certain wounded look. Maybe she had been a model of sorts back when she was Pinkie. But, this line of thought was a waste of time. Lili was not here to solve anyone else’s problems. “Hanes could you start looking through the closet? That would be useful.” She’d give her some time to shake off her ruminations.

“Useful. I don’t believe I’ve ever been called that before.”

Lili squinted at the label on one of the bottles. Diazepam, August twenty-third, Farmacia Moctezuma. That was out by the airport. “My God,” Lili called out to Hanes as she read another prescription. “She got Vicodin from someplace called Dental de Dios out near the Poniente bus station, that slum. Can you imagine Vivienne wandering around loaded up there?” Lili put her head in her hands and closed her eyes. “Hanes?”

She found her on the bed, the lace mosquito netting draped over her shoulder, her eyes closed, an armload of dresses beside her.

“Hanes?”

“Have you seen these? Valentino. De la Renta. Do you have any idea what these cost? Anyway, no smoking gun. No address of some Narco Zeta boyfriend, I’m afraid.”

Lili lifted another pill bottle from the dresser. “She got this one near Ciudad Neza.”

“It’s a very bad neighborhood. Scary.”

“Did you know she was wandering around these places?”

“Honey, I try not to know too much. I find it’s easier that way.” Hanes looked at her watch, said she had a class to teach, that she would check in later.

“Sure, do that,” Lili told her, doubtful she’d bother. It seemed she had other issues to deal with.

After Lili heard Hanes close the door, she sat on the stool in front of the dressing table and studied her reflection in the mirror. Her skin looked grey in the shuttered light, her once red hair dull, the jaw line starting to go, the lids on her green eyes heavy.

She opened the right hand drawer. Make-up rattled inside. She penciled around her mouth with a lip liner making it bigger, prettier, then filled in with lipstick. She lifted Vivienne’s silver brush, the old-fashioned kind with white horsehair bristles. Strands of her sister’s hair clung to it like angel hair on a cast-off Christmas tree. Lili pulled at it, thinking there had to be clues somewhere, remembering the post-it she’d found in the laundry room in her Menlo Park house on one of Vivienne’s few—but always disastrous—visits. Vivienne had scribbled the word Bonnaire on it, one word, enough for Lili to call all the beach resorts and travel agencies on that tiny island to get her back. Where was the post-it, or whatever it would be, this time?

Lili opened another drawer. Jewelry— gold, jade, stones, thick silver bracelets, Indian beadwork, all of it thrown together, the junk with the diamonds. Lili slipped a bracelet over her wrist, then another, and another. She searched the bureau and rummaged through the old chiffonier—lingerie, dresses. She unzipped a garment bag. A copper silk gown hung on a padded hanger. Lili looked at the label— another Valentino. Good Lord. Hanes was right. Didn’t those things cost ten thousand dollars? She told herself to stop being paranoid, that designer gowns didn’t mean Vivienne was involved in drug trafficking or with the Mexican mafia. Maybe she’d sold a very expensive painting. Lili leaned her head against the chiffonier and thought of the kidnapping service. She really would have to call them if Viv wasn’t back by morning.

She pushed herself up, stretched and wandered into the living room. Through the long windows she noticed the color of the sky had changed, had deepened as afternoon descended over the city, and a brief twilight fell like blue silk over the buildings. She became aware, in a dull sort of way, of how the birds in the park’s scraggly plane trees across the street had hushed, how the jackhammer that had been rat-tatting in the distance all day had stopped. Her limbs felt heavy, her hands grimy from handling all of Vivienne’s things.

Kneeling by the bathtub, Lili ran the tap. The water poured out rusty and brown. Once it cleared, she stuck her hands under the warm stream and held them there. Then she unstopped the cork on a bottle of bath gel and poured until the water frothed. Archaeologists, she thought, running her hand back and forth in the hot water, created whole worlds and made assumptions about lost empires from only fractured bits and pieces. But, Lili had lived her life with Vivienne and could figure out nothing from the gowns and the jewelry and the paintings.

She floated in the tub until the water cooled, and then dried her hair, put on makeup, and headed down the stairs. From Fatima’s kitchen the smell of dark, roasted pasilla chilis drifted into the courtyard. Even though she was hungry, the smell of food made her queasy. She felt weak after the hot bath, and spending the day searching through Vivienne’s things made her feel tender and raw, as if she’d scraped off an old scab. Tomorrow she had go to the embassy and the Herald. She had to find Viv’s calendar at the gallery. Maybe she’d notice something others had missed.

Fatima’s door was open, revealing a string of glaring yellow bulbs dangling from the ceiling. In the corner, the TV, tuned to a soap opera, flashed bits of color, the volume on full blast. An ancient woman in an equally ancient wicker wheelchair sat directly in front of the screen. Fatima lowered her spoon to a steaming bowl in front of her as Lili walked past the door.

“Ay Dona Lilia,” Fatima smiled and led Lili into the zaguan. “Ay Dios Mio. Usually my mother is asleep, but not tonight. The pills are not working. The noise is not a bother, is it? ” She dabbed her eyes with her housecoat. “The Lord doesn’t give you any cross you can’t bear, I know, but Ay Dios. Donde vas?” Where are you going?

Lili named a café around the corner, but Fatima wouldn’t hear of it. Lili had no choice but to accept, and when she did, Fatima grinned, showing a few gold teeth.

“Si. You are too thin.” Fatima sucked her cheeks in like a cadaver.” You must eat. Come.”

Lili sat down and smoothed out the fuchsia-flowered oilcloth in front of her place setting. Fatima set a bowl in front of her. The soup smelled like chili, corn and bean paste, all of it mixed with the clay smell from the pottery.

Fatima poured Lili a glass of bright red agua de jamaica.

“Gracias, Fatima.” Lili smiled. It was nice to be taken care of for a change.

“Eat.” Fatima crossed her arms in front of her flowered apron and waited.

Lili sipped the soup. “Sabrosisimo.”

Fatima beamed her gold-toothed smile and pushed a blue, plastic tortilla holder toward Lili. “Toma.” She turned, pulled aside the raspberry-colored curtain under the sink and lifted a plastic gallon jug off the floor. Agua ardiente, a cheap moonshine. Lifting two marmalade jars from the dish drainer, she half-filled them, set one in front of Lili, and fixed her with a hard stare. “Dona Vivianna?” she demanded. What did Lili know?

The grandmother shrieked, her voice piercing the din from the TV. “La puta. Donde esta?” That whore. Where is she?”

Fatima tapped Lili on the arm. “You see,” she mouthed the words. “When she wants to hear, she can hear.” Fatima pointed to her ear. “Mami, behave,” Fatima shouted to the old woman. “Watch your program, or I’m going to turn it off.” She turned to Lili. “Valgame Dios,” Make me worthy, Lord, she crossed herself. “The doctors have done tests, and they tell me she is blind and deaf. I tell them she hears when she wants to. She has them fooled. But who will believe una vieja? Not those veterinarians they send poor people to at the Cruz Roja.” Fatima sat down at the table and wiped her eyes again with her housecoat. She took a swallow of liquor. “You know, in this city, se dicen, they are killing poor people, selling their organs to hospitals in Dallas.”

“Fatima, that’s horrible.” Lili had heard the story before, only it was children they were killing. She sipped her agua ardiente. “Where you think Vivienne might be?” Lili asked.

“Dona Lilia, I am just a servant. What can I know? Vivianna was a child of God. In spite of everything.”

The grandmother wailed again, pointing an arthritic finger at the air. “Libertine. Whore of Babylon,” she howled.

“Mami,” Fatima scolded. “Now, I’m going to cut off the television.”

“Fatima, why is she saying that?” But Lili could guess the answer—too many men up and down the stairs.

Fatima shrugged and circled her index finger around her temple. She mouthed the words loca, vieja. Crazy. Old.

“We need to talk later, okay? You need to tell me everything. I can’t stay here long, and I’ll need your help.”

Fatima nodded.

Lili finished her agua de jamaica, and thanked Fatima for the dinner, kissing her on the cheek. She was already on the second floor when she heard Fatima calling.

“Ay Dios mio, I forgot. There is a problem with your neighbor’s apartment.”

“Hanes and Gabi?”

“No the other one,” she said, curling her lip in disapproval. She put her finger under her lower lid, meaning watch out. “He says he would like to talk to you about the oven. Ay Dios, the things that go on in this house. Dona Lilia, don’t give him any money. People will rob you if they can. And this one,” she shook her head.

Lili and Fatima heard the old woman howling again. Fatima shrugged.

“I’m coming Mami,” she called.

The things that go on in this house. It probably meant nothing, Lili told herself. Mexicans were prudes, really— all that Church, all that formality. Anything that smacked of indiscretion was an insult to the beholder. None of that live and let live gringo stuff. On the other hand, it could mean everything, not that Fatima would be likely to give up Vivienne’s secrets. Lili knew the way Mexicans like Fatima thought. Everything was fate, destiny. Should destiny return Vivienne to her rightful place as mistress of the house, it would do Fatima no good to have revealed anything. Lili might be well meaning, but she was a usurper. Only God could bring Vivienne back. For that Fatima had to pray and wait.

Lili picked up a pillow that had fallen off the bed. Just to check, she lifted the dust ruffle. Fatima was a good housekeeper. No thick coat of dust here, just a book dropped between the bed and the nightstand. When she opened it—a Mexican novel— a thin sheet of onionskin paper fell to the floor. She set the paper on the night table, smoothing its ripples, and turned on the lamp. Some of Vivienne’s doodlings— a sketched pen-and-ink drawing of the Sun Pyramid, a self-portrait of Vivienne draped over the top of the pyramid, dwarfing it, her wild, long hair tumbling to the ground. Underneath, Vivienne had scrawled the words Avenida de los Muertos. Avenue of the Dead.

Lili imagined Vivienne, her dark sunglasses hiding the crow’s feet she worried about, sitting in the restaurant at the Teotihuacán ruins, saw her peeling off this piece of aerogram paper from a tablet, lifting her expensive German pen, drawing the delicate lines that made up so much of her scribblings, lines no more substantial than dragonfly legs. Lili focused on the drawing on the bottom of the page, rows of skeleton heads hanging from the side of the pyramid, Vivienne’s own face among them.

“Iphigenia at Teo,” Viv had written.

Lili felt a shock of recognition. The daughter sacrificed for her father’s war. She wanted to scream at her sister, “It wasn’t just you, he sacrificed, for his dreams of the worker’s paradise. But, now was not the time. After she found Viv, she could scream all she wanted, but not now.

Folding up the drawing, she wondered what was it like to be Vivienne. To believe your suffering was the stuff of tragedy. To know you were a bright, burning star, and to watch as everyone else, boring gray moths to the flame, rushed in— Lili right with them— flapping her dull little wings. Putting the drawing back in the book, she reminded herself of the drugs in the medicine chest— all downers and lithium. Nothing was worth that.

Lili wandered into the hallway, and for lack of anything concrete to do at this hour, she scanned Vivienne’s art collection—a framed painting of a bloated woman by Bottero, a sad-faced Indian girl by Maria Izquierdo, a small Tamayo, all vibrating light and color, very beautiful and very pricey. And to the left of the door hung a chip of an Aztec fresco of Quetzalpapalotl, the Blue Butterfly. Who were her sources, as she called them, the collection of vaguely sleazy oddballs who contacted her with offers? There must be some clue here. Even the walls could be hiding secrets the way Indian carvings on colonial churches hid Aztec deities— the rain god, the god of the starry night. They were all there, buried amidst the sour-faced saints and martyrs, if you knew how to see them.

Lili went into the bathroom and poured water from an agua mineral bottle over her toothbrush, the high whine of the light bulb next to the sink echoing in the room’s tall ceilings. She passed her hand over the light switch on the wall by the bathroom door, and the metallic sound died. A door slammed somewhere— probably Hanes.

Still searching, Lili picked through Vivienne’s jewelry again—Frida Kahlo earrings, big silver cuffs and hair combs, a man’s heavy gold wedding ring with tiny Hebrew letters engraved on the inside. Definitely not her father’s, but could Vivienne have a hidden ex-husband she’d never known about? It was certainly possible. Anything was possible. There was so much about Vivienne that was a mess— a wild, exotic mess— and Lili had been cleaning up those messes her whole life.

She heard voices on the terrace. Peering out the French doors in the dining room, she saw Sr. Misterioso seated at the patio table under an umbrella, a candle flickering in a hurricane lamp on the table. He was talking on the cell phone. What had Fatima said? That he’d complained of some problem with his oven. Well, she’d tell him to discuss it further with the housekeeper, leave it to Fatima’s miserly ways.

As she stepped onto the terrace, he stood, emerging from the umbrella’s shadows, and Lili was surprised by his large, athletic, frame.

“Buenas noches,” he bowed. “Soy Alejandro Perez-Luna a sus ordenes.” He pulled out a chair, scraping the wrought iron on the tile. “Care to join me for a brandy? Please, sit.”

Hanes had been right. The man was film star beautiful. Lili noticed his strong jaw, felt his black eyes cut through her reserve. Perez-Luna poured a brandy and handed it to Lili.

Lili shook her head. “No gracias.” She wanted to go back inside, wouldn’t let herself be swayed by Perez-Luna’s handsome charm, wouldn’t allow him think she was one of the gringas with a bad reputation. “I understand you have a problem with your oven.”

Alejandro Perez-Luna laughed. “Nothing is wrong with my oven. And if it were, I would be the last to know. It was only a pretext.”

“A pretext?”

“A pretext to meet a fascinating woman.”

Lili flinched. The words attractive, lovely might have been expected, though she would never say them about herself, but fascinating was a surprise. Had Joel ever called her fascinating?

“Your sister spoke of you often, said you were changing the world, making it better, teaching the new robber baron’s children to be Marxists. Que bueno,” he smiled. “The computer age is our Gilded Age, don’t you think? All that new money and the social displacement that follows.”

“Not all of them are wealthy. We bus kids from other areas,” she said, uncertain why she was continuing the conversation, or why she felt moved to defend her rich students. “Anyway, I’m hardly indoctrinating them.”

“I understand your sister seems to be missing. If I can help.” He opened his suit jacket, pulled out a wallet and handed Lili a business card.

Lili took the card and read the words Lic. Alejandro Perez Luna Senedor. Partido Democratico Revolucionario. Why would a politician live here? Then Lili remembered Yarabi Molino—of course, a love nest. “You’re a senator?”

“A socialist senator. My father was livid.” Senator Perez-Luna swirled his brandy in his glass. “But I made it up to him.”

“How?”

“I won.”

Lili laughed and then wished she hadn’t. It felt like a loss, that little reflex. She stood up as if to go, but noticed the look of surprise on Perez- Luna’s handsome face. Maybe she should be careful not to offend him. She might need his help. “I’m glad about the oven.” She flashed a smile. “This mess with my sister will be over soon.” Past his shoulder, Lili saw city lights, shell after bright shell on an endless beach.

“It would be my pleasure to assist in any way,” he told her, standing, and with that gesture, releasing her.

Back in the flat, she rummaged through Vivienne’s closet for a nightgown and wondered how well Perez-Luna knew Vivienne? Had they been lovers? Of course—why else would he live here? And Yarabi Molino? Lili knew everyone in Vivienne’s little bohemian world was as intertwined as mating snakes.

Opening a little box of matches, she lit the votive candle of the Virgin of Miracles on Vivienne’s dresser. For luck, she told herself, just in case the virgin knew where Vivienne was and would bring her home. The face of the virgin glowed pink from candle wax.

“Help us, Virgencita,” Lili whispered to the beatific face surrounded by a crown of tinsel stars glued to the glass.

She felt sick, sick with fear for Vivienne, sick with the memories of her family. She grieved for all of them, for their inflated dreams, their need for perfect worlds—the workers’ paradise, the romantic idyll. Lili blew out the Virgin’s candle and climbed into bed. She reached her right arm across her chest and held on to her shoulder, waiting for sleep’s black oblivion. She didn’t want to be haunted by their dreams—her father’s, her mother’s, Vivienne’s. She had made sure that her own life would be placid and calm, full of cool grey fog, pale straw-colored California hills. She imagined the oak trees dripping in mist, heard the foghorn at Land’s End.

Home, she thought, trying to hold onto the images as they receded into the darkness of Vivienne’s room.