All About Jane's Ranch

PROLOGUE

Mexico City
The Day of the Dead

“Cuanto?” the old woman asked. How much.

“No mucho. Bastante,” the younger woman answered. Not much. Enough.

The old woman pulled a cigarette out of her housecoat pocket, turned her head and scanned the alley, looking for someone. “Como te llamas?” she asked, striking a match against the wall.

“Vivienne, pero, aqui me llaman Viviana.”

“Pues, Viviana. Que quieres?”

“Lo que ofrece.” Whatever you can give.

“No tengo mucho.”

“Es suficiente.”

Just then a car turned into the alley from the cross street, its headlights swiping the metal door of a fruit stand, illuminating a graffiti sprayed wall.

“Ya vienen.” The older woman nodded toward the car. Lista? Are you ready?

“Si, Lista,” the younger woman said. I’m ready.

CHAPTER ONE

Just past the Cuauhtemoc freeway entrance, the city went dark. The lights on the Pemex Tower disappeared, and the neon Suntory billboard that had been flashing on and off in the distance evaporated into the night. All Lili could see was a blur of headlights approaching from the other side of the periferico, whizzing past in a rush.

“Que pasa?” she asked, leaning forward over the driver’s seat.

“Falta de electricidad. Huelga. El sindicato,” the cab driver shrugged. The electricians were on strike. “Bienvenido a Mexico.” He reached out, turned up the radio, and the announcer’s Rs rolled over the static. “Estas escuchando la RRRRradio de la Capital.”

Lili leaned her head back on the cracked upholstery and counted the hours since she’d gotten the news, since she’d been padding around her little bungalow in Menlo Park, trying to come up with a lesson plan for her AP Spanish class, and had absent-mindedly clicked on her computer where an e- mail from an unknown sender had turned her life around. The heading read simply “V Missing.”

Lili knew exactly who V. was. Vivienne. Her sister.

What followed, after a plea for help from the writer, who turned out to be Vivienne’s neighbor and tenant, was an attached article from the Mexican Herald dated November 4. Once downloaded, the headline — Filmmaker’s Daughter Reported Missing — blared from the computer, each bold-faced word a blow. Lili’s heart had raced as she had read the following:

Vivienne Golden, daughter of blacklisted filmmaker Manny Golden, has been reported missing. Miss Golden, owner of the Palace of the Blue Butterfly gallery on Avenida Dumas, was last seen three days ago leaving Restaurante Izote in the Polanco. Friends say she had been celebrating the Day of the Dead and that she left the restaurant around 10:30 p.m. alone. According to her housekeeper, Miss Golden did not return to her Colonia Roma residence that night.

Lili rubbed her eyes, remembering how the rest of the article dragged her father up from the grave— Emmanuel Golden, the martyr, the victim. He was, all those things of course, but that was only part of the truth. The drink, the drugs, the women, well, his fawning admirers always left them out.

The Herald writer filled in whatever space he needed to with all of Manny’s good deeds and with Vivienne’s connection to them how “Miss Golden was chairwoman of the Emanuel Golden Foundation”, how the foundation supported young Mexican filmmakers, how it was named for her father who refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, how Manny had expatriated to San Miguel del Allende, and so on and so on until the writer finally remembered Vivienne and urged . . .

. . . anyone with information about Miss Golden to contact the police in any delegacion, as well as the American Embassy on Avenida Reforma.

But no one had.

Now in the blacked-out city, inching along in traffic, Lili stared through the window at the faces in a crammed combi van in the next lane and found herself searching for Vivienne’s face again. It was something she’d been doing ever since the pilot had turned on the seatbelt sign and had begun his descent over the volcanoes. She’d peered beneath the wing where, under the smoggy afternoon air, a turquoise pool had swept by, a golf course, a Ferris wheel set up in a raw muddy field. Her focus had sharpened then, as if she might, if she looked hard enough, see the beautiful Vivienne riding up and down on the brightly lit Ferris wheel, waving to her.

Of course, her sister had not been there. Neither had she been in the crowd at the airport, standing at the Mexicana counter, purchasing a ticket to Oaxaca or some other location, nor had she been queued up in the cold outside the airport waiting at the taxi sitio. As hard as Lili looked out of the cab window, she had not found her sister standing at a magazine kiosk in the shabby streets of Colonia Moctezuma, or among the devout, marching with candles around the boxwoods in a local park, their patron saint held aloft in a glass coffin. But Lili kept squinting into bus windows and at pedestrians, her eyes dry from staring; Vivienne’s absence was everywhere.

The oncoming traffic lights thinned out as the driver swerved up the Colonia Roma off-ramp and turned left onto Calle Orizaba. Even in the dark, Lili knew this was Vivienne’s neighborhood with its crumbling, Porfiriato palaces, all of them sinking into the drained Aztec lake. Lili leaned forward and pointed to a dark clump of trees. The taxi’s lights swiped their peeling bark, and they were suddenly, briefly bright. “Esta en frente, en la Plaza Rio de Janerio.”

“Si. Okay.” He drove around the plaza, past the decaying fin de siecle villas until they reached the side of the small, circular park across from Vivienne’s house. He pulled to the right and stopped at number 47, a three-story chateau built, Vivienne had told her, for the French mistress of one of Porfirio Diaz’s clerks. The romantic story more important to Vivienne than the building’s alarming cracks. Of course, it was. Romance always mattered most to Vivienne. She’d gotten that from their mother.

All the good it had done both of them.

“Gracias.” Lili handed the driver a pale blue twenty-peso note for a tip, opened the door and stepped onto the sidewalk. The air around her smelled like Mexico City at this time of year—-all dust and dry leaves. Even blindfolded, she’d know where she was.

The driver hopped out, the engine running, and stood next to her. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the gritty air. “Espero aqui, hasta que contesten.” He’d wait with her.

Lili rang the bell next to the wooden doorway, built wide enough for nineteenth century carriages. She found herself hoping against hope Vivienne would open the door, but that was not likely. Lili had checked her cell phone in the taxi que at the airport, praying to hear Viv’s lilting voice—“Oh God, Lili, eso es un fracaso total!” Nothing. Not even a text message from the tenant, Hanes, who’d e-mailed yesterday with the terrible news—V missing. She pushed the doorbell again, over and over, until the heavy barricade opened, and the crow-like face of Fatima, Vivienne’s housekeeper, peered out.

“Ay Gracias a Dios. Bendito sea Dios.” Fatima began to cry. “Dona Lilia.”

Lili put her arm around the tiny, weeping woman, nodded to the driver, and watched the cab speed off, taillights flashing red, toward Avenida Obregon. She squeezed the housekeeper’s shoulder. “I’m here, Fatima. I’m here now. No te llores.”

Fatima rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, lifted Lili’s bag and pulled her into the servant’s quarters through a door on the right side of the zaguan. Under the brick boveda ceiling, a man and woman—about in their forties Lili guessed—sat at Fatima’s table, yellow candlelight illuminating their faces. The man, small and dark with a mop of curly black hair, leaned over the cards spread in a cross shape in front of him, lost in the bright pictures.

“Senor Baxter?” Lili asked.

The man laughed, and without looking up, nodded towards the woman. “Es ella,”

The woman stood, and when she did, her straight, silver hair spilled to her waist. “Lili,” she said, offering her hand. “We’ve been expecting you. Gabito,” she spoke to the man. “Por favor, un poquito de cortesia.”

Gabito peeled a bright card off the deck. “The Queen of Swords,” he announced, placing the card upside down on the table. He looked up and nodded at Lili. “Bienvenido. Soy Gabriel Beltran. Gusto en conocerle.”

“Egualmente,” Lili said.

Gabriel Beltran thwapped another Tarot card onto the oilcloth. “We must do the cards,” he said. “We must know if we should involve ourselves. We must understand who is this Queen of Swords.” He shuffled the deck. “Es importante. We can only solve this problem with imaginacion.”

“Gabi is your sister’s business manager,” the woman drawled, her accent placing her below the Mason Dixon Line. “I’m surprised y’all haven’t met befo-ah.”

Actually, she didn’t sound surprised in the least.

The strange, silver-haired Hanes Baxter possessed a pale, eerie beauty, sort of like a Vermeer painting in motion, Lili thought, while Gabi could have been her pet—a dachshund perhaps—-, all pointed features and jittery energy, save for his eyes—deep, brown pools. He regarded her now with those eyes, neither kind nor unkind, just a glassy reflection of what he saw in front of him, waiting. She had the sense he could turn vicious on a dime.

“Si, si. Las cartas.” Fatima pointed to the cards. “Que dicen?” she asked him, full of anxiety. What do they say?

“Whatever he wants them to say,” Hanes drawled.

“You have a very bad attitude, companera.” Gabi snapped the cards. “The cards may tell you nothing now.” He reached for a black and gold book embossed with Cartas del Tarot and turned the dry pages.

“Like all Mexicans my companero is deeply superstitious.”

“And like most gringas Senora Bax–tair is very arrogant.” Gabi looked up the explanation for the Queen of Swords Reversed. “ Except Dona Viviana. She understands. She has powers.” He pointed to the queen in the book as if it were a kind of proof. “This is the symbol of female wisdom,” Gabi said. “We must understand why the card appears the wrong way.”

It seemed pretty obvious to Lili why her sister —the Queen—was upside down. She always had been, and now she was even more the wrong way than ever. She was missing. Not that she hadn’t taken off before. Because she had.

Hanes sighed. “I’m not much for this sort of thing. Shall I walk you to Vivienne’s apartment? You must be tired.”

Lili nodded, and lifted her bag. “Buenas noches,” she said to the others. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Vaya con Dios,” Fatima said, handing her a candle and making the sign of the cross on her forehead.

“How long will it go on like this?” Lili held the candle above her, trying to see the way.

“The séance in there? Who knows?” Hanes ran her fingers through her silver sheet of hair and rolled her eyes.

“No, the blackout.”

“Oh that. Depends on who blinks first, the Electrical Union or Calderon, I suppose. It’s a cajones thing, sugar” Hanes stopped at the fountain, now silent and dank, all the splattering water stopped dead by the power outage. She pointed towards the sky with a long, thin arm. “Look. There’s a waning moon. You’d never see it if there weren’t a blackout. It’s probably some kind of sign.” She paused, “Waning? Waxing? Which do you think is better?”

Lili glanced at the bright, cold chip in the night sky above the courtyard, wishing she could see any meaning at all in the moon, the cards, the cast of the die that set her upside-down sister in motion and put Lili in orbit around her.

Hanes waved her arm at the second story balcony—a wide marble passageway bordered by carved stone balustrades, “Gabi’s and my apartment.” She pointed toward a blue door. “Blue keeps the malas espiritus away.” She paused, sizing Lili up with a glance. “You don’t believe me, do you?” She laughed a throaty laugh and turned, climbing to the mezzanine landing where a seven-foot carved wooden Christ hung on his cross in eternal agony.

“My sister seems to have taken the Mexican thing a bit too far, don’t you think?”

Hanes stopped. “Do you have any idea what it’s worth? It’s Siglo de Oro. An absolute fortune. A friend gave it to her.”

“Nice friend. Rich friend, I’d say.”

“Well, she has lots of them, as I suppose you know.” Hanes continued around the second floor balcony and up another flight of stairs. Lili followed, aiming her candle toward the iron grillwork that ringed the walkway. In the candlelight, the railing looked as flimsy as a mantilla.

Hanes stopped in front of an ornately carved door on the south side of the building, “Those rooms,” she pointed across the opening above the courtyard, “belong to Senor Misterioso.” He moved in last May.” Hanes mimicked a vaudeville swoon. “ Oh, you wouldn’t get the reference, would you? It’s a Telenovela with Jorge Salinas. He kind of looks like Salinas. Anyway, Vivienne and mystery man share the terrace at the back of the house. I don’t know how much you’ll see of him. He seems to have an active social life, as one would imagine. Anyway, from the terrace, there’s a view. Not that it’s the rooftops of Rome or anything. I would have asked Senor Misterioso if he’d heard anything, if he’d spoken with Vivienne, but he hasn’t been around.” Hanes reached Vivienne’s door, turned and squinted Lili’s direction. “I must say you’re not what I expected. All my high-school teachers were old biddies, those of them who weren’t nuns and flat out baldheaded under their habits. You’re rather soigné.”

Years of teaching teenagers had kept Lili’s defenses agile. She tossed out the following riposte. “ Haircut— Yosh,” she fluffed her auburn curls. “Make-up— Bobbie Brown. Leather jacket— Jil Sander Neiman Marcus. The French readers,” she lifted her glasses from their chain around her neck.” Focal Point in Berkeley, It’s the Bay Area native’s tribal costume, donned by women of a certain age. We all look like this.” Still, she bristled at Hanes’s remark, and making light of it didn’t take away the sting. Had Vivienne described her as a frump? “Anyway,” I was expecting you to be.. “

“A man, right? Hanes finished the sentence. “ Always happens. It’s a southern thing, family names and all that, tres important down in Nawlins. Oh Damn,” Hanes swore, turning the word into two syllables. Day-um. “ I forgot to get a key from Fatima. “I’ll have to descend Mt. Everest again, she said leaning over the banister. Tell me you have a key.”

Lili nodded.

“Fabulous. Well, goodnight then. I hate to bring this up, but tomorrow you should call that kidnapping service in Texas. I’ve got the number.”

“Thank you.” Lili offered one of her candles.

Hanes shook her head. “I’m quite good at walking in the dark, dahlin. You have to be down here.”

Lili listened to her footsteps clatter down the staircase, heard her door creak open, then close. She looked down on the courtyard for a moment, feeling like a sailor looking overboard, then she touched the mezuzah by the door with two fingers and brought them to her lips. Reaching behind the small brass scroll, she found the carved-out place behind it. The key was where she guessed it would be, in its little cave behind the mezuzah, a trick her parents had taught the girls. Her commie father had said it was the only useful thing in the whole goddamn religion. Lili took the key, wrapped in the parchment where the S’hma was written, and then slipped the mezuzah back in place. She held the candle up to the keyhole, turned the key, and pushed the door open. The sound of her suitcase scraping the wood floor only made her sister’s abandoned flat sound darker, emptier.

She turned left down the hall, feeling her way to the closed pocket doors. When her hand touched the brass knobs, she pulled them apart. Inside the old ballroom—Vivienne’s living room now— the smell of trapped wood smoke lingered. Lili set her candle on the fireplace mantle. A log lay in the grate, and she kneeled to pass her hand across it. Cold. She stood, kicked it with her toe, and the log collapsed into white ash, too old to be any clue.

Lili lifted the candle and waved it around the room as if, abracadabra, the gesture would make Vivienne appear. But no one materialized on either side of the two sofas flanking the carved, marble fireplace—not that she really expected it. Lili sank into the upholstery. Now what, she asked herself.

At least she’d made it this far.

“How do you know you’ll even get out of the airport alive?” Joel— her partner of how many years was it now?— had demanded early that morning, putting his hand on her suitcase to stop her from packing. “Are you nuts? Leave it to the embassy.” He’d reminded her of the statistics— almost six thousand dead this year. He’d reminded her of the French scientist who’d been followed as he left the airport, robbed and killed in a cab. “And that was just two weeks ago, Lili.”

“Precisely why I have to go.” Lili lifted his hand from her bag and shoved in a sweater and a wad of socks.

As it turned out, she’d been a lot less brave once she landed. When the cab driver took an unexpected route, the story of the French scientist flashed in front of her. “Donde vamos?” she shouted—already looking for some way to escape— when the driver turned down a narrow, barely paved street of derelict buildings and dingy bars, their jukeboxes blaring ranchero music. The driver had held up a scratchy sounding walkie-talkie just as a woman stepped out of one of the slum buildings and sloshed dishwater from a plastic basin onto the street.

“No hay paso,” he’d told Lili. There was a strike, and a water main in the Isabel la Catolica subway station had been broken by vandals. The area was blocked off and the traffic had come to a halt. “Central,” he’d shouted into the walkie-talkie, demanding directions, an alternate route.

You could get tired of all this, Lili thought, decide to walk or grab an unofficial cab if the driver promised a faster route. Could Vivienne have done that? Lili wondered, looking at her watch. Nine-thirty. Quite early by Mexico City standards. Maybe this episode of Vivienne’s would be over in a few hours. Any minute Vivienne might arrive home, breathless and dramatic. “Oh my God, Lili,” she’d laugh. “What a nightmare.”

But as for now, she hadn’t arrived. She wasn’t swirling around the room, recounting her escapades. Everything, except for the distant roar of traffic, was dead silent.

Lili rubbed her chilled hands across her face, pushed her palms into her eyes to dull the headache that had started. What was the psychiatric euphemism for her sister’s problems? Acting out, that was it, words that made her think of a Garbo movie, the actress collapsed on a fainting couch. How unlike the words Vivienne’s acting out really was. Lili thought of all the sobbing phone calls, the panicked telegrams from far-off places—the stolen traveler’s checks, the misplaced passport and the friend who’d abandoned her in Istanbul, or was it Athens? Vivienne’s disasters were starting to blur together. And now this.

All it took was one error, and Vivienne was capable of so many. Even the head of the FBI’s task force had been kidnapped in San Luis Potosi last summer. He’d trusted the wrong person. Only a brief lapse is all it would take— not noticing the man crossing the street near your car as you waited for the light to change, never seeing the hammer he would use to smash the window, the gun he would point at your temple. She thought of her sister, her mind smashed like hammered window glass, tiny unconnected lines going everywhere. Which error had it been this time? What was it someone had wanted?

Lili walked to the armoire Vivienne had set up as a bar— a looming, chestnut closet hauled over from France in the nineteenth century by some hacendado. On the shelves were bottles of single malt scotch and Kentucky bourbon, a bottle of Courvoisier and a fine reposado tequila. The glasses were set upside down, the cocktail napkins fanned on top of one another like petals as if Vivienne had been expecting guests. Lili poured two fingers of scotch in a glass and drank, letting it dull the lost-at-sea feeling that was enveloping her. The city seemed as vast as an ocean, full of strange, distant sounds. Even the air felt as if it had rushed in, violent as a wave on sand, to wipe out the traces of her sister’s body, the imprint of her hands straightening a painting, one of her expensive treasures.

Lili noticed a new one on the wall next to the fireplace—a Toledo lithograph of an erupting beehive. Lili sipped her drink and stared at the swarming insects. Like her sister, she thought, always stirring up things, erupting in mad flight.

She turned from the Toledo painting to the French windows on the south side of the room where a row of shutters had not been closed. The polished wood creaked under her steps, and the glass, like black mica, reflected the candle flame. Lili shaded her eyes with her hands and peered out. The large jacarandas rose, huge sentries watching over the garden. Lili stared at the lawn, patches of it silver in the moonlight, until her breath smoked the windowpane, and the jacarandas disappeared in a cloud. She knew Viv hired a team of workers to wash the pollution off the trees three times a year and was planning a pool beneath them, where the petals could fall on the water.

Lili shivered. This place cost a fortune. There was Fatima, half her family off and on, and a whole retinue of Indian servants who came and went with the wind. There was Gabi, the business manager, Hanes, the southern belle, and who knew who else. These villas were their own small worlds. Someone here had to know something about what had happened to Vivienne. Lili would demand answers, threaten an investigation. No one in Mexico wanted to get messed up with the police.

How does anyone live in such a huge city? she wondered, recalling someone at one of Vivienne’s soirees, a British woman, asking the same question. A Mexican man leaning against the wall, smoking, had answered, “Mexico City is just a cluster of small villages. You are born in one colonia about five blocks wide, you live there, you die there.” He blew smoke, as if to emphasize the end of the chilango life-cycle.

Lili hoped the man had been right, that Vivienne was just five blocks from her house, that the blackout had somehow prevented her from returning, or that she was in Playa del Carmen with a lover, with one of her many friends. Anything, Lili thought, pressing her forehead against the cool window pane, that meant she didn’t have to turn this over to the police, because, if she did, they were doomed. Scanning the shadowy lawn once more, praying she would see Vivienne unlock the iron gate, Lili noticed Vivienne’s vintage Citroen, parked—obviously, left behind— on the gravel spur in front of the garage.

She thought of the dangerous things Vivienne could have gotten lured into. Was the art just a drug front? Were the antiques? Was she involved with really bad people and oblivious to the fact? Her sister saw the world as she wanted it to be, Lili knew, not as it was.

Really, she shouldn’t be thinking about this anymore, not tonight— she needed sleep if she were to be any use tomorrow— but here, in this drafty ballroom, in the strong currents left in her sister’s wake, Lili felt a jarring sensation, a distorted alertness. Past her sister’s antiques, her art, her lovely jacarandas was all empty space, unfinished gaps. Why hadn’t Lili noticed all the missing parts of Vivienne’s world last spring when she had stood in this very room? Because Vivienne had been there, flitting and blazing like a lit kite over a Moon Festival, wobbly, drunk, stoned, her feet barely on the ground. Now in this rushing vacuum, Lili noticed there were no pictures of friends or family, no tossed mail, no unread books spilled to the floor. The room was a theater set after the audience and actors had gone, after the janitor had swept and cut the lights.

Making her way through the dark to Vivienne’s bedroom, Lili spotted her purse on the floor by her suitcase. She carried it into the bedroom and, lifting the gauzy panels that surrounded Vivienne’s iron plantation bed, tossed it onto bedspread. Lace mosquito netting, another one of Vivienne’s romantic notions. She said it reminded her of childhood trips to the Yucatan, where the beds were swathed in gauze to protect the girls from dengue fever. Princess beds, Vivienne had called them, making even the threat of disease seem glamorous.

Lili felt around in her purse and pulled out her phone. This place was so different from her own organized life in the Bay Area, the life in which Joel would be sitting in bed reading, waiting for her call. But, if she called now, they would just fight about Vivienne—how she should be institutionalized, how this couldn’t go on, how she was manic, a dope fiend. It was all so simple for Joel, and Lili couldn’t face it, not tonight. She was too tired, too scared. And besides, it was not simple. Instead, she called his Stanford office, told him she didn’t want to wake him, that she arrived safe and sound.

She clicked the phone shut, stretched out in the bed and buried her face in Viv’s pillow, breathing in the cat fur smell of her sister’s hair and the grassy scent of her perfume. Then, she reached for the candle and blew it out. She could still hear the airplane engines, the sound trapped in her ears like the ocean sound in a shell, still felt she was moving with the plane, up and down, floating on wavy air in the dark.

It was bright when she woke, everything white and too bright —white bed, white shutters, white lights. She sat up, groggy, cotton-mouthed, her heart fluttering. Light blazed from the crystal chandelier, hanging large and glassy near Vivienne’s bed. The electricity—it must have come on while she’d been asleep. Her eyes followed the ancient wiring along the ceiling and down the wall to the light switch. She climbed out of bed, her heart still racing, and swiped her hand across the switch, but lamps still shone brightly in the living room. She shivered as she padded down the hall to cut them off.

Back in bed, she wrapped the comforter around her shoulders and breathed deeply and slowly, willing her heart to stop racing, willing her mind to silence the litany of chores chanting inside her head—go to the embassy, call the kidnapping service, sort through Vivienne’s things, comb through the gallery on Dumas for clues. The lights, she wondered. Had she turned them on without thinking or had Vivienne left them on?

Then, there was a noise, and she froze, certain she’d heard the back door open. Lying there rigid, she heard it again. Lili bolted up from bed. “Viv?” she shouted. “Vivi? she called out, edging her way down the hall. But, no answer.“Quien es?” Who’s there? The door creaked again, then banged against the frame.

Only the wind.

Out on the terrace, bougainvillea flowers blew across the tiles. The patio umbrella fluttered, and the horizon over the roof ledge was grey with ambient city light now that the electricity had returned. But there was someone there, sitting on the ledge behind a large, potted kentia palm—a woman, half-hidden by fronds, the orange glow from her cigarette punctuating the air. Her back was turned. Lili crossed the terrace, breathing in cigarette smoke and the dusty, Mexico City wind. “Desculpe,” Lili said. “Estaba aqui alguien mas?” she asked. Had she seen anyone else?

The woman turned, and Lili thought she recognized her from a movie. She was severe-looking, with wide-set eyes and bangs cut straight across her forehead like a Lacandon Indian. The woman looked at Lili and lifted her cigarette to her lips. Small silver bracelets cascaded down her arm, a waterfall of clinking metal. “No,” she said.

“Yarabi.” A man’s voice called from the other apartment.

Of course. Yarabi Molino—the first Mexican woman to get an Oscar.

“Ya.Voy.” Yarabi dropped her cigarette, crushed it against the tiles with one of her huaraches and walked toward the man’s voice as if she had all the time in the world, as if the man beckoning her would just have to wait. Her mother had walked like that, Lili remembered with a sharp pang, regally and with hauteur, even drunk, even with one hand against the wall.

After Lili heard the apartment door click shut, she sat down on the ledge of the terrace. Cars rushed along the periferico south out of town. Closer, a siren approached, screaming.

This was Vivienne’s world, the one she had taken up after her parents left it half-destroyed. God, how had either of them survived their childhood? The fame—or notoriety— the revolucion in Cuba, the rum and cokes, the hangers-on? None of it had done her sister any good. And where would Lili be now, she wondered, had she stayed, relying on favors from her father’s inebriated cohorts, his contactos and compadres?

She’d fled that drunken, defeated existence. She’d wanted the safe, bourgeois life her father had condemned.

The lit buildings now sprawled before her, an iridescent, brilliant, spill. She needed to get out of here fast—find Vivienne, find what had driven her from her house full of movie stars and mystery men. She would make some sane arrangement for her sister, and get back to Joel, her classes, her committees, her docent tasks at the University Art Museum, the things that anchored her.

In the distance, a siren shrieked again, one long wail, then a short one. Inside, she slipped the brass bolt into place. Behind the windowpane grid, the city seemed far away, contained, the rushing traffic no longer so loud. This would be the way she would remember this night when she got home, a remote dream, more like a ten-peso postcard tossed on her desk, the rectangular image faded with age.