Prologue
Beneïu, Senyor, aquests aliments
que de les teves mans rebrem. Amen.
After the prayer had been said over supper, fourteen-year-old Mayte Forta raised her eyes from her folded hands and pushed up her horn-rimmed glasses with the tip of her finger. Her own family never said grace the way the Figueres family did, but when in Rome… Of course, Olga and her family were members of the Opus Dei. Hipercatòlics, Mayte’s mother used to call them in jest. Before she died six months earlier, that was. She had made the Christmas escudella the day before the car accident that ended her life and her husband’s. It was Mayte’s favorite soup. She had helped her mother by making the pilota, a giant meatball that simmered in the broth to be divided among the diners on Christmas Day and they always made it a day or two early because it tasted better once the flavors had a chance to marry. However, last Christmas had been spent in the hospital, and Sant Esteve, the day after, in the funeral home. The escudella went untouched as they couldn’t bear to eat it, and Mayte’s grandmother, l’avia Cristina, dumped the whole thing down the toilet in batches, crying the whole time. A bump to Mayte’s arm shook her out of the memory. Olga Figueres gave her a look of concern.
“Are you okay?” she asked. Mayte nodded. Though she had passed the period in which she had spent whole days crying, she still thought about her parents all the time, particularly her mother. Mayte put on a schooled, cheerful expression and looked around the table. Olga’s parents smiled at her and began to eat. Olga’s brother, Rafel, who was sixteen, was already lost in his dish and Asha Palau, the third member of Mayte’s tight little circle of friends, kept looking over at him while picking at her food.
After the meal, Asha and Mayte offered to help with the dishes but the Figueres summer home had staff who did that, so the girls were free to wander around the grounds until it was time for bed.
“So, still crushing on Rafel, I see,” said Olga. Asha shrugged and looked down. The three were sitting on a rattan couch on the stone porch in the back of the house, their feet huddled under a blanket. Even in summer, it was cold at night in the sierra.
Mayte would have bet that Asha was blushing under her dark skin. “Don’t worry,” she said. “When he sees how pretty you look at church this Sunday, he’ll come around.”
“Maybe he’s just not into black girls,” said Asha.
“These days, the only thing he’s into is his horse,” said Olga, making the other girls laugh. As if to give truth to the statement, Rafel came out of the house with an apple in each hand, ignored the three of them as usual, and headed toward the stables. He was followed by peels of laughter, mostly from his sister and Mayte.
“It was really nice of your parents to invite us up for the summer,” said Mayte, gazing up into the clear sky. Most of the lights were off and the stars shone bright above them. “It’s beautiful here.”
“Well, they’ve been worried about you since…” Olga took Mayte’s hand. “Well, you know.”
“How are you holding up?” asked Asha, giving Mayte a squeeze. Mayte loved the smell of coconut hair shine that was a part of her friend.
“I’m okay most of the time, I guess,” she said. “I’ve accepted that it’s happened, but there are moments when it doesn’t seem real. It’s really hard when I hear my grandmother crying when she thinks I’m asleep. I think I’m the only reason she doesn’t die of sadness.”
“We’re here for you,” said Olga. Asha nodded in the darkness. They chatted about the upcoming school year until they saw Rafel returning to the house.
“So what’s on the agenda for tomorrow?” asked Mayte.
“Horseback riding,” said Olga. The three began giggling again as Rafel walked past them toward the door, shaking his head.
***
Mayte lay in the rollaway bed that had been wheeled into Olga’s room four weeks earlier. She listened to the quiet snoring of her best friends. Reaching under the bed, she found her glasses, put them on and looked about the room trying to sear every detail into her memory.
Asha and she were going back to Barcelona the next day, their holiday with Olga and her family having ended with a splendid barbecue on the grounds behind the house. One of Olga’s uncles had come with his wife and children to spend the weekend and there had been games and jokes with some of Olga’s cousins. It all left Mayte in a fog of mixed emotions, glad she had been invited to spend part of the summer in a place her parents could never have afforded, and heartbroken that the reason she was here was because her parents were dead and Olga’s had wanted to help her through her grief.
She would always remember this year for its many changes. While her parents’ death took center stage, it was also the year she had gotten braces, started wearing glasses, and experienced her menarche. Adolescent trifecta. She looked over at Olga, with her long, black hair and large blue eyes. Always cracking jokes and trying to break the rules. Her parents would be furious if they ever found out that she had paid the doorman of their luxury apartment in Barcelona to pretend he did not know that she snuck up to the rooftop to smoke at night. She had her finger on the pulse of all the juiciest gossip at school and was always ready for an adventure. It was Olga who always found reasons to pull the other two away from their studies to visit the Corte Inglés department store to try on clothes, hats, and sample colognes and makeup which they scrupulously removed before returning home. Olga was horribly spoiled, according to Mayte’s mother, but instead of being snobbish, as other girls in her position could be, she was always so happy to share her experiences with Mayte and Asha, that it was hard to ever be mad at her for very long even when she got them into trouble.
Asha was curled up under a light blanket on the other rollaway bed, her halo of frizzy hair, a soft mound on the pillow behind her. It slowly rose and settled as she breathed, her face indistinguishable from her hair in the shadows created by the moonlight. Catalan of Senegalese descent, Asha was tall and willowy with high cheekbones under smooth dark brown skin. She was the quietest of the three but had the sharpest intellect in Mayte’s opinion. She worked the hardest at school and earned top grades no matter what else was going on around her. Asha had told her once that because her mother had been raised in poverty, she had instilled in Asha the importance of excelling in her studies. She never wanted Asha to have to do without as she had before marrying Asha’s father and moving to Barcelona. Of all the people Mayte knew at school, Asha was the one who never minded giving up social events if she had studying to do. Mayte herself had sometimes had to do the same before an exam, but she had certainly minded. She had a healthy envy of her friend’s drive and her wisdom. Asha somehow knew how to navigate the line between having fun and keeping her compass facing true North. Mayte smiled, watching her friend sleep. She had no doubt Asha would succeed at whatever she set her mind to when they got older.
What would they remember about her? Mayte’s looks were almost stereotypically Mediterranean. Of average height with brown hair, light brown eyes, and a body shaped like a Spanish guitar, meaning all hips and butt, she knew there was nothing arresting about her appearance as was the case with Asha and Olga. She was more straight-laced than Olga would have preferred, the “good girl” of the group, always more comfortable with following the rules than she was ever tempted to break them. Asha once called her a setciències, a know-it-all, while acknowledging that Mayte was often right. When Olga wanted to get out of doing homework and take them on more adventurous pursuits, they all knew that Mayte was the one whom it took the longest to convince.
Mayte sighed. The next day, she and Asha would be home again, and in two weeks, school would start. Where she used to look forward to the first days of school, this year she’d be coming back every day to her avia’s house where the sadness was tangible. It still didn’t quite feel like home. At night, Mayte stayed awake listening to her avia quietly weep through the cardboard-thin walls of the apartment. Mayte would have given anything to have one more night of her mother coming into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight, however much she had complained about being too old for it. A tear slid down her cheek. She pulled a small lined notebook and a pen out from under the bed. She opened it to the first available blank page and wrote the date. She had started a journal when her parent’s died on the advice of a student counselor at the high school but found she was only able to write short sentences in it. Mayte would begin writing and a lump would form in her throat that threatened to choke her. She centered her pen on the page:
Nothing will ever be the same again.
The book, the pen, and her glasses went back under the bed. Mayte prayed that sleep would come quickly.
