The Santiago Sisters

‘No change?’

‘No change.’ Brian got up. He looped his arms around Simone’s waist and she did her best not to wince. She could feel Brian’s gut pressed up against her gym-toned stomach, and endeavoured to focus instead on the wall-mounted shots of him mixing with the power set. That was what had drawn her to him in the early days—how was she to know that underneath the façade lurked an overweight spineless doormat? No wonder Brian’s first wife had left him for a woman. If it weren’t for Brian’s bi-weekly ruts she would begin to doubt if he possessed anything between his legs at all.

Simone went upstairs and knocked softly on Tess’s bedroom door.

‘Tess, sweetheart?’ she called. ‘Can I come in?’

It had been like this for weeks. Tess emerged only to wash and eat. She didn’t speak. She didn’t engage. She held herself stiffly, as if she were made of glass. What was going on in her head? Anger, sadness, shock; which was the overriding emotion?

It would take time, Simone knew. A bit like training a dog. She was able to close her heart to Tess’s plight because once, many years ago, she too had been forced to make a sacrifice, one for the good of a child, and it had made her tough. If she could get through it, then the rest of the world ought to be able to as well.

She closed her eyes and swallowed hard, to stop herself gagging on the past. When she thought of it, she could still feel the weight of the baby in her arms.

The baby …

Taking Tess was karma. Simone deserved her child.

‘Still pissed with you, is she?’ Lysander passed her in the hall. He wore peppermint shorts and a polo shirt with the collar turned up, and looked offensively handsome. Wasn’t he meant to be at college? ‘Can’t say I’m surprised.’

‘You know nothing about this, Lysander.’

‘I know it’s abduction dressed as Armani.’

‘It is nothing of the sort!’ Simone was aghast.

He grinned.

‘You just stay away from her,’ she said. ‘Do you understand?’

Lysander took a step closer. He put a hand on the small of her back and her entire body tingled. ‘What,’ he whispered, ‘like you told me to stay away from you?’

Blushing wildly, Simone turned and flew downstairs. The sooner Lysander moved out of the mansion, the better. He was a diversion she could well do without.

13 (#ulink_3cfc7563-9c7c-54ca-a8b9-1a86a112eb5e)

Argentina

Calida’s sixteenth birthday drowned in all the other days.

If she had been capable of feeling, she would have felt her twin’s absence. She would have known that this was the first birthday they had ever spent apart. She would have touched the wound, the searing wound where Teresita had been ripped from her side in the same way she had been ripped at their inception. She would have looked at her hands, her arms, her knees, her chest, heard her breath and her pulse, and questioned what their mirror reflections were doing at this moment, the precise minute and second they had emerged, as two, into the world, sixteen years before.

But she didn’t, because it was any other day, and every day was submerged in the same numb disbelief so that it became impossible to make distinctions.

Her sister had gone. She wasn’t coming back.

Julia admitted it a week into the so-called vacation, unable to hold her tongue any longer. ‘Teresita begged me to let her go,’ she explained, as she exhibited another new acquisition: satin shoes, expensive perfumes, watches and jewels. Calida had thought it strange that Simone had been so generous—but she hadn’t known then the product she had paid for. ‘She begged Simone to take her. Told us she was ready—she was desperate. It’s permanent, Calida. Your sister’s been adopted. She’s gone to live in England. The sooner you come to terms with it then the easier it will be.’

Calida’s body was kicked and punched by her mother’s words. But her mind remained steady, and told her, quite calmly, through the noise: Of course. It was what Teresita had sought: to get away, to flee her humble beginnings, to forge her fortune.

Calida remembered every poisonous sentiment that had spilled from her twin’s lips on the night they had fought and in a ghastly way it added up. Being adopted by a movie star was the opportunity of a lifetime. Teresita hadn’t cared what she was leaving behind—it was no sacrifice to her. When I’m gone, I hope I never come back. I hope I never see you or this dying shit-hole ever again …

After the news, when the shock moved from sky-collapse to mere earth tremors, Calida wrote dozens of letters. Unable to extract Simone’s details from her mother, she instead located her manager online: a Michelle Horner, who had an office in Mayfair, London, and an address to go with it. On searching for the actress, pages brimmed with doppelgangers of the sweating, dishevelled woman who had graced their ranch that day: this one was ravishing. There were stills from her films and onstage; snapshots from articles and interviews, some of a young, wide-eyed Simone, and others where she was older and standing next to a suited fat man, or posing with a blonde girl and a black-haired boy, and looking a little less pleased with herself.

In her letters, she pleaded with Teresita to come home. She said she was sorry for the spiteful words they had exchanged, vowed that their friendship was worth more and had to be saved. No matter what … right? No matter what, they were there for each other. She wished to explain that there was a way back. There always would be. She wasn’t mad with Teresita for the decision she had made—it would have been a decision borne of the hurt and frustration of their showdown, and she understood.

Calida didn’t know what she had expected from initiating correspondence—but whatever it was, it wasn’t what she got. Silence.

Each one of her letters went unanswered. She waited every day at the gate for mail, hoping for change—but nothing. She imagined Simone and Teresita scrutinising the notes, her increasingly despairing tone as she implored her twin to reconsider, to come home, and laughing cruelly at her efforts. Though she tried with all her soul to deny it, she knew she had to face the truth. Teresita had closed the door on her family—what was left of it, anyway—and had no intention of opening it again.

She had always possessed a harder heart than Calida. But to read those letters and not be touched by any of it, or moved to reply, if for nothing else than to cement the choice she had already made? To ignore the twin who asked for understanding, for help, for forgiveness; not stopping once to acknowledge her part in the collapse of their relationship?

It wasn’t the sister she knew … or thought she had known.

It was a stranger.

The year 2000: a new millennium, a new start. Instead, it felt like an end. As the days passed and turned into weeks, Teresita became a ghost in her mind; the sudden ring of her sister’s laugh or the mischief that danced in her eyes assaulting her from nowhere, like a ghoul from the shadows. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep.

Calida’s sadness solidified into fury. Right now her twin would be in London, loving every moment, living out the fantasy that she and Julia shared, the fantasy that had always turned its back on Calida because she couldn’t understand it. How could she be so unfeeling, so pitiless; and for what—a palace of fakery? Yet despite Calida’s indifference to the glamorous lifestyle, and the painstaking denials she made to herself that she desired anything whatsoever to do with it, she couldn’t help the worm of envy that burrowed its way into her heart. Why hadn’t Simone taken her? Was she not pretty enough, lovely enough, exciting enough? What was it about Teresita that drew people like moths to a flame, while Calida stayed in darkness?

One day, Julia came to her and said: ‘I’m leaving. You’re sixteen now. You’ll live. I’ve renewed a friendship in the city and I’m going to stay there for a while.’

Calida’s mouth fell open. ‘What? But what about …?’

‘The farm?’ Julia swished a silk scarf over her shoulder. ‘Tell you what, Calida: it’s yours. You always did like this place better than I did.’

‘I can’t look after it on my own.’

‘You’ve got Daniel.’

‘Mama—you can’t. It’s not …’ Her throat closed, making it hard to speak. She felt like sand in an hourglass, time rushing through her fingers. ‘There isn’t—’

‘Come now, Calida. You’re an adult. Teresita’s started her new life. You can’t expect me to hang around here for the rest of my days playing the doting mama.’

And, just like that, the next morning, Julia left. Just like her daughter, she was able to turn away from her past and her responsibilities without a backward glance. She left behind no cash—but Calida wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. It was blood money, testament to the devil-sent pact the three of them had orchestrated, the abomination of that unholy exchange. Calida would have nothing to do with it.

Alone, she summoned Diego’s voice. Speak to me, Papa. Tell me what to do. And she heard his reply: Every path has an ending. Every problem has an answer.

It was the same guidance he’d bestowed on her when she took her pictures, telling her to be still and quiet and at peace, because only then was she truly able to see. Calida had become a lone pillar in a sandstorm, after the rest of the building had blown down. All her life she had been taught to be self-sufficient, to rely on no one but herself. Now, after the dismantling of her family, she understood for the first time how crucial this independence was. The way forward was to become the pillar; to lean on no other supports, neither props on either side nor a foundation beneath her feet.

Winter blew in. It was the harshest season Calida could recall, sleet lashing and winds crying, and some nights the gale threatened to tear the wooden farmhouse from the ground. The land froze and with it the ghosts of their crops. Food was scarce. The old roof leaked and dripped, and as fast as they repaired one fissure, another appeared. Calida lined up buckets on the kitchen floor, the slow seconds counted by the pit-pit of water as it spat into the tin. Each day she prayed for sun, a sliver of promise in the clouds, but the sky churned grey and limitless as a deep, livid sea.

Paco the horse became sick. It started with a waning in his eyes, a burning ember reduced to a flickering wick. He became listless and depressed, and lost his appetite. ‘Strangles,’ Daniel called the disease.

Calida couldn’t survive losing Paco as well. She floundered against his illness, unsure what steps to take. But Daniel knew. He said: ‘I know how much he means to you—it will be all right,’ and in the same grave, capable way as he tackled so much else on the farm, he did what was required to save Paco’s life. Calida questioned why Daniel was still here; the pay had long since dried up, but he never graced her with a response. Just once, he asked if she would refrain from enquiring again.

‘I’m part of this,’ he told her. ‘That isn’t going to change.’

But what had changed was the lost ease of their companionship, when Calida’s youth had excused her bumbling infatuation and Teresita had never said those wicked things. She can be so desperate. She should set her sights lower.