The Santiago Sisters

Teresita was watching the police lights. ‘What’s happened to Papa?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is he dead?’

The question stalled Calida. She knew the word that wanted to form on her tongue, the natural, logical word, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

Calida would reflect on that moment and the tormented days that followed as frozen segments in time, as still and silent as the images on her camera. Diego pinned against the tree, the brief, ruthless frame of his body before he’d been covered; Julia with a handkerchief to her face, crying for him or for herself; Teresita refusing to weep, even once, and refusing her sister’s sympathy and shutting herself away.

It transpired that Diego had been drinking. Not just that night but every night before. Calida didn’t understand why. Her papa was a responsible man—not a drunk who got smashed in a bar and walked out into the middle of the road in front of a truck and got hit so hard his lungs collapsed and his heart stopped beating.

Diego had been her compass, her anchor and her ally. Now, he was gone.

Calida mourned him quietly and alone. Her mama’s door remained closed.

‘Are you awake?’ she whispered into the dark.

Weeks later, in bed, listening to her twin’s sleeping breath, Teresa shivered. She thought of her papa picking her up when she was five and swinging her over his shoulder, tickling her until she screamed with laughter. Tears sprang to her eyes.

You killed him. You have to live with that for the rest of your life.

Guilt and confusion hounded her every minute.

Papa died because of me.

Teresa had pushed him to it. In telling her father what she knew, she had set the wheels in motion. She had watched his face fall, heard his pleas not to tell her twin, delighted when he’d dismissed Gonzalez. She’d enjoyed that he spent more time in the bars, away from the farm and away from Calida. She hadn’t considered that his shame had turned him into an addict, or that he would wind up killing himself.

How was she to know that?

‘Are you awake?’ She tried again.

Silence came back at her. Perhaps, if it hadn’t, she would have told Calida the truth. Her sister would have kissed her and told her she wasn’t to blame—it would all be OK; they would get through it together. But there the silence was, cold and accusing. Teresa sat and climbed down the ladder, her feet meeting the floor, pale toes against dark wood. Her nightdress was thin and her legs were bare. She crept into Calida’s bunk and lay down next to her, felt the heat of her sister’s body, and put an arm round her slumbering shape, using the other to pull the blanket up to her chin.

Calida moaned as a freezing ankle touched hers.

A yawn, a sigh, then nothing. Sleep.

Teresa longed for the same oblivion. She snuggled into her twin’s back and held hard, thinking if she held hard enough they could be close again, like they had been when they were little. Everything seemed so complicated these days. It wasn’t simple, like it used to be, when all that mattered was each other. She had kept her father’s secret because she’d been scared—and then because she had wanted to shelter Calida in the way Calida had always sheltered her; she hadn’t wanted her sister to lose faith, like she had, in the only man in their life. But the more time passed, the deeper this wedge drove—a point of divergence on the cusp of adolescence. Teresa inhaled her sister’s skin, a scent she would never lose because it lingered on her own body, and wished she were more like Calida. She had thought she was doing the right thing in getting rid of Gonzalez—but since when had she been any good at that? Calida was the one who did the right thing, who fixed, mended, and made better.

Since Diego’s death, Calida had set to with grit and purpose while Teresa hung back, thinking, I’m twelve. I don’t want this to be my life.

Every time she looked at Calida, she saw her own failings—at having robbed them of their papa, at not wanting to stay and toil, at wishing she could be far away from their home—and the reasons why Calida would always be the better twin.

At last, she withdrew from the covers and left the safety of her sister’s side. For a moment she stood alone in the gloom, the boards scratchy beneath her feet. Through the window, the gate at the foot of the track seemed alive, pulsing in the moonlight, lit up like a pearl. She returned to her own bed, her heart thundering.

I’ll get away from here one day. I’ll make Mama proud. I’ll be rich and successful and all the things she wants me to be. Then I’ll have done something right.

Comforted by this, Teresa reached for Fortune’s Lover and read it beneath the blankets for a while, until her arm started to ache from holding the torch.

When at last she surrendered to sleep, the story grasped for her unconscious and, in her dreams, she walked through the farm gate and kept on walking.

She dreamed of billionaires and red carpets, of palaces and yachts, of sparkling blue swimming pools and satin purses stuffed with notes.

She dreamed of the elusive heroes of her mother’s novels, their shirts crisp and parted at the collar. So unlike any of the men she had encountered, these men were of a different breed, exotic and treacherous and holding out for her.

5 (#ulink_1b187120-4a02-5370-ba93-3214f4f1ae89)

He arrived on a day in July, when the sky and earth and everything in between was enhanced, as if she was looking at it through her camera lens and could draw it into sharper focus. All week they had drowned in a storm—angry, grinding clouds dousing the soil and filling the lakes—and now it had cleared the air was silver-fresh.

Calida was inside. The door, loose on its hinges, trembled gently within its frame. She heard him before she saw him—the heavy bag that fell from his shoulders and hit the soil, the deep, single cough—and the sound of a man took her by surprise. It was a year since Diego’s death. At first, illogically, she thought it might be him.

‘Hello,’ she said, stepping on to the porch.

The stranger was standing at the wooden gate, his back to her. Paco the horse was nuzzling the palm of his hand, and the way he leaned into the animal, and the animal into him, struck Calida as secretive and rare. When he turned, she caught it in stages: the lifting head, the profile, the crease in one cheek as he smiled. He was in front of the sun, making his hair blonder and his face darker, though his eyes shone like bursts of blue water on the arid steppe. He was taller than her, lean and muscular. He wore a grey T-shirt, the kind that’s been used so much it becomes soft to touch, and faded blue jeans. The jeans were tucked into cow-leather gaucho riding boots.

‘Señorita Santiago?’

He had a sure voice. Paco responded to it, nudging the stranger with his muzzle. A weird thing was happening to Calida’s tongue. It seemed soldered to the roof of her mouth. She tried to unstick it.

‘I’m here for the work,’ he explained. ‘I saw your ad.’

On her mama’s instruction, Calida had pasted the fliers up months ago. Calida wasn’t sure what she had expected—certainly not for someone to turn up out of nowhere, without warning, someone who looked like this: certainly not him.

‘My name’s Daniel Cabrera.’ He put out his hand.

She experimented with the words in her head. The surname sounded like a kiss and a dance, maybe both at once. She took his hand. It was cool and strong.

‘I got talking with Señor Más at the market and he said you were still looking for help. I figured it was better to come straight out here and meet you in person …’

She nodded. Speak, for God’s sake! Say anything!

‘I’m Calida,’ she offered at last.

Daniel’s smile widened. She guessed he was seventeen, maybe eighteen. His forearms arrested her—the colour of them: a deep tan; and powerful—on the outside was a scattering of light, fair hair, and on the tender skin closest to his body a strong vein was visible. His wrists were thick, and around one he wore a leather band.

‘Your home is amazing,’ he said.

‘Gracias.’

‘It’s quite the legend in town, Calida.’ How come no one else could make her name sound like that? ‘People look out at this land. They can’t believe one family owns it all. It would be a privilege to be out here every day, with you.’

Every day … with you … Calida blushed. Her eyes darted to the ground.

‘Beautiful horses,’ he said. ‘I used to work on an estancia in the south—rides for tourists, that kind of thing. I grew up with animals—they’re my family.’

Calida struggled for something to say. If Teresita were here, she’d have no trouble talking. ‘What about your real family?’ she blurted, and instantly knew she’d said the wrong thing. Daniel’s face, formerly so open and friendly, fell into shadow.

‘They live in Europe,’ he said. ‘Where I’m from.’