THE SOLARIUM

Dare I climb the tree of death, or do I lock my window, ignore its calls?

Wind whispers through the withered leaves of the orange tree. Branches rasp against my windowsill. I pace before the rain-warped glass, glancing out at writhing darkness—black clouds raging, blacker night. Lashing rain sets the tiles on the roof chattering like teeth, as if the house is shivering in its stucco skin, as I am shivering. 

It surprises me when I feel goosebumps rising beneath my sister’s stiff white blouse, the black mantilla that was once my mother’s. Clothed in the castoffs of corpses, listening for the cries of the dead, alone in the storm-drenched solitude of night, it surprises me to remember that I am alive. But my heart bruises itself slamming against my ribcage. My lungs fight for breath. Death is still, and, even now, impatient life keeps me in motion. Even when I wish it wouldn’t. 

My skin grows hot despite the chill. The glow of candlelight at my desk flares from dreamlike yellow to arresting orange before softening again. I tear my gaze from the window and watch the flame. Slowly, I find myself drifting toward it. The candle flickers within an elegant bronze cage that takes up nearly half the desk. My father made both years ago, when he was quick to smile and quicker with his hands. The thought of him makes me cold once more, but the light holds true. I should feel comforted, but one candlelit room in a house of darkness is not enough. Tears sting my eyes, blurring the flame. One harsh breath: I blow the candle out. Then the stubborn fire leaps back to life.  

Sighing, I sink into the rickety wooden chair beside my desk. Stacks of books with yellowing pages, leather-bound journals with cracked spines, and scrapbooks bursting with dried flowers tower precariously. Scattered around the stacks lie dull pencils, pens and an inkwell, brittlebush blossoms in a pot painted with matching yellow flowers, a bronze music box with a broken handle. One scrapbook is fanned open where I left it, on a page with preserved sunflowers and a pencil-sketched border of leaves. My heart slows, taking in the familiar clutter. I breathe deeply, then wrinkle my nose at the smell of hot dust.

I catch my reflection in the mirror above the desk, my face shifting with the candlelight. I see my mother’s cool, light brown skin, her hooked but narrow nose, her mournful eyes. Then I find my own eyes staring back: wider than hers, not as dark. I see the full lips of my sister, Maria Elena, but hers were always open, laughing, and mine are closed as if something vital would come loose were they not pressed shut. My skin ripples as if wrinkling, and there is my grandfather. My heart jumps into my throat; a croaking sob escapes. He had a mole in the same place I do, high on the edge of the left cheek, and it was the last thing I saw before they closed his casket this afternoon.

Abuelo Francisco used to call me Giri, short for Girasol, because I brought him sunflower bouquets in summer. He stopped a few years ago, though I still brought him bouquets. We both knew the name didn’t suit me anymore. I didn’t smile when I handed him the flowers, and he didn’t smile when he took them, though his dark eyes were tender. Every time, all we could think about was Maria Elena and the sunflower sentinels standing tall around her grave. 

“Lonely, isn’t it?” he would murmur, his heavy hand on my head. “It’s lonely for a flower with no mariposa.” 

Mariposa was his name for Maria Elena because she flitted from flower to flower without a care, unable to decide which she liked best. She put them in her hair, wove them into bracelets for me, mixed the petals into salad. I always wanted to be just like her, but it always turned out wrong. Stems slipped out from behind my ears. My bracelets fell apart. I nearly killed the San Miguel sisters with oleander petals at a tea party. Their mother wouldn’t let me in their house for a year, but Maria Elena could always charm her into smiling at the door, convincing her to let the twins out to play. 

Flowers weren’t the only things Maria Elena collected. She had a big leather satchel, and if she saw anything she liked, she would snatch it right up. Harmless things, pretty things, things that belonged to no one—mostly.

“It isn’t stealing if it grows on trees,” she explained to me once while leaning halfway over the Gonzalez’s stone wall to pluck one of their pomegranates. I thought she was the wisest person in the world, aside from Abuelo. 

Maria Elena especially liked to hunt for skipping stones along the riverbed. Sometimes, she’d bring me with her. I had to promise not to cry if I gave her a rock and it wasn’t “just right”, or she wouldn’t let me come. I would stay very quiet and serious, playing at being grown up. When I found a stone that she liked, she would talk like Señora Matthews, who lived in the old hacienda and only came into town to go shopping. 

“Moo-chose grassy-as,” Maria Elena would say, looking down her nose at me. “Maybe you Mexicans are good for something. Now fetch me a saddle for my horse and a feather for my hat.” 

“Sí, Señora,” I would choke through helpless giggles.

When Maria Elena had enough stones, she would challenge Abuelo to a skipping contest. Only Abuelo—no one else gave her enough of a challenge, she would tell him, making him laugh and shake his head. 

“Ai, mija, it’s all I can do to lift myself out of bed. If I try to pick up one of those heavy rocks, I’ll break my poor old wrist.” 

But he would beat her more often than not. 

Maria Elena, who treated serious things like games and took games so seriously, always puckered her mouth while skipping stones, eyes narrowed in concentration. She had strength, but no strategy: her stones flew far, but the second they struck the water’s surface, they sank, while Abuelo Francisco’s skipped on. 

Abuelo and I, we never went to the river together, just the two of us. He was more Maria Elena’s grandfather than mine, but I never held it against him. I was more her sister than his granddaughter. In a way, I lost him long before the funeral. In a way, I’ve been dead to the world for years.

In a way. But here I am, and there he is, with Maria Elena—in the ground.

There is everyone I love, everyone who loves me.

And here I am.

I drop my head on the desk. The birdcage rattles, and a pencil clatters to the ground. I don’t look up. I’m crying too hard to do anything but cry. Facedown, I can barely breathe, but I don’t care. I’m choking in the dark. I can’t see the candle. My thoughts are a violent whirl—and about the desk, for some reason, how if the wood was still living, my tears would water it. I could water that tree for a hundred years, and it would grow up over me, twisted and bitter, its roots leaching into my body. It would try to feed from me that way and starve because there’s nothing left in that part of me. All that is left are these tears.

But the image of the tree . . . slowly, I lift my head. 

There stands the orange tree outside my window. It has never spoken with his voice before, but I am not surprised to hear the dry, rattling cough that always followed Abuelo’s laughter. 

I lift a hand to the braid that came unpinned as I walked home from the funeral. A stray sunflower petal crumbles at my touch. The rest of the flower, already dead, brittle at the edges, remains in place behind my ear. I did learn the trick of it eventually—if Maria Elena could see me now.

Another laugh from the tree. I imagine roots snaking beneath the earth, reaching through the still-loose soil, the wooden coffin, the wrinkled skin of Abuelo’s throat. The roots of this tree have tasted blood. They drink the laughter of the dead like sweet rain and torment the living with echoes.

Lightning flashes. I squint instinctively, then force my eyes wide open. I want them to burn. I want the light to blur everything. I don’t want to see the orange tree beckoning. I don’t want to see the candle wax weeping, the pale light waning. I don’t want to see the ghosts that make up my face and the guilt that darkens this house. I don’t want to see the desk my father carved—my father, who would not even go with me to the funeral. How could something so predictable hurt so much? I was too numb even to cry. 

It was the talk of the village: all Nuestra Claudia wept at the loss of Francisco Flores, but his ungrateful granddaughter, his own namesake, felt nothing, and his son was nowhere to be found.

And that was for the best, some people had shuddered. Diego Flores had sunk to the bottom of a bottle years ago. They prayed he would never claw his way out. At least now, he was only killing himself.

There was no hope for my father, but if I had cried, even the hardest hearts in the village would have softened toward me for a moment. The men with their contempt for my father’s weakness; the women who made sure their errands never, never brought them past the Flores house; the girls my age who whispered about my family and its sickness of grief, forever keeping me on the outskirts of their laughter, games, confidences.

Only Abril understood. Abril, who was once my closest friend, after Maria Elena. Abril the silent, who lost her sister, too. 

I remember her catching my eye in church before my grandfather’s burial. Her pinched, pale brown face offered a tentative flash of sympathy before her head abruptly dropped. Heavy, tangled hair the color of coal dust fell forward, obscuring her face. I kept watching her, waiting for a second glance that never came.

Branches scrape against the window—a screech of childish laughter.

I remember running, panting and giggling, through the shaded arcades of the San Miguel house, Abril and Maya hot on my heels. They leapt after me at the same time, tackling me in a tangle of four identical arms, four identical legs, two identical, wild smiles. I remember playing hopscotch, chalking circles and squares on the reddish-brown tile of the walkway to their door. Abril and Maya always held hands, always jumped at the exact same time. 

The longest they were ever apart was the hour between their births: one late April 30th, one early May 1st. Everyone called them los dos, and few people could tell them apart until they spoke. Maya’s voice was louder, more buoyant. When the twins’ steps came unsynchronized, she was the one to push forward first.

Until the branches broke. Until Maria Elena and Maya both lost their lives in one tragic stroke of fate. Now Abril does not speak because she has lost half her voice. And I have lost everything I was, everything I hoped to be.

It was Abuelo Francisco who led me away from the bloodied branches and bodies in the dust. He wiped my tears with gnarled hands, sighed heavily, and shook his head, saying nothing, but offering me his silent strength. I stared at the mole on his cheek, the one in the same place as mine. For weeks afterward, I slept, sobbing, in his arms, seeking comfort my father was too drunk to give. I needed to be held by someone who loved Maria Elena as much as I did.

Now there is no one. 

I turn toward the window ever so slightly, my hand on my sunflower. Wind whistles through branches like a whoop of triumph. My heart clenches. I hear a thousand fragmented shouts of joy; I live a thousand fractured moments. There’s Maria Elena coming first in a footrace, her curly, dark brown hair tied back with a fading red ribbon, sweaty strands plastered to her forehead. Maria Elena leaps out from behind a door to frighten me, repenting when I burst into tears. I see Maria Elena climbing higher, higher, higher, to the top of the tree, her cry of excitement almost indistinguishable from the shriek of terror that followed. 

Then I hear the plaintive wail of an infant. I do not know this voice. Is it mine? Am I, fourteen and futureless, mourning my past self, a girl that might have grown up to be happy? I don’t know. The cry continues a moment longer before the wind goes silent. Raindrops glisten against glass. I hear myself breathing. Only myself.

I used to match my breaths to my mother’s. That was when I was small, and I would lay my head on her chest while she cradled me in her lap. Her breathing was slow and meditative. For some reason, it always made me think of the way she held her brush before starting a new painting. Her fingers looked so long and elegant, and her eyes were still and thoughtful. 

 I think of the way she used to glance at me out of the corner of her eyes and smile before returning her gaze to the canvas. Those smiles grew rarer and rarer in the last year of her life. She stopped painting, but I’m not sure why. I think she was sick. I mostly remember her lying down, and all I recall of her voice is its softness. I do not hear her in the tree; I never have. Wistfully, without believing, I tell myself that means she’s still alive, but I know the truth. 

I am the last living daughter of the drunk that killed her mother. My father is downstairs in a stupor of spirits—a loss beyond death. On the ofrenda of my heart, he will have no picture. How long would it take for him to realize I was gone? How many drinks would it take to forget? 

There is nothing and no one left for me here. Slowly, I stand. I drift toward the window. 

A long, brown finger taps the glass—not Abuelo’s, though it is crooked and aged. Not my mother’s, though it is slender and artistic. It isn’t Maya’s, prodding me to come play, and I know it is not Maria Elena’s. She has gone much further than the riverbank, to a place she would never let me follow. I know it is the hand of death, yet I wrench the window open.

Wind rushes in, perfumed by oranges, dizzyingly strong. My hands are still latched onto the windowsill, but the waxen, slightly uneven skin of an orange seems to press against my palms. I let my arms drop, but I don’t step back. Instead, loose curls lift from my braid, and my skirt billows around my ankles as I step forward. Although the wind should push me back, it seems to caress me, draw me closer. The candle on my desk hisses as its fickle flame sputters, then dies. 

Cold rain strikes my face. Droplets trail down my cheeks like the ghosts of every tear I’ve ever cried. Rain darkens the dusty pinkish floor. The clay tiles soak it up at first, but the storm wrenches out sob after sob, and the room begins to flood. Water creeps up to my ankles. 

The wind forces in another silvery torrent, shoving the rain all the way back to my desk. Rain falls with enough strength to turn the handle of the music box. A whisper of warped, tinny melody floats out. Water drips down the music box onto the open scrapbook. A slurry of sketches slips to the floor as dried flowers drink their fill, blossoming once more. They entwine one another with lengthening stems and leaves as fresh buds bloom: bitterbrush, sunflowers, oleander. Overgrowth consumes the desk, shrouding it in verdant new life as the pale brown pages of my scrapbook swell like a bloating corpse. I see this in a place beyond my eyes; I do not turn to look. 

My hands grip the windowsill, testing if it can hold my weight. The rough wood threatens to splinter but does not crack, even when I press with all my strength. I lift myself until my toes only skim the surface of the water. When I drop back, afraid, water surges midway up my calves. My black skirt clings to me, sodden. I clasp my mother’s mantilla with a shivering hand to keep it from blowing away. 

I draw breath after breath, hesitating—no, readying myself. Overpowering, the odor of oranges doesn’t fade, but the longer I breathe, the more I notice other scents from outside. Crushed leaves and beaten flowers yield their aromas to the rain, flooding the restless air. Even two stories up, the richness of wet soil reaches my nose. The house itself, wood, and stone, and stucco, seems to exhale its own perfume, brought out by the storm. Only now that I have chosen death do I smell the lushness of life.

It does occur to me that it’s not too late. I could close the window. I could lie down. I could sleep. I could sleep. My body aches for it. I close my eyes.

But what would I wake up to? 

Once more, I lift myself. The windowsill is slick beneath me, but the wind holds me up. The wind wants me to do this. The orange tree holds out its arms, and I take my first cautious step onto a branch broad enough to bear my weight. The storm has silenced itself around me though the rain falls harder than ever, pelting me. The white ghost of my breath shudders against the black of the sky. 

I venture closer to the tree trunk, taking shelter beneath its shaking leaves. The bark is rough, biting into the tender skin of my hands and feet, but I tighten my grip. I know, in a part of me older than life itself, that this tree will take me to la tierra de los muertos as it once took Maria Elena. It has called to me, and I will come.

Above me, oranges ripen to bursting, searing suns against a night of deepest green. And I climb. And I climb. I climb beyond rain-glutted clouds and dusty streets. I climb until I can no longer see the house below me. I climb, and I climb, growing lighter with every moment. I am no longer climbing but soaring. Sunlight peers through leaves, dazzlingly bright. Nothing stings my eyes. I am beyond sight, sensation. I am part of the sunlight, part of the tree, part of the life beyond death.

I am dead. 

Mama and Abuelo, Maya and Maria Elena, everyone I’ve loved and lost: I am home.