Page 83 of The Lost Heiress
“They were beautiful pants,” Saoirse said wistfully.
He laughed, his eyes drifting back to the screen.
Saoirse couldn’t bring herself to ask Salvador what was going on because that would mean admitting interest, so she made up the story in her head. The girl’s name was Lucia. Her parents had died in a car crash. She had lived this beautiful life before, in the city. They had a lot of money, a nice house. She had a lot of friends and a boyfriend whom she loved. But when her parents died, everything changed. She found out that her father was in debt; she was left with nothing. Her estranged aunt took her in, but her aunt lived on a hacienda far out in the country, andit was a very different way of life. Lucia had to learn to muck horse stalls and milk cows. She went to public school, where people thought she was difficult and stuck up. They didn’t understand her. She had a hard time.
There was a boy who appeared in some of the scenes, about the same age as the girl, maybe a little older. He was handsome, but the way he looked at the girl sometimes made the hairs on the back of Saoirse’s neck stand up. One day, the girl was off by herself on the property, going for a swim in a secluded lake. The boy found her there.
No one would hear her if she screamed,Saoirse thought.
She couldn’t help herself. She had to know.
“Is he the bad guy?” Saoirse asked.
Salvador looked over at her, startled that she had spoken. He thought for a moment. “In Spanish telenovelas, there is no clear-cut line between good and evil characters, like you have in America,” he said. “There are protagonists and antagonists, sure, but the protagonists have weaknesses and flaws, and the antagonists often have noble motivations. It is not uncommon for an antagonist to gain the sympathy of their audience or to enjoy a happy ending. In this way, our telenovelas are a bit more realistic than, say,The Young and the Restless.”
“You don’t think there’s such a thing in real life as a bad guy?” Saoirse asked.
“No,” Salvador said. “People are more complicated than simplygoodorevil.”
“You should meet my ex-boyfriend,” Saoirse said. “He would change your mind.”
Salvador chuckled. “I used to watch telenovelas with my grandmother,” he said. “We’d sit at the kitchen table, eating tortillas she’d make each morning by hand, and watch. Watching them now reminds me of her. Makes me feel like I’m home.”
“I used to watch soap operas with my dad sometimes, when I was home sick from school,” Saoirse said.
She would lay her head on his lap, and he would rub her back. He’d bring her Sprite and saltines, and he wouldn’t say anything about the crumbs on the coffee table or the seat of the couch, the way her mother would have.
That was the kind of parent she wanted to be, she decided, her hand moving to rest protectively over her stomach: the kind who wouldn’t say anything about the crumbs.
On the screen, the boy was talking to the girl.
“What’s he saying to her?” Saoirse asked.
“It’s a quote by Concepción Arenal,” Salvador said. “It basically means those who face adversity and fail but get back up are greater than those who never experienced hardship or failure at all,” he went on. “It’s about the power of resilience, how hardships make us stronger. You see, Concepción Arenal was a founder of the feminist movement in Spain. She went to law school when such a thing was unheard of for a woman. She was the first woman in Spain to attend university. She spent her life defending women’s right to an education, that their purpose was not just to be wives and mothers but to be people in their own right.”
“Imagine that,” Saoirse said. “People in our own right.”
The next day, Salvador wheeled in a chalkboard and started conjugating verbs into the past perfect. This time, Saoirse didn’t protest. She took out her notebook and started copying them down. At the end of the class, Salvador wheeled in the TV again, and they watched the episode with the subtitles on.
For her homework, Salvador had Saoirse translate pieces of Concepción Arenal’sLa Mujer del Porvenir. They’d sit out front on the grass on a nice spring day, a breeze teasing its way through the branches of the oak trees overhead. Saoirse would take off her shoes and stick out her bare feet, the green blades tickling the skin between her toes.
“I hope he’s a boy,” Saoirse said, her hand on her belly. “Sometimes I wish I’d been born a boy. How different things would have been. It’s crazy how much of your life is determined by what’s between your legs.”
“A lot of your life is determined by things that you have no control over,” Salvador said. “Not just your gender, but where you’re born. Whoyou’re born to. What you look like. The color of your skin. The language you speak. Things you didn’t choose. Things you cannot change.”
Saoirse looked over at him. She knew parts of his story, but she had never before really considered what things must have been like for Salvador. To be born poor, to grow up without his parents. To go away to school in another country where he knew no one, where the language they spoke was not his own.
She had always viewed Salvador as one of her brother’s friends. But he wasn’t, really, was he? At school, Salvador had been their tutor, the guy who helped them cheat on exams. And now here he was again, the hired help.
She saw in him a twin hurt, a mirrored rage, a deep wanting.
A few weeks later, when the baby came too soon at six months and Saoirse labored for a day and a half to deliver a child, blue hued, silent, and still, she held the infant to her chest for hours, skin to skin. A little girl. Saoirse was exhausted and spent, her hair stuck to her forehead, the sheets to her thighs. The nurse and the doctor begged to take the child away, but Saoirse wouldn’t let them. She cradled the baby in her arms, trying to memorize every inch of her: her eyes closed, her mouth slack. The impossibly small fingernails and little lashes. She wouldn’t let them take her away until she had given her a name—Cetta Josephine Towers—and said a prayer to a god that Saoirse had never before believed in to watch over her in the next life.
Ransom was away when it happened. Tabby dabbed at her sweaty forehead with a sponge, changed her sheets, brought her her favorite meals to eat. But it was Salvador who sat with her in the afternoons while they watched the soap opera with the misplaced girl and the boy who was neither bad nor good in her dimly lit room.
Her love of Salvador was slow and grew out of grief and rage and wanting, out of loss and a shared understanding of the cruelty of the world. It was a deep-rooted, stalwart love, but it had not been her first. It was as different from her first love as it could possibly be. A counter. A study in opposites.
She’d never felt about any boy the way she felt about Teddy. It wasn’t just that he was beautiful, even though he was. It was that he had a way of drawing everybody in, like he was the sun and everyone else just planets stuck in his gravitational pull, orbiting around him. When Teddy spoke, people listened. He was fun and shrewd. And when Teddy paid attention to you? Well, it felt like the summer sun warming your cheeks. And when his attention drifted, it was like a cold coastal fog had drifted in and you’d been caught without a sweater.
