to discover that my daughters lived in their own worlds.
Maybe it was their age difference. By the time Nora was old enough to play with dolls and toy trucks, Salma had already moved on to Clue and Monopoly. Or maybe it was their personalities. Nora loved to listen to music alone in her room, but Salma was always with her friends from the volleyball team. They didn’t even look like sisters, because Salma has light skin, like her father, and Nora is dark like me. As the years passed, I spent most of my time alone, while my husband was at work, one daughter at practice, the other with her music. We were like a thrift-store tea set, there was always one piece missing.
After Driss died, Nora came back home, which was a comfort to me, because I couldn’t stand being alone in the house, and I let her take care of all the small things, like mailing out payments to the mortuary, going to the dry cleaners to pick up a suit her father had dropped off a week before the accident, driving his car home from the street where he had parked it. In between all these errands, she would go into the master bedroom, run her fingers on the bristles of her father’s hairbrush, open the closet and smell the sleeves of his jackets, or take one off its hanger and wrap herself in it. That was how I found her the day before the school play, sitting on the bed, wearing her father’s suit jacket, staring at her feet. “Nora,” I said, but she didn’t hear me, I had to touch her shoulder before she noticed me standing there beside her.
She looked lost, and in a way, she was lost. She always had her head in the clouds, that one, and I think this was why her father left her a bit of money, to help her make a fresh start, maybe choose a better career this time, though of course the money only upset her sister, and caused them to have this terrible argument in the school cafeteria. I could hardly pay attention to the play that night, my heart was aching from hearing my daughters fight, like strangers rather than sisters, and I slowly let myself sink into the fog again, that hazy place where Driss and I were still young, still together, still a family.
Efraín
Elena was going to play one of the good fairies, and she was excited because she had to wear a blond wig. I could see it in the way she was looking at herself in the dresser mirror, tilting her head a little, smiling at her own reflection. Only eight years old, and already mimicking the women she saw on television. As soon as Marisela finished pinning the wig on her, she teetered forward on the chair, trying to reach the plastic clip-on earrings that sat on top of the dresser, between the bottle of cologne and my pain-relief ointment. “Why are you wearing a wig?” I asked from the bed. Elena’s hair was black and glossy, and it was also long enough that it fell halfway down her back. It was perfect for the part, I thought. “Can’t the good fairy have black hair?”
“Fairies have blond hair, Papá,” Elena said.
“Is that true?” I asked Marisela. I had seen Sleeping Beauty once, on television, but I couldn’t remember much about the story other than the princess falls asleep for one hundred years. I had been getting so little rest lately, I almost wished I could sleep that long myself.
“Fairies are supposed to have hats,” Marisela said, “but the teacher ran out of them, so she gave us the wig instead.” She smoothed a sheer pink cape over Elena’s shoulders and turned to me. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.” I took Daniel’s hand and followed Marisela and Elena out of the apartment. The walk to school takes about fifteen minutes, and when the desert wind blows, those fifteen minutes can be unpleasant, but that afternoon there was only a soft, cooling breeze. I could feel the day’s tedium and irritation lifting from me, replaced by the simple pleasure of being with my wife and children. Elena had only one line, which she’d practiced so often that all of us knew it by heart—“Little princess, I give you